You might also be interested in
Replies (1)
Please login or register to join the discussion.
Appreciate your point re family successions, clogs to clogs in three generations, as whilst family can inherit assets they may not inherit talents.
No experience of professional succession in recent years but I do know how my father was brought in to the law firm in which he ended up as senior partner, so maybe in the 1950s and 1960s these things were better planned.
He was purloined from Murray Beith & Murray W.S. in Edinburgh by a similar Edinburgh firm , Melville & Lindesay W.S. who wanted a bit of talent and as he knew MBM were never going to make him a partner (all partners at MBM back then tended to own landed estates and not need to financially be partners-of independent means-the essential qualification alongside hunting, shooting and fishing) he jumped ship to a firm with a more progressive outlook.
He was advised at outset that with decent performance he had prospects when starting as a qualified solicitor in the 1950s, whilst still in his twenties.
After a couple of years a fellow lawyer friend of the then senior partner took ill so my dad got parachuted in to manage that person's smaller firm for about 18 months (In effect part of his training for the future-how to run a firm) and on his return he was made first a salaried partner in his late 20s then a profit sharing partner by about age 33 in circa 1960.
As a profit sharing partner he had a right each year, under the partnership agreement, to buy a small fraction of the then retiring senior partner's interest in the firm using a pre arranged formula based on average firm profits and a fixed multiplier. (As did his more senior partners as he ranked initially fifth)
This was a five partner firm and over the intervening years my father purchased those fractional shares (64ths I think) he was entitled to from the original senior partner and then others who over the years departed and offered up their interests, so that by 1974 he was the senior partner owning the largest stake of the then three partners firm (two junior to him had come in over the years)
The structure of the partnership agreement, with this mechanism , remained pretty much constant over the years from the 1950s until the firm eventually split in 1982 ,and always seemed to me to be a reasonably clever way of enticing ambitious prospective partners who did not come from a particularly wealthy background.