Leaders of small and midsize businesses (SMBs) recognize succession planning is important. But they don’t always prioritize it when faced with competing demands.
In a Vistage survey that captured responses from 1,768 SMB CEOs, only 15% said they’ve identified a successor for themselves and just 20% have identified successors for their leadership team. About one-third (36%) of CEOs report working on their succession plans, while 27% have no plan in place.
Recent Vistage research outlines three scenarios that bring urgency to succession planning:
- In the operational scenario, succession planning accelerates due to the natural flow of business.
- In the aspirational scenario, it is motivated by the desire to distinguish the business.
- The sale or purchase of a company prompts the transactional scenario.
We interviewed two leaders from the Vistage community who have dealt with some of these scenarios, but with the added challenge of perhaps the corporate world’s most complex organizational structure: the family business.
Here, these CEO members explain how they balanced the personal with the professional while charting a new course for their companies.
