Alright, it’s 11 O’clock. This is Eric Anderton. Thank you for joining me today for how to build a simple, powerful succession plan for your construction company. 11 O’ clock on the Pacific coast here in the United States of America. It’s a beautiful day in California, the rain has finally stopped and we’re ready for spring. My kids are playing baseball and looking forward to kicking some butt here spring and summer. I’m sure the jobs that you guys are running are getting up and going again after a bit of dampness here on the west coast. So I really appreciate you taking the time to join me for the webinar here today. We’re going to go through this content and I think you’ll find it extremely interesting. So as we’re going through the process here today I just want you to just to have a particular mindset that this time is your oasis, it’s a time for you to put away the smart phone for just a few minutes, stop answering e-mail, grab a pen and a piece of paper if you’re able to do that and focus in on working on your business. And particularly when it comes to succession planning we’re talking about the future and what you’re doing today to prepare for the future. And before we get started I just want to say succession planning is a deep challenge. It’s something that requires a lot of hard work but I know a lot of you guys here on the call and I know you’re not afraid of hard work. So that is why it’s a very good thing to have a clear process that you can use to help you with your succession planning. And really we have a simple three step outline that we use in terms of succession planning. Number one is the preliminary work. number two, you’ve got to get your house in order and number three we’re going to talk about traditional succession planning and we don’t mean traditional in the bad way, we mean traditional in a good way.
So just a little bit about me, my name is Eric, I’ve been helping construction companies build profit and people since 2004. I like to think of it in little more direct way, I’ve been helping contractors kick ass and make money since 2004. And the three ways I do that is very simple, executive coaching, one on one mentoring with executives in the construction companies, leadership development. I’m currently in year two of the leadership development program with one of my clients. We started off with the top executive level and now we’re down to the mid managers. We’re having an awesome time as far as that’s concerned. And then I also help you grow your business with strategic planning and of course these are some of the folks that I work with, from half billion dollar sub contractors and general contractors to smaller companies that are in the $10-20 million range. I tell you man I love working with construction companies and you guys know what a wonderful opportunity you have in construction. Two, 740 billion dollars in new construction is predicted for 2018 and so that means that you guys are probably pretty stuffed as far as work is concerned at the moment. And you don’t need me to tell you that construction is challenging, it’s really interesting. You know, 2004-2007 I don’t know if you remember it but this is when I got into working with construction companies and everybody was a genius back then. You just kind of showed up and started making money and everyone thought it would go on forever, you know what human beings are like. Then all of a sudden from 2008-2012 everybody was a dummy. And it was really, really difficult. People had to be laid off, we basically lost a whole generation of skilled people in the industry because they left construction because there was no work and they went to find – and that’s an issue that’s still affecting us today. You know, from 2013-2019 things have been pretty good, I mean I hope that things are going well for you. Again I know many of you are here on the call and I know that business is good. I see your trucks wherever I go, I work with some of you guys, I know that things are going well. Now when business is going well there’s lots of challenges but there’s lots of opportunities as well. 2020 and beyond who knows, who knows what the next election is going to hold for us, the next presidential election. Who knows the impact that that’s going to have upon the economy. You really don’t know. But one of the things you do as a leader is you plan. You think about the future, you plan for the future and one thing is true, time is passing. So right, if you look at the US labor force you see the boomers, some are top line here and maybe you’re a boomer here on the call. Boomers are beginning to fade out of the workforce. The gen Xers are sticking around here for a while, I’m a Gen Xer. I got another 20 years, that’s what I’m thinking, I’m on a 20-25 year journey with my business. I got another 20 years and then you got the millennials coming up and as you know the millennials are the future of your business. So whether you’re in senior leadership of an organization or you’re one of the partners or owners of a company this is the reality, time is passing. You’re not as young as you used to be, that’s probably a good thing in many ways. But you are not as young as you used to be, time is passing and you’ve got to consider what am I going to do with my business in the next five, ten, fifteen years. And that’s what succession planning is all about. And when it comes to planning I really want to emphasize this quote from George Patton. “A good plan violently executed today is far better than a perfect plan tomorrow”.
This is the recent study from FMI, 43 percent of people who own construction companies they plan to sell their company to their employees. 16 percent they plan to sell or gift it to family members. 8 percent are looking at a third party sale, 5 percent are selling both to family members and employees. 4 percent are just going to sell the equipment and sell the land and ride off into the sunset. It’s interesting here, 24 percent they’re uncertain at this point, they’re uncertain. So if someone was to ask you what you’re planning to do with your company in terms of succession what would you say. Okay, if you could just chat that into the box I’m not going to share your name or anything like that with anyone but what would you say is your plan if you’re to pick from one of these six options in terms of your business. “Family”, okay, excellent. Thanks very much for that, that was fast. Okay, looks like someone is looking for an outside sale, that’s very interesting. That’s a deeply challenging thing, you see that 8 percent plans to sell to a third party. I tell you I worked with one company they’re an ESOP so in effect they’re selling it to their employees over a period of time. So there’s a variety of different things that you can do as far as that’s concerned. Employees and family, yeah, so it’s kind of a combination. Yeah, so it’s very interesting. Think about this, this is another part of the FMI study. Where will your successors come from? So 77 percent say internal candidates, 17 percent say an equal proportion of internal candidates and outside hires. 2 percent outside hires, 5 percent are not sure. Okay, so think about this for the moment. The vast majority of construction companies when they think about succession are looking internally.
So here let me ask you another question, feel free to answer this. I will not share your name with anyone on the call here but have you identified internal candidates who could take over the business and run it at an executive level sometime in the future. Just give me an answer to that. Have you identified those internal candidates. Interesting. Looks like some people have. Yeah, okay. Excellent. Internal candidates identified. And you may not be sure, you know, perhaps you are looking at the outside hire. Not sure, yeah, thank you for being honest there. So it’s interesting, isn’t it. If you’re not sure succession planning has a part to do with finding out. Okay, so some people aren’t sure. And so as a result of that succession planning can help you to really answer that question. Is this person a fit for the organization moving forward? And when you think of your company there’s for many of us our company there’s a fantasy and it’s like everyone thinks that their kid is beautiful. Right, but the reality in many cases right is that many odd company is not as beautiful as you think it is. And what succession planning is all about whether you’re looking for an internal transition or an external sale it’s about getting your company to move from being the ugly baby to being the pretty baby. In other words ask yourself this question, if you’re thinking about an internal transition why would anyone in your company at the moment want to take over your business.
So let me just throw that question out to you. Why would anyone want to take your business from you, why would they want to – think about your employees. Why would they want to spend a bunch of money taking over your business at the moment or why would an outside buyer want to do that. Is this something that you’re – are you convinced that your company is attracted to others at the moment. Tell me what you think about that. Ah, little bit of uncertainty there. Yeah, I can understand that. Little bit of uncertainty. Well, I’ll tell you, that’s exactly why the succession planning – okay, so there’s a little bit of confidence here. “Strong tradition, cash and assets” I tell you, it’s very interesting. There’s so many ways to skin the cat as far as a construction company is concerned and there’s so many ways to build a successful construction company. So let’s look at some factors that would make your company attractive either to internal or external candidates.
Number one is the strength of your management team. Okay, so think about that for a moment, to prepare your firm for a transition you have to have a strong management team. Okay, so the strength, depth and duration of the management team are among the first questions people ask when they’re looking to either acquire or transition into an organization. Okay, so if one or two owners or managers are actively managing multiple aspects of the business and they’re seeking to retire shortly after the transaction what is the buyer actually acquiring. This is very important because many construction companies are based on the quality of the relationships the that owners have with the people who purchase their services. And if those owners go away what happens to the value of the organization. Here’s one question that people ask. Another question, a project versus reoccurring revenue. So think about your business at the moment. Are you a project based revenue company or do you also have a reoccurring revenue aspect to the business. I know one gentleman here on the call works for a company where there’s a lot of reoccurring revenue there. Okay, excellent, but think about your business, if you’re just going project to project to project what is the true value of your business. So buyers tend to treat predictable consistent revenue much more favorably then volatile revenue. That’s why many construction companies try and get into the service aspect of the business so they can have that reoccurring revenue. Now here’s another thing, are you in a competitive hard bid or in negotiated time and material environment. Or do you have a degree of diversity there, companies operating in highly competitive hard bid markets are much greater risk of job losses. Furthermore they’re easily displaced on bid day than companies that are operating in negotiated capacity. So that’s really interesting because buyers understand this risk and they react accordingly. I work with one company that’s in a competitive higher bid environment and they specialize in coming in second or third and yet understanding the bid so well that they can leap ahead of the person who comes in first. So those competitive hard bid environments can be very, very challenging. Okay now check this out here, Prime vs Sub. Companies working at the prime capacity or GCs in other words for clients they drive more value in acquisitions than those who serve the sub contractors because subs depend on the GCs or the primes for their work and they’re often selected based on price. And then here’s another one, self-performance. So self-performance is a growing bottleneck in the construction supply chain and companies that control the labor pool are less risky than those dependent on the use of sub contractors. So if you’re a GC that also does quite a bit of self-performing you’re going to be more attractive to a company than if you’re just a GC that pushes paper. So those are just some things to consider.
So let’s dive into what we really want to talk about today and this is the outline here. First you got to do some preliminary work in terms of your succession planning. Then you got to get your house in order and then you got to get into some traditional succession planning. And so first we want to dive into the preliminary work and I want to thank my good friend Andrew for the general succession planning structure used here. He and I worked together for many years and he’s really helped me as far as putting together these processes and helping my clients with it. So when you’re thinking about preliminary work picture yourself sitting with the key partners in your organization asking a number of questions. So it starts off with this, what does succession planning mean to you. So that’s a question I’d like to ask. When you’re thinking about succession planning – let me just open it up to everyone here, what does succession planning mean to you. If you could just chat that into the box, please. What does succession planning mean to you? “Planning for the future”, that’s excellent. “Identifying, training, mentoring the next leaders of the company”. Yeah, that’s great. “Company transition with sustained growth”. Yeah, it’s tricky, isn’t it. That transition with sustained growth, it’s very tricky. That’s one of the reasons why I tell you this is a great process because you’re going to be able to see how much time you actually need to spend working on your business, not just getting stuck working in your business. Okay, so these are some of the preliminary questions. What a great outcome of the succession plan be? One of the great things I love about succession planning and about business is it can be whatever you want it to be. Okay, whatever you want is what your business can be. It doesn’t have to be some sort of cookie cutter thing. If you want to stay working until the day you drop dead go for it. If you want to ride off into the sunset you can do that as well. If you want to stay on in an advisory capacity that’s something you can choose as well.
Here’s a great question, what is the timing to create a plan and then what is the timing for the execution of the plan. Here’s a good question, what is driving the need for the plan. Let me say this, if you’re on a 3-5 year timeframe then you’re getting a bit of a late start in terms of putting your plan together and you’re best advised to be thinking about this when you’re 40 not when you’re 60. Now when you’re 40 you’re not really thinking that you’re going to be out of the business any time soon and it seems like it might go on forever but those 20 years go by really quickly. And so you have to be thinking about it in advance particularly because a lot of what we’re talking about here is identifying and developing talent. And we know that people’s situations change. The person that you think is going to take over your position in fact ends up finding a job with another company or leaving the area because of family issues or something like that. So you got to ask this, who should be involved in the planning process. What is your own exit strategy and timing? What are the key roles that you need to plan? Maybe you start small. So you might get overwhelmed by how much planning you have to do but perhaps you understand, okay, as far as construction is concerned I need someone who can run the bidding aspect of the business. I need someone who can run the building aspect of the business. I need someone who can run the planning aspect of the business. Whatever the case is what are those key roles that really need some help. Maybe you’re in it for the next 15-20 years but your partner who runs the field is only going to be in it for 5 years. So you got to focus in on the field, make sure you got a chief operating officer who is really kicking some butt. Who are the key people who might be retiring, leaving, or moving up that need a succession plan? What are your thoughts about succession plan as an ongoing process versus a onetime event and what else about succession planning is important to you. Now you can see just with these preliminary questions you could be sitting around in a room. maybe you do an offside with your key people, you know, with the partners in the business, this is a long discussion right here. It’s not something that you’re going to just be diving into right away. And as you’re going through the discussion the next thing you want to be thinking about is your future performance. So look out a year from now, three years from now, five years from now, ten years from now and ask yourself these questions, what are the strategic drivers creating new needs for the organization. Which talents and roles will continue to be important, which new talents and roles will become important. Which key vacancies will open up. So let me ask you this, just looking at your company right now, again, I’m not going to share your name with anyone or anything like that but if you want to be open about this I’d appreciate it. What are some key vacancies that are opening up for you that concern you in the next let’s say 3-5 years. Any of those key vacancies that are opening up just check that into the box here. “General superintendent”. Whenever I think of general superintendent that is – whenever I think about superintendents I think about them at the hub of the business. I mean they’re the bridge between the field and the office, hopefully they’re the types of people who understand the needs of the office and of the field and can break down those silos. “Area manager, general superintendent, regional manager”. Yeah, I’ll tell you, these are all critical positions in your organization and if that’s the case you have to focus in on it right away. So whether it’s one year, three year, five years the train is coming down the track and you don’t want to get hit right in the head by the train, you want to be able to nip out of the way and jump on the train so it can take you where you want to go. Okay, so you have to be able to define future performance. And one of the things that many companies do, this is really interesting, they have a succession planning war room where they get into this war room and they have a clear organizational chart on the wall for instance or maybe they have pictures of people in the organization and this war room doesn’t necessarily need to be in your business where people can walk in. Maybe it’s in your home office or something like that. But they visualize and they pictured where the company is going and it’s something that they were processing through on a regular basis. These war rooms can be particularly helpful when you’re doing reviews of the organization and that’s one thing I really encourage you to do is you need to look at succession planning on a regular basis. Don’t just think it’s a onetime event that you can do today or tomorrow and then leave for another five or ten years. This is really something you need to be doing on an ongoing basis. So preliminary work is where you got to get started.
Now the second thing you have to do is you have to get your house in order. And this is really hard to do because you think about it, right, you’re on the job sites all day, your folks are on the job sites all day. Everybody is working, working, working, you get stuck working in your business and then one day you wake up its five years from now you may have made a bunch of money but your company is not really ready for where it needs to be. You got to think about your organization capacity charting. And that has to do with your org chart. Okay, so think about this, let me ask you this. Do you have a clear org chart for today, I’ll just pop forward to this slide, for today and for the future. Do you have that clear org chart. And have you thought about the people who are in your organization right now and where can they be in the future.
Okay, so going back here to these topics you’ve got to figure out roles, responsibilities and key performance metrics, you’ve got to put career paths together, you have to think about development planning, performance management. You’ve got to understand an excellent management develops and engages people. So one of the things I really encourage you to do, let me ask you this. How many of you have incentives in place for the leadership in your organization to develop the next generation. Clear incentives can really help people to put that development as a top priority. You got to have strong recruiting and onboarding. And I know that all of us here in the construction industry are very much challenged by the lack of talent that’s available at the moment. You got to have rewards and incentives, processes need to be mapped out and key knowledge needs to be captured. You know, you guys are really talented people and the stuff that you do just by instinct you’ve been doing it all your life. You’ve built your business on the basis of your talent and your instinct and your experience but what you need to do is be able to get that experience out of your head and in one way or another put that into processes so that people who are coming into the organization can understand what it is that you do to be successful and to the best of their capacity replicate that success.
So again organization planning. Do you have a clear org chart today and if not I encourage you to do that and do you have a clear org chart for tomorrow. So also roles, responsibilities and KPIs. One of the problems that many people have is they don’t have clear roles and responsibilities that they can hold people accountable to. So that frustrates people and leadership and it frustrates people in the roles and responsibilities because good people they want to know what they need to do to be successful and then they want to be held accountable for that. So you need to have roles, responsibilities and then KPIs. Career paths are very important. Okay, so if people think that there’s a future and a hope with your company they’re much more likely to stick around. So you have to be able to paint the picture for them in terms of where they could go in your organization. Now you don’t want to make false promises and you don’t want to promise too quickly. There’s no promises in business, the only promises is if you work hard and build profitable projects then we’re going to keep going here. But my point is you have to map out a career path in this way. Think about when you hire a project engineer into your organization. This is a challenging statement here and I know it may be difficult to swallow but I’m going to make it. If they’re not an A player, if you can’t picture them as an area manager or a division manager or the president or the CEO of your organization at some point in the future why bother hiring them in the first place. Now I know that’s easy for me to say. But think about the quality of the people that you’re bringing into your organization. Are you committed to bringing in A players into your company and do you know how to identify with some degree of success who those potential A players are. Because if you’re bringing in people who you’re confident have a good shot at really climbing the ladder then you can build these career paths for them and help them to know what needs to be done in order for them to get where they want to go. And so when you’re doing that career planning you also have to have development planning. And development is really important, do you give people mentors, do you give people clear development opportunities both formally and informally. Then you have to manage performance. I’ll tell you one of the things that some people struggle with is consistent performance management. And the reason why is because performance management requires time and difficult conversations. You have to be willing to sit down with people, review their KPIs and say how well are you doing, how can you improve your performance, what do you need to improve. You have to hold people accountable for what they’re doing. And then you’ve got to have excellent management that develops and engages people.
So think about this, people in your senior leadership one of their jobs is to develop other people. It’s not just to hold on to their position for as long as they can it is to develop others. And if they’re stuck working in the business your job as the leader is to really help them to free up their time as much as possible so they can spend time working on the business specifically developing other people. And then of course you need strong recruiting and onboarding and you need to be able to provide rewards and incentives for them. So let me just go to a particularly challenging part. Processes that are mapped out. now if there was one process that you could map out that would really have a positive impact in your organization that isn’t currently mapped out what would that process be. Can you let me know that. What is the one process where if you really spend some time developing it what would that process be? Now that’s interesting. “The pre planning process”. So the hand off from the estimators to the people who’re going to execute the project, the project managers and the superintendents. “Business development”. Yeah, that’s a really good one. you know, it’s interesting because I know some of the guys here on the call and I know that you’re really good at business development but you may not know why. It’s just instinct for you, it’s something you’ve done over the years. So once you’ve got those processes mapped out then the next thing you need to do is you need to capture that key knowledge. Okay, and that’s where you have to sit down with your superintendents that have been in the field for years or your key foremen or lead men. And ask them how is it that you guys – what are you guys doing that enables you to execute the work safely, quickly and on time with high quality. What is it that you’re doing? You need to capture that key knowledge. You need to capture the key relationships that you have. You need to have all of that down in order to be able to really think about how you can do succession planning moving forward.
Now this is all about getting your house in order. And this is why I just want to let you know how you can get a little bit of help with me before we move on to the traditional succession planning process. If you’re going to get your house in order you’ve got to get yourself in order first. And this is where the construction leaders dashboard comes in. So what you can do is just sit down with yourself and I know we got multiple people on the call here who run construction companies. You should be able to sit down with yourself and go through this construction leaders dashboard and clearly identify your vision, your mission, your values, your edge, the initiatives that you need to work on, your personal performance metrics, the key relationships that you need to build and your own development opportunities. And you can frame this in terms of developing the succession plan. Because you’re succession plan is not just going to happen overnight. It’s going to be something that requires some thought and some development and it starts with you getting really clear on what you need to focus on in your leadership. So if you’d like to be able to just walk through that construction leaders dashboard with me what you can do is just go to this web address right here, it’s ericanderton.lpages.co/cld. And what you can do there is you can book in a one hour conversation with me to go through the construction leaders dashboard. Now I normally charge $597 for this, but if you book it before the end of the day today I’ll do it for you at no charge. Okay, so I chatted in the link that you can go to to look at that page and then go directly to my calendar and book in a time and come to do that. So that’s one way that you can get help. Alright, let’s get back to the outline here. So we talked about the preliminary work, we talked about getting your house in order and I’m happy to help you with that if you’d like. Now let’s talk about traditional succession planning. Okay, here we go.
So first thing you need to do is address flight risks. Now, let’s just be honest, right now. Does anyone here have a flight risk in their organization at the moment? Someone who you’re just a little bit unsure whether or not they’re going to stick around for the future. But the first thing you need to do is address flight risks and we’re going to get into that a little bit. Then you got to identify roles for succession, you’ve got to choose those internal high potentials, you’ve got to consider roles that need to be filled from the outside. You have to develop and test candidates and then you have to put together an overall plan. Okay. So let’s look at the flight risks.
Now think about this real quick. I know a couple of you responded in terms of the flight risks and this is absolutely confidential, I won’t share this with anyone else. Why do you think there are flight risks. Can you give me some input there? Why do you think there are flight risks? “Too many opportunities elsewhere”, “ambition higher than the opportunity”. Ah, that’s a tough one. So maybe you have someone who has great ambition but the opportunity isn’t there for them to take the spots that they want at the moment. That’s a tricky one, that requires a lot of thought and a lot of conversation with the person. So perhaps you can go through this process, what motivates them, what is the best approach to keep them and who is best suited to engage them. So go into the one, I won’t mention your name but what are your thoughts here on the one whose ambition is higher than the opportunity what do you think is the best approach to keep them. That’s an interesting question. If you can just chat that in, if you want to engage with me there a little bit what is the best approach to keep them, what do you think? And if anyone else has some input on that feel free to chat that in, but let’ take that one case study here. Someone whose ambition is higher than the opportunity. What’s the best approach to keep them? It’s interesting, I was working with a company just a little while ago one of my clients and we were talking about one of these situations where let them make up their own job duties and tasks. Okay, so perhaps they can do that and then you can look for opportunity for them to expand their horizons internally. I know one of the things that one of my clients recently did for someone who wasn’t promoted to a level that they wanted to get to but they want them to stay in the company because they’re awesome is that they really emphasized to them the mentoring opportunities that they had in the organization and made sure that they understood that they were valued part of the organization as well. So if you’re thinking about someone whose ambition is higher than the opportunity what can you do to keep them. That’s a very, very interesting question. Okay, and another question you want to ask is who is best suited to engage them. So who is it that can step up and even mentor them and encourage them and stay close to them so that you’re not waking up one day and a good performer who you would like to move up perhaps in the future one day just leaves. So you better address those flight risks.
The next thing you have to do is you have to identify roles for succession. And this is important. Which role should always have people being developed as successors? Which roles need a plan now? What are the talents required for each role? Who are possible candidates and what are the next steps? Okay so let me just ask you guys again here and I appreciate you guys who are interacting awesome here today which is great. Which roles in your company should always have people being developed as successors. You know, even if there isn’t a need today what are the roles that need people being developed for the future. What are those key roles in other words. Could you give me some feedback on that? Yeah, “Superintendent”. Absolutely. That’s a key role. Yeah, “project executive”. I’ll tell you developing your project managers and project executives. Having those executive roles I’ll tell you any executive level position exactly, it’s so easy just to get stuck in your own little world and you’ve got the weight of the world on your shoulders as an executive in the organization but whose taking your spot. You know, you don’t want to be the hero in your organization. You want to be developing other heroes. You want people who are up and coming and are able to deal with the tough challenges. And that’s what executives do, they deal with the tough challenges and the tough decisions and you’ve got to be thinking about how you can be moving people into those roles as you grow your business and as the business moves forward. So you’ve got to choose internal high potentials. And I’m going to be sending you this PowerPoint here and it’s really great. You think about it it’s really simple. Put their name, their current role, roles they could fill, top leads as far as development is concerned, possible mentors. How to challenge and test them. I’ll tell you people need to be challenged. Perhaps you’ve got someone working on a particular project type that they’re very comfortable with but maybe you need to move them to a different project type working with maybe a challenging customer to see how well they respond in a tough area. Some people are very good at certain projects but they need their horizons expanded so they can understand the length and the breadth and the depth of your business. And then you’ve got to ask what kind of training do they need and what are some potential other ways for them to develop as in terms of being a high potential.
And then you’re going to ask what are the roles from the outside. So just you got to be honest. You know, looking at the people that you have in your company at the moment you got to be honest and say I don’t think I have a general superintendent in my company at the moment and perhaps I need to look to the outside. And it may not be today, it may not be tomorrow, it may not be next year but I need to be very aggressive in recruiting that general superintendent. I need to do a better job developing relationships, networking with my peers. Networking with other organizations in order to develop those relationships so that perhaps I can tap someone in the future. Okay. And then when you thought about that you got to develop and test candidates. If you’ve never seen this SNL skit, the Chippendale skit with Chris Farley and Patrick Swayze you got to check it out, it’s kind of interesting. But you got to develop and test the candidates. You’ve got to test them, you’ve got to say okay, what is it that I can do to really see if this person is a fit for the organization in terms of the role that I want them to be in. And it’s important that you’re willing to be disappointed because sometimes people disappoint you. Right, you give them the test and they fail it. and perhaps they’re saying I may not be an executive but perhaps I can be a step just below the executive level. Perhaps they’re not the president of the organization but they are going to be your chief superintendent or your chief estimator, or your project executive. And you can trust them and rely on them in the future but they’re not quite that president or CEO tabbed. But you’ve got to develop and you’ve got to test them. So now it’s time for you to get to work and the good news is I’m going to be sending you a 22 page booklet with all of these things that we’ve just discussed here today that you can use as a template to really begin your discussion. So I tell you, if you just took that and began discussions in or organization as far as succession is concerned you’re going to have a massive ROI on just joining me here on the webinar. And just remember this, Patton said this, “Again a good plan violently executed today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow. Okay, so overall plan, one needs to be done by when and by whom? So let me just open it up to the group here on the call. What would you say is the one thing you need to do in the next 30-90 days to begin moving forward in terms of succession planning? “Develop a future org chart”. Thank you very much. That’s good. Man, you should have that like on the wall of your office or maybe it’s your home office but that future org chart and you can start playing with the names. “Identify candidates”. Yeah, you got to identify candidates. Sometimes you got to sit down with them and just have a heart to heart conversation and say hey, listen, where do you see yourself in five years time? So we’ve got develop that future org chart, we’ve got identify candidates, what else. Anyone else? Yeah, develop candidates. That’s right. I tell you so when you’re developing people you’ve got to ask this. Is it formal or informal training that they need. Do I need to get them a mentor? Do I need to get them some coaching? Do I need to send them to a class perhaps it’s self development. Is there a good book that they could read. I’ll tell you I’ll give you a good book that you can read. And by the way if you want me to send you a copy of this book just send me an e-mail I’ll send you a copy. And that book is the Effective Executive by Peter Drucker. Now it was written many, many years ago but it’s simple, it’s straightforward and they can have a massive impact on someone who you are developing into that executive role. So if you’d like a copy of that book just shoot me an e-mail. I know most of you here on the call have my e-mail, at ericanderton.com and I’ll send you that book, “The effective executive by Peter Drucker it’s absolutely awesome. I’ll tell you guys let me just encourage you, think about succession planning. It’s a process, it’s not a magic pill. If anyone comes in and says it’s a magic pill they’re giving you a bunch of. It’s a long process but you’ve got to get started on it. And you can use some of this context today to get started. If you have any questions if I can help you in any way you know you can contact me. I appreciate you guys taking the time here today and I wish you the very best this weekend and to season here and start kicking some jet building projects. Have a terrific day, guys. Bye, bye.
