Every Owner Needs a Quarterback (And Why Fragmented Advice Costs Millions)

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Most business owners already have a roster of advisors that includes a CPA, an attorney, an insurance professional, and maybe an investment professional too. But the unfortunate reality is that everyone’s working in silos, and that leaves gaps where important balls are being dropped.

Owners are translating between advisors, trying to make sense of conflicting recommendations. With most advisors not talking to each other, who’s setting the big-picture goals? Who’s defining the projects, creating accountability, and reporting progress?

Without a quarterback, owners end up coordinating the biggest financial transaction of their lives on their own — and paying dearly for the inevitable inefficiencies.

The Cost of Fragmented Advice

Fragmented advice equals fragmented results. If you tell a physician your shoulder hurts, they can treat the shoulder but unless they look at the rest of your body they might miss the real cause. Business advice works the same way; if the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing, the whole system fails.

It’s not that any one piece of advice is necessarily bad. CPAs optimize for taxes. Attorneys optimize for liability. Insurance professionals optimize for protection. But without coordination, these solutions collide.

Maybe your trust and estate attorney updated beneficiaries, but nobody made sure the changes were executed on financial accounts and insurance policies. Or your CPA recommended filing as an S-corp instead of a C-corp, but your attorney never amended the company’s legal structure. Unwinding these kinds of missteps costs serious money and time.

Why Owners Can’t Be Their Own Quarterback

Most owners try to quarterback by default, but they have neither the time nor the expertise to fill this critical role properly.

As an owner, you’re worth more per hour running the day-to-day business than trying to coordinate tax planning, estate planning, M&A structures, and insurance. And CFOs may understand the P&L, but they don’t know estate law, deal terms, or insurance strategies.

People who hire financial quarterbacks believe in subject matter expertise. They’re happy to trade money for time, and what they need is someone with broad knowledge across disciplines — someone who knows enough in each vertical to understand what needs to happen and when to go deeper with the specialist.

What a Quarterback Actually Does

Think of a quarterback like an eagle on top of a pole. They can see the entire field, not just a single silo, so they can create accountability across all advisors and present the whole story back to you.

So what does your quarterback really do? In essence it’s applying the RACI framework:

Defining projects by triaging and prioritizing steps. For example, de-risking is always step one. If you get hit by a bus an extra $10,000 of EBITDA becomes irrelevant. Estate planning and risk management have to come first.
Aligning the team by making sure your CPA, attorney, banker, and insurance advisors are all working within a single, coherent strategy.
Coordinating execution by setting clear deadlines and accountability so recommendations don’t get lost in the shuffle.
Translating complexity by turning technical advice into clear decisions for you to make.

The result is relief. You finally have one point of contact, so you can stop being the project manager for your financial life and can focus on running your business.

The Right Kind of Quarterback

The quarterback role is usually filled by a wealth advisor who’s willing to run point and understands the intersections of tax, legal, business, and personal planning. Not every financial advisor does this, and most CPAs and attorneys lack the bandwidth.

A good quarterback has to understand that growing transferable value is the key to funding your future. If they don’t understand business, they can’t guide you effectively.

Your quarterback also needs to understand you. That means knowing your family dynamics, your role in the community, and the legacy you want to leave. Numbers alone won’t get you there.

Ideally, they should be a credentialed CEPA trained in the process of aligning business, personal, and financial planning around a successful transition. A CEPA knows what it takes to orchestrate across tax, legal, business, and wealth disciplines so nothing gets lost.

The Brass Tacks of Quarterbacking

Here’s the truth: You don’t have time to do this job. Your highest value is running your business, not coordinating advisors.

If you try to be the quarterback yourself, the opportunity cost is massive. What are you worth per hour in your business? Now add the hourly rates of your CPA, attorney, and insurance professionals. Multiply that by the wasted time chasing advice that is uncoordinated.

Without a quarterback, it will take ten times as long and cost ten times as much.

In billable hours alone, quarterbacking saves money because you aren’t paying when the advisor communicates with the CPA or attorney. Without a quarterback, you’d pay hourly rates with each professional to chase the same alignment on your own.

With the right one, you get relief and save money too. You have a trusted advisor who understands your business and your psychology, someone who knows where you are going and is on the journey with you. The longer they’re in the role, the more efficient, valuable, and impactful the relationship becomes.

How to Put a Quarterback in Place

Every business owner needs a quarterback who can align the team, create accountability, and report back with clarity. Owners who rely on siloed advice pay for it in time, money, and missed opportunities. You’re left quarterbacking the very process you hired professionals to handle. If that’s you, here’s how to transform your financial game:

Choose a lead advisor. This person must be willing to coordinate, not just advise, and bring a project manager’s mindset to define the tasks, assign accountability, and move projects forward.
Empower your quarterback. They need to be able to set clear deadlines for other professionals and prevent recommendations from drifting.
Keep your current team. The quarterback aligns but does not replace your other advisors.
Measure by mindshare. The deliverable is clarity, not more documents or more meetings.

Don’t wait until a deal is on the table to realize you don’t have someone to coordinate this critically important financial play. Put your quarterback in place now. The payoff is clarity, efficiency, and peace of mind for you, your family, and your business.