Succession Planning
Well-planned ownership succession enables owners to pass their
firm’s legacy to a new generation of leaders.
[Succession Planning]
Successfully navigating firm succession, capitalizing on firm legacy, and sustaining momentum requires stakeholders to embrace new mindsets and methods.
Approaches to AE firm transition have not kept pace with the changing attitudes and expectations of younger generations surrounding ownership, leadership, empowerment, and influence. Greenway’s work enables firms to eliminate the ambiguity in the meaning of ‘ownership’, ‘principal-ship’, and management roles. This creates clarity to provide a predictable stable leadership foundation for the firm that dovetails with the aspirations of younger generations and current leaders.
Continue the Legacy
In the life of every firm, there is a need to pass on its legacy and its ownership.
Greenway approaches transition planning from a perspective of stewardship and
resiliency—of the culture, the staff, and clients—as well as from financial considerations.
We work with a firm’s current and future owners to evaluate alternatives and tradeoffs,
define financial strategies, implement, change, and strengthen ongoing leadership
development.
Today’s AE leaders are reevaluating their firm’s transition frameworks and ownership
agreements in response to new practice challenges. The inherent complexity of
ownership transitions are compounded by the evolving expectations and divergent
generational perspectives regarding the financial purpose of the firm.
Owners are increasingly challenged to rebalance the allocation of resources between the
competing demands of funding firm growth, providing competitive current compensation
and benefits, and accumulating long term wealth or retirement assets.
Read Greenway Strategies for Success ‘Engaging Your Future Firm Leaders: NOW!’
Successful Transition
An integrated ownership succession framework promotes firm resiliency and continuity, fosters engagement and collaboration, and conveys strategic competitive advantage.
Greenway works with clients to build comprehensive internal ownership transition plans.
Our professional services focus on the financial implications of transition, retaining key
talent, and supporting the firm’s clients. We explore healthy ways for owners to divest
stock shares, while assuring the future quality, financial strength, and brand reputation of
the firm.ention.
Our Succession
Planning Services
Include
Developing proven and innovative covenants regarding employment contracts, retirement benefits, and shareholder agreements.
Evaluating potential updates and enhancements to existing buy-sell agreements to reflect the new ownership context.
Designing career path frameworks, including approaches to making new principals and criteria.
Advising all parties about common mistakes made during ownership transitions and discussing how to anticipate and avoid them.
Facilitating Change Management, staff engagement and stakeholder alignment.
[Succession Frameworks]
Legacy shareholder agreements need to adapt to the changing needs of increasingly diverse groups of stakeholders and to accommodate new practice models, evolving work-life modalities, and delayed retirement ages.
Adapting to the Changing Needs
Legacy shareholder agreements need to adapt to the changing needs of increasingly diverse groups of stakeholders and to accommodate new practice models, evolving work-life modalities, and delayed retirement ages. Some firms are grappling with how best to address significant commitments to former owners and other ‘unfunded pension’ obligations.
We provide opinion and structure for the review of agreements with respect to financing,
timing, contractual relationship, and common sense. Financial modeling of alternative
structures and scenarios helps to illustrate tradeoffs and align expectations.
Carefully crafted shareholder documents and valuation structures are foundational but
prove to be only one component of the essential cultural and financial understandings
that unite firm leaders and shareholders.
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