Succession Planning for Businesses Under $5M: a Practical Playbook Small Business Owners Without Board, Family Office, or Consultant on Retainer

If your business does under $5 million a year, you're probably the owner, the accountant, and the HR department - often before lunch. The idea of convening a governance committee to plan your business's future is more than a little absurd when there's no one to convene.Succession Planning for Businesses Under $5M is a short, practical, no-jargon guide built entirely around what you can actually do without a team behind you. No 400-page academic frameworks. No consultant on retainers. Just a clear, sequenced plan you can work through in stolen twenty-minute windows - starting with the one document that protects your business this week, whether or not you've figured out anything else yet.Inside, you'll find:A 20-minute Emergency Plan that protects your business if something happens to you tomorrow - before you've decided anything elseA decision framework for choosing between family takeover, employee buyout, outside sale, or a deliberate wind-downReal scripts for the family conversation everyone avoidsA plain-English way to calculate what your business is actually worthHow to fund a buyout when your successor doesn't have the cashWhich legal documents genuinely need an attorney - and which don'tA step-by-step path to getting your business sale-ready, if that's the direction you chooseA single-page action plan that ties everything together, with separate tracks depending on whether you have five years or five monthsNearly two-thirds of family-owned businesses have no succession plan at all - most often because the owner assumes the business is "too small" to need one. It isn't. This book meets you where you actually are: busy, capable, and ready for a plan you can finish, not just read.