No. 14: What Does it Mean to Create a Legacy?

In the decades I’ve been helping professional service owners set up their succession plans, I often ask the founders to answer one question right up front: “How does your story end?” I hear lots of different answers but one of my favorite is “I want to build a legacy”, except that when I ask what that means to them, I learn that it means something different to almost every owner and entrepreneur.

Some G1s want to build a business that will outlive them. Some feel a commitment to ensure their work and their advice continues on and is delivered by a trained team who can carry on a certain culture. To others, I hear about an implied promise to always be there and to get the job done on the clients’ timeline, not the Professional Service Provider’s (PSPs) career limitations.

I think that a legacy means something more than just a business that carries on through succeeding generations of ownership, though that is a part of the answer. Certainly, it is more than a Succession Plan to a founding owner. I think that it includes not only a transfer of ownership, but also a transfer of knowledge, experience and culture – the special way that the founding generation got things done and delivered services. I used to think that family businesses had a clear edge on legacy building but through experience and observation, I now think that family-like businesses hold an edge. Regardless, here is a working list of what constitutes a business legacy model from my thirty years of experience:

1. Starting with the clients, the focal point of a Professional Services Business should seek to provide continuing services with the same core values to the children and grandchildren of G1’s client base;
2. The services need to be delivered under a continuous or very similar business name and in, or from, the same general geographical area;
3. The services need to gradually and continually improve while safeguarding the Business’s reputation in the community;
4. The business needs to be adaptable and resilient, changing with the times, the economy, the rules and regulations, and client demands;
5. A client cannot purchase the exact same services down the road from a legacy business – therefore, a legacy business needs to deliver something more, something different, often cited as a continuation of a certain culture, but also with a built-in culture of continuation. 

These are thoughts, not rules. Of course there are exceptions. But as a next generation PSP, or G2, when you next talk to G1, your boss(es), about what he or she wants to do with the Business at the end of their career, and listen carefully to their thoughts and any inference that they’d like to create a legacy because it means something more than just passing the Business on to new owners or key employees. Using a term such as “selling the business” completely misses the mark.

G1 starts it all, but there is no legacy without long-tenured, key employees and next gen owners who are trained in the processes of service delivery and can pass along that training, with improvements, to future employees and owners. Leadership from one generation to the next must carry the burden of respecting and remembering the past while adapting to the present and making sure the clients never forget what makes a legacy business different and special. It isn’t easy. It takes a very special team of people assembled one at a time.  

Thanks for reading,

David Sr.