Your Prospective Successor & Team Members
Many senior partners are reaching an age where retirement is becoming a consideration. At the same time, many firms are offering fixed-term buyouts of the practices if they team-up. This inadvertently has created the perfect storm. Navigating this transition may create rougher waters than you anticipate. You are attempting to transfer a relationship made up of trust, affinity, and loyalty from a financial professional the client has been relying on for many years, sometimes even a lifetime, to a financial professional who the client has just recently met.
Integrating your succession partner into a high functioning team, with defined roles and responsibilities, allows you to ease your partner into the team and client relationships over time. This will help to mitigate flight risk from your key clients and team members. Consider this metaphor: the focus is on the squad’s capability versus any one individual to execute under pressure to achieve a desired result. Early on in the client relationship, you want to regularly emphasize the power of the team to execute on behalf of the client, not on the replaceable brilliance of the senior partner.
Determining Your Prospective Successor
When making the challenging decision of who will be your successor, remember to seek someone out who is somewhat like you both personally and professionally. Your practice successor should have:
- A similar level of talent and skills–This helps give clients the confidence that their complex financial challenges are handled and makes it more likely for them to connect personally.
- Complimentary talents and skills–The longer your runway is to retirement, the more critical complimentary talents and skills become. This helps you expand the capabilities of your team, position your prospective partner within their area of accretive specialization, and slowly integrate your new partner into relationships with your clients.
- Philosophical alignment–You should have philosophical alignment critical issues such as comprehensive wealth management, client engagement and service strategy, and compensation structure. Your work ethics should be similar.
Analyzing Your Personnel
A synergistic team reflects the functional model of an army squad, the tactical unit of specialized military personnel organized around a common endeavor.
Think of your team like this…
- The Smallest Tactical Unit: Without a disciplined and focused rationale for the team’s strategic and tactical purpose, financial services teams often grow to unmanageable proportions and, in many cases, become mini branches.
- Specialized Military Personnel: While most financial professionals likely have the same foundational training, just like their military brethren, it is their sub-specialization that often allows them to come together as a complementary and cohesive team.
- Organized Around A Common Endeavor: In this case, that common endeavor is the client, the client's extended family, and, in many cases, the client’s business/professional practice.
This self-contained fighting unit, also known as your team, should be capable of handling most, if not all, the day-to-day challenges facing its clientele including but not limited to portfolio management, estate planning, personal and professional banking services, hedge funds, alternative investments, and trust services.
On occasions when the client’s challenges are sophisticated and somewhat esoteric, you can call in your high-powered strategic alliances–just like the army unit calls in the heavy artillery and/or air cover– to assist in that particular case
