A Quick Guide to Creating a Business Succession Plan

Change is hard but is inevitable and necessary. The more we prepare ourselves against such anticipatory alterations, the better we tend to navigate through future downtimes and chaos.

This “change” is inescapable in your business staffing as well. You never know who will get promoted, change projects, or leave the company altogether. But what you CAN know is how to tackle such emergencies without hampering your workflow and the overall efficiency of the team.

This is why strategic business succession planning becomes so crucial, especially for small businesses.

Thus, in this blog post, we’re going to run you through an in-depth guide to succession planning. Without any further ado, let’s get started!

What Is Meant By Business Succession Planning?

Business succession is an important part of business planning that refers to a process where you create a roadmap for the potential alteration in your business team. This planning includes identifying the most deserving candidates in your existing team who could take over for the roles that could get created or left vacant sometime in the future.

Although businesses usually keep C-suite job roles in mind while planning a business succession, one should always stay prepared for every kind of emergency. They should create a plan keeping every junior or senior role in mind.

Benefits of Succession Planning

Key highlights that emphasize the benefits of succession planning-

• Maintaining a consistent experience for the customers.
• Reducing turnover and last-minute chaos & productivity loss.
• Visualizing business forecasts to make more visionary business decisions later.
• Saving the costs of financing external recruitment services.
• Making employees more engaged and happier at work.
• Making better use of the limited fund obtained via investment or loan.

Quick Guide To An Ultimate Small Business Succession Planning

Create an intact small business succession plan with this smart checklist below–

• List down your potential recruitment needs: 

Figure out your business goals for the upcoming future. 

For example, if you're making an organizational shift in your entire business or launching a new product or service in the near future, you will need to recruit more people for the new roles. Also, keep a list of the most important roles that are vulnerable to get vacant at any moment.

List down the skills and personality well suited for the potential roles.

1. Identify the most deserving employees: 

Keep an eye on your most talented team members. Here’s how you can identify them.

• High performers
• Emotionally intelligent
• Take criticism positively
• Motivated enough to learn new skills on their own
• Never shy away from taking new challenges
• Possess leadership qualities

• Invest in early L&D (Learning & Development): 

You can’t expect someone to just step-up and manage everything from day one. Thus, keep the concerned employees in look & well equipped with knowledge by investing in their learning and training. 

Run programs, create courses, and assign them to the members who you think can do justice to the potential job roles. Give them assignments or assign them tasks related to the potentially vacant position in advance. 

This would give your business an edge over the emergency requirements.

• Utilize software tools

You can consider investing in an HR management tool or a business planning tool if you haven’t already. Such tools often provide succession planning templates apart from providing entire business plan templates. These readily available templates can make your work at least 10 times simpler.

To understand the importance of a business plan, read this: 

10 Reasons Why You Need a Business Plan