Here’s a question I like to ask business owners, and it usually gets a long pause before an answer: if you stepped away for three months starting tomorrow, no phone, no email, what would happen to your business?
For a lot of owners, the honest answer is that things would fall apart fairly quickly. Not because their business isn’t successful. Often it’s very successful. It’s because success and stability aren’t the same thing, and a lot of us build the first without ever building the second.
The succession gap nobody talks about
Research from Gallup, done in partnership with JPMorganChase and the Kauffman Foundation, found that among business owners nearing retirement, roughly a quarter don’t have a clear plan to sell or transfer ownership. Among solo and smaller business owners, that number is far worse. Only about a third have a clear plan to transfer the business at all, meaning most either plan to simply close it down or genuinely don’t know what happens next.
Think about what that means. Years, sometimes decades, of work, relationships, and reputation, with no real plan for what happens to any of it. That’s not a distant retirement problem. It’s a risk that sits quietly in the business every single day, because the same lack of structure that makes succession hard is usually the same thing that makes the business fragile if anything unexpected happens sooner.
Why this is bigger than an exit plan
Real strategic stability isn’t just about what happens when you eventually leave. It’s about whether your business can absorb a bad quarter, a key employee leaving, a major client walking away, or your own unexpected absence, without the whole thing wobbling. Businesses that could survive any of those things tend to have a few things in common: decisions get made with real information instead of gut feel alone, leadership isn’t a single point of failure, and there’s an actual plan for what happens next, not just an assumption that there will be time to figure it out later.
Where to start
You don’t need to have succession fully mapped out this year. What you need is an honest look at where the biggest gaps actually are, so you’re building toward stability on purpose instead of hoping it shows up on its own.
That’s exactly what the Business Stability Assessment is designed to help you see.
Take the Business Stability Assessment →
And if long term strategy and stability is the piece you’ve been putting off, that’s exactly what we work on together. Learn more about Strategic Advisory →
Source: Gallup, in partnership with JPMorganChase and the Kauffman Foundation, business owner succession planning research, 2024.