I took this picture from our back garden, looking out across the fields.
It was a winter morning, early, cold, the kind of morning where you almost don’t bother going outside, except something made me stop.
The field was fallow. The trees were bare, every branch visible against a sky that was doing something extraordinary: deep blue fading into a band of fire along the horizon, the sun not yet up but already announcing itself.
I stood there longer than I meant to.
There’s something about a fallow field in winter that looks, at first glance, like nothing is happening. No crop, no growth, no visible sign of life. But of course something is happening. The ground is resting. The soil is recovering. Whatever’s beneath the surface is being allowed the time it needs before the next thing can grow.
It struck me, standing there, how easily we mistake stillness for emptiness, how easily we look at something quiet and assume nothing is being decided, when in fact the most important decisions are often the ones taking shape exactly when everything looks calm.
I think about that a lot in my work with family businesses.
Succession is the fallow field nobody wants to talk about.
It sits there, present but undiscussed, assumed but not actioned, implied but never quite formalised. Everyone knows the season will change eventually; few people want to be the one who says so out loud.
And so the field stays fallow a little longer than it should.
The sun was beautiful that morning. It would have risen whether I’d watched it or not.
But there was something in choosing to stand there, in the cold, and pay attention to a transition that was happening anyway, slowly, quietly, on its own schedule, that felt like it was trying to tell me something.
Some things don’t wait for us to be ready. They simply happen. The only real choice we have is whether we’re paying attention when they do.
This week I wrote about a winter sunrise over our back fields, a fallow field that looked empty but wasn’t. It got me thinking about how often family businesses mistake quiet for safety, particularly when it comes to succession. The conversation sits there, present but undiscussed, for far longer than anyone intends.
What’s missing is the conversation.
This is one of the strangest features of family business life. The most consequential question any family business will ever face, who runs this next, and on what terms, is also the question most consistently left unaddressed.
Not because people don’t care about the answer. Because they care too much, and addressing it head-on feels like inviting conflict, mortality, or both.
Why “it’s understood” isn’t the same as “it’s planned”
Ask most founders whether they have a succession plan, and a surprising number will say something like: “Well, it’s understood that my son will take over” or “Everyone knows the business goes to the children equally.”That word, understood, does an enormous amount of unearned work in family businesses.
An understanding is not a plan. It has no timeline, no governance structure, no agreed process for what happens if circumstances change, no clarity on what ‘taking over’ actually means in practice.
Understandings feel comfortable precisely because they avoid the harder questions. But comfort now is frequently paid for with confusion, resentment, or conflict later, often at the worst possible moment, when the founder’s capacity to manage the situation is already diminished.
The cost of waiting
I have seen succession delayed for a decade or more, not through malice, but through a quiet, mutual agreement among everyone involved not to bring it up.The founder doesn’t want to feel they’re being pushed out.
The next generation doesn’t want to seem impatient or grasping. And so the topic sits, untouched, while the business, the family, and the founder all continue to age around it.
The costs of that delay rarely show up immediately.
They show up as: a next generation who have quietly built their identity around uncertainty, never fully committing because they don’t know if they’re truly wanted in the role.
A founder who has unconsciously avoided developing other interests or a post-business identity.
Or, in the worst cases, a sudden health event or unexpected departure that forces a decision to be made in crisis conditions rather than in calm ones.
Starting before the season changes
The families who get succession right rarely do so with a single dramatic conversation.They do it gradually, starting years before any handover is required, with small, low-stakes conversations that build toward clarity rather than a single high-pressure announcement.
That might begin as simply as the founder being honest, even just with themselves, about what they actually want.
Do they want to step back from ownership, leadership, or both? On what timeline?
These are private questions before they’re family questions, and being clear on the private answer makes the family conversation immeasurably easier.
From there, the conversation needs to involve everyone with a genuine stake, not just the most obvious successor. Siblings who may not be involved in the business day to day often have views, and sometimes entitlements, that need addressing early rather than discovered late.
And finally, succession planning benefits enormously from structure: a written plan, regularly reviewed, with clear triggers and timelines, rather than an evolving set of assumptions that live only in the founder’s head.
Succession planning, done well, looks similar from the outside: quiet, gradual, unremarkable. But the alternative, leaving the field fallow indefinitely, rarely ends well. Eventually, every family business faces its transition. The only real choice is whether that transition is planned, or simply allowed to happen.
peter@familybusinessman.com
