During a recent monthly business review meeting with an executive team of a privately held company we were working through a number of important issues, one of which was succession planning for the firm, a topic people had been deferring for sometime, thinking it was important but not urgent.  One of the partners looked around the room and said, “Holy ###, I am only now realizing that all eight of us are within seven years of each other in age.  We are all in our late 50s and we have no younger people that we are really assessing and developing to see if they are able and willing to take over the firm.  And look how long it took us to develop the ability to run this place.  If we don’t get moving on this, our firm is going to die and we will get no money out of it for our retirement, our customers will be left hanging and our employees will be out of jobs.  We need to do something now!”

Well, that was quite a conversation stopper.

The team stepped back, broke for coffee and came back to the table pretty subdued.  It was becoming clearer to them that they were not going to be running the company forever.  They were going to leave the company one way over the other over the next 5-10 years and had done a poor job of bringing younger talent along.  The outspoken partner pushed hard and succession planning moved way up the priority list.  In fact, here is the action plan that was entered on the CEOs plan.  Create an actionable succession plan for all members of the firm 55 and over.  The date set for the plans presentation was only four months out.

What kind of a succession/exit plan does your company have?