The Most Wonderful Time of the Year?

In the interest of full disclosure, I’m not one of those people who gets all giddy and smiley during the holiday season. And for those who know me well, it hardly qualifies as a revelation when I admit I’m even less of a warm fuzzy this time of the year than the remaining 11 months.

There’s just something about hanging holiday lights in freezing weather, nearly getting into Pier 6 brawls at retail checkout counters, overeating to the point where I need a personal trainer to return my waistline to more comfortable dimensions and ultimately, receiving  credit card statements that approach my monthly mortgage.

And this past weekend did nothing to sway my anti-holiday sentiment. 

The bride and I took in a Broadway matinee with plans afterwards to visit the tree at Rockefeller Center and hopefully snap a picture or two.

Wrong.

The area between Times Square and Rock Center resembled the arrival of the Beatles in America in terms of crowds, and it required a healthy 15 minutes to walk exactly one block. Every restaurant in the vicinity had a minimum wait of 90 minutes (incredibly, even TGI Fridays and Applebee’s!) and just to get me in the spirit of the season, I took a smarting head shot from a clumsy, but apologetic, German tourist waving a camera with an overlong lens.

Not exactly Yuletide postcard material.

But as 2013 winds down, there are probably more than a few CPA firms that share my point of view – particularly when they realize that another year is about to pass and they’ve done little or nothing to address a long-neglected succession issue.

That will surely sour the mood at any holiday party.

Case in point: I received a call the other day from an owner who freely admitted that he has procrastinated creating a formal succession plan like a teenager who was told to clean up his room. But with the holiday season in full swing and a wave of client 1040s just over the horizon, he didn’t feel this was the right time to begin laying the groundwork.

I resisted the temptation to point out that he obviously felt that it wasn’t the right time the other 10 months of the year. But I pointed out we could work with him to get his ducks in a row so to speak and then pursue an agreeable strategy in earnest post tax season.

He then gave me the third best answer one could hear – “Let me think about it,” and wished me a happy and healthy holiday season.

I didn’t have the heart to tell him my true feelings about this time of year or tell him that his attitude toward a succession strategy mirrored the battle cry of many unsuccessful sports teams throughout history – “Just Wait ‘Till Next Year.”

That is until there is no next year.