Planning for Endings and Exits
Four different conversations today centered on the challenge of planning for the ends of things. There's so much we can't know about our futures so we're creating a projecting an imagined future and constructing a plan for that knowing full well that life never goes exactly according to plan. In our businesses, so much energy and effort go into planning for the start of the business, and we get to the middle stages of planning soon enough, but I haven't met many business owners who plan for the end of their business, or for their exit from it. And then there are the times when we find ourselves in the midst of unplanned endings with no vision for the next stage of our lives. How can those times be planned for? And ultimately there are plans for the ends of our lives. Some of us don't want to think about this at all. Too scary and too painful. But if we neglect these, our families are left to deal with messes that could have been made much easier had they been plann