Source: Fortune
Summary
JPMorganChase released a report highlighting the challenges of succession planning among small-business owners, with 70% in early stages and only 8% in advanced stages. The bank estimates 12 million businesses, valued at $10 trillion, will change hands in the next decade. The report aligns with Jamie Dimon’s warnings about the American Dream slipping away. JPMorgan is using the findings to advocate for policy changes and support small-business transitions, part of its $80 billion American Dream Initiative.
Our Reading
The numbers tell one story.
JPMorganChase highlights a gap in small-business succession planning, with most owners unprepared for retirement.
The bank frames the issue as a systemic problem, not just individual failure.
It uses the report to push for policy changes and position itself as a solution provider.
The dysfunction is not just about aging owners, but about a lack of structure and support.
Author: Evan Null
A retirement wave that refuses to retire
The dysfunction isn’t just that baby boomers own an outsized share of American small businesses. It’s that they are approaching the exit with something close to paralysis. McKinsey’s Institute for Economic Mobility estimated 6% to 13% of small-business closures over the coming decade could be avoided if owners planned better—closures driven less by failing businesses than by owners who simply ran out of runway before finding a buyer or successor. A 2025 Gallup survey found 27% of employer firms with owners 55 or older are either unsure of their long-term plan or intend to close the business outright rather than sell or transfer it.
U.S. Bank’s 2025 small-business survey found that while most owners say they became owners to build something they could pass on, a majority told lack a formal plan for how that happens, and describe the process of figuring it out as overwhelming. The same paralysis shows up above the small-business level, too. A recent analysis of S&P 500 companies found at more than one-third of firms sampled, the CEO and CFO—the top two seats—were sitting in the retirement window simultaneously, with no clear succession plan disclosed.
Estimates of the raw scale vary by methodology. Project Equity puts the number of baby boomer-owned businesses expected to transition at 2.3 million, representing one in six U.S. jobs; other analyses run as high as 3 million businesses, or, by some counts, 6 million transitions by 2035. The boomers simply aren’t preparing the business climate for the next version of the American Dream.
The dysfunction isn’t confined to the corner hardware store; it runs from Main Street to the C-suite. The same paralysis shows up above the small-business level, too. A recent analysis of S&P 500 companies found at more than one-third of firms sampled, the CEO and CFO—the top two seats—were sitting in the retirement window simultaneously, with no clear succession plan disclosed.
Estimates of the raw scale vary by methodology. Project Equity puts the number of baby boomer-owned businesses expected to transition at 2.3 million, representing one in six U.S. jobs; other analyses run as high as 3 million businesses, or, by some counts, 6 million transitions by 2035. The boomers simply aren’t preparing the business climate for the next version of the American Dream.
The Fillmore, twice over
Nicole Williams told JPMorgan she grew up on family stories about San Francisco’s Fillmore district when it was known as the “Harlem of the West”—a corridor once dense with Black-owned businesses, music, and community before redevelopment scattered much of it, closures that swallowed a generation of ownership with no mechanism to pass it forward.
That history is part of why, when her boutique Belle Noire started to grow, she didn’t try to build alone. She recruited five other Black women entrepreneurs—Vickie Brown of Ice Body Skincare, Layshaunese Fuqua of Beauty and Brains Tees, Rashida Taylor of Stash Candle Co., Tshara Ball of LB House of Beauty, and Melissa Robinson of MellRose—to open the Cowrie Collective, a shared retail space inside San Francisco’s Palace Hotel.
“We didn’t open Cowrie Collective to sell more products,” Williams says. “We opened it to make downtown feel connected again—six businesses, one vision, and a place where every purchase carries meaning.”
Williams and her partners got there with help: SF New Deal’s “Vacant to Vibrant” program, a public-private partnership backed by JPMorgan and the City of San Francisco, converted an empty downtown storefront into their opening, handling permitting, accessibility compliance, and the leap from pop-up to long-term lease. Ongoing coaching through Chase’s “Coaching for Impact” program and everyday banking support are now helping the Collective build out its financial foundation.
It’s a rare case of a small-business transition—from six solo operators to one shared enterprise—that actually got planned, funded, and executed on purpose, the same early stage where most of Chase’s surveyed owners get stuck.
Why JPMorgan is telling this story now
JPMorganChase is showcasing Williams’ story because most owners don’t get her outcome. The succession gap gives Dimon’s “slipping away” warning an actuarial edge—a dated, quantifiable wave rather than an abstract complaint.
It also gives the bank a policy lane to lobby in: The report backs the American Ownership and Resilience Act, the Small Business Succession Planning Act, and the Retire Through Ownership Act—and pushes the SBA to build a national succession toolkit.
It ties directly to money the bank already pledged in its March launch of the American Dream Initiative—$80 billion in small-business lending over 10 years, plus transition advisory services and $11.5 million in philanthropic funding for ownership transitions announced in 2025.
For every Cowrie Collective, there are far more small businesses following the pattern the surveys describe: a solo founder or a handful of partners aging toward retirement without a transition plan, for whom the default outcome is not a sale but a shutdown.
The report aligns with Jamie Dimon’s warnings about the American Dream slipping away. It also gives the bank a policy lane to lobby in: The report backs the American Ownership and Resilience Act, the Small Business Succession Planning Act, and the Retire Through Ownership Act—and pushes the SBA to build a national succession toolkit.
