Conceiving what will happen to your practice when you take a planned retirement or an unplanned absence from the practice should be part of your overall strategic planning document. It's a difficult paradox to accept, but any successful growth and development efforts can actually make your practice less marketable (less affordable by a successor physician, or more dependent on your unique energies and skills.)

Traditionally, succession planning has involved building a larger base of partner-providers, whose ages are staged such that the burden of buying out each successive retiree is minimized.