Demographers studying business ownership have landed on a specific year for the busiest stretch of baby boomer retirements: 2027, according to data cited in coverage of consultant Nicholas Mukhtar’s succession planning work. Roughly 4.1 million Americans turned 65 in 2024 alone, a rate of about 11,200 people daily, and that wave carries a proportional share of the nation’s 2.3 million boomer-owned businesses toward a transition point at the same time.
Mukhtar, founder of the Fort Lauderdale consulting firm Tera Strategies, works with family offices and business owners nationwide on the planning gap this timeline exposes. Most of his clients arrive believing they have more time than the calendar actually gives them.
Employer Businesses Fare Better Than Sole Operators
Survey data from Gallup, conducted with JPMorganChase and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation among 1,264 business owners in the fall of 2024, found a split worth noting: 66% of owners without employees lack a succession plan or intend to close their business, compared with 27% of owners who employ staff. The gap suggests that having employees pushes owners toward at least some future planning, even if that planning falls short of a full transition strategy.
Gallup surveyed those 1,264 owners between Sept. 20 and Oct. 28, 2024, a window that captured attitudes before the current wave of retirements fully arrived.
That distinction matters for the 24.7 million workers employed across boomer-owned businesses, since a sole operator’s retirement without a plan simply ends the business, while an employer’s exit without a plan can put an entire staff’s income at risk.
A Ten-Year Runway, Not a Ten-Month One
Mukhtar’s counsel to clients treats succession as a decade-long project rather than a late-career task, in part because the owners most likely to delay it are also the ones driving the fastest growth. “When you’re a high-performing, high-achieving individual, it’s even harder to slow down and actually do family planning with the people who matter,” he said.
A transition plan, in Mukhtar’s framing, isn’t a single document signed the year before retirement. It’s a sequence of decisions, made over years, about who learns the business, who gains authority over decisions, and when ownership formally changes hands.
With 2027 approaching, owners who start that sequence now still have a runway most of their peers no longer do. Those who wait until a health event or a buyer’s unsolicited offer forces the question tend to land in the 55% Gallup identified: no plan, and no time left to build one.