PROFESSIONAL SERVICES MARKETING | TUESDAY EDITION
A succession planning advisor built his entire practice around a simple, sound premise: business owners need help preparing their companies — and their finances — to change hands. He had the technical process down cold. Valuations, tax strategy, buyer identification, deal structure. And still, deal after deal stalled out.
Not at the pitch. Not at the proposal. Deep into the engagement, sometimes months in, the owner would quietly go cold. Meetings got harder to schedule. Enthusiasm that was there in month one had evaporated by month four.
He assumed it was price. Or timing. Or a competing priority. It was none of those. It was that the owner couldn’t picture Tuesday.
Not the deal terms — the actual day after. Who they’d be without the business. What they’d do with the hours that used to belong to the company. Whether their marriage, their friendships, their sense of purpose could hold up once the identity of “owner” was gone. Asking someone to sell a business they’d built their whole life around, without ever asking who they’d be on the other side of that sale, was asking them to leap without knowing where they’d land. So they didn’t leap. They stalled.
The Friction Wasn’t a Flaw. It Was a Signature.
This is what friction usually looks like up close. It rarely announces itself as an objection you can rebut. It shows up as hesitation, slow-walking, sudden unavailability — a client quietly protecting themselves from a decision they’re not ready to make, because nobody has addressed the part of the decision that actually scares them.
The advisor didn’t need a better pitch. He needed a partner who solved the part of the problem he wasn’t built to solve.
Enter the Wealth Advisor Who Sells a Different Kind of Plan
Across town, a wealth advisor had been quietly building a niche most of his peers overlooked. He called it life planning — the work of helping someone imagine, in concrete and specific terms, what their life looks like once the portfolio is funded and the paycheck stops. Not just “can you afford to retire,” but who are you when the identity that’s organized your calendar for thirty years is no longer there.
He’d discovered, almost by accident, that this was his real strength. Clients didn’t light up over asset allocation. They lit up when they could finally answer the question, “what does Tuesday look like?” And once they could answer it — once retirement, or an exit, stopped being an abstract fear and became a picture they could actually see — they stopped stalling and started moving.
The Partnership Friction Built
Put these two side by side and the fit is almost too clean. The succession advisor’s clients were stalling on a question he had no tools to answer. The wealth advisor’s specialty was answering exactly that question — and he was already doing it, just without a systematic way to reach the business owners who needed it most.
The referral flows in both directions, which is what makes it durable instead of a one-time favor:
- When a succession engagement stalls on identity and “life after,” the succession advisor brings in the wealth advisor to do the life planning work that unsticks it.
- When the wealth advisor works with a business owner who’s already done that work — who has a clear, energized picture of life beyond the business — that owner is often exactly ready for succession planning, and gets introduced back.
- The wealth advisor becomes more successful when their AUM (Assets Under Management) grows, which happens when the sale of the business is finalized.
Neither advisor had to change their core offer. Neither had to become a generalist. They just had to notice where their client’s friction appeared and the other person’s strength began — and build a relationship designed to pass the baton in both directions.
This Is the Whole Game
Friction isn’t a dead end. It’s a signal pointing directly at the partnership you haven’t built yet.
Every advisor, consultant, and fractional executive has a version of this story sitting in their pipeline right now — a specific, repeatable place where good prospects go quiet, not because they don’t want what’s being sold, but because something adjacent to the sale hasn’t been addressed. Find that exact point, and you’ve found the outline of the partner you’re missing.
SOLVE FOR X
Join us Thursday, July 9th for SolutionsXchange Speed Networking: Finding Friction
11:30am – 12:30pm CT | Virtual
Bring one real, current point where your prospects stall out. Leave with a room full of people brainstorming the fix — and a shot at being the fix for someone else’s stalled deal, too.
To your influence, Breandan
