About Cornerstone

The Seat That Was Missing

I did not build Cornerstone because I set out to be a financial advisor. I built it because I once needed one particular seat, the one place where the whole of what I had built could be seen at once, and there was no such seat to be found.

The Founder

Josh Ryan

I did not come to this work from the top. I came to it from the bottom of a hole I had helped dig.

By my early thirties I had built something real in real estate. Then 2008 took it. Not just a bad year, but the whole thing, down to the studs.

I could get over the money. What I could not get over was that no one could tell me why it had happened. Sure, it was a bad economy. A lot of people got hurt. But I had done everything I was told was responsible, the accounts, the insurance, the plan, and I had capable professionals on every piece. Not one of them was wrong about their part. And it all came apart anyway. How do you do everything "right" and still lose?

I went looking to become the person I thought could have prevented it, an advisor. I got licensed, joined a large and respected firm, and waited to learn the knowledge that I had nearly gone under for not knowing. It never came. I learned how to gather assets. I learned how to construct a portfolio as well as anybody. But I never found anyone responsible for the whole picture that a portfolio is only one part of. The industry is not built to teach that, or to sell it. I had gone looking for the architect. I found more engineers, each one appearing excellent, each one certain his square was the game.

There had been a whole board in front of me the entire time, and I had been staring at one square, playing it well, and losing the game. No one was standing where all the pieces could be seen at once. Not me, and not any of the specialists I was paying.

A dozen people can each play one square perfectly and still lose the board, and no one in that arrangement is even accountable for the board itself. Once I saw that the seat was empty, I could not unsee it.

By then I had sat on both sides of the table. The side that gets hurt, and the side that is paid to try to keep it from happening. I understood what the second side kept missing, because the first side had lived it.

In 2013 I left and started Cornerstone. Larger firms had made generous offers to bring my clients over, and every one of them felt like more of the same. I wanted to build the seat that had been missing, so that the next person who had done everything right could finally see the whole board and decide for himself.

The longer version is in my book, The Most Expensive Thing.

It is rarely a money problem. It is a visibility problem. Every decision was reasonable on its own. What gets expensive is the space between them, the part no one was watching.

The Model

What That Seat Became

The seat I needed already existed. It had simply never been built for families like mine.

For a century, the wealthiest families have had a name for it: the family office. One seat whose whole job was to hold the entire picture and keep every part in view of every other. Not to do the accountant's work or the attorney's, but to see the one thing none of them could see alone: how each decision moves all the rest.

A Virtual Family Office brings that seat to people who do not need the overhead of a full family office on staff. The shape of it is one architect and a set of engineers. Your accountant, your attorney, your banker, your property manager stay yours, and each is an engineer, a specialist on one part. I am the architect. I hold the whole design and answer for how the parts move against each other, so important details don't get decided alone. I am also one of the engineers: the management of the wealth itself stays in my hands.

The Whole Picture

You Already Own All Six

A Virtual Family Office does not add pieces to your life. It brings the ones you already have into view. The professionals who serve you well stay yours. Where one does not, you are not sent back out to look on your own. Over the years I have built a network of roughly 75 specialists, each one reviewed before a client is ever put in front of them.

Six pieces tend to shape every meaningful decision, and until they sit in the same room, each one gets decided alone.

Your Business

Often your largest asset, and the one every other decision quietly bends around.

Your Real Estate

The properties, the entities, the debt, and how each moves against the rest.

Your Taxes

Not a season, but a lens on nearly every choice you make all year.

Your Estate

Where it all eventually goes, and whether that plan still matches the life you have now.

Your Risk

What holds the whole together on the day a single part has its worst one.

Your Investments

The one part managed here directly. The industry starts and stops with it; here it is one square of six, not the whole game.

None of these is a product. They are the parts of one life, and each one either strengthens the others or quietly works against them. The work is making sure that is a choice and not an accident.

How It Works

How the Work Moves

There is no rush to a product and no standard package. The work moves in a sequence, and it begins with recognition, not a pitch.

Recognition

It usually begins the day success stops simplifying things. New decisions, new variables, more of them at once than any one person can hold in view, including you.

Conversation

A first conversation, with no assumption that it leads anywhere. I want to know how you got here. You should be vetting me at least as hard as I am listening.

Discovery

Everything goes on the table. The whole board, not just any single square.

Architecture

We map how the pieces actually pull against one another, and where one decision quietly moves three others.

Implementation

The plan gets built. Your own professionals keep their roles, the network fills what is missing, and for the first time everyone is working from the same drawing.

Stewardship

It does not end. Every good year adds pieces, and the pieces need the same seat next year that they needed this year.

Credentials

The Record

I have worked in this industry since 2008 and started Cornerstone in 2013. I am a registered representative and investment adviser representative of Harbour Investments, Inc., Member FINRA/SIPC, and securities and advisory services are offered through Harbour Investments, Inc. Client assets are held at Charles Schwab. My full record is on FINRA BrokerCheck, a page I do not control.

The Next Step

Where This Goes Next

If any of this reads like your own situation, the next step is not a sales call. It is the Black Letter Private List, where this thinking continues.

See the Private List