In family businesses, succession does not begin on handover day

When succession starts being discussed in a family business, two sentences usually circle the table. The first: “It is time.” The second: “Is he ready, though?”

The second is usually asked years after the first. And that is exactly where the matter lies.

Everyone agrees on the same thing

Deloitte Private's 2026 study drew on data and conversations from 1,587 family businesses across 35 countries. 85% of them say succession planning is critical.

Eighty-five per cent. You do not often find agreement that wide on anything in business.

So the problem is not that nobody knows.

Then where do we get stuck?

The same study lists the biggest obstacles to succession. The top three sit at very close percentages:

• The next generation not being sufficiently qualified
• Difficulty finding a suitable successor
• Current leadership being reluctant to let go of control

I looked at those three for a long time. All three lead to the same place: nobody prepared in time.

“Not sufficiently qualified” is not a sentence of fate. Most of the time it is the polite way of saying “has not been prepared yet”. Nobody is born knowing how to read a board, how to negotiate a partnership with a sibling, or how to step out of a founder's shadow. These things are learned.

The third item is the least discussed: the founder being unable to let go. That is not an inadequacy either. Handing over something that represents a lifetime takes as much preparation as taking it on.

The bill for being unprepared is not a salary

The cost of an unprepared successor is not the salary paid to them.

Add up the wrong strategic decisions, the missed opportunities, the damaged team morale and the capable managers who leave, and the bill grows many times over. And none of those items appears on the balance sheet under its own name. By the time they are noticed, it is usually late.

From 13% to 26%

The study's most striking finding is this: today 13% of family businesses expect that when the current generation's tenure ends, someone from outside the family will take the helm. That proportion is expected to double before long.

In other words, more and more family businesses will have to hand the reins after succession not to someone in the family but to an outside professional.

Let me be clear about this in advance: putting a professional at the head of the company is not a “failure”. Bringing in an outside CEO is very often the right and courageous decision.

But it should not be an obligation caused by nobody in the family having been prepared.

That is the difference. For a prepared family, an outside CEO is a choice. For an unprepared one, it is a necessity. The same person may sit in the same chair in both cases — but one arrives there by strategy and the other by helplessness.

When should the preparation begin?

Successor coaching is usually thought of as preparation that starts once it is settled that someone will lead.

To my mind the right method is for the coaching to begin the moment the leadership potential becomes visible.

The difference between the two is measured in years. And those years may be the single most important factor in the answer to “is he ready, though?”

What the preparation covers

This is not only a matter of technical competence. It takes two separate kinds of skill.

On the technical side: the handover process itself, preparing for the board, decision-making, strategic thinking.

On the relational side lies the harder part: managing the relationship with the founder and the change of role, separating the family from the company, finding the balance among siblings and cousins, building visibility and authority, carrying the weight of expectation, managing egos and choosing the right words.

Running the company by your own convictions without wounding the generation above you takes two separate kinds of skill.

Why training alone is not enough

Many companies assume that sending the family member they are grooming for senior management on a good leadership program — preferably abroad — will solve the problem at the root.

A study carried out in a public agency in 1997 measured this. Managers were first given conventional training; productivity rose by 22%. In the group that then received eight weeks of one-to-one coaching, the increase reached 88%.

Let us also state the study's limits: the sample was small, there was no control group, and the date is old. Even so, what it shows matches what I see in the field. Training delivers knowledge; turning knowledge into behavior happens through one-to-one work. What each manager — or manager-to-be — needs is as particular as a fingerprint, and so the answer has to be particular too.

Most of what a successor needs to learn cannot be taught in a classroom anyway. How to talk to the founding generation, how to say “no” to a sibling, what to do the first time they are contradicted — in short, how to gather both the technical and the artistic points — is worked through one at a time, at their own pace.

A last word

Succession is not really a particular day. It is a process. And that process begins in the years when nobody is talking about succession at all.

If today you are asking “is he ready, though?”, the answer you need lies in how many years you gave him to prepare, and in whom you placed beside him as a thinking partner.

Successors are very used to people telling them what to do on this journey. But that advice does not have the effect anyone hopes for. What they are looking for is someone they can comfortably ask questions of. Someone who does not judge, who has sat at those levels themselves, who knows both the technical side of the work and the psychology of the person, and who is sincere.

I have been sitting at this table in that role for years. Being chosen for it means a great deal to me. And do you know where the real pleasure is? In seeing the moment a successor finds their own voice, and catching their eye in that very minute…