Five years ago, Elizabeth Ledoux and Laura Chiesman sat down to write a book about business transition planning. They had watched too many owners arrive at the most significant decision of their working lives with no roadmap in front of them, and they wanted to put one in their hands. What neither of them fully knew at the time was how much of that roadmap they would end up walking themselves. Since the first edition, Laura has completed her second transition and Elizabeth is three years into her own. That
When a business owner sits down with me to talk about their transition, they usually come prepared. They can talk about valuation. They can walk me through who might take over and roughly when. Many of them can describe the legacy they hope to leave with genuine feeling, because they have thought about it for years. Then I ask a much smaller question. What will an ordinary Tuesday look like after the transition? I am not asking about the celebration dinner or the trip you have been promising your spouse
Many business owners delay transition planning because they believe it signals the beginning of the end. The opposite is true. A business transition strategy starts creating value the moment you begin, long before any change in ownership or leadership takes place. We call this the multiplier effect, and it shows up in five measurable ways: your people, your business value, your time, your conversations, and your decisions. This post breaks down each one, drawing on Episode 87 of The Business Transition Roadmap podcast, where Elizabeth Ledoux explains what compounds when
After more than thirty years of walking beside business owners through their transitions, I can tell you where most plans actually stall. It’s almost never the valuation. It’s rarely the legal structure or the tax strategy. Those pieces are complicated, but they’re solvable, and there are plenty of talented advisors who solve them every day. The place where transitions get stuck is quieter than that. It lives in the owner’s own heart, and it usually goes unspoken for years. The fear of letting go of a business you built is
Somewhere on your to-do list, there’s a line that says something like “start transition planning.” It’s been there for a while. Not because you forgot about it, but because every time you look at it, it feels like it’s asking you to admit something you’re not ready to admit. So you move it. To next quarter, to after this launch, after this hire, after the busy season. And it sits there quietly while time keeps moving. I want to talk to the owners I think of as still building visionaries.
Most business-owning families can tell you exactly what they spend to protect their company. Insurance, advisors, legal work, investment management, it all adds up to one or two percent a year, tracked to the decimal. But when I ask families what they invest in the family itself, in the relationships that will carry the business and the wealth into the next generation, the answer is usually silence. That question sat at the center of my recent conversation on Your Next Gen Friend with Michael Palumbos, founder of Family Business Flywheel
A few weeks ago, Andrea Carpenter and I sat down with Family Business Magazine for a live webinar on preparing the next generation for ownership. We were joined by two people who know this journey from the inside: Laurie and Brad Irish-Jones of Irish Family Companies, a fourth-generation family business that has been serving Western New York since 1932. Laurie is the prior CEO who led her family through the transition from the third generation to the fourth. Brad is part of that fourth generation, now helping lead the business
Because movement and direction are not the same thing. Every transition has a destination. But most business owners start moving long before they actually know where they’re going. Dates get set. A valuation gets pulled together. Legal documents start circulating. And somewhere in the rush toward execution, nobody has stopped to ask the harder question: where are we actually headed, and does everyone agree? This is the gap I see most often in family business transition planning. Owners jump straight to the mechanics, the price, the structure, the timeline, without
For thirty years I’ve watched owners assume the people coming after them will simply be ready when the day arrives. They’ve built something worth passing on, they’ve worked hard for it, and somewhere along the way they let themselves believe that readiness would sort itself out. Then the day comes. They look over their shoulder, and the person they hoped to hand the business to isn’t standing where they pictured. Here’s what I’ve come to believe after all those years. Most owners leave a little too soon and start the
