The IPO market is back. After a dearth of public listings over the past few years, companies are going public at a rapid pace—and scale. This month, annual IPO proceeds hit $142 billion, marking a 630% increase from 2025 and surpassing the full-year record set in 2021.

And the mega-IPO era is just getting started. SpaceX completed the largest IPO in history on June 12, and major debuts from OpenAI, Anthropic and Databricks are expected in the next 12 to 24 months, with hundreds of smaller companies queued behind them.

Behind every one of these listings are founders, investors, executives and early employees holding concentrated equity that is about to become real wealth—as well as real tax exposures and concentration risks.

This is the wealth-creation event advisors have anticipated since last year, and it will keep arriving in waves through 2028. Many expect to benefit from it. Far fewer will—not because they lack the capability, but because their platform does.

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The IPO Is a Test, Not a Payday

An IPO isn’t the finish line. It’s the beginning of an entirely new set of financial complexities, particularly for clients crossing the $20 million threshold into ultra-high-net-worth territory.

Clients face expiring lockups, concentrated positions, volatile share prices and significant tax exposure. Conversations shift from retirement projections to estate planning, private investments, family governance and charitable structures. Decisions that used to carry six-figure implications now carry eight-figure ones.

Here’s what gets underestimated: clients don’t move through this shift passively. They ask fellow founders who they use. They compare notes with their newly liquid coworkers. They shop around and arrive at consultations with pointed questions about QSBS, direct investments, tax strategies and liquidity solutions.

The six to 12 months around a listing are when these relationships are either cemented or lost. The advisor’s skill is rarely what decides it. Their platform is.

Where the Gaps Show Up

Advice stops at the custody line. Proceeds rarely stay in a brokerage account. Clients with newfound wealth buy homes, acquire investment real estate, back startups, establish foundations and so on.

Most advisory business models are still built around managing custodied assets. If an advisor isn’t compensated or equipped to advise on assets held elsewhere, the client makes those decisions without the professional who is supposed to see the whole picture.

Tax becomes the dominant variable. For many IPO participants, taxes are the single largest financial risk to long-term wealth creation. Stock compensation alone contains layers of complexity: QSBS eligibility can allow substantial capital gains exclusions, but only where ownership requirements are met, and planning begins well before the event. ISO exercises can trigger AMT unexpectedly. RSUs generate ordinary income at vest. NSOs require deliberate exercise timing.

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Beyond equity comp, there are tax deferral and mitigation strategies, charitable gifting, donor-advised funds, and the sequencing of sales across multiple tax years. The distinction between proactive planning and reactive preparation isn’t a matter of degree—it’s the difference between tax strategy and filing. It requires dedicated tax professionals working alongside the advisor, not a return prepared in March by someone who wasn’t consulted in October.

Private investments stop being optional. Clients who spent years building a private company tend to want to keep investing in private ones. Venture, private equity, private credit, real estate and direct deals and co-investments go from interesting to expected, and few advisors can meet that expectation without a platform built to support it.

Even then, access is hard to deliver well. Diligence, manager evaluation, liquidity constraints, allocation construction and honest conversations about risk and taxes are what separate a private markets capability from a menu. An advisor without that behind them tends to do one of two things: avoid the conversation or say yes to something that doesn’t fit.

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Nobody is quarterbacking. The aftermath of a liquidity event is often a client’s first encounter with multi-dimensional wealth planning. What they need isn’t an investment manager. It’s a personal CFO who coordinates the CPA, the estate attorney and the specialists so every decision is made within an integrated financial plan rather than a series of disconnected conversations that the client has to manage.

If an individual advisor can’t provide that level of coordination independently, it’s critical to have the support of a firm with the infrastructure and specialists to deliver it.

What Actually Gets Won

On the surface, the IPO wave is a prospecting opportunity. In reality, it’s a stress test for clients navigating life-changing wealth and for the advisors who want to serve them.

The advisors who come out ahead over the next several years won’t necessarily be the ones with the best investment performance. They’ll be the ones at firms where they can integrate tax planning, estate strategy, family office services, private investments, and balance-sheet-wide advice into one coordinated experience.

The 12 to 24 months following a liquidity event are frequently the defining period in a client’s financial life. The advisors prepared for that period won’t just win assets. They’ll build relationships that outlast the position that started them.