Our Approach

Norm: When I was in highschool, what they had in my yearbook was, "Most unlikely to succeed." And in a way I kind of laughed it off and from that day on I said, "Just wait and see."

SLATE: Norm & Donna built a successful company over the past 25 years. Now it was time to pass it on.

Norm: We thought… that’s the easiest thing, to do was to pass it on to family.

Donna: We have two children and we had no concept of how to do this in a fair way to respect both girls when they had different goals. When you have a business and you’re trying to bring it over to the family, you’ve got family dynamics involved in a business decision, and that’s really a struggle.

When we first started out, we were with Denise at the branch level and Denise helped us as much as she possibly could.

Denise: In order to retire when you’re self-employed. You either close the business, you sell the business, you give it to a family member. It’s very difficult.

Norm: And that’s when she brought Bruce and Sandra onboard.

Sandra: It’s more than just their finances, it’s their family histories and their family dynamics and their values and their hopes and dreams and it’s much more important than numbers on a page.

Bruce: The investments is always a cornerstone of what we do and we continue to do that with them, but one of the things Donna said to us off the start was she wanted to have peace at the dinner table at Christmas every year and so that’s one thing we’ve never lost sight of.

Donna: Everything has happened around this table.

Donna: We got all these brains around our table sitting here trying to work on our problem, our situation, focused on us.”

Norm: They come up with answers, or they will find the answers, There’s just no way we could have accomplished without the wealth management team, I mean, we’d never be this far.

Ryan: Often with business owners we’ll talk about different options, sale of operating companies, sale of holding companies, what the income tax implications of the two different options could be, things like estate freezes.

Donna: Ryan did a very in-depth analysis of our financial position. And then they brought Murray in.

Murray: Our role in high net worth planning is to help assess the needs, help get the vision sorted, a plan that looks like we can achieve the vision, and then to bring in the players, either internally or externally, to make that all happen.

Donna: We definitely hit some speed bumps, but they have taken us by the hand and gone through every step with us.

Murray: We’re going to probably have to be looking at a third party sale. And there’s only so far I can take that, but now there’s James.

James: My role was to help them understand first of all, your business is valuable. It’s extremely saleable, and that you do have options. So I went through the whole process of not just helping the understand the value of the company but certainly what is the process if they were to sell the company to a third party, what that process looks like.

Norm: I just cannot say enough about this team and what they’ve done for me and what they’ve done for Donna.

Donna: They make sure that at the end of the day, we’re getting what we want. We’re taking care of our family and we get to retire peacefully with the kids. And that’s, that’s all we want. That’s all we wanted.

Voiceover:
RBC Wealth Management is Canada’s leading wealth manager.

Our approach brings the best of RBC to you; our resources, solutions and full access to our team of experts – through one single contact, your wealth manager.

Simply put, there’s wealth in our approach.