The Exit Planning Institute® (EPI) is excited to welcome SkillStacked as a partner, expanding the resources available to Certified Exit Planning Advisors (CEPA®) working with micro-market business owners.
Founded by former financial planner Skylar Dean, CEPA, CFP®, CVGA®, Business Value Advisor at SkillStacked, uses technology and a network of experienced professionals to make business-value and readiness support more accessible for owners who may not have the scale or complexity to engage a traditional private-client or family-office team.
During his work as a financial planner, Skylar noticed a challenge that many small business owners faced; while high-net-worth clients often had access to specialized support, many strong business owners fell through the cracks because they fell into the category of a micro-market business.
“They’re still really great clients (and) still make up the majority of wealth managers’ best clients,” he says. “I wanted to help those people on the more underserved side by using technology to scale in ways I couldn’t before, while still being human-centered in our delivery.”
That experience inspired SkillStacked, which focuses on helping advisors assemble the right teams for clients who need broader support in business readiness, leadership, process improvement, and value creation but may not already have a complete team in place.
Instead of asking one advisor to manage every aspect of a complex business owner engagement, SkillStacked can help build a tailored team for the client in the form of a fractional family office.
While the team of advisors works hands-on with the business owner, SkillStacked uses technology to handle behind-the-scenes coordination.
According to Skylar, this model is especially helpful for advisors whose business-owner clients need help beyond personal financial planning. These owners may understand the importance of improving their businesses, but they often lack the time, internal capacity, or access to the right specialists to act on those priorities.
The partnership between EPI and SkillStacked is built around helping more business owners improve financial success and long-term stability.
SkillStacked is intentionally focused on the smaller and underserved end of the market, often “Main Street” entrepreneurs. These owners face many of the same challenges as larger organizations, but with fewer resources available to address them.
For CEPAs, SkillStacked can provide added implementation capacity and specialized support. Skylar notes that the shared language of the EPI community makes collaborative work more effective from the start.
"When you try to build a team to enhance (capacity), if you've got a lot of things you're working on, you might end up actually making the capacity worse because now you're trying to deal with five or six other people,” he says. “But when you have a shared language, it's easier to hop into a functional team faster and pick up as though it's one team and one voice, rather than six different people at competing levels.”
That common foundation can help advisors form functional teams more quickly, coordinate around a client’s priorities, and create a more unified experience for the business owner.
Capacity is often one of the biggest barriers business owners and advisors face. Owners might lack the time or internal resources to address critical business issues, while advisors may recognize the need but lack the infrastructure to manage every initiative themselves.
SkillStacked is designed to help address that challenge by connecting advisors with specialists who can work as an extension of the existing client team.
The goal is to make collaboration more seamless and to help business owners access the support they need to move forward.
“We want to help advisors' best clients that don't currently have a whole team (of advisors) built around them, but they know they need it,” Skylar says. “We want to be the people who are there to help solve that problem and build tailored teams around their clients who otherwise might not get it.”
SkillStacked is already working with approximately 50 partners, including about 30 CEPAs. Looking ahead, the company hopes to expand those relationships and work with 1,000 or more CEPAs over the next several years.
Through this partnership, EPI and SkillStacked aim to equip advisors with the relationships and resources needed to successfully serve business owners of all kinds.
By making this type of service available to the micro-market, “Main Street” entrepreneurs will be better positioned to build stronger companies, improve their exit readiness, and pursue greater financial freedom.
The Exit Planning Institute® (EPI) is the exit planning market leader, providing education, tools, resources, and the ecosystem to support professional advisors across the globe on all things Value Acceleration. EPI’s offerings include the Certified Exit Planning Advisor credential, the annual Exit Planning Summit, EPI Academy, an extensive Chapter Network, and more.