Where does your family business actually stand?

Five minutes. Three scores. Is the owner ready? Is the successor ready? Is the business ready?

Free · About five minutes

Your handover depends on three things

Owner readiness

Are you actually ready to step back?

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Successor readiness

Are they ready to run it?

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Business readiness

Could it survive the change?

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3 separate scores

5 min to complete

Free instant results

9 in 10 family businesses have no agreed plan for what happens next

2 in 3 owners say they want to keep it in the family

1 in 3 have anything written down

The problem is not the plan. It is the deciding.

Nine in ten family businesses have no agreed plan for what happens next. Two thirds of owners say they want to keep it in the family. Only a third have anything written down.

Most people put it off because it is hard, and because it is emotional. And you cannot plan for something you have not decided.

Running a business should not be a roll of the dice. Ask a room of twenty five people to guess what two dice will land on and one of them will be right. Plenty of businesses are run on odds no better than that.

Sell it or hand it on. Both are good answers. Being stuck between them is the expensive part, because either route wants three to five years of preparation and neither of them tends to get it.

Three questions, and they rarely come out the same

01 — OWNER

Is the owner ready?

What the business will need to provide when you step back, whether it can, and how you feel about not going in on a Monday morning.

02 — SUCCESSOR

Is the successor ready?

Who takes it on, what they actually do all week, whether they have ever said out loud that they want it, and how much would land on them tomorrow.

03 — BUSINESS

Is the business ready?

Whether it runs without you, how long it could cover its costs, when prices last moved, and what forward numbers exist.

Most owners I meet are wearing about ten hats. Personnel, operations, finance, credit control, and everybody needs them for something. That is fine until the day you want to put a few of them down.

You get a score against each, as well as an overall one. The three separate readings are the useful part, because in most businesses they are miles apart.

Give it to whoever might take it on, and compare

The questions are written so the current owner or the next generation can answer them.

If there is somebody who might take the business on one day, fill it in separately and compare the results.

I have watched a lot of families discover they were not answering the same question at all, and it is a good deal better to find that out on a screen than three years into a handover.

Nothing to look up, nothing to prepare

Five minutes, free. Leave your details, answer the questions, and your scores come straight back.

43 years working with businesses

Forty three years of watching this happen

I am Paul Miller. Forty three years an accountant, thirty of them running my own firm in Bodmin with a team of ten, most of it working with family businesses across Cornwall.

When I started in 1994, three clients helped me get set up. That is why giving something back matters to me, and it is most of the reason this exists. Two of the three are still clients.

I have written two books about what happens to a family business when the person who built it wants to stop.

These are the questions I have been asking myself, so I thought I would share them.

Remember, nobody sorts out retirement in the last few months.

Start your Handover Health Check

Enter your details below to begin. You’ll then continue to the five-minute Handover Health Check on the next page.