Nicholas DiFalco, APMA®, CEPA®
Managing Partner, Westport Wealth Partners
Nicholas DiFalco is a Managing Partner at Westport Wealth Partners, a three-partner wealth advisory practice in Westport, CT affiliated with Raymond James Financial Services.
He holds two designations, and they map to the two halves of his work. The Accredited Portfolio Management Advisor℠ (APMA®) designation, awarded by the College for Financial Planning, a Kaplan Company, covers portfolio construction, asset allocation, and risk management. The Certified Exit Planning Advisor (CEPA®) designation, awarded by the Exit Planning Institute, covers what drives business valuation, the realistic ways ownership can transition, and the personal financial planning that has to follow a sale.
What Happens the Day After a Sale
This is the planning problem Nick considers the most important one in the practice, and the one he wants Westport Wealth Partners to be known for.
A business owner spends decades with two things running in parallel: income coming in, and deductions going out. A sale ends both on the same day. The company that was the paycheck and the tax shelter is gone, and whatever replaces it has to be built on purpose.
In Nick's framing, the question is how to take the proceeds and replace that cash flow for the rest of a life. Answering it well is work that starts years before a transaction, not after one.
Who Nick Works With
Nick works primarily with business owners in their sixties who are either planning an exit or beginning to explore one. They are high-net-worth, most of their wealth is concentrated in a company they built, and they usually need several things at once: a financial plan, wealth management, the exit itself, and often estate planning.
He also works with people who have built substantial wealth over a long career of high earnings and equity appreciation, and who want the investment side handled well enough that it stops being something they think about.
What this group worries about privately is consistent. Not realizing the value they spent a working life building. Paying more to the government at death than to their children. And whether a transition to the next generation will actually work.
The clients Nick works best with are the ones who want advice and ask good questions. He would rather explain the thinking than hand down a recommendation.
Assembling the Right Team
An owner exit is not a one-person job. It involves CPAs, attorneys, and investment bankers, and Nick treats a significant part of his role as building that team and coordinating it around the owner's plan, rather than leaving the owner to manage a group of specialists who have never worked together.
Through the Raymond James affiliation, that includes access to Raymond James investment banking for qualifying transactions. Raymond James does not provide tax or legal services. This work is coordinated with the client's own CPA and attorney.
How Nick Approaches the Work
That emphasis on the downside runs through the portfolio work. APMA® training is in the mechanics of building portfolios, and Nick's view is that a portfolio only does its job if the client can stay with it when markets are difficult. A theoretically optimal allocation that a client abandons in a bad quarter has not helped anyone.
He is also direct about what this work is and is not. “It is not just about the market. There are tax mitigation strategies, downside protection, and planning that are valuable.” His own view, and the one the practice is built around, is that the financial plan carries more weight than the investing does.
What Nick Focuses On
His work with clients covers:
