... The hitherto studies concerning SMEs management and development in Poland mainly concentrate on the statistical dimension of data about enterprises, their size, employment and activity profile (GUS, 2019b;PARP, 2019), as well as their legal forms (Jagodziński, 2015;Kosmal, 2019). Some of the reports and publications dealing with SMEs concern their innovativeness (Okoń-Horodyńska and Zachorowska-Mazurkiewicz, 2008;MPiT and Siemens, 2018;Ribau et al., 2017), macro-economic surroundings (Wach, 2016;Zygmunt and Zygmunt, 2016), legal surroundings (Kabut and Malesa, 2015;ZPiP, 2017), institutional support (Lachiewicz, 2016;Wójcik-Karpacz and Rudawska, 2016), labour costsy (Chłąd, 2016;Papaj, 2016), access to technology (Kaliszczak and Pawłowska-Mielech, 2019;Nowak and Wieteska, 2020) and to financing (Korzeniewska, 2016;Steinerowska-Streb, 2015). The subject of management succession appears in literature mainly in the context of family companies, where property and firm management are transmitted between generations (KPMG, 2020;IBR, 2019), whereas the issue of succession "from an entrepreneur to a professional manager" (Ballini, 2020;Blikle, 2013) is referred to extremely rarely, though it is crucial for the Polish economy, in which the first generation of entrepreneurs is just approaching the age of retirement. ...