A February 2026 report from the McKinsey Institute for Economic Mobility estimates 6 million small and medium-size businesses will face ownership transitions by 2035, representing as much as $5 trillion in enterprise value. McKinsey describes this as the Great Ownership Transfer and flags a troubling undercurrent: Without deliberate preparation on the part of owners, a significant portion of these businesses will close rather than successfully change hands.
The Exit Planning Institute’s 2023 National State of Owner Readiness Report, based on surveys of more than 1,100 privately held businesses, found that 78% of owners still lacked a formal transition team and that roughly 80% of the average owner’s net worth remains concentrated in the business itself.
The Raymond James 2025 Business Owner Report, drawing on a national survey of 540 privately held business owners conducted in April 2025, found that 56% planned to partially or fully exit their financial stake within five years, with that number climbing to 88% over a decade. At the same time, 44% acknowledged that the business represents more than half of their personal wealth. These are owners actively counting down toward a transition, many of them without the structural preparation to make it work in their favor.
Research published in March 2026 by Russ Alan Prince and Paul Saganey in Financial Advisor magazine offers a sobering frame for all of this. Across the population of business owners who intend to sell, only about 6% actually maximize family wealth in the process. Some never complete a transaction at all. Others close a deal and discover that taxes, structural decisions and missed planning windows consumed far more than they expected. The owners in that 6% made no different bet on the market. They simply started earlier, coordinated more deliberately and gave themselves time to act on what good planning surfaced.
In my experience, a business transition that accounts fully for tax exposure, estate design, personal independence and family readiness typically requires three to five years of coordinated work to execute well.
Why The Deal Closed But The Transition Didn’t
According to the Exit Planning Institute, more than 3 in 4 business owners report profound regret within one year of selling, and among those, 60% trace it to the same root: No personal plan existed for life after the business was gone.
The Work Before The Calls Start
The questions that drive genuine readiness are seldom the ones advisors raise when a deal is already on the horizon. How much financial independence does this owner actually need? How dependent is the business on the owner’s daily presence, and how does that dependency affect what a buyer is likely to pay? Are the drivers of enterprise value durable, or are they tied to relationships and knowledge that walk out the door at closing? How will the wealth be governed and protected once it is no longer concentrated inside a single operating company?
Women Owners And Multigenerational Families
Two groups deserve particular attention in this conversation, both because of the scale of wealth involved and because standard advisory models have historically underserved them.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2024 Annual Business Survey, women own approximately 14.3 million businesses in the United States. Revenue from those businesses has grown more than 43% since 2012, and Cerulli Associates projects that women will receive close to $54 trillion of the $124 trillion Great Wealth Transfer expected to change hands through 2048, with more than 95% of inter-spousal transfers going to widowed women.
Many women entrepreneurs are actively reframing what the liquidity conversation should include. Rather than anchoring it to valuation and deal mechanics, they are pressing into questions of family leadership, philanthropic intent and long-term stewardship of wealth across generations. That instinct points to something important. A sale does not happen to one person in isolation. It touches a family, a legacy and a network of relationships that will outlast any transaction by decades. Compressing the preparation for all of that into the weeks before a closing is simply not adequate.
For family business owners, the territory grows more complex still. Succession surfaces questions about who among the next generation is prepared and willing to lead, about sibling dynamics and long-standing family narratives, about what it means for a founder to step back from work that has defined a significant portion of their adult life. Families that have been working through those questions over years, with structure and outside perspective, move through transitions on fundamentally different terms than those for whom every question surfaces at once.
Retiring, Or At Least Rethinking, The Phrase ‘Exit Planning’
“Exit planning” may be the right description for what this work involves, but it is not a useful name for it.
The practical work spans five areas. Business value planning focuses on making the enterprise something a buyer can actually own and run without the seller by reducing owner dependence, reinforcing the infrastructure around key people and documenting the systems and client relationships that produce recurring revenue. Tax and estate strategy runs alongside that work, identifying the vehicles and structures that preserve family wealth rather than diverting it unnecessarily.
Personal financial independence modeling establishes the owner’s actual number, the concrete figure that defines what life after the business actually costs, rather than what an optimistic projection might deliver. Risk management protects the whole plan from being unraveled by the unexpected. Family governance gives the human dimension of wealth transfer the same care and structure that the financial dimension receives.
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