How to retire from your firm without all your hard work being destroyed
Partners in professional services firms work hard. Very hard. You might think that after decades of strenuous and demanding work, a looming retirement date would glisten with the promise of endless leisure, long holidays, decent nights of sleep and an improved golf game. Yes, there are definitely some positives to not having to spend 50+ hours in the office every week.
But it’s not that simple.
I have heard it often. One of the most common hurdles blocking a soon-to-retire partner from doing so with ease and enthusiasm for their next chapter is a fear that their hard-built practice will wither and die.
And fair enough… but sooner or later, retire they must. So if this is you…
What can you do to ensure your practice is cared for?
Imagine you spend 30 years planting a garden by hand. Every day, you go to the garden and get to work – painstakingly adding to the soil, doing heavy lifting, dealing with serious obstacles, perhaps recruiting and working with a team, sometimes fighting the prevailing conditions, sometimes enjoying periods of ease – and sometimes even starting again after a wipeout. But you stick at it. And over time, as you worked, the garden grows, plant by plant, until finally, it’s there. No longer a patch of dirt but a verdant, complex, thriving thing of beauty. You made it. And now you need to walk away.
Most partners in professional services firms have spent years and decades investing blood, sweat and tears building their practice, and often in just the one firm. They are invested in it – not just financially, but emotionally. It is part of their identity. They don’t want to see it poisoned, or slowly wither through neglect. They want to see that practice continue to thrive.
Here’s three key ideas I’ve extrapolated from working with partners facing this issue.
1. Think of your practice as a living thing, not a ship with a single captain
Things will be different after you leave. This is a fact. But what if that was ok?
Once we dig into it in coaching, part of the concern about leaving often turns out to be a feeling that no-one else in the team knows the finer elements of how to run the practice as well as the partner does. They feel they are the captain that keeps the ship on course, and in many respects, that’s likely true.
Deep client relationships borne of years in the trenches together mean that the soon-to-depart partner understands those clients in a way that no-one else in the team does. The client feels that too, and so tends to call the partner for advice, not their team.
Someone new won’t do things exactly the same as you.
But they don’t need a single key to open a lock. A living, complex garden will continue to grow and thrive with skilled and attentive care. Given the space to step up, a new gardener can set about nurturing and evolving a healthy, thriving practice.
2. Give your senior team the space to step up
Remember how learning to delegate was hard? It seemed quicker, easier and more effective to just do all the work yourself in the moment. But you learned that was a false economy, and that to flourish as a more senior professional you needed to invest the time in training your team so that they could do more of the doing, learning the skills to progress and develop their own careers, and thereby also freeing you up to do more strategic and value-adding work.
Now, it’s delegation 2.0. It seems safer and easier to handle the big, longstanding client relationships yourself. But that is a false economy. You’re blocking your team from stepping up into that most senior level of leadership and building that deep level of client knowledge, and you are perpetuating a dependence on you that will eventually come back to bite you. By holding on, you are actually undermining your practice’s chances of thriving after you leave.
You will need to be strong about handover: set it up to succeed. Even if your retirement isn’t public – or even decided – the partners I’ve worked with that do this well are clear and intentional about introducing their senior team to their best clients and transitioning more and more of the handling of those relationships over.
3. Start early
Your retirement date may not be firmed up – but if it’s going to be happening within the next 2 to 3 years, you should already be implementing your handover plan. This is not about a long, drawn-out stint in the departure lounge. Rather, the aim is to create an elegant, intentional and effective handover so that when the day comes – and it will – you are confident about the ongoing success of the team and thus free to look ahead to your next steps with a clear conscience and even some excitement!
Pick a likely departure date (you can always change it), and reverse engineer your plan from there.
Which are your key relationships?
Who is best placed to step in when you leave?
What elements of the relationship will you be handing to them, and when?
Who needs to be told, and when?
Build a graduated plan so that when your retirement becomes public, that announcement is just another step in a well-organised, ongoing process.
So: start early, give your team space to step up, and think of your practice as a living thing that you have grown, of which you should be proud, and which is now ready to take on a life of its own. Congratulations: that is a wonderful achievement!
And now… you can book that holiday.
Madeleine Shaw
I work with clients from executive leadership teams to the front line, helping them to make clearer decisions about what they want, and adapt faster and more easily to change and transition. I use deep purpose as a key to unlock powerful thriving in work and life.
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