Succession Planning
For Family Enterprises
Benefits of Succession Planning
- It’s important to take the time to put some of the key decisions on paper, so that they become more real and “official”
- Both generations, the current leaders and those rising to eventually take their place, need to work on how the process will work, TOGETHER
- Succession planning is NOT an EVENT, it is a process. You need to think in terms of years, not weeks, to do it properly
When should we start Succession Planning?
- It’s almost impossible to start too early, and most people wait too long
- As soon as it becomes probable that the right successors are in place, the process can and should start, even if it’s only informally
- As the certainty grows that the right people are in place, you can kick it up a notch and make it more formal as you go
How to get started with a Succession Plan?
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Family Business Succession Planning is sometimes just assumed to be happening. But you really should have some sort of agreement, even if it isn’t written or very formal, around what you are trying to do
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Both the eventual outgoing leader(s) and the incoming future leader(s) need to come up with a timeframe that makes sense for everyone.
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Once you have a timeline, you can start to fill in what needs to happen, what your priorities are, and when certain important changes should begin to happen.
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You don’t need to have it all figured out in order to get started, you will need to be flexible and adapt on the fly, but you can and should still get going as soon as the players are identified.
Some people work their butt off for their whole life trying to build a business for their family. They often dream about how great it will be for the family to work together with a common purpose. But the dream doesn’t always work out the way they imagined, because it is a LOT more complex than they ever imagined.
It isn’t usually the business part that trips them up, more often it is the family part. The roadblocks usually show up when it comes time to truly transition the business to the next generation, and this is where Steve comes in. He specializes in helping families turn their dream into a workable plan, using a step-by-step method to get everyone on the same page.
Once the family has completed his Business Family Continuity BluePrint, all family members will see the family’s goals, and they will understand their roles. Steve then helps them all figure out how they can move forward, working together.
Steve is a proud FEA Designate (IFEA) and holds ACBFA and ACFWA certifications (FFI), in addition to having an MBA (UWO-Ivey) He is also a CFA charterholder (CFA Institute), and the author of Shift your Family Business (Friesen Press, 2014)
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