On June 27th, 2016, Peter Dal Bianco, founder of Bianco’s Audiotronic, spoke to the chamber about his experience with succession planning and how to value a company. He went on to provide the following advice to business owners in terms of their succession planning and future success:
- understand your business, know your industry, follow economic trends and know who your competition is; know what factors are going to impact your business in the long term;
- work internally – always look at the people in your organization with the lens of whether or not they have what it takes and the passion for the business to one day take senior management control and a share of profits;
- always have a five or ten year game plan in place and don’t assume your children are going to want to take over;
- stay relevant and always catch up with technological changes and understand how to use social networking for your business as competitive forces today are more significant than ever;
- set out some time every week to work towards your plan;
- get yourself educated as a business owner – there are a variety of different sources of information readily available online that provide tips on succession planning.
The July 12th meeting of the Task Force involved a discussion about how the chamber can raise awareness community wide about the importance of succession planning and the risk associated with not having a plan through various marketing initiatives.