About
About Succession Navigator
Developed by Regan McKay in July 2026, and in active development.
The north star
Succession Navigator aims to be the fastest, easiest and most successful path for advisory practices to establish and independently deliver a high-quality succession-planning service for farming families.
I never expected to end up working in succession planning.
My background is in commercial software and business, building and launching B2B technology products and businesses. After moving from Melbourne to regional Victoria, I became involved in developing a succession planning service in Gippsland and quickly saw a problem I knew how to help solve.
The professional expertise was already there. Accountants, solicitors, financial planners and other advisers knew their respective areas. What was missing was a practical process to bring the family, the information and that professional expertise together.
The work also became personal. My own family experienced the consequences of succession planning that never happened. The resulting dispute over our family farm damaged relationships across generations and ended family traditions that had been part of my childhood.
That experience shaped why I built Succession Navigator: to make succession easier to start, easier for advisers to guide and easier for families to work through before uncertainty becomes conflict.
The book
The Ripple Effect
A story about what happens when the conversations keep getting postponed
Alongside Succession Navigator, I have written The Ripple Effect, the first book in the Succession Series.
The book follows a fictional Australian farming family across several generations as they work through the questions that so many families leave unresolved: who will take over, what retirement actually requires, what is fair, who owns and controls what, whether the next generation genuinely wants the farm and what happens when assumptions are allowed to stand in place of conversations.
It is a story about the human side of succession—about delay, family expectations, money, identity, difficult conversations and the options that can quietly disappear when decisions are continually pushed into the future.
The book also includes practical tools to help families begin the conversation, including a First Conversation Tool and a Succession Readiness Check.
Writing it was another way of addressing the same problem that led me to build Succession Navigator: helping families begin before circumstances force the conversation on them.
Coming soon
The Ripple Effect will be available through Amazon shortly.
If you’d like an early copy, get in touch.
The second book
It’s Time We Talked About the Farm
A practical guide for sons and daughters who want to start the succession conversation
It’s Time We Talked About the Farm is the second book in the Succession series. It is written for the son or daughter rather than the parent: the adult child who can see that nothing has been settled about the future of the family farm, who has raised it once or twice and got nowhere, and who would rather not spend another two years guessing.
The book does not try to solve succession. It has one job, which is to help you start one real conversation, with one person, in the next month. It covers why parents delay and why that is usually not stubbornness, how the same question sounds from the other side of the table, what tends to open the subject and what shuts it down, and how to recover when it goes badly. The harder parts, retirement, money, fairness, brothers and sisters, are dealt with honestly, without pretending any of them has to be settled before you can begin. Each of the twenty-one chapters ends with a page you can actually use: opening lines, questions, worksheets. Nothing in it is legal, tax or financial advice, and it does not tell you what a fair outcome looks like, because that is not something a book can know about your family.
You do not need it worked out before you begin. What makes these conversations go badly is rarely a lack of goodwill; more often it is a set of private assumptions that have never been laid beside each other, and that is something one honest conversation can start to put right. If you read this book, buy nothing else, and have one useful conversation with your parents, it has done its job.
Coming soon
It’s Time We Talked About the Farm will be available through Amazon shortly.
If you’d like an early copy, get in touch.
Where things stand
An honest picture
Succession Navigator is a growing platform with early adviser partners, built by one person. It is not a large company with a long client list, and pretending otherwise would be a strange way to start a relationship built on trust.
What's real today
A working multi-tenant platform with a complete adviser workflow, a built-in demonstration case, and early adviser partners across Gippsland and beyond. Every screen on this site is the real product.
What's still moving
A direct-to-family product is planned but not finished, and isn't available today. Anything still in progress is flagged as such on the page it appears on.
Talk to me directly
It's a small operation, so the discovery session is with me. Bring the difficult questions.
A conversation about your practice, the opportunity in your farming client base, and whether it's worth taking further. .