Season Two · Part Two · Episode 15 of 24
Designing succession for other people turns out to be the easier version.
Jason opened the same spreadsheet he had built alone months earlier, with no name in the file system beyond a date, and found that the hardest part of PRIME had been waiting for him at the bottom of his own file all along.
Twenty-two relationships. Fourteen point one million dollars. The number hadn’t changed since the night he’d first built it. What had changed was that the blank column beside each name was no longer his to leave blank. Susan had made sure of that early on: the criteria applied to every equity partner, or to no one, Jason included.
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His first draft took him eleven minutes. He looked at it for much longer than that.
Robert Hayes was paired with nine of the twenty-two rows, then with four more. By the time he reached the bottom of the page, Robert’s name appeared on more than half of it, and each time he typed it, it felt, in the moment, like the obviously correct answer.
He brought it to Susan and Renee before he could think better of it, the same instinct that had once sent him down the hall to Renee’s office with a spreadsheet he hadn’t wanted to show anyone.
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Renee read the page twice, the way she read everything that mattered. “You know what this is,” she said. It wasn’t quite a question.
“It’s the strongest relationship I have in the building,” Jason said. “Robert’s earned every bit of the trust I’m giving him. That’s not favoritism. That’s a decade of watching him work.”
“I believe every word of that,” Susan said. “I also believe that if Robert’s name ends up on thirteen of your twenty-two rows, we haven’t reduced your firm’s concentration risk. We’ve just renamed it. In five years, it’s not Jason Bellows the client can’t do business without. It’s Robert Hayes. You’ll have built the exact structure you asked me to dismantle back here, just with a name you trust more.”
Jason let that settle before he answered. “I wasn’t trying to build anything,” he said. “I was trying to pick the person I’d actually trust with these clients.”
“That’s exactly the problem,” Renee said, with no edge in it. “Trust isn’t the scarce resource here. Distributed trust is. You have one relationship you’d stake your name on. The firm needs more than one such relationship.”
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Alone that evening, Jason let himself feel the thing he’d been managing all week, which was less a professional problem than a personal one dressed up as a spreadsheet. These weren’t accounts. Marion Vance at Calloway Freight had called him at home the week his father died. He’d sat through two divorces with clients who had no one else to sit through them with. Handing over pieces of that to anyone, even someone as good as Robert, felt less like succession planning and more like being asked to describe, in writing, which parts of himself he was willing to give away.
He thought about the question Susan had asked him from a phone line, back before any of this had a name. Whose name is on your biggest relationship, besides yours? He’d answered it honestly then. No one’s. He was running out of ways to keep answering it the same way.
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Two days later, Anna found Jason in the small conference room, ostensibly to drop off Hal’s exposure time log for his signature. She lingered at the door instead of leaving it on the table as she normally would.
“Can I tell you something I probably should have told someone weeks ago?” she said.
Jason set his pen down. “Go ahead.”
“Kevin Patel told me, the night he closed my office door, that he had no idea what to do next,” Anna said. “Not about the law, but about the rest of it. Whose clients he was supposed to be building toward, and how you even start that when nobody hands you a first name. I never told anyone. I asked him last week if I could tell you now, since you’re actually looking for names instead of running audits, and he said yes.”
Jason placed the name slowly. Kevin Patel. A face from a partners’ meeting he could picture clearly, and a career he realized, sitting there, he’d never once tracked.
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He asked Kevin to the same small conference room the following morning. Kevin arrived early. He took the chair nearest the door and didn’t pull it in.
“I’m not here to talk about anything you said to Anna,” Jason said before Kevin could brace himself. “I’m here because I have a relationship that needs exactly what you’re good at, and until this week I hadn’t once thought to ask what that was.”
Kevin’s face went through a complicated shift. “I assumed you knew who I was and had already decided,” he said.
“That’s the honest answer for most of the past two years,” Jason said. “I’m not proud of it. I’m trying to fix the part I still can.”
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He laid it out plainly. Not Calloway Freight. That one, and the litigation instincts it required, belonged to Robert. This one was steadier: a mid-sized regional client with recurring compliance work and a general counsel who valued continuity over aggression, exactly the kind of relationship that rewarded someone who showed up reliably for years rather than someone who hunted for the next deal. “You’ve never needed to be taught how to originate,” Jason said. “You need someone to stop assuming that was the only skill that counted.”
Kevin didn’t answer right away. When he did, his voice sounded less like the performance Jason had heard from him in years. “Nobody’s ever described what I’m good at as a reason to give me something,” he said. “Usually it’s the reason I get passed over for whoever’s louder about wanting it.”
“Then that’s one more thing this was never designed to catch until now,” Jason said.
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Margaret logged both nominations that afternoon: Robert Hayes paired with Calloway Freight, with readiness criteria attached and an exposure plan drafted for the following month. Kevin Patel paired with the regional compliance relationship, same criteria, same rigor, no asterisk beside his name explaining why a quieter candidate had made the list.
Two names, paired with two of the twenty-two rows. Jason looked at the other twenty, still blank, and understood that most of the actual weight of what he’d agreed to was still in that column, waiting for him to do this exact thing eighteen more times without the benefit of it getting any easier.
It hadn’t gotten any easier tonight. It had only just begun, which, he supposed, sitting there at his own desk at sixty-four years old, was the entire difference between what happened to Marcus and whatever this was instead.
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