Run The Region

Market-Level Succession Planning Nobody Writes Down

Everybody says they do succession at the market level. Almost nobody has the chart on paper. The chart is the whole thing, and the blank cells are the point.

Kiyong (Eric) Lee·Operations Executive·August 2026·9 min read

The short version

Succession at the single-unit level is easy to point at. Succession at the market level is invisible until the day you need it, and by then it is too late.
The core tool is a 2-deep chart. Every seat, two named successors underneath, blank cells left blank on purpose.
Ready-now has a real definition. Two weeks without escalation, a defensible weekly P&L, at least one recent hire, and the room already treats them as the second voice.
Ready-in-12-months only counts if it is wrapped in a stretch responsibility, a weekly coaching cadence, and a quarterly review.
Growth punishes weak benches first. The Zareen's 3-to-5 expansion is where I learned to stagger the promotions and hire external into the 12-month roles.

Nobody writes down market-level succession planning. Everybody says they do it. If you ask a regional director who their number two is at their best unit, you will get an answer. If you ask who the number two is at the unit that is quietly bleeding, you will get a long pause. The pause is the whole problem.

Succession at the single-unit level is easy to point at. There is a general manager, and there is or is not an assistant general manager, and everyone knows which. Succession at the market level is different work. You are not asking "who runs this unit if the general manager leaves." You are asking "who runs this district if the district manager leaves, who takes the market if the regional director gets promoted, and where do the four next-generation general managers come from when we open two new units next year." That work is invisible until the day you need it, and by then it is too late.

I did most of the succession work in my head for the first half of my career. Then Zareen's grew from three to five units in a year, and the head-in-a-notebook approach broke. This post is what replaced it.

The 2-deep chart per seat

The core tool is a two-deep chart. Every seat in the operating org, from general manager up, has two names underneath it. Not one. Two.

The reason it is two and not one is not paranoia. It is that one-deep is the same as zero-deep the day the successor gets poached, promoted, or personal-emergencies their way out. Two-deep is the smallest number that gives you the option to lose someone and still have a plan.

The chart is not fancy. Mine is a Google Sheet. Columns are: seat, current occupant, ready-now successor, ready-in-12-months successor, gap description. That is it. The value is not in the software. The value is in the discipline of having to fill in every column, and having to admit when a column is blank.

Blank columns are the whole point. A blank ready-now column at a unit is a red flag on the operating map. It means if the general manager leaves in the next 90 days, you are running the unit yourself or hiring externally under time pressure. Both are expensive. The blank column is telling you to invest.

Fig. 1 · Blank cells are not a failure to fill in the sheet. They are the point.

What "ready now" actually means

Everyone says "ready now" too freely, and it is the reason most succession plans do not survive contact with an actual succession. Ready now has a real definition. Test it against the following:

Can the successor run the unit for two weeks without escalation. Not can they cover a shift. Can they own a full pay period, including a truck delivery going wrong, a call-out, a guest complaint, and a labor variance conversation, without needing you.
Can they hold a weekly P&L review conversation and defend last week's numbers with specifics. Not can they read the P&L. Can they explain why the food cost moved 80 basis points, in real terms, without hedging.
Have they hired at least one team member in the last six months. Interviewing is a proxy for judgment. If they have not made a hire, you have not seen them make one, and you do not know how they do it.
Do the other unit team members treat them as the second voice already. This is the honest test. If the line cooks call the general manager for a decision the assistant general manager could have made, the assistant is not ready. The room votes with its behavior.

If any of those four are missing, the person is not ready now. They may be ready in three months. They may be ready in a year. They are not ready now. Do not lie to yourself on the chart. The lie is worse than the blank cell.

The blank cell tells you where to invest. The lie tells you nothing, and it costs you a full quarter the first time you have to use it.

What "ready in 12 months" means, concretely

The 12-month column is where most succession planning actually creates value, because it is the column that drives development. To put a name there, you need a real plan for what happens between now and month twelve.

A good 12-month plan has three parts.

One stretch responsibility that is theirs alone

Not shadowing. Not helping. Owning. Own the ordering. Own the schedule. Own the monthly regional operating review presentation for the unit. The specific thing matters less than the fact that the person can point to a piece of the operation and say "that is mine." Ownership grows judgment in a way that shadowing never does.

One weekly coaching cadence, on the calendar, protected

Thirty minutes a week with the person who is developing them, most often the general manager but sometimes the area director. Same day, same time, same agenda. Coaching without cadence is a wish. Cadence with even mediocre coaching moves the person forward every quarter.

One quarterly review against the ready-now criteria

Every ninety days you sit with them and score them, directly, against the four ready-now tests. You tell them where they are strong and where they are not there yet. The score is not the point. The conversation is the point. Both of you leave that meeting with the same picture of what still has to happen.

If a name is in the 12-month column without those three things wrapped around it, the name is aspirational, not planned.

The development plans that actually get done

Most development plans do not get done. Everyone writes them at the annual review, everyone files them, nobody looks at them again until next year, and by then the person has either taught themselves the missing skill or has left. The failure mode is universal. Here is what fixed it for me.

The plan lives in the weekly one-on-one, not in the annual review

Every weekly conversation between the general manager and the ready-in-12-months successor references one item from the plan. Not all of them. One. Rotating. That way the plan is present in the room fifty-two times a year, not once.

The plan has three items, not fifteen

Fifteen-item plans do not get done. Three-item plans do. Pick the three highest-leverage development moves. The other twelve become next year's plan, or they become obvious once these three are done.

The plan has a specific product, not a general skill

"Get better at cost control" is not a plan. "Own the weekly food cost report and present it to the district manager every Monday for the next twelve weeks" is a plan. The product is what you can check off.

Protecting the bench during fast growth

At Zareen's, when we went from three units to five in a year, the succession chart got tested in real time. Opening two new units meant we needed at least two more strong general managers and four more strong assistants, on top of maintaining the three units we already had. If we pulled the best assistant from each existing unit to run the new ones, we would have gutted the bench at every unit that was actually working.

Here is what we did instead. We promoted from the two-deep chart in a staggered pattern. First promotion pulled from the unit with the strongest ready-now successor. That unit got the transition, but it also got a real ready-now backfill. Second promotion pulled from a unit where the successor was ready-in-9-months and had been developed against a specific opening timeline for the previous two quarters. The other three units held their bench intact.

The point is not that our chart was perfect. The point is that having a chart meant we could see the trade-off before we made the promotion, instead of after. Without a chart, "who runs the new unit" is a name someone shouts in a room. With a chart, it is a decision you can weigh against the cost to every other unit you already run.

What happens when there is no succession plan

The absence of a succession plan does not look like a crisis. It looks like a series of small, expensive events that nobody connects.

Single point of failure per unit

A general manager gets sick. A general manager takes a personal week. A general manager quits. Any of those, on a unit without a real second-in-command, means the regional operator or the district manager parachutes in and runs the shift. That is high-cost cover, and it is happening because you did not invest lower-cost development a year ago.

Poached by competitors

Your best assistant general manager, who could have been a general manager in nine months if you had planned it, gets a general manager offer from a competitor across town and takes it. That is not disloyalty. That is you failing to make the internal path visible. When the internal path is invisible, the external offer is the only path.

No growth pipeline

You want to open two units next year. You do not have the operators. Now the decision is not "which two markets" but "can we open at all." Growth capacity is a succession problem, not a real estate one. Real estate is easy. People are not.

Culture drift at the unit level

When there is no ready-now successor, the general manager knows it, and the general manager knows they cannot take real time off, cannot delegate the hard conversations, cannot build the second voice. The unit runs on one person's stamina, and stamina is not a strategy.

What I would do differently

Two things I got wrong in the Zareen's expansion.

I did not start the succession work early enough. We built the chart in month three of the expansion planning. It should have been month one. The three months of lag cost us at least one hire we could have promoted instead.
I underweighted external hires as bench builders. I was too committed to promoting from within. In a fast-growth window you need to hire externally into ready-in-12-months roles too, because your internal bench cannot generate people fast enough. The external hire, developed against the same 12-month plan, gives you optionality.

The point

Succession planning at the market level is not a document. It is a discipline. It is a chart you look at every month with your leadership team, a set of criteria you refuse to lie to yourself about, and a set of weekly coaching cadences that make sure the ready-in-12-months names actually become ready in 12 months.

Nobody writes it down because nobody wants to be caught in the honest gap between what they said about their bench and what the chart actually says. That gap is the whole reason to write it down. Write it down. Look at it. Fund the development. The next opening, promotion, and resignation will find your chart whether you built it or not.

Building the succession bench for a growing region?

I work with multi-unit groups planning market expansions and with regional leaders who inherited a region without a real bench. If you are trying to draw the 2-deep chart for the first time, I am happy to compare notes.

Get in touch

Questions people ask

What is market-level succession planning?

Market-level succession planning is the discipline of knowing, in writing, who runs every seat in the region if the current occupant leaves. It is not a single-unit exercise. It maps general manager, district manager, and regional seats, with two named successors per seat, and it lives on a chart you review monthly with your leadership team. Most operators do this work in their head. The moment the region has more than three units, the head is not enough.

What is a 2-deep chart?

A 2-deep chart lists every seat in the operating org, from general manager up, with two names underneath each seat. One is the ready-now successor. The other is the ready-in-12-months successor. Two names, not one, because one-deep is the same as zero-deep the day the successor gets poached, promoted, or personal-emergencies their way out. Two-deep is the smallest number that gives you real optionality.

What does ready now actually mean for a successor?

Ready now means the person can run the unit for two weeks without escalation, can hold a weekly P&L review and defend the numbers with specifics, has made at least one hire in the last six months, and is already treated as the second voice by the team. If any of those four are missing, the person is not ready now. They may be ready in three months or in a year, but not now. Do not lie to yourself on the chart.

What does ready in 12 months require?

Three things wrapped around the name. One stretch responsibility that is theirs alone, not shadowing. One weekly coaching cadence, on the calendar, protected. One quarterly review against the ready-now criteria. If a name is in the 12-month column without those three, the name is aspirational, not planned, and the person will not actually be ready in 12 months.

How do you protect the bench during fast growth?

Stagger the promotions off the chart. Pull first from the unit with the strongest ready-now successor, so that unit gets both the promotion and a real backfill. Pull second from a unit where the successor has been developed against a known opening timeline. Do not gut every unit's bench to fill new units. And add external hires into ready-in-12-months roles too, because internal benches cannot regenerate as fast as growth demands.

What happens when a region has no succession plan?

Four failure modes that compound. Single point of failure at every unit, so a general manager sickness becomes a regional crisis. Assistants get poached by competitors because the internal path is invisible. Growth stalls because you do not have operators to open new units. And unit culture drifts because the general manager knows they cannot take real time off or delegate the hard conversations. None of it looks like a crisis. All of it is expensive.

When should you start succession planning in a new regional seat?

The draft chart should exist by day 90. Refined by month six. Reviewed monthly from then on. If you wait until you need it, you are already behind by at least two quarters. The Zareen's expansion from three to five units taught me that the succession chart should be a month-one artifact for any growth market, not a month-nine one.