MAKING

YOU SUCCESSFUL

IS WHAT MATTERS

October 2, 2016

Business Succession Planning and Effective Mentoring

Doug Lawrence

Business Succession Planning

When you look around you and see all the businesses that are there to provide you service and meet a need you have for products/services you likely take things for granted. As one of those business owners you likely have that feeling of immortality – my business will go on forever. Somehow we think that the business can and will operate on auto-pilot after we are gone. Let me paint a picture for you.

Approximately 90% of the businesses globally are small to medium sized. 71% of the owners of those organizations are preparing to exit the business in the next 10 years. Only 7% have a succession plan.

Most business owners are not ready to move forward with the decision to sell their business and have not examined the possibilities. Are we going to sell to a family member(s), to our employees or to a third party, to name a few options? Are we going to take help from business sale brokers to find a suitable party to take over the business, or are we going to do it independently? Have we prepared ourselves for what happens next after the business has changed hands? The feelings we are experiencing are strange and actually somewhat foreign and we ask ourselves if we have become soft – after all it's just a business.

All of these thoughts and feelings can weigh heavily on you when it comes to selling your business, and how it when it should be done. Your legacy is important to you and it should be. You have poured all those years, all that wisdom into building an organization that you are proud of. You got caught up in the emotion of it all and forgot one thing – you need to prepare someone to take control of the helm sooner rather than later.

There are resources out there that walk beside you on your journey to sell your business. SuccessionMatching is one such organization. (http://www.successionmatching.com/?p=2) If you are wondering where do I go next, check out what they offer as it will definitely give you confidence in moving forward.

Here are some things to consider. Am I ready personally to begin the journey of selling and creating that legacy? If I have some doubts how will I work through those doubts and then move forward. I want to share with you a potential solution to that problem.

Mentoring or better yet – effective mentoring is a powerful tool that can facilitate personal and professional growth in a person and an organization. Mentoring can help with the challenge of knowledge transfer from you to the new owner of your organization. Mentoring can help in providing the soft skills to enhance your employees making your organization more productive and more attractive to potential buyers. It will also be the light at the end of the tunnel in preparing employees to assume ownership of your company ensuring your legacy lives on.

Effective mentoring and the skills required to do so are transferable skills. Skills such as relationship building and effective communication are skills that we use in our family, in the community in which we live and in organizations that we are part of. Working with a trained mentor can ensure that you recognize the path to achieving these skills and then put them into practise. A trained mentor knows when to guide and when to listen as you talk your way through decisions. They know the right questions to ask to help you see the path that you may follow. They become a person that you trust and who you build a trusted relationship with.

Take the first step and reach out. You don't need to go on this journey yourself. Take advantage of the resources that are available to you. Selling the business that you have nurtured and grown over all these years is not an easy decision. Embrace the "gift of mentoring" – can you afford not to?

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