My own exit strategy was designed the day I started in this industry, and too many advisors wait until it's too late to start theirs
Succession planning is the industry's best-kept blind spot. Ask any of us to build a client's exit strategy and we do it without blinking. Ask us to build the same plan for our own practice, and most advisors freeze. Throughout my career as an advisor, I have learned that succession planning only works if there is an intentional roadmap designed years in advance, not a reactive scramble triggered by age or circumstance.
Why do advisors wait too long to develop an exit strategy?
From my experience, most advisors get consumed by the day-to-day of running their practice and don’t seriously begin thinking about their exit strategy until they are within 3-5 years of retirement and even then, many are uncertain where to start. That uncertainty causes them to avoid it and procrastinate, and then before you know it, retirement is suddenly three years away and everything feels rushed and reactive.
There is also an emotional weight to the decision that plays a significant role. An advisor’s business has often been their life, built over decades of relationships, and can become a direct reflection of who they are. Walking away can feel less like a financial transition and more like an identity crisis: if I am no longer an advisor, who am I?
This is an important issue the industry needs to address by finding better ways to support and guide advisors through both the practical and emotional sides of succession.
What does a real roadmap actually require?
A successful exit roadmap starts with the exit itself. Some advisors approach their exit by bringing on a junior associate and investing the time and resources to develop that person over many years before transitioning the practice. Others, look for a compatible advisor to absorb their practice. In my view, this approach can introduce greater risk as many advisors who are financially and operationally positioned to acquire a book are already running full practices. The question, then, is whether they truly have the capacity to take on a significant number of additional clients without compromising the existing standard of care or the client experience. Get that handoff wrong, and the consequences can be significant for the clients, the exiting advisor and the value of the practice itself.
The better option is to align with a compatible advisor team that has the capacity and resources to absorb those clients without disrupting their experience.
For me, that became the only way I was comfortable approaching my acquisitions. I intentionally built a strong team around me with the capacity to absorb new clients while maintaining and ideally improving the standard of care they deserve.
That approach has supported significant growth in my practice while maintaining a near perfect retention rate. For me, that reinforces the value of building capacity before pursuing growth through acquisition.
“Nobody is buying a business. They are buying an advisor's clients, people with deep, long-standing relationships to the person leaving.”
Tax planning is the piece I’ve witnessed fail most consistently, which is ironic given that planning is at the heart of what we do for clients. Too often, advisors fail to apply the same discipline to their own exit. It is the proverbial shoemaker’s children going barefoot.
Advisors simply can’t expect to restructure their affairs on Monday and sell their business on a Friday. Tax planning around a sale can involve attribution rules and other provisions that affect how income and gains are treated, and some strategies require structures to be in place well in advance of a transaction, sometimes years in advance.
At the planning stage, it really comes down to two questions:
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Who are you selling to?
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How do you structure your affairs to minimize the tax impact?
I am only 37, and I am already building my own answer to those questions with intention. My exit at Panache is clear: I intend to sell the business to the team I am building today.
In the short term, that means investing significantly in my business, but I take a long-term view. Building that capacity supports future acquisitions and positions me to pursue ambitious growth goals. The trade-off is deliberate: higher costs today in exchange for greater capacity, stronger growth potential and a more seamless succession over time. Over the next couple of decades, the team will know the clients as well as I do, and the culture and standards I’ve built will be deeply ingrained.
What real support from dealers looks like
In my view, dealers must first understand that the different practice styles matter just as much as the mechanics of a sale.
There is often a disconnect between the exiting advisor and the acquiring advisor in how they run a practice. It is rarely a perfect match. The goal is to honour what has worked while creating space for a new model and a different way of thinking.
At Panache, for example, we continue to send electronic newsletters and cards by mail. A practice we acquire may not operate that way. The transition therefore becomes a matter of compromise and thoughtful integration rather than simply overwriting one approach with another.
That matters because clients notice these differences. How they react when they discover their advisor has no clear succession plan, or when the transition feels abrupt and unfamiliar, is a risk both dealers and advisors can underestimate.
Dealers say they want to support advisors through this, but too often the approach is a survey asking whether an advisor plans to sell in the next five years, followed by a list of buyers and sellers with no real matching process behind it. Thirty advisors want to buy, three books are for sale, and deciding who gets access becomes a numbers game rather than a fit exercise.
The right approach starts with taking the time to understand what the exiting advisor actually wants, then walking them through how to structure the sale and negotiate an agreement. This process alone can take a year to finalize.
Dealers need to move beyond simply facilitating transactions and play a more strategic role in building advisor readiness. There is an opportunity to add significant value by providing advisors with ongoing education and best practices on both sides of a succession transaction, regardless of where they are in their career or how far they may be from an eventual exit.
Advisors should understand how to optimize the value of their practice when they eventually sell, but they should also know how to evaluate and successfully acquire a book of business, from assessing fit and capacity to integrating clients, preserving service standards and optimally structuring the transaction.
That preparation will ensure that advisors are better positioned when an opportunity knocks, rather than trying to learn the process in real time.
None of this happens overnight. The right foundation needs to be in place long before an advisor can begin evaluating who might be the right fit to take over the practice.
Success in both succession and acquisition comes down to advisors being very intentional about the business they are building, the wealth they are creating for clients and themselves, and the legacy they want to leave. It would be a shame for the shoemaker’s children to go barefoot. Advisors should apply the same discipline to their own future that they bring to their clients every day.
