Exit, Succession, and Transition
You have spent many hours of your life building your successful business, and now you are considering an exit. Within the next five years, this might be a sale, grooming a successor, or transition to employees or family members, and you want a guide to lead you to this successful transition.
You are nervous about its future and whether your life’s work can be transitioned, whether it is worth anything, what happens once you are not managing the day-to-day, and what you will do once you have transitioned.
With the proper guidance, you can have clarity of direction, plans, and implementation, ensuring you, your business, and your finances are ready and giving you the confidence to make the best decisions for you and your family.
As a business coach with an exit planning specialism, I help you gain confidence, clarity, and a roadmap to move forward in preparing to achieve your desired transition when the time comes, or the right opportunity comes knocking.
Here is how we’ll work together on preparing you for your exit, succession, or transition from your business:
Initial Assessment: We'll start by comprehensively evaluating your business from buyers' and successors' perspectives, identifying strengths and areas for improvement, and assessing your personal and financial planning.
Customized Action Plan: Based on the assessment, we'll create a tailored strategy that addresses your specific needs and goals.
Twice Monthly Owner Coaching Sessions: Through regular one-on-one sessions, we'll help you get ahead of the business and your post-business life phase, either in person or via video.
Quarterly Advisor Meetings: Through quarterly meetings with your Wealth Advisor, CPA, Legal, and other advisor representatives, and impacted immediate family members to ensure that all is on track.
Project Coaching Sessions: These are in-person sessions supported by video, and we coach the business, leaders, and teams through the design and implementation of the projects identified in the Assessment.
Access to Resources: You'll get exclusive access to tools, templates, and training materials to support your continued growth and transition.
Ongoing Support: I'll be your dedicated growth partner, available for guidance and support between sessions.
Private Workshop Access: You will have the opportunity to attend client-only workshops.
Network Access: We have an extensive network of professionals with whom we can introduce you to specialists who can meet your needs.
Exit & Succession FAQs
Exit and succession coaching is a strategic process that helps business owners plan for transition of their business and the next phase of their life, to ensure a smooth and successful exit or succession.
Proper planning is about having the necessary conversations and putting into action the required plans for how the business owner will live their next act, post transition as well as ensuring business continuity, maximizing business value, aligning their personal goals, and reducing stress during the required transitions.
The approach starts with your post-succession picture and life will be like post sale or transition. What is required to make this happen on a personal level and how this then drives context into the business strategy, what challenges this creates, acknowledging and leveraging the emotional undercurrents that this major life change creates.
Business owners planning to transition out of their business through a sale, transition to employees, or pass it onto family members should consider coaching to ensure a successful process.
Succession coaching is also ideal for leaders that are considering retirement and they are being succeeded by an employee or new hire.
Personal benefits include post transition clarity, a clear roadmap with the right transition, successful transition without regrets, confidence, clarity, and less stress.
Business benefits include a strategic plan, enhanced business value, prepared business, attracting the right successors, and an aligned management team.
By providing coaching and jointly building and implementing their specific plan. Transitioning from their business is one of the most significant activities they will ever do. By having the necessary conversations that impact themselves, their family, their business partners and their employees ahead of the transition stress is reduced. These are supported with strategic guidance and practical tools.
The program focuses on three facets:
- Your personal transition readiness and preparedness
- Preparing the business and the team
- Coordinating the team of specialists required including wealth, estate, legal, accounting, and tax.
During the transition journey there are often highs and lows. For some the journey is like grieving the loss of a loved one, for others it is a fear of stepping forward. Their identity is often entwined with being the owner or part of the leadership team, this loss of identity can create many emotions and thoughts. Mapping out the journey ahead and the likely emotions and thoughts that the transition could bring up for them provides a start so as they become reality we work together to connect to the new future, acknowledge what is happening and what they can do to address these emotions.
Strategic planning is required for the three legs of a transition. These plans align the ‘why’, with ‘what’ and the ‘how’ to set clear goals, align the resources, activities, and expectations across the personal, financial and business domains.
Emotions are normal and they will show up. Acknowledging that they will is the start. By fostering open communication and empathy, you can navigate emotions that come up during this major milestone of your life journey.
A structured roadmap and toolkit, these unique frameworks provide the start of creating the custom map for you. Your business and your post transition life may look the same from the outside but seldom is. The maps and frameworks provide you with conversation starters to explore, tailor and align your personal and business strategy and implementation of the transition.
When a business owner has fallen out of love with their business it is usually because the business has outgrown its current infrastructure and ways of working. Each day requires them to get the top score of playing whack-a-mole and effectively the business now runs them rather than they run the business.
working with the owner by understanding where their business is now running them, what it has outgrown, and supporting the implementation of the people, and systems infrastructure to handle where the business is, where it is going, and releasing you from the role as the chief whack-a-mole officer.
Open communication is key to understanding needs, addressing the current issues and challenges. This fosters a supportive, motivational transition, and change positive environment to support the business and you through transition.
The three biggest issues that prevent a successful transition are:
- Loss of status/identity: – The owner or leader is known in their community for that role. Unless they do the work to transition to a new identity they will resist and even sabotage all succession plans despite saying they have got it.
- Inflated valuation expectations: – The owner’s mental model for the value of their business combines ego and belief that their business is better than their competitors. Mergers and Acquisition specialists cite this as the number one reason why the sale of a business fails to be completed.
- What to do post transition: – This is sometimes linked with the loss of status and identity. Business owners that have gone into their business every working day and many weekends for 20 or more years, and the fear of suddenly not having a channel for their energy, dreams, and purpose can be overwhelming.
Working together to anticipate the challenges you expect, the ones we have seen, as well as the specific business or personal outcomes required. When unexpected challenges present themselves, together we embrace them, work through them to find the appropriate solution, and how to ensure there is not a recurrence. Typically these unexpected challenges come from third parties.
Unexpected changes in circumstances and life require a review and re-evaluation of the transition strategy. By understanding these changes and working through the impact of these changes sometimes requires a completely different strategic approach, an acceleration, or slowing down of the implementation of the strategy. The triggers for re-evaluating include change in health, relationship, societal, technology, legal or macro-economic factors. You will have the tools to understand the impact and adjust your strategy to better serve your goals and reduce stress.
Key messages are that exit and succession planning requires multiple drivers aligned. These drivers are personal readiness, financial readiness, business leadership, and operational readiness.
All of these drivers need to be assessed and aligned to have a successful regret free transition.
You start by using the frameworks provided to give you understanding of the drivers and their typical importance by buyers. Ultimately it is what makes a business sustainable versus what makes a business risky or unsustainable from a new owner’s perspective.
Building a realistic, prioritized strategy and implementation plan to reduce the risks in your business as well as making your business assets transferrable results in a business that is desirable and worth more.
Stress and other emotions are normal, and they will show up. Acknowledging that they will, is the start. Giving space to acknowledge emotions and feelings during the transition is important. During the sale of a business the requests for information can feel unrelenting and exhausting. By fostering open communication and empathy, you are able to navigate the emotions that come up during this major milestone of your life journey.
Transitions can be very dynamic and choice points can create a lot of emotions. Plans are never perfect. By doing all the preparatory work our clients have more mental and emotional energy to tackle challenges as they come up. Working the challenge when it shows up is critical for long-term success.