Where do the family’s dollars and hours go?
Fourteen entities across four jurisdictions is not a structure anyone designed. It accreted. Each LLC solved a problem at the time, and each one still costs a filing, a registered agent, an audit line and a slice of somebody’s week to reconcile. The principal’s scarcest asset is attention, and most of it is going to work that could be delegated, automated, or simply stopped.
SIGNAL prices the structure and the week together: what each entity costs to maintain, what it still does, and how many hours go to low- or zero-return work.
Four data points and a flag.
Entity overhead by jurisdiction
Filings, registered agents, audit and admin, priced per entity per year.
Weekly attention
Hours by category — reconciling, chasing signatures, entity admin, actual investment decisions — from a twelve-week log.
Delegable and automatable hours
The share of the week that a process, a person or a system could take, with the candidates named.
The flag
Entities that exist only for reasons that no longer apply, and the hours they still consume.
What the answer looks like.
A fictional book, the real mechanism. The headline, the data, the flag, and the source chain — in that order, every time.
| Reconciling statements | 9.5 h | automatable | |
| Entity admin | 8.8 h | delegable | |
| Chasing signatures | 6.0 h | delegable | |
| Investment decisions | 7.2 h | the actual job |
Reconciling takes 9.5 hours a week and is automatable; investment decisions get 7.2.
- Attention log · 42-hour week
- Each category marked delegable or automatable
- principal time priced at $3K an hour
A different question, not a better chart.
No reporting platform measures the cost of being complicated, because complexity is not a position. It is a set of obligations spread across counsel, accountants and the family’s own calendar. SIGNAL treats structure as a line item so it can be managed like one.
The number, then the decision.
Three entities are flagged for counsel's review. Nine and a half hours a week of reconciliation have a system assigned to them. The investment decisions that were getting seven hours get more.
SIGNAL, answered.
Where does the attention data come from?
A short log kept by the family or its operating staff for twelve weeks, entered in the portal. It takes a few minutes a week and produces the first honest picture most families have seen of where the time goes.
Does SIGNAL recommend closing entities?
It shows what each entity costs and what it still does. Whether to collapse one is a legal and tax decision for your counsel; the framework gives them the numbers to start from.
How is overhead priced?
Filings, registered agent fees, audit and administration, entered per entity and per jurisdiction, then totalled. Estimates are labelled as estimates until replaced by actuals.