You’ve got a client who should be moving on. The signs are all there – the age, the energy, the business that’s ready for the next generation. They may even say it themselves: I know I need to step back. And yet the handover never quite happens. There’s always one more reason it isn’t the right moment. You’ve given them the good advice. Retire to something, not from something – find the thing you’re passionate about and go and do it. It’s sound counsel. And it bounces straight off. Here’s why. Stepping back from a business you built isn’t a technical problem with a known answer. It’s an identity problem – and that’s a different thing entirely.
For decades, this person hasn’t just run the business. They’ve been it. It’s who they are to their staff, to their family, to themselves at 5am. Ask them to walk away and, at a level they may not even register, they hear you asking them to stop existing. No wonder they stall. And this is why “go and find your passion” fails as advice. We tend to think passion comes first – you discover what you love, then you do it. It usually runs the other way: you do something, gently and repeatedly, and passion grows out of the doing. But your client can’t start doing the something because the something belongs to a life they can’t yet picture themselves living. Their current identity has no room for it. Passion can’t take root in soil the identity won’t allow. So, the block was never really the golf, or the travel, or the grandchildren. It’s the quiet, unshakeable sense that stepping back means losing their identity.
Which reframes the most common symptom of all. When your client insists the next generation isn’t ready, that may be true – or it may be the identity protecting itself. If they’re not needed, who are they? None of this is solved by arguing someone out of who they think they are. You can’t. But you can help them start becoming someone new, in small steps, long before the handover. As James Clear argues in *Atomic Habits*, “every small action is a vote for the person you’re becoming”. A day a week with the business running without them. An interest taken up with no pressure for it to become a calling. Small rehearsals of a self that exists beyond the office. Do enough of them, and one day the identity has quietly shifted, and the letting go no longer feels like a death.
That’s the real work behind succession. Not the shareholder agreement or the tax structure – those are often the easy part. The hard part is helping a person let go and become someone who can live well on the other side of the thing that defined them. And if all this sounds less like your client and more like the senior partner down the hall – the one the agreement says will retire in two years – then you already understand the problem better than most.
