Nobody hands you a car without a driving lesson, but families hand over voting shares in a business every day with no training at all. The heir gets a stake worth more than everything else they own combined, plus the...
Nobody hands you a car without a driving lesson, but families hand over voting shares in a business every day with no training at all. The heir gets a stake worth more than everything else they own combined, plus the power to hire, fire, and sell, and the entire preparation was watching a parent complain about the business at dinner.
David Bentall grew up as the third generation of one of Vancouver's great construction and real estate families, worked two decades inside it, and watched succession tear it apart anyway. The curriculum he built afterward, published in Leaving a Legacy: Navigating Family Business Succession (2012), is a ten-step development track for future owners. Not future managers. Owners. His anchoring rule deserves to be painted on the boardroom wall: "just because you own shares, it doesn't entitle you to call the shots."
Shares give you rights: to elect directors, approve big transactions, receive distributions. They do not give you competence, and an owner with rights but no competence is dangerous to everyone, including themselves. This guide turns Bentall's ten steps into a per-heir checklist, with a first version of each step scaled for children and teenagers, so the track starts years before anyone signs a share transfer.
Budget for the full adult track: two to three years, a few hours a month. Budget for starting it: one evening.
Step 1: Visit the business. Physically. Walk the floor, the warehouse, the shop, the site. An owner who has never watched the work cannot judge the people doing it. Adult version: a structured half-day visit each quarter, different department each time, ending with 30 minutes asking one employee what would make their job easier. First version, ages 6 to 12: one shadow day a year. The child meets three employees by name and comes home able to say what the business actually sells. Bentall's larger point is that children cannot love, or later steward, a business they have never seen.
Step 2: Review the financials. An owner who cannot read the accounts votes blind. Adult version: sit with the accountant twice a year until you can explain revenue, gross margin, debt, and cash flow without notes. Two hours per session. First version, ages 13 to 17: one page, one question. Take a single month's income statement and trace where each unit of revenue goes: cost of goods, wages, rent, tax, profit. Most teenagers guess profit is half of sales. Correcting that guess is a real education.
Step 3: Research the market. The business does not exist in a vacuum, and neither do its threats. Adult version: once a year, write two pages on the three biggest competitors, what is changing in the industry, and what would kill this business in ten years. First version: name three competitors and one thing each does better than the family firm. A 15-year-old can do this from a phone in an afternoon, and the dinner conversation it starts is worth more than the exercise.
Step 4: Get expert advice. Owners who only hear from family only hear the family's assumptions. Adult version: build your own bench. One session each with the company's accountant, lawyer, and banker, asking each the same question: what worries you about this business? First version: sit in, silently, on one advisor meeting a year. Watching a parent take hard questions from an accountant teaches an heir that even the founder answers to facts.
Step 5: Meet regularly. Owners who talk only at funerals and crises make their worst decisions there. Adult version: a standing owners' meeting, quarterly, with an agenda and minutes, separate from both management meetings and family dinners. Ninety minutes. First version: teenagers attend one family council session a year as observers, with one agenda item where they are asked their view and someone writes it down.
Step 6: Recruit a board. Bentall is blunt about this one: if a family does only one thing on the whole list, it should be this. Independent directors, or at minimum an advisory council of two or three respected outsiders, give the business a place where facts outrank feelings. Adult version: lead or join the recruitment of one outside advisor this year. First version: interview one board member, or any outside advisor, for 20 minutes about what a board actually does. The heir who understands boards early never mistakes ownership for command.
Step 7: Hire a CEO. The business deserves the best available leader, and the honest version of that sentence includes "who may not be family." Adult version: participate in writing the real job description for the top role: the skills, the track record, the temperament. Then measure every candidate, family included, against it. First version: an older teenager writes one paragraph on what the top job requires. Comparing that paragraph to the current officeholder is a delicate conversation. Have it anyway.
Step 8: Join strategic planning. Owners set direction; managers execute it. An heir who has never sat through a planning cycle inherits a steering wheel they have never touched. Adult version: attend the annual strategic planning session as a full participant and take responsibility for presenting one section the following year. First version: attend the planning day, then present one idea for the business, five minutes, with one number in it.
Step 9: Compare alternatives. This is the step families skip because it feels disloyal, and Bentall includes it precisely because it is not. What would the capital tied up in this business earn somewhere else? Adult version: once a year, one page comparing the owners' return from the business against a boring alternative such as an index fund or commercial property. If the business persistently loses that comparison, owners deserve to know they are paying for sentiment. First version: an heir compares the business's profit to what the same capital would earn in a fixed deposit. One page, one hour, permanent immunization against romantic arithmetic.
Step 10: Act. The track ends in decisions, or it was tourism. Adult version: make one real ownership recommendation this year, in writing, with reasons: a dividend policy, an investment, a hire, a sale. Sign it. First version: the heir makes one recommendation, any size, and gets a written response from the current owners explaining what happens to it. Being answered seriously is how future owners learn their voice carries weight, and their homework matters.
Copy this once per heir. Review it on their birthday.
Successor Development Tracker: [name], born [year]
| Step | First version done (date) | Adult version done (date) | Evidence | |---|---|---|---| | 1. Visit the business | __ | __ | __ | | 2. Review financials | __ | __ | __ | | 3. Research the market | __ | __ | __ | | 4. Get expert advice | __ | __ | __ | | 5. Meet regularly | __ | __ | __ | | 6. Recruit a board | __ | __ | __ | | 7. Hire a CEO | __ | __ | __ | | 8. Strategic planning | __ | __ | __ | | 9. Compare alternatives | __ | __ | __ | | 10. Act | __ | __ | __ |
Evidence means something written or witnessed: the one-pager, the minutes, the presentation. No evidence, no tick. And put Bentall's rule at the top of the page where the heir will read it every year: shares are not a license to call the shots. Competence is earned on this page, one row at a time.
Two cautions. First, the track is per heir, not per favorite. Every future shareholder runs it, including the ones who live abroad and the ones nobody expects to join the firm, because all of them will vote one day. Second, sequence beats speed. A 40-year-old heir starting from zero starts at step 1, at the front door of the business, like everyone else.
Pick your youngest future owner and book their first version of step 1: one shadow day at the business, on the calendar, with three employees told in advance to expect them. The ownership transfer your family will eventually sign takes an hour. The owner it deserves takes years, and the track starts this week.