Business owners in every industry are aging. According to Census statistics, the average age for finance, insurance, and real estate business owners is 54 years. This higher age bracket holds in other industry segments, too, including wholesale trade, agriculture, forestry, fishing, mining, services, public administration, and manufacturing.
Succession planning is an important, if oft overlooked, step for business owners. It can not only place a business in good stead for the future, but can also benefit younger individuals at a business. A 2015 Software Advice survey concluded that 94 percent of employers said a succession plan positively affects employee engagement. Despite these benefits, about a third of businesses in the US do not have a clearly defined succession plan. The cost of poor succession planning can be high, putting a business’ stability and future at risk. What can help? Taking a few key steps, including implementing the right ERP.
Optimizing Your Team
Succession means a new person at the helm, and this by definition will require realignment throughout a business’ ranks. As a first step, assess your current team, identifying critical employees that you will want to keep. Next, look for where new positions may open up given both the imminent succession and new paradigms in your industry. Be transparent about your succession plans with all your employees and stakeholders—gossip and rumors will only complicate the process.
How ERP Can Help
You should work to evaluate all of your critical business processes once you have a clearer idea of what your team will look like. This involves documenting procedures and simplifying or automating them where needed. ERP steps in to streamline the process here. Intuitive ERP software, such as Acumatica, can set your business up for success during succession by delivering key insights into processes and employee roles and workflows. It can also give you a high-level view of business data and performance, driving real-time BI, making important business decisions much, much easier.
ERP systems like Acumatica make your day-to-day operations easier, providing embedded wikis to document processes. You can implement and leverage an ERP solution to store customer, vendor, partner, and prospect information is in a centralized and connected CRM application. You can also configure dashboards, alerts, reports, and inquiries to manage metrics. The project accounting included in a comprehensive ERP solution can be beneficial to managing succession planning tasks, as well.
Succession doesn’t have to be an intimidating process. It’s essential, too, given the high cost of poor succession planning for your business. Consider starting the ERP selection process today if you are creating a succession plan to future-proof your business. Implementing an all-in-one solution like ERP can give you the data and edge you need to navigate a complex succession successfully.
