"Enhancing your family's well-being & the financial health of your farm."

A Typical Management & Ownership Transition Project Outline

A family business succession planning project typically consists of three phases:
  1. Assessment / Readiness
  2. Plan Development
  3. Implementation
Purpose:  
To design and articulate a series of plans that will enable your business to successfully transition management and ownership to future generations.

Phase 1 - Assessment
Conduct an Assessment and Readiness Review that includes:
  • Completion of a series of questionnaires and interviews of senior and successor generation stakeholders
  • Identify areas of alignment and misalignment in vision, goals, objectives
  • Identify individual behavioral and communication styles
  • Financial analysis and benchmarking of key ratios of the business to determine profitability, scale and access to capital generally required for a successful transition
  • Interviews with owners, successors, spouses and other key stakeholders that will help discover the goals, aspirations, concerns and other pertinent information that may relate to the development of a successful management and ownership transition plan
  • A final report shared and presented to the ownership team that evaluates the readiness of the family(ies) to move forward with the next phase.

Phase 2 - Plan Development

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A series of meetings and internal activities with the family stakeholders and key outside advisors will focus on the following objectives:

  • Identification of the strategic objectives of the transition 
  • Development and discussion of the family business vision and mission statement 
  • Development of a family business code of conduct and guiding principles
  • Evaluation of the current communication system and revising as necessary
  • Development of the senior management transition plan with position profiles for all members
  • Development of the ownership transition plan with funding mechanism proposals
  • Development of an action items schedule 

Phase 3 - Plan Implementation
This phase will involve your CPA, legal counsel, insurance representative(s) and other stakeholders with the development of specific entities, funding plans, risk management plans (buy/sell agreements) and other related tasks in order to complete the master plan. 

We will provide leadership and coordination with your professional service provider team. The final step of this process is the implementation of all the pieces of the plan to include the start up, funding and kick off of any new business entities.  For the following year, there is a proposed follow-up schedule of meetings each quarter (or sooner if needed) to help facilitate the implementation of the plan and to help assist when outside accountability might be helpful. Thereafter, annual or semi-annual follow-up meetings for 1 to 2 years help ensure progress and to provide some outside accountability toward a successful transition process. 
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