If you can’ t answer these questions, you might not be fired immediately. Instead, the relationship may just drift as the client seeks meaning elsewhere— and then possibly meets someone who speaks more directly to what they’ re experiencing.
A Pre-Exit Retention Protocol
Advisors can reduce this risk by bringing the personal transition into the conversation before a business sale closes.
The goal is not to turn every planning meeting into an emotional excavation. The goal is to widen the planning conversation enough so that you can identify where the business owner client may be exposed.
Here are five questions advisors should consider asking before the client exits:
• What role does the business currently play in your identity beyond income and net worth?
• What parts of your life are you assuming will improve after the sale?
• Who will be most affected by your increased time, liquidity and availability?
• Where do you expect to direct your energy once the company no longer requires it?
• What would make this exit feel successful three years after closing?
These questions change the conversation. They help the advisor see whether the founder has a life plan or simply a liquidity plan.
They also create space for the founder to name concerns they may not have known how to introduce. Clients don’ t often volunteer it when they feel fear, guilt, uncertainty or disorientation. They have spent years being the person with the answers. They may need permission to admit that the next chapter is not clear to them.
If you give it to them, that might help you hold on to them as clients.
The Retention Opportunity
The founder exit is one of the most important advisory moments in the life of a client relationship. It is also one of the most fragile.
Handled well, it can deepen trust for decades. The advisor becomes more than the person who receives the assets. They become part of the founder’ s transition architecture.
Handled poorly, it can expose the limits of the relationship. The founder may conclude that the advisor was useful for the transaction but not for the life that followed.
JEROME MYERS is the founder of Exit to Excellence and the author of The Exit Expedition, Your N. E. X. T., and Exit to Excellence. He helps company founders and advisors address the personal, psychological, and identity challenges that surface before, during, and after a business exit.
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