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Beverly Flaxington is a practice management consultant. She answers questions from advisors facing human resource issues. To submit yours, email us here.
Dear Readers,
With Labor Day and the last weekend of summer behind us and September just getting started, this transition article will focus on how to wrap up your year-end to position your team or firm for transition in 2026. It’s important to consider how best to position yourself to get the best offer and enhance the choices you have to make a transition once you are ready.
- Put a focus on organic growth. The market has been a great friend over the last few years, and advisors have reaped the benefits as a result. In addition, most great advisors benefit from increasing assets from existing clients and referrals. It’s important to look at your practice and ensure your growth is not simply a function of market movement and random additional share of wallet or referrals — it should be consistent, recurring and predictable in all market conditions. If your advisors are not comfortable selling — and many are not — either give them the tools to teach them how to improve or find other ways to generate new opportunities. The more you can show how adept your team is at bringing in new assets, the more valuable you will be, because this is not a skill set many teams and firms possess.
- Be sure your team is working well together. You want to have clarity around roles and responsibilities and how each team member interacts with another. You want to ensure people are aligned with their skills and are able to operate at highest levels of effectiveness. You want to give them a chance to identify and then overcome obstacles to success and be problem-solvers, not problem-makers. The better your team functions, the more nimble and change-oriented they will be. Then, they may be more receptive and willing to embrace a move, supporting you along the way.
- Know your strengths and weaknesses, and be self-reflective. When I work with advisors on EQ (emotional intelligence), the hardest area for most successful professionals is to step back and be objective about one’s abilities. Yes, you are likely running a very successful team and you have grown significantly. Most teams and firms will say the same thing. However, when you look underneath, you’ll find significant weaknesses that could compromise the longer term as the market, the clients and the industry change.
Become self-aware. Ask for input. Consider doing a 360 to find out what your team thinks of your management and leadership skills. Seek input from clients. Put yourself to the test, and establish areas in which you could challenge yourself to improve. The more realistic you are about how you lead and manage, the better able you will be to present a well-rounded picture to a potential buyer or merger partner. - Consider one thing your team or firm could do to stand out in a crowded market. How are you using technology? Do you have a service model that aligns with your segmented clients? What are you doing about client education and communication? How are you reaching out to the second, third and fourth generation of your clients? What are you doing about elder care and support for existing clients? Push yourself to examine what’s in place today and think strategically about what you might be able to integrate in order to position your team as a forward-thinking, market-leading entity.
- Attend conferences, read articles, talk to other advisors and pay attention to what’s happening around you. Many advisors can isolate, and — if the team and the firm are doing fine, they stay home and stay focused. That’s a fine philosophy, until you decide you want to transition your team somewhere else. You want to be up-to-date on trends, know the important questions to ask and learn from what others have done. From there, you can either follow their lead, or learn from their mistakes. It’s important to stay knowledgeable and relevant. As an added bonus, if you are out and about circulating more often, you may meet your future partner/owner/acquirer!
