Succession Planning

There’s a strange kind of denial that lives inside every fast-growing company.
It usually sounds like: “We’ll deal with that later.”

Later, of course, is when someone critical leaves. When a founder burns out. When the head of a key department hands in their resignation just as you’re about to raise Series B. And suddenly, everyone’s scrambling to cover responsibilities no one else ever really understood.

Succession planning isn’t glamorous. It doesn’t scream innovation or capture headlines. But quietly, in the background, it’s one of the most important levers a company has to protect its future.

It’s the grown-up version of scaling. The difference between hoping your best people stay forever, and preparing for the day they don’t.

What Succession Planning Is—And Isn’t

At its core, succession planning is the strategic process of identifying and preparing people to step into critical roles, whether by design or by surprise.

But here’s the nuance most companies miss: it’s not just about CEO transitions or grooming future executives. It’s about role continuity. Any role that, if left vacant, would hurt your ability to operate, grow, or deliver value… that’s a role worth succession planning for.

This could be a technical co-founder. A product lead with all the context in their head. A financial controller who knows every cash flow quirk in your business. If they disappeared tomorrow, would you have a plan? If the answer is no, then you’re not protected, you’re exposed.

Planning Only Starts When It’s Too Late

Let’s be honest: succession planning feels like something that big, slow, old companies do. Something reserved for CHROs and corporate boards. So startups often push it aside.

And that’s exactly why it stings harder when something breaks.

People leave. People get poached. People burn out. And when they do, most companies are caught flat-footed, scrambling to backfill, knowledge-share, and hire under pressure.

The irony? Succession planning isn’t even that complex. It’s just rarely urgent… until it’s way too late.

Startups spend months refining go-to-market strategies but have zero visibility on what would happen if their head of ops left next quarter. That’s the blind spot.

Your Talent Pipeline Isn’t Ready

Here’s a common assumption: “We’ll just promote someone internally when the time comes.”

The reality? Most teams don’t know who’s ready, or what “ready” even means.

Succession planning forces clarity. It makes you define what success looks like in a role, what skills are missing in your bench, and what development pathways actually matter.

This isn’t just about who’s next in line, it’s about whether they’re being prepared to take the baton. A name in a spreadsheet isn’t a succession plan. It’s a placeholder.

And if your internal talent pipeline isn’t being actively nurtured, you’re not building resilience. You’re just waiting.

Founders Don’t Plan for Themselves

This one’s harder to talk about. But in startups, the founder is often the biggest single point of failure.

Most founders don’t succession plan themselves. The idea of stepping away feels distant, maybe even disloyal. But the truth is, founding is a phase, not a forever.

Whether it’s through acquisition, burnout, or evolution, most founders eventually step back. If there’s no plan for how the company transitions without them, no clarity on leadership, values, or institutional knowledge, what happens next is chaos.

Succession planning isn’t about planning your exit. It’s about making sure the business survives it.

Nobody Owns It—So It Gets Ignored

One of the most common pitfalls is this: succession planning is everyone’s responsibility, so no one really takes ownership.

Hiring managers think HR will do it. HR thinks leadership will do it. Leadership assumes there’s a system in place.

And so the plan becomes a mental checklist rather than an active strategy.

Ownership needs to be explicit. Someone, ideally a people leader or founder, needs to drive it. Not just in title, but in practice. That means reviewing role criticality, identifying gaps, tracking development progress, and revisiting the plan as the company evolves.

Because when it’s everyone’s job, it usually gets done by no one.

We Pick the Wrong People

Another truth people don’t like to say out loud: we tend to pick people we like. People who remind us of ourselves. People we feel comfortable with.

This is where succession planning gets messy.

Without a structured, criteria-based approach to evaluating future leaders, succession becomes a popularity contest, or worse, a replication machine. We promote people who are visible, agreeable, and easy to trust, not necessarily the ones best equipped for the future we’re building.

That’s how companies lose diversity, innovation, and adaptability. That’s how they stagnate.

Building a fair, forward-looking succession strategy means defining success in terms of skills, not just tenure or charisma. It means surfacing talent that may not look like the “typical leader”, but has what it takes to move things forward.

It’s Not Just About the C-Suite

It’s easy to focus on the C-suite. But many of the most critical roles in a company are deeply operational and far less visible.

That one person who owns your infrastructure. The only developer who knows how your legacy billing system works. The customer success lead who handles your biggest clients.

If they left, would you know who could take over? Would anyone?

Succession planning should go beyond the org chart. It should touch technical dependencies, institutional memory, and the roles that don’t always show up in board decks, but quietly hold your company together.

A List Is Not a Plan

Identifying successors is only half the job. The real work is in developing them.

This means mentorship. Shadowing. Clear learning goals. Feedback loops. Exposure to cross-functional decisions.

If your “succession list” sits untouched in a Google Sheet while your team stays stuck in their current roles, nothing changes.

Development has to be active and intentional. Otherwise, your plan is just a list of people who might be ready someday… if you’re lucky.

Don’t Let One Exit Break Everything

In the end, succession planning is a control mechanism. Not in a restrictive sense, but in the “we’re not going to be held hostage by any single point of failure” sense.

It’s an insurance policy against disruption.
A structure for continuity.
And yes, a sign that your company is growing up.

Because the real test of a company isn’t how it performs when everything’s going well, it’s how it absorbs impact. How it adapts when someone moves on. And how it keeps building momentum anyway.

That’s what succession planning is for. Not perfection. Not prediction. Just enough foresight to stop gambling with your future.