The 680 Group Beliefs

What We Believe, How We Work, and Why We Will Stay This Way

A letter from our family to yours. For forty-nine years, I have done the same work in essentially the same way. I sit across from a person — sometimes a couple, sometimes a family with three generations in the room — and I listen. I ask about their children, their parents, the worry that woke them up at three in the morning, the dream they have not told anyone else. And then, slowly, we build a plan together.

Who We Are

The 680 Group is a family. Not a metaphorical family — an actual one, joined by people who have become family through decades of shared work.

● Cosmo Boyd, founder, forty-nine years in this profession.
● Jana, with us since 2007.
● Beth, with us nearly as long.
● Thiot, Cosmo’s older daughter, carrying this work forward.
● Emily, Cosmo’s younger daughter, carrying it forward beside her sister.
● Robin, who keeps the founder — and therefore the firm — pointed in the right
direction.

Six people. One phone. One door. When you call us, a person you know answers. When you walk in, the same faces are here that were here last year, and the year before, and the year before that. We mean to keep it that way.

What we Believe

Every client is a human being. Not an account number. Not a tier. Not a household with a minimum. A person, with a story, a family, a set of fears, and a set of hopes. We have never had a minimum, and we never will. If you need help and we can help you, we will.

Trust is built slowly and broken quickly. We have spent five decades earning the trust of the people who sit across from us. We will not trade that trust for growth, for a multiple, for a quarterly target, or for anyone else’s idea of what this firm should look like.

Advice should fit the person, not the model. Many firms today decide in advance what kind of client they want, what kind of plan that client will receive, and what products will be inside it. We do it the other way around. We meet the
person first. The plan comes from the person.

A small firm can do something a large firm cannot. It can know you. It can remember that your granddaughter is starting college this fall. It can call you when the market is ugly, not because a system flagged you, but because someone here thought of you. Scale erases that. We are not interested in scale.

The next generation should be raised inside the work, not parachuted in. Thiot and Emily did not arrive here by acquisition. They grew up in this office. They know our clients by name and by story. When the day comes that they lead this firm — and it will come — the work will feel the same to you, because it will be the same work, done by people you already know.

What we will not do

There is a quiet pressure in our industry right now, and you may have felt it elsewhere. Firms are being bought. Independent practices are being folded into larger organizations whose owners live somewhere else and whose interests point somewhere else. The familiar names stay on the door for a while. Then the service changes. Then the people change. Then the door changes too.
We will not do that.

We will not sell this firm to outside owners whose obligations run to shareholders instead of to you. We will not adopt minimums that turn away the people we have served for decades, or the children and grandchildren of those people. We will not replace the human work with a script, a portal, or a process designed in some other city by people who have never met you. We will not change what works.

What you can expect from us

● A real person will answer the phone, and you will know that person’s name.
● When something in your life changes — a birth, a death, a sale, a move, a
diagnosis — we want to hear about it, because it changes the plan.
● We will tell you the truth, even when the truth is inconvenient for us.
● We will remember you between meetings.
● We will treat your family the way we would want someone to treat ours,
because, in every way that matters, your family has become ours.

Our Promise, in one Sentence

We will stay independent, stay family-owned, stay small enough to know you, and stay human- for as long as there is a 680 Group, and for the generation that follows.
-Cosmo Boyd
On behalf of Jana, Beth, Thiot, Emily, and Robin
The 680 Group