Finance Monthly M&A Awards 2019 - Winners Edition

56 CANADA www.macmillanestate.com TRUST PLANNING ADVISORY FIRM OF THE YEAR Our next winner is Sheri MacMillan – a highly respected leader and a truly inspiring woman who’s dedicated her life to helping people with estate planning, empowering clients to do more with their finances and helping them craft their legacies. We had the privilege to speak with Sheri and learn more about her company and legacy in the estate planning sector. For over two decades, MacMillan Estate Planning has provided families with comprehensive estate planning services. What were your goals for MacMillan Estate Planning when you set up the company back in 1996? My main goal was to offer our clients a more humanised approach to estate planning. Our purpose was to safeguard significance – and what this means to us is to safeguard people’s values and beliefs. And this continues to be our main priority to this day, 23 years later. Of course, people’ values and beliefs change over time, so we, as an estate planning company, have to make sure that we adapt their estate plan to their current priorities and purpose in life. As an estate planning company, we want to make sure that our clients’ wisdom and values are transferred to the next generation onwards. We don’t consider a single client as an individual only – we want to make sure that our plan is a plan for the client’s entire family. We always do our best to encapsulate their legacy, which becomes the driving force of their plan. Combined with an innovative approach, first-class service and a team committed to excellence, these have been our core values since the very beginning. Does MacMillan Estate Planning service clients in jurisdictions where it does not have a permanent office? Currently, we have offices in Calgary and Vancouver in Canada, Arizona, USA and London, UK, but we have found that servicing clients in jurisdictions where we don’t have a permanent office is a natural extension of the planning work that we do. We have been blessed to have had the opportunity to work with entrepreneurs and HNW families, who have not always been in Q Q