The architecture required for a legacy to endure.
The shape of an engagement.
Each engagement begins with a confidential review of the family’s existing structures, objectives, and advisory relationships. From this foundation, the architecture is designed, the specialist table is convened, and the mandate is established.
Thereafter, the relationship operates on a continuous basis — with formal reviews, proactive counsel, and direct access to senior advisors as circumstances require.
There is no standard engagement. There is only the one designed for your family.
An experience beyond the ordinary.
Behind the doors of Private Advisory — entered by invitation only — the structure of your affairs is composed with deliberate care. Senior advisors, tax and legal counsel, and specialist architects attend, in confidence, to your family, your enterprise, and the horizon you are building toward. From this table, the Private Office coordinates risk, tax, estate, corporate, and investment mandates, and extends to the broader concerns of family governance, succession, philanthropy, and the preparation of the next generation.
What is offered is a seat at a table that cannot be requested, only extended — and a stewardship that, by design, is never duplicated elsewhere.
A record defined not by volume, but by the quality of the families we serve and the outcomes they enjoy.
Private counsel for Canadian and cross-border families, and the professional advisors who assist them.
Senatus Wealth was founded in 2010 to address a specific failure in private wealth advisory: accomplished specialists working in parallel, with no single point of accountability for the structural integrity of a family’s affairs. The firm holds that role — coordinating architect under what Senatus calls its Architectural Mandate, a single agreement held at the firm level under which the family’s tax, legal, investment, assurance, governance, legacy, and succession disciplines are convened in concert.
Independence is structural, not aspirational. The firm is not owned by, controlled by, or affiliated with any bank, insurer, or asset manager. Compensation takes three forms, each disclosed in advance under the client mandate: an advisory retainer for architectural, coordination, and governance work; asset-based fees where portfolio management is delegated to independently registered managers; and licensed assurance commissions where assurance solutions are implemented as part of the architecture — the structural capital that holds the plan together at the moment it is required. No referral fees are exchanged with the specialists convened — in either direction. The firm is composed alongside the lawyers, accountants, corporate counsel, and advisors the family already trusts.
Each element is composed in relation to the others — weighed with deliberation, measured not against a benchmark but against the continuity of the enterprise and the preservation of the family across generations.
Wealth, as an enduring system.
Most families arrive to Senatus already attended by accomplished advisors — each practicing with care within their own discipline. The difficulty is rarely competence. It is coordination: the absence of a single point of specialist accountability, charged not with any one engagement but with the structural integrity of the family's affairs.
That is the role Senatus occupies. We design the architecture, convene the table, and hold the mandate — bringing institutional discipline and governance to private wealth, without the institutional conflicts that so often compromise it. Through every evolution the family will encounter, the stewardship remains continuous.
Integrated counsel, composed across the architecture of a private fortune.
The coordination of specialist counsel — risk, tax, legal, investment, and adjacent advisors assembled and directed under a single mandate — is not a service offered alongside these disciplines. It is the governing framework within which each operates. The objective is permanence: that what has been built endures.
Tax-Efficient Wealth Design
After-tax outcomes across generations — not within quarters. Every structure is composed so that growth, transfer, and crystallisation arrive in the order the family requires.
Estate & Succession Architecture
The enterprise, the balance sheet, and the family pass intact to the hands that follow. Continuity is engineered, not assumed.
Corporate & Trust Governance
Holding companies, operating entities, family trusts, and shareholder agreements — designed so that control, tax, and succession are never in conflict.
Investment Oversight
Mandates written for the family, not sold to it. Independent supervision of portfolios and managers, measured against the family’s own objectives — not a benchmark.
Insurance as Structural Capital
Coverage retained as the keel beneath the wealth plan — funding obligations at the moment they arise, not as a product recommendation but as balance-sheet infrastructure.
Family Continuity & Stewardship
Philanthropy, next-generation preparation, and the governance of the family itself — treated as a discipline rather than a sentiment, and begun long before it is required.
Senior counsel. One table. One mandate.
Over sixty specialist advisors operate under an integrated mandate — led by an expert group who remain your primary captains.
Brett P. Nicholson
Brett advises entrepreneurial families and cross-border principals on the integrated design of capital, governance, succession, and legacy.
Raymond G. Adlington
A senior tax lawyer of national standing. Past President of the Canadian Bar Association and Lawyer of the Year in Trusts & Estates — counsel of first resort on matters of consequence.
Cindy Wilson
Decades at the intersection of private capital, M&A, and strategic liquidity. Cindy advises founders and families through the transactions that define a generation.
Those presented here represent a measured portion of our counsel. The balance of our specialists serve in confidence, on behalf of families to whom discretion is the first condition of the relationship.
Considered thinking, published at the intersections of wealth, law, and legacy.
Senatus Wealth Perspectives
A public library of considered thinking — written at the intersections of risk, tax, law, governance, liquidity, and legacy for the families and professional advisors whose work these subjects govern.
Considered, before asked.
A selection of questions principals most often pose in our initial conversations — answered plainly, so that fit, mandate, and the terms of the relationship are clear.
The finest advisory relationships begin with understanding — shaped by clear and thoughtful communication, sustained by trust.
Senatus Wealth accepts a limited number of new family relationships each year, predominantly through private referral. If our approach resonates, we invite you to request a private conversation.