Why the practice you built around yourself may be worth less than you think
One of the most successful advisors I ever had the privilege to call a friend, texted me on a Sunday afternoon at the tail end of her vacation. She was standing in the parking lot of the resort. Her family was inside changing for dinner. She had been on the phone with two clients back to back for the last ninety minutes.
She messaged me, “i’m drowning”
She was tired in a way she did not know how to describe. She told me she loved her clients. She told me she loved her work. She told me she also could not imagine doing this for another decade.
I asked her when her last real vacation had been. She thought about it and said she was not sure.
We talked for another fifteen minutes on the phone. Then I told her something that I think surprised her at the time.
I told her that she had built a very valuable business and she was not going to be able to enjoy any of it unless she was willing to become less important to it.
Her name is not important to this story. What is important is what she had done. She had built a practice with nearly a billion dollars under management. Six hundred client relationships. A team of nine people. Every client had her cell phone number. Every meaningful decision ran through her. Every client meeting had her in the room. Every complex plan was built by her personally.
By any external measure, she was a hugely successful advisor.
By any internal measure, she was trapped inside her own practice.
That story is not unusual. It is closer to the norm than the exception, in the second half of a successful career. Advisors build practices that work because they, personally, are at the center of every important thing. And then they slowly discover that the same design that made the practice work has become the ceiling on what the practice can be.
It also becomes something else, which is what I want to write about today.
It becomes the largest single risk to the value the advisor has built.
I do not mean risk in a compliance sense, or a continuity sense, or any of the ways that risk usually gets discussed in our industry. Though those are real too. I mean it in the plainest possible sense. A business that cannot function without one specific person is worth dramatically less than a business that can.
If you sold my mentee’s practice to a buyer, the first question the buyer would ask is not what her revenue is. It is what percentage of her clients would leave the moment she stepped away. The answer, in her case, was almost certainly the majority of them. Because she had made herself the practice.
I want to be clear that this is not a criticism of her. She had done everything anyone had ever taught her to do. Deep relationships. High touch. Personal responsiveness. Attention to detail. Every one of those instincts is what makes an advisor beloved by clients. Every one of those instincts, taken to its logical conclusion, also makes a practice unsellable.
The gap between being beloved and being replaceable is real. And it takes real effort to fix.
I have watched advisors get to the last five years of a career and realize, for the first time, that the practice they built to serve their clients cannot outlive their own involvement in it. That is a hard recognition. It is often accompanied by a scramble to build in systems, hire team members, delegate authority, all of the things that should have been happening gradually across the previous decade. And it usually does not fully succeed. Clients who have been trained for twenty years to expect one specific person do not readily accept a substitute in twenty months.
The time to build a practice that does not depend entirely on you is not the last five years. It is continual.
This is easier to say than to do. Because for a certain kind of advisor, the impulse to handle everything personally is not laziness or ego. It is care. It is the deep sense that if you do not do it, it will not be done to the standard your clients deserve. That instinct is real. It is also what builds the trap over time.
The way out is not to care less. It is to design a practice where the care is systematized rather than personalized. Where the standard your clients experience is embedded in how the team operates, not just in what you personally deliver. Where a client whose call goes to another team member gets the same quality of response, framed the same way, delivered with the same warmth, because the practice was built that way.
That takes years. It also takes a specific willingness that most successful advisors do not develop until they are forced to, which is the willingness to be, at least sometimes, not the person in the room.
My friend took the call from that vacation resort parking lot as her turning point.
She spent the next four years reshaping her practice. She built out a real second chair. She systematized her planning process so that another advisor could deliver most of what she used to deliver personally. She trained clients to accept a team model. She lost a handful of clients who could not accept that she was not going to be their only touchpoint anymore. Most of them stayed.
When she sold her practice years ago, the valuation was signficantly higher than a comparable practice built entirely around a single advisor would have received. Not because the assets were greater. Because the practice actually transferred.
She called me the week the transaction closed. She told me that the hardest thing she had ever done as an advisor was the work of making herself less important to her own business. And she told me it was the best decision she had ever made.
If you are running a practice today where every meaningful call goes to you, every complex plan is built by you, and every important client relationship is held exclusively by you, I would offer only this. Being indispensable feels like strength. Over a long enough time frame, it becomes the thing that costs you the most.