Welcome to the Inside BS Show. I am Dave Lorenzo, and if you're just joining us, this is the show for family businesses that helps you plan for the future, protect your legacy, grow, scale, and transition your business to the next generation or prepare for a sale if that's what you wanna do. So today, I am answering a question from one of our listeners, and the listener reached out to me.

They didn't want me to use their name, so I'm not going to, and they asked about tactical application of succession planning. So for the last couple of weeks, if you've been listening to the show, I've talked a lot about succession planning, and the reason I've talked a lot about succession planning is most people are not doing it. If you're a family business owner right now, you're the CEO of a privately held company, I can almost guarantee that you've given no thought to the succession plan for you, and I'm not talking about your exit strategy.

I'm not talking about how you're gonna sell the business. I'm talking about what happens if you can't come to work tomorrow. That's a continuity plan, which is part of succession planning.

I'm also talking about how you prepare someone to do your job if you wanna move from CEO to chairman of the board, and perhaps take more time off, but the level below you, your C-suite, so your CFO, who's gonna succeed your CFO if they become CEO? Who's gonna succeed the controller if the controller reports into the CEO? The chief marketing officer, the head of sales, who's gonna succeed them? All of those positions need to have succession plans in place, and our position at Exit Success Lab, our focus and what we do when we work with our clients is we install a performance appraisal process that includes a succession planning component to it. So everyone in the organization is responsible for two aspects of this succession plan. They're responsible for their replacement if they can't make it to work tomorrow, so a continuity plan, and they're responsible for their long-term replacement, so they're teaching at least one person, preferably multiple people, how to do the job that they're currently doing, and they can be promoted when they get someone to an 80% capacity, where the person can do the job at 80% of the capability of the incumbent.

So the question I got from the listener was, Dave, that's easy for you to say, but it's hard for us to come up with a way to do that. Well, this is what we do. This is what Exit Success Lab does.

Part of what we do is we'll come in and we'll create a succession plan and we'll examine all the roles in the organization. We'll redo your performance appraisal process so that every role has a succession plan in place. If you wanna do it yourself, I'm gonna give you the formula for doing that.

I'm gonna give you the recipe for a succession plan today. Here's the recipe. You're in your job right now, and maybe you have a job description for your role, maybe you don't.

Here's what you need to do. For at least this week, from the time you turn the lights on in your office, open up your calendar and keep your calendar open on the screen under whatever you're working on. Or if you have multiple monitors, keep it on one monitor while you do your work on the monitor in front of you.

And then every half hour, or if you're really industrious, every 15 minutes, just put an entry as to what you're doing. And then at the end of the day, pick up your phone and dictate a voice note summary of each of the line items. So you say, 8 a.m. on my calendar, it says I had a sales meeting, and today's sales meeting was with Jeff Smith from Fitzgibbon's company.

And we talked about making new widgets for him. And that meeting was from 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. At 10 a.m., I reviewed the survey results from our customer satisfaction survey, and I made some notes. At 10.30 a.m., I had a meeting with the head of marketing and asked if he had reviewed the survey, and we discussed the survey, so on and so forth.

So you dictate into your phone everything that's in the calendar. Then you can do one of two things at the end of the week. You can take all of that information, upload it to AI, and have AI summarize all of the activities into a checklist for you.

Or you can have an assistant or a virtual assistant listen to it, or better yet, have AI do it and have an assistant review what AI did. So you will then come up with a checklist. And it just so happens that I have a checklist like that right here.

I have one for tomorrow that is not completely filled out yet. So I'm holding it up. If you're watching on YouTube, you can see it.

But it is a checklist with the day and the date and a bunch of activities that I do every day. Now, why am I? I'm the senior executive in this business here. Why am I going through a checklist? Well, number one, I love checklists because they keep me organized.

And my philosophy has always been, if a pilot of a plane and a surgeon, two of the smartest people in any job that you're ever gonna find, if they use checklists, well then, I certainly am smart enough to use a checklist too, right? But the second reason I'm doing it is because at Exit Success Lab, I am creating the sales process that our sales team follows. So I am doing the sales checklist in addition to my checklist. And that's what I'm working on right now.

So you uploaded everything to AI, your calendar, your dictation of what you did on an hour-by-hour basis. AI organized it into a checklist for you. Your assistant double-checked everything to make sure that AI did it accurately.

And now you've got a day-by-day list of things that you have to do if you're in your role. So then the second week, you go through and you continue to make modifications to your list. So what I've done here with my list is I've checked off all the things I've done in red.

And then in blue, I made notations for all the things that I wanted to change. And I change this on a day-to-day basis, but you can have your people change their checklists on a week-by-week basis, okay? Now, there are some tasks that will be done every day. There are some tasks that will be done every week.

There are some tasks that will be done monthly. And then there are some tasks that will be done with less frequency. All of those have to be noted on here, and your checklist could be three, four, or five pages long.

But what you'll have after a month of constant revisions, you'll have a working document that outlines everything that needs to be done, but it will have nothing in any detail. And that checklist will serve as what you can use to start your succession planning process. So after you've gone through this checklist for a month, and by the way, you're gonna continuously update it as your processes improve, as you find things that you didn't include on there, what you're gonna do is you're going to take one day every month, and maybe take three hours out of that day, and train someone on one of those tasks on the checklist.

And while you're training that person, you're going to update and tweak the activities for that specific thing. So each line item on this list will have a list of its own. So number one on here for me is, one thing on here for me is prepare tomorrow's podcast.

That's on my list of things to do. And then there's a second page here, which is the podcast worksheet. And if you're watching on YouTube, you can see the podcast worksheet is all filled in from this particular day.

And this is what I used to record the show. Well, when I go to prepare the podcast worksheet, I have a specific way I do that. So I would create a separate activity sheet, like a checklist for that activity, and use that checklist to train someone on how to prepare the podcast worksheet.

And then I would work with that person over the course of two or three months to train them on how to prepare a podcast worksheet, and how the worksheet actually translates to a regular show. So after two or three months, they would be fully trained on that one line item of this sheet of 50 line items. And then eventually, over the course of time, this person will have been trained on all 50 line items, and they could do any one of the 50 line items to the capability of the person who's in the job on a permanent basis.

That's the benefit of succession planning, and that's the tactical aspect of succession planning. That's the very short 10 minute version of how we do it at Exit Success Lab. You can come up with your own procedure, or you could bring in us as a consulting team to have us do it for you.

For really detailed, really specific, really intricate roles, we actually bring in a film crew, and we will video people doing specific tasks so that we can check to make sure we didn't miss anything. This is also a process that we use to develop standard operating procedures. So it is very, very easy for us to do job descriptions, a succession plan, and standard operating procedures all at the same time, because we can use one process to record all three of those things.

And then they all become part of your performance review process for each of the people in your company. I hope this was helpful. That's some insight into the succession planning process that we use at Exit Success Lab.

My name is Dave Lorenzo. I'm the godfather of growth. We'll see you back here tomorrow for another edition of the Inside BS Show.