Advisor	Rich Harper Managing Member F S Group, LLC
Firm	FS Group
Location	Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
Model	Independent insurance agency, estate planning, executive benefits
Specialties	Succession planning, buy-sell agreements, executive benefits, multigenerational wealth
Client base	Business owners, high-net-worth families, and institutional clients across the U.S. and Europe
Waterlily User Since	February 2025

Key Takeaways

• Every referred client run through Waterlily resulted in a sale

• Rich introduced a repeatable LTC planning workflow across his practice

• Shifted LTC from an “optional conversation” to a core component of financial planning

• He created clear, data-backed client decisions instead of general assumptions

"All of which we've done Waterlily on, and all of which have resulted in sales. And none of them are small."

— Rich Harper, Managing Member, FS Group, LLC | 48 years in financial services

The Waterlily Result: Every Assessment Led to a Sale

Rich Harper has been in the insurance business since the 1970s. His clients include business owners, high-net-worth families, and institutional accounts across the U.S. and Europe, with $20 million or more in assets.

Since using Waterlily in February 2025, Rich has run assessments for numerous clients. The results have been direct:

1. Every client assessed through Waterlily resulted in a sale and these are high-net-worth, high-premium transactions

2. A new agency partner in North Carolina began referring clients, and Rich ran every one through Waterlily first

3. He now plans to rerun assessments every couple of years as client circumstances change, creating an ongoing review cycle and repeat engagement opportunities

"If somebody is seriously doing planning of any sort, particularly for clients above age 55, they use this once, they'll keep using it."

The Insight That Changed Everything

The old planning assumption was a two-to-three-year nursing home stay. Rich's own family proved defied that trend, three times. Rich served as power of attorney for three family members who needed long-term care:

• His grandmother spent seven years in care before she passed in 1987.

• His mother spent nearly ten years in LTC.

• His sister became disabled in her late 50s and is currently in a facility — where she will remain for the rest of her life.

"All of her money is gone… because of going into long-term care."

And the costs keep accelerating. As Rich put it, nursing home rate increases are sometimes in the double digits, outpacing even the 7–8% annual rise in college tuition.

How He Uses Waterlily: A Risk Management Framework for High Net Worth Clients

For decades, Rich assumed his wealthiest clients didn't need long-term care planning. They had the assets to absorb it. Then he remembered his own family.

The problem was never that his wealthy clients lacked funds. It was that no one was showing them the actual probability and projected cost; so they could make data-backed decisions about how to deploy their money.

Rich first encountered Waterlily at a LIFE Brokerage study group meeting in New York. Intrigued he first ran the assessment on himself. From there, he built a repeatable approach rooted in risk management — a language his high-net-worth clients already speak.

1. Framing LTC as a Probability Problem

Rich compares Waterlily's probability estimates to the Monte Carlo analysis his clients already understand from their investment portfolios. If a client's probability of needing long-term care exceeds 50%, it demands attention — regardless of net worth.

"If you have a probability of more than 50% that you're going to need long-term care, you need to look at this and say, OK, well, what asset am I going to use for that? And what's the impact going to be?"

2. Modeling LTC as an ROI Exercise

For his wealthiest clients, Rich frames Waterlily as a capital deployment analysis. When a family business recently sold, he used the platform to model where beneficiaries were better off allocating capital to protect against a long-term care event versus leaving it in other vehicles.

No pressure. No pitch. Just data.

Why It Works: Clarity Over Complexity

After decades of using planning tools that generate 50-page reports no client ever reads, Rich found something his clients actually engage with.

"It's not jargon-based. It is written in a manner that a client can look at that printout and understand it. They don't know all the calculations going behind it. That's not important…I like the fact that I can print it out. It's one or two pages."

For Rich, this is the differentiator. This clarity is what moves high-net-worth clients from "I don't need this" to "Show me my options."

How He Operationalized It

Rich didn't overhaul his practice. He embedded Waterlily into what he was already doing:

1. Runs Waterlily during existing client reviews — no separate meeting required

2. Uses it as the opening data point in risk management conversations

3. Prints the 1–2 page output and walks clients through it in person

4. Reruns assessments every couple of years as health, location, or financial situations change

5. Shares the platform with referral partners — his new North Carolina agency partner now sends every client through Waterlily first

He also leverages something he couldn’t do without Waterlily - automatic geographic cost modeling across multiple regions. With clients spread across the U.S. and Europe, Rich can't manually research care costs for every location. Waterlily handles that automatically.

“You can't possibly know the regional costs for long-term care in more than a handful of locations. There's no way you could.”

His Advice to Agents Who Think They Don't Need This

"They don't need it because they haven't seen it in action."

Rich's advice is simple: don't present it to a client first. Run it on yourself and see what comes back. Waterlily doesn't just generate data; it generates clarity.

"It provides me calculations that I could not and probably would not do on my own, and it really helps me explain the probabilities to the client."

After 48 years, a cancer battle, and watching three family members lose everything to long-term care costs, Rich knows the stakes aren't theoretical.

The data just makes the conversation possible.

Ready to see what Waterlily can do for your practice? Rich's advice: start by running the assessment on yourself.

Schedule a Demo →

About Rich Harper

Managing Member, FS Group, LLC · Harrisburg, Pennsylvania

Independent insurance agency specializing in estate planning, executive benefits, succession planning, buy-sell agreements, and multigenerational wealth. Serves business owners, high-net-worth families, and institutional clients across the U.S. and Europe. Waterlily user since February 2025.