Episode 122: Your Founder Is Stepping Back—Now What? | Story Snacks Series

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The founder is retiring. The team is evolving. The story… gets archived?

Not so fast.

In this episode, Stacy shares what to do before you toss the origin story and how to transition from version 1.0 to 2.0 without losing the magic.

Inside the episode:
• Why “retiring the founder” ≠ “retiring the story”
• How to pull legacy threads into your firm’s next chapter
• What to do if the original story was never that strong to begin with

This is Story Snacks, a bite-sized, jam-packed series for fund managers who are ready to master strategic storytelling in under 20 minutes a week.

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TRANSCRIPT

Below is an AI-generated transcript and therefore it may contain errors. 

[00:00:00] Stacy Havener: Craving more knowledge, but don't always have time to sit down for a five course meal. Take a quick snack break with story snacks, bite-size content to feed your funnel. Each short episode features Stacey, digging into one question. This series has her talking stories, sales, and so much more. Oh yeah, it's time for story snacks.

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Our firm's original partners are stepping [00:02:00] back. So how do we transition our stories? Okay. I'll give you the snack sized version of this. Let me say, this is actually a big topic right now. We have two workshops in process where transitioning from founder led to founder inspired is sort of the the challenge that we are helping our clients work through.

I think it's super relevant. So the first thing is, if you have the founder's story, the temptation when they are retiring is to retire the story with them. We don't wanna, shit, can the story. Okay. Like we're not 86 it. Why? Because typically the firm was built around the founder in some way. Whether that's actually their name is on the door and or there was a certain philosophy that they really believed in, or a set of values or a way of looking at the markets or investing that was like they are [00:03:00] known for that thing.

So presuming that you are not completely changing how you do what you do and what makes it special and all those things, the real challenge instead of shit canning it, we wanna shorten it. We wanna shorten that founder story, that that origin story. We wanna get it down to like the core kernels of what makes it special and why someone should care.

And then we wanna pull those threads forward and use them to inspire the next iteration of the company. So we're going from 1.0 to 2.0. We're going from then to now. So that's a really good framework here. Like this is how we started, this is the founder. These are all the things we've run the company for X number of years doing this, blah, blah, blah.

It's amazing. And here's where we're going, then now and next. And we're pulling these threads, these legacy pieces [00:04:00] forward into the next chapter. So this only works though if you've got the founder's origin story down. I think the challenge comes when you're like, well, actually, even when the founder was here, we didn't really have a great, tight, differentiated, unique story.

If that's happening, then you're basically trying to like. Take chaos and like mess and turn it into magic in the 2.0 version. So you kind of have to start from the beginning here. You're gonna have to redo or craft that founder story in a powerful way, and then do all the pieces I said of pulling it forward.

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If you're ready to simplify scale and start working with a team that feels like an extension of yours, check [00:06:00] out billion dollar backstory.com/ultimas. That's ul. T-I-M-U-S. You've got the investment strategy, the vision, the track record. Now it's time to upgrade the engine behind it all with ultimas. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.

The information is not an offer, solicitation, or recommendation of any of the funds, services, or products, or to adopt any investment strategy. Investment values may fluctuate and past performance is not a guide to future performance. All opinions expressed by guests on the show are solely their own opinion and do not necessarily reflect those at their firm.

Manager's appearance on the show does not constitute an endorsement by Stacey Haven or Haven or Capital Partners.

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