Succession Thinking
Build a resilient business and deliver sustained value
Who has this book been written for?
Owners-Leaders of Small Medium Enterprises (SME)
If you own (or co-own) and work in your business, this book is for you.
This book helps you answer the following questions.
For the Owner-leader of an early stage SME or Startup
Navigating uncertainty is a great challenge.
Do you have a guidance system to support making wise decisions (including funding)?
Have you thought about how to scale with resilience?
For the Owner-Leader of an established SME
This is a tough job - where do you go for support?
Is your business resilient and can you navigate negative market events?
Do you feel that even when the business is going well all roads lead to you?
Do you ever have the feeling of being stuck?
For all Owner-Leaders
How do you manage and maintain alignment of the vision for all owners?
Are you attracting highly motivated and effective people to join your team?
The core message of the book
Your business may be financially successful, but you are probably still central to too many decisions. Feelings of being stuck, overwhelmed or lonely are common. You may be in an SME startup and thinking about how to scale resiliently.
Succession thinking is an SME business-building approach to help you build a resilient business – a business that can be successful beyond you. A business that can create sustained value and deliver long-term success. The application of succession thinking can deliver this while also increasing the value of your business. And it is an approach to building your SME where you don’t lose your entrepreneurial roots.
This book provides direction to support you as an Owner-Leader to be clear about what you want and how to deliver it. It supports you in building a stewardship system that is specifically designed for you as an Owner-Leader of an SME. Your business will be driven by investing in people because it is essential for good business. You can design your business to challenge power hierarchies and ideas that undermine sustained success.
This book explores:
Clarifying roles as an important starting point. Getting clear about the many hats you wear.
Building an Owners Vision. Establishing critical guidance for your business.
Clarifying leadership and developing other leaders from the get go.
Building a high trust culture. One that can sustain without you.
Capturing your business way - your real point of difference. How do you maintain it?
Chapter summary
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This is an exploration of the challenges that are common to most SME Owner-Leaders. You, as an Owner-Leader, will probably identify with most of these. I also introduce the idea of harnessing the advantages of your SME. In the past, many thought that ‘big is best’. But the evidence is mounting that small is beautiful because we need to be agile in an ever-changing world.
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Succession thinking is not succession planning. The distinction is important because it helps to underscore why succession thinking is a way of building as well as handing over a business. I introduce the five principles and how, with their application, you can build your Business Way. An important part of this chapter is understanding that trust is the essential fuel of succession thinking.
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To become a succession thinker, you need to acknowledge you have different roles. The lack of visibility of these roles can create confusion for all, including you. By acknowledging this, you can apply the principle of role clarity across your business. The clarity between owner, director and organisation leader is the starting point.
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When there are multiple owners, your integrated owners’ vision is the source of all decision making. This is the combination of the star on the horizon merged with the guardrails of your business. The star is where you want to head, and the guardrails help you get there. The guardrails will remain in place as you hand over decision rights.
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The central measure of success for you as a succession thinker is when you’ve handed over roles you no longer want to do. This will not happen without understanding how leadership works in your business. Distributing leadership to others is key to both growing a business and your succession. The problems of single leaders or leaders who don’t know your Business Way are explored.
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SME Owner-Leaders can harness the advantages of having a small system. You have the decision rights to define your culture. There are no constraints on how you build your culture. The only limitation is your imagination. This is the place to differentiate. To be a succession thinker, you need to attract capable and aligned people and have them contribute for the long term.
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Your Business Way is a set of data specifically to support SME Owner-Leaders. As a succession thinking leader, you need a place to store your Business Way so you can provide clarity and support to current and future stakeholders. Th is will encourage leaders in building a resilient and adaptive business. It also supports the clarity of vision and delivers to that vision.
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At ADAPT by Design, I’ve gone from founder in 2014 to handing over all roles except owner and director. I share my story by explaining it through the fi ve principles of succession thinking.
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You have a lot of wealth tied up in your business and future ownership. Realising the wealth by selling part or all of your business is a core part of your owner's vision. You need to integrate getting what you want for the business commercially with what you want for all other stakeholders. In succession thinking, you consider all stakeholders. To make the best decision, you must be clear about your access to capital. What you do with your shareholding is the final succession challenge. In this chapter, we will explore several considerations that put you in the best position to deal with debt and equity capital decisions.
Succession thinking
Your business may be financially successful, but you are probably still central to too many decisions. Feelings of being stuck, overwhelmed or lonely are common. Succession thinking is an SME business-building approach to help you build a resilient business – a business that can be successful beyond you. A business that can create sustained value and deliver long-term success. The application of succession thinking can deliver this while also increasing the value of your business. And it is an approach to building your SME where you don’t lose your entrepreneurial roots.
Printed Version
Ebook Version
Connection to
I founded adapt to support Owners of SMEs to build resilient businesses. The succession thinking principles evolved as adapt was founded. Succession Thinking is the core logic for how to build a resilient SME. ADAPT has taken this core and put it into a form to make it accessible to SME Owner-Leaders. Accessible in its application and accessible from a cost perspective. The adapt products have been designed to provide a solution for SMEs at all stages of evolution.
Events & presentations
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Adapt End of Year Co-Innovation Dinner November 2023
16th Nov 2023, 5:30 pm - 9:00 pm AWST
As many of you know, adapt Founder Bill Withers has been writing a book to communicate the core logic that underpins adapt. Bill will give a brief (!!) speech on the book and make some presentations. He would love to have as many members of the adapt community present to share this special occasion!
About the author
Bill Withers
I discovered succession thinking by being an SME Owner-Leader from 1987 to 2023. Three different SMEs with different visions and purposes made up this 36 year journey. Each business was integral in the discovery and funding of its successor. The long term nature of value creation and the understanding about the importance of distributing leadership and decision rights were discovered here. Investing in culture and people is essential to long term success.
As with most SME-Owner leaders I started as a technician. I entered the workforce as a computer programmer (a software engineer in today's terms). I really liked being able to invent solutions and solve complicated problems. I did this for 15 years while also having many other roles as an owner,director,organisation leader & team leader. acQuire was founded in 1996 and sold in 2018. It was here that I honed my skills as an organisation leader and owner/director and recognized the power of role clarity and role handovers. The discovery of the threads that formed succession thinking.
I am passionate about equality of opportunity and the need for this to build a stable and enduring society. I believe SMEs are the way to build a resilient economy. Succession Thinking provides a way to increase SME stewardship so that we can redirect capital to this type of economic contributor. By doing this we can build an algorithm for distribution of opportunity (and power) as a countermeasure to centralisation through aggregation. I believe that 100,000 strong SMEs is antifragile where a few ‘too big to fail’ corporations is not. SMEs are small and can be more human and less mechanistic. Also, they are good at innovation with scarce resources.