Built to Change hands
Get your succession choices back.
Three days for owners of established family businesses who want the freedom to hand over, sell or appoint a CEO, without leaving behind a business only they can run.
The situation
However you structure it, every exit from a family business comes down to one of three moves. It passes to your family. It passes to a buyer. Or it passes to professional management while you step back to the board. In every case the business changes hands: sometimes the hands that own it, always the hands that run it.
And right now, be honest: could yours?
Most family businesses grew the sensible way: investing just enough in systems and processes to get by, or to fund the next product, the next machine, the next customer. The gaps were covered by people who've been there forever. And every decision that matters still finds its way to you, even now, even if you've told everyone you've stepped back.
None of that was a mistake. But it has quietly tethered you to the business, whether or not there's a succession plan in the drawer. A successor can't take over a machine only you can drive. A buyer won't pay full price for a business that walks out the door with you. A hired CEO can't run a company where every big call routes around them to your mobile. Until the tether is cut, no version of leaving is genuinely open, whatever the plan says.
Built to Change Hands is three days out of the business, in a room of owners on the same tether, doing the first honest work of cutting it.
one path chosen
and invitation
inside the ticket
in the room
How it works
Two days to make every path possible.
One day to walk yours.
Whoever takes this business off your hands, a daughter, a buyer or a CEO, needs the same four things: reporting that tells the truth, knowledge that's written down, decisions that don't route to you, and systems a stranger can understand. Days one and two build them. Day three applies them to your path.
One hour of pre-work
A short questionnaire and a simple data checklist: your org chart, the reports you rely on, a list of your systems. The three days run on your real business, not your memory of it. That hour is the only homework in the entire program.
Arrivals
Welcome drinks and canapes by the pool. No content, no name tags doing heavy lifting. Faces to names before the work starts.
Face it
Map exactly where the business depends on you: knowledge, systems, decisions, relationships, key people. The afternoon is the path decision framework, and it starts personal before it goes commercial: what do you actually want your next chapter to be? If you haven't chosen your path yet, this is the day you get a structured way to choose. Deciding is part of the work.
Build it
Draft the skeleton of all four assets against your own pre-work, then build the one your business most depends on, properly, with peer review in size-matched groups. One real asset beats four half-finished ones; your roadmap sequences the rest. That evening you confirm your stream and dine with your Day 3 cohort.
Walk your path
Three parallel streams, one for each way a business changes hands. You attend the one matching your path, then the whole room comes back together for commitments, the bar, and the closing dinner.
The reward
A morning fishing charter out of Noosa, then a barbecue lunch back on shore, eating what the group caught. The program is complete on Thursday, so fly home if you need to and miss nothing. Not a boat person? Skip the charter and just come for the barbecue. Partners welcome.
Day three
Choose your stream
Each stream takes what you built on days one and two and carries it to a different finish line. You choose on Wednesday evening, not before.
Stream one
Next Generation
Bring your successor. Together you'll build the Handover Map: everything they need to run the business without ringing you from the car park, plus how the family makes decisions once your vote is no longer the casting one.
- The Handover Map, built side by side
- The reporting your successor will actually run with
- A 12-month handover roadmap both generations agree on
For owners handing over to family. Come as a pair.
Stream two
Sale Ready
Face the questions a buyer's advisers will ask, two years early, while there's still time to act on the answers. And be ready for the approach that comes before you are: they usually do.
- The Buyer's-Eye Audit of your own business
- Red flags ranked by deal impact and effort to fix
- A considered response for the unsolicited approach
- A plain-English brief for your deal team
For owners planning a sale within three years.
Stream three
Beyond the Founder
Build the operating environment a professional CEO needs to succeed, and the ground rules that let you genuinely step back to the board rather than deciding from a different chair.
- The CEO-Ready Pack: reporting, delegations, systems
- An owner's charter: what you keep, what you hand over
- A pre-boarding timeline, before you even recruit
For owners appointing a non-family CEO. Bring your chair.
Every stream is small by design. Between six and ten owners, working on their own businesses, with facilitated peer input from people facing the same decision.
What you take home
You'll leave with
- An honest map of where the business currently depends on you
- The Transferable Core: all four assets skeletoned, the most load-bearing one built properly
- Your stream toolkit: the Handover Map, the Buyer's-Eye Audit, or the CEO-Ready Pack
- A 12-month roadmap, sequenced so the transition date stops slipping
- Confidence in the path you've chosen, because you chose it with your eyes open
- A peer group of owners on the same road, which you will not find at home
What three days can and can't do
Let's be straight. Three days will not unstick a business that took thirty years to get stuck, and anyone promising otherwise is selling you something. What three days will do is give you the honest map, the chosen path, the first real assets, a sequenced plan for the 12 to 36 months that do the unsticking, and a room full of proof that owners like you get this done.
You'll leave knowing exactly what the next year looks like. That's the claim, and it's one we can keep.
The rhythm
A working program, not a holiday with worksheets
The days are full and the work is real. Every day runs the same rhythm: working sessions until 4.30pm, work finished, pens down, then the bar, then a group dinner. Tuesday's dinner has a fireside conversation with an owner who's lived it. Wednesday you dine with your stream. Nobody eats alone and nobody leaves with homework.
The holiday bit comes on Friday, after the work is done, and you'll have earned it.
The reason we're at RACV Noosa isn't the pool. It's that owners think differently a long way from the factory floor.
The room
Who's in the room, and what stays there
You'll be asked to be honest about your business in front of other owners, so the room is built to make that safe.
Chatham House rule
The whole program runs under it. What's said in the room stays in the room.
No competitors
One business per niche and region. You will not be mapping your dependencies next to the bloke from up the road.
No adviser seats
The only advisers in the room are the ones facilitating it, bound by the same rule. Nobody is listening for deal flow.
Genuine peers
Owners of established operational businesses, typically $50m to $150m revenue. Working groups are matched by size and complexity.
It's why places are by enquiry rather than a buy button. We curate the room so you can be honest in it.
If you're the successor
Days one and two are as much yours as theirs. You'll map the business you're inheriting with your own eyes rather than through thirty years of someone else's assumptions, help design the reporting you'll actually run it with, and on Thursday build the Handover Map together. For many pairs, day one is the first time both generations have seen the business laid out the same way. That changes the conversation on the drive home.
Who's running this
Shane Williams
Shane works with the owners, boards and family offices of privately held operational businesses, from manufacturers to growers, processors and logistics operators, on one problem: businesses that can't run without their founder. He has seen what buyers' advisers find, what hired CEOs walk into, and what the next generation inherits, usually after it's too late to fix cheaply. This program exists to move that discovery earlier.
He learnt his trade over two decades running technology through the growth, transformation and succession of some of Australia's most complex businesses, including News Corp and REA Group. The years since have been spent where that experience does its best work: in the sheds, packhouses, factories and boardrooms of family businesses, and behind the microphone of the Manufacturing Tech Australia podcast.
The stream facilitators
Alongside Shane, the day three streams are facilitated by certified family business consultants, including advisers who come from multi-generational family businesses themselves. They bring the disciplines that sit around the systems work: family governance, transition dynamics, and the longer view of what a family sustains across generations. Every facilitator is bound by the same room rules as everyone else.
After the program
A straight answer about the obvious question
Yes, Shane advises businesses like yours for a living. And no, nobody will pitch you in the room. No selling at Built to Change Hands is a rule, and it binds the facilitators too.
What's included afterwards: your private 30-minute session during the program, a 30-day follow-up call once the roadmap has met reality, a facilitated 90-day reconvene call with your stream, and an invitation to the alumni dinner at the next intake. If you want help beyond that, you'll know where to find him. If you don't, the toolkits are yours and they work without him.
The investment
$11,500 Plus GST · All-inclusive · By enquiry
- A one-bedroom suite for four nights, Monday to Thursday
- Monday welcome drinks and canapes
- All working sessions, workbooks and toolkits
- All meals, including the fireside dinner, your stream dinner and the closing dinner
- The nightly bar shout after pens down
- A private 30-minute session for your business during the program
- The 30-day follow-up call and the 90-day stream reconvene
- An invitation to the alumni dinner at the next intake
Owner and successor pairs, and owner and chair pairs, attend at 1.6 times a single place and count as one business throughout. The Friday charter and barbecue is an optional add-on at around $500 a head.
Your stay, and theirs
Your ticket includes a one-bedroom suite: king bed, sixty square metres, balcony or terrace. Upgrades to the resort's apartments and villas, up to three-bedroom villas with private plunge pools, are available at an additional charge, and the conference discount carries across your full stay.
Bringing your partner? Family members receive 25 per cent off the resort's restaurants and facilities, plus a $200 voucher for the restaurants, bars or spa. Many attendees make it a week.
Who it's for
Founders and custodians of established private and family businesses, typically $50m to $150m revenue. Built for businesses that make, grow and move things: manufacturing, industrial, agriculture and horticulture, logistics, distribution and contracting. Planning a transition in the next one to five years, or wanting the freedom to. If you're near the band rather than in it, enquire anyway. Fit matters more than the number.
Who it's not for
Anyone looking for estate planning, tax structuring, a valuation pitch or a recruitment shortcut. Those all matter, and your advisers do them well. This program is about the thing underneath all of them: whether the business itself can run without you.
If three days away from the business feels impossible, sit with that for a moment.
That feeling is the problem this program exists to fix, and it does not fix itself.
Places are by enquiry
Tell Shane about your business
and your likely path
Every enquiry is read and answered personally by Shane, within two business days. No funnel, no sales team, no obligation. If the fit isn't right, he'll say so.
Enquire about a placeBuilt to Change Hands is presented by Shane Williams. RACV Noosa Resort, Monday 14 to Thursday 17 September 2026, with the optional charter and barbecue on Friday 18. Limited to 18 owners. The whole program runs under the Chatham House rule. No adviser seats, no selling in the room. Prices exclude GST.