COMING SOON — The Most Dangerous Person In Your Financial Life May Be The Professional You Hired To Protect It

You built the business.

You accumulated the wealth.

You bought the property.

You learned enough about asset protection to understand that you need attorneys, CPAs, insurance professionals, financial advisors, bankers, and other specialists.

Now comes a problem almost nobody prepares entrepreneurs for:

How do you know who actually knows what they're doing?

Who Can You Trust is James Orsillo's practical guide to choosing, questioning, coordinating, and—when necessary—firing the professionals who advise you about your business and wealth.

Because credentials aren't enough.

• A license doesn't guarantee judgment.
• A beautiful office doesn't guarantee competence.
• A large bill certainly doesn't guarantee that anyone has looked at the whole picture.

And one of the most expensive mistakes an entrepreneur can make is assuming:

“My attorney handles that.”

• Which attorney?
• Handles what?
• Did the CPA know?
• Did the insurance professional know?
• Did anybody actually coordinate the pieces?

Or did five competent professionals each solve their own little problem while nobody protected the owner?

That's the problem this book attacks.

THE PROFESSIONALS MAY ALL BE RIGHT—AND YOUR PLAN CAN STILL BE WRONG

This is one of the hardest lessons in business and asset protection.

• Your attorney may give perfectly reasonable legal advice.
• Your CPA may give perfectly reasonable tax advice.
• Your insurance professional may properly insure the risk they were shown.
• Your financial advisor may properly manage the investments in front of them.
• Your estate-planning attorney may properly draft the trust you requested.

And the complete structure can still have a hole big enough to drive a truck through.

Why?

Because each professional is looking through a different window.

Nobody necessarily owns the entire blueprint.

James Orsillo wrote Who Can You Trust for the person who should own that blueprint:

You.

YOU DON'T NEED TO KNOW MORE THAN YOUR ATTORNEY

You need to know enough to recognize when the conversation doesn't make sense.

That's a completely different standard.

You should be able to ask:

• Why are we doing this?
• What problem does this solve?
• What doesn't it solve?
• What owns this asset?
• What happens if this company gets sued?
• What happens if I personally get sued?
• What are the tax consequences?
• Does my CPA agree?
• Does this conflict with my estate plan?
• What happens if I die?
• What happens if I become incapacitated?
• What happens if my partner leaves?
• What happens if I sell the company?
• And perhaps the most important question of all:
• Who else needs to know about this?

If a professional becomes irritated because an owner wants to understand those answers, you've learned something important before signing the check.

THE $5,000 SUIT DOESN'T MAKE SOMEONE AN EXPERT

Entrepreneurs are particularly vulnerable to authority theater.

• Fancy terminology.
• Complicated diagrams.
• Huge binders.
• Expensive offices.
• “Proprietary” structures.
• Promoters telling you they discovered something nobody else knows.
• Professionals who make a straightforward concept sound impossibly complicated—and then conveniently sell the solution.

Asset protection attracts plenty of this.

• So does tax planning.
• So does estate planning.
• So does investing.

Who Can You Trust is designed to help entrepreneurs distinguish real expertise from salesmanship.

Not by pretending you can become an attorney or CPA over a weekend.

By teaching you to evaluate the thinking behind the recommendation.

A good professional should be able to explain the strategy.

A great professional should be able to explain its weaknesses.

And somebody you trust with decades of accumulated wealth should be comfortable saying:

“I don't know. We need another specialist at the table.”

That's not weakness.

That's professionalism.

BUILD THE TEAM BEFORE YOU NEED THE TEAM

• The worst time to search for an asset-protection attorney is after you've been sued.
• The worst time to find an estate-planning attorney is during a family emergency.
• The worst time to discover your CPA and attorney disagree about your structure is after the transaction closes.
• And the worst time to learn that nobody coordinated your advisors is when something breaks.

Build the team while things are boring.

• Know who you're calling.
• Know what each person is responsible for.
• Make sure they understand what the others are doing.
• And keep yourself in the center.
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Your professional team may include attorneys, CPAs, insurance professionals, bankers, financial advisors, estate planners, and specialists.

• They don't all need to agree.
• They do need to communicate.
• Because this is not their business.
• This is not their property.
• This is not their retirement.

It's yours.

NO GATEKEEPING. NO BLIND TRUST.

James Orsillo created Practical Asset Protection around a simple belief:

You shouldn't have to blindly surrender your financial life to professionals simply because they know terminology you don't.

Use professionals.

Pay good ones well.

Listen when they know more than you do.

But understand enough about your own business, wealth, property, and asset-protection structure to participate intelligently in the decisions.

That is the purpose of this book, and the conversation remains open after you finish it.

Through Practical Asset Protection, readers can continue exploring James Orsillo's books, asset-protection education, business structures, trusts, planning guides, and practical resources designed to make complicated subjects understandable to the people who actually own the assets.

THE SIXTH BOOK IN THE AMERICAN ENTREPRENEUR SERIES

Who Can You Trust completes James Orsillo's six-book American Entrepreneur Series.

The series follows the journey most entrepreneurs actually live:

• Your Business Is Exposed — Find the vulnerabilities.
• Protect the Business — Separate and contain operating risk.
• Protect Your Wealth — Protect what the business created.
• Protect Your Properties — Protect real estate and accumulated equity.
• Your Last Business Decision — Prepare the company and yourself for the eventual exit.
• Who Can You Trust — Build the professional team capable of helping you protect all of it.

These aren't six random business books.

They're one entrepreneurial journey.

If you're building a business because you ultimately want wealth, independence, and the ability to retire on your own terms, read all six.

• There will always be attorneys.
• There will always be accountants.
• There will always be advisors.
• There will always be somebody willing to sell you the next great strategy.
• But at the end of the day, there is only one person who has lived every year it took to build what they're advising you about.

You.

• Hire expertise.
• Demand competence.
• Understand the advice.
• Coordinate the team.

And be very careful who you trust with everything you spent your life building.

By James Orsillo

Author and founder of Practical Asset Protection