Few business owners ready for succession

I'm attaching an excellent article from Kate Robertson in the Globe and Mail that discusses business succession planning. She talks about why some business owners wait too long to start planning, and defines how long is too long. She also discusses a couple of options open to business owners. Click here to read it.

The article focuses in part on how risky it is to try to hand a business down to the next generation. This is, of course, part and parcel of waiting too long to get started. This is a point that I made in my book Succession Planning Kit for Canadian Business. If you're a business owner and you're not sure how, where and when to start your succession planning, reading articles and books to get ideas is a starting point. Sooner or later though, you're going to have to put the ideas into action.