Jim Grote of Financial Planning magazine has written a generous profile of myself and my firm, Ensemble Capital Management:
Sean Stannard-Stockton is a bit of a Renaissance man in the wealth advisory world. A principal of Ensemble Capital Management in Burlingame, Calif., he’s an expert who brings the two disciplines of wealth management and philanthropy consulting into harmony for high-net-worth clients interested in giving…
…Many planners, he says, offer “a service that revolves around helping people think through their personal charitable interests, their family mission statement and/or social goals.” Their guidance revolves around strategic thinking about philanthropy.
“We offer tactical philanthropy consulting, a phrase we coined in 2004 that is now beginning to enter common usage. This means we focus on structuring our clients’ assets to maximize their personal and philanthropic goals. We are not in the business of encouraging people to give. We just make giving more effective.”
In early 2004, Googling the term tactical philanthropy yielded zero results compared with 92,000 for strategic philanthropy. If you do the same search today, you end up with 110,000 hits for the tactical variety and 236,000 for the strategic…
…Ensemble’s proficiency also includes concierge services that help clients navigate the multidisciplinary practice of philanthropy. For example, Ensemble has brought in an expert in multigenerational family dynamic issues to work with a client who was unsure how to include his family in the foundation’s work. In another instance, Ensemble helped a client explore the possibility of using its foundation’s assets to offer a bank a letter of guarantee, so that nonprofit grantees could receive loans at below-market interest rates.
You can read the whole article here.