How a transition adviser transitions
Barry Goodman has transitioned. Since 2014 the solo owner, operator, adviser and staff of Birkdale Transition Partners LLC, Goodman is now one of three founding partners of SVA Value Accelerators LLC.
There's a touch of irony here. Goodman's role has been to help other business owners get their businesses ready and make those ultimately inevitable transitions - sometimes to retirement, sometimes to a strategic merger, sometimes to a blend.
Goodman isn't new to transitions, and indications are that he has been a successful transition adviser. Still, transitions can be difficult.
The son of an entrepreneur, Goodman chose to become a CPA and open his own firm rather than join the family business. His first transition came when he merged H. Barry Goodman & Co. with Steinberg Advisors Ltd., which since 2016 has been part of Wipfli LLP, a Milwaukee accounting and consulting firm with offices in nine states.
Birkdale came next.
Now Goodman is part of SVA, which formally introduced itself July 1. The company is Chicago based, but the other two partners are in Denver and Miami.
"We talked for a long time about the pros and cons of getting together," says Sean Hutchinson, the Denver-based partner. (The "we" includes Warland Griffith, based in Miami and the third partner. Griffith was out of the country when this column was written.)
"It's not easy to transition to what's next," Goodman says. "It took two years for me to do this."
Interestingly, Goodman didn't talk to a Barry Goodman-type of adviser, though a case can be made that his conversations with Hutchinson and Griffith served much the same purpose. He did have "a long conversation with my wife and asked for her input," something transition professionals know often is missing from the process.
"There are a number of things that factor into this decision. What will life be like after you make the plunge? Economically? Behaviorally? I ask a lot of questions of transitioning clients," Goodman says. "This time I asked me the questions."
Like many other pre-retirement entrepreneurs, Goodman had two basic options: Remain small or get bigger. "Bigger is not always better," he admits, but that fact was countered by the opportunity to be a leader in the transition advisory sector.
"I was tired of being by myself," Goodman says. "I couldn't, alone, get to the next level. I needed somebody I could bounce ideas off, someone to collaborate with.
"I have developed an expertise in family businesses and transitions. I wanted to take my business, and myself, to the next level."
To do that, however, "I needed a 'real' organization, one with more breadth."
"A lot of sole practitioners take pride in the flexibility they have," Hutchinson says. "I know Barry wondered if he was giving up too much. There's a change in identity, because now there is a high degree of accountability to the other partners.
"But now you have partners to lean on."
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