Most owners of privately held businesses have never had someone who doesn't sell to them, report to them, or depend on them, read the business back to them plainly. That is the gap Stuart Kessler built his practice to fill.
Stuart began advising clients in 2010. Seeking business owners as a market, he found the entry point where most advisors do: benefits and retirement plans, the relationship owners start before they trust you with anything harder. By 2012 his practice had found its center in privately held businesses, and in a specific kind of owner: the one who still carries a central role in most functions personally. That concentration is exactly what makes a business hard to transfer and hard to step away from.
As Managing Director and head of the Business Advisory Unit at Kinnect Advisors, Stuart and his team work with those owners on the questions that matter most: what the business is worth, what is holding that number down, and what it would take to change it. The diagnostic they developed covers the eight functions that drive business value, then asks two questions many advisors never seek answers to: Is the business transferable? Is the owner ready?
Benefits, business advisory, and succession planning are typically three separate engagements with three different firms. Stuart's team holds all three. When it's time to optimize the benefits program for the owner, the succession plan isn't lost in another room.
He also chairs the Kinnect Investment Committee, which develops and manages the firm's model portfolios spanning the full risk spectrum, built for advisors serving individual investors. Owners who build concentrated, illiquid wealth in a business often arrive at a liquidity event without an investment framework to receive it. Having both sides of that transition in-house means the conversation about what the business is worth and the conversation about what to do with the proceeds doesn’t have to start over with a different team.
He has earned the Certified Exit Planning Advisor (CEPA) and Certified Plan Fiduciary Advisor (CPFA) designations, alongside an M.B.A. with a concentration in managing financial performance from the Merrick School of Business at the University of Baltimore and a B.S. in Accounting from the Smith School at the University of Maryland.
He previously chaired the Greater Baltimore Walk to End Alzheimer's and has represented the Alzheimer's Impact Movement in meetings with elected officials on research funding and care policy. He lives in New Market, Maryland, with his wife and two daughters, and coaches his daughter's soccer team, which he describes as the most complex governance problem he works on.