Yesterday’s Meeting of the Titans was a deep dive into succession planning and was rich in pertinent questions that were relevant to us all. The Member in focus asked for support with structure and options for reducing his role in his business over the next 5-7 years and was initially planning to support a staff buyout arrangement for this to happen.
The session that followed was brilliant. As this Member’s business was originally built by his parents before being taken over by himself, it was a great opportunity for some soul searching around the idea of legacy.
The brains trust came in to help him to firstly become absolutely clear on what his ideal result was (either staying involved but to a lesser degree, or selling out entirely to do other things), before secondly offering wisdom, experience and contacts to help with the practicality of that.
As with any decision related to direction, the key opportunity is to explore what we truly want. And sometimes it can be tricky to distinguish what we want from what we think we want, or what we think other people want, what we think we should do, or what we’ve always done.
A question that we can ask ourselves to facilitate this inquiry, is Who are we without this?
‘This’ can be a title, role, habit, business, relationship, idea etc and it is possible to have our identity so closely linked with something that it’s almost impossible to imagine life or business without it.
True freedom of choice comes from challenging those associations to discover if they are still relevant to who we are now and also who we would like to be moving forward, so that we can uncover what it is that we truly desire.
Once that is clear, the rest becomes quite easy.
