There is a moment in almost every family business transition where you look across the table at someone you love and realize you want a different thing than they do. Not in a small way. In a way that can make the whole deal feel like it might not work. And it can be a gut punch, because this is not an adversary across from you. It is the parent who raised you, the sibling you grew up with, or the partner who built this thing alongside you. The only
Most of the owners I’ve worked with knew something was shifting long before they were willing to say it out loud. It didn’t show up on a balance sheet or in a valuation, and it almost never made its way into a transition plan. It showed up as a feeling. A little restlessness. A quieter sense that the energy wasn’t quite where it used to be. Something small enough to talk yourself out of, and most owners do, for years. I recorded a solo episode of the Business Transition Roadmap
Most of the next gens I talk with are not afraid of responsibility. They are afraid of the gap between what they will one day carry and what they were ever actually taught. Nobody hands you a manual for this. At some point you realize, often all at once, that there is a whole world of governance, ownership, and family history you were never let into, and now part of it is yours to understand. https://youtu.be/RPBM7jilNJU That gap, and the slow work of closing it, is what I want to
What the most successful owners understand that the rest learn too late: a good transition is built, not triggered. For most of my career, I’ve sat across from owners who built something real. A company with their name on it, or their family’s name, or a culture they shaped one decision at a time. And almost all of them arrive at the same moment eventually. The moment where retirement stops being an abstract someday and starts being a question that needs an answer. Here’s what I’ve learned watching hundreds of
Jimmy Taylor has lived the thing most business owners are afraid of. Over his career he built three companies. Two ended in successful sales. One was, in his own words, a colossal collapse. He was a founding partner of Novotus, a Texas recruiting firm that grew into the number one mid-market RPO in the country. And at one point, he and his two partners had no idea what came next. I wanted to start there, because the Novotus story is one of the clearest pictures I know of what actually
They’re not asking for a perfect plan. They’re asking for any plan. Over the last year and a half, I’ve had so many conversations with successors and next gens who are in the middle of family business succession. And I started running some analysis on the patterns showing up across all of them. There are some big themes, but one keeps surfacing more than almost anything else: “I just want to know if there’s a plan.” Not a polished strategy deck. Not a five-year roadmap with quarterly milestones. Just something
Mark Richards has been in the advanced planning and life insurance space for more than four decades. He has served ultra-high-net-worth families, family-owned businesses, and privately held companies. And across that time, he went through not one, not two, but three major business transitions. When Mark joined us on a recent episode of the Business Transition Roadmap podcast, he shared his full story with a level of openness that every business owner can learn from. The thing that stays with me from this conversation is how the values behind his
There is something that almost every successful business owner has in common. You have built the team. You have built up the revenue. You have got your reputation. And you are still building. That is good. That is actually great. But there is one thing most founders never build: a plan for what happens when something changes. Not because they are careless. Not because they have not thought about it. But because when you are still in the middle of building, the idea of planning for what comes next can
Most business owners spend decades building something and then only months trying to sell it. That gap is where value disappears, deals fall apart, and sellers walk away with regret. Tim Vorhoff, founding partner of CreoValo and author of Exit Right: How to Sell Your Company, joined Elizabeth Ledoux on the Business Transition Roadmap podcast to talk about what it actually takes to prepare a business for an external sale. Tim is a veteran of Evercore turned founder and advocate who helps mid-market and family-run business owners prepare for and
