Emory Smith serves as Partner and Senior Advisor at Balefire, working with clients whose financial lives involve significant complexity across business ownership, family wealth, and legacy planning. He acts as the central point of coordination across a client’s advisory team, helping align the many pieces of a family’s business and estate into a single, coherent strategy.
Emory holds the Certified Exit Planning Advisor (CEPA) designation, reflecting a practice built around the intersection of business succession and legacy planning. Much of his experience centers on helping business owners navigate the transition of their life’s work, working through the family and business dynamics involved and protecting what they’ve built along the way.
Clients and colleagues turn to Emory when a planning situation involves multiple advisors or moving parts that aren’t yet working in sync. Significant wealth often comes with a disjointed advisory team, and Emory works to close those gaps, integrate the advice being given, and keep the plan moving toward execution rather than stopping at strategic recommendations.
As part of his work with Balefire’s Insurance team, Emory helps clients evaluate how life insurance can address estate tax exposure and liquidity needs tied to business transitions, particularly the cash liquidity required for large estates or closely held businesses to pass to the next generation without forcing a sale or disrupting the business. He also works with clients on structuring these strategies in ways designed to avoid straining household cash flow.
At Balefire, Emory brings together business succession expertise, estate and legacy planning coordination, and insurance strategy to support clients through some of the most consequential transitions in their financial lives, working alongside each client’s broader advisory team to see the plan through to execution.
Originally from Dallas, Emory moved to Phoenix to attend Arizona State University. He and his wife, Katie, have two young boys and enjoy spending their free time coaching youth sports, connecting with friends and family, and engaging in competitive games of Monopoly.