No. 10: What’s Even Better Than Your Own Succession Plan?!

After months of watching various political candidates evade the questions asked of them, I’m going to break ranks and just answer the question straight out. The answer is, having two dozen of your largest professional service clients with their own succession plans, each building a legacy of their own. Rather than watching your long time clients sell their businesses to a third-party and retire, a succession plan allows them to retain control longer, and transfer equity gradually to an existing or developing team of key employees and/or family members.

As a financial advisor, insurance professional, attorney, accountant, or other business consultant, imagine counseling the clients who have long trusted you and your judgment, to build their own stronger, profitable, investable and more valuable business models. And, having done this for your own business, you will have one additional and unique skill to offer your clients. Everyone wins!

Turning a job into a lasting business is not easy. But with a good plan and professional guidance, it is quite possible and usually the preferred route once the facts are known and the goals are clear. It has to start someplace and that’s where, respectfully, you need to practice before you preach – build your own succession plan, your own stronger, more valuable and investable business and share your own lessons with your own clients. Even if it doesn’t work out, you will know enough to help your clients consider the possibilities. Over time, even as you, G1s, hand your business off gradually to your own Successor Team, your successors can begin to work with the successors of your own, larger, more valuable present day clients. Each generation helping and supporting the next generation of owners and leaders.

I am convinced that the methods and approaches outlined in my new book, Building With the End in Mind, can be applied to almost any professional services business. It makes no sense to start most professional service books or jobs or practices from scratch with each new generation. Unless you really love the sole proprietorship model, it only makes sense to at least explore the possibilities of building on top of what someone else has painstakingly assembled, perpetuating what you’ve worked so hard to start and nurture. It only makes sense to bring in talent and skills that can continue to grow the business and get individually better, and to serve the client base at an increasingly high level.   

As a result of working with financial and insurance professionals for the past 30 years as a securities regulator, a securities attorney, and a business builder, I have shared this vision with my friends and business comrades. To a person, every financial professional that I have shared a copy of my book with has been met with a paraphrased response of “I have a doctor client, or an accountant, or an engineer, who needs to know about this.” Or, as one insurance professional said “my brother started a roofing company right out of high school and now has over 75 employees, but he’s getting older and is the sole owner and is wondering what the future holds.” Yes! That is the point. Let’s spread the word and help others even as you help yourself. The best way to learn, is to teach; the best way to teach, is to be a student forever.

My goal in writing this new book is to help and to teach other professionals how to move from a job or a book to a long-lasting, valuable business that offers great choices towards career end – if you build with the end in mind.

Why not pass a copy of this new book  – looking at you, financial advisor, insurance professional, attorney, accountant, appraiser – and see where it goes. Share your experience or progress on your own goal of building an equity-centric business that can one day be your legacy. You’ve got nothing to lose and everything to gain.

Thanks for reading,

David Sr.