Before You Reach Out, Here Are the Answers to What You're Likely Wondering

No. We do not take custody of client assets or execute trades. Suncentral is structured as an independent consulting firm — we provide analysis, recommendations, and ongoing oversight, but your money stays with your chosen custodian, whether that is a bank, brokerage, or investment dealer. We never have access to move funds, purchase securities, or liquidate holdings on your behalf.

If you do not currently have an advisor or are dissatisfied with your current arrangement, we can help you select one through our Advisor Selection & Due Diligence service, which evaluates candidates against 28 criteria including compensation structure, compliance history, custodian arrangements, and client-to-advisor ratio.

This structure eliminates conflicts: we have no financial incentive to recommend one product over another, no trailing commissions tied to fund holdings, and no referral payments from any dealer or platform. Revenue comes exclusively from consulting fees paid by clients, quoted in advance, in writing, in dollars. You can read more about how this independence shapes our work on the About page.

Most financial advisors in Canada are compensated through asset-based fees — typically 1.0%–1.5% of your portfolio annually — or embedded trailer commissions inside mutual funds, usually 0.50%–1.00% per year paid by the fund company to the advisor's dealer. As your portfolio grows, their fees grow proportionally, whether or not the complexity of their work increases or the quality of their service improves. On a $1.5 million portfolio, a 1.25% advisory fee amounts to $18,750 per year — a figure most clients have never seen stated in dollars.

Suncentral charges project-based fees for defined engagements or retainer fees for ongoing consulting relationships. Every fee is quoted in advance in writing, stated in dollars, and scoped to specific deliverables with a written timeline. A Fee Audit has a defined cost. A Portfolio Construction Review has a defined cost. There are no asset-based charges, no trailing commissions, no referral payments, and no fees that increase simply because your portfolio grows. You can review the full list of our ten consulting services — each with its scope, timeline, and deliverables described in detail.

For the same reason a company hires an external auditor even though it has an internal accounting team. Independent review catches what insiders miss — or prefer not to raise. Your advisor has a financial relationship with you that creates inherent incentives: to retain your assets, to recommend products within their dealer's shelf, and to avoid difficult conversations about underperformance or excessive fees. An independent consultant has none of those constraints.

We regularly identify fee structures that could be reduced by 30–50%, asset allocations that have drifted substantially from stated targets, holdings that were suitable when purchased but no longer match the client's life stage, and duplicate positions across multiple accounts that create unintended concentration risk. In one documented engagement — Prairie Mechanical Ltd. — we identified $267,000 in projected fee savings over eight years that the client's five existing advisors had never disclosed.

Approximately 60% of our clients continue working with their existing advisor after our review — but with better terms, clearer reporting, a written investment policy statement, and measurable performance benchmarks that did not exist before. The remaining 40% choose to transition to a new advisor, often one we help them select through our Advisor Selection & Due Diligence process.

Timelines vary by engagement type, but we publish specific ranges for every service so you can plan accordingly:

• A standalone Fee Audit & Cost Disclosure takes 2–3 weeks from document collection to final report delivery.
• A full Portfolio Construction Review runs 4–6 weeks, depending on the number of accounts and holdings involved.
• An Investment Policy Statement development project takes 3–5 weeks depending on complexity — a family holding company with multiple beneficiaries requires more time than a sole proprietor with two registered accounts.
• A Group Retirement Plan Review averages 6–8 weeks, including employee surveys, provider benchmarking, and fund shelf analysis.
• A Retirement Drawdown & Decumulation plan runs 4–6 weeks, including Monte Carlo stress-testing across multiple scenarios.

We provide a written timeline at engagement start — not an estimate, but a committed schedule with defined milestones. In 2025, 94% of our projects were delivered on or before the stated deadline. The remaining 6% were delayed by client document collection, not by our team.

Our clients range from sole proprietors with $200,000 in registered accounts to family holding companies with $8+ million in combined assets. There is no firm minimum. One of our founding principles — detailed on the About page — is that a business owner with $500,000 in savings confronts the same analytical complexity as a pension fund: asset allocation, tax efficiency, risk management, longevity planning, and fee optimization. The work we deliver reflects that reality.

For group retirement plans, we typically work with employers in the 15–300 employee range — small enough that major institutional consultants overlook them, large enough that a poorly structured plan creates real financial harm to participants over time. Our case studies document engagements across this full spectrum, from a $620,000 individual portfolio to a $4.8 million corporate holding company.

The common thread across every client is not portfolio size — it is the demand for analytical depth, fee transparency, and documentation detailed enough that a third-party examiner could reconstruct every finding without a single phone call.