Agency Owners — Protect your Wealth and Legacy with Exit Planning
EXIT PLANNING PROTECTS YOU, YOUR AGENCY AND YOUR TEAM.
To exit in style, you need the best plan for YOU.
After devoting so much of your talent, energy and career to building your agency, you want to exit in style…..leaving on your own terms… knowing that your legacy will be in good hands.
A detailed and customized exit plan is the best way to ensure that will happen. Your plan should address all of the many important considerations in writing such as:
Laying out the specific desired goals and outcomes for you and all stakeholders.
Developing a path that ensures you will get paid what you need to maintain your post-agency desired lifestyle.
Allowing you to remain in control of your agency from start to finish of the exit process (which is payment in full).
Identifying your appointed buyer or successor. If an internal sale, executing a stage-by-stage succession to make sure that he or she is the right person for the job.
Managing your exit so that it’s perceived as the natural evolution of the agency by your clients, prospects, staff and strategic partners.
Retaining and motivating key staff, locking in talent and defining who will be doing what in the future.
Most importantly, whether you’re selling to an internal team or an outside party, your plan must demonstrate how your firm will be able to continue to grow and thrive without you.
A great plan requires time, experience and a proven process.
You should start planning at least three years ahead of when you want to leave. Your plan needs to allow enough time to:
Find the right buyer (50% of these deals fall through and even internal sales can take much longer than you think)
Confirm that you’ve chosen the right successor based on results and not just judgment (CEO succession isn’t about replacing a person… it’s about perpetuating your organization)
Address whatever operational problems or staffing holes there may be in order to make your agency more effective as a business (and more attractive to buyers)
Overcome any unexpected obstacles that crop up along the way
At Prosper Group, we’ve used our deep experience to develop a unique exit planning process which carefully assesses:
The owner’s readiness to sell, value of the agency, preferred transition path and timing of all phases involved.
Organizational readiness, including agency performance on the Seven Drivers of Future Growth as well as being able to transfer not only the owner’s functional responsibilities to the institution but also his/her knowledge.
The in-transition performance of the successor and senior team (while providing mentoring, training and motivation throughout).
Continuity readiness including who’s in charge, protecting the agency and owner in case of tragedy and other contingencies.
These four areas will be covered in much more detail in the second and third e-mails in this series which will be sent in the coming weeks.
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
