The Successor's Impostor Syndrome: What the Person Taking Over Goes Through, Not Only the Seller

What I see come back, mandate after mandate, is not the seller's doubt. That one is expected, named and looked after. It is the doubt on the other side of the table, in the person taking over, who has nowhere to say it out loud.

The buyer has signed. They have convinced a bank, committed their savings, sometimes accepted a vendor loan that ties them to the seller for several more years. On paper, they own the company. In the corridors, they are the new one. Employees watch, compare, keep quiet. The first customer they visit asks after the previous owner before mentioning the order. None of it is hostile. All of it says the same thing: this house was built by someone else.

I do not reach for the vocabulary of psychology easily, but impostor syndrome describes what I observe rather well: a capable person who has carried a demanding acquisition through to the end, and who still feels illegitimate in the chair they paid for. The feeling does not show up at closing. It comes later, in the first weeks, when the energy of the negotiation drains away and the daily reality of the business presents itself, with its habits, its codes and its loyalties.

What the successor tells no one

First observation: the successor does not talk about this doubt, least of all to the seller. They would have everything to lose, or so they believe. They may still be negotiating an earn-out or the terms of the handover period; they are not going to admit to the person on whom part of their price depends that they feel out of their depth. They do not tell their banker either, nor their team. They end up in a solitude that looks very much like the seller's during the sale, shifted by six months.

Second observation: this doubt rarely looks like doubt. It takes forms that are easy to mistake for a management style. The successor who changes everything in the first three months, the organisation chart, the accounting software, the names of the meetings, does not always do it out of conviction; often they do it to exist, so that something in the company finally carries their mark. The successor who, on the contrary, touches nothing, who still asks the seller's opinion on decisions they could take alone, who keeps postponing the first visit to the largest customer, is expressing the same thing differently. Two opposite behaviours, one origin.

Third observation, the most delicate: the seller often feeds the problem without meaning to. Take a scenario invented for the purpose: a joinery business of 25 people in Aargau, taken over by a 44-year-old manager from a construction group. The founder, 66, stays eighteen months for the transition, as the contract provides. He arrives every morning at seven, before the successor. He keeps signing the important quotes, "to help". When a workshop foreman has a problem, he walks into the old office, whose door has stayed open. The founder believes he is being useful, and he is sincere. Day after day, he nonetheless maintains the very hierarchy the sale was meant to reverse. The successor, for their part, has no way of saying "please stop coming in the morning" to a man who trusted them and granted them a vendor loan.

What this changes in the handover

What I take from these situations is that the handover period is generally designed to transfer knowledge, and rarely to transfer authority. Customers to introduce, suppliers to meet, procedures to explain: all of that gets listed. Almost never listed is the date from which the seller no longer signs anything, no longer comes in every day, no longer receives employees in the old office. Yet it is that date that gives the successor legitimacy, far more than the list of customers to introduce.

In the mandates I lead, this transfer of authority is prepared like everything else, before signing, in three lines: who decides what from when; where the seller sits during the handover, and it is not the old office; and how the team is told that decisions now go through the successor, including the ones they will take differently. The announcement to employees and customers, whose timing I have described before, matters less for its content than for who delivers it: if the seller introduces the successor, the seller is still the boss; if both speak and the successor closes, something has changed.

There is one more observation I share less often with sellers, because it surprises them. Their own difficulty in letting go, which I have described in connection with the void that follows a sale, and the successor's doubt feed each other. The seller who stays too present sometimes does so because they sense the successor's hesitation, and that presence deepens the hesitation. The circle closes without anyone having acted badly.

What breaks the circle, in what I observe, is not a pep talk. It is a written calendar that is kept, with a third party who holds both sides to it, because neither the seller nor the successor is well placed to call the other to order. The successor does not need to be told they are legitimate. They need the company, one morning, to have no other boss but them.