St. Louis is blessed to have a myriad of small to medium sized firms, many of which are doing absolutely outstanding work. Some of them are creating "properties" beyond normal marketing communications, which will turn into "assets" and reap absolutely sensational sales and profit. There's an exciting diversity of work being delivered by a wildly diverse group of organizations. Some of those are more organized, than others.
Many of the principals and owners in this group of agencies (for lack of a better term) are in their 50s, some staring at 60 or more. (I should point out that the same thing is happening with privately held companies, and the phenomenon is not limited to St. Louis). Some of those principals have done an admirable job of planning for the succession of leadership in their shops, many more have not. It's surprising to me.
The benefits of succession planning include the ability to plan for stability and growth into the future . . . beyond the working years of the existing leadership. That is of course to say that properly executed means the existing principal can continue their income beyond their working years. The additional benefit of succession planning is the retention of existing employees and the ongoing ability to recruit new ones.
Employees worry when there's no clear plan for succession. They're not stupid . . . they "get it". From the employee perspective, lack of succession means lack of stability which inevitably leads to a lack of long term security for them. The obvious and logical next step for those employees is to actively be keeping their eyes open for new opportunities as they become available.
I know of cases where the only thing keeping existing employees (and I mean productive and successful employees) where they are is the lack of alternative opportunities. Even though I make a living recruiting premier performers to other career opportunities, I'm continually preaching to my clients that they need to focus on retention. If they have great employees, they need to keep them, period!
There are loads of reasons owners don't focus more time on retention, they're "too busy", it's too soon, they believe their value to be such that it can't be replaced, they can't "let go", or even worse they don't care, or believe that they're the ones who're actually going to get out of this alive!
There are probably others, but none of them work. They're all excuses. If an owner has a viable business and is not focusing how how they can keep that business stable in the longer term, one has to wonder why.
