The month of decisions: how we plan a founder’s handover

People talk about succession as a question of titles: who becomes managing director, who chairs the board, when the founder steps back. The titles are usually settled in a week. The decisions take far longer.

Which customer gets the last slot in a busy month. Which order is worth a late night. Which supplier gets paid first when cash is tight. Most of those calls have never been written down, and many founders don’t know how many they make.

Write down a month

So the first step in every succession we run is unglamorous. For one month, the founder writes down every decision they make, however small, with a line on why. We collect the lists every Friday and ask questions.

At Brodie Boatyard on the Moray Firth, Alasdair Brodie had run the yard for forty years. His list ran to 140 items. His daughter Kirsty was already taking about a third of them without anyone noticing.

A handover is finished when the customers stop calling the founder first.

Hand over in stages

We sort the list into groups. Decisions the successor can take from now on. Decisions that need a few months of working side by side. Decisions that are better taken by a small board than by any one person. Each group gets a date.

Then we meet the bank and the largest customers with both generations in the room. That meeting matters more than any document, because it tells the people outside the business who to call.

The hardest part is usually the middle group. Founders agree to hand over a decision and then take it back the first time it goes differently. We plan for that, and a partner stays in the room for the first few months.

Kirsty Brodie became managing director eighteen months after the first list. Her father chairs the board, and he still builds one boat a year.