Family business succession is one of the most emotionally complicated things we work with. Not because the families we encounter are dysfunctional. Because the expectations involved are so rarely spoken out loud.
The owner assumes the children want to take over. The children assume they’re supposed to want to. A son-in-law has been working in the business for years and has real expectations about what that means. A longtime employee who has run operations for a decade has been watching all of this unfold with their own stake in the outcome.
Nobody says any of it out loud. Not until the owner finally raises the subject. And when that conversation happens, often under time pressure, often when health or burnout is forcing the issue, it rarely goes as smoothly as anyone hoped.
Here’s how rarely it actually goes according to plan. The University of St. Gallen and EY analyzed survey responses from more than 34,000 university students with a family business background across 34 countries. Only 3.5% intended to succeed their parents directly after graduating. Five years out, that number rose to 4.9%. A larger group, nearly 20%, said they were open to the idea someday. But “open to it someday” and “ready to commit to it” are very different things, and most owners are counting on the former while planning around the latter.¹
A 2026 survey of US business owners and potential successors found that 14% of owners believed a family member wanted to take over, without ever directly asking. Thirty-five percent of potential successors said no meaningful conversation about the company’s future had taken place at all. And when asked whether a succession plan existed, 59% of potential successors assumed one did. Only 35% of owners said they actually had one.²
That’s not a succession plan. That’s a shared misunderstanding on both sides of the table.
What actually happens when the conversation gets avoided
The pattern is predictable. The owner assumes the child wants in. The child assumes the parent expects them to want in. Neither says anything, because the stakes feel too high and the timing never feels right. Meanwhile the son-in-law is making ten-year career decisions based on an expectation that was never confirmed. The operations manager is doing the same.
And then one of a few things happens: the owner is ready to exit and discovers for the first time that no one in the family actually wants to run the business; a health event or crisis forces the issue without any preparation; or the business ends up sold under time pressure, without the runway that would have produced a better outcome.
What actually predicts a successful handover
A 12-year longitudinal study of Canadian family businesses found that the strongest predictor of a completed succession was the successor’s own intrinsic motivation. Not announcing a date. Not naming an heir. Not handing over a title. Even in firms where a successor had been identified and both generations were engaged, roughly half of those handovers had not been completed a decade later. The ones that did happen were driven by genuine commitment from the next generation , commitment that had to be found or developed early, not assumed.³
Deloitte’s 2026 survey of US family businesses found that 61% had at least one family member interested in the CEO role, but only 23% believed that person was ready to step into it in the near term.⁴ Interest and readiness are not the same thing, and neither one is the same as actually wanting the job badly enough to see it through.
The conversation that changes everything
This is fixable. But it requires starting the conversation early, when there’s room to adjust, negotiate, and plan around what you actually find out rather than what you assumed.
Owners who navigate family succession well are the ones who had this conversation early, before the stakes were urgent, before timelines were short, before the son-in-law had spent another five years on a path that might not lead where he thought. They found out what their children actually wanted. They separated the ownership question from the leadership question. They discovered, in some cases, that a child who had no interest in running the business day-to-day was deeply interested in being a good owner. That’s a completely different plan, and a workable one.
The worst version of this story isn’t the child who says no. It’s the owner who’s ready to exit, discovers no one in the family wants the business, and now has to find an outside buyer under pressure, with no runway to prepare, no systems documented, and none of the value-building work that produces a stronger number. Every element of that scenario is more expensive, more rushed, and more likely to leave money and options on the table.
Have the hard conversation early. Get clarity on what each person actually wants. Then build your exit plan around the truth, not the assumption.
¹ University of St. Gallen / EY, “Coming Home or Breaking Free?”, global analysis of GUESSS (Global University Entrepreneurial Spirit Students’ Survey) data from 34,113 students with a family business background across 34 countries. Published by the University of St. Gallen Center for Family Business.
² Revenued, family business succession survey, May 2026; reported by InvestmentNews, July 2026. Sample: 130 business owners and 274 potential successors in the US. Note: the sample is small and Revenued is a fintech lender; findings are directional.
³ Gagné, M., Marwick, C., Brun de Pontet, S., and Wrosch, C. “Family Business Succession: What’s Motivation Got to Do With It?” Family Business Review, 2021. Peer-reviewed, 12-year longitudinal study of 89 Canadian family businesses.
⁴ Deloitte Private, “Family Business Succession Planning Survey,” February 2026. Sample: 300 US family business executives at companies with $100M or more in revenue. Fielded September 2025.
Rodrigo Passalacqua is Managing Partner at Exit Factor of Raleigh-Durham. If succession and family dynamics are part of your exit picture, reach out. This is exactly the kind of conversation we navigate every day.
