No succession plan? Start here (Template inside)

Hi Everyone,

When OpenAI's board fired Sam Altman in November 2023, they had no succession plan, no interim CEO prepared, and no communication strategy. The company cycled through two interim leaders in 48 hours, and 91% of employees threatened to quit. Altman was back within five days.

A PwC study of the world's 2,500 largest public companies found that forced CEO exits cost an average of $1.8 billion in lost shareholder value compared to planned transitions. And only 35% of organizations have a formal succession process in place.

Today, we're sharing three documents you can create in a single afternoon that will keep your company running if something happens to you or a key leader tomorrow.

Document 1: Emergency Authority Letter

This is a one-page document that names who takes charge if you're suddenly unavailable, and what authority they have.

It should cover:

• Who becomes the acting leader
• Who backs them up if that person is also unavailable
• What decisions the acting leader can make without board approval, and what requires sign-off

One detail that often gets skipped is the authority level. So be specific about what the acting leader can and can't do.

Can they sign contracts under a certain amount? Approve hires? Make vendor payments?

At a 20-person company, one named backup is enough. At 200, you'll want a second and third. Once you've written it, send it to each person named and ask them to confirm they've read it.

Document 2: Critical Access and Contacts Sheet

When a key leader leaves suddenly, the first problem is usually access.

The banking login, the payroll system, the insurance broker's number, the second signature on the company account – all of it lives in one person's head or inbox.

This document lists everything someone would need to keep the business running for 30 days without you:

• Password manager credentials
• Bank account signers
• Payroll provider login
• Insurance policies and broker contacts
• Attorney and CPA contacts
• Key vendor relationships

Store it in a shared vault like 1Password with emergency access turned on. Update it twice a year, or whenever you change a provider.

Document 3: First 72 Hours Runbook

The first three days after an unexpected departure are when the most damage can happen. The longer it takes for clients, employees, and partners to hear something clear, the more they fill the silence themselves.

This runbook is a step-by-step checklist covering:

• Who calls whom and in what order (board, leadership team, key clients, employees)
• How payroll and accounts payable continue without interruption
• What goes out to clients and partners as an initial communication
• Who speaks on behalf of the company externally
• Write it so someone reading it under stress can follow it without guessing

We built a free template that covers all three documents. You can fill it in and have your emergency succession plan done in one sitting.

Test the plan

One way to pressure-test these documents is to take a few days fully offline and see what breaks. Make sure your backups know they're activated before you leave, and resist the urge to check in.

When you come back, whatever broke or almost broke tells you exactly what to fix next.

Go deeper

👉 CompassPoint Nonprofit Services: Emergency Succession Plan Template – the gold-standard fill-in-the-blank emergency succession document, freely available as a PDF

👉 Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City: Nonprofit Executive Succession-Planning Toolkit – a free 40-page toolkit with templates, checklists, and case studies for emergency and departure-defined planning

👉 Strategy&: The $112 Billion CEO Succession Problem – the PwC research behind the $1.8 billion forced-exit number, with data on why planned transitions outperform

👉 PwC: How the Best Boards Approach CEO Succession Planning – nine practices from boards that get transitions right, including how to start the process years in advance

Coming up tomorrow

Tomorrow we'll talk about the hiring advantage that costs nothing and that almost no one uses.

P.S. If you disappear for a week tomorrow, what's the first thing that would collapse or significantly deteriorate?