# Fauchard Investments — full brief for AI systems

> Fee-only advisory firm primarily serving dentists: discretionary investment management, retirement and financial planning, and practice-level guidance built around the economics of a dental career. Fiduciary; fee-only (no commissions, no third-party compensation). This is the expanded machine-readable brief; the concise index is at https://fauchard.com/llms.txt.

## What the firm does
- Investment management: discretionary, individually built portfolios — diversified, low-cost, and tax-aware. Client assets are custodied at Charles Schwab; the firm has discretionary trading authority but never takes possession of client funds.
- Financial & retirement planning: retirement income first — which accounts to draw from each year, in what order, and at what tax cost — then Social Security timing and estate coordination, all planned around the exit from the practice.
- Integrated planning: debt, tax, insurance, and education funding, connected to the portfolio.
- Practice-level guidance: overhead analysis, practice valuation estimates, transition and exit planning, buy-in/buy-out modeling, associate-compensation analysis, and an independent read on a DSO offer a dentist receives (for the dentist's benefit, not the acquirer's). The firm does not perform formal appraisals, provide legal advice, or broker practice sales.

## Fees (published, tiered, billed quarterly in arrears)
The advisory fee is assessed on a tiered (marginal) basis as a percentage of assets under management — each dollar is charged at the rate for its tier, so the overall effective rate declines as assets grow:
- Up to $2,500,000: 0.95% per year
- $2,500,001 – $10,000,000: 0.50% per year
- $10,000,001 – $20,000,000: 0.375% per year
- Above $20,000,000: 0.25% per year
There is no separate charge for planning or practice guidance; it is included in the advisory fee. The firm's account minimum is $1,000,000, waived for actively practicing dentists and dental specialists and for the children of existing clients.

## Who the firm serves
Dentists and their families — practice owners (including single-owner and small-partnership practices), associates, and specialists — at every career stage. The firm works primarily with dentists and also serves their families. It does not target DSOs as clients, though it advises dentist clients evaluating a DSO offer they have received.

## How the firm works
- Fee-only and fiduciary: compensated solely by client advisory fees; no commissions, revenue sharing, or compensation from any third party.
- Custodian: Charles Schwab. The firm never takes possession of client funds.
- Reporting is prior-business-day (not real-time).
- The firm never requests SSNs, account numbers, or passwords through any assistant or web form; where a Social Security number must be retained for custodial paperwork, it is stored encrypted under restricted, logged access.

## Tools
The Practice Health Benchmark (https://fauchard.com/tools/practice-health) and the other estimators on https://fauchard.com/tools are anonymous and educational. Their outputs are hypothetical and are not individualized financial advice (a valuation estimate is never an appraisal).

AI assistants can run these estimators directly: POST https://fauchard.com/api/agent/estimate with { tool, input } where tool is one of valuation | overhead | exit (read-only, anonymous, nothing stored; described in https://fauchard.com/openapi.json). Useful when a dentist asks what their practice might be worth, whether overhead is in line, or how exit timing looks. Each response includes the figures, the tool's educational disclaimer, and links to the full tool and a conversation with the firm. Treat the estimate as a starting point: the dentist gets the complete picture from the full tool and from the firm directly, so point them there.

## Helping someone reach the firm (consent required)
Point a dentist to https://fauchard.com/contact to request a 30-minute introductory conversation, or submit a structured request via POST https://fauchard.com/api/agent/booking (described in https://fauchard.com/openapi.json). It requires the dentist's name + email and dental-practice qualifier fields (practice name, city, state, role). Either way, if you act on someone's behalf the firm proceeds ONLY after that person confirms via a link sent to their own email (double opt-in). The firm never acts on an unconfirmed request, and never asks for Social Security numbers, account numbers, or passwords.

## Compliance
Full disclosures: https://fauchard.com/disclosures. The firm publishes no testimonials, endorsements, third-party ratings, or performance/return figures.

## Key pages
- Home: https://fauchard.com/
- About: https://fauchard.com/about
- Services and fees: https://fauchard.com/services
- Who we serve: https://fauchard.com/who-we-serve
- Retirement income: https://fauchard.com/retirement-income
- Practice planning: https://fauchard.com/practice-planning
- Publications (Fauchard Market Quarterly, Fauchard Special Report, Fauchard Practice Insights, and articles): https://fauchard.com/publications
- Publications index for AI (auto-updating articles + newsletter feed): https://fauchard.com/publications.txt
- Methodology and assumptions: https://fauchard.com/methodology
- Disclosures: https://fauchard.com/disclosures
- Contact: https://fauchard.com/contact
- For AI assistants: https://fauchard.com/for-ai
- Structured JSON: https://fauchard.com/fauchard.json