Publish Date: August 25, 2026
Brian S. Hoffman, CRPC®, CEPA®
Most of us advisors got started for one of two reasons. Money and freedom. Maybe even to make enough money to be free to make your own decisions. That is why you worked, sacrificed, and pushed harder than made sense some years.
A funny thing happens on the way to that freedom. You built a business that has provided real wealth, but it has also cost you time, and maybe even choice. Quickly approaching may be the moment you need to decide whether to trade the daily grind of running the business for more of that time back.
So here is a hard question. If tomorrow was the day you were done, if you walked in Monday morning and said “I’d rather be somewhere else,” what happens to what you built?
Who takes over? Would they run it exactly the way you would, or better? Would the business keep growing, or would it start slowly coming apart the moment you stopped holding it together?
Most advisors have never actually let themselves answer that question, because, partly, we can admit, walking away from monthly revenue feels insane. Secondly, the timeline always feels far enough away that we put it off. Sounds just like one of our clients when we broach life insurance or retirement, doesn’t it? We all know the old saying “the cobbler’s kid has no shoes.” Refusing to plan will not go unnoticed and there is a downside.
The real cost of putting off answering the question may very well be your freedom of choice. Postponing or ignoring the conversation can be like an invisible parasite, eroding away the choices you didn’t even know existed. An advisor may wait so long that they end up “taking what they can get.”
There Is a Real Fork Here
Succession planning is not really about picking a buyer. It is bigger than that. Every advisor eventually faces one fork, do you want to sell the business or keep it?
• If you sell, who is the buyer? An external strategic buyer? A PE-backed aggregator? Or an internal buyout, where your own next-generation advisor finances buying you out over time?
• If you keep it, who runs it? Do you separate yourself as the business owner and financial advisor? Do you keep running it fully yourself, indefinitely? Does a G2 advisor step into the day to day while you retain ownership? Do you bring in a partner to share the weight?
Neither path is wrong. But most advisors have never picked one, which means there is no streamlined endgame. Surprisingly enough, the preparation work is almost identical no matter which fork you take. A buyer needs to see a business that is not entirely dependent on you. So does a next-gen successor. A PE-backed aggregator wants documented processes and predictable revenue. So does a partner you are bringing in to share the load. The who changes. The how almost never does.
Let’s shed some light on one more reason time matters here. Whichever fork you choose, that path can still fail. A G2 successor who looks perfect on paper might not be the right fit three years in, different vision, cultural friction, or they simply decide the timeline no longer works for them. A buyer or partner can walk away from a signed letter of intent right before closing. It happens. It can happen, and it needs to be factored in as a possibility.
If you started your process early, with real runway, a failed attempt is a setback. You regroup, you find a different who, and you keep building toward the fork you chose. But if you are already on a compressed timeline because the question got put off for years, a failed attempt is not a setback. It is the end of your choices, or maybe the best ones at least. You can go from picking your path to quietly asking around, who wants to help me out and buy my business, which is exactly the position of weakness this whole conversation is trying to help you avoid.
The How Is the Harder Half
This is where most advisors fail the walk-away test, not because there is no one to hand the business to, but because the business itself was never built to survive the handoff. The business was built as your profession with you as the figurehead. Ask yourself a few questions.
• Are your processes documented, or do they live entirely in your head?
• Are client relationships tied to the practice, or are they tied to you personally, your voice on the phone, your name on the birthday card?
• Could someone else make a real decision in your absence and actually move the business forward, or would they just be trying to keep it from falling apart?
These questions can change a bit depending on the makeup of your business. They will also hold true when examining a practice with three people or an office of seven or eight. We are talking about practices here in the truest sense of that word, the same way you would talk about a law practice or a medical practice. High end, relationship driven professional work, built by people who trained for it and gave their lives to it. The word “practice” gets a bad reputation in some corners of this industry, but the discipline it implies, documented process, repeatable quality, work that does not evaporate the day the founder steps back, is exactly the standard worth building toward. I also enjoy the insinuation that “practice” can mean intentionally going over something every day and making it better.
What the Data Says About the Window
We all know that advisor who swears they will get to the succession plan eventually. Most advisors do. Roughly 20% to 25% of advisors currently have anything formal and documented in place, depending on which industry survey you look at, and even the more optimistic numbers put well under half of advisors with a real plan. The rest are running one of the most valuable assets they will ever own without a plan for what happens to it.
And the window is not static. It is closing, measurably. Four years ago, about 40% of advisors believed their next-generation successor could actually afford to buy them out. Today that number is closer to 20%, because valuations have climbed faster than G2 earning power has kept pace. That is not a future risk. That is a gap that has already doubled in the time most advisors spent not thinking about it.
Layer onto that the retirement wave itself. Cerulli Associates projects more than 100,000 advisors will retire over the next decade, more than a third of the industry’s entire headcount. That is not a distant abstraction. That is the environment every advisor reading this is already operating inside of, whether they have acknowledged it or not.
Why G2 Cannot Just Be Bought
If your answer to the walk-away test leans toward keeping the business and developing a next-generation advisor to eventually run it, there is one more hard truth worth sitting with. You cannot buy loyalty. Advisors who have been on the buying side of dozens of deals will tell you the same thing, most of the acquisition opportunities that exist today exist specifically because a prior firm failed to properly develop or retain its own G2 talent.
Compensation is almost never the deciding factor for a next-generation advisor deciding whether to stay and build a career with you. Recognition, autonomy, and real decision-making authority consistently rank higher. The advisors who successfully hand a practice to the next generation are not the ones who paid the most. They are the ones who set clear expectations early, gave real ownership over decisions, and made the person feel like a partner in something rather than an employee waiting for a title.
Where This Actually Leaves You
The cost of waiting was never really about a valuation multiple. It is about whether you currently have a choice, or whether the timeline has quietly started choosing for you.
If tomorrow was the day, and you are honest with yourself about the answer, you already know which one is true right now.
If the answer is not yet, the next question is simple. What would it take to get there, and how much runway do you actually have to do that work carefully instead of under pressure?
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Built By Advisors | Brian S. Hoffman, CRPC®, CEPA®
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