You’ve put your blood, sweat, and tears into your business. You’ve watched it grow from an idea to a fully-fledged enterprise. Now, it’s looking like it’s time to retire. While ultimately the ability to retire and when is up to you, it’s important to know when to take a step back. Working proactively towards your retirement can mean not just being financially secure enough to retire, but also that your successor is fully trained and ready to take up the mantle.

Properly planning for your retirement in advance is a smart move for you and your company, so don’t delay; get started by using these tips today:

Start with a Financial Planner

When you’ve got a business, you have multiple assets to consider. Hiring a financial planner can help you fully utilize these assets so that you can properly save up your pension and set up your business so that you personally receive dividends—a great passive income stream opportunity.

A financial planner, of course, can do more than just that. They can also help you with your estate and your will. Comprehensive estate planning lets you properly plan out how to divide your assets and who gets what when you pass away. Ignoring this part of your retirement is a huge mistake. If you don’t want the courts to divide up your business, then you need an estate planning solution that works to protect your legacy long after you’re gone.

Start Hiring for Your Replacement

You won’t simply be hiring your replacement and then leaving. If you want your business to continue working well with your values at its core, you’ll want to hire your replacement, and keep them in a VP position while you train them up to take over. Mentoring them should never replace innovation. You’ll want your successor to take your values and tried-and-true methods and be able to identify some key ways to improve your business so that it can survive the changing tides and the next big societal upheaval.

Take Baby Steps Backward

You don’t need to set a hard date for your retirement. Instead, you can take small steps backward as necessary. Instead of working five days a week plus, start only working three days a week and work in tandem with your successor. You can then cut back more and more until you’re only at one day a week, or just every once in a while.

Technically, you don’t need to stop working completely. If getting into the office one day a week to keep up to date with the goings-on and to help out with anything helps you get more value out of your retirement, then you can absolutely do just that. Most, however, will eventually break away from the working world and will just stay updated on their business through email and reports.

Find New Ways to Help Your Business

There are many ways that you can stay active without actively working. If you want to write a book, your retirement is the perfect time to focus on just that. Unless you have a dream of writing fiction or poetry, you can write about your expertise. You can then not only publish something, but you can increase your own and your business’ notoriety. You can work as a speaker, as a consultant, and so on. The difference is that this will be on your own terms.