Captains and Navigators Part 1: Why the Wealth Advisory Model Is Rigged Against You

Most investors treat their advisors like airline pilots. Hand over the controls, trust them to land safely, flip through the quarterly report while the experts handle it. The metaphor is comforting. It's also broken.

A pilot takes you to a destination someone else chose. You bought the ticket; the route was set before you boarded. And here's what the wealth management industry doesn't want you to notice: they've already chosen your destination too. "Preserve and grow." That's the entire flight plan. The only question your advisor is trained to answer is how to get there faster.

What if you don't want to go there? Or you don’t know what the possible destinations are?

We've been thinking about a different way to frame the relationship between investors and the people who advise them. A ship's captain and navigator. The captain decides where the ship goes. The navigator figures out how to get there—reading the currents, the weather, the risks beneath the surface. Both roles are essential. Neither can do the other's job. And the captain can fire the navigator if they keep steering toward the wrong port.

This distinction matters more than it sounds. Because the wealth advisory industry has spent decades collapsing these two roles into one. Your advisor sets the destination ("market rate returns," "wealth preservation," "intergenerational transfer", “tax avoidance”) and you approve the route. The inversion is so complete that most investors don't even realize they've handed over the most important decision: where they're actually trying to go.

When we first needed an advisor, it seemed reassuring to know we would have help responsibly stewarding our resources. We were excited to invest in our community and build a world where our kids and their kids could thrive. And while we weren’t necessarily excited to pay more taxes, it felt like our patriotic duty to invest in the infrastructure that had enabled us to get to this point where we needed an advisor. Instead, we were asked how much our “burn rate” was and reassured that there were legal structures we could use to “shelter” our money from tax burdens. Overall, the message was clear. They could help us use our money to make more money. 

Here's where the math gets uncomfortable. The standard advisory model charges roughly 1% of assets under management per year. On a $5 million portfolio, that's $50,000 annually. Over a decade, with compounding, you've paid your advisor well over $600,000 for the privilege of going where they wanted to take you. On a $10 million portfolio, you're looking at well over a million dollars across the same period.

That fee structure doesn't just create a misalignment. It creates a structural hostility to the very strategies that impact-oriented investors need most. An advisor who helps you spend down your wealth, deploy it catalytically, or direct it into community ownership transitions is literally cutting their own paycheck. Every dollar you deploy into a recoverable grant to a CDFI, or a first-loss tranche for an employee ownership conversion, is a dollar that stops generating fees.

The incentive isn't subtle. It's arithmetic.

We have been told by partners that they are excited to encourage people to “get off their assets!” and they have pitched themselves as very focused on impact. But once we set up an account with them, they went silent and were only too happy to let the account grow unless and until we voiced concerns.

So when you tell your advisor you want "impact," what actually happens? They find you impact-labeled products that keep the assets under management. They add an ESG screen. They hand you a lens to see the problem more clearly, while the ship sails toward the same destination it was always headed. The GIIN estimates that the impact investing market has grown to $1.571 trillion, but that number includes a significant amount of capital that has been relabeled rather than redeployed. When every fund now claims "impact" as a feature, the word has become more brand than substance.

This isn't about bad people. Most advisors entered finance because they genuinely wanted to help. But structure beats intention every time. A system in which the advisor's income depends on assets remaining under management will produce advice that keeps assets under management. And then we wonder why the money keeps flowing to the same places.

We have worked with advisors who get really excited when we say that we believe the purpose of money is to catalyze shared prosperity. They tell us it enables them to be creative and think outside the box. But more often than not, they bring us investment opportunities labeled “impact for indigenous communities,” “racial justice,” or “a gender lens,” yet it’s still the same 2-and-20 deals that extract value to generate wealth for the investor. When an investor says that they see promise in employee ownership transitions, an advisor who doesn’t look beyond the equity-washed label will think they are meeting the desires of their client, when instead they are guiding them toward the same extractive system.

We should be honest about something else. The captain-passenger inversion isn't entirely the industry's fault. It's also comfortable. Choosing a destination means taking responsibility for it. It means doing the work to develop a real theory of change, not just checking a box that says "I care about climate" or "I want social impact." It means interrogating where your returns come from, which can be deeply uncomfortable when you discover the answer. It means accepting that some of your wealth may have been generated by the very systems you now want to change.

In 2016, we decided to invest in TPG’s The Rise Fund. We were early in our investing journey, and it was exciting to think we could make a difference in education, financial inclusion, and climate. The Rise Fund touts itself as a global fund committed to achieving measurable, positive social and environmental outcomes alongside competitive financial returns. We thought, “Maybe we can have our cake and eat it too?” We eagerly traveled to New York City to attend the first annual meeting and hear John Kerry speak to early investors about how important our capital was in addressing societal challenges. The meeting was a disappointment. It was clear that the vast majority of the fund's investment managers were investing as usual. The impact marketing of the fund was getting them into deals that otherwise would turn them down. It was clear that impact was only in the marketing. Unfortunately, we still have money tied up in that investment, and we look forward to receiving the returns so we can do better.

That reckoning isn't optional. If you want to go somewhere different, you have to start by accepting that you're the captain. No one else should choose your destination. And no navigator, however talented, can steer a ship for a captain who won't say where they're going.

This is the first in a series. In the next three posts, we'll lay out what the captain's job actually looks like in practice—the specific responsibilities an investor owes to this partnership. Then the navigator's job—what you should demand from any advisor who claims they can help you deploy capital for transformation. And finally, a practical framework for how the two roles work together, with a worksheet you can bring to your next advisor meeting.

Because this relationship can work. We've seen it work. But not on the terms the industry currently offers.

The advisory world will keep selling smoother rides to the same destination. Better service within extractive structures with excuses about hands being tied due to fiduciary duty. More sophisticated lenses to see the problem from every angle while the ship drifts toward the same port.

We're not looking for a better view of the problem. We're looking for a different port entirely.