We have to watch that our ego doesn’t cut into the value of everything we built. That goes for an organization as much as for a business about to be sold or handed over. And with the wave of business successions already underway and still building, it’s even more true.
So for the owners and organization managers who will be part of the next wave at the top: don’t keep your information in your heads. And that goes for your key employees too. They can have a direct and very negative impact if they walk out with their knowledge.
Me, I have to do it in every engagement. Every business and every organization should do it too, for their own benefit and so the organization lasts.
Here’s why I’m bringing it up this week, and what you can do with it right now.
The wave shows up in the numbers
In 2023, 11,755 SMBs changed hands in Quebec, the highest number since the Observatoire du repreneuriat started tracking it. That’s more than 194,000 jobs that stayed in place.
This isn’t just a Quebec thing. Across Canada, 61% of SMBs are owned by people aged 50 and over, according to Statistics Canada’s Survey on Financing and Growth of Small and Medium Enterprises.
The preparation isn’t keeping up. According to the Indice entrepreneurial québécois, 58.9% of owners plan to sell or hand over within ten years. Of those, 55.6% don’t know the market value of what they built, and fewer than 7% have a written succession plan.
The number that stuck with me most
In a Canadian Federation of Independent Business survey, 2,479 owners were asked what’s blocking their succession planning. The same answer came back from 39% of them: the business depends too much on their active involvement. That comes right after finding a buyer and setting a price.
Finding a buyer, setting a price, those depend on the market. This one doesn’t. It’s the only one of the three that gets settled from the inside.
And I want to be clear on one thing. Feeling important in your own organization isn’t a fault. It’s what kept the place standing for years. When you’re the one who knows how client A wants their deliveries, how to fix the machine when it makes that noise, and why that supplier gets invoiced in two steps, the business moves fast. It’s just that the same reflex that built the value is the one that caps it when it’s time to sell.
I can’t tell you that documenting is worth 20% more on the price. Nobody measures that. If you see a percentage floating around on this, ask where it comes from: you won’t get an answer. Canadian chartered business valuators do have a notion of a discount for key person dependence, but their own bulletin puts no number on it. What is measured is that owners themselves say their business depends too much on them, and that this is what’s blocking them.
What I’ve seen
My engagements are temporary, six to eighteen months. Clients ask me to document properly, so I do. Right now, in a large organization in my region, in education, I built a knowledge base for the technology team, so they can support the other teams during the engagement and after I leave.
On my side, it’s clear. Clients ask for it, and they’re right to, and I’m already set up to serve them on that.
When I look at the businesses themselves, though, it seems less clear, and people forget about it. I see it all the time: plenty of procedural workarounds, and nothing documented. What builds up over the years is honestly impressive. A way of working that stacked up over decades, that holds together, and that lives in the heads of a few people.
My read on what comes next: someone walks in to buy, looks at that, and thinks “this is a whole different animal, not sure I want to take this on.”
And it can be fixed.
What AI changes, and what it doesn’t
Documenting what the organization does, then optimizing it, used to look like a big project you keep pushing back. That’s where AI shows up at the right time.
Here are the only two serious measurements I found, with their limits. A lab had ten standard operating procedures written with an AI assistant fed the device manuals and the package inserts: drafting time dropped by about 91%, and on the study’s own scoring grid, the assisted procedures were more complete than the ones written by hand. That’s one site, ten documents, no control group, and the author himself asks for it to be validated elsewhere.
The other one comes from a Stanford benchmark, run on close to 3,000 workflow demonstrations. The best models recover 88% of the steps of a process shown to them on video, but when it comes to verifying that the work was done correctly, their score falls below 0.3 out of 1. Worth noting: this benchmark measures extraction from a video, not dictation. It isn’t quite the move I’m suggesting further down.
Translated for your office: AI writes the draft fast, and writes it well. It doesn’t know whether it’s right. That’s where your judgment, and your people’s judgment, makes the difference. And that’s good news, because it’s exactly the part you can do yourself, with no technical skills at all.
And the successor starts from that base and pushes it further. Document structure and AI, the two together, that’s the foundation that raises the value.
One last thing, and this one is my opinion, not a measurement. With the number of businesses that will be up for sale at the same time, there’s going to be competition between sellers. And when two similar businesses show up in front of the same successor, the one that transfers without its owner keeps the buyer. The other one watches them move on to the next file.
Where to start this week
Pick one process. Just one. The one only you know how to do, or the one that sits and waits for you when you’re not there.
This week, record yourself explaining it out loud, or dictate it to your AI assistant. Ask it for the draft procedure. Then correct it. That’s where your judgment counts. And file it somewhere another person will find it without having to ask you.
Start again whenever you get the chance. Ten processes out of your head is already a different business.
So where is it, your process that nobody else knows how to do?
Sources
- Observatoire du repreneuriat Québec, Étude nationale du repreneuriat, 3e édition, August 20, 2026 (2023 data, base of 1,886,015 SMBs from Statistics Canada).
- Réseau Mentorat, Indice entrepreneurial québécois 2022 (collected from December 2022 to February 2023; the entrepreneur portion is not a random sample, the report says so itself).
- Canadian Federation of Independent Business, Se préparer au tsunami de successions, January 10, 2023 (2,479 Canadian owners, margin of error of 2%, 19 times out of 20).
- BDC, Fusions et acquisitions, un avantage pour les PME canadiennes, January 28, 2026, which cites Statistics Canada’s Survey on Financing and Growth of Small and Medium Enterprises 2023 for the 61%.
- A. N. Kaftan, AI-assisted drafting of standard operating procedures, Scandinavian Journal of Clinical and Laboratory Investigation, 2026 (ten procedures, one site, no control group).
- R. Wornow et al. (Stanford), WONDERBREAD, a benchmark of 2,928 workflow demonstrations, 2024.
