I'm a scuba instructor and safety diver. I train other safety divers. And the performances I work are put on by mermaids.
Yes. Mermaids. Professional mermaids, performers in monofins and elaborate tails who do underwater shows for aquariums, resorts, events, and film shoots. It's a real thing. I've been doing it for years. I'll give you a moment.
Okay. So. The safety diver's job during a mermaid performance is specific: stay close, stay ready, stay invisible. The audience is watching the mermaid. They're not watching me. If the performance goes perfectly, I'm just a vague shape in the background, probably mistaken for a large, unremarkable fish.
If something goes wrong, whether a performer loses consciousness, a breath hold goes too long, or a tail gets caught on something, I'm already in position. I move. The situation gets handled. The performance continues or it ends safely, but either way it's controlled.
After a clean show, nobody thanks the safety diver in the program. The mermaid takes a bow. I rinse my gear.
That's fine. That's the job. The whole point is that nothing happened.
I've been doing business succession planning long enough that this feels like exactly the same thing.
Nobody Thinks About the Plan on a Normal Tuesday
A business succession plan does nothing visible on a day when everything is working. Revenue comes in, decisions get made, the company runs. The plan just sits there in a file somewhere, quietly governing what would happen in scenarios everyone hopes never occur.
That is the correct state of affairs. A succession plan you're constantly invoking isn't a plan. It's a symptom. The goal is for it to be boring and unused for as long as possible, and then to work perfectly the one time it matters.
The mermaid never thinks about the safety diver during a good show either. That's not an insult. That's the system working.
What It Actually Covers
For a Colorado business, succession planning addresses a few distinct situations, and what you need depends on your structure.
If you're a sole proprietor and something happens to you, your business assets go through your estate, into probate if they're not held in a trust, then to whoever inherits them, who may have zero interest in or ability to run your business. A plan puts the transfer of ownership and authority on terms you've set, not terms a probate court works out after the fact.
If you have co-owners, the operating agreement or shareholders' agreement needs to address what happens when one of them wants out, can't continue, dies, or goes through a divorce that potentially lands their ex-spouse as your new business partner. (This happens. It is not fun. It is significantly less fun than a mermaid show.) A buy-sell provision sets the terms for these events in advance: what triggers a buyout, how the interest is valued, and where the money to fund it comes from. Without it, you're negotiating under pressure with someone whose interests are no longer aligned with yours, while trying to keep the business running.
Key person situations are their own category. Some businesses are built around specific people. Succession planning here means identifying who steps in, what they need to be effective, and how the business survives the transition. Sometimes it involves key person life insurance to provide liquidity during that gap.
And sometimes the succession event isn't a crisis at all. Retirement, selling to a third party, transferring to a family member: these benefit from planning too. A business with clean agreements, clear ownership records, and documented processes is worth more and easier to sell than one where a buyer has to spend months untangling what was whose.
The Moment You Need the Safety Diver
In an underwater performance, you learn to read signs, things the performer isn't even aware they're showing you. A hesitation. A slight change in body position. Something in the timing that's a beat off. Even under thirty feet of water, with someone in a sequined tail and a smile painted on, an experienced safety diver sees those signs before they become an emergency and is already moving.
In business, the signal is usually less subtle. A partner calls and says they have cancer. A founder has a stroke. A co-owner announces they're leaving and wants their money out by end of quarter. These are the moments that test whether your business was built to survive them.
The ones that handle it well didn't get lucky. They had a plan, and the plan was already in place before anyone needed it.
The ones that don't have a plan discover, at the worst possible time, that Colorado's LLC Act defaults and a probate court are now making decisions about their business. Which is the business equivalent of the boat crew scanning the surface with no idea where anyone went down.
If you want to talk through what a succession plan looks like for your business, here's more on how Hoog Law approaches it, or just reach out directly. It's a pretty normal conversation once you start having it.
Probably more normal than explaining to someone that your weekend involved keeping a mermaid alive.