The Welsh Wire: Sara Fazio, Kreis Enderle

One of the key but underappreciated benefits of having a succession plan for your small business is the impact on employee retention. A succession plan helps make your workers more confident that the company, and their jobs, are going to survive the illness of death or the business owner.

“Because if you don’t have that and there’s a medical event, or dementia, you get a lot of nervousness, and if there’s a decent job market people will start leaving,” says Sara Fazio, an attorney and succession planning expert with Kreis Enderle in Grand Rapids. “So you need to give them that confidence that the business is going to survive any different sort of medical situations and that the business itself is not the same as the human being. It will continue to thrive regardless of what happens to a single person.”

Fazio says it’s not enough to have a succession plan — it also needs to be effectively communicated to your management team and family.

Listen to Sheri’s entire interview with Sara Fazio.

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