An August 2026 report in The American Reporter attached a set of figures to a question many small-business owners postpone: what happens to the company once the founder stops working. Nicholas Mukhtar, founder of Tera Strategies, a consulting firm based in Fort Lauderdale, told the publication that most owners are unprepared.
2.3 million. Project Equity’s count, based on the 2012 U.S. Census Survey of Business Owners, puts roughly 2.3 million privately held businesses with employees in the hands of aging baby boomers, or 44.7% of that total. Its analysis says the retirement of those owners puts one in six employees’ jobs at risk.
4.1 million. About 4.1 million Americans turned 65 in 2024, roughly 11,200 a day, according to the Reporter.
1,264. That’s how many owners Gallup analyzed for its fall 2024 succession findings, all of them people who spend most of their working hours on a business they own. The broader survey reached 3,589 owners and was funded with support from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and JPMorganChase.
33%. A third of owners in the Gallup data have no long-term plan or are unsure what will happen to their business.
55%. Add the owners who plan to close, and the same survey finds 55% either intend to shut down or have no plan at all.
Fewer than 15%. The Reporter puts the share of these businesses typically passed to family members below 15%, a sign of how rarely the next generation is ready or willing to take over.
Mukhtar’s Read on the Gap
Mukhtar attributes the shortfall to attention more than to knowledge. Owners, he said, get “so busy building their business” that planning slides down the list, even though the company was built for the family that now stands to lose it.
He has watched the cost land on heirs who were never brought inside. Those children, he said, “truly have no idea what their parents built, how they built it, how things are set up, or what to do.”
Who Else Is Exposed
A boomer-owned company with no succession plan puts payrolls, supplier contracts and local tax revenue in doubt along with the owner’s retirement savings, the Reporter notes. Owners who treat the company as their retirement account and never ready it for a sale are, in the Reporter’s phrase, betting a life’s savings on a coin flip.
Mukhtar works on these transitions with both business owners and family offices. His earlier commentary on succession, including what he calls the 86% problem in family office planning, appeared in the Ritz Herald.
