enables us to retain talent and therefore to grow the firm. And enables us to avoid having to sell out at the owner's retirement. So in creating a continuous ownership program, I'm not the world's biggest authority on this. Again, this is how we have done it in our firm. Understand first of all, we are a professional services corporation like attorneys, physicians, accountants, architects, engineers, and landscape architects. These professionals perform and deliver the services using their expertise. The professionals within the firm are creating this value. They are the ones creating it. So reasons for transitioning the ownership, this is somewhat repetitious of the past, but retention of talent, avoiding having to rebuild the firm due to some talented person, leaving somebody managing a lot of clients, whoops, we were doing great, but now we have to drop back and find somebody else to serve these clients to enable growth of the firm. The retention of talent enables you to grow the firm again. Fairness to the value creators and the endurance of the firm having a legacy firm. Those are the reasons. The internal transition of ownership is about inclusion in wealth building for those employees who are creating value here rooted in fairness. And the value creators are truly those who are excellent at firm management or even at internal services, such as the chief finance financial officer or human, resources officer, and the very direct client-facing delivery service people within the firm. They are creating value in the firm. By the way, ownership transition is not about percentages of ownership. That's a zero-sum game. It's about the value, the dollar value of this transition of ownership is best done over time. It's an event. I mean it's not an event, it's a process. It's very difficult to accomplish this internally, only at the end of the owner's career. We figure it takes about 20 years to transition ownership 100% of the time. We got going in our ownership transition program about the year 2000. So we've been at it for 24 years now. We figure people acquire stock, professionals acquire stock in their 30s and 40s and they divest stock in their 50s and 60s. The average share of stock is held for a period of 20 years. That's an average, of course. And so if they hold it for 20 years then you can. We are deliberate about trying to turn over 5% of our ownership every year so that in 20 years we can do a complete 00:10:00 John R. McAdams: transition. All right. As we see it, to establish an ownership transition program, there are four things to get right in it. First of all, a means of valuation of the firm. The firm has got to have a known agreed-upon value. The second is to craft a shareholder's agreement. It is sometimes called a buy-sell agreement. I don't think that's nearly as good a name as an ownership, as a shareholders agreement because it has to do with so much more than buying and selling. It has to do with how we will all behave within this. The third is to establish criteria for whom to invite into the ownership program year by year as you go along. And fourth is to establish the procedures for the continuous nature of it. So we're going to talk through those four
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