Ask an advisor when they plan to deal with succession and the honest answer is usually some version of not yet. There’s a client base to serve, a good year to finish, one more market cycle to get through first. Succession is the thing that waits, right up until it can’t.
The number most people in this business land on is ten years, which sounds absurd if you’re sixty and feeling fine. But succession isn’t a transaction you schedule. It’s a set of changes to how the firm operates, and those changes take years to show up in what a successor is willing to pay for. Here’s roughly what the runway looks like.
Ten years out: build a firm that isn’t you
The single biggest thing separating a practice that transfers well from one that doesn’t is whether the clients belong to the firm or to the founder. If every meaningful relationship runs through one person, there’s very little to hand over. Ten years is enough time to actually fix that. Get a second advisor into client meetings. Move the review calendar out of your head and into a process. Write down how the firm does the work, in enough detail that someone else could follow it. None of this is dramatic, and that’s exactly why it needs the runway. It’s also the single largest lever on what the firm is worth, which we walk through in our primer on valuing an advisory practice.
Five to seven years out: pick the door you’re going through
Internal successor, outside buyer, merger, or a slow wind-down. Each one implies a different set of decisions starting now, and most solo advisors only seriously consider one of them. We laid out the tradeoffs in four paths to RIA succession. The point of deciding this early isn’t to lock yourself in. It’s that an internal successor takes years to develop and an outside sale takes years of clean financials, and you can’t start either one at the last minute.
Three to five years out: find the person
If the plan involves a successor rather than a sale to a firm, this is the part that takes the longest and gets started the latest. A successor needs time in front of your clients, repeatedly, in a role that’s visibly more than note-taking. Clients need to watch that person handle a bad quarter, a hard conversation, a mistake. Three years of that builds trust. Three months of introductions doesn’t, and clients can tell the difference.
Two years out: get the house in order
This is the mechanical part. Clean financials with owner compensation and personal expenses separated out. Client agreements that can actually be assigned. A compliance file that survives a look. Revenue documented as recurring rather than assumed. Vendor contracts that don’t have surprise termination terms buried in them. Our succession planning checklist covers this stretch in detail.
The final year: the handoff is the product
Everything up to here is preparation. The last year is the thing clients experience, and it’s where deals quietly lose value. Joint meetings, a clear and unhurried explanation of what’s changing, and a founder who stays visible long enough to signal endorsement without hovering. Retention through the first eighteen months after a transition is what determines whether the successor got a firm or a client list.
If you’re already inside the window
Most advisors reading this aren’t ten years out. They’re three, or two, or already taking calls from aggregators. That’s fine and it’s normal. It just means sequencing matters more, because you no longer have room to do everything. The order that holds up under compression: get the financials clean first, because nothing else can be evaluated without them, then reduce founder dependency wherever it’s cheapest to do so, then find the successor. Skipping straight to finding a buyer is the common instinct and it’s the one that costs the most.
The best time to start was ten years ago. The second best is before someone else sets the timeline for you, whether that’s a health event, an unsolicited offer, or simple exhaustion. A conversation now costs nothing and it tells you which of these stages you’re actually in.
Succession conversations with Ritz Stevens are confidential and cost nothing. The point of the first one is to find out where you actually stand, not to put your firm on a list.
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