Episode Description:
In this episode, the first of a two-part series, host Elizabeth Ledoux and guest Andrea Carpenter have a wide-ranging conversation about the possibility of Andrea becoming Elizabeth’s successor at Transition Strategists, Elizabeth’s consultancy that offers transition and business succession planning strategies to families, individuals, and businesses. Tap or click the play button below to listen to: Opportunities in Business Transition: A Dialogue on Succession with Elizabeth Ledoux and Andrea Carpenter.
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Elizabeth and Andrea discuss the value of potentially collaborating together in business, their conversation invites listeners like you to ponder your situation and whether you, like Elizabeth, might want to start planning your own business transition or succession.
They also discuss the difficulties and opportunities that people face when planning business succession, plus conducting personality assessments to evaluate the fit—or lack of fit—between two potential business partners.
Connect with Elizabeth Ledoux, Andrea Carpenter, and the Transition Strategists:
Website: https://transitionstrategists.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thetransitionstrategists
Elizabeth on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elizabethledoux/
Andrea on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreashaver
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
Google Podcasts: https://bit.ly/BTR-Google-Podcasts
Get Elizabeth Ledoux and Laura Chiesman latest book, “It’s A Journey: The MUST-HAVE Roadmap to Successful Succession Planning”: https://amzn.to/3oq2LQv
Chapters in this episode:
(0:01) Finding a successor.
(7:18) Finding the right business partner.
(11:57) Personality assessments and business succession planning.
(20:05) Business transition planning.
This episode was produced by Story On Media & Marketing: https://www.successwithstories.com.
Opportunities in Business Transition: A Dialogue on Succession with Elizabeth Ledoux and Andrea Carpenter Transcript
Andrea Carpenter: So in the objectives matrix, like what’s important to Elizabeth personally, to her and her husband and her extended family, and she was talking about what was important to her employees and her legacy and things like that, she had written all of that down her objectives matrix, but before she ever showed me hers, she had me also right in line. And so all of us goes through, she said, she shares her objectives matrix, and I pulled mine up. And I was like, there’s a lot of like, just alignment between the two of us in spirituality, family first, wanting to care for people, people, first the type of growth that she wanted the business to have and the type of impact that I was hoping to make in a business that I was hoping to grow. And because I had done my thinking, and she had done her thinking, then we came together to see where are we aligned? Or where are we different? Where do we need to have conversations? Or is it really, really helpful tool?
Elizabeth Ledoux: Welcome to the Business Transition Roadmap. My name is Elizabeth Ledoux. And through my years, I have seen how communities thrive. When business succession and transition are done. Well, me and my team at The Transition Strategists have been helping business owners develop and implement transition strategies for over 30 years. And on this show, we want to help you by giving you the roadmap to a healthy business transition. Let’s get started. Hi, everybody, and welcome back to our Business Transition Roadmap, our podcast today, we’re going to take a little bit of a different path forward with a two part series that we’re going to record. And it’s actually going to be about myself and my journey on my transition. And I we have Andrea Carpenter here, who is a person that I’ve known now for almost a year, and we’ve been thinking about our transition. So let me tell you a little bit about my story and how this all came about. For many, many years, we’ve been doing transition strategy work for a lot of different clients, internationally, and here in the United States. And one of the things that really spurs business owners to start the process isn’t actually their need for it. It’s actually the team’s need for it. So I had my team together, we were in a retreat a couple of years ago. And we were doing gosh, you know, the regular SWOT analysis, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats. And we were just going through that what’s working, what’s not working was the activity. And one of the biggest things that came out of that exercise was that the team was very concerned. You know, I’m, at the time I was 59, I was coming up on my 60th birthday, I thought that was pretty cool. And they were going, you know, you’re getting a little older here. And what happens if something happens to you, because they are investing their lives and their energy and all of the things, you know, their livelihood into the company and into what we’re doing. And then you know, what would happen if one day they woke up and I was gone? And the business was dependent on me? And what’s the plan? So, out of that, I made a commitment that day to the team, that I was going to start my own transition work. So even though we were doing that for everybody else, I decided that, I guess it was time for me to do that. And so I asked one of my teammates, if they would make me the client, and I could be that and they would walk me through as a guide to help me explore my side and help me see what I couldn’t see. Because, you know, as you walk through it, I’ll be like, oh, yeah, this is my plan. But they had another perspective to ask, you know, Elizabeth, are you thinking about this? And have you considered this and I see a hole here. So I asked one of our guides to be my guide, I went into the client role. And it was a really great experience. So fast forward, got that done. That took about nine months for me to get through that. And it gave me lots of time to think. And then I’ll tell the story about how I met Andrea, because I think it’s magical. You know, people get put into our lives at specific times, they think for really good reasons. And if you pay attention to what the universe is telling you and what’s going on, and you’re ready to receive it. I think it makes a big difference. So anyway, I was down at a meeting in Dallas and I ended up well, I ended up talking to Andrea’s dad. And you know how parents are they’re always looking out for their kids and So you like he was like Elizabeth, because you’ve been doing this consulting thing for a long time. And my daughter is going to start a consulting practice. That’s what she wants to do. And she lives in Denver, so you’re not too far apart? Would you mind spending a little bit of time with her, and just seeing if you can help her to do that, and give her some ideas. And I said, Of course, I’d love to do that. That’d be my pleasure. So it took a little time for Andrea carpenter and I to get together, but we got connected through her dad. And we ended up sitting in Fort Collins it on our patio, my my patio up here in Fort Collins, and having this absolutely terrific conversation, as I listened to Andrea and what she was trying to do, and her vision of what she wanted to build, and all the work that she put into her own self development, to become what she was at that time, I realized that what she was going to build was a lot of what I’d already built. And I also because I’d already done my transition work, and I knew what I wanted. I knew my timeline, I knew what I was looking for. And at the time, I was not actively looking and you know, with all in all transparency, but I think I was able to see that Andrea was potentially somebody that I should be interested in looking at, potentially my successor, because one of my foundational beliefs, of course, is why would a younger person go build exactly what an older person’s already done? Why couldn’t they come in midstream, and pick it up and even do more with instead of starting over? Because it’s such a hard thing for everybody to start over? In those situations? So anyway, Andrea, and I started chatting, and yeah, I’ll let Andrea tell her side of that meeting. And kind of leading up to that. So our goal here today is for us to do a two part series, we’re going to tell you a little bit about our story, and hoping that it will help you to start to ponder what yours might be.
Andrea Carpenter: Awesome. Yeah, thanks, Elizabeth. I think something you just said right at the end was like, why would someone try to go build something that someone else has already built? And I left like to think back to like a one hour like we we spent one hour together on the porch? And to leave being like, is it kind of silly to like, build my own thing, if something like this already exists? And what does that look like? That can be a hard place for I’ll just call myself a successor now, like in this example, like, that can be a really hard place for someone coming in to say, Whoa, okay, I want to, I have this impact I want to make I have this idea. I have all this energy, I had done a lot of work on gaining clarity around the type of thing I wanted to do, what my strengths were what I had to bring to the table. And so to begin to shift from, I’m going to be able to do this totally myself from how can I activate myself on a team. It definitely wasn’t just in the hour, but the hour was a really good catalyst for me to begin thinking about that, which has been pretty transformational just in the way that I’ve been thinking about life and work over the last year as we’ve talked and considered potential opportunities for the two of us to work together. So all of that leading up to it was right, dads are good metallers parents love to do what’s right for their children. My dad has always like really encouraged me to just have conversations. And it wasn’t just conversations with you that I’ve had, over the last two years, it’s been conversations with countless people that I’m I’m so grateful for who have shared their stories about completely building something from scratch, or buying something completely that already exists or going into a partnership with someone where they had good synergies together. And you can learn a lot from different people’s stories to understand, okay, what are my strengths and what’s going to be best were right for me, in any given situation based on Lifetime meaning, what I’m excited about doing? And I think if I hadn’t had that clarity, or I hadn’t done some of that work, I wouldn’t have been able to show up maybe in that capacity that I ended up showing up that attracted us to each other. Just because that clarity really did Yeah, I think the clarity really just helped provide that catalyst.
Elizabeth Ledoux: Yeah. Yeah. Which is it’s exciting. It’s It’s so exciting. I remember leaving that meeting when you left the our house. And I remember being cautiously excited. Because it opened up a new opportunity. I think one of the biggest things that owners face, and it may be even a reason why they don’t want to do the planning. Is because or even you know, have a strategy is because they don’t have their who figured out yet? And it’s like, well, until I figured out my who, then and who’s who would be a good possible? I am I don’t have anything to work on. So I think that, yeah, I do think that understanding what your journey is helps you to look for the who, and helps you to find that. Yeah. So and I was I was cautiously optimistic that maybe this was an interesting thing. I it was a complete unknown. And that our was, it was impactful and memorable.
Andrea Carpenter: For sure. And it’s worth mentioning, though, just how candid you were with me, which is something I really appreciate. Like we’re sitting there, you’re like, I obviously can’t promise anything. But like, I’ve been thinking about this, and I could see you fitting. And like we’ve only been talking for 40 minutes so far. But there was a world where I could see you fit in, like, how do we evaluate together if you fit if I fit? And what does that look like? Is that something you’re interested in? And I think as someone who’s younger, someone who’s still growing as a leader, that was like, it was a little ego boost, maybe like, oh, there’s there could be something like someone that I view as very impressive, who’s doing the type of thing that I want to do, sees a place where I could contribute and provide value. And that’s pretty cool. Like, that made me want to pursue exploring it in more earnest for what it’s worth. So I appreciated that the the radical candor for lack of a better term that we were able to have it within 30 minutes of meeting each other.
Elizabeth Ledoux: Yeah, that was pretty exciting. was a pretty exciting time. So okay, well, fast forward a little bit. So we met each other, and then both left, I guess, positive with that. And we started having some conversations. One of the things that I have put a lot of a lot of weight into over my career is this. It’s a personality profile called the IMAP. And it’s a multi construct personality profile that I got. Well, I was introduced to it probably 25 years ago. And we purchased it probably about 10 years ago. And I have to say in full transparency that when I met my husband, I did a very similar thing. I met him heli skiing and British Columbia. And one of the first things I did is say, Hey, would you take the IMAP? Because I want to see who you are. And, and my PhD psychology or psychologist who used to be a past business partner of mine, he would say, you know, it takes six months off of getting to know somebody, basically. And so we did the IMAP. And I think it was a pretty interesting experience for me and for Andrea. And so discovered that we had some great opportunities, I think, to pair together and to really have some synergy where we could help each other to do more. So Andrea, you tell your side of that IMAP.
Andrea Carpenter: Yeah, she’s like, Okay, here’s this, this thing that we have everyone do to sort of start and I’m like, okay, like, at the very least I’ve spent some time and I’ve taken, I like a personality assessment that people could fall on either side of the fence, right? I’m always like, okay, let’s like see how accurate this is about myself? And if I agree with it, or if I don’t, and there was some stuff primarily. There’s a couple buckets across the top, there’s one called a refiner. And when Elizabeth describes this, I was like, wow, like I’ve done a lot of work to try to define, like, who I am and how I’m gonna fit in a team. The refiner basically means you can come in and you can iterate, and you can take to the next level, something that someone else has already started or been working on. And I up at this point, I don’t know it’d been three or four months that I had been dipping my toes in to what is this coaching consulting business practice look like? What is my IP that I’m going to build and I was already so Tired, like there was already a lot of stuff that I was like, I love the facilitating part I love, like I could name the 10 things that I loved about it. And I could also name the 20 things that were sucking my energy, which was, I didn’t love totally working alone, I got a lot of energy, working with other people. And creating all the IP from scratch, I could come up with the idea that I was missing the like, build the first iteration. And so the refiner made sense, because I can take something and I have a background as a user experience designer, which basically you’re, you’re taking things and you’re iterating you’re improving, you’re making it better. So that kind of clicked for me. I was like, Okay, that’s interesting. And I remember Elizabeth, you saying, like, you actually came out way more refiner than I thought, which was kind of exciting to you, because you’re like, we actually could complement each other really nicely as partners. So I don’t know if you have anything else to add on that.
Elizabeth Ledoux: Yeah, no. And when that was part of it is because I absolutely am the creator of IP. And then I quit, right i, it gets built, and it gets built once and then that’s good. And then we’re moving on and so in, for somebody to come in and take what we built, which we have a sizable amount of intellectual property, with many, many, many tools that are helpful to people trying to figure out what they want to do with their transition. And it really steps them through depending on where they are, whether they’re in the very beginning of it, or partway through it. They’re just helpful tools to organize your thinking and organize again, what you’re looking for, and what you’re trying to accomplish with it. So it was great to see that I’m happened to know that we do not between the two of us, we do not have what we call very many natural points of conflict. So probably we would, it gave an initial view in a very short period of time, as well. There aren’t a lot of items that we need to pay special attention to. And so we can pay attention to the few and just get going, which was nice. So yeah, so that was the IMAP process. So we did that. And then we started talking about what a partnership might look like. And knowing because of the work that I’ve done for so many years, knowing that it’s the owner’s responsibility to guide the whole thing. You know, the owners, the leader, and usually the successor, even if they’re super excited, one, it, even if they’re your child, at times, they won’t push you very hard, they sort of are waiting for you to make the move, and then you can then they’ll come along or tell you what they think. But they’re not. They’re not pushing you. And it’s very uncomfortable, usually for an owner to feel pushed. That’s one of the things that our owners really don’t want to experience in their transitions. So we started talking about, I brought that up, and we started talking about what it might look like at a very high level. And I actually shared my roadmap with her. I shared my transition strategy, because my strategy, I know it hasn’t a date when I think it would be a good idea for me to have transitioned out of my role, of course, but also transacted for a lot of reasons. One might be for me to go enjoy my life, my grandkids, monetize some of what’s invested in this company, so that I can enjoy that. But on the flip of it, what about my legacy? What am I trying to leave behind? Because my part of my motivation was, you know, what happens if I don’t do the work and I don’t figure this out. And we have all this intellectual property company gets shut down. The IP sits in a closet, and basically deteriorates, and nothing ever comes from it. You know, that’s, I was like, wow, wouldn’t that be sad for that to happen? So and all the employees not have jobs, etc, because I care so much for everybody. So anyway, I shared that roadmap, which was kind of frightening in a way, because I didn’t know whether my timing and my vision and what I wanted would meet her needs. And I think we both made some, as we started down the road, we both talked about things, open communications a big key. And also, in a way he negotiated some of our timing and made some shifts so that we could see coming together but that took my reflection and Andrea, you can tell your side here, too. But I think it took some reflection on your side as well.
Andrea Carpenter: Yeah, and you mentioned earlier that the transition er tends to be the one sort of initiating conversations and things are happening. Like, it can feel really late. It can feel like such a long process are a wait. So like, here I am potential successor. I’m like, well, am I supposed to be building my business? Am I supposed to be waiting to kind of like, talk or like, think about what our next steps are? What am I doing? How do I fit into this? So I totally sympathize with anyone who’s sitting like in this place as a successor. Like when that timing is murky. Just know, like, if you’re the business owner, you’re the transition or because Elizabeth was so open, and we left a conversation with Okay, the next action, the next thing we have to do is this, it helped keep me I think it helped keep me focused, because otherwise I could have, I could have felt myself drifting, drifting away, drifting out. From from the conversations. And when Elizabeth mentioned her roadmap, there’s obviously lots of pieces of the roadmap that we looked at. One was the objectives matrix, which we do have as a resource, we’d love to share that with people just because you’ll see right here, it was big. So in the objectives matrix, like what’s important to Elizabeth personally, to her and her husband and her extended family, and she was talking about what was important to her employees and her legacy and things like that. She had written all of that down in her objectives matrix, but before she ever showed me hers, she had me also write mine. And so Elizabeth goes through, she said, she shares her objectives matrix, and I pulled mine up. And I was like, there’s a lot of like, just alignment between the two of us in spirituality, family first, wanting to care for people, people, first the type of growth that she wanted the business to have, and the type of impact that I was hoping to make, in a business that I was hoping to grow. And because I had done my thinking, and she had done her thinking, then we came together to see where are we aligned? Or where are we different? Where do we need to have conversations? Or is it really, really helpful to also I think that was conversation three. So it was Hello, nice to meet you. Let’s talk about our iMac like, what are our skills? And then like, Let’s go super deep and talk about like objectives for our entire life, and where we think we’re going, but all of that led to me feeling. Okay, this can be good, like, how do we how do we start to explore this more? That’s low risk to you, low risk to me. And that’s kind of when we started talking about me coming in to potentially just do some consulting to support the team.
Elizabeth Ledoux: Yep. Yeah, definitely. And, you know, going back to that objectives matrix, that’s a foundation of our process. And one of the reasons why that was built in the first place is it’s we’re trying to figure out, how do you want to live your life. And I think sometimes it is, from the owners perspective, and in my experience, the owners trying to figure out how they’re going to live their life. And they’re also still trying to figure out how to make the other person’s life work without actually knowing what they want, without actually having them do that work. So it’s, it’s as important for you to understand what you want, as it is for you to understand as an owner, what you’re what you’re trying to achieve. If you don’t know the problem, you can’t solve it. That’s the engineering me. And I think it’s very important to have that foundation. So we did go there right away, and found that we were aligned. So that meant, though, when we build this company, then when we build this partnership, we’ll be building it to support ourselves in our lives, for the long haul, which, you know, why would you go do something that isn’t going to work for you in your life? So that worked out well. So we started having conversations about coming in. And, you know, in again, I think, just sharing everything with you. We talked about sweat equity, we talked about gosh, you know, Andrea coming in, and she was like, well, I could come in and I don’t need to be paid and I could come in and we could just work together. And been there done that in my past. And so I thought you know, we don’t know if this partnerships gonna work and we don’t know if we’re gonna get to the end of it. And it’s easier just to pay somebody for what they’re, what they’re worse, right? Have them come in and contribute. And it worked out great for us. So she came in. She’s been working since Sept. member, so I think we probably met each other in about June, July, it was July. Okay. So it took us from July until basically belts up to mid September to, for you to start working with us. And she came on in a great role made a huge difference in the company. And we’re still under that model. Currently, we’re still under that model for lots of different reasons. But the model worked. So it gave us a chance to, it’s like living together before you get married way to, because some successors, business owners know because they worked together for a long time, but they haven’t worked with them in a capacity of being a partner. So this gave us the opportunity, since we didn’t know each other, working together, we’ve created some new content together. And then some really neat things. And we’ve also Andrea got to see kind of the workings of the company, and who this team was that she might be joining and also leading in the future. So I think there were a lot of benefits to having you come and work with us. While we were still trying to figure out the partnership and the details.
Andrea Carpenter: Yeah, and, and all transparency to be where we are now it’s probably fast, it might be faster than a lot of other other businesses are moving. And it’s really just, I think, a testament to us both like leaning in, where’s the guide, there’s a little bit of a timeline crunch, and that I’m pregnant and expecting a baby soon. So that also is like, created a little bit of urgency for us to begin to have discussions, and really real about just all the things that can come up when you’re your partner with someone. So I think that’s probably Elizabeth, I don’t know, a great introduction to how we began to talk sort of what led to me beginning to work in the business and new we call that here. We would love feedback from any of our listeners, if you like this format, if you like us sort of talking through the process of the conversations that we’ve had around our potential transition and what that looks like.
Elizabeth Ledoux: Yeah, it’s, it’s exciting. It’s an exciting place to be it’s frightening. Little bit scary at times, for a lot of different reasons, both emotional and financial on both sides. There’s just so many pieces and parts to it. And now but it’s fun to be able to share it with you. And I hope we’re both hoping that it’ll be helpful and that you’ll enjoy listening to it. So
Andrea Carpenter: make sure to check out part two, which will release in a couple of weeks.
Elizabeth Ledoux: That’s right. Thank you for listening to this episode of the business transition roadmap. If you’re listening to this and you find yourself wanting to go deeper into these topics and start the process of putting together your transition strategy. I’d love to offer you a free initial strategy session with my team, where we’ll help you to explore the future transition of your business, head over to www.transitionstrategists.com To schedule a call. Thank you again for listening, and I’ll see you on the next episode of the business transition roadmap.
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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.
