What’s next for your business? Most family business owners I meet have thought about that question. Far fewer have written the answer down. The distance between those two things is where a family-owned enterprise tends to lose ground, and sometimes the relationships that built it. A transition roadmap developer closes that distance. At The Transition Strategists, we help owners pass the business to the next generation with their family relationships strong and their successor ready to lead. Transition is a journey rather than a single event. When the plan lives
Nearly every time we ask a group of business owners what worries them most about transition, the answer comes back the same. Will the successor be ready? I understand that worry. I have sat with owners who could not picture anyone else carrying the weight they carry. What I have come to believe, after more than ninety of these conversations on the Business Transition Roadmap and many more in client work, is that the question points at the wrong person. The owner has a growth curve too, and it is
If you own a family business, take a minute with this question. What do you think each person in your family believes will happen to the business when you step back? Most owners haven’t looked at it that way. They’ve been carrying the transition privately, waiting until they have something solid enough to share. In the meantime, the people around them have been filling in the gaps on their own, and those private versions rarely agree. That disconnect is where a lot of family business tension about succession quietly begins,
I’ve asked “is my successor ready?” as an owner, and I’ve watched our own team live that question as Andrea Carpenter steps into leadership at The Transition Strategists. It’s one of the most natural things to wonder in a family business transition, and it’s the question owners bring to me more than any other. Over the years, though, I’ve noticed it tends to leave someone out. https://youtu.be/XN9ANhKvYqA Successor readiness matters, of course. The trouble is that most people ask about it in a way that only has room for one
I’ve worked with hundreds of business owners through business and family asset transitions, and I can usually tell in our first meeting whether someone is going to move forward. Some owners leave that conversation ready to act. Others stay stuck for another two years, or drift into what I call the five-year rolling retirement plan, where the target date slides out a little further every time someone asks. When people ask me why business owners delay succession planning, they usually expect the answer to involve taxes or valuation. Those matter,
Ariel Steele works two days a week and still owns one hundred percent of her company. It took her three years to build that, and about twenty to get out of her own way. She has owned her business in Colorado for twenty one years. Her team of five now runs everything from the prospecting through the closings, work she spent most of those years believing only she could do. When she came on the Business Transition Roadmap to talk about how it happened, she did not point to the
Owners ask me this constantly, and it is almost always the ones who have already built a strong team around them. They have a tax advisor they trust, an attorney who has handled their work for twenty years, and a financial professional who knows every line of the balance sheet. So the question tends to arrive with a little hesitation, as though asking it might insult the professionals they already rely on. It never does. What is a transition strategist, or what we call a transition guide, doing that those
A private equity group came knocking on a company doing more than forty million in revenue. The owner had not gone looking for a buyer and had no particular plans to sell. The group opened his financials, spent some time with what they found, and passed. Nothing was wrong with the business. It had grown from around seven million to more than forty million in five years, which is the kind of trajectory that brings buyers to your door in the first place. The problem was the record of that
Founders rarely reach out because the numbers confuse them. They reach out because they have started to picture life on the other side of the business and the picture comes back blank. The company has a plan for almost everything. There is a plan for hiring, and a plan for the equipment that gives out in year seven. Then the owner sits down to think about their own next chapter and finds nothing to work from. Thirty years of energy went into building something, and very little of it went
