The Two Plans Every Advisor Needs, and Why Most Have Neither
John ran a $220 million practice. He was the CEO, the chief investment officer, the top producer, and the client relationship manager, all in one person. He knew he needed a plan, so he spent years trying to grow a successor from inside the business. When that did not work, he pivoted to a merger with a firm that had one. He even drafted the agreement. Then the day to day took over, the way it always does, and the agreement sat on his desk.
Six years ago, John died unexpectedly at 57. The agreement was still unsigned.
Roland, FindBob's founder and a certified exit planning advisor, told John's story (anonymized) to open the second session of FindBob's Summer Series, "The Owner's Playbook." The tragedy was not only personal. A quarter-billion-dollar business had no one authorized to open the doors the following Monday. Industry research cited in the session found that having no named successor can wipe out half a book's value on death, with the rest eroding quickly as clients leave.
"Continuity isn't a document that you write for yourself," Roland said. "It's a promise to clients and families, written down or not."
Two plans, not one
Roland opened by separating two things advisors tend to blur together.
A continuity plan answers a narrower, more urgent question: who steps in tomorrow if something happens to you? How do clients get served, and how does your family get paid? It is a stopgap, and in most of North America, regulators already require firms to have one at the firm level. What most advisors lack is the practice-level version.
A succession plan is different: a deliberate, multi-year handoff to a successor you choose, on your timeline, planned rather than forced by a crisis.
Both matter. Only one of them is optional in terms of timing.
The three-legged stool
To explain what "ready" actually means, Roland borrowed a framework from the Exit Planning Institute: readiness rests on three legs, business, financial, and personal. Like any stool, it only holds when all three are there.
The business leg is transferable value: recurring revenue, client concentration, key-person dependence, growth. If the business cannot run without you, a buyer is not pricing a business. They are pricing the attrition that starts the day you leave.
The financial leg is a real number in place of a guess. Roughly 80% of an owner's net worth is typically tied up in the business itself, yet most advisors would never let a client run retirement projections on a guess about their largest holding.
The personal leg is the one almost everyone skips: identity, purpose, and how you will spend your time once you are no longer in the business. Roland pointed to research showing that about 76% of owners regret a sale within a year, and roughly 60% of them had no personal plan for what came next. The deal was fine. The person was not ready.
As Roland put it, describing an industry that coaches business owners on this exact topic every day but rarely takes its own advice: "We're kind of like the dentists with bad teeth, aren't we?"
The numbers back that up. By the Exit Planning Institute's data, only 22% of owners have aligned business, financial, and personal goals, and only 32% have a documented plan of any kind. Roland's own polling of the session found similar results: about 8 in 10 advisors have no written succession plan, and roughly 9 in 10 have no catastrophic or continuity plan at all. Separately, only about 20% of businesses that go to market actually sell.
Three moves for the next 90 days
Roland closed with three concrete, low-cost steps any advisors can take without waiting for the "right" moment:
Build a continuity or catastrophic plan. Who steps in, how clients are served, how your family gets paid. This is a fraction of the effort of a full succession plan, and it can start today even if you have not yet identified the person who steps in.
Get a baseline valuation. Turn the guesswork about your biggest asset into a number, and understand what actually drives it, so you know what questions to bring to your team or your trusted advisors.
Write your personal one-pager. What comes next for you. Who you want to stay close to. What gives you purpose in the next chapter. This is the leg almost everyone skips, and the one most likely to determine whether you are glad you sold a year later.
None of these require a finished plan or a firm timeline. They require a start.
Where to begin
Advisors and agents on the call already have access to tools built for exactly this, through their enterprise's FindBob instance: a continuity and catastrophic plan module, a multi-line valuation tool for a baseline number, and a succession plan builder that walks through the business, financial, and personal legs in roughly an hour, with the option to save and return. None of it requires going to market, and everything stays private until you choose otherwise.
As Roland told the room in closing: "Readiness isn't a document that you finish. It's a promise that you make to your current clients, to your family, and the version of you that wants a great next chapter."
Start with one leg this week and if you want a sounding board reach out to success@findbob.io.