Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

BSG Advisers (operating as the registered trade name for Business-owner Strategies Group, LLC) is a fee-based Registered Investment Adviser (RIA) based in Apex, North Carolina. The firm was established and has been providing fiduciary investment advisory services since September 2018. We specialize in comprehensive wealth management, financial planning, and insurance planning services. Our core mission is to act as a supportive partner to successful individuals and business owners who manage their professional careers at a high level but lack the time or inclination to manage their personal finances with the same rigor.

Our primary office is located at 56 Hunter Street, Suite 230, Apex, NC 27502. We also have offices in Arlington, VA (2300 Wilson Boulevard Ste 700, Arlington, Virginia 22201) and Overland Park, KS (6840 West 105th Street Ste B, Overland Park, Kansas 66212).

BSG Advisers is organized as a limited liability company (LLC) under the laws of North Carolina. The firm is owned by three parent entities, each holding a minority ownership interest:

• Intelligent Insights, Inc. (wholly owned by Robert Picha)
• TLA Group, Inc. (wholly owned by Laird Hepburn)
• Wealth CAPS, Inc. (wholly owned by Justin Struble)

Robert Picha, Laird Hepburn, and Justin Struble serve as the managers of the firm and are actively involved in its day-to-day operations.

Yes, we are fiduciaries. Under the Investment Advisers Act of 1940, BSG Advisers is legally bound to a fiduciary standard of care in all of our advisory relationships. This means we have a duty of loyalty and prudence to act in your best interest. We are required to provide full and fair disclosures of all material conflicts of interest, avoid misleading statements, and never place our financial interests ahead of yours.

Our firm operates under the registered trademarked slogan: "We're Not Brokers; We're Fixers!". This means we focus on holistic, objective planning and resolving complex financial gaps, rather than acting as traditional transactional brokers who focus on selling investment products for commissions.

Our typical clientele includes successful professionals, families, and business owners whose finances are complex enough to require sophisticated coordination. Many of our clients experience a service gap between their individual professionals (like accountants, attorneys, and traditional stockbrokers) and hire us because no one else is managing the complete picture. Our typical client has at least $250,000 in investable assets, though we also work with clients who have smaller portfolios but possess a strong commitment to achieving their personal financial goals.

Yes. We offer a complimentary initial consultation. This meeting is designed to help us get acquainted, discuss your current situation, explain our services, and determine whether our firm and your goals are a good mutual fit.

Yes, absolutely. While our physical office is located in Apex, North Carolina, we partner with clients all over the country and prefer to meet in whichever format you are most comfortable with.

Whether you prefer virtual video conferences, phone calls, or in-person meetings, you will receive the exact same high-touch, fiduciary standard of care. Every planning client is assigned a dedicated team of two advisors to ensure planning continuity, and you will be fully integrated into our Triangular Review Process© with three scheduled reviews each year - regardless of your geographic location.

No. Neither BSG Advisers nor any of our management persons has any legal or disciplinary events to disclose that are material to a client’s or prospective client’s evaluation of our advisory business or the integrity of our management.

No. BSG Advisers does not provide direct tax or legal services. However, we place a strong emphasis on professional collaboration. We proactively coordinate with your existing tax and legal advisors - such as your CPA, Enrolled Agent (EA), or estate attorney - to build a unified team of professionals working on your behalf.

To help protect against service disruptions and promote plan succession, we utilize a team-based advisory approach. By assigning a dedicated team of two advisors to every family or business owner client, our goal is to maintain seamless continuity. This structure is designed to provide you with consistent access to a professional who is fully up-to-date on your objectives, family dynamics, and financial plans.

Financial planning may be right for you if you fit any of the following profiles:

• You are highly successful in your career or business but lack the time, expertise, or inclination to manage your personal wealth as professionally as you manage your business.
• You have hit a crossroads or a significant life change, such as approaching retirement, receiving an inheritance, or navigating the sale of a business.
• Your financial life has grown to a level of complexity where you need to maximize returns while avoiding unnecessary taxes and risks, but you do not have a coordinated strategy in place.

If you have goals, and think you need professional insights to help you get to your destination, financial planning would probably be helpful.

We offer broad-based planning services structured under personal or business categories. These include:

• Comprehensive Financial Planning: Multi-year, deep-dive planning that reviews your entire financial life.
• Continuous Financial Planning: An ongoing, month-to-month service to keep your completed plan on track and address new concerns early.
• Business-oriented Financial Planning: Single-topic engagements for business owners covering succession, buy/sell funding, executive compensation, key-person protection, tax strategies, and value estimation.
• Business or Personal Financial Consulting: Hourly consulting for narrow, specific topics that can be addressed in a single meeting.

Our collaborative process largely parallels the 7-Step CFP® Financial Planning Process:

1. Understand your current financial situation.
2. Identify, quantify, and establish your goals.
3. Analyze possible courses of action.
4. Develop planning recommendations and rationales.
5. Present clear, written custom recommendations.
6. Implement agreed-upon recommendations in coordination with your other professionals.
7. Monitor progress and update your plan as your situation evolves.

Our planning is distinguished by our "planning first" philosophy and our structured Triangular Review System©. Rather than checking in once a year, we block out dedicated months to meet with planning clients three times per year to prevent critical planning concerns from being missed:

1. February: Annual Goals and Plans Review.
2. August: Detailed Investment and Insurance Portfolio Discussion.
3. November: Year-end Tax and Estate Planning Meeting.

We offer transparent, flat-fee and hourly pricing based on the complexity and scope of your situation:

• Comprehensive Financial Planning: Typically costs between $2,500 and $7,500 (with fees generally falling between $3,000 and $6,000, and a standard minimum fee of $1,500).
• Continuous Financial Planning: A monthly fee starting at $50 per month, capped at a maximum of 1/12th of your original Comprehensive Planning fee.
• Business Planning & Hourly Consulting: Billed on an hourly basis, with rates ranging from $150 to $450 per hour based on the advisor's experience (standard minimum of $750 for business planning).

We charge for financial planning because we believe in providing objective, conflict-free advice. Traditional brokers often offer "free" plans as a lead-generator to sell high-commission products. Because we operate on a fee-based model and do not accept commissions on investments, we charge transparently for our time and intellectual capital. Your fee covers our analysis and ongoing support for a full year.

For Comprehensive Financial Planning, we accept full or partial upfront payments, with up to 50% due upon delivery, or convenient monthly installments at no additional cost. We will begin working on your plan once the initial payment is received. Continuous Planning is billed monthly in advance. Hourly consulting is invoiced upon completion, or on a monthly/quarterly as-earned basis.

To ensure your plan is fully accurate, we utilize a structured checklist of documents, including:

• Personal Finances: Net worth statements, cash flow statements, and recent paystubs.
• Tax Documents: Personal tax returns, W-2s, and business Schedules C and K-1.
• Account Statements: Brokerage, bank, annuity, pension, and retirement account statements (401k, SEP, IRA, Roth).
• Insurance Policies: Personal life, disability, and long-term care policies, as well as health insurance or Medicare supplement policies.
• Estate Documents: Wills, trusts, powers of attorney, and gift tax returns.
• Business Owner Documents (if applicable): Balance sheets, P&L statements, operating agreements, buy/sell agreements, employee benefits books, and employee censuses.

Our investment philosophy centers on the belief that long-term portfolios should be growth-oriented unless a client’s specific mandates dictate otherwise. We believe ownership of productive, growth-oriented assets (such as equities) is critical for wealth accumulation and preserving purchasing power against inflation.

However, we do not chase returns in isolation, nor do we pursue "safety" by reflex. We define risk as the long-term or permanent impairment of capital relative to what your money is supposed to accomplish - not short-term market volatility. We construct custom portfolios based on a client's documented purpose rather than a generic risk score.

To operationalize our philosophy, we orient client portfolios toward specific, documented Client Mandates. This is very different from many wealth managers.

1. Long-Term Growth Mandate: Prioritizes capital appreciation and long-term wealth compounding using productive growth assets.
2. Cash Flow or Income Mandate: Delivers reliable, sustainable liquidity to fund your lifestyle without forcing asset sales during down markets.
3. Shaping Mandate: Focuses on mitigating sequence risk and extreme volatility by altering traditional asset-class correlation assumptions.
4. Liability Mandate: Aligns assets with known future expenditures over a defined time horizon, emphasizing capital preservation.
5. Tax-Efficiency Mandate: Focuses on improving net, client-retained wealth through active tax-loss harvesting, asset location, and gain management.
6. Strategic Maneuverability Mandate: Uses cash and short-duration cash-equivalent reserves to defend the overall portfolio and maintain opportunistic liquidity.

Our collaborative process largely parallels the 7-Step CFP® Financial Planning Process:

1. Understand your current financial situation.
2. Identify, quantify, and establish your goals.
3. Analyze possible courses of action.
4. Develop planning recommendations and rationales.
5. Present clear, written custom recommendations.
6. Implement agreed-upon recommendations in coordination with your other professionals.
7. Monitor progress and update your plan as your situation evolves.

Our planning is distinguished by our "planning first" philosophy and our structured Triangular Review System©. Rather than checking in once a year, we block out dedicated months to meet with planning clients three times per year to prevent critical planning concerns from being missed:

1. February: Annual Goals and Plans Review.
2. August: Detailed Investment and Insurance Portfolio Discussion.
3. November: Year-end Tax and Estate Planning Meeting.

We charge a transparent, asset-based fee applied only to Billable Assets (which excludes funds held in the primary cash position). Fees are billed monthly in arrears, calculated based on the Average Daily Balance (ADB) of your billable assets:

• First $1,000,000: Maximum annual fee of 2.00%.
• Portion above $1,000,000: Maximum annual fee of 1.25%.
• Minimum Fee: Greater of 0.35% per year or $50.

With your written authorization, these fees are directly and automatically deducted from your account by the qualified custodian, generally within the first ten business days of each month.

We charge for financial planning because we believe in providing objective, conflict-free advice. Traditional brokers often offer "free" plans as a lead-generator to sell high-commission products. Because we operate on a fee-based model and do not accept commissions on investments, we charge transparently for our time and intellectual capital. Your fee covers our analysis and ongoing support for a full year.

For Comprehensive Financial Planning, we accept full or partial upfront payments, with up to 50% due upon delivery, or convenient monthly installments at no additional cost. We will begin working on your plan once the initial payment is received. Continuous Planning is billed monthly in advance. Hourly consulting is invoiced upon completion, or on a monthly/quarterly as-earned basis.

Investing in securities involves a risk of loss that you must be prepared to bear. We do not guarantee future performance, and diversification does not guarantee a profit or protect against loss. Common risks include:

• Market and Equity Risk: Volatility and declines in equity assets.
• Interest-Rate and Credit Risk: Risks affecting fixed income and debt holdings.
• Inflation and Liquidity Risk: Risks that can erode purchasing power or hinder your ability to quickly sell assets at a fair price.
• Model and Platform Risk: Risks that third-party systems, sub-advisers, or model delivery platforms fail to achieve their objectives or experience operational errors.

Yes. We offer comprehensive Pension Consulting and Retirement Plan Services to help employers implement or optimize retirement benefits. This includes plan design, vendor selection, price negotiation, plan implementation, benchmarking, and ongoing investment monitoring. When providing these services, we act as a fiduciary under ERISA Section 3(21) regarding our investment advice. We support multiple plan structures, including 401(k), SEP, SIMPLE, profit sharing, and defined benefit pension plans.

No. We do not accept performance-based fees (fees based on a share of capital gains or capital appreciation). This prevents conflicts of interest that could encourage advisors to take speculative risks with your assets.

No. We do not vote proxies for client accounts. All proxy materials will be sent directly to you by your custodian. However, at your request, we are happy to offer advice and help clarify corporate actions or proxy voting rights.

We believe managing risk is a critical foundation of any financial plan. Our Investment Adviser Representatives are licensed insurance agents who can assist you with identifying and obtaining a variety of protective products, including:

• Life Insurance: Term life, whole life, and group life policies.
• Disability Insurance: Personal disability income protection, group disability, and Business Overhead Expense (BOE) insurance.
• Long-Term Care Protection: Custom policies designed to protect your retirement savings from healthcare costs.
• Medicare Solutions: Medicare Supplement (Medigap) insurance to assist with healthcare transitions.
• Annuities: Fixed or variable annuities for structured retirement income.

To operationalize our philosophy, we orient client portfolios toward specific, documented Client Mandates. This is very different from many wealth managers.

1. Long-Term Growth Mandate: Prioritizes capital appreciation and long-term wealth compounding using productive growth assets.
2. Cash Flow or Income Mandate: Delivers reliable, sustainable liquidity to fund your lifestyle without forcing asset sales during down markets.
3. Shaping Mandate: Focuses on mitigating sequence risk and extreme volatility by altering traditional asset-class correlation assumptions.
4. Liability Mandate: Aligns assets with known future expenditures over a defined time horizon, emphasizing capital preservation.
5. Tax-Efficiency Mandate: Focuses on improving net, client-retained wealth through active tax-loss harvesting, asset location, and gain management.
6. Strategic Maneuverability Mandate: Uses cash and short-duration cash-equivalent reserves to defend the overall portfolio and maintain opportunistic liquidity.

Because our advisors can earn commission-based compensation from insurance carriers when you purchase a policy, a conflict of interest exists. An advisor could be incentivized to recommend insurance products based on the commission payout rather than your sole planning needs. We proactively mitigate this conflict through the following firm policies:

• Full Disclosure: We disclose all commission-based conflicts upfront in writing.
• No Obligation: You are under absolutely no contractual or financial obligation to purchase insurance products through us or any affiliated person.
• Suitability Reviews: Our compliance department conducts regular, independent reviews of all advisor recommendations to verify they are suitable and in the client's best interest.
• Outside Business Activity Monitoring: Our Chief Compliance Officer (CCO) must approve and regularly monitor all outside insurance activities and appointments held by our advisors.
• Fiduciary Training: We continuously educate our advisors on their fiduciary responsibilities, ensuring that any recommendation has a sound, independent planning justification.