Your succession plan is being written whether you write it or not

Do you know, in writing, what happens to your business on the first Monday you stop turning up?

Not roughly. Not "the kids will sort it out" or "I'll sell when the time comes". Who runs it, who owns it, who gets paid out, and from what date.

If the honest answer is a shrug, you have plenty of company. Research commissioned by VistaPrint and conducted by Pureprofile, published in April 2026, surveyed five hundred and ten Australian small and medium business owners. Thirty-one per cent planned to retire within five years, yet only sixteen per cent of that group had a documented business succession plan.

Among owners already considering an exit, forty-five per cent had no succession or sale plan at all.

The usual excuse is time. It is rarely the real reason. A succession plan forces decisions about family, staff and money that feel easier to leave open, so they stay open. Across Australia, a whole generation of owners is heading for the door without having chosen which door.

What a business succession plan has to decide

What works is a written plan, started three to five years before you expect to leave and reviewed every year after that. Not a folder of good intentions. A short document that answers what a stranger would need answered if you were gone tomorrow.

Timing matters because every route out needs years of groundwork, and the groundwork only starts once a route is chosen. I covered that in why your exit options close before you decide to sell. Without a plan you keep every option in theory and lose most of them in practice.

A workable plan settles five things.

• Who. The person or kind of buyer you want to hand over to, and who runs the business in the meantime if something happens to you.
• When. A target year, and the events that would bring it forward.
• How. A sale, a family transfer, a staff buyout or a staged handover, and what each would need that is missing today.
• What you need from it. The sum you need to live on, which is a different figure from the price you would like.
• Who knows. The family members, partners and key staff who have read it and had a chance to argue with it.

Tax and legal structure sit underneath all five. How the business is held, and how it passes on, can change the result a great deal, so take the draft to your own accountant and lawyer before acting on any of it.

The fair objection is that plans change. Health changes, a child changes their mind, a buyer turns up early. True, and that is the reason to start now rather than an excuse to delay. A plan revised every year bends with events. A plan never started is a decision made by default.

Written early, succession is a choice. Left late, it is a mess someone else inherits.

The Murdoch trust: written in 1999, fought over in 2024

In 1999, Rupert Murdoch set up the Murdoch Family Trust, which holds the family's voting power in News Corp and Fox. Its central condition, set when he divorced his second wife Anna, was that his four eldest children would share equal votes after his death.

Twenty-five years later he wanted something else: control passing to one son, Lachlan. The trust was irrevocable, so he went to a probate court in Reno, Nevada. Sealed hearings began in September 2024, with James, Elisabeth and Prudence opposing the change.

In December 2024, probate commissioner Edmund Gorman Jr. ruled that Rupert and Lachlan had acted in bad faith, calling the plan a "carefully crafted charade". The family settled in September 2025. Lachlan took control, and the three siblings left the trust with payments reported at $1.1 billion each, funded by share sales.

It gets told as the story of a dynasty without a plan. There was a plan. It was written once, under the pressure of a divorce, and then left alone for a quarter of a century while the founder's intentions moved and the children it named grew up expecting something different.

The document was never the problem. The silence around it was.

Why I do it this way

I write the plan before I need it. The habit came from the boardroom.

I chaired the board of an ASX-listed company, ran its search for a chief executive and took it through to a relisting. At board level, succession is not a mood. It is a process with a timetable, a written brief and people who are told where they stand.

Private businesses deserve the same discipline and rarely get it, because the owner is also the board. Nobody asks the owner what a board would ask a chief executive: if you left tomorrow, who would run this, and how would we know?

So I ask it of my own businesses and of every owner I sit down with. The answer is often uncomfortable. It is still better heard across a kitchen table than read in a court file.

Do this before Monday

Take one page and answer the five questions: who, when, how, what you need from it, and who knows. Use pencil. Wrong answers are fine at this stage.

Then choose one person named on that page who has never heard the plan, and book a time before Monday to walk them through it. The first draft is for you. The second is for them.