Retirement is a strange word that means different things to different people. For some, it means stepping down from their current role and moving onto other pursuits, a time to build that second career they’ve thought about for a long time perhaps. For others it might be an opportunity to move onto volunteer roles, other civic duties or long dreamt about hobbies.
In the mid 1970’s my grandfather retired after spending 30 years as a milk man. He came home on his last day, sat in his recliner in front of the TV and didn’t move again.
He was done moving anywhere, having believed he had paid his dues to society.
Regardless of what your dreams are, there are some steps to take before introducing yourself as a retiree. I stepped down from my role as CEO of A Few Cool Hardware stores in June after a two-year planning period that set me up for transition success (at least I hope it did).
I separated my preparation into two key buckets – professional and personal.
Professional Separation: My Role as CEO
I had the privilege of watching CEO transition plans unfold while sitting on boards of two multi-billion dollar companies. These are the kinds of folks that have resources and knowledge about how to do things the right way. My front row seat gave me a great deal of insight that I infused into my own plan.
The teams at these two organisations were methodical in their planning; they crafted a strategy for hiring and/or promoting an incoming CEO that included benchmarks to measure success. They documented a period of overlap between the incoming and outgoing executive, and finally, they made detailed communication plans for how all their stakeholders would be informed along the way.
In modeling their behaviour, I created a list of possible successors, both internal and external. This was followed up by the pros and cons of each candidate, interviewing questions, and a timeline for how and when the interviews would be conducted.
In the process, we hired an executive leadership coach to help with the transition. Her role was to guide the communication plan to our team as well as ensure that
any holes in the skillset that my exit would cause were considered when choosing the new CEO.
Hindsight is always 20/20 and I learned a very interesting lesson in this process. I was advised to be as transparent as possible with my leadership team, to give them updates along the path of choosing the incoming leader.
So that is exactly what I did. I provided periodic status reports regarding my successor, my departure, and any other part of the process that seemed pertinent.
Unfortunately, what ensued was a level of anxiety on the part of the team that I had not anticipated. While I had hoped my transparency would provide comfort and time to prepare for the pending changes, it seemed to do the opposite for some in the group.
Somewhere along the process, I met a neuroscientist who studies how human beings react to things. We were having a casual chat and I explained this dilemma to her to which she almost wryly responded, “If you had told them one day before you left, they would have been stressed out for a day, not two years”. I’m not sure I would do it differently if I had to do it all over again, but geez, she made her point loud and clear.
Professional Separation: Selling the Business
While preparing for my successor, we simultaneously worked on how the business would be sold. We had settled on a solution unique to the United States, an ESOP (Employee Stock Ownership Plan). At its most basic, an ESOP means a trust buys the business and holds it on behalf of qualifying teammates. Much like a certified retirement plan, employees qualify after 1 year of service and 1,000 hours of work.
The day we announced the sale of the business to the entire team was also the day we announced that I would be leaving in approximately two years.
The Bottom Line
Once the professional plan is on track and satisfactory, you can begin to prepare yourself personally for the transition. To do this, there are a couple of subcomponents you should consider that include mental and financial preparedness.
Personal Separation: Financial Preparedness
My father retired at age 55 and had no intentions of spending his golden years like his father had. He hoped to live another 40 years (he’s 75 now!) which meant he had to be able to finance his non-working lifestyle for almost as long as he had been alive. While I have heard him say way too many times “I’m on a fixed income”, he also taught me the value of hiring a good financial planner, having a solid budget, and documenting contingency plans.
Before you leap into retirement, take a good hard look at your finances. Better yet, have a professional do this with you. Be realistic about what you want to do with the rest of your life, especially if you’re not planning on working any more. It was also important during this portion of planning to include my spouse because our household earning level would be changing.
Personal Separation: Mental Preparedness
Assuming now that you can financially retire, can you honestly answer whether or not you mentally can? If you’re like me, and your identity is tied up in the title you hold or the position you fill at your company, leaving that role can be a big emotional step.
One day, I had a friend ask me what my post-retirement support system was going to look like. I was then shocked when she advised me to get a personal coach, a retirement “advisor” or a therapist. Woah! Weren’t these supposed to be the days that I could fill anyway I wanted? My golden years? Did I really need to pay someone to tell me how to do this?
I realise now that she had my best interest at heart and knew that not everyone could transition into this next phase in life without a well thought out plan. There have been copious studies done about how friends and hobbies help with this kind of major life change and each of the three professions my friend mentioned would likely have asked me questions about the status of said requirements prior to my stepping down. Did I have some activities that I was itching to do? Did I have friends I could call if I was bored and wanted to try new things with someone?
Despite my husband hoping that I would spend several months with no commitments or meetings, I started a seemingly endless list of things I wanted to try in retirement which I broke into three buckets; fun, educational, and revenue generating. On any given day I can pick and choose from these buckets to ensure that I am stimulated. Not all these pursuits have a friend associated with them, but I made sure that many of my activities were not solitary ones.
This is all fresh in my head right now, so I can’t stress the importance of each one of these steps enough. If you’re uncomfortable or unsure about when and how to start, I highly recommend consulting a coach or professional who can help brainstorm and document your ideas and thoughts. Be honest with yourself. And don’t let the options and steps become so overwhelming that you craft a poor plan or worse yet, that you don’t do anything at all and get stuck in a rut.
The beauty of having it all behind me is that I can now answer the most oft asked question for someone who has retired – “So what are you going to do next?”
Sometime around 2016 one of my teammates came to me and said, “You know Gina, this place is known as ‘Recovery Hardware’ in the community”. That little phrase jumpstarted a book by the same name that tells so many beautiful stories of the people that helped grow our business. If you’d like to read more about them, you can order the book Recovery Hardware by Gina Schaefer at www.waterstones.com
