Farm Succession Planning Tool

The process had grown into a patchwork of fillable PDFs, email, cloud storage, shared drives, Word documents and specialist internal systems. Financial Professionals gathered information from clients, organized documents, assembled PDFs and submitted everything to an internal consulting team — who then had to enter much of it again, by hand, into another system.

But the inefficiency wasn’t the whole problem. Advisors struggled to understand what information was required, what had already been submitted, what was still outstanding, and where a case stood once it entered the process.

That mattered because these were not quick transactions. A case could involve several family members, businesses, ownership structures and advisors, and stay open for months or years.

I approached this as a service and workflow problem rather than a form redesign. Through interviews, workflow analysis and conversations with Financial Professionals and internal specialists, I mapped how information actually moved through the organization — as opposed to how it was supposed to.

Advisors had built their own systems around the official one: Word documents, cloud folders, email threads, handwritten notes, third-party tools. Every one of those workarounds marked a place the process was failing, and together they pointed at the principle the replacement had to follow.

I designed a centralized digital workspace for building and managing cases. Rather than completing documents and assembling a packet, advisors build a case progressively through structured sections covering the client, family, businesses, ownership and financial situation. Documents upload directly instead of being combined into carefully prepared PDFs.

Structure alone wasn’t enough. Specialists needed the story behind the data — family relationships, unusual circumstances, competing goals, the context that makes each farm different. So the experience deliberately accommodates both structured information and open narrative. A farm isn’t a collection of fields in a database.

The platform changed what happens after an advisor submits. Cases stay visible over time, so a Financial Professional can see status, what’s outstanding and what happens next. Automated follow-ups keep momentum, and structured information can move into downstream systems instead of being typed in again.

Better-structured incoming cases mean fewer incomplete submissions and far less duplicated work. That is the same argument in three different currencies, depending on who is listening.