- Topic
- Succession
- Published
- 19 February 2026
- Reading time
- 5 minutes
- By
- Everston Partners
In short
- Ownership can change hands in a day. Leadership takes years to hand over.
- Most businesses have a plan on paper. Far fewer have prepared the person who will lead.
- We start with the people and build the structure around them.
Ask a founder about succession and the conversation soon turns to tax, trusts and share transfers. These matter, and good advisers handle them well. But a business rarely struggles after a handover because the paperwork was wrong. It struggles because nobody was ready to lead.
Two handovers, not one
Every succession is really two transitions. One is ownership: who holds the shares. The other is leadership: who customers, staff and suppliers will follow. They run on different clocks. A share transfer can be signed in a day. A leader needs years to earn trust, and the founder needs time to let go.
When the two are planned as one legal event, the second one tends to be forgotten.
A plan on paper is not a successor who is ready
In a 2019 Kreischer Miller survey of about 100 family businesses around Philadelphia, 63% said they had a leadership succession plan, up from 49% in 2015. Yet nearly two thirds had no formal development or mentoring plan for the next generation, and more than half expected their senior leaders to retire within five years.1
Among the businesses without a plan, 34% named the availability or readiness of the next generation as the main reason.1 The document exists. The person it names has not yet been prepared.
What a handover looks like when it works
The best accounts of founder succession agree on a few things. Spencer Stuart, writing about founder-led companies, advises that the board run a structured selection with the founder's input, that the founder publicly back the new CEO, and that the founder agree a clear next role, because "there can only be one CEO."3
McKinsey's interview with Steve Melhuish, cofounder of the Southeast Asian property platform PropertyGuru, shows what that takes in practice. The company began planning in 2014 and first prepared the business itself, hiring a finance, marketing, technology and people lead below the founders. The new CEO spent his first nine months in a chief business officer role. The founders worked alongside him for 15 months after the announcement, and the full handover took three years.2
What we ask first
Because leadership is the slow part, it is where we begin. In a first conversation about succession we want to understand:
- What does the founder want to protect, beyond the price?
- What is the next generation ready to carry today, and what do they still need to learn?
- Is there someone else, inside the company or outside it, who could lead?
- What will the founder do afterwards, and how will that role stay out of the new leader's way?
- Where could management ownership bridge the gap between what the founder wants and what the next leader can take on?
The structure follows from those answers. It is easier to design a transfer once you know who is receiving it.
Key takeaway: start the leadership handover years before the legal one, and let the people decide the structure.
Time is the real asset
A founder who begins early has options. They can try a successor in a bigger role, bring in an outside leader alongside the family, or keep a stake while someone else runs the company. A founder who begins when something forces the question has far fewer.
If you are thinking about what comes after you, we would like to talk about who will lead the company, before we talk about how it changes hands.
Sources
1. Kreischer Miller, 2019 Family Business Survey, announced 3 December 2019. Read the release
2. Tomas Laboutka, "How to plan a successful leadership succession at a start-up" (interview with Steve Melhuish), McKinsey & Company, 15 October 2020. Read the interview
3. Jason Baumgarten, Lisa Caswell, Seonaid Charlesworth and Cassandra Frangos, "From founder-led to founder-inspired," Spencer Stuart, June 2023. Read the paper