Most farming families already have a good team of people around them.
You might work with the same accountant as your parents, or have a solicitor who understands your family and has handled everything from land purchases to wills over the years.
So when succession comes up, it’s reasonable to ask why you’d need anyone else involved.
The answer? Your solicitor and accountant are likely very good at their jobs, but there are many conversations that need to happen before any technical work can properly begin.
Your accountant can help you understand the numbers, and your solicitor can advise on the legal structures. But before either of them can build the right structure, you need to work out what your family actually wants to achieve, by asking questions like:
These aren’t accounting or legal questions – they’re family, business and future-planning questions – and if you start with the legal or financial structure first, it can be expensive and disruptive to adjust if you want to make changes down the line.
Some do, and do it well.
But there are a few reasons this work usually sits outside your accountant’s role.
They’re usually brought in to answer a question – not work out what the question is
Most accounting and legal work is responsive. You arrive with a decision, and your adviser tells you how to give effect to it, what it will cost and what it means.
And that’s exactly what you want from them.
But succession often starts somewhere else. Before you can answer “How do we structure this?”, someone needs to help the family answer “What are we actually trying to achieve and why?”
It’s a different kind of work
Law, tax and compliance work are precise and technical.
Helping several people with different hopes, concerns and expectations arrive at a collective way forward is a different set of questions – and requires a different approach.
In this way, having a succession planner on your team can make it easier to ensure everyone has had the opportunity to be heard, the important issues are on the table, and the decisions being made work in the best interest of everyone involved, before anything is set in stone.
We help farming families work through the family, business and financial decisions that need to be made before the legal and financial structures are put in place.
We do that through our program, the Farm Transition Blueprint – a structured process that typically runs over four months.
We look at the business, the people involved, what’s already been assumed, what’s working, what’s uncertain and what’s prompted the conversation in the first place.
Every family member has the opportunity to talk privately about what they want, what concerns them and what they think is important – before anyone has to speak in front of the whole family.
Once everyone has been heard, we bring the family together and work towards the bigger decisions with a much clearer picture of where each person actually stands.
Retirement planning, superannuation, debt, tax, business structures and asset protection are brought into the process rather than treated separately.
This means the family decisions and the financial reality can inform each other, because – in our book – there’s little point creating a plan that looks great for the family but doesn’t work financially.
We’re not here to replace your accountant or solicitor, we’re here to help your family work through the decisions that sit between:
“What do we want?” and “How do we legally and financially make that happen?”
Once those decisions take shape, we move into implementation.
If you have existing advisers, we work alongside them to put the right structures in place, and if you don’t, we have a team of our own and a network of trusted partners who can help with the technical work required.
The point isn’t to add another adviser to the mix for the sake of it. It’s to make sure the right questions are being answered in the right order.
Matt Meehan is a Chartered Accountant and Certified Financial Planner with more than 30 years’ experience working alongside Australian farming families.
Matt’s work sits at the intersection of family, farm, financial planning, accounting and business coaching – helping families work through the decisions that need to be made while they still have options.
If your family is at the “we don’t really know where to start” stage, you don’t need to have a plan worked out before you reach out.
You can start with a free 15-minute conversation with Matt to talk through where you’re at and whether having a succession planner on your team could be the right move for your family.
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