Succession Planning Toolkit is a unique planning resource that helps accounting practitioners to address succession planning in a constructive, positive and non-threatening way.

• Comprehensive step-by-step strategies for maximising the profitability of your practice now so you can increase its value for future succession
• Three modules of real-world guidance – Getting Started, Getting Ready, Making Your Move – and comprehensive case studies
• Self-assessment checklists and planning forms – with useful Word templates on CD-ROM that can be customised to meet your particular circumstances.

Product Review

After suffering through several excruciating acquisitions, Mr. McIntyre-Smith was more than willing and able to offer this excellent commentary on how to prepare an effective Chartered Accountant practice succession plan; and to examine why, particularly for sole practitioners, it is so important to look ahead to an orderly exit. The fact that 99% of these practitioners have no formal written plan of any kind is striking enough; that 45% will consider retirement within the next decade, simply makes this Succession Planning Toolkit a must-read.

Yet this work is also for those who own firms and may have a plan “in mind,” but not “in fact” for succession through partners and employees. With the help of clear and useful to-do checklists, the author lays out the hurdles to leap, if one hopes to exit with sanity intact. Interestingly, the development of a mindset that you own a business much like those of your clients is key. You can do this work for them, so why not for yourself?

Perhaps it is the personal emotional stake in the process that has caused so many CAs to shy away or give the inevitable such short shrift. McIntyre-Smith digs deep into the dispassionate nuts and bolts of assessing the value of what may have taken a lifetime to build. His Chartered Accountant “practice self-assessment” forms certainly start this crucial process of allowing one to step back, take a breath and start the process of determining price, potential buyers from within or without, deal structures, client relations, and finally, finally implementing an exit strategy from a well-worthy, not well-worn career.