In the early stages, advisory businesses must focus on growing a book of business. Once you've established yourself and your business, however, you must shift your attention toward capacity and scalability to help ensure profitability and success as the workload increases and expands.

For all advisors, managing revenue growth is vital for your success. It allows you to see correlations between your activities and top-line revenue. In turn, those correlations highlight the best initiatives for you to pursue, so that you can expect your firm to grow, rather than just hope it will.

Building your succession plan doesn't happen overnight. It takes time, extensive research, and careful preparation.

Part 1 of this series outlined the first steps for building a financial advisor succession plan. Here, we outline the next steps, along with some additional tips to help you reach your specific goals and ensure a successful transition for you, your business, and your successor.

As an advisor, you may find the prospect of building a succession plan and transitioning your business to someone else difficult—maybe even a bit daunting.

Consider how you guide and manage clients' retirement plans according to their specific circumstances and dreams. Many clients probably find the thought of saving enough for retirement an insurmountable task. You help them see the big picture and move toward their goals, step by step.

Advisor continuity and succession planning are vital to business stability. According to the 2012 IN Adviser Solutions Succession Planning Study, however, only half of all advisors have an adequate succession plan in place.

That's a pretty staggering statistic considering that advisors build their careers helping clients prepare for the future.