Why So Little Real Research Exists on Regional SME Succession, And What That Gap is Costing Business Owners

There is certainly no shortage of data telling business owners they have a problem. There is, however, a real shortage of research telling them what to do about it.

The gap everyone already knows about

A recent survey of around 1,000 small business owners found that nearly half plan to retire within the next 10 years, but only a small share say they have a fully developed succession plan (Chase, 2026).

Now that finding isn't new, in fact it shows up in study after study after study, maybe in slightly different numbers, but in the same shape. One industry survey found that more than 60% of regional business owners claim to have a "detailed" succession plan, but definitions of what counts as an actual “plan” vary so widely that the number means less than it actually suggests.

The same research also found that more than a third of owners have no long-term plan at all, and the reasons owners give for not starting are almost identical everywhere: it's "too early," or they're "too busy" (Exit Planning Institute, 2025).

A separate study went further and surveyed both owners and their likely successors. Only 35% of owners reported having any succession plan in place. Meanwhile 59% of the people expected to take over believed a plan probably or definitely already existed, but this is a 24% gap between what owners have actually done and what the next generation assumes has been done (Revenued, 2026).

Put those three data sets side by side and the picture is remarkably consistent. It doesn't matter whether the survey comes from a bank, an industry body, or a fintech lender, the same story repeats: most owners intend to leave, most owners haven't actually built anything that would let them leave well, and most of the people around them believe otherwise.

That last part is the quietly dangerous bit. A successor who assumes a plan exists isn't going to go looking for one. Neither is a spouse, a business partner, or an accountant who's never been asked the question directly. The gap doesn't announce itself. It sits there, unexamined, until a health scare, a burnout moment, or an unsolicited buyer enquiry forces the issue, usually at the worst possible time to be starting from zero.

What the research doesn't tell you

Read enough of this material and a pattern quickly emerges: almost all of it is perception data. It asks owners what they believe, what they intend, what they assume. It's genuinely useful for sizing the problem, and it confirms, at scale, what most advisors already see one client at a time.

What it very rarely does is answer the operational question underneath the survey finding: what does closing this gap actually require, in practice, for a regional business in the $1.5M–$10M range? How long does it genuinely take to reduce an owner's day-to-day grip on the business to the point where it can be handed to a manager, a family member, or a buyer without the business itself losing value in the handover? Which interventions move the needle and which are just activity - a strategy day here, an org chart update there - that feels like progress without changing anything about how dependent the business actually is on the person who built it?

Why this matters for regional businesses

This matters more in regional markets than the national surveys may suggest. An SME  business in a regional centre doesn't have the same depth of local talent pool, the same density of buyers, or the same advisor ecosystem as a capital-city based business of the same size. The mechanics of reducing owner-dependence, building a genuine second-in-command, documenting the judgment calls that live only in the owner's head, giving a business enough of a life independent of its founder that someone else could actually run it, play out differently when the nearest experienced manager is two towns over rather than a LinkedIn search away.

That's not a criticism of the survey work, as sizing the problem is valuable, and the Chase, Exit Planning Institute and Revenued data all do that job well. It's a gap in what sits above it: rigorous, methodical research into the mechanics of reducing owner-dependence in closely-held businesses at this scale, done with the same discipline you'd expect from any other applied business research.

It's also, not coincidentally, the reason I'm about to start formal doctoral research on exactly this question. "Get a succession plan" is advice nearly every advisor gives. Almost no one has done the work to define, rigorously, what a plan actually needs to contain, or how long the underlying changes really take to embed. Owners deserve better than a slogan. They deserve an answer that's been tested, not just repeated.

What this means for you right now

You don't need to wait for a research program to find out where your own business sits. The pattern in the data is consistent enough to be useful today: if you haven't specifically diagnosed how much of your business's value and continuity currently depends on you personally, there's a good chance you're closer to the "assumed plan, no real plan" side of that 24-point gap than you'd like to think.

That's worth sitting with for a moment. Not as a reason to panic, but as a reason to actually look at your business needs. Most owners in this position aren't avoiding the question out of denial - they're simply too busy running the business that the plan is supposed to be about.

The irony is that the busier you are keeping everything running through you, the more urgent it becomes to find out exactly how much of that running-through-you is actually necessary, and how much is just habit.

The Owner Independence Simulator was built to answer that question directly — not with a survey about your intentions, but a diagnostic on where your business actually sits today. It takes about ten minutes.

Take the Owner Exit-Readiness Assessment - Exit Readiness Assessment | Profitpoint

It takes just 5 minutes, and whatever it tells you, it's a better starting point than another statistic about how many other owners are in the same position.