Steve was recently interviewed by internationally recognized firm management expert Patrick McKenna, about the Practical Steps for Transitioning Clients.
Nobody can serve forever. Eventually, either through retirement, merger, acquisition or firm demise, your clients are going to need to work with someone else.
Steve’s practical and valuable insights – gained from more than 30 years working in firm management, both as a managing partner and a nationally sought-after consultant – into client transition can help you and your management team handle this sometimes delicate, and always emotional, process with ease, efficiency and grace.
So why is client transition given such short shrift? Perhaps because it’s not a purely logical exercise – it’s actually a very emotional one.“So many accountants like to make this mechanical, but this is an emotional event,” says Steve Erickson, consultant and former accounting firm managing partner.
The retiring partner’s emotions range from indignation (“I’m still healthy – why do I need to retire?”) to protectiveness (“This is my client and only I know how to take care of them!”) to a sense of loss (“Who am I without my work?”).
Transitioning clients to a new advisor can be nerve-wracking for the client, too. “Clients never like to feel like they are being cast off,” Erickson says. And the remaining partners may be frustrated with a partner who refuses to retire even though he’s no longer producing at the same level as the other partners. Or they might feel jealous of (or abandoned by) a partner who has decided to retire early so she can pursue other interests.
And further,
Younger partners and managers often lack the relationship management skills of their more senior partners. “In many cases the younger person taking over is more technically competent, but many younger accountants don’t have the empathy, or the emotional IQ,” Erickson says. “I equate it to going from a general practitioner to a specialized surgeon. That surgeon is very technically competent but often doesn’t have a good bedside manner.”
These relationship skills can be learned. One of the retiring partners’ most important responsibilities during the 2- to 3-year transition period is to show the new client servers how to take care of those clients. The goal is not for the new client server to do everything exactly like the outgoing one did; the goal is to make transitioning clients as seamless and painless for the client as possible so that the client will stay with the firm. Of course, this process is considerably easier if the firm’s culture encourages team serving of clients, which allows the relationship partner to introduce other experts into the client’s matters over time in the name of better client service. If a client works with a tax partner and an audit partner and a business valuation partner, then the retirement of one of those partners isn’t as traumatic for the client as it would be if the retiring partner handled all of these functions and no one else in the firm was familiar with the client’s idiosyncrasies.
Read the entire article by Patrick McKenna, Practical Steps for Transitioning Clients
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