How to develop a succession planning program. That's what you want to know. And that's what we've got for you today on this edition of the Inside B.S. Show.

Hey now, it's Dave Lorenzo. As you know, I am the godfather of growth. And today I'm going to give you the guide to developing a succession planning program in your organization.

For the last few days, we've been talking about succession planning. And down in the show notes, I'm going to put links to all the shows we've done so far on succession planning, because it's so important for you as the owner of a family business doing $5 million or more in annual revenue. So succession planning is the key for you to unlock your freedom.

It's the key for you to unlock the value in your business. And whether you want to transition your family business to the next generation, or whether you want to sell your family business, you need to be prepared for succession planning. So here's how you develop succession planning and build a succession planning program into your organization.

The first thing you should do is have job descriptions for every position in your organization. A job description is essential. A written job description that you share with people when they're candidates before they join your company is step number one.

So every position in your company should have a job description from the janitor who sweeps the floors all the way up to the CEO. You should have a job description. These job descriptions should be at minimum put in a binder.

They should exist all throughout the organization and everyone in the company should be able to review every single job description. When it comes to what people do, there are no secrets. This is how people know what they can aspire to.

If you want to attract the best people into your company, everything has to be clear and transparent. They have to know what the guy in operations does. They have to know what the gal in finance does.

They have to know what they could potentially be in the future. So job descriptions that spell out what everyone does and what the performance expectations of them are. That's critical.

The first step in succession planning is to create job descriptions and publish those job descriptions for everyone. If you have a SharePoint or a knowledge management system for your company, job descriptions need to be in there. So that's step number one.

Step number two in this process is for everyone in the role to keep track of what they're doing all day long. Here's the best way to do this. If you want someone to track their daily activity, have them pull out their phone and on the calendar of their phone set a timer for every 60 minutes or set an alarm for every hour throughout their workday.

So let's say a frontline employee works from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. For each day for a work week, you have them set a calendar alarm, set an alarm for every hour on the hour, 8 a.m., 9 a.m., 10 a.m., all the way up through 5 p.m. When the alarm goes off, they go into their calendar and they type in what they've done for the past hour. Once an hour they do this. Start by tracking it for a week.

I have our folks when we're doing this program do this every day for a full work month. So let's say the month starts on Monday the 4th, Monday the 4th through Friday the 9th from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. If that's what their work hours are. They set an alarm for the top of the hour every hour and they write down what they've done for the last 60 minutes.

So in the course of a nine hour day with one hour for lunch, they write down what they've done every hour in that calendar link. If they've done three tasks in the hour, they write down those three tasks. If they've done one thing that hour, they write down what they've done that hour.

If they have a task that takes them three hours, every hour they stop, take five minutes and write down what they've done the past hour. If the task takes three hours, they copy and paste the same thing to three hours. Do this for a week.

If your work varies every day for a month, do it for a month. Then the employee and their manager sits down and they review what they've done over the course of each day. At the end of the day, they review what they've done every week.

They review what they've done every month. You compile that information and that gives you all of the tasks the person has to do. You compare those tasks to the job description and then you can write down specifically, this is step three.

Step three is take all the data that you've compiled each day for a week and compare it to the job description. Write down the tasks in the job description. After you've done it for four weeks over the course of a month, match it up again to the job description, update that job description with specific detailed tasks.

So step four then is to update the job description at the end of the month with specific detailed tasks. Step five is to compile all of that information and put it in three buckets. Bucket number one, admin tasks.

Bucket number two, operations if it's a frontline employee or management tasks, so things that they do every day. Management tasks for managers and then bucket number three is leadership tasks if it is a leadership role. So for frontline roles, you're going to have a lot of operational tasks and maybe some admin tasks.

For managers, you're going to have administrative tasks, management tasks and leadership tasks. And then obviously, as you get further up in leadership, there's going to be further leadership development competencies. Once you have all of those things broken down into three buckets, the next step, which I believe if I'm up to step six in the process is doing a training program where you coordinate the daily operations tasks, the admin tasks, the management tasks, the leadership tasks.

So operations tasks are for frontline employees. Admin management leadership are for managers and leaders in your organization. So what you're going to do is you're going to spread this training program out so that they learn one specific task, say, every week.

If they're in the role and there's 52 tasks, they're learning a new task every week. You're going to do a mix for managers of admin, management and leadership. You're going to mix those up along the way.

You're going to reinforce them. And then when you have a sit down and managers should be sitting down with their frontline employees weekly, if not weekly, then monthly or more often than not, the more frequently the manager can sit down with the employee, the better. You pull this out and you look at where they are in their training program for their current role.

And then when they've mastered everything in their current role, that's when you start talking about future roles and you pull out the job description with these specific tasks on it for future roles. So succession planning looks like you reviewing current job description. And this job description that I'm sharing with you today is extremely detailed.

It may be 20 pages long for each job because it lists out all the tasks they have to do and what they should be, what should be expected of them from each task. So everybody has a very specific 15, 20 page manual of everything they're supposed to do. You're sharing current role and future role with employees so that they're ready for the future.

Once they're at 80 percent mastery of their current job, you're looking at the future job as well. That's the breakdown of the succession plan. Now, you're going to have to listen to this multiple times because you're taking a job that someone's doing and you're having them record what they're doing and then you're matching it to what they actually do.

And you're compiling that into a manual so that the next person in that role knows what they need to learn. That's how you develop a succession plan for your organization. Do it for each role in the company.

I know it sounds like a lot, but this is how you add value to your company and you make sure the next person can run it as well as you, if not better. I'm Dave Lorenzo. This is the Inside BS Show.

We'll see you back here again tomorrow at 6 a.m.