Succession Planning – PQMC’s Approach

Succession Planning – PQMC’s Approach

Business owners want their legacies to live on.

But often, children of business owners are either un-interested or not up for the job. This is where we come in.

Succession planning is ultimately about capacity building. Whether this means the capacity to run the company or the capacity to be a responsible owner of the company, this task is harder than it sounds.

The Nitty-Gritty

The first thing we do is go beyond the system of the business and understand the culture of the business. We always gets intimately involved with our clients and eventually develop a deep intuitive understanding of their business – the un-articulated hopes, sense of purpose and core values.

Along the way we build bridges of genuine trust between ourselves and both generations. We analyse skills gaps (again across both generations) and tactfully present plans on how to raise capacities across the organisation.

This is an art in itself. It is critical at this juncture that family members leave preconceived ideas (and family hierarchies, egos, etc.) at the door to accept this reality check.

Skills-roles mis-matches are the norm and the transition-period potentially frustrating. The transformative task at hand is massive – a technically competent child may need to be turned into a CEO or a creatively oriented sales personnel has to learn to lead highly technical teams.

At the outset we always make it a point to define the period of transition – sometimes up to 5-years. It is not uncommon for the interim (and sometimes as the ultimate solution) that we have advised families to engaged an external CEO.

Unexpected Results

The results of the succession plan is not always clear cut and consistent with the original vision of the business owner. The next generation may not end up leading the company as the CEO – and that’s fine!

One of our succession projects saw a non-family-member employee become the GM while the 2 sons remained owners that took on roles as Sales and Warehouse Managers. Critically, all family members were happy that the succession plan considered what was best for the family, for themselves as individuals and for the business as a whole.

The desire to let a good business have a life beyond the owner is worth supporting and investing energy into. When the business continues to offer wonderful products/services and grow in relevance to the market across generations, that is a succession planning at its best.