A Story About Succession

The adviser from the bank opens her folder and asks a question I have been avoiding for years.

There are three of us in the meeting room: the adviser, my daughter Katrin and me. On the table lies the application for the new laser system, a good piece of business that will keep us busy for the next ten years. I am Werner Halbig, sixty-two, and for thirty-four years I have run this company that my father founded. Metalwork, eighty people, a hall on the edge of the village that smells of oil and hot steel. I know every weld seam in here.

The adviser runs her finger along a form and says pleasantly: “Herr Halbig, for the term of the loan we still need something on the succession arrangement. How is that planned in your case?”

The room is silent. I feel Katrin beside me holding her breath. She has been in the business for nine years, studied business administration, knows the customers and the figures better than I do. Everyone in the company knows she is the successor. Nobody has said it out loud. It sits there like a crate nobody touches.

“That’s all arranged,” I hear myself say. “My daughter is here, after all.” And then I talk on quickly about the laser system, about delivery times and interest rates, so that the question stays in its corner.

In the afternoon Katrin is standing in my office. A regular customer has called, a larger order, and she has promised him a delivery date that she agreed with the workshop first. A good date, cleanly calculated. I listen, I nod, and then I say, almost as a reflex: “Call him again. Two days more, better safe than sorry.” She looks at me, only briefly. “I spoke to Marco, it works.” “Call him anyway.” She leaves. She does not turn round in the doorway.

I stay sitting and know that her date was better than mine. I overruled it without a reason I could justify to myself. I am holding on. I notice it and do it anyway.

Two weeks later my tax adviser is sitting with me, Herr Grieshaber, who has done the books for thirty years. We go through the accounts, figure by figure, as always. At the end he puts the pen down, looks at me over his glasses and asks drily: “Werner, one more thing. If you are gone tomorrow, who signs? Is that written down anywhere, or is it only in your head?”

I want to answer quickly and say nothing. It is not about the signature on the paper. It is about the fact that I have owed an answer for years, to my daughter, to the company, to myself. Grieshaber waits. He asked three years ago too; back then I dodged it. Today I notice that dodging is also a decision, only one I am loading onto Katrin.

“It’s in my head,” I say quietly. “And that’s where it stays, because I don’t dare.”

Grieshaber nods, as if he had been waiting for that one sentence. “Then start. One step is enough for a beginning.”

That same evening I go into the workshop, when the last colleagues have already left. Katrin is standing at her computer doing the scheduling for next week. I stand next to her, and for the first time in a long while I do not know what to do with my hands.

“That customer date the other week,” I say. “Yours was right. I overruled it because I could, without a good reason. I’m sorry.”

She looks up, surprised. “Dad, that was ages ago.”

“It isn’t the date,” I say. “It’s the pattern behind it. I have been putting off the handover for years. You wait, and I act as though the question weren’t in the room. That wasn’t fair.”

For a moment neither of us says anything. Then I sit down on the stool beside her. “I want us to make a plan. One with a date on it. And I’ll start straight away: from next month you get signing authority, and you introduce the new laser system, from the first order to the acceptance test. Without me interfering.”

Katrin puts her hand on the keyboard and leaves it there. “You know I’ve wanted this for years.”

“I know,” I say. “And I also know that letting go is harder for me than any negotiation I have ever conducted. This company is my father, and it is my life. But if I hold on to it until I can’t any more, I’m giving away the best years you still have ahead of you here.”

She smiles, and her eyes are wet. “Then let’s set a date. With Grieshaber, with the bank, with everyone.”

I stand up, and something in me is lighter than it has been for a long time. The hall lies dark behind us, the machines at rest. Today I have built nothing, delivered nothing, welded nothing. And yet for the first time in years I have moved the most important thing.

Shaping a succession does not mean waiting for the right moment. It means saying the unsaid while you still have the strength to shape the handover yourself. Letting go is not an ending. It is the last great act of leadership I owe my company.