How McMillans prepared for generational transition without losing what made them successful.
McMillans, a well-established accounting firm in Victoria, faced a challenge that many successful family and partnership businesses eventually encounter: how do you preserve what works while preparing for inevitable change?
Planning a leadership transition is one thing. Actually doing the work that makes it possible is another. For McMillans, with two of the founding Directors preparing to exit over a five-year horizon, the urgency was real.
It's about documenting McMillans' way and how we go about things so that when people come and go, it can continue forever.
Wendy Glasson, Director, McMillans
McMillans had been built the way most successful advisory firms are: through hard work, close client relationships, and the determination of a small group of people who made everything happen themselves.
But this wasn't just about key people leaving. It was about confronting a fundamental question: what happens when the people who built the business, who wore five or six hats each and learned everything on the fly, step back?
"We needed a proper platform to record and document McMillans' values and what people's roles are in particular, and enable some transparency as to what each of us are doing for the future," Wendy Glasson says.
McMillans faced the challenge of ownership and leadership transition. They'd tried various initiatives before, but nothing had stuck. It is where Adapt has lasting business impact, and it was the reason McMillans came to the table.
The problem at McMillans was not performance. The business was successful. But underneath that success was a structure, or rather the absence of one, that made the future feel fragile.
We were all doing everything across the business. And it's taken us a while to break that down and to comprehend that it doesn't have to be that way going forward.
Wendy Glasson, Director, McMillans
Director Wendy Glasson's involvement with another Adapt client, ERGT, gave her insight into how the Adapt programme could work for a business on a completely different scale. She recognised that while McMillans was smaller, the benefits, particularly around role clarity and business documentation, would be equally valuable.
The firm engaged Adapt with a clear commitment: this wouldn't be another "shiny thing" they'd abandon when it got difficult. They brought on a coach, specifically because they knew they needed external accountability to make real change happen.
I definitely wouldn't do this without having a coach. That was the best thing for us because we'd be too set in our ways, and we'd just do it our own way, and then it would fail.
Wendy Glasson, Director, McMillans
Eighteen months into the Adapt journey, the most visible progress at McMillans has been around role clarity, and what that clarity has made possible.
The Director role has been properly defined for the first time. As two founders step back and two new Directors step in, there is now a documented framework for what that role means: what it includes, what it does not, how decisions get made, and what accountability looks like. That framework exists in the Adapt platform, visible to everyone who needs it.
Some of the most significant change at McMillans over the past eighteen months has shown up in the quality of the conversations the leadership team is willing to have with each other.
Two years ago, the Directors would not have sat down and asked everyone to come with their honest opinions on something difficult. The culture was not there for it. People would walk out of meetings uncomfortable, things unresolved, and nothing would change.
"We challenged ourselves to be open and upfront about some things," she says. "Two years ago, we wouldn't have done that."
McMillans is not finished. But the direction is set. When the founding directors eventually step back, the business will have something it did not have before: a documented way of doing things, a leadership team that knows what it owns, and a platform that holds all of it together.
As some of us rotate and exit out, the basis will be there for business longevity.
Wendy Glasson, Director, McMillans