Built, Not Assumed: Leadership Takeaways from the Boomer Circle Summit

Most succession conversations start years too late, and the leaders having them are often the last to recognize their own instinct to delay. These are some of the leadership themes shared at the 2026 Boomer Circle Summit. Speakers offered several entry points for solving the problem of building leadership capacity.

Succession is a system, not an announcement

Leanne Radcliffe, Chief Talent Officer at RLB LLP, opened her session, Succession as a Leadership Strategy, with a story about watching a longtime partner cry over client feedback, then get interrupted by a request to redo his client allocation list, again, in his final year. The firm had run what looked like a good succession process. It had retained more than 95% of the departing partners' revenue. It had also, in Radcliffe's words, moved fast enough to serve nobody.

Her reframe treats succession planning as a standing leadership discipline. The firm needs effort from every leader, every year. They can’t treat it as a task list triggered by an upcoming retirement.

Radcliffe walked attendees through a forecasting model built on four questions for every partner:

1.     Who owns the revenue and when do they step back?

2.     Who else has a relationship with those clients?

3.     What revenue does the firm want in ten years?

4.     How long does a new leader need to absorb a book?

Applied to a firm's growth targets, that math produces a specific number for the additional leaders the firm needs to develop by a specific year, well before partners announce retirements.

Radcliffe was equally direct about leadership development. When firms can’t name who is ready to step up, the honest diagnosis is usually a talent problem, a training problem, a visibility problem, or an aspiration problem. When leaders are reluctant to hand off client relationships, she recommends firms stop asking them to give something up and show them what holding on already costs them in growth, advisory work and the chance to build a legacy on their own terms.

Sandra Wiley of Sandra Wiley Strategies and Consultant of Boomer Consulting, led a companion session, Exit With Purpose. She took the same problem to the individual level by asking leaders within five years of stepping back (and those hoping to step up in that same window) to rate their own readiness across two lenses:

1. Personal readiness. Do they know who they are beyond their title and feel emotionally ready to let go?

2. Firm readiness. Can the firm run 90 days without them? Have they named a successor?

Both matter equally. A firm with a technically sound transition plan can still fail if the departing leader hasn’t done the personal work of letting go. Her framing borrowed John Maxwell’s idea that we measure a leader's lasting value by succession and who they built to carry the work forward.

We have to build (not assume) independence

Jim Boomer's session, Private Equity's Ripple Effect, widened the lens from individual firms to the competitive landscape as a whole. Roughly a quarter of the Top 100 U.S. CPA firms now carry private equity investment. PE-backed firms are growing organically at roughly 16%, compared with about 10% for independent firms, and they reinvest close to 25 points more of net income back into the business rather than distributing it to partners.

Boomer's point centered on the profession's operating baseline, and how thoroughly PE has reset it by putting continuous strategy in place of annual partner votes, outcome-based pricing in place of billable hours and firm-level performance metrics in place of partner comfort.

Firms that want to stay independent and competitive must build the same operating discipline on their own terms. Partners need to create strategic plan, reinvest 20 to 30% of net income, develop middle managers and regularly invest in technology. Whether firm leaders call it a choice or not, independence is a capability rather than a default state.

Ownership culture starts with what leaders model

Susan Stutzel of PartnersCoach offered a compact framework in her session, OWN IT: Create a Culture of Responsibility. Leadership means creating the conditions for growth, like a gardener tending soil rather than trying to force a bloom. Her four-part model includes preparing the soil, planting the seeds, tending the garden and harvesting the rewards. This treats accountability as something leaders cultivate rather than mandate. Setting clear expectations and modeling the responsibility leaders expect comes first, because, as Stutzel put it, people learn ownership by watching, not by being told.

She recommends building momentum by tracking professional skills and behaviors alongside charge hours and realization.

What this means for your firm

Across all sessions, leadership at this year's Boomer Circle Summit looked less like a title and more like an ongoing practice. Current leaders must name successors before a retirement forces the question, do the personal work of letting go, build the operating discipline independence requires and model the accountability a firm wants to see. A leader’s true legacy is what continues after they step back.

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