10 Years Away From Retirement: Set Objectives and Decide on Strategies and Tactics

When you’re ten years away from retirement, it’s not too early to start thinking about your succession plan and deciding how you want it to play out. In fact, most analysts and coaches recommend starting at least 10 years before your intended retirement date. The more lead time you give yourself, the more you will be able to make choices that are measured, thoughtful, and suited to your goals and priorities. Being able to achieve your objective requires you to have a clear vision of what that objective is, and then you will be able to plan the strategies and tactics to take the needed steps along the way towards attaining that objective.

Your objective might not be to sell your practice. If the nature of your book makes it more profitable for you to die with your boots on, then making your retirement about selling your practice might not be all that compelling to you, and that’s ok. However, you may find that other objectives do have a strong call. Perhaps you want to spend uninterrupted time with your family for the first time in years. Perhaps your objective is to take up a new pursuit that you’ve always wanted to try or leave your clients with the peace of mind that they’re not at risk if anything happens to you. It’s time now to think about what your objectives are and then begin to break those objectives down into achievable tasks.

The beauty of this step is that you already have the skills for this since you do it for your clients every day. Don’t be afraid to take a step back from yourself and ask, “If I was one of my clients, what would I tell myself to do for my retirement?” You may be surprised when you are able to clearly articulate the answer.

5 Years Away From Retirement: Line Up Everything Into Place

Now is the time to start lining up key players in the execution of your retirement strategy. The diligence that you apply to this phase of your retirement strategy will play a big part in the next few years by determining whether you feel stressful, chaotic, and the tyranny of the urgent, or whether you’re able to progress forward on the path you’ve laid out with steadiness, peace, and structure.

• You should have identified the person or firm who will be your successor or at least have it narrowed down to a shortlist of two or three options. The choice you make in who succeeds you can drastically alter how the rest of the story plays out towards your retirement, so choose carefully, keeping the endgame in mind.
• You should have a plan of action for how you will begin to transition day-to-day activities to your successor, how and when you will communicate this change to your clients, and whether any re-branding will need to occur on their statements.
• You should also have clearly defined expectations laid out for how gradual or sudden the process will be, how much ownership you retain and for how long, and how you expect your successor to operate.

2-3 Years Away From Retirement: Execution of Strategy is in Progress

This is the time that you’ll actually walk through all the steps that you’ve defined in the earlier stages of your plan. While the nitty-gritty details will look different for different advisors, you’ll likely be signing initial agreements, collaborating with your successor at a much closer level, and looking at some actual movements taking place.

Beware! This step is where the emotional toll really kicks in. When you have to send an announcement letter to your clients, you’ll feel that emotion. When they start seeing someone else’s name on their statements, you may wonder momentarily why you ever got yourself into this process in the first place. When you introduce a client to their new advisor, it may just wring your insides out. After all, no one has put as much blood, sweat, and tears into the care of their finances as you have, and the relationship you have built with them is not just transactional—it’s personal. Steel yourself for this step. It’s coming. Fix your eyes clearly on the “why” behind what you’re doing that you defined in the “Setting Objectives” stage. You can get through this. No one said it would be easy. But you will find the courage to move forward one step at a time.

In this stage of executing your succession plan, it’s also a good idea to continue to grow your book. The more that you can outsource the tasks that others can do and focus on the tasks that only you can do, the better chance you have at maximizing your book value for the final sale. Note that the way you set up your succession agreement may or may not have this plugged in as a possibility. For instance, if you are running yourself ragged just getting the tasks done to execute your succession plan, it’ll be very difficult to grow your book at the same time. You only have so much bandwidth. It’s a difficult balance to strike to accomplish both at the same time, but it’s possible.

One Year Away From Retirement: Finalizing Everything

This year should be a year of wrapping up the final pieces. You may retain the ownership interest in your business. You may not. But the bulk of the hardest work should be done, leaving you free to set up meetings with clients and their new advisor to answer any questions they may have. You may decide to retain your favorite clients up until the last minute–or even into your retirement. How you choose for this to look is flexible, and you have options for what you want to do.

Unfortunately, many advisors wait to start thinking about their retirement until it’s just a year or two away. We urge you not to do this. It will put an undue burden and strain on you, and could even cause you to have to delay your retirement or postpone it longer than you expected, due to the time frame of putting everything into place.

If this is the case for you, and it’s too late, don’t despair. It’s still possible for you to create a viable timeline, execute your strategy, and retire as close to on schedule as possible. However, you’ll need help to do this. One of the best options available for you today is the program that advisorRETIRE offers you, where all the planning is done, the program is set up, and all you have to do is to plug into it.

Enjoying Your Retirement

Your retirement ought to be a time where you enjoy all the fruits of your long years of labor. It should be a time when your family enjoys the peace of mind of knowing that they will be taken care of if anything should happen to you. And it should be a time where you can rest secure in the knowledge that your clients are going to be well-taken care of and treated with the respect and dignity they deserve.

Take the next step

No matter what stage you are at in your retirement planning, advisorRETIRE is here to help. Our succession plan is set up to accommodate your needs, offer you flexible timelines, and give you numerous choices about what happens to your practice. We have put a lot of work into scripting a succession plan model that works for advisors, and we hope you’ll find it works for you.

Start today by filling out our online form to sign up, get an initial valuation of your practice, and receive our FREE ebook, “Independent Advisor’s Guide to Retirement.”