For more than 22 years, Jürgen Dukat managed and expanded the gardening and landscaping business that his father Armin Dukat founded in Belm in 1958. In 2014, at the age of 52, he made one of the most important decisions of his professional life: he sold the family business to his long-time employees Birgit Koormann and Sven Ernst. The internal generational change was a course-setting decision of which he says today: ‘I think it is very important to take care of the succession in the company at an early stage. I had my plan and was looking forward to a new phase in my life.

Our guest author Enno Kähler, contact person for business start-ups and business successions at the Osnabrück - Emsland - Grafschaft Bentheim Chamber of Commerce and Industry - describes a successful generation change in a business from the district of Osnabrück.

Immediately after completing his studies, Jürgen Dukat took over the management of the family business in 1991. Gardening Ducat in Belm. The transition worked well back then, because my father took a step back and let me do what I wanted to do,” the engineer recalls. He says that when it came to succession, he himself initially thought of a succession through his children. But when it became clear that there would be no succession within the family, he offered Birgit Koormann and Sven Ernst the takeover of his company in spring 2013.

We had talked about it briefly beforehand and could basically imagine taking it over,” Birgit Koormann remembers, “but when the time came, I still needed some time to think about it and discuss it with the family,” the 42-year-old state-certified horticultural technician reports.

Only seven months for generation change in the company

They wanted to make the change within seven months. In addition to the day-to-day business of customer service, planning and construction management, Birgit Koormann, Jürgen Dukat and Sven Ernst held talks with lawyers, tax advisors and the company’s bank. In November 2013, the preparations were completed and the aim was to inform customers and suppliers about the succession by Christmas mail. Before that, however, the staff were to hear the news: “It was very quiet at the time, most of the staff were visibly surprised,” says Birgit Koormann of the evening when she and Jürgen Dukat and Sven Ernst announced the results of their initially internal negotiations.

For the state-certified garden and landscaping technician Sven Ernst, the preparation for the change and the first months in the new role were ‘an exciting time’. Most things, he says, Birgit Koormann and he left unchanged, implementing small changes carefully. Both successors see the fact that they have worked in the company before as an advantage. Of course you have to be a boss, think in business terms and sometimes make decisions that are unpopular,” says Koormann. But she also knows that she can rely on her staff and delegate responsibility to them. This does not only apply to holiday planning, where Ernst and Koormann would like to “take themselves out of the equation” as far as possible in the future.

Transferor gradually withdraws

All in all, we succeeded in making a very harmonious transition,” the former entrepreneur and his two successors agree today. They are well aware that this does not always have to be the case. In our circle of experience with landscaping companies, there are a few examples where the succession failed,” Jürgen Dukat knows. He sees one reason for this in the economic dependence of the successor, which often continues to exist. His most important experience: “In order for the successor to be able to act freely, the senior entrepreneur should take himself completely out of the company, just like my father did”. Therefore, it was clear to him from the beginning that he, together with his wife, who was in charge of the company’s accounting, would only accompany his successors in their new task for a limited period of time until the end of 2014.