Episode 170: What’s your endgame? Planning your agency exit strategy with Drew McLellan

It’s something we all dream about – retirement. Selling our agency for big bucks so we can sip Mai Tai’s on the beach. The agency’s name and reputation carrying on with another generation. Or just locking the door and calling it done. All are worthy ends for your shop.

Whatever your dream is – I know that it’s very personal and important to you and I want you to achieve it. But no matter which end game appeals to you, it requires some serious planning (up to a decade before depending on your exit strategy) before you’re ready to walk out the door for the last time. And you’ll need to run your agency differently in terms of how you handle the money and make other key decisions.

Bottom line – the end game is not something you can leave until the end. You’ll need to give it serious thought and as Stephen Covey has long implored us, “begin with the end in mind.”

It starts with some soul searching in terms of how, ideally, you want it to play out and what is possible or at least plausible. Once you’ve figured that out – you need to put your plan into action, so everything is in place when you’re transitioning out and the agency can survive that transition.

Over and over I see agency owners who started too late or didn’t do the homework to build out the details and specificity they needed in their succession plan. That’s the perfect way to limit your options or force you to stick around longer than you want.

I don’t want that to happen to you. In this episode, we’ll take a close look at all of your options and the criteria for each. Hopefully, that will set you up to create a win for you, for your employees, and for potential buyers of your thriving agency.

What You Will Learn in This Episode:

• Building your wealth while you still own your agency
• Succession options for agency owners
• Factors that affect the valuation of your agency when you go to sell
• Why being a generalist decreases the value of your agency
• The value of setting up sources of residual income outside your agency work
• Different options if you want to sell your agency
• How to have candid conversations with potential buyers of your agency
• Why gifting shares of your agency to employees is a bad idea
• Baking succession planning into partnership agreements
• Why you need to go slow when considering merging with another agency

Drew McLellan is the CEO at Agency Management Institute. He has also owned and operated his own agency since 1995 and is still actively running the agency today. Drew’s unique vantage point as being both an agency owner and working with 250+ small- to mid-size agencies throughout the year gives him a unique perspective on running an agency today.

AMI works with agency owners by:

• Leading agency owner peer groups
• Offering workshops for owners and their leadership teams
• Offering AE Bootcamps
• Conducting individual agency owner coaching
• Doing on-site consulting
• Offering online courses in agency new business and account service

Because he works with those 250+ agencies every year — Drew has the unique opportunity to see the patterns and the habits (both good and bad) that happen over and over again. He has also written two books and been featured in The New York Times, Forbes, Entrepreneur Magazine, and Fortune Small Business. The Wall Street Journal called his blog “One of 10 blogs every entrepreneur should read.”

Ways to contact Drew McLellan:

• Email: drew@agencymanagementinstitute.com
• LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/drewmclellan