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 lived experience is exactly what the Second Edition of It’s A Journey is built on, and it is the reason a new chapter exists at all.
The successor who was handed a direction
Laura’s transition journey started in 2015, when she purchased the wealth management firm she had worked in from its original founder.
By the time the opportunity reached her, a great deal of thinking had already happened without her knowledge. The founder had spent time with Elizabeth working through what he wanted and what the business needed, and the offer that eventually came to Laura was clear because of it. She only discovered later how carefully it had been shaped before she was ever brought into the conversation.
That preparation gave her something more valuable than certainty. It gave her a path. She still had her own work to do and her own decisions to make, and this was by far the largest financial commitment of her life to that point. But she was not being asked to invent the route while driving it.
There is a lesson in that for any owner thinking about succession planning. When a transitioner does their own thinking first, the successor inherits clarity. When that work gets skipped, the successor receives a question wearing the costume of an offer, and the uncertainty travels outward to the team, the clients, and the family.
Laura describes her approach to financial planning in a way that fits here too. Start with the knowns and work toward the unknowns. A transitioner who has answered the knowns hands the next generation a much better place to begin.
Where the roadmap gets tested
Laura and the founder were close friends before the transaction, and they still are. Keeping that intact through a purchase agreement took intention.
She talks about the balance it required. You are standing up for your side of the deal while genuinely caring about the other person’s situation, and both of those have to stay true at the same time. They also cared about the same business, the same clients, and the same team, which gave them a shared reason to keep the process from turning into a contest.
That people-first instinct showed up most clearly in how they communicated. They built a communication plan rather than letting news find its own way through the building. Certain team members heard first, then key clients and pivotal vendors, then everyone else. Nobody who mattered to the business learned about it secondhand.
Laura is also candid that the hardest part was the legal work. She describes herself as someone who tends to look on the bright side, and the contingency planning forced her to sit with outcomes she hoped would never arrive. Every unlikely scenario needed a documented answer, and both sides needed protection.
She has no regrets about that now. As she puts it, there is nothing worse than having to figure things out live when the fur is flying.
Becoming the transitioner
After the acquisition, the questions started almost immediately. What happens next? What happens when you are not here? Laura had inherited the same questions the founder once faced.
Acquiring firms called steadily. For a long time her answer was simply no thanks, without much consideration behind it. What eventually changed was not the volume of calls but her own clarity about what she wanted.
The word she returns to is freedom, and she is careful about her meaning. She was not looking to be free of her work. She loves what she does and is still actively practicing. What she wanted was the availability of freedom, the ability to choose her timing rather than being bound to the business by obligation.
Underneath that was something heavier. She has worked in this industry long enough to know that things happen, planned and unplanned. If something happened to her, she never wanted to leave behind a mess or uncertainty for her family, her clients, or her team.
So she did the visioning work before she did the deal. She got clear on who she would not align with, and clear on the characteristics she wanted in a partner. When she met the team at Savant Wealth Management, they were so well matched that the conversation could move straight to details.
She also explored every alternative fully, including doing nothing, and says she would not be as happy today if she had skipped that. Looking down each road deeply enough to close it is part of how you know the one you chose was yours.
Why the book needed a second edition
Here is where the two stories converge.
Both authors went into the first edition with decades of experience guiding other people’s transitions. Both have now spent the years since as participants rather than guides. Elizabeth started her own transition planning roughly five years ago, met her successor two years later, and is three years into working alongside her. What began as a five to seven year plan now looks closer to ten.
That stretching is not a planning failure. It is what an honest transition journey looks like when readiness on both sides gets taken seriously.
What both of them kept noticing was the difference it makes when people are brought into the design rather than informed of the outcome. Laura says that if she were doing it again, she might have brought a few more of her people in earlier. Elizabeth points out that Laura’s trusted internal team was able to think alongside her, which meant nobody was surprised at the end.
That observation became a whole new chapter in the Second Edition on Transition 3.0, which is the practice of building the transition together with the people it affects most rather than handing them a finished plan. It is the biggest addition to the book and the clearest example of the authors learning something by living it.
What to take from it
Asked for a minimum timeline, Laura lands on three years for an owner heading toward a sale to an outside party. That window gives you time to strengthen financials, document processes, and develop the team, all of which make the business healthier regardless of what you decide.
Elizabeth adds an important distinction. If you plan to mentor a successor and stay involved, five years or more is the better starting point, and even that tends to grow.
Laura’s closing thought was about honoring the work. Owners put untold hours and genuine risk into building something meaningful. Walking through a well laid out process, with people who have done it before, is a way of treating that work with the respect it earned rather than rushing past it.
Listen to the full conversation on Episode 88 of The Business Transition Roadmap, and find the Second Edition of It’s A Journey in paperback and on Kindle.
