A report to read, or a story to walk through?
Robert Hartwell is selling his company, and with the proceeds he is weighing a gift to his children’s trusts: $3M or $6M, split evenly. His advisor had already built the analysis. The problem was the format. Robert and Margaret had a stack of reports from the last two years, and they were not reading them. So the ask was one sentence:
“Turn these decisions into a presentation I can walk them through.”
What came back. A seven-slide presentation that moves like a conversation: the decision, what the sale leaves after tax ($10.5M sale, about $2.2M of federal tax, $8.1M net), how each gift shapes retirement, where everything ends up, the tradeoff, and the notes. It pages with arrows, the keyboard or a swipe, and the slides that need it stay live: the retirement slide has sliders for spending, return and how long Robert lives, and the legacy slide toggles between the proposed trust for Margaret and the current plan. It carries the firm’s own brand, not Helmsted’s.
So the conversation with the client: the $3M gift starts retirement with $12.3M and supports up to $600,000 a year; the $6M gift starts with $9.3M and supports up to $455,000. The larger gift sends Thomas and Grace $33.0M in all instead of $31.5M and removes about $0.8M of estate tax, because more growth sits outside the estate. More for the children now, less cushion for the two of them, and both gifts still reach 95 at today’s $320,000 plan.
Getting creative with materials with Helmsted
Three choices made the presentation work. One decision per slide. A report puts everything on one long page; a presentation makes the family agree to one thing before moving to the next. Keep the model live. The slides are not screenshots: move spending or life expectancy and every figure, the chart and the tradeoff sentences update. End with the next steps. The tradeoff slide closes on four items to confirm before choosing, so the meeting ends with a list, not a pile of pages.
Don’t like something on a slide, or spot an issue? Just tell Helmsted, slide by slide: “On slide 3, fix the formatting, the words are hard to read. Remove slide 5, and swap slides 2 and 6.”
One thing makes all of it work: context. Helmsted needs the letter of intent for the sale, the trust documents and prior gift returns, the account balances, Social Security estimates and the estate plan, so the same model can be told as a report, a presentation or a one-page summary depending on who is in the room.