Table of Contents
By Justin Deja, CEO of BeyondWill. For financial advisors.
I'll start with the belief BeyondWill is built on, and the case for proactive estate planning: a plan is never done. It's accurate the day it's signed and drifting by the next. A child turns eighteen. A business sells. A client moves to a new state with different law. A parent passes and an inheritance lands. The document doesn't change, but the life it was written for keeps moving.
For advisors, that gap between a static plan and a moving life is where relationships are quietly won or lost. The advisor who learns about a change in time to help keeps the family. The one who finds out late is left cleaning up. And the stakes keep growing. Roughly $80 trillion is expected to change hands over the next two decades, according to Cerulli, and about two-thirds of Americans still don't have a will (industry figures). Most of that money will move through moments no one flagged in time.
Key takeaways
- Proactive estate planning treats a plan as a living document that stays current as a client's life changes, not a one-time file.
- Every life event or law change is both a risk to catch and a revenue opportunity to act on.
- Plan Monitor flags changes proactively; Opportunity Signals ranks what it finds by dollar impact across its AUM Growth and AUM Retain views.
- Advisors on the platform uncover $1M+ in AUM opportunities per advisor, per year (individual results vary).
What proactive estate planning really means
It's simple to state: keep the plan true to the client's actual life, continuously, instead of discovering the gaps years later at the worst possible moment. Estate planning isn't a document you produce once. It's a condition you maintain.
How BeyondWill catches the moment first
We built BeyondWill so those moments don't pass unnoticed. Plan Monitor watches every client's plan for life events and law changes and flags them proactively, so the advisor knows first. Opportunity Signals then takes what it finds, held-away accounts, life events, and at-risk inheritances, and ranks it by dollar impact through two views: AUM Growth (assets you don't manage yet) and AUM Retain (assets at risk of leaving). The most valuable conversation is always at the top of the list.
Why proactive estate planning is your growth engine
Here's the part advisors don't expect. Being proactive isn't just good service. It's the growth engine. The next million in a book is almost never a stranger. It's a held-away account inside a household you already serve, an inheritance heading toward a client who never thought to loop you in, or a second generation no one has met yet.
On our platform, advisors uncover $1M+ in AUM opportunities per advisor, per year, and see a 2x return on the platform fee in the first year, while saving 12+ hours a month on book reviews (individual results vary). Not by prospecting harder, but by noticing what's already moving.
How does proactive estate planning grow AUM?
It grows AUM by turning changes you would otherwise miss into timely conversations. One planning-led advisor completed 44 plans in six months, which uncovered 150 net-new prospects and a 29% activation rate. That's a single-advisor result, it isn't typical, and individual results vary. Every one of those prospects started the same way: a plan revealed something worth a conversation.
Proactive and growth are the same story
That's why, at BeyondWill, we've stopped treating proactive and growth as two different stories. They're the same story told from two ends. Proactive is the discipline, never let a plan go stale. Growth is the result, when you're first to know something changed, you're the one in the room when it matters. The alert and the opportunity are the same moment.
So the question we'd put to any advisor isn't whether your clients' plans are finished. They're never finished. It's whether you'd know the day one of them stopped being true, because that day is the next $1M in your book, waiting to be caught. To see what's hiding in your book, get started with BeyondWill.
BeyondWill is not a law firm and does not provide legal, tax, or financial advice. Documents are generated from attorney-approved, state-specific templates.
