4 March 2026
A succession plan is a set of decisions
The binder is a record. The plan is the set of choices a family has actually made about a company, a house, and the people who will have to live with both.
Families often arrive with a request for documents: a will, a trust, sometimes a new operating agreement. Those papers matter. They are not the plan. The plan is a short list of decisions. Who may control the company. Whether a child who works in the business is treated differently from a child who does not. What happens to the house, and whether anyone has a right to keep living in it.
Until those decisions are made, a draft can only pretend. It will pick a default the family has not discussed, and the default will surface at the worst time. We start with the decisions. The documents come after, and they have to agree with each other. A will that leaves the shares one way and an operating agreement that leaves them another is not a plan. It is a future lawsuit.
Two states make this plainer. A family with a company in Charleston and a house, or a child, in Virginia needs the papers in both places to describe the same outcome. Title, the company records, and the estate documents should be read together. Reading them separately is how contradictions survive.
A useful plan is also allowed to be modest. Not every family needs a stack of trusts. Some need a will, a revised operating agreement, and a written account of who is supposed to run the company for the first year. The test is whether a person who was not in the room could carry the decision out.
This note is a general comment on how the firm approaches the work. It is not advice for a particular family or company.