subject: Family Business Succession Planning, You Must Be Willing To Ask For Help [print this page] Because you are in the middle of it you know the family business succession planning is many faceted. Because it is unlikely that you have already been through family business succession yourself, other than perhaps as a witness to what your parents or grandparents went through, it will require you to ask for help from those likely to know more than you.
Family business succession planning includes elements of strategic planning, management succession, and ownership transition, aka estate planning, each calling for different skills and experiences you probably don't have. Even if you have the insights, are you willing to bet the farm on them? What if something you know for sure turns out to be wrong?
So, with your family business at stake, are you willing to set your ego aside and ask for help or not? Someone needs to look at what's working and what's not in order to better understand which past, present, and future actions are the most likely to take the business in the direction you want it to go.
Someone will have to create policies, practices, training, tactics, and actions that will result in your next generation being able to lead and manage the operation in the future. And someone will have to put it all together with the documents required to add the force of law necessary to ensure it all happens.
It goes without saying that no one knows all that needs knowing on their own, enough to cobble together all these elements in an overall process that will result in the seamless transition of your company over the years to the next generation. The $64,000 question, "Who you gonna call?"
Here are three groups of individuals you should consider when reaching out to get the insights you'll need in order to make the choices only you can make. In the final analysis the entire family business succession process is for the benefit of your family.
Why don't you ask your family for help - not technical advice, but help in the context of sharing what's important to them and what they hope the future holds. It is especially important to get their wishes out in the open. They will probably not be burdened with the knowledge of how easy or hard to accomplish their objectives are - that's what your advisors are for, what you want from your family is help opening up the stream of communications required to end up with something everybody wants.
During the early stages of the process you are not really looking for a diagnosis or treatment. You are really looking for processionals who are team players - willing to work together for your benefit instead of their own.
If you are free to bounce ideas off of them as the process develops you can latch onto what might work as part of the plan and what clearly won't. Each discussion builds on the last so in the end there will simply be an common opinion of what they should do to put it all in place for you. And because this is a long, never ending process - there will be no "job done" celebration. There will be a growing consensus on the next step and the next and the next.
What about your peers, a mastermind group composed of successful business owners whose opinions you trust chosen because they have no financial stake in the decisions you make and they have your best interests at heart. They will not only ask you questions, testing your assumptions of what's true and what's not - they will be able to reach out to those they know who have shared with them what's working and what's not.
And when your mastermind group consists of members both older and younger than you - even from different generations, their points of view may make it easier to understand your parents motives, your siblings concerns, and your children's perspectives.
Finally, family business succession is an evolving process. These important constituents, groups of confidants, will be able to shed light today, as well as in the future.
Be willing to ask for help when entering the family business succession process, then pay heed to the insights offered because they are a vital ongoing part of the process.
