As a designated Family Enterprise Advisor™ who was born into a third generation business family, Shauna Feth has been actively and effectively promoting, educating and supporting outreach programs for entrepreneurs and business families for over 11 years.

Feth, who is President and CEO of the Alberta Chambers of Commerce, based in Edmonton, with 107 Chambers in the province representing more than 22,000 businesses, says more and more businesses these days are looking to transition.

“You might have heard things like the ‘Great Retirement’ and those types of titles attached to some reports and articles that have been written. But we are within the next five years looking at unprecedented transition in senior leadership,” she says.

“There’s entrepreneurs that have started these businesses now wanting to access what are their options. So we really need to be thinking about as communities, as provinces, as countries, what we need to do to support them in that transition. What conversations? It’s really about the communication and the conversations that need to happen now because it takes time.

“None of this stuff happens overnight. It doesn’t matter whether you’re transitioning to a family business member or whether you’re looking to scale up to sell, whether or not you have some sort of exit strategy in place. There’s all the planning on the back side of that that needs to take place as well. We just need to really be supporting people. In my role with the Chambers, this is something that I’m very focused on. How are we supporting those Alberta businesses that are critical to communities, sustain operations and find that next buyer or transition to a family member if that’s something they want to do.”

Feth has been a panelist and moderator at Business Transitions Forums in Alberta and she has sat on the advisory committee for the event.

The next Alberta Forum is May 1 in Calgary.

“(The Business Transitions Forums) provide that critical kind of starting point. Business owners who don’t know where to start, (the Forums) are fantastic to kind of see what are the options and opportunities out there for them and what does transition look like for them,” says Feth.

“It explores all of the spaces of transition which is really exciting to me because it really highlights the opportunities that are available but it also highlights too the work that needs to be done. For the most part, I like to say when you do your business plan that’s when you should be talking about your transition and your succession planning. It should be not integrated into your operations that you’re paying attention to it and working on all the pieces that propel you forward to effective transition, whatever that looks like.

“That’s why (Forums) are so exciting for business owners who really don’t know, because some of the topics that are coming out are very important. Things like how does your business run without you and the good, the bad and the different in transitioning so that business owners really understand effectively where they need to start. It also provides those resources that they need to start. They understand who they can talk to, who they can reach out to if they need to further conversation around their own transition.”

(Mario Toneguzzi is a veteran of the media industry for more than 40 years and named in 2021 a Top Ten Business Journalist in the world and only Canadian)