Succession Planning for Financial Advisors: Building an Enduring Business, + Website

Conclusion

Congratulations! If you’ve read all the preceding pages and made it to this point, you’ve graduated from practice ownership and you understand how to build something that will be greater than any one person, something that can outlive you and take care of your trusting clients for generations to come. You hold in your hand the keys to your own business.

You’ve also learned that the process of creating and implementing a succession plan is all about building for the future. It has almost nothing to do with ending your usefulness to your clients or staff—in fact, just the opposite. Succession planning is about growth and collaboration and cooperation and trust; those are the stepping-stones that create a path into the future envisioned by the contributors to this book. But we fully recognize that you’re more than a business, and your future is about more than just making money.

In these many pages, we’ve provided the steps and the strategies and the tools to help you build a valuable business, but ultimately a business is not about these things any more than your home is about its wooden frame and concrete foundation. In the end, it is about you. Your work and what you leave behind are a reflection of you and your values and priorities. Whatever it is you choose to build, picture that day in the future when you do stop, look back, and take inventory of your accomplishments, your successes, and your failures. What is it that will make you most proud? We trust that the ...