The operator before Mission Control
A four-decade career, a sale, a holding company. Three legal entities now hold the work: a C-Corp running the operating business, a pass-through control LLC carrying real estate and a minority stake in a friend's firm, and a spendthrift trust funded for the kids. The CPA tracks tax in QuickBooks. The attorney tracks trust roles in Word. The owner tracks net worth in a single Excel sheet that opens slower every quarter.
Quarterly close was a three-day exercise. The CPA pulled trial balances. The attorney confirmed trustee assignments. The owner sat in the middle, copy-pasting numbers between three professionals' email threads, hoping nothing slipped. Every refinance, every gift, every minor estate event meant another round of hand-coordination across the same three inboxes.
The trigger was a routine trust review where the attorney flagged that the Successor Trustee assignment hadn't been refreshed since 2019. Nobody noticed. The owner realized: if I'm not here tomorrow, none of this is operable. The whole machine runs on me holding it in my head.
What Mission Control replaced
Six Excel files (consolidated balance sheet, cash forecast, real estate roll-up, trust ledger, insurance summary, family medical log) became one cockpit. The CPA still uses QuickBooks; the attorney still uses Word. But everyone now reads from — and the owner reasons from — a single private surface that pulls each professional's source-of-truth into one room.
The Family Office persona ships with eleven pages out of the box: Holdings, Control Layer, Trust, Money, Compliance, Documents, Notes, Ops, AI Consultant, Settings, and a Citizenship/Intel page tier-gated to Signature. We turned all eleven on. Each page renders the same data shape, persona-flavored — the owner sees their estate, not a generic dashboard.
The build, in detail
Document extraction was the heaviest lift. The trust documents alone ran 240 pages across three instruments. We ran a single-pass Sonnet extraction over every PDF in the family vault, then a three-pass Opus extraction (extract → cross-validate → resolve conflicts) over the foundational documents — trust agreement, articles of incorporation, operating agreement, insurance master. The output is a structured graph of every entity, role, beneficiary, trustee assignment, distribution event, and policy term, queryable from the AI Consultant.
Trust-role management surfaces as a dedicated page. Every role defined in the trust instrument (Settlors, Judges, Trust Guardians, Trustees, Successor Trustees) is tracked with its current holder, acceptance status, and contingency chain. When the Successor Trustee accepts in writing, the cockpit logs it. When the chain has a gap, the cockpit flags it.
Whole life cash-value tracking is a quiet feature that earns its keep in year five. Each of the four kids has a policy structured as part of the legacy plan; the cockpit pulls cash value monthly and projects forward against the funding schedule. The owner can see at a glance whether the policies are tracking projection.
Per-entity tax position renders as a quarterly grid: rows are entities, columns are quarters, cells show estimated liability with `DEFERRED ∞` flags on positions structured to roll forward indefinitely. The CPA reviews this grid; the owner sees the same picture without a 30-minute call.
The family health vault — biomarkers, longevity protocols, recent MRI and DEXA scans, an AI doctor per family member — is the page the owner didn't know he needed until it shipped. Now it's the page he opens first on Sunday mornings.
What changed
Quarterly close: 3 days → 4 hours. Net-worth confidence: weekly check-in instead of quarterly reconciliation. Trust governance: every role accepted, every contingency named, every gap flagged before it becomes a crisis.
The professionals stayed. The CPA still closes the books. The attorney still drafts the documents. What changed is that all three of them — and the spouse, and the eldest kid who's old enough to learn the structure — read from the same surface now. The owner stopped being the bottleneck.
Tier and engagement
Signature build, single payment up front. Custom integrations for the document RAG and the trust-role page. Ongoing: light retainer for new document ingestion as instruments are amended, and a quarterly review with Eric to sharpen the picture as the estate evolves.