The step-back timeline year by year
From the first private decision to the year after the exit, set out year by year, with what to do in each and what can wait.
From the first private decision to the year after the exit, set out year by year, with what to do in each and what can wait.
An exit from an advice firm takes longer than the transaction. The sale itself can be agreed in months. The work that decides how the clients fare, what the firm is worth and how you feel about it afterwards takes years.
The years are approximate. If you are starting later than five years out, do the earlier years' work faster, in the same order.
At this point the decision is usually private. You know you will not do this for ever, and you have a rough idea of when you would like to stop.
Recurring income by client, how each fee is paid, the date of each client's last documented review, and the share of income from your ten largest households.
Ask your accountant and your own financial planner what you need from the exit, how your pension fits with it, and how the tax works. The rules on pensions and inheritance tax change from 6 April 2027, and that may change your plan.
Move report writing and review packs to a paraplanner. That frees time for the rest of the work.
Begin with your largest clients and those who have only ever dealt with you.
None of this commits you to anything. Each step improves the firm whether you sell or not.
This is the year to deal with the clients who have gone quiet. For each client paying an ongoing fee without a recent documented review, decide whether to re-engage them, change the service they pay for, refer them elsewhere, or stop charging. Then do it.
It is also the year to put the paperwork in order: a current service agreement for every client paying an ongoing fee, a fee instruction in the firm's current name on every platform, and a list of every legacy product with what you know about it.
Under Securo this is the second stage. Trainee advisers work through the quiet relationships: they reconnect, update the file, get reviews back onto an annual cycle, and hand each client to you or your team for the advice. You decide who they contact and in what order.
By now you should know which route you want: a sale to an outside buyer, a sale to somebody inside the firm, a staged programme such as Securo, or a combination. Speak to the people involved in each. Ask each one the same questions about price, structure, what happens to clients and what happens to staff, so the answers can be compared.
If you plan to join a programme, this is the time to join. Under Securo, compliance, paraplanning, administration and infrastructure move to Equity & General on joining, your team's position is settled in writing, and the exit floor is agreed in writing before anything starts. The joining stage is measured in weeks.
Continue the review cycle. By the end of this year, every client paying an ongoing fee should have had a documented review within the last twelve months.
The handover starts. Decide which adviser will take over each client. Base it on the client's needs, the adviser's experience, and how well the two are likely to get on.
Run the handover in meetings. The pattern under Securo is three meetings over about a year. In the first you lead and the next adviser is present. In the second they lead and you are present. In the third they lead and you call in. Start with the clients who have only ever dealt with you, because they need the longest.
Tell your team before you tell clients. Staff notice change, and they will be the first people clients ask. Tell them what is happening, when, and what it means for each of them.
Write down what only you know about each long-standing client: the family history, the reasons for past decisions, how they like to be dealt with. Put it on the file for the next adviser.
In the year before you stop, your list of clients gets shorter as each one completes the handover. Your role moves from adviser to the person who introduces, supports and checks.
Any client who has not met their next adviser by now should do so in the first half of the year.
A complex piece of planning that will run beyond your exit should be led from the start by the adviser who will finish it.
Under Securo, Equity & General acquires the assets under management at no less than market value, on the floor agreed when you joined. The date and the structure are agreed with you, firm by firm.
Professional indemnity for the advice you have given, access to your records if a complaint arrives, and your regulatory status after you stop.
Ask your accountant whether the timing of the exit within a tax year makes a difference to you.
On the day of the exit, the clients already know their adviser, the files are up to date and the fees are evidenced. The work that remains is mostly legal and administrative: the sale agreement, the payments, the change of ownership, the notices to the regulator.
Under Securo, if terms cannot be agreed at that point, your clients are novated to a host of your choosing and you go your own way. That is written into the arrangement from the start.
Plan the year after the exit as carefully as the year before it. Decide whether you will keep any working role, and on what terms. Decide what you will do with the time. Agree how former clients can contact you, if at all, and what you will say if they do.
If part of the price is deferred, keep in touch with the firm. Ask for the information the agreement entitles you to, on the dates it sets.
Different people need to know at different points. Your accountant and your own financial planner should be involved from five years out. Your solicitor should be involved once you start serious conversations with a buyer or a programme, and before you sign anything. Any business partner or co-owner needs to be involved from the start, because the exit is theirs too.
Your spouse or partner should be part of the planning throughout. The exit changes your household income, your time, and possibly where you live.
Your team comes next, once the route is chosen and before clients are told. Clients come last, in meetings, as the handover reaches each of them.
Check progress at the start of each year. The timeline is slipping if:
Any one of those means the year's work needs reordering. Several together mean the date you want to stop may need to move, or the work needs more help.
If you are three years or less from the date you want to stop, the order still holds. Get the figures first. Hand over the writing. Deal with the quiet clients. Start the handover meetings. Each step takes time, and doing them in a shorter period means doing several at once. A programme that takes over the back office on joining helps most here, because it frees the hours to do the client work.
If your date is less than a year away, talk to somebody about the options straight away. The choices narrow as the date approaches, and the earlier conversation keeps more of them open.
Keep one folder for the exit, separate from the firm's day-to-day papers. Put in it:
Review it at the start of each year and check that the year's work is on track.
A first conversation with Steven Bates, Director of Advisory at Equity & General, is confidential. It covers where your firm sits on this timeline, how the programme would apply to it, and the basis on which the exit floor would be set. You can have it at any point, including five years out.
The order in which to bring client files up to date in the eighteen months before a sale.
Read it
When and how to tell your staff about succession plans, and what to agree about their positions.
Read it
Before a sale or handover, each ongoing fee needs a record showing what the client agreed to, what they received, and that the price is fair.
Read itSteven Bates, Director of Advisory at Equity & General, takes the first call with every adviser. Ring him on 020 8396 0486 or send a short note about your firm.