Derek S. Questions Gary Quackenbush about Estate Planning and Trusts.
Estate Planning – Difficult Decisions Day
Who should be my Trustee?
Who should be the Guardian?
Gifts to charity.
How to “control” distribution- based on age, maturity, or other criteria
Is it a good idea to try control distribution? – Or just let them have it all at once?
Options for Successor Trustee and Guardian
Family or Friend
Professional – Private fiduciary or Institution?
Distribution Options:
Sprinkling
Staged @ ages, @ life stages, @ accomplishments, @ land-marks
Pooled Trust
Successor Trustee’s discretion
Words, words, words – how to get it all written properly.
Putting Property in Your Living Trust (Trust Funding)
The process of putting your property into your Living Trust is called “funding”
The process of putting your property into your Living Trust is called “funding”. To be vaild, a Trust must be funded. If your Trust is not funded, it is invalid. If you become incapacitated or die before you transfer property to the Trust, your heirs (family) will need to go to Probate Court to have a Judge determine if the Trust is valid. You can avoid this mess if you fund your trust.
Learn about trust funding by listening to this blog post radio show or visit GQ Law for a free consultation.
GQ ON The LAW – Special Needs Trust, Power of Attorney, Guardianship
GQ on the law explains Special Needs Trusts, Powers of Attorney, and Guardianship. Special needs trusts are required if a beneficiary receives any type of government assistance due to disability, incapacity, or special needs. Without a Special Needs Trust, the special needs beneficiary could forfeit any government assistance for medical care or other support. In this show Gary Quackenbush explains ways to create and use a Special needs Trust. GQ Law.
Health Care Directives, Living Wills, Guardian Nomination, Putting assets into Trust
If you can’t speak for yourself, you will need a Health Care Directive to appoint someone to speak on your behalf regarding healthcare, life support, and organ donation decisions.
GQ LAW and Marty Schneider have a lively discussion on their live radio show covering this importatn estate planning topic.
Minor children need to have a Guardian nominated to prevent them from being placed in the foster child system if they lose both parents. A Guardian nomination is a simple but very important document to have in your Family Protection binder.
Gary Quackenbush
GQ Law
IRA Conduit’s and Living Trusts. Word on Wealth Radio show discusses IRAs, Living Trusts, Estate Planning
Having your IRA or 401k handled by your Living Trust requires special trust language.
The average Living Trust or Family Trust can not handle retirement money properly and could cause accelerated income taxation if not prepared properly. If prepared properly, your Trust can safely distribute inherited retirement accounts to your beneficiaries on your terms and yet avoid accelerated taxation. This radio show “Word on Wealth” with Marty Schneider, CFP, and Gary Quackenbush, Attorney, frankly discusses IRA and 401k inheritance issues.
For more information go to GQLAW.com.
Digital Transformation: Transforming Business Models
Digital Transformation: Transforming Business Models
A third, and perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of an organization’s digital transformation, is the transformation of it’s business model. The digital world has allowed, and oftentimes necessitates, the complete reformation of the way a business makes money and goes to market. Capgemini Consulting and MIT offer two notable ways this occurs.
Digitally-modified Businesses (i.e. sustaining innovations)
A digitally modified business is one that adopts technologies or innovations that add to their current product or service. For example, Toyota may develop a new technology that reduces the need for human capital and offers more production capacity. Or, perhaps, an insurance agency may dramatically reduce the amount of customer cold-calling it’s sales office does in exchange for collecting customer information through website traffic data or free web chat consultations. This potential customer information could then used for outreach via email, text or social media. Both of these cases are examples of a modified business model that changes the way business is done without the need of a new, separate organization to manage the innovation.
New Digital Businesses (i.e. disruptive innovations)
Another aspect of business model transformation is in the introduction of a completely new and “disruptive” way of doing business. The term disruptive is not simply to imply the type of competitive moves that cause shake-ups in the market and temporarily disrupt the steady trajectory of other organizations. The type of changes that are followed by relatively short-term, reactionary plays which bring competition inline again. A disruptive innovation in the sense considered in this article quite literally upends incumbent organizations and houses the inertia to put the existing business model out of the job.
As defined by innovation expert Clayton Christensen, disruption “describes a process by which a product or service takes root initially in simple applications at the bottom of a market and then relentlessly moves up market, eventually displacing established competitors.” Think personal computers disrupting mainframe and mini computers, or cell phones disrupting landlines and online retailers that are currently disrupting discount retailers that once disrupted full-service department stores.
This subject will merit it’s own series of posts and will describe in detail the process of disruption and a tried and true methodology to either disrupt or avoid being disrupted.
As you consider your business model, ask yourself, “What ways can I incrementally use technology to improve and enhance my current business model. And, “What simpler, more convenient, cheaper, down-market trends am I seeing that are taking my lowest end customers? Should I adopt a similar methodology to prepare for the long-term?” Once again, we’ll discuss these questions in more depth in posts to come.
To summarize, here is an insightful comment recorded by Capgemini and MIT researchers, “A media executive said, ‘We’ve realized that if we don’t transform the way we do business, we’re going to die. It’s not about changing the way we do technology but changing the way we do business.'”
Digital Transformation: Transforming Operational Processes
Digital Transformation: Transforming Operational Processes
While transforming the customer experience will affect heavily what’s going on outside of the walls of the office, transforming operational processes will completely change the way you work. This can be accomplished in three main ways, as taught by MIT and Capgemini researchers.
Process Digitization
One of the key improvements technology can make in an organization is getting rid of repetition. Many repetitive tasks can now be automated with software, robotics or other means. The goal should be, if I have (or someone else has) to do this regularly, what do we need to do to eliminate it? Simple examples may include payment, customer setup, or data entry. More complicated examples might include the use of artificial intelligence to solve intermediate problems such as fixing broken production lines or anticipating/predicting inventory management and supply chain decisions in the event of upcoming changes to demand.
Worker Enablement
From introducing dramatic changes to employee flexibility, while also increasing the amount of time an employee is connected, to increasing communication between upper management and all levels of the organization, digital change can greatly enable employees. If the workforce has more access and is more accessible, a company’s speed to action can increase without the need of slow meetings and drawn out decisions.
Performance Management
As time is created through reducing redundancies and creating agility, there is an increased capacity to use data, insights and broader input from the organization for better decision making. Companies can more easily outsource what is outside the scope of their expertise, and focus on being the best product or service possible in their scope of value. Time can then be used for creating more time in the future and the virtuous cycle continues.
The digital landscape has completely altered the way a company can operate. Through digitizing processes, enabling workers and increasing the amount of time for creativity and value creation, a company’s operational processes can become one of it’s greatest assets to growth.
Digital Transformation: Transforming the Customer Experience
Digital Transformation: Transforming the Customer Experience
One important area companies are transforming digitally is in their customer experience. The customer experience can be bucketed into three categories:
Customer Understanding
A company can create customer understanding using data and predictive analytics, being more deeply involved in their pain points through analysis of social media, budding trends and successes/failures of other organizations’ interactions with customers in varying industries. Social media, advanced search and much improved CRM systems have made this type of information much more accessible, organized, and affordable. Resources that used only to be available to deep-pocketed companies are now readily available for much smaller organizations.
Top-line growth
With a better understanding of your customer you can be more effective in anticipating/understanding needs and catering to them. This is particularly important in the sales process. As your organization becomes more mobile and nimble, your sales force can be better equipped to engage customers. Another essential aspect of top-line growth enabled by digital change is brand management. It is now easier than ever to guide a brand with a well-managed marketing strategy–but don’t worry, you don’t need to be the expert. True to form, digital disruption has changed the advertising industry and many small “marketing boutiques” are available remotely that specialize in digital marketing and promotion.
Customer Touch Points
One of the greatest benefits of technology in the customer experience is speed and response time. Especially in competitive, commoditized industries where products are hard to differentiate, customers look more and more for speed, access and convenience. Companies can more readily engage customers through social media, targeted mobile push notifications and ensure 24/7 access to solutions, products or service information, payment, scheduling and ordering.
The fast evolving digital landscape has broadened your ability as an organizational leader to transform the customer experience. Through understanding your customers, driving top-line growth and increasing the quality and quantity of customer touch points, your company will better be able to serve customers who will in turn spread the word to their broad and easy to reach social networks.
Digital Transformation: Our World is Evolving, Is Your Company?
Digital Transformation: Our World is Evolving, Is Your Company?
Just out of curiosity…
What was the first thing you did today?
You just stepped into line at the DMV, what do you do?
How has your job changed over the past 10 years? Or if you haven’t been in the workforce that long, did your job even exist a decade or two in the past?
And finally, last time you made a purchase for a Christmas gift, how did you decide what to buy and where to buy it?
No doubt, technology has changed the way we live. We are constantly connected, always being advertised to and last year’s “ways of working” are outdated. We’re living in an era of digital transformation.
Now, the question is, are you leading your organization through the digital change necessary to keep up with (and we hope, outpace) your competitors and offer outstanding value to your customers?
With this question in mind, our next series is called: Digital Transformation. A new set of posts where we’ll help you get started (or help you continue) on the path to improving your customer experience, digitizing your day-to-day operations, and even redefining or reinventing your business model for a digital landscape.
The graphic below, developed by digital consultancy Cognizant, is an excellent way to summarize this process of organizational change.
First, we become aware of a need to change
Second, we design a roadmap (strategy) of how to approach the transformation
And finally, we relentlessly focus on the implementation/execution of that plan
The next few posts will be regarding three critical areas of digital transformation, developed as a framework by researchers from MIT and Capgemini Consulting. Following are the main topics:
Transforming the customer experience
Transforming operational processes
Transforming your business model
We look forward to discussing such an exciting and relevant topic within the fast-evolving business environment and hope these principles will better arm you to continually pivot with, and even be in front of, your ever-changing customer.