Exit Planning is the Path to a Successful Transition for Agency Owners

EXIT PLANNING GUIDES YOUR DECISION MAKING TO GET TO WHERE YOU WANT TO BE.

Getting you and your agency ready to make a successful transition.

Exit planning helps agency owners protect their wealth and legacy. It allows you to leave on your own terms and timing. We believe that a strong exit plan can be created only after carefully assessing five critical areas.

1. The first area is the owner’s readiness. How ready are you to actually do this? Among the most important considerations are:

• What’s the current value of your agency? Is it enough to maintain your desired lifestyle post-transition?

• What is your preferred transition path? External sale… internal sale… passive ownership… or ESOP?

• What’s your timing? How long are you willing to wait for full payment?

• How important is it to you that your agency’s brand name survive?

• Do you have a post-agency life plan?

2. Next is the organization’s readiness. Is your agency ready as a business to do this? Key factors to evaluate include:

• Does your exit impact the agency’s strategy, ability to deliver service offerings, lead generation or new business win rate?

• How can your relationships, skills and knowledge be replaced or transferred to others?

• Does your organization have an alpha successor on staff?

• As the senior team steps up, what new resources are needed to support them?

• The agency must be able to operate at or above historical levels without you. What does the future organizational chart look like? Where are the holes? How will you fill them?

• How stable is the staff if you leave? Are the key people locked in?

Prosper Group’s experience and unique methodology will help you effectively address these questions and make the best decisions for your exit plan.

Improving agency performance to maximize your earn-out.

3. The third area is to maximize the agency’s performance in order to maximize the earn-out to you. Exit planning should therefore also assess how the agency is performing on the Seven Drivers of Growth & Value.

Where needed, we can help your agency improve its performance on each and all of these drivers.

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4. You must also very carefully assess your successor and senior team:

• Are they aligned on vision, values and temperament?

• What’s the specific plan to train, coach and mentor your successor to fill your role?

• How does your senior team truly feel about their new roles… and reporting to your successor and not to you?

• And how are you going to keep them happy and motivated?

5. Finally, your exit plan needs to address continuity readiness in order to protect yourself, your agency and staff:

• How will you deal with unexpected events or tragedies?

• Who will be in charge?

• How will you convince clients that the transition will not affect service?

• What if your successor underperforms or quits? What happens if you want to come back?

The right plan addresses the “what if’s” now so that your world doesn’t get turned upside down later.

We're here to help.

Prosper Group exists to help the owners of independent marketing communications agencies achieve their ambitions and maximize the value of their lives’ work.

Our team of former agency heads focus their deep experience on implementing proven proprietary methodologies across our three practices of agency performance, owner exit planning and M&A transactions in order to drive owner and agency success.

Developed by Alex Halbur/Partner & Managing Director