In the spring of 2010, a founder named John Manuck was wrapping up a planning meeting with his executive assistant. He had built Techmer PM, a plastics additive company, from nothing since 1981; by...
In the spring of 2010, a founder named John Manuck was wrapping up a planning meeting with his executive assistant. He had built Techmer PM, a plastics additive company, from nothing since 1981; by then it had more than five hundred employees, plants in seven American states, and a presence in markets on four continents. As the meeting closed, he asked if she had any questions. "Only one," she said. "What are your retirement plans?"
The question landed like a slap. John was sixty, vigorous, healthy, and having, in his own account, too much fun building the company to have thought about leaving it. "Don't worry," he told her, "I am not going anywhere. I expect to be stumbling in many years from now!" A few weeks later, at an industry event, two of his own employees asked him the same question at the company booth. Back in Tennessee he called his assistant in and asked what was going on with "the retirement thing." Her answer deserves to be framed on the wall of every founder's office. People have worked with you through good times and bad, she told him. They all feel comfortable approaching you about anything. But what happens if you're not there? Can your son do the job? Will the company be sold?
"Talk about an epiphany!" John said later. The story comes from Building Family Business Champions by Eric G. Flamholtz and Yvonne Randle, two consultants who spent more than thirty-five years advising family businesses, and who tell the Techmer case in a chapter section they title, with a knowing wink, "The R-Word." The wink is the point. Even in corporate America, where succession planning is an industry with its own conferences and certifications, a thriving founder could not say the word retirement out loud until his assistant said it for him, and his first reflex was a joke and a deflection.
Now carry that scene home. If the r-word is hard to say in Tennessee, it can be nearly unspeakable in the families we write for. In many African households, and in the diaspora families that carry those norms to London, Houston, and Toronto, naming a successor to the family business can feel like naming a death. To sit a father down and ask who takes over the shop is to ask him to imagine the world without himself in it, and the deference owed to elders means the children who most need the answer are the ones least licensed to ask the question. There is a second fear stacked on the first: choosing one child looks like ranking your children, in cultures where a parent is expected to hold them all equally. So the question goes unasked, the plan goes unmade, and the business waits for a funeral to decide its future. This article is about doing what John Manuck did instead, and about doing it without the consultants, coaches, and corporate budgets his version required.
Flamholtz and Randle anchor their succession chapter with a line they borrow from the researcher Kelin Gersick and his co-authors: "SUCCESSION is the ultimate test of a family business." Everything else a family business survives, bad seasons, bad debts, bad hires, it survives with the founder still at the wheel. Succession is the one test the founder cannot take for the business. And the authors are unusually specific about how long the test takes. A reasonable lead time for developing a successor, they write, is typically between five and ten years: enough time to develop the person, test them, and orchestrate the change. Then, even after the formal handoff, the new leader needs one to two years to find what the authors call their "sea legs" before the transition is truly stable.
Sit with those numbers, because they are the most useful thing in the chapter. Five to ten years of preparation, plus one to two years of stabilization. If you are a founder of sixty who plans to hand over at seventy, you are not early. You are on time only if you start this year. If you are fifty-five and have never said the r-word aloud, the arithmetic is already leaning on you. The authors quote Harvey Golub, the former CEO of American Express, on why the runway has to be so long: "You can't really be a CEO until you are one, but you can do a lot of 'flight simulation.'" Nobody steps into the chair ready. The years are for simulation: real responsibilities, real stakes, real feedback, taken on while the founder is still there to catch what falls.
The process itself, in the book's telling, is three steps, and the plainness of the list is deliberate. Identify the successor or possible successors. Provide the training and education to prepare them. Manage the transition itself. Most families fail at step one, not because they cannot choose but because they will not say the choice out loud, and an unspoken choice trains no one.
Techmer's answer to the epiphany is the fullest how-to case in the book, and it is worth walking through honestly, price tags visible. There was no drama over the choice itself: John's son Ryan Howley had worked in the business since high school, doing, in his own words, "everything from sweeping the floors in the beginning to entering data into a computer database to color matching to customer service to tech service assistance," followed by years of global postings, two hundred travel days a year, and a stint building Techmer's manufacturing presence in Brazil. Family and nonfamily leaders alike backed him. Everyone, including Ryan, also agreed he was not yet ready.
So the company ran a two-track program. Track one developed the whole senior team, not just the heir: group leadership training built around the company's big national meetings, so that Ryan's growth happened inside a rising tide rather than a spotlight. Track two was personal. Ryan was mentored by a troika: his father, who taught him how a CEO reads financial results and manages the company's partners; David Turner, a senior nonfamily manager who met him every ten days or so on business issues and every six to eight weeks on his development; and Eric Flamholtz himself, a paid outside coach, who began with a 360-degree assessment, interviewing the senior team about Ryan's strengths and weaknesses. The first round, in early 2011, was hard to hear. Ryan listened anyway.
Then came the move the whole case turns on. Rather than asserting that Ryan was ready, the company gave him chances to prove it publicly. He was assigned to build Techmer's marketing function, which barely existed, and he was trained to lead the company's new strategic planning process, becoming its recognized in-house expert. Credibility was earned in view of everyone, which matters because, as the authors note, every family successor carries the suspicion of belonging to the "lucky gene club." When the 360 interviews were repeated in late 2012, the verdict had flipped. "He's come an awful long way," one colleague said. "He's convinced me that he can lead the company." In February 2013 Ryan was named president, with the CEO role ahead of him, and David Turner's summary stands as the case's closing line: "He is the voice of the next generation at Techmer."
Here is our honesty note, and the book itself would not dispute it. This program assumed a company that could hire a national consulting firm, fly a hundred people to team-building meetings, and pay an outside coach for years of one-on-one work. Flamholtz and Randle's cases come from their own consulting practice, which means their sample is companies rich enough to hire them. Most family businesses, in Africa or anywhere else, have no HR department, no training budget, and no coach on retainer. If the lesson of Techmer were "buy this program," it would be useless to the family running three shops in Kampala or a logistics firm in Accra. It is not. Strip the budget away and four moves remain, and every one of them is free.
The first move is to name the successor early and out loud. Not in your heart, not "they all know," but said, in front of the family, with the reasons. This is the move African family convention resists hardest, so make the frame do the work: you are not naming a death, you are naming a training program. John Manuck did not retire in 2010; he is the one who stayed for years while his son grew. Naming early is what allowed him to stay. And if the fear is favoritism, notice what naming actually does: it replaces a silent ranking every sibling privately suspects with an open decision they can hear the reasons for. Bell-Carter Foods, the book's hundred-year unifying case, shows the standard: "We always understood that we would give it to the person who was best equipped," Tim Carter said of his own family's choice. Best equipped is a reason a sibling can accept. Silence is not.
The second move is the troika, and you already have one. Techmer's three mentors were a parent, a senior nonfamily figure, and an outsider. Every family enterprise can assemble the free version: the founder, who teaches how the money actually works and how the key relationships are kept; the most trusted nonfamily person in or around the business, a foreman, a senior supplier, a longtime bookkeeper, who tells the successor what the founder cannot see; and one outsider who owes the family nothing, a retired businessperson from church, a cousin who built something in another city, anyone whose approval cannot be inherited. What made Turner effective, the authors note, was that he was not competing with Ryan. Choose your third voice by that test.
The third move is the visible win. Do not hand the successor the whole business in shadow form; hand them one real thing the business needs and does not have, and let everyone watch. Ryan got marketing and strategic planning. Your successor might get the new branch, the move to mobile-money bookkeeping, the export paperwork nobody else will touch, the WhatsApp ordering channel. The assignment must be real enough to fail at. Credibility that cannot be lost cannot be earned.
The fourth move is the feedback loop, which is all a 360-degree assessment actually is. Choose five or six people who see the successor work, family and not. Ask each the same two questions in private: what does this person do well, and what would stop you from following them? Write the answers down, give them to the successor whole, undiluted, the way Ryan got his. Then, and this is the part almost nobody does, repeat the same questions with the same people a year later and compare. The repetition is what turns opinion into evidence. It costs six conversations.
There is one more thing the book insists on that translates with no loss at all: the succession plan should be documented in writing, with goals and milestones. This cuts directly against another inheritance many of our families carry, the tradition of oral succession, the assumption that the founder's wishes live safely in the memory of those who heard them. Oral wishes die twice: once when memory fades, and again when grief turns every remembered sentence into a weapon. A diaspora family has it even harder, because the successor may be on another continent, absorbing the plan through phone calls and holiday visits.
So write it. One page is enough to start: who the successor is, why, what the three or four development milestones are, who the troika is, and the rough year the handoff begins. Date it. Let the family read it. This is exactly what the Document Vault in LegacyPot exists to hold: put the succession page in the vault beside the land titles and the business registration, where every family member, in every country, can see the same version, and update it as the milestones fall. A plan locked in one man's head is a rumor. A plan in the family's vault is an institution being born.
Here is the work, and the first step takes one evening. If you are the founder: say the r-word yourself, before your own version of John's assistant has to say it for you. Write the one-page plan: the name, the reasons, the milestones, the troika, the decade. If you cannot yet write the name, write the criteria, the way the Carters did, and give the family a date by which the name will be filled in. If you are the successor generation and the founder cannot start, you now have a gentler door than "when will you retire": ask what the training plan is. A training plan does not name a death. It names the years you still get to learn while they are here to teach.
Five to ten years to prepare. One to two to stabilize. Count backward from the age your founder will be when they truly must stop, and you will find that the right year to begin is almost always this one.