Every wealth management firm knows heir retention matters. Far fewer can tell you, with any precision, where on their own book the retention risk lives. This audit is designed to close that gap in 15 minutes. The questions are drawn from the patterns we see across firms running high-performing heir engagement practices. Answer each one honestly and you'll have a usable map of where to focus.
Part 1 — Relationship coverage
- For what percentage of your book have you personally met the primary client's adult heirs? If the answer is under 30 percent, that gap is your single biggest retention risk surface.
- How many households on your book have clients aged 70 or older? Of those, how many have you met the heirs of?
- How do you know which heirs exist across your book? Is the answer 'our CRM notes' or 'the advisor would remember'? The first is documented. The second is fragile.
Part 2 — Engagement infrastructure
- Does your firm have a formal cadence for heir touch points — birthdays, milestones, annual outreach — or is it left to individual advisor preference? Unstructured engagement scales poorly.
- Do you have a mechanism for heirs to engage with your firm's content or platform outside of advisor meetings? If heirs only hear from you when the primary client initiates, they never build a relationship with your firm.
- When an heir does engage, does the primary advisor know? How quickly? Automated alerts vs. manual logging is the difference between a 24-hour response and a 24-week one.
Unstructured heir engagement scales poorly. Structured heir engagement compounds.
Part 3 — Succession readiness
- For every household with clients over 65, do you have a documented succession plan — who the heirs are, what the firm's engagement cadence is, and what happens the week after a primary client passes?
- If a primary client passed tomorrow, what is the probability (0-100%) that the heirs would retain your firm? Don't guess — write the number for your top 20 households by AUM.
- When was the last time you ran a succession briefing with a family — not a tax conversation, but a values-and-relationships conversation? If the answer is 'never' or 'rarely,' that's a product problem, not a sales problem.
- What percentage of your AUM sits in households where you have never met the heir AND the primary client is over 65? That number is your decade-out retention risk, and it is almost certainly higher than you want it to be.
What to do with the answers
Run this audit with your leadership team and your top three advisors. The gaps will be larger than expected. That is normal — every firm we have run this with has discovered the same pattern. The goal is not to produce a perfect score. The goal is to produce a triaged list: the ten households where the retention risk is highest and the engagement lift is smallest.
Heritance is built to close every gap this audit surfaces. The morning briefing flags the ten households automatically. The engagement cadence runs in the background. The documentation builds itself. If you want to stop doing the audit manually, we built the platform for that.
