The owner who became the key person risk, then succeeded himself out.
Gilkison Group is a family financial advice firm in Perth that has been looking after Australian families since 1979. Dean Gilkison took it over from his father, and he did what a conscientious successor is supposed to do. He worked deliberately to take things off his father's plate, removing the key person risk one responsibility at a time. In parallel he grew the business around five fold.
Then he looked at what he had actually built.
I'd strived to remove key man risk by taking things away from my father, and then just simply replaced him with me. Genius, right? Take one key man risk, make it five times bigger and replace it with a key man risk. It even had the same surname.
Dean Gilkison, Succeeding Owner, Gilkison Group
By the time Dean engaged Adapt, he had been through plenty of business coaches. Each one left a residue. Word documents, scans of handwritten notes, spreadsheets, plans on a page, all of it disparate and none of it supported by a methodology and the technology to carry it. The ability to bring the business's digital operating system into one place was compelling.
What made the decision easy was values alignment. From his first conversations with the Adapt team, and then with founder Bill Withers, it was clear they saw things the same way. "As I met more and more of the team, it was a very easy decision."
He also arrived with what he calls a sufficient level of pain. He struggled to see a way through that was not all going to be him.
To codify why we exist and what matters, to enrol the team in that, and to define the roles that existed spiritually rather than literally, felt fantastic. It felt organised. The sense making system in action.
Dean Gilkison
The codified roles gave Dean something concrete to hand over, and a way to watch how people carried them. Chris and Ashleigh, who would go on to become owners, were already responsible for parts of the business well before any equity changed hands. Dean got an insight into their conduct as owners while they were still stepping up. This was also relevant with Isabella as she moved into leadership positions and became an owner.
That framework carried the final handover too. Partnering with Broadleaf Financial Group, of which Dean is a co-founder, gave effect to a transition of the owner role. This was succession of every role in the organisation, including his ownership, to others in the business who had the passion and alignment to take it beyond what Dean was able to in his time.
The ripple effect ran long. A renewal of very long term team members, work that started five or six years before, was revitalised by Dean stepping away. The succession work kept living on well after he left the room.
There were struggles. It's emotional. I consider myself a reasonably competent person in applying the intellectual concept, but then that meets humanness. I am emotional and connected to the history of the organisation. So having that highly trusted person that I could lean on, the trusted ear, guide, challenger, was huge value.
Dean Gilkison
Dean is now out. A couple of years past the operational handover and, at the time of this interview, seven months past handing over his last remaining ownership. What he watches for is consistency, and the business has not only continued that without him, it is flourishing under the leadership of aligned owners who came from within.
His name is still on the door. That was his father's decision first, and then the team's decision to carry it on. "I still see clients in random places, and I'm actually proud to see them. I'm not going, geez, I need to cross the road," he says. "It's impossible to place any form of measured value on that. It's kind of everything."
Asked why he would recommend Adapt to other owners, Dean goes straight to the distinction most owners never make.
Most owners don't actually distinguish the business from themselves. You ask them what they want and they answer in a whole pile of business metrics. Adapt gets that difference in a completely different way to anything I've seen in any form of business coaching.
Dean Gilkison
For owners who feel lonely, isolated and stuck, he says, engaging diminishes all three significantly. Then comes the challenge he puts plainly.
"If you're really genuine about wanting it to be better, do something about it. Build the system that allows you to actually bring others through, because without the others, you'll always be shackled to it. And that might be okay. And if it's okay, don't do it."
Dean did do it, which created the conditions for his succession and others to achieve their own aspirations. The proof is a business that still carries his name, running consistently, without him.