Our team

Lake House is deliberately small. There is no service tier that determines who returns your call, and no junior advisor assigned to you after the first meeting. The people below are the people who do the work.

Chris Gatsch

Founder & Managing Partner · Series 7, 66, 24

Chris founded Lake House to do the coordination work larger institutions were not built to deliver. He spent the first part of his career on the institutional side — Vice President at JPMorgan Chase, and before that at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, where he completed the Princeton PMD program and received the firm's Financial Advisor Excellence Award in 2019.

What he kept noticing was a pattern. The moments that mattered most in a client's financial life — a sale, a large vest, an acquisition, a retirement — were exactly the moments a large firm was least equipped for. The answer tended to be a model portfolio and a service number.

He works primarily with executives and founders navigating liquidity events: equity treatment under a deal, Section 280G exposure, concentration through a closing, and the multi-year tax sequencing that surrounds all of it. He is a graduate of The College of Wooster.

Stephen Shaffer, CFP®, AIF®

Partner, Director of Financial Planning · Series 65

Stephen has spent 40 years in aviation and 19 in financial services, which is an unusual combination and the reason he is unusually good at one particular thing. In 2013 he founded Latitude Advisors, working with airline pilots and other high-achieving professionals whose careers do not follow an ordinary shape.

Pilots face a set of problems most planning frameworks handle badly: a compressed high-earning window, a federally mandated retirement age, a qualified plan that caps out well below what they would like to save, and an income stream that depends on passing a medical exam twice a year. Stephen has been working inside those constraints long enough to know where the real decisions are.

He leads the financial planning practice across the firm, and holds the CFP® and AIF® designations.

Sarah Ploskonka

Investment Assistant

Sarah handles custodian coordination, account paperwork, distributions, and portfolio implementation — which is to say she handles most of what determines whether a client's experience is smooth or frustrating.

Advice is only as good as its execution. Transfers that complete on time, paperwork that is right the first time, and distributions that arrive when they were promised are not administrative details to the person waiting on them. Sarah is the reason those things happen.

How we work

You work with the whole firm. In a practice this size, the planning lead and the person implementing your accounts are in the same conversation about your situation. Nothing is handed across a wall.

We coordinate rather than replace. Most clients arrive with a CPA and an attorney already in place. That is usually right — they know your history. What is typically missing is somebody sequencing the whole picture across tax years, deal timelines, and trading windows.

We answer the phone. It is a low bar. It is also the single most common reason people tell us they left their previous firm.