Business succession: the marketing guide for Quebec's next generation of owners

Here is what we see in our transition mandates, and it repeats from one company to the next.

The marketing of an established SMB is almost never a documented system. It's a person. Often a marketing director who has been in the role for ten or fifteen years and carries in their head:

• the real seasonality of the market, not the one in the reports;
• the history with every agency: what was tried, what failed, what can be negotiated;
• the logic behind the budget: why this amount goes here and not there;
• the relationships with suppliers, media and partners;
• and a thousand micro-decisions a month that appear on no org chart.

When that person leaves, that knowledge leaves with them. Not out of bad faith: because nobody ever asked for it any other way than by working.

Try the test: if your marketing lead announced their departure in 90 days, what would be documented tomorrow morning? For most SMBs, the honest answer is: the account logins, and almost nothing else.

From the successor's point of view, undocumented marketing is an acquisition risk on par with aging equipment. Except it shows up in no standard due diligence.

Concretely, a buyer inherits four invisible things:

1. A budget already committed. Marketing budgets are decided months in advance. If the deal closes in the spring, the year's budget was built the previous fall by someone who may no longer be there to explain it.
2. Agency contracts that straddle the transition. Media agreements, creative mandates, licensed platforms. Some commitments run twelve or twenty-four months, and the person who negotiated them knows which clauses can be reopened.
3. Seasonality that does not forgive. In most industries, two or three windows a year make the number. Missing a window because the team was reorganizing is a hole you don't dig out of.
4. A team waiting to know. The people in place know how to execute. What disappears with the departure is the arbitration: what to prioritize, what to refuse, what to pay for.

The good news: this risk can be neutralized in a few weeks of structured work, on one condition, doing it while the key person is still there.

In our mandates, we work through four analysis blocks, in this order:

1. The typical week. What lands on the marketing director's desk, from where, how often, and what it triggers? It's the only way to measure the real load of the role, the one no job description captures.

2. The budget and its mechanics. Not just the amount: how it gets built, who approves it, how it gets adjusted during the year, and which decisions are already locked for the next twelve months.

3. Agencies and suppliers. The exact scope of each mandate, approval cycles, current commitments, and above all the negotiating leverage that vanishes if nobody knows the history.

4. The craft's subtleties. Lived seasonality, customer behavior by period, the quirks of the sales network. The kind of knowledge that takes years to build and one structured conversation to transfer.

The deliverable of this exercise fits in one question: what is the 20% of the role that produces 80% of the result? That 20% is what must be transferred first. The rest gets delegated, automated or dropped.

One point of method that changes everything: this exercise must be presented to the person in the role as what it is, the documentation of a role to prepare continuity. Not an evaluation of their performance. The difference between those two framings is the difference between generous collaboration and polite information hoarding.

Many Quebec transfers include a family or internal successor: someone competent, often younger, who already knows the company but has never run the marketing function.

The classic mistake is transferring the tasks without transferring the judgment. They know how to publish, coordinate, execute. But deciding what to cut when the budget tightens, refusing an agency proposal, arbitrating between two campaigns: that is learned through mentorship, not osmosis.

A serious marketing succession plan therefore includes three things: a period where the successor decides with a net (someone validates their calls), clear criteria to measure their autonomy, and a date when the net comes off.

When the marketing lead leaves during a transition, the buyer has three options. None is bad in itself; they fit different situations.

Hire a senior marketing director. The right option when the company has the size to keep that person busy full time and the means for an executive salary. The risk: recruiting that profile takes months, and the transition doesn't wait.

Hand everything to an agency. Works for execution. But an agency executes a strategy; it does not replace internal arbitration. Handing marketing leadership to an external supplier is asking the vendor to set their client's budget.

A transition fractional CMO. An experienced marketing leader, a few days a month, long enough to map the role, stabilize the operation and train the successor to autonomy. It's the option designed precisely for the transfer window: senior enough to arbitrate, without the cost or delay of a permanent hire.

If you are in the middle of an acquisition, or selling a business you want to hand over in working order, here are the five questions to settle before anyone leaves:

1. Is the marketing lead's typical week documented anywhere other than in their head?
2. Can next year's budget be built and defended by someone else?
3. Does every agency mandate have a written scope, a known end date and a negotiation history?
4. Has the successor already made a marketing decision with real consequences, alone?
5. Is there a written date when the transfer is considered complete?

Five yeses: your marketing transition is in order. Three or more nos: you are transferring a machine without its manual, and the manual leaves on a date you already know.

At Borgia, we support business transfers on exactly this: mapping the marketing role before a departure, quantifying what taking it over really requires, and training the successor to autonomy. It's a bounded mandate, with a written deliverable and a date.

If your business is in transfer, or will be within the next twenty-four months, let's talk before the knowledge walks out.

Discover the transition fractional CMO