Succession planning is a topic that most high-level executives and business owners don’t put too much thought into. Running a company from such a vantage point leaves little time for grooming someone to take your place. Not to mention, who wants to really consider when their term will be over?
In the book “Passing the Torch Without Getting Scorched: Preserving Your Legacy with Smart Succession Planning,” author Lawrence M. Gold explains how to create a plan for passing along your company to someone with capable hands.
The book covers chapters on topics such as:
- Owners and managers
- Mistakes
- Elements of smart succession planning
- Valuations
- Shareholder agreements
Our IT Downloads area provides an excerpt from the book, a segment of part 1 on the basics of succession planning. Gold explains why leaders put off succession planning:
It is not easy for someone to contemplate what will happen after he is gone, much less deal with the issues that this unhappy event will precipitate. And so one procrastinates and delays and delays and delays. Perhaps the owner thinks that natural selection will occur and a successor will emerge from the current lot of contenders. Perhaps a white knight will come along—someone who embodies all the fine qualities that the owner finds so sorely lacking in his current crop of descendants or managers. Perhaps a buyer for the company will surface and rescue him from these difficult decisions. There are so many possibilities to hope for. But, as one wise man once said, ‘Hope is not a strategy.’
The rest of the excerpt gives thoughts on why it’s important to develop a plan and what could happen if no plan is in place at the time the leader steps down.
This download gives leaders a good picture of how the thought process for developing a plan begins and perhaps the impetus to start developing a plan for their own retirement.
