Episode Description:
Business owners face a critical question: What happens if you’re suddenly not there? In this episode of The Business Transition Roadmap, Elizabeth Ledoux guides listeners through becoming a “business empty nester” – preparing your business and successors to thrive without you. Learn why successful business transitions require planning, how to prepare successors for independence, and discover your Next Adventure beyond ownership. Essential listening for family business owners, succession planning, and anyone considering their business transition timeline. Tap or click the play button below to listen to Becoming a Business Empty Nester: Preparing for Life After Ownership.
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Elizabeth uses the powerful metaphor of becoming an “empty nester” to help business owners understand the transition process. Just as parents prepare their children for independence, business owners must prepare their teams, successors, and businesses to thrive without their daily presence.
The episode begins with a thought-provoking visualization exercise: What would happen if you could never step foot in your business again, starting today? Elizabeth guides listeners through examining their gut reactions – whether relief or panic – and what those responses reveal about their transition readiness.
Key topics covered include:
- The ripple effects of sudden owner absence on leadership, family, employees, and customers
- Why business transitions should be journeys, not events
- How to help successors become independent while honoring your legacy
- Elizabeth’s personal transition story and timeline with her successor Andrea
- The difference between leaving your business and leaving it well
- Planning your “Next Adventure” and rediscovering purpose beyond business ownership
- Creating clarity and peace for everyone affected by your transition
Elizabeth emphasizes that meaningful exits aren’t just about leaving – they’re about leaving well. This means preparing successors for both good times and challenging periods, while also discovering what fulfilling life looks like beyond business ownership.
The episode concludes with an invitation to explore the Evolve program, designed to help business owners and successors navigate their transition journeys with confidence and clarity.
Chapters in this episode:
00:00 Introduction to Business Empty Nester Concept
01:46 Visualization Exercise: What If You’re Not There Tomorrow?
05:31 Understanding the Ripple Effects of Owner Absence
09:50 Building Your Transition Roadmap: Elizabeth’s Personal Story
13:11 Creating Meaningful Exits and Planning Your Next Adventure
17:24 Providing Clarity and Peace for Your Team and Family
21:07 Moving from Fear to Love: Starting Your Transition Journey
Connect with Elizabeth Ledoux and the Transition Strategists:
Website: https://transitionstrategists.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thetransitionstrategists
Elizabeth on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elizabethledoux/
Transition Strategists on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/transitionstrategists/
Transition Strategists on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@transitionstrategists
Subscribe to “The Business Transition Roadmap with Elizabeth Ledoux” on your favorite podcast player:
Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3MxSYA2
Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3IhMMux
Get Elizabeth Ledoux and Laura Chiesman’s latest book, “It’s A Journey: The MUST-HAVE Roadmap to Successful Succession Planning”: https://amzn.to/3oq2LQv
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Becoming a Business Empty Nester: Preparing for Life After Ownership Transcript
Elizabeth Ledoux: Hi everybody and welcome back to the Business Transition Roadmap podcast. I am Elizabeth Ledoux and I’m founder of the Transition Strategists and am here today to hopefully talk to you a little bit about becoming an empty nester, a business empty nester. It’s kind of exciting and also kind of, I don’t know, frightening at the same time. to think about graduating your business and graduating your legacy and putting it into somebody else’s hands to take forward without you. So today what I thought we would do is do just a deep dive into the heart of your business, into your leadership and your legacy. And I want you to, well, I invite you to do a little bit of visioning with me.
I want you to imagine that as of today, that you’re no longer in your business. So not six months from now, not a week from now, not five years from now, not someday, not after one more big deal or something that happens, but literally right today you are out of your business. And I want you to just kind of sit back and take a deep breath and let that sink in for a minute and ask yourself, you know, what’s your gut response to that? Imagining that? What is your gut response to imagining that today, right now, you never step foot in your business again? So are you feeling maybe some relief? Like, oh good, I don’t have to go back and everything will stay. It’s their problem. They’ll figure it out. Whatever happens, happens.
Are you having a little panic attack? Like, my gosh, they wouldn’t be ready, the business would fail, I don’t know what to do or to think. Yeah, is it peace or is it chaos? So just take a moment to think about that. And let’s talk a minute about the void, the void that happens when a business owner is no longer there.
So you can imagine your chair is empty and your office is empty. So nobody’s in that office at the moment. You can imagine that your emails are continuing to come. They’re piling up and nobody’s responding to them because they don’t have your login information or whatever. But the emails are continuing to come. The phone is continuing to ring. People are still needing decisions made and problems solved.
Really, your office is empty. So if you have been steering the ship, imagine that you’re not in that room, you’re not in that chair to steer the ship anymore. You may have some great team members and some great people that you think are ready. So if you think about that and go a little bit deeper, what’s the ripple effect in your business that- that happens if you’re imagining no longer being there. Does your leadership team rise to the occasion? Can they do that? Or are they going to have to scramble? And what about your family? What are they doing dealing with you no longer being there? And it could be due to a variety of reasons, but probably if you’re no longer there in a simple event and it’s unforeseen.
Probably something pretty challenging has happened to you. So what’s your family dealing with? Not only maybe the challenge of a loss or you not being there for some reason, but also the business, the money, the family, the employees and their wellbeing. And what about your clients or your customers? So if you think about that, most of the time in our experience, most of the time, when a business transition is an event, there usually is chaos. You may have set your team up or set the family up as best you can for a transition of you being out suddenly. However, usually it’s really not that pleasant and it really is not that peaceful. There’s a lot of chaos that goes on.
So my podcast today isn’t about a doomsday exercise, but it is about asking you to imagine what it would be like. And now I’d like to imagine, you know, for you, probably not a happy thing, but you may be no longer on the planet. So you might have left your business horizontally. You’re going to leave it vertically or horizontally, so one way or the other. So you may have left your business horizontally. But I want you to consider other people.
I want you to consider the people that you’ve been taking care of and what the impact is to them and how they’re getting through that. stepping away from your business, it is a challenge for the business, but it’s also very personal for you. For many of us, including me, because I’m a founder owner of a business as well.
It is a part of our identity. We’ve worked on it for decades, sacrificed, we love it. And for many of us, it’s a big part of our purpose in our lives. We’ve really become accustomed to being the leader of the business and also caring for all the people because we can, because we can make decisions. So the thought of stepping away can be terrifying.
But yet not stepping away or failing to have what we call a roadmap, a timeline. It can leave the people that you care about the most in a vulnerable position and maybe in a position that they’re just not ready for. I don’t know that anybody’s really ready for a business owner to leave, but we can do a pretty good job of working our way out of being an owner as best we can.
So if you think about kids, so I’m thinking about my kids, and now they’re 35 and 36 and have been on their way for many, many years. They’re doing just great. And if I think about my kids and go back to being a mom, one of my number one jobs as a mom, in my opinion, when I was in that stage of helping them to grow and learn, one of my number one jobs as a mom was to help them. Be independent of me, help them to create their own lives forward and help them to be successful. And not only just be successful, but be confident in themselves, find their own passion and their own vision and do the things that they loved. So if you think about transitioning a business, it doesn’t have to be that you’re completely out. So if I go back to becoming an empty nester, that started.
Probably when my kids were about 14 or maybe even earlier, helping them to choose what was right and what was wrong and how to do things and even how to walk across the street or tie your shoes or whatever, all of those things they learned and they didn’t know them before. So when I think of a transition for a business, I think of it as you helping them to become empty nesters so that they can take the business that they’re working in, the business that hopefully they love, the business that they see a future for, and they can take it forward without you. Now, if that sounds like a sad thing to you, that’s probably very normal because of course you’re loving being there and there are always challenges but they’re still foundationally as a reason why you’re there.
So if your job is to help them thrive without you, how do you do that?
The idea behind that for us is building a roadmap because if I build a roadmap, I have the opportunity to move and use time to my advantage. So if I can use time to my advantage, can one, look at what I want.
So I’ll tell you a little bit about my story. My story, I was getting pressure from my team to actually figure out what would happen to the business and what would happen to their jobs and what would happen to the clients if I all of a sudden wasn’t here. And that started like four or five years ago. And when you do a SWOT analysis, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, in a small business, typically one of the biggest threats is having a sole owner. If you have a sole owner, that’s a pretty big threat because if all of a sudden you’re not there, the business is at risk. And there’s nothing that you’re going to do about it. You don’t control potentially whether you’re there or not in that instance. So anyway, getting pressure from my team, decided to walk through even though I thought I wasn’t ready, which is like many, and I do this work with people. So I was like, I don’t need to do that. I’m not ready for this, but I did it and I did it not for me. I did it so that I could help them understand. And have some peace on what would happen if something happened to me.
What I found out along the way, which was really cool, is I found out a lot about my husband. I found out a lot about what he envisioned and what he wanted in his life. He found out a lot about me. And then I found out that I could have a roadmap forward without having a successor chosen.
I could have a roadmap forward without knowing exactly when I wanted to leave and exactly how I was going to navigate. It was pretty cool because about a year and a half later, a lady showed up in my world that I actually recognized could be a successor for me. The thing is that I could recognize she was a potential and I also knew because of the work that I’d done with my husband, that our timeframe was about seven to 10 years. Like seven to 10 years, I started that early. So fast forward, really worked out well. And what it gave me is confidence and clarity, and it gave my team peace. It gave them some confidence as well in what to do. So I think this roadmap concept is great. So I still have about, hmm, probably six years or so before I’ll make a decision whether or not I’m leaving or not. Could be four years. But I have a successor who’s engaged now, which is exciting. And so the roadmap, I’m just giving you my example because it’s a living, breathing document that gives you a vision forward where you’re able to recognize opportunities and also know if you’re not doing what you need to do to get to where you want to go.
So it’s important. Many of us aren’t ready. Many of us don’t know what we want to do. And the thought of being an empty nester is terrifying. An empty nester business, no more business, like no more kids at home. What am I going to do with my time? So it takes time to do a transition well. And it’s a very fun journey if you engage in it.
So a meaningful exit, let’s talk about that. A meaningful exit, what does that mean? If you’re going to go and do this over time, like my job now that I see it, again, it’s very similar to my job as a parent when I was getting my kids ready to go to college, to have them go and literally not need me. They still called me because they knew that I had some information that might be helpful. But they would have been fine on their own if I hadn’t been there. So a meaningful exit, it’s not just about leaving, but it’s about leaving well. It’s about helping your successors know how to run this company in the good times and the bad times, because a lot of business owners will hold on in the bad times and then transition in the good times. Pretty challenging for your successor to only learn how to run a business in good times.
So when you think about leaving, it’s about also for you moving towards something. What’s your next adventure? If you’re going to be an empty nester and your successors are flying forward without you, how do you, you know, what about you? So start dreaming again, doing some interesting things with people that you haven’t touched base with for a while. Maybe learning something or doing something that you have always thought about doing.
And many of our clients actually do things like, gosh, they will go get like their catamaran, bare boat certification so that they can go rent boats and, you know, go explore islands and do things like that. Another one, they started doing some art. Another one decided that they wanted to get their golf game down to, you know, be a scratch golfer. Some people are traveling.
if that’s something that’s of interest to you and they’re traveling for extended periods of time. So what does your next adventure look like? What are you going to move towards? And you can test it out if you have a timeline and a roadmap. You can test out, you know, starting to help your team do more without you, maybe taking some extended time off that you haven’t been able to take probably since you founded the business.
Starting to have some conversations with people so that especially family members if they’re in the business or coming into the business What’s that mean for them? And how does it work? You can have all of those conversations and you can explore what’s next for you If you don’t like it, you can do something else So it’s sort of the fun trial and error to see what really is fulfilling to you And maybe it’s being part-time in the business with your kids there too so that you can come in and bother them now and then and maybe it’s just trying to separate from the business completely because you’ll be happier there and not even have any interest in the business at all. So when you think about this roadmap forward and you imagine yourself literally not being there today, do you have clarity? Do you have peace? And do the people around you have clarity and peace?
That’s a good question to ask. If they don’t have clarity and they don’t have peace, where is their biggest area of lack of clarity? Where is it most unclear for them? If you have a timeline, if you have a roadmap, you can put those things on the roadmap to help them learn or help. Document or get those things cleared up if it has to be with a lawyer or somebody else to do some estate planning and all of that kind of thing. All of that can be done in this journey that you’re getting ready to go on. It feels pretty good, I have to tell you, to be grounded in knowing what you want.
Now, again, a roadmap is just an intention on paper. Find that you need to shift it or move it or something happens to someone else around you, that it’s easy to move it. It’s easy to shift and you know that you’re doing it. Hopefully, this has been a good podcast for you. My intention is to spark some thinking and maybe to spark a little bit of sense of urgency.
The sense of urgency comes from maybe the hard visioning of what happens if you’re no longer there. It could come from that, but it also, I hope, comes from a deeper place, not a fear. I hope it comes from a deeper place where you’re looking to help and looking to support the people around you to live the best life and, yeah, just to be able to honor them. Because they’re important and you’ve done such a good job of taking care of them for so long. So it’s good for you to think about these things. There’s a lot of growth. This is where the growth lives for you. And this is just a what?
So as we close this podcast up and you’re thinking about the visioning exercise that we did in the beginning, the visioning exercise was just to give you a little bit of a spark, just to think a little bit about what it might be like for others because you may not be on the planet, but what do you think it would be like for others?
What kind of a legacy will you have left? What kind of clarity and what kind of peace will they have? Not you, but what kind of clarity and what kind of peace will they have? And if you explore that a little bit, you can find the places where they’re going to have the least amount of clarity, where it’s most unclear, and where it’s going to be more chaotic for them and not as peaceful.
On your roadmap, you can start to think about, you know, this year I’m going to take care of this and next year I’m going to take care of that. And two years from now, I’m going to start really diving into my successor. And three years from now, I hope that they’re on board or successors. I hope they’re all on board, but I might start to have conversations a couple of years from now. There always is some cleanup to be done, and that can all be on your timeline. You don’t have to be ready to leave.
You just need to be ready to begin. And so that’s where the good is. That’s where a lot of the growth lives. That’s where the connection to you and your spouse or your partner, your business partner, it’s where you can have some amazing conversations about what life is and what you want life to be and how to get there with support. This, hope, is a gentle nudge to start building your roadmap.
And I don’t want you to build it out of fear, right? In the visioning exercise, there’s fear and likely there should be some fear because you’re probably, your business isn’t ready, you’re not ready, family’s not ready, kids aren’t ready, all of that stuff. But I don’t want you to build it out of fear. I want you to build it probably more out of love and out of goodness. Your idea of taking care of these people and your idea also of taking care of yourself. Because as you get closer and closer and closer to your event of exit, which will happen, right? Time takes care of everything for us. So as you get closer, the stress and the pressure on you gets bigger. And again, through my story, I started so early because of my team. I was feeling a little pressure from them.
It lifted so much off of my shoulders. So I’m just sharing my experience, but I also see that every day in the clients and the work that we help them do and to navigate. So there’s love for you. There’s love for the team. There’s love for the family. You’ve got love for your clients and they feel that they feel that. So they have that sense of peace and they have that sense of clarity.
I just encourage you to do the work now so that someday when it comes they can say that you and they together built something that would last and when the time came they were ready. I’d like for this to be something that’s on your terms so that you leave on your terms and you don’t leave on someone else’s. just encouraging you with a good nudge to get started.
We have some great programs that will help you because this is work that typically owners haven’t done before. And so I’d love to invite you to come and explore some of the programs that we have. We’ve got a new program that’s called Evolve. And this morning I was on a call with a person out of Connecticut and he asked me the question. goes, he goes, evolve. And he said, why? What’s evolving? You know, is the owner evolving? And I said, said, well, if you really look at it, the owner is evolving from their old job to maybe, you know, a leader, decision maker to mentor. And so they’re moving and evolving to a next kind of a next adventure. You’ve also got, gosh, the business is going to evolve because the team is going to have new leadership. Your clients are going to evolve because they potentially are going to be working with different people. As your team moves up, you might have to fill in some of those spots because hopefully they’re going to be able to grow with you. So you have the team evolving, you you evolving, the family’s going to evolve, the business is going to evolve, and there’s so much excitement truly in getting this ready to go. Sometimes it’s all new and all different, which to me as an entrepreneur is so much more fun than running the old business. I get to reinvent it as the leader and the person as I start to work my way out. So thanks for joining
I hope this resonated with you and if you, if it did, just share it with someone and check out our website so you can learn more about the Evolve program that we have.
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The Business Transition Roadmap with Elizabeth Ledoux
How do communities thrive? When businesses experience healthy growth and transition. Join CEO of The Transition Strategists, Elizabeth Ledoux as she and her guests identify what makes a successful business transition roadmap. If you know you want to transition or exit your business “one day”, today is the right day to start planning. This show will give you the roadmap.
If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, you can check out other episodes here: Podcasts – The Transition Strategists
