The Succession Plan for a 15-Person Company

Apple's succession headlines this week made me pull up our own plan and check the dates on it. Ours was last touched in March. That's too long. If you run a 10-20 person shop, you probably don't have a plan at all, and I understand why. It feels premature. It isn't.

What a small-business succession plan actually is

It's not a leather binder. It's a shared document, maybe six pages, that answers three questions for every key role: who covers this if the person is out for a week, who covers it if they're out for six months, and who takes it permanently if they never come back. For us that means the two owner seats plus four others: office manager, lead technician, bookkeeper, and the person who owns client renewals. Six roles. Named backups for each. Reviewed every six months on the calendar, not "when we get to it."

The backups aren't aspirational. If I write down that Jamie covers renewals when Priya is out, then Jamie has actually done a renewal call this quarter. Otherwise it's fiction, and fiction fails the first time you need it.

The parts people skip

Two things get left out of nearly every smlal-business plan I've seen, and both matter more than the org chart.

• Access. Password manager emergency access, bank signatory list, the physical location of the safe key, who can talk to the insurance carrier, who the attorney and CPA will actually take a call from. If I'm hit by a bus on Tuesday, Alexander shouldn't spend Wednesday locked out of payroll.
• Client communication. A one-page script for what gets said to our top ten clients in the first 48 hours if a key person leaves suddenly. Not a form letter. A script with the actual name of who's calling, in what order, and what they're authorized to promise. Silence is what loses accounts, not the departure itself.

The tax and legal side of ownership succession, buy-sell agreements, key-person insurance, cross-purchase versus redemption structures, all of that goes to your CPA and your attorney. Don't let a blog post talk you into a structure. Do let this blog post talk you into calling them this month.

Why I do this even though nothing has happened

Because the plan isn't only for catastrophe. It's for the ordinary week when the office manager takes her honeymoon and something breaks on day three. It's for the resignation you didn't see coming. Every time we've had a real absence, the plan caught something the calendar missed, usually a vendor login or a recurring approval nobody remembered was manual. The document pays for itself the first time it's used, and it's used more often than you'd think.

If your business would stumble hard the day a key person didn't show up, that's the version of the plan worth writing this quarter. Send us a note if you want a look at the template we use internally.

— Amanda @ SBATC