Succession Planning: Aligned Before the Handoff
A family-owned trades business was ready to pass ownership to its next generation, but agreement on the idea had never become agreement on the plan. As one next-generation owner put it, the family was aligned on transitioning without ever having sat down to define what they were transitioning to. Discovery, Hogan profiling, and structured interviews surfaced eight critical gaps: no governance structure, an invisible line between who was in charge and who would be, a next generation that had worked together operationally but never aligned as owners, and a culture that managed friction privately instead of resolving it.
Lacher Business Consulting built its Phase 1 engagement around four workstreams. Next-Gen Ownership Alignment turned employed and non-employed heirs into a single ownership group with a shared mission, values, and growth philosophy before any authority changed hands. Governance Architecture gave the business a four-room model, phased role-transition roadmaps for each senior leader, a board charter, and clear decision rights. Generational Alignment created the structure and safety for cross-generation conversations that had never been possible, and a non-employed owner model defined legitimate ownership for family members outside daily operations.
Over a six-to-twelve-month Phase 1, ten foundational shifts replaced the original eight gaps. The next generation now holds a unified ownership identity, an adopted governance model, and a formal Go/No-Go framework with criteria and a deadline, while the conflict-avoidance pattern that would have collapsed any structure has been named and addressed head-on. That is the Lacher Business Consulting difference: intentionally ending patterns handed down through generations before they become someone else's inheritance.
