Succession planning
Succession planning is the structured preparation of a company for the handover of key roles — classically the owner-director of an SME or family business. It covers ownership, governance, financing and leadership. Its habitual blind spot is knowledge: plans transfer the role and assume the knowing will follow.
What is succession planning?
A competent succession plan answers who takes over, when, under what structure and with what financing. Advisors, notaries and banks all have checklists for those. Almost none of the checklists ask: what does the departing person know, and how does that reach the successor? The plan schedules a transition of authority and hopes the judgment transfers by proximity.
Not to be confused with replacement hiring. Filling the seat is necessary; it does not move the thirty years of context that made the seat's previous occupant effective.
Why it matters for SME continuity
Family business successions stack two transitions on one person: ownership and knowledge. The ownership half gets professional attention; the knowledge half gets whatever overlap time remains after the deal work — usually too little, started too late. Successions are judged failures years later for reasons planted exactly here.
Succession planning inside MentX
MentX gives the knowledge half its own track: capture starts while the expert is fully active, runs parallel to the legal and financial planning, and produces a knowledge base the successor — and the whole team — can query through DigiME from day one. See also knowledge transfer.