From Control to Collaboration: Building Trust in Business Transition

Elizabeth explains that while business owners often get labeled as “control freaks,” control is usually rooted in care for others—protecting employees, family members, and the business itself. However, without a plan to gradually shift from control to collaboration, owners often get burnt out or stuck with nowhere to go.

The key insight? The best transitions are journeys, not events. Rather than a sudden handoff of control, successful transitions involve a gradual shift where successors can learn to lead before they have to dive in completely.

Key topics covered include:

• Why control is often rooted in care, not ego
• The dangers of sudden control handoffs versus gradual transitions
• How trust builds over time through collaboration
• The mindset shift from “I make the decisions” to “we’re building this future together”
• Why starting early gives you the gift of time for both owner and successor development
• The biggest mistake owners make: waiting too long to involve others
• How to collaborate without making premature promises

Elizabeth emphasizes that collaboration requires time—successors need experience and knowledge to contribute meaningfully to decisions, and owners need time to develop confidence in their successors.

Chapters in this episode:

00:00 Introduction to Control vs Collaboration  
02:30 Why Control is Often Rooted in Care  
05:15 The Problems with Sudden Control Handoffs  
08:45 Building Trust Through Gradual Transition 
12:20 The Mindset Shift: Building the Future Together 
16:30 Why Starting Early Gives You the Gift of Time  
20:15 The Biggest Mistake: Waiting Too Long  
23:45 How to Collaborate Without Making Promises  
26:30 Invitation to Discovery Call

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 

 

From Control to Collaboration: Building Trust in Business Transition Transcript

Elizabeth Ledoux:

Hi everybody and welcome back to our Business Transition Roadmap. As I think many of you know, I’m Elizabeth Ledoux and I have been working with owners doing business transitions for about 30 years. It’s been a long time and I’ve been definitely immersed with business owners in multiple countries and in multiple industries. And one of the things that I wanted to talk to you about today is the concept of going from control to collaboration.

So what do you mean? You know, when you’re a business owner, typically you, even though you may not think of yourself as a control freak, you probably are. You probably are somebody that likes the control and control not in a bad way, but control in a very positive way. Control in a way that where you’re really taking great care of people and control means I’m thinking of a business owner in particular that we work with on a regular basis and he has control and the reason why he likes it is because it allows him to take care of not only his employees but also his children because many of them work inside of the business. So control, it often gets a bad rap, truthfully, but control is usually rooted in care for others. What we’ve found is founders really want to protect the business and they also want to protect their people.

Without a plan for when they go through transition, without a plan, for them to move from control to collaboration, right? And they’re moving from control, they have control to collaboration so that they’re sharing control and then moving to letting go of control and watching the new successor take the control. Without a plan for that, usually one, they get tired, they can get burnt out because there’s nobody else that can control and take care of everybody because they haven’t taught that, they haven’t allowed it. The other one is they can get stuck because there’s nowhere to go.

So the best transitions in our opinion are the ones that are not a big handoff, right? Like, I’ve got control. Here, you take control. Those are the ones that we see and we believe are behind the failures in our transitions, the transitions of business. We think that that exact handoff and then the business owner retreating too quickly is what creates some of the statistics that are out there today on successful business transition. They’re very low. So in our work, the gradual transition is the way to go. It’s a gradual shift. It’s a gradual relational shift that moves from one person to another and their invitations and people are able to lead before they have to dive in and before they have to be the one that’s controlling by themselves.

So it goes back to the book. It’s a journey, not an event. And that’s the whole theory behind what we believe is a great transition strategy. So if you think about it, trust is really built over time. I don’t know a lot of people that trust somebody right away. Earlier today, I had the opportunity to talk to somebody about joining one of the peer learning groups that I happen to have the honor of leading. If you think about coming into any new group of people or you take on any new role, there’s a little bit of trepidation and probably a lack of confidence at times with people coming in.

So, you know, building trust with who, building trust with you as the transitioner, trusting themselves, you doing the flip of that, you trusting yourself, you trusting them and building that trust. It’s a two-way street. And so that trust gets built over time. So your shift is in thinking and the mindset would be like, hey, I make all those decisions. Those decisions are mine. I make the decisions on what we’re going to do from a financial position. And I make all the decisions on whether we’re hiring or not. I even like to have, gosh, people when they have to be let go or whatever, they have to transition someplace else out of the business. You might have your fingers in that too.

You move from, make the decisions, maybe not all the decisions, but I make a good majority of the big ones. Two, we’re building this future together. Since we’re building the future together, one, we might have to make those big decisions together, which typically might take more time, more collaboration. Moving from control to collaboration, so we’re building this future together. That’s what turns out to create these great transitions. It turns good ones into great transitions when you can make that big jump to that new mindset of we’re building this future together.

The best succession outcomes come when you start early. When you give yourself the gift of time, and you also give yourself time in a couple of different ways. So one, if I give myself the gift of time, I’m gonna start early because I have to start with me. I have to start with, and this is the control side, right? Because it’s my vision. If I am the transition and I’m the original founder, especially, I need to give myself the gift of time because reflecting how would I like to see this business go forward that I can’t make the decisions on at the spur of the moment because I’m not going to be there all the time.

So what’s my vision? How do I see this business going forward? How does I see this family going forward? How do I see my partners in their lives going forward? How do I want my employees to be treated and by the way, how am I going to be whole and how am I going to enjoy a next adventure that I haven’t lived yet that I don’t even know and I may have not even looked at so starting early allows you to give yourself the gift of time to figure this out talk to your spouse and do a little bit of work on your own then starting early giving yourself that gift of time.

It allows you to bring in your successors and enjoy that. It allows you the opportunity because trust takes time, allows you to interact and create that trust. It allows you to invite them, maybe not into an event, right? Here I am, here’s the control, here you are. That typically is challenging, but it allows you to invite them into a journey and into a dialogue of what should we do first? What do you want to take on first? What’s best? And how do we want to do that?

So again, we’re moving from control to collaboration because by you starting early, you’re able to have that dialogue and you’re able to have space and time for things to go well, as well as things to go wrong. You know, we don’t have that crystal ball and we can’t see into the future exactly. So how do we know if things are really going to work out the way that we think they are? Some will, some won’t. And there is one thing that we do know is it won’t all work because we’re dealing with a lot of moving parts here.

So it leaves space for that creativity and for your ability to solve a new either opportunity or threat as it comes about to understand a weakness maybe in your successor or in yourself and how to support that so that you can get through to the end of your journey and ultimately transition the business into somebody else’s hands.

One big, one big, big, big mistake that we see is that owners wait too long to involve the people, the others who are going to make this transition successful. That is a huge issue and many times I wondered even to myself, you know, why do we do that? Then I think it’s completely out of fear that we do that or as transitioners, it’s either fear that you don’t want to make the promises and you don’t want to do that or it could be that we’re just hanging on to the control. We’re not ready to actually collaborate with anybody.

There could be a lot of reasons behind that. Some of it could be ego, if you want to reflect on that and see if you think that might be yours. Another one though, easily at times can be just not having enough wealth outside of the business and not believing that your potential successor is going to be able to buy you out, that you’re going to be financially stable after you leave this company. So we don’t want to make promises to people.

Then just in my experience over these years, you don’t need to make promises in order to have collaboration and in order to bring somebody in and in order to have interactive dialogue and in order to do that. You don’t have to worry about making promises as long as you have a strategy that includes time. Because in a strategy that includes time, and we’ll take the control to collaboration concept, because that’s the focus of this podcast. If you look at the control to collaboration, that is best done over time.

So if you decide that you’re going to start to bring somebody in early, you can have milestones of things they need to achieve. You’re going to have milestones of things that you need to achieve. Along the way, you’re going to find out how fast they learn, how fast they can grow, how fast they’re accepted by others in the environment that they’re entering, a lot of different things. You’re also going to see how ready you are. Being upfront about that in the beginning, that you are going to be in a control situation. You’re going to have somebody shadowing you. You’re going to then start after a while, you’re going to collaboratively work on some decisions, and then over time, they’ll take on more control and you’ll take on less collaboration role.

There aren’t any big promises in there. It’s just we’re going to be on this journey together and we’re going to figure it out. It’s hard to practice collaboration if you start too late because your successor doesn’t have enough time to grow into what they need to be in order to be material in the collaborative decision, right? So hopefully that makes sense that you need the person to have experience and knowledge enough to contribute well so that the collaboration makes sense. That takes time.

So big mistake is waiting too long. And I know that’s a tough one because there can be some relationship challenges in that. And having a great strategy will help you with the ability to have that timeline and go from control to collaboration. So if you are, if you’re getting close, if you’re ready to explore what a collaborative transition could look like for you and your business, I’d like to invite you to come and talk to us. We do this all day long every day, and we love talking to business owners about what their challenges are, what might be keeping them stuck, why they may not be moving forward.

My little call to action and my invitation for you is if you’re ready to explore, please reach out to us. It’s an invitation. We’ll help you take the first step with clarity and confidence. All you have to do is go to transitionstrategists.com/discovery and you can sign up to talk with us. We will do our very best to give you great value for your time. And hopefully it’ll be information even if you decide not to work with us, which is fine. It’ll be information that you can take forward that’ll be of value to you as you navigate your transition. So hope to see you and hope to have the opportunity to talk to you.

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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