Members participating:

Michelle L. Bender, CFP, 12-year MDRT member from Germantown, Maryland, USA
Gerald C. Grant Jr., 18-year MDRT member from Miami, Florida, USA
Gerald C. Grant III, CFP, MBA, three-year MDRT member from Washington, D.C., USA
Donald F. White Jr., CLU, ChFC, 34-year MDRT member from Palm City, Florida, USA

An August 2021 webinar covered several keys to successful succession planning and included a discussion about challenges and caveats for passing a practice to the next generation. Gerald C. Grant III left the corporate world to become an advisor with his father, Gerald C. Grant Jr., and both talk about some of the ups and downs of that transition.

Bender: Are there any family challenges in terms of working together?

Grant III: One of the beautiful things about our relationship is we’re so much alike that we just click. So regardless of what’s going on, we’ve figured out ways to work through them. But something that stood out was separating work and family life, especially when I first moved back to Miami and was living at his house. For the first year, it was just hard to turn work off. I felt like we would talk about client meetings at the family dinner, and we would always be working because we’re both so driven and want to get the job done.

I felt like we never had time to really step back and have that father-and-son relationship and talk about football or about things that are not client related. I think being apart (Grant III now works in the Falls Church, Virginia, office and his dad is based in Miami, Florida) helped our relationship a little bit because we can turn work off and come back, and be father and son, not boss and co-worker.

But we’re able to turn off the father and son roles in the work environment. There are moments when he may want to jump in and save the day because he’s my father. But in a business, you must create that environment for growth and say, “All right, this is my co-worker. He’s not my son in that moment. So, I need to give him the space and the ability to grow in that capacity.”

Grant Jr.: It has been very positive. A lot of our clients have been with me for the last 20, 25 years, and if something should happen to me now, they feel comfortable that they’re working with my son. We create the meetings in an agenda format, so he covers certain things, I cover certain things. It’s a team effort, and a lot of our clients like that. We’re even starting to bring in our clients’ children as clients. Just this weekend, I was talking with one of my neighbors and suggested that his son and my son should meet. We’ve grown the business about another 20% just by having our clients’ children becoming clients.

Bender: What do you feel is the most important position you need to put yourself in to be able to take over the business? 

Grant III: I broke it down into three things. The first is you have to be willing to learn. I think younger advisors, especially millennials, come in with this mentality of trying to be disruptors. We want to come in, add value and be the superstar. But I think there’s a time to learn, and there’s a time to disrupt, especially when you were talking about transitioning businesses. We’re dealing with people who have had successful practices for 20, 30 years, so they’re doing things that are working. It’s important to know when it is time to sit back and learn the business, learn the things they did that were successful and from there you can find ways to disrupt and add value on top of that.

Second, you’ve got to understand the areas where you can add value, because it’s not about just receiving the business. It’s about building and growing it above and beyond where it was when it was given to you. 

The last thing for me was understanding every aspect of the business. I learned how to sell the products, but there’s way more to it when you’re talking about inheriting a business and running a practice. I remember the first time I had to hire and fire somebody. I’m like, This isn’t in the job description. But when you’re running a practice, you must be able to understand how all those things work, understand your profit and loss, and be able to note every single aspect of the business down to how much we’re spending on travel and things like that. If you want to grow and scale the business, you can’t just know how to sell products and not know how to run the business. 

White: I’d like to dovetail on what Grant III was talking about. Sometimes you need to think about having more than one person as the successor. Asking Grant to do things that he doesn’t have the unique ability to do is unfair to him. So, we need to be very cognizant of the fact that often it takes more than one person to take over the company and to fill these particular roles. Don’t be afraid to think that we can have multiple people that might be the successor. 

Bender: How do you talk to your children about coming into the business or ask them to at least think about it?

Grant Jr: I think the best way to teach is just like how physicians do it. They’ve got to come in, see it and feel it. Have them come in as an intern and see how they like it. There are different aspects of the business that they may like. Some of them may be analytical, and they may like that, and some of them may like sales. There are multiple roles; it’s a business and you can see what part they like. Different people have different personalities, and an internship at least gives them an opportunity to understand what is available. Let them know that they need to understand the financials because it’s a business, and there’s some easy decisions and some difficult decisions. The more they see the whole thing, the better position they’re in to determine if being an advisor is something they would like to do.

Log in to view the full archived webinar from this conversation at mdrt.org.