Comstock's magazine 1018 - October 2018 | Page 43

PROSPER
in Your Community.
“Anyone who’s looking at transitioning out in the
next 10 years should be thinking about a
succession plan now, or even sooner.”
— Ben Brown, managing partner, BFBA
should be thinking about a succession
plan now, or even sooner,” he says.
In theory, the day could come
when all the world’s family business
owners create and follow through on
time-tested strategies for turning over
control to someone else when they re-
tire. If that day arrived, the economic
impact would be huge: Under the nar-
rowest definition, family firms con-
tribute about a third of U.S. GDP and
employ more than a quarter of the U.S.
workforce, according to a 2003 analy-
sis of the numbers.
Over the decades, BFBA has iden-
tified a key trait of successful transi-
tions: enough time.
It’s why BFBA’s partners built in a
full two years for the leadership tran-
sition from Myles to Ben Brown. And
it’s why they took three years to ham-
mer out the partnership agreement.
“It’s not like the kind of thing where
you just say, ‘I’m going to spend eight
hours a day for three weeks on this
thing.’… You have to keep grinding at
it,” says Ben Brown. After those three
years of work, says David Boyce, “ev-
erybody is pretty happy.”
Planning ahead offers the space to
let negotiations like those play out in a
way that feels fair to everyone. “Stuff
has to percolate. People have to think
about it. You’ve got to get consensus,”
says Boyce. “You have to take the time
to do that.”
The same goes for the time that
BFBA has spent working with com-
panies over the years. For going on
four decades, they’ve watched what
works and what doesn’t in making
handovers a success — and for that
there’s no substitute. n
Steven Yoder writes about business, real
estate and criminal justice. His work has
appeared in The Fiscal Times, Salon,
The American Prospect and elsewhere.
On Twitter @syodertweet and at steven-
yoder.net.
Depend on the local business
specialists at Community
Business Bank for the banking,
cash management and
financing solutions to grow
your small business. Because
in this community, your success
moves us all forward.
Bank Local
CommunityBizBank.com
[phone]
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Suncrest
Bank. All Rights Reserved.
October
2018
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43