Firms that wait until a partner is ready to retire have already waited too long, plus 19 more key takeaways.

The Disruptors
With Liz Farr

Erin Daiber, founder and CEO of Well Balanced Accountants, keeps seeing the same issue in firm after firm. A partner announces their intention to retire within a year or two, and the firm suddenly realizes no one is ready to take over. “Firms are not starting that conversation soon enough,” Daiber says.

“They’re not thinking about succession planning as a strategy,” she explains. Instead of treating succession as an ongoing process, firms see it as simply the point in time when a partner exits the firm. According to Daiber, succession planning should ideally begin with hiring decisions and culture building so that firms can be confident that they won’t lose clients or staff due to uncertainty about what might happen as partners get older.  

When succession planning fails, firms lose key employees before they even reach partnership consideration. “We're losing them much sooner than that, which creates a big hole in the pipeline,” Daiber notes. She identifies an inability to have difficult conversations as the root cause, particularly when dealing with founders who view the firm as their legacy.