Charting Opportunities With Portus Wealth Advisors

In this installment of the Portus Perspectives series, William weighs in on one of the most talked about new financial vehicles of 2026. Trump accounts became available for the first time on July 4th, and the buzz around them has been significant.  And for good reason.  Trump accounts allow parents to put money into a pre-tax account for children under the age of 18. The government contributes an...

In this installment of the Portus Perspectives series, William shares the story of a client he worked with years ago at his previous firm in Baltimore. An attorney who worked for a smaller law firm in the DC area that handled M&A work and went under during the 2008 financial crisis.  Fortunately for this attorney, the M&A team he was part of got picked up by a much larger firm almost immed...

In this installment of the Portus Perspectives series, William shares a story about a client he has worked with for 21 years. First met in 2005, now 93 years old, a man with an extraordinary life story that includes open heart surgery in the 1950s where doctors packed his chest cavity with ice to slow his heart, and 20 years of chemotherapy for cancer that he has continued to fight through. A rema...

 In this installment of the Portus Perspectives series, William opens with a quote that stopped him cold.  "Let it offend you that someone else could be handed your days and turn them into something greater."  It stings a little. And according to William, it probably should. Because there is a lot of truth in it.  He was reminded of a conversation years ago with a fellow financial planne...

In this installment of the Portus Perspectives series, William opens with a classic summer scene. Back from the beach, car unpacked, and a dead battery waiting in the driveway.  His son's car, 80,000 miles on it, had died before they left for the trip. So the moment they got home, William and his 16 year old son went back outside and William walked him through jumping a car for the first time...

In this installment of the Portus Perspectives series, William shares a conversation that got him thinking about one of the most common patterns he sees in business owners preparing to sell.  A client is likely heading to market later this year or early next year. The M&A team is in place, the quality of earnings conversation has started, and the process is moving in the right direction. But a...

 In this episode of Charting Opportunities, William Bissett sits down on stage with Dave Newell, founder of the Five Facets of Business program and an expert in organizational design and development. Together they dig into something harder than it sounds: the difference between treating symptoms and diagnosing the actual disease inside a growing business. The Five Facets framework looks at every o...

In this installment of the Portus Perspectives series, William shares a real time situation involving a client who has been working with the Portus team for five or six years. After exiting a business back in 2018 and spending the years since managing rental real estate and a handful of other investments, this client is ready to get back into the work game. They've landed on something popular...

 In this installment of the Portus Perspectives series, William shares a memory that has stuck with him since childhood. His dad was an extraordinarily proud no-sock-wearing person, a style he apparently picked up during training in the Northeast and brought home for good. There are pictures to prove it, including one of his dad out on a soccer field in shorts and loafers, no socks, pushing a pudd...

 In this installment of the Portus Perspectives series, William sits down with a husband and wife client to talk through a problem that comes up more often than people realize. The wife runs a successful and growing business, currently operating on the desktop version of QuickBooks Pro. As the business expands, she needs more people to have access, which means moving to the cloud version. Their CP...

In this installment of the Portus Perspectives series, William opens with a weekend visit to a physical therapist he met years ago at the gym. After 18 months of dealing with persistent swelling in his left knee, a thorough session and some testing revealed something he wasn't expecting. Arthrogenic Muscle Inhibition, also called AMI. It sounds like a complex medical term but the concept behi...

In this installment of the Portus Perspectives series, William gets home to an empty house, clears out emails over dinner, and eventually winds down scrolling through Instagram.  And then an ad stops him mid-scroll: A national wealth management firm. It's a well produced video. And at the end of it, a ten point checklist for selling your business, with a prompt to hand over your name, email a...

In this installment of the Portus Perspectives series, William shares a situation that unfolded recently with a business owner here in Charlotte who reached out after learning she needed a medical procedure that carried a higher than normal level of risk.  The call was a reminder of something William sees regularly. An estate planning process that had started a couple of years ago, never quite got...

  In this installment of the Portus Perspectives series, William opens with something that stopped him mid-read over the weekend. A health newsletter about sleep. Specifically, about how the way we sleep today may have nothing to do with how humans naturally slept before the industrial era.  Before artificial lighting, before television, before phones, the pattern looked completely different. Peop...

In this installment of the Portus Perspectives series, William shares a detail that jumped off the page during a routine quarterly check-in call. The client is a business owner in the housing services market in Charlotte, NC, likely heading toward a sale somewhere in the next six to 18 months. William and the Portus team have been working with them for a year and a half, helping them prepare, impr...

In this installment of the Portus Perspectives series, William opens with a lunch meeting that stuck with him. A prospective client, early to mid-50s, successful, multiple businesses, solid net worth. By every external measure, someone who has figured it out. And yet sitting across the table, William could tell he was scared. It's more common than most business owners realize. And it showed u...

In this installment of the Portus Perspectives series, William opens with something he hasn't thought about in years. A quote he chose for his senior yearbook page: "I don't know where I'm going, but I'm on my way." As a 17 year old, it felt right. Looking back, he laughs at just how accurate it turned out to be. But as he shares in this episode, that quote is the exa...

 In this installment of the Portus Perspectives series, William opens with a story he's told clients many times: A wealthy family, old money, a grandmother who got sick, a grandfather who moved on, and a decision that ultimately disinherited the children and grandchildren in favor of a new wife and her family. Despite the fact that the original wealth came from the first wife's side of t...

 In this installment of the Portus Perspectives series, William opens with a celebration. He had the privilege of attending the 18th business anniversary of a client, Anoop, founder of Confiance. And as Anoop stood up and told his story, from launching alone after his original business partners backed out, to traveling the world, sleeping on a couch in San Francisco, and ultimately putting down ro...

In this installment of the Portus Perspectives series, William opens with a moment that caught him completely off guard during a client meeting in Washington DC. He walked into a routine appointment with Mary Lou, a long time client, and before they even got through the agenda she stopped him and asked what was wrong. She told him he didn't have the same energy, the same passion, the same exc...

In this installment of the Portus Perspectives series, William shares a conversation he had with his mom, a real estate agent heading to a listing appointment, that turned into one of the clearest analogies for business exit planning he's come across. Selling a home and selling a business have more in common than most people realize. Homeowners stage their house, freshen up the paint, call in...

In this installment of the Portus Perspectives series, William shares a phone call with a prospective client that perfectly illustrates one of the most common obstacles in financial planning. Making major decisions based on feeling rather than vision. The couple had built a solid net worth through rental real estate and were facing a significant decision. They were about to sell a property and wer...

 In this installment of the Portus Perspectives series, William shares a conversation that stopped him in his tracks during a recent client meeting in Baltimore. The client is someone he has worked with since 2007. She sold her business in 2023 after years of planning, dozens of conversations with M&A advisors, retirement projections, and exercises designed to help her envision life after the...

In this installment of the Portus Perspectives series, William shares a conversation he had with his mom, a real estate agent heading to a listing appointment, that turned into one of the clearest analogies for business exit planning he's come across. Selling a home and selling a business have more in common than most people realize. Homeowners stage their house, freshen up the paint, call in...

 In this installment of the Portus Perspectives series, William gets personal. Really personal. We live in a world that celebrates success. LinkedIn feeds full of wins, achievements, and growth stories. But what we rarely see is everything that came before those wins. The failures, the detours, and the moments where the path forward wasn't clear at all. William shares his own story. Failing o...