Practice area

Owner succession

What has to be true before the business can run without you, and how long that actually takes.

one engagement
From $22,000
ten to twenty days

“I want to be out in four years and I have no idea how.”

I want to be out in four years and I have no idea how. Most of the work of leaving is operational rather than financial, it is slow, and the single most common finding is that four years is not enough — which is the answer nobody wants and the reason it is worth asking early.

What has to be true before the business can run without you is a list, and it is longer than it looks: what is only in your head, which relationships are only yours, which prices only you can set, and which decisions still come back to you every week. We start by shadowing you for a day, badly disguised as a normal day, counting the interruptions — that number is usually the whole argument. Then a written plan with dates on it, and coming back at intervals to see what has actually moved rather than what was intended to. It is the one engagement here that is measured in years, and it is the one where the finding you did not want is the one you paid for.

What we would actually look at

In roughly this order

A day shadowing you, counting the interruptions and what each was about
What only you know: prices, methods, history, who to ring when something goes wrong
Which customer and supplier relationships exist only with you
What is written down and what is not, and how long writing it down would actually take
Who is left, how old they are, and whether any of them wants this
A plan with dates, revisited every few months against what really moved

The engagements

What you can buy, and what it costs

Days are chargeable days. Weeks are the elapsed time, which is always longer. The fee is the first multiplied by the day rate and there is nothing else in it.

Owner succession. Days are chargeable days; weeks are how long it takes on the calendar, which is always longer. The fee is the day rate multiplied by the days and there is nothing else in it.
Engagement	Days	Over	Fee
A succession plan and a handover	ten to twenty days	twelve to twenty-four weeks	$22,000 to $44,000

A succession plan and a handover

$22,000 to $44,000

What has to be true before the business runs without you: what is only in your head, which relationships are only yours, and which decisions still come back to you every week.

ten to twenty days over twelve to twenty-four weeks
partner day, $2,200

The first week: A day shadowing you, badly disguised as a normal day, counting the interruptions.

What you are left holding: A written plan with dates on it, and a list of what has actually moved off you, kept current as it moves.

How that fee is arrived at

Partner day× ten$22,000
The same rate, at the long end× twenty$44,000
Travel, materials and anything bought for youat cost—
What you would be quotedten to twenty days$22,000 to $44,000

The day rate is $2,200 and it is on the fees page. That multiplication is the whole of the pricing model: there is no retainer hidden inside it, no percentage of anything and no success fee.

Where this stops

What this is not

We do not value the business, we do not sell it, and we do not advise on the transaction. A figure that says what a business is worth is a professional opinion with a licence behind it and consequences attached; a sale is a broker's job and a lawyer's. We work on the part that makes any of those go better, which is whether the business can run without you, and we hand over cleanly when it becomes somebody else's.

Everything we do not do, and who we send you to

A worked example

The contractor who wanted four years and needed six

Mechanical contracting · Nineteen people, family owned since the eighties

The owner wanted to be out in four years. Every supplier relationship, every price and the entire estimating method were in his head, and two of his three long-serving staff were within a decade of retiring themselves.

What we did: A day shadowing him and counting interruptions, then a written plan with dates, then eighteen months of returning to see what had actually moved. Sixteen days over two years.

The whole example

Every case study on this site is a composite. Every case study on this site is an illustrative composite assembled from several businesses. No client is named, no logo appears, and there is not a single testimonial on this website attributed to a person — a fabricated one would be the one genuinely dishonest thing a consulting site can do.

Questions

What does it cost?

A partner day is $2,200, a blended day is $1,800 and a consultant day is $1,400. Every project on this site is a number of days at one of those three rates, and the fee range printed against it is exactly that multiplication. The smallest piece of work here is four days.

Why do you publish your rates when almost nobody else does?

Because the alternative is that every first meeting spends twenty minutes on a question that has one number in the answer, and because a fee that is only revealed after you have explained your problems is a fee arrived at from your problems.

Is the first meeting really free?

Ninety minutes, no fee, no obligation, and no proposal at the end of it — you get an opinion. Roughly one in four ends with us saying that we are not the right thing for this, which is why we can afford to give the time away.

How long does a piece of work take?

The smallest is about three weeks and the largest runs for two years. The days and the weeks are different numbers and both are printed against every engagement, because six days spread over five weeks is what actually happens.

Owner succession · from $22,000

Start with the assessment, or telephone

The assessment takes about four minutes and gives you a written summary of what your answers suggest and which engagement addresses each thing. It is indicative and not professional advice, and it is a better opening than a blank contact form. If you would rather skip it, the telephone works and the first meeting is ninety minutes and free.

Take the assessment Call 000-000-0000