SUCCESSION PLANNING & TRANSITION PLANNING
FOR FAMILY OFFICES AND PRIVATE EQUITY FIRMS

You Built a Great Firm.
Who Continues Your Legacy?

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Three Key Questions:

1.

VISION

Can the successor articulate a strategic vision for taking the firm forward, drawing on the legacy of what has worked and updated for what the market wants today?

2.

LEADERSHIP

Does the successor have the leadership skills to oversee the firm?

3.

STAKEHOLDERS

Are all stakeholders on board with your selection, or do some of them (key LPs, family, board members) need to understand the candidate better?

Each workstream is a different art that requires collaboration across current management, the coach and key stakeholders

VISION

THE OUTCOME

Can the successor articulate a strategic vision for taking the firm forward, drawing on the legacy of what has worked and updated for what the market wants today?

You’re in good hands.

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The Three Things That Determine Whether Your Leader Succeeds

  • 1. Can the successor articulate a strategic vision for taking the firm forward, drawing on legacy of what’s worked, and updated with what the market wants today?

  • 2. Does the successor have the Leadership skills to oversee the firm?

  • 3. They build trust and traction with their own team.

    The narrative becomes a Town Hall, and every direct report gets a one-page brief translating it into what's expected of them specifically. The plan cascades down instead of stalling at the top. Ongoing sessions keep it running: thinking through the thorniest problems as they come up, and each year, writing it down again in a Chairman's or CEO letter: what they accomplished against the vision, and what they're playing for next.

The Executive Position Doesn’t Come With the Plan

Nobody's questioning whether they're capable. That's already settled, or they wouldn't have the seat. What's untested is whether they can take what's in their head and turn it into a plan that gets three different groups of people to move in the same direction:

  1. A Board that needs to trust it,

  2. A team that needs to execute it, and

  3. The executive themselves, who needs to know which parts of the job actually move the company and which parts are just noise.

The Excutive’s new job:

  • Setting the strategic vision.

  • Coaching the people under them instead of doing the work themselves.

  • Managing attention instead of managing a task list.

That's a different job than the one they were just promoted out of, and nobody arrives already fluent in it.

CAN THEY TURN A VISION INTO SOMETHING
THE BOARD WILL BELIEVE IN, AND THEIR TEAM WILL EXECUTE

Why Me

For a decade, as a hedge fund / PE investor, my job was tearing apart a CEO's plan for creating enterprise value — digging into every assumption, testing whether their story, vague or specific, would actually hold up into real value on the other end. Firms paid me to find the hole in it.

Now I do the same work from the other side of the table. I help your executive build a plan that would survive the analyst I used to be. That's what earns a Board's trust, keeps your stakeholders satisfied, and is what actually gets your executive paid.

I've spent the last decade coaching the direct reports of CEOs who couldn't say what they actually wanted. Watching how much gets lost in a company when the person at the top has a vision nobody else can read.

I've sat on both sides of the table your new CEO is sitting at now: the one grading the plan, and the one coaching the person who has to write it.

Princeton, then fifteen years on Wall Street — Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, Perry Capital, Millennium Management — before I moved into coaching full time.

And I'm not on your org chart. Not a peer, not a direct report, not someone with a reason to soften what I hear or repeat it upward. That's the only reason a CEO tells me the truth. Assessment firms are good at telling you where the gap is. I pick up exactly where they leave off, and stay through the part where the gap actually closes. I love the job of slingshotting someone from a person who can theoretically do the role into someone with an actual, intelligent plan for it.

Sounding Clear in Your Head Isn't the Test.

There's a gap between how clear a plan sounds when you're picturing it in your own head and how it holds up against a Board's follow-up question, live, in the room. Writing it down first, with someone pulling it out of them line by line, is what closes that gap before the room finds it for them.

WHY CEOs CHOOSE JUSTIN AS THEIR EXECUTIVE COACH

“I’ve never experienced coaching like this. I didn’t realize how much of my vision only lived in my head. Now I have a whole team behind me working together to make this vision a reality, a Board who believes in it, and a plan to measure my results against.”

— CEO of a $5bn Market Cap Company

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