If you are in the middle of planning a business transition, or even just starting to think about one, chances are someone has already told you to call your attorney. Get the entities set up. Talk to your CPA about the tax implications. Put together an estate plan before a sale or a transition. That advice is not wrong. Those professionals are essential, and every successful transition needs them. Bring smart people together who are specialists in their area and you are going to get a great plan. But here
There is a particular kind of stuck that only shows up in people who have built something significant. They are decisive in business. They can read a market, manage a crisis, and make a hundred calls a day without flinching. But ask them to sit down and plan what comes after the business, and everything grinds to a halt. Dennis Passis, founder of the Family Wealth Library and author of Founder Paralysis, has a name for it. And in a recent conversation on the Business Transition Roadmap podcast, he helped
We work with a lot of families and owners who are carrying a quiet fear. They’ll say things like, “I don’t want my family to fight over this,” or “I just want to protect what I’ve built.” And underneath those words is this belief that they have to choose between keeping their family together and preserving their business legacy. It’s one of the most common things we hear. And I want to tell you: you don’t have to choose. We have plenty of examples where families ended up with both
When business owners start thinking about what comes next for their companies, the conversation often jumps straight to selling. Brokers, valuations, letters of intent. And for some owners, a third-party sale is the right path. But for many of the owners we work with, selling to an outsider was never part of the vision. They built their companies with their families, their communities and their employees in mind. The idea of handing the keys to a stranger, even a well-funded one, feels like a contradiction of everything they worked to create. These owners want
We recently sat down with Marcy McNeal, one of our transition guides and a certified social and emotional intelligence coach, to talk about something that shows up in nearly every family business we work with: conflict. Not the dramatic, door-slamming kind that makes for good television. The quieter kind. The kind that sits in the space between a parent who built a company from scratch and a successor who is trying hard to earn a seat at a table that has always belonged to someone else. https://youtu.be/YgqVU_n_Iro Marcy brought a
I talk to a lot of families and business owners who tell me, “I know I should be thinking about transition, but I’m just not ready yet.” And every time I think, of course you’re not ready. Humans don’t leave something comfortable unless we believe there’s something better waiting ahead for us. And it’s not weakness that causes that. It’s just our normal human wiring. Our brains, our emotions, even our habits. They’re all designed to keep us safe and to stay in what’s familiar. We operate our lives, if
If you own a private or family business, you’ve probably thought about the future of your company more than once. You may have wondered who will lead it after you, how the transition will unfold, and what your own life will look like on the other side. These are big questions, and they deserve more than a passing thought on a Sunday evening. For 30 years, we’ve walked hundreds of business owners through the journey of transitioning ownership from one generation to the next. Our Transition Roadmap Developer Process™️ has
Transition is a journey, not an event. I say that often because I mean it. When it becomes an event, it tends to catch everyone off guard, even when a plan technically exists. And what I see most often is that the plan was built around the business and the wealth, with very little thought given to the people who are supposed to carry it forward. I’ve seen plenty of transitions that looked complete on paper. The ownership structure was figured out. Someone had thought through the what-ifs. And yet
We get asked a lot about what it means to be responsible. Gosh, what a big word. Especially when you’re leading a business or guiding a family through a transition. For most of the owners I work with, the word “responsible” sits right next to a quiet fear. They’ve built something meaningful. They provide for their people and protect what they’ve created. And somewhere along the way, they make a decision (sometimes out loud, more often just in the back of their head or their heart) that they’ve done their
