Whether you’re selling a business or closing out a career, the years on either side of that decision are the highest-stakes financial window of your life. You’ve done the hard part. What comes next deserves the same intention that got you here.
Brian Skrobonja, CPWA®, ChFC®, is the founder of Skrobonja Financial Group, a St. Louis wealth management firm established in 1993, and the creator of WealthSync®, a proprietary process that coordinates retirement, tax, income, and estate planning for business owners and high-income families.
You didn’t get here by accident.
Decades of discipline. Smart decisions. Sacrifices other people weren’t willing to make.
And now you’re standing at the edge of the transition you’ve been building toward your whole career, retirement, a business exit, or a major shift in how your wealth needs to work for you.
The decisions you’re facing now are unlike anything that came before. They’re more interconnected. The stakes are higher. And the window to get them right is narrower than most people realize.
You’re not looking for more information. You’re looking for someone who has been here before, with people like you, and knows exactly what to do.
We work with successful professionals, executives, and entrepreneurs who have built wealth, in a business, real estate, intellectual property, or decades of disciplined investing, and are now navigating the transition that determines what happens to it.
If that’s you, keep reading.
And by then, the window to fix them has often already closed.
The families who struggle in retirement rarely made reckless decisions. They simply didn’t have someone coordinating the full picture, until it was too late to matter.
That moment, the one where a fixable problem becomes a permanent one, is exactly what this firm was built to prevent.
What if the market drops right when you start drawing income? Unlike your working years, there’s no time to recover. A bad sequence of returns early in retirement can permanently alter everything you planned for.
Decades of deferred taxes are sitting inside your investments, retirement plans, and deferred compensation, and retirement is often when the IRS comes to collect. Without a proactive strategy, you could hand over far more than necessaryduring the years you can least afford it.
The paycheck stops. Now every dollar has to be engineered to last. Without a
deliberate income design, you’re guessing, and in retirement, guessing has
consequences that compound.
These three risks are real.
They’re what brought you here.
But here’s what most people don’t realize: there are three more.
Most advisors address what you ask about.
We address what you haven’t thought to ask yet.
Not every dollar should do the same job. Without intentional design, assets end up misallocated, working against each other instead of together. The result is unnecessary exposure, missed opportunity, and a financial picture that doesn’t match how you actually live.
Wealth locked in the wrong places creates a different kind of poverty. Whether your wealth is in a business, real estate, or a lifetime of investing, the inability to access capital without disrupting your plan is a risk most people never see coming.
This isn’t just documents. Without intentional design, what you’ve spent a
lifetime building may not go where you intend, and the cost, delay, and conflict left behind can undo in months what took decades to create.
Six areas. All interconnected.
None designed to function alone.
This is what WealthSync® was built to coordinate.
The financial industry was built for accumulation, and most firms are still operating that way.
They manage your portfolio. Some may even review your tax return or suggest some estate documents.
But nobody is sitting at the center, making sure every decision in one area isn’t quietly working against another.
Investment decisions made without income context. Tax moves made without estate awareness. Risk management treated as an afterthought.
When no one coordinates the full picture, you become the coordinator.
Reconciling advice. Filling gaps. Carrying the weight of decisions that deserve more.
No sales pitch. No pressure. Just clarity.
Think of it as a gift to your future self.
WealthSync® is a consultative process designed to help take you from where you are to where you
need to be, with clarity at every step and nothing left to chance.
It begins with a Discovery where we learn everything about your situation, your goals, and what matters most to you. From there, we map your opportunities, present our findings, and, if we’re the right fit, move into building and activating your complete financial system.
Once you’re inside the WealthSync® Processᴵᴾ, you no longer have to guess about where things stand.
A quarterly Pulse helps keep every layer of your financial life actively reviewed, adjusted, and aligned, year after year.
The WealthSync® Frameworkᴵᴾ is the architecture behind every decision we make together.
Six disciplines, none designed to function alone, coordinated so that every dollar has a purpose, every decision has context, and nothing works against itself.
No financial decision is made in isolation. Every dollar is guided by rules-based discipline, positioned with purpose, aligned to your full financial picture.
Before we walk you through the process, here is what it is built to deliver: three outcomes that change what it feels like to have your financial life working the way it should.
We help you see your full financial picture, not just your portfolio. Every layer. Every connection. Every decision in context. No more wondering what you might be missing or whether something important has been overlooked.
Every discipline works together as one system. Income, taxes, assets, risk, liquidity, and estate, all aligned, all connected, none operating in isolation. This is what helps separate a coordinated Virtual Family Office from a traditional advisory relationship.
Every dollar has a purpose and a rule. You remain the CEO of your financial life. We serve as your CFO, helping make sure the system runs the way it should, so you are not carrying the weight of it alone.
Clarity. Coordination. Control. Three things the WealthSync® Processᴵᴾ was built to help deliver, and maintain.
I grew up in a blue-collar family in St. Louis. My dad came from Croatia, worked hard his entire life, and was always the smartest guy in the room when it came to figuring things out. But he traded time for money his whole career, and I watched that limit what was possible for him.
In my twenties I made the same mistake. I chased the lifestyle before I understood how wealth actually works. It took years of doing it wrong before I had the clarity that changed everything: real financial freedom doesn’t come from earning more. It comes from building assets that generate income, so
money works for you instead of the other way around.
That realization became the foundation for everything I’ve built since 1993. Thirty-plus years of working alongside successful families and entrepreneurs at exactly the moment that matters most, the transition from building wealth to protecting it, living on it, and passing it on.
What I’ve learned over those years is simple: the people who struggle in this season aren’t the ones who made bad decisions. They’re the ones who didn’t have a system, or someone coordinating the whole picture.
WealthSync® is the answer to that problem.
And after three decades, I still love this work, because I know what it means to a family
when it’s done right.
Founder, Skrobonja Financial Group · 30+ years in practice · Author of three books · Host, Common-Sense Financial™ Podcast (Forbes Top 10) · Regular contributor, Kiplinger · Featured on KMOX and 97.1 FM Talk
"The result of working with Brian has been setting up my portfolio so I have the income that I need to cover my expenses and live the lifestyle that I want to live."
"Brian's team can add a lot of value to anyone's personal financial portfolio, finding us the best value for how we want to invest our money."
"Prior to coming to Skrobonja Financial, we really weren't taught anything… Brian has taught us along the way to where we have seen things from a different perspective."
"At some point you just kind of have to trust somebody and believe that they've got your best interest at heart, and I feel like Brian does that with my family and our finances."
"The trust that had already been built on establishing the plan played out in the interaction with the team, continuing to have that good communication and transparency."
"When Brian was giving me recommendations, it was always going to be what was best for me and for our business."
"It takes a big burden and a load off of my shoulders… the idea that someone really does have our back."
"What keeps us with Brian is first of all the personal touch, he initiates contact with us every so often to make sure we're doing well, he listens to what our needs are, understands what the goals are, is willing to adjust to those goals."
"The recommendations have always been solid and have perfectly aligned with whatever our investment strategies were, and I have complete confidence."
"I can sleep at night even when the market is tumbling."
"Brian showed us how to save several hundred dollars a month and put it away—we never thought we had that kind of money that we could save."
The individuals featured in these testimonials voluntarily provided their feedback and were not compensated for their statements. These testimonials are based on personal experiences and reflect individual opinions. Results may vary, and no specific outcome is guaranteed. The individuals were not coerced or influenced to provide their feedback.