When contemplating your practice succession, there are many moving parts to consider.
One of the critical stages of your succession planning is the transition of your client relationships to your successor.
As you prepare for your succession and the due diligence process, you are expected to have high-quality client files and working papers. There will often be an up-to-date structure diagram of each client group's entities and all the associated details. What is usually missing is all the intangible knowledge about your clients that you, your fellow partners, and your team members know.
Having as much knowledge and information about each client as possible will be critical to a successful practice transition.
Typically, during a practice transition, your client knowledge is shared in various discussions and meetings, leading to actual client meetings you might attend with your successor. Post any initial client meetings, you may be required to provide further information about your clients. Typically, all technical details on a client group will be shared via the client file or through discussions. Inevitably, all the periphery information about the client is missing. The ability to share relevant client information you have captured over many years of servicing your client will be critically important in helping transition your clients successfully.
In preparation for your succession and client transition, a different approach and an extremely worthwhile exercise to invest time in are developing 'client dossiers' for each of your key client groups. As a starting point, you might aim to prepare dossiers for your top 25 client groups.
Some of the information you might consider capturing for each client group is:
Who is the key decision-maker in the business
History of the client's business and any notable successes over the years
Key relationships with other clients
Which staff have worked with the client
What are the dos and don'ts in servicing the client
What are the client's hobbies/interests/passions
What are the client's short/medium/long-term objectives
The following 'Client Dossier' template will provide a more detailed guide to some relevant information you might consider capturing as you prepare your client dossiers for each key client group. https://www.practicesuccession.com/client-dossier-template
Taking the time to focus on your key clients and work through one client group a week for six months will prove an invaluable exercise as you prepare for your succession.
Produce video 'client dossiers'—While you might simply manually document each client dossier for your successor, another way you might consider is to prepare a quick video recording, whereby you talk through all the relevant information about a client group.
Loom is a helpful and low-cost tool you might consider to capture your audio recordings and simultaneously incorporate any information you might have on your computer systems.
Recording a 'video client dossier' might be more time-efficient than manually recording all the required information.
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