A Guide for Irish Business Owners
Finding a successor is one of the most consequential decisions a business owner will ever make. Get it right, and the business continues to grow under strong leadership while the founder moves forward with confidence. Get it wrong, and the consequences can take years to undo – damaged culture, lost revenue, and sometimes the unravelling of everything the founder built.
The question Irish business owners most frequently ask us at this point in the process is a deceptively simple one: do we look inside or outside?
The honest answer is that there is no universal right answer! However, there is almost always a right answer for your specific business. Here is how to find it.
How do you know if you have a successor internally?
Before you look anywhere, look at what you have in your business.
The question is not “who has been here the longest?” or “who works the hardest?” Those are measures of loyalty and effort, which are valuable but are not the same as leadership capacity. The question is: does anyone in this organisation have the combination of strategic thinking, people leadership, commercial judgment, and cultural authority to take this business to its next stage?
That is a higher bar than most founders realise. And in many businesses, particularly founder-led Irish SMEs built around the personality and energy of one individual, the honest answer is that no one currently in the organisation clears it.
That is not a criticism of your team. It is a reflection of how founder-led businesses are typically structured. The founder makes the big calls. Everyone else executes. The successor needs to do both and that is a different job than the one most internal talent has been doing.
When should you promote from within?
Promoting from within is always preferable when the right person exists. The advantages are real and significant.
An internal successor knows the business – its clients, its culture, its history, and the decisions that shaped it. They have already earned the trust of the team. The transition is less disruptive. And, critically, the founder can observe them over time in real situations before fully handing over the reins.
The conditions that make internal succession work are:
- a professional who has already been operating at or close to the level required
- a business whose next chapter does not require a fundamentally different kind of leadership from what got it here
- a founder who is willing to genuinely step back rather than remaining involved in a way that undermines the new leader’s authority.
When these conditions are present, internal succession, done well and with proper preparation time, is the lower-risk path.
When should you hire externally for succession?
In many organisations, particularly those at an inflexion point such as entering a new market, professionalising operations post-growth, preparing for a sale, or absorbing private equity investment, the leadership requirement has changed. The business needs something it does not currently have internally.
This is not a failing. It is a natural consequence of growth. The skills that build a business from zero to €10 million in revenue are genuinely different from the skills required to take it from €10 million to €50 million. Many exceptional internal people simply have not had the opportunity to develop at the pace the business has moved.
When going to the external market, the risks are real but manageable. Cultural mismatch is the most common failure point; an externally hired successor who cannot read the room, who imposes a style that jars with the existing team, or who underestimates how much of the business is held together by relationships and informal knowledge that does not appear on any org chart.
The way to mitigate this is time. Bring the external successor in with an explicit overlap period, six months at minimum, although ideally twelve, where they work alongside the current leadership before taking full responsibility. This allows them to earn trust, learn the business from the inside, and demonstrate to the team that they are the right person before they are formally in charge.
It also allows the founder to observe them under pressure, which is the only reliable test of whether a hire will work.
The conversation nobody wants to have
This is where most succession processes run into trouble and where we see the most damage when handled poorly.
In almost every business we work with, there is someone internally who believes, often quite sincerely, that they are the natural successor. They may have been told, explicitly or implicitly, that their time would come. They may have been acting up in a leadership capacity for years. They may have built genuine relationships across the business and have real credibility with the team.
And they may simply not be the right person for the role.
If this situation exists in your business and you look to the external market without addressing it directly, you will face a serious problem. Word will get out, as it always does, and the internal professional will likely feel blindsided, disrespected, and perhaps even angry. That is a retention risk, a culture risk, and a distraction at the exact moment when you need the business to be stable.
The conversation has to happen first. Before the search begins.
What that conversation looks like, in practice, is something along these lines:
“You are a critical part of this business, and we want you to remain so. You are excellent at what you do. But as we think about the next stage of growth, we need someone who can do X, Y and Z, and if we are being honest with each other, that is not where your strengths lie. We want to be transparent with you about that rather than let you find out another way.”
That conversation is hard to hear. Some people will respond well and accept their place in the organisation with renewed clarity. Others will choose to leave, and that is a risk you have to be willing to accept. What you cannot afford is to avoid the conversation and hope nobody notices.
Done with respect and genuine care for the person, this kind of directness is almost always received better than founders expect. People can handle difficult truths far more easily than they can handle being managed around and misled.
The overlap model: what a well-run handover actually looks like
Whether the successor comes from inside or outside the business, the handover itself is a process, not an event. Founders who treat it as an event – announcing a successor and then stepping back – almost always create problems.
A well-structured succession handover in an Irish SME typically looks like this:
Months 1 – 3: The successor joins or is elevated into a clearly defined co-leadership role. Responsibilities are shared explicitly. The successor begins building direct relationships with key clients, team members, and stakeholders. The founder remains fully available but begins deferring decisions that fall within the successor’s remit.
Months 4 – 6: The successor takes primary ownership of day-to-day operational leadership. The founder shifts to a strategic and advisory role, available for major decisions but not present in the daily rhythm. The team begins to experience the successor as the de facto leader.
Months 7 – 12: Full transition. The successor holds the seat. The founder’s involvement is defined and bound to board participation, specific projects, or a consultancy arrangement if appropriate. The successor has full authority, and the organisation knows it.
This model requires discipline from the founder. The instinct to step back in, to course-correct, to be available for every decision is natural, and it will undermine the transition if not managed consciously. The successor needs to be seen to be in charge. That only happens if the founder is willing to let them be.
Questions every Irish business owner should ask before deciding
Before committing to either path, work through these honestly:
Does anyone currently in the business have the full capability set the next chapter requires, not just parts of it?
Is there anyone who believes they are the natural successor, and have I had a direct conversation with them?
What stage is the business moving into, and does that stage require leadership skills we do not currently have internally?
Am I genuinely ready to hand over? Not just in structure, but in practice?
Do I have enough time to run a proper process, or has a trigger event (sale, retirement, health) compressed my timeline?
The answers to these questions will almost always point clearly in one direction. The difficulty is rarely in identifying the right path. It is in having the courage and honesty to follow it.
A final word on timing
The biggest mistake Irish founders make in succession planning is not choosing the wrong path; it is waiting too long to choose either one.
When succession planning begins under pressure, the quality of decisions drops. Founders make choices based on who is available rather than who is right. Searches are rushed. Handovers are compressed. The business absorbs unnecessary risk, and the founder’s exit or transition is far more stressful than it needed to be.
Partner with a talent advisor who specialises in this process. Not when you are ready to move, but 12 to 18 months before you think you need to. The clarity that comes from starting early with proper support is the single biggest factor separating well-run succession processes from those that don’t.
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Barden partners with Boards and executive teams to appoint leaders, build future-ready organisations, and develop succession plans. Our founders and senior leaders work directly with clients, bringing first-hand experience of scaling businesses and driving growth. Reach out to jonathan.olden@Barden.ie to connect. Your Leaders, Found by Ours.
