Why Most Businesses Fail: The Secret to Succession Planning with Daniel Feman

So most people get stuck early on, meaning you have a founder, you have someone that's kind of like very rigid in the way that they are.

The employees may not work well with them.

It looks like you've come up with the five phases of succession planning, helping people to be able to build and operate a company that's scalable and sellable.

Tell us how that evolved and let's go through some of the steps.

Well, what is interesting to me is that, again, as you mentioned earlier, I've had the privilege of working in over 30 countries and many people presume that business is done differently in different countries.

And absolutely,

there are uniquenesses to every region and every country.

But what is common is the lack of a blueprint, the lack of a roadmap to get a company from where it is to the next step.

Most organizations are basically on a hamster wheel.

It's today, it's this week, maybe even this quarter.

So what I recognized early on, and a number of my clients were generous enough to allow me to work with them, we said, how can we get you to an ideal situation? Let's assume that you could control things and you could create your own ideal outcome.

What would that be? And so we really help them, or in some cases, force them to create a vision, a true ideal horizon.

From that ideal vision, we reverse engineer the roadmap to take them from where they are.

And Chad, it's very important.

This is not a two-week or a two-year journey, right? to really create your ideal succession, it should be 10, 20, even 30 years in the future, so you don't have to be limited by your beliefs today.

It's what you would like to have happen, the ideal, the perfect.

Because, Chad, your organization, and you do great work on the financial side, if you could have everything you wanted, 10, 20, 30 years in the future, what would that look like? And I'm not asking you right now because we'd need to work on that specifically.

But by writing that on the wall, it becomes more real.

And then saying, okay, assuming you could achieve that, let's create the actual steps, the actions, the responsibilities, the metrics.

And suddenly, even if you fall short, you're a heck of a lot further down the road than you would have been otherwise.

So you're speaking my language now because I have the abundant life roadmap and I truly believe that goals are one of the most important things you could have.

And in the books I've written, I believe the universe conspires to make these things happen.

There's some people believe that there's some people that don't, but I believe that by being focused on where you want to go, success is more likely to happen.

And the fact that you are taking people through this plan and looking out not just three to five years, but 10 and 20 and even 30 years into the future about what you want is really big picture and something that's a gift to those people that let you take them through it, in my opinion.

I completely agree with you.