As a new year begins, it'stime to examine the issues your clients care about most and assess how well you're addressing them. This process is likely to lead you to the following conclusion: It's time to move beyond investments.

Many advisors have completed year-end meetings with clients about investments and how to position portfolios for the next 12 to 24 months. Their clients are still nervous about future prospects and wary of taking action. Sure, the major indices have recently posted big gains. But many clients are still paralyzed by the market downturn, while others are willing only to dip their toes in the water.

It's no surprise, then, that advisors with client-service models that extend beyond investments are reporting more success in impressing existing clients and attracting new ones. Now advisors can identify and solve these non-investment concerns that keep their clients up at night. In doing so, they show their clients that they can offer more value in their financial lives than most other advisors out there-and increase the number of quality referrals they receive.

FOUR WINDOWS

This plan should deal with four key areas of a client's financial life: wealth protection, wealth enhancement, wealth transfer and charitable giving.

• Wealth protection is all about legally acceptable strategies to ensure that potential creditors, litigants, ex-spouses and children's spouses can't unjustly take a client's wealth. It also means protecting the client against catastrophic loss. Industry research conducted by CEG in 2007 showed that nearly three-quarters of advisors' best clients are highly concerned about losing their wealth, and almost 40% report that their top clients are worried about being sued.

Common actions to protect clients' wealth include controlling risks though business structure, employment agreements and buy-sells, as well as restructuring various assets and considering legal forms of ownership-such as trusts and limited liability entities-that put wealth beyond the reach of third parties.

• Wealth enhancement is the process of using strategies to maximize the tax efficiency of current assets and cash flow. Common client goals include maximizing a pool of funds to reach financial goals and minimizing exposure of a pool of funds to unnecessary income taxes. Indeed, about 40% of advisors say that their best clients' top goal is mitigating income taxes.

Accomplishing these goals might involve any number of tasks. You or a member of your team might review past tax returns and perform a current-year tax assessment to develop scenario planning for various strategies. You might examine the effectiveness of the client's cash management or analyze an executive compensation program or benefits plan to ensure that it maximizes investments and tax-advantaged vehicles.

• Wealth transfer strategies legally structure the eventual transfer of current and protected assets effectively and facilitate the most tax-efficient ways to pass assets to succeeding generations. About 45% of advisors report their top clients are concerned about taking care of heirs.

That means helping clients answer important questions that they may not have considered or would prefer to ignore. How should assets be distributed at death? How and when should heirs receive an inheritance? How can liquidity needs be met for an illiquid estate? Your tasks might involve determining clients' wealth transfer preferences, identifying special situations (such as a special-needs child), examining business succession issues and considering a range of trusts, insurance policies or partnerships that ensure effective transfer.

• Charitable gifting is helping to fulfill a client's philanthropic goals and maximizing the effectiveness of a charitable intent-ideally to create gifts that are significantly greater in value than what would have been possible otherwise.

About 37% of advisors say their top clients see charitable giving as a main concern-not as important as protecting wealth, but still on the minds of many affluent clients and prospects. Advisors with such clients typically evaluate charitable strategies and how they fit in with retirement income needs and wealth-transfer goals before creating any number of trusts, donor-advised funds, foundations or gifting methods.

PULLING IT ALL TOGETHER

Many forward-thinking advisors are providing tremendous value today by addressing one or more of these non-investment concerns with their clients. Identifying and addressing all of these tasks on top of providing planning and investment services is a tall order.

The good news: You don't have to do it alone. Top wealth managers create networks of specialists-professionals who have deep knowledge across the range of advanced planning specialties. The primary members of most networks (apart from the wealth manager) are private client attorneys (who can address tax, estate planning and legal needs) and insurance specialists (who work closely with the private client lawyer to identify and structure solutions that leverage the entire range of insurance products).