Family CFO Client Update – March 23

At Buttonwood, we are committed to doing everything we can to ensure the safety of our Team, clients and community. Like many others, we have taken necessary steps to reduce the spread of the coronavirus through technology. Most of our Team is working remotely, allowing us to continue our daily work.

During these unique times, we are receiving more email from investment managers, vendors, and community groups, as well as regular client email. Please know client email takes priority, and we will respond to your messages first, and as quickly as possible. Please continue to send us documents through ShareFile and use our office address for physical mail – we will receive them and confirm so.

Our phone lines at the Buttonwood building remain central to reaching us while we work remotely. Local @ 816-285-9000 / or 800-448-9093. Give us a call anytime! Brent has updated our Welcome recording with specific directions: Press 1 for our Advisory Team and 2 for our Operations Team. To leave a message for any of us, simply choose from the phone directory and leave a voicemail. Your message will be immediately sent to our individual cell phones and we will call you as soon as we are able. Like email, messages from clients take priority over all others.

If you have an upcoming Strategy Update or other meeting, you will receive a confirmation email at least 1 day before your scheduled meeting with specific details for your call / web meeting. As we have always done, we will call you at your scheduled time. Some of you are familiar with web meetings and others of you are not. That’s okay! If you have questions on how to connect, please know we have added extra time in every call to make sure we connect as you would like.

Our Team is doing what we can to remain up to date with COVID-19 and the state of the economy. Through our Investment Policy Committee updates , we will keep you informed of our thoughts and actions.

With thousands of opinions on the severity of our situation, it can be difficult to know how to react. We wanted to share this link to a summary about COVID-19 from an actual medical source.

Many of us have our own businesses, and this is a very interesting time for small business. In the days to come we will learn more about the trillions of dollars of assistance being offered. In an attempt to centralize this information, we have created a Small Business Resource post on our website. We will continue to update this page as we learn more.

Since our founding in 2002, we have had a business continuity plan in place as required by our regulators. The base case of our plan has assumed a situation where our building and offices are destroyed and we needed to continue to serve our clients. While a virus isn’t quite the same, our plan has been implemented and is fully operational. If you would like to talk in more detail about the specifics of our plan, please contact me: Jon McGraw .

As we prepare for additional “Stay/Shelter at Home” guidelines, we want you to feel confident that while we are not physically in our offices, we’re available for you and your family – even if you just need a friendly and familiar voice to talk with.

Many of us listen to podcasts or read blogs. I have followed Shane Parrish & his blog for quite a while now. This morning his wrap up resonated with me and as such I wanted to share:

We’ve aged a generation in the past three weeks.

What matters has sharply come into focus. Family matters. Love matters. Kindness matters. Health matters. Generosity matters. People matter. Community matters. The rest is just noise.

Aside from physical distancing, the biggest thing you can do right now is choose to see the best in each other. Be kind. Be patient. Be tolerant. Be quick to help out in anyway you can (assuming you don’t harm yourself in the process.) Be forgiving when you would otherwise be upset. See things through the eyes of others and try to understand where they are coming from. Seek out opportunities for generosity. Reconnect with your community. Reconnect with yourself. Reconnect with your priorities. Live them.

We will get through this together, and we are here for you through every step.

Stay safe and be well.