Most successful businesses, somewhere along the way, trained up a senior person.
It might be a general manager. A second in command. A senior tradesperson. Someone who, over five or ten years, has been taught the work, given more responsibility, brought into the harder decisions, and gradually become someone the owner relies on for the things that used to require the owner’s personal attention.
This is one of the more important things an owner can do for their business. A senior person who can carry weight is the difference between a business that runs through the owner and a business that runs alongside them.
What I have noticed is what happens next, which is not what most owners expect.
The senior person reaches the point where they can do most of what the owner does. The training has worked. The judgment is there. The team trusts them. The clients respect them. By any reasonable measure, the senior person is now operationally capable of running the business.
And the transition stalls.
The owner, who has been gradually handing things over, suddenly slows down. Not deliberately. The conscious mind still wants to step back. But the daily behaviour does not match. The owner finds themselves still being copied on the emails. Still attending the meetings. Still being asked for input on decisions the senior person could make alone. The senior person, sensing the owner is still there, defers more than they would if the owner were not. The handover, which was working for years, stops working in the last twenty percent.
This is the part most owners do not see coming. The senior person can do the work. The owner can let them. But the handover stalls anyway, because there is something underneath the operational handover that has not been addressed.
The owner has not worked out who they are if they are not the person making the decisions.
For fifteen or twenty years, being the owner has meant being the one with the answer. That identity has been the spine of their working life. When the senior person becomes capable of carrying it, the spine starts to dissolve, and the owner does not know quite what is supposed to replace it. So they stay involved. Not because the business needs them to. Because they need the business to need them.
This is the financial moment in the transition, even though it looks like a personal one. A business where the owner cannot quite step back is a business that has not yet completed the transition to running independently. Its value is still concentrated in the owner. Its scalability is still limited by the owner. Its saleability, if that ever comes up, is reduced by the owner’s continued presence.
The cost of an incomplete handover is significant. The senior person, who has been training for this, eventually leaves because they have stopped advancing. The team, sensing the owner is still the centre, stops developing into a team that can run without one. The business that should have become an asset stays a job. And the owner, who has been working towards this transition for years, ends up in the same position they were in, just older and slightly more tired.
What I have observed is that owners who actually complete the handover usually have help in the last twenty percent. Not because the operational work needs help. The operational work is fine. But there is a structural conversation to be had about what the owner is moving towards, financially and personally, and that conversation is not one the owner can have alone, with the senior person, or with anyone inside the business. It needs to happen outside.
If you have trained someone who can do most of what you do, and the handover has been stalled for longer than it should have been, the question is probably not about them.
It is about you. And what comes next.
Murray.
