How to Create a Succession Plan

If your business can’t survive without you then you’ve put it in a very risky position, simply because you become a potential single point of failure. Another good reason for making yourself replaceable is for your own benefit. Whether you would like to spend more time on the golf course, take longer holidays or even retire to take up new interests? Your business should work for you.

A third reason – and one that can bring the biggest benefit of all – is to get back to being the brains behind the operation. When you step away from the day-to-day running of the business, you free your mind to become more creative. Enabling you to see the bigger picture, grab hold of new opportunities and to make more progressive strategic decisions.

5 key steps to creating a succession plan.

According to one survey, 75 per cent of small business owners have no succession plan. Having worked with numerous businesses, I can understand why. It’s very easy to become immersed in the work and bury your head in the sand when it comes to planning.

A step-by-step approach will help you to carry out the necessary restructuring of your business, allowing you to create a succession plan without you having to take your hands off the wheel.

Step 1: Systemise all your business requirements.

This is important at any stage in a company’s development and a business coach can be very helpful in providing that all-important objectivity. Putting systems in place helps you to assess the efficiency of your business processes. This will make it easy to delegate and train your employees. Establish systems for everything from budgets and accounting processes, to making and receiving phone calls, dealing with customers and managing orders. When you have these systems in place, it becomes much easier to see what’s working and what isn’t.

Step 2: Take stock of what you do personally on a daily, weekly or monthly basis (whichever is the most relevant to your work).

Detail all the different aspects of your role and log the time you spend on each. Write this up into a procedure, because this becomes an effective instruction manual for anyone wanting to replicate what you do. Once captured you can always go through your processes and work on who best to assign each task to. This is especially useful when it comes to assigning each aspect of your own work for completion in your absence.

Step 3: Share your plans with your employees and give them the necessary training to carry out the roles you’ve delegated to them.

Teach staff how you want them to talk to clients and suppliers. Furnish them with relevant industry knowledge and give them the confidence to make decisions.

Step 5: Start to step away.

Remember when you launched the business? You were full of bright ideas. By stepping away, you will rediscover that creative mindset, which will feed back into the business development objectives and help it to grow. When the time comes to walk away for good, you’ll have a well-formed, autonomous entity to sell.