You’re the president of your company. Congratulations! You have built a successful business and have placed a few trusted lieutenants to help implement your vision and manage various aspects of the day-to-day operations of your business. But something happens to one of these key people, and they are going to be unavailable to your company unexpectedly and for a while. Is your company ready for this?
Your business succession plan is an essential part of your business plan. By putting the right people in the right places with clear instructions on how to accomplish key business functions, you create a more valuable, easier to sell business. You also enable disaster planning.
The Keyholder
A “keyholder” is a person in the business, usually a supervisor or manager of some kind, who is trusted with the keys to the physical premises of the company. Their responsibilities usually include opening the building and closing the building. If you use physical premises in your business operations, you likely have one or more keyholders. And you likely have backup keys and backup keyholders in case one of your keyholders isn’t available.
The world is increasingly digital. Most businesses today rely on many SaaS offerings to operate. From your bookkeeping, to your payroll, to your CRM systems, to your operations platforms, most businesses today need access to many online systems to carry out their essential functions.
While each member of your team may have a login that allows them to access some of these systems, it’s more likely that only your top people have the key “Administrator” login that allows them management-level access. If the system is related solely to management, there might only be one person in your company, the person managing that system, who has any login for it. To secure your business, you need a plan.
Just as you have backup keys and backup keyholders for access to your physical premises, you need to be sure that you have backups for your accessing digital tools as well.
As businesses prepare their succession planning, an easy thing to overlook is the digital elements of your business. Specifically, making sure that the right people have access to the tools necessary for the business if the person normally managing these pieces is unavailable.
Password Succession Planning
Succession planning with passwords is often overlooked, but it’s easy and saves you from massive headache down the line. Everything has online account access; and while this may be hard for you to keep up with, it is next to impossible for a successor, unexpectedly thrust into this position, to decipher without a key.
You can ease the successor’s burden of accessing these by providing the login information. This password succession plan is also incredibly important because it allows the successor to know what accounts you have and whom you do business with so that these parties may be contacted and company assets properly managed in the absence of the key person.
To find out about bank accounts, your successor could review your mail or records to look for bank statements. But if you’ve opted to receive paperless statements such a search could prove fruitless. You could have $100,000.00 in a bank but if the successor has no way to find that money it may not be useful to the company, at least not expediently.
Payroll may need to go out on Friday. But if the successor now in charge of running payroll in the primary manager’s absence doesn’t know which service you use or how to log in, there’s going to be some upset people on Friday! The password succession plan not only provides the means of access; it also tells the successor where to look.
What to Include in Your Password Succession Plan
Creating your plan is easy. The most important step is to take the time to do it. The second most is to keep it secure. This may mean storing it in pieces rather than in a single document. Make sure you follow your IT security guidelines as you store your plan, or else you’ll accidentally give some enterprising hacker a roadmap of all of your important information.
To make your succession plan follow these simple steps. Make a concise listing of all the login names and passwords associated with the numerous online accounts we all keep.
Here’s what your plan should include:
- Web Address of the Relevant Service Provider
- User Name
- Password
- Any other detail the service may request to obtain access
Relevant Accounts for Your Password succession plan
- Email account(s)
- Bank accounts
- Credit cards
- Insurance policies
- Utility providers
- Cloud based storage and backup drives
- CRM service
- Payroll service
- Bookkeeping service
- Accounts you have with your various vendors (for example, your CPA may have a secure platform for exchanging information related to company tax returns, or your landlord may have a portal for the payment of rent)
Remember the password succession plan is important for helping the successor determine the identities of your service providers and obtaining access to accounts. Any information you don’t provide in the plan may remain unknown to your executor. Even things that may not immediately seem essential to business operations, remember that if you do not share this information the contents of the account may be lost to the company forever.
What Next?
Writing your password business succession plan is easy. You and your top team members already have the information. You just need to make sure that the information is recorded in a place where a potential successor to someone else’s role can access it and keep it secure.
At Way Law, we know building a successful business is about strategy and methodology. Your strategy dictates your methods, your methods advance your strategy. We build the legal strategy to help businesses thrive, and the methods to implement that strategy. When you’re ready to use legal as a tool for your success, we’re here for you! Give us a call.