By K&R Managing Partner Phillip Osborne
Succession is the most personal conversation in any family business. It is also the most frequently deferred.
Across the food and ag businesses I work with in Australia and across the Asia-Pacific region, the pattern is consistent: founders who have spent 20, 30, or 40 years building something extraordinary find it genuinely difficult to start the succession conversation. Not because they don’t care about the business’s future. Because they care about it enormously — and succession forces questions that are as much personal as they are professional.
A well-managed succession in a complex ag business takes three to five years minimum. It takes that long to develop an internal candidate to genuine readiness, or to identify and onboard an external one in a way that earns the trust of the people, customers, and partners the business depends on.
When succession is triggered by an exit date — when the founder is 12 or 18 months from stepping back — almost every option becomes constrained. The internal candidate doesn’t have time to be developed. The external search is rushed. The transition is compressed. And the incoming leader inherits a business that is already in an anxious state because everyone could see the urgency that the board was pretending wasn’t there.
The cost is rarely visible immediately. It shows up 18 months later — in lost commercial momentum, in key staff who quietly leave, in a business that no longer quite has the forward energy it had before.
Succession in family-owned ag businesses across the Asia-Pacific region carries particular weight. Across many cultures in this part of the world — Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Southeast Asian — the expectation of family succession, the importance of face, and the complexity of a senior family member ceding authority are not peripheral considerations. They are at the centre of how the conversation can be had, and how the transition can be structured.
The businesses that navigate this well don’t ignore those dynamics. They design around them — finding ways to honour the family’s values and traditions while also giving the business what it needs to grow into its next chapter.
In my experience, the family-owned and founder-led ag businesses that navigate succession well consistently do four things.
They start the conversation 3–5 years before the exit. Not when retirement is imminent — when there are still genuine options on the table. This is the single biggest determinant of whether a succession goes well.
They separate the ownership question from the leadership question. Who leads the business next and who owns the business next are different questions that need different answers. Conflating them — because it is emotionally easier — damages both decisions.
They put the internal candidate through external assessment. Even when the next leader is clearly going to be a family member, the best businesses put them through a rigorous external process — not to create doubt, but to validate readiness, surface development needs, and give the candidate a genuine foundation for their authority. Leaders who’ve been externally validated lead with more confidence.
They design the transition, not just the appointment. Succession is a process, not a date. The departing leader’s role during and after the transition is defined in advance. The incoming leader’s first 90-day priorities are agreed before they start. The key relationships — family, staff, customers, suppliers — are managed deliberately, not improvised.
The founders I most admire are the ones who treat it that way — who see getting the next chapter right as the final, and perhaps most important, thing they will do for the business they built.
If you’re navigating a succession question in a family-owned or founder-led ag business in APAC, I’d welcome a confidential conversation. It’s a conversation I have every week at Kincannon & Reed, based in Australia with reach across the region.
