A new JPMorganChase report finds roughly 12 million small businesses worth nearly $10 trillion could change hands in the next decade, and almost none of their owners have a real plan for what comes next.
Chase surveyed 1,000 business owners for its report, Powering 10 Million Small Businesses, released Monday. The numbers paint a picture of an ownership class frozen in place: 70 percent of respondents said they were still in the early stages of succession planning. Just 8 percent had reached what the bank called an advanced stage. The rest, the vast majority of Main Street employers approaching retirement age, are somewhere between vaguely aware and actively avoiding the question.
That paralysis sits at the center of a warning Jamie Dimon has been pressing since March. The JPMorganChase chief has argued that "the American Dream is alive, but it's slipping out of reach for too many people, and for future generations." The new report puts hard data behind the slogan, and the data is not encouraging.
The scale of the problem dwarfs what most people picture when they hear "small business." An estimated 12 million businesses are expected to change hands over the coming decade, Fortune reported. Together those firms represent nearly $10 trillion in assets, wealth built over decades by owners who, in many cases, started the company themselves.
In industries the bank considers critical to national security, more than half of firms have an owner aged 55 or older. Chase did not specify which industries it placed in that category, but the implication is plain: the country's defense-adjacent supply chain is disproportionately dependent on aging owners with no disclosed exit strategy.
A 2025 Gallup survey reinforced the concern. It found that 27 percent of employer firms with owners 55 or older were either unsure of their long-term plan or intended to close the business outright rather than sell or transfer it. More than one in four businesses in that age bracket, in other words, may simply disappear, not because they failed, but because nobody planned for what happens after the founder walks away.
A separate U.S. Bank survey from 2025 captured the contradiction at the heart of the crisis. Most owners said they got into business to build something they could pass on. Yet a majority lacked a formal plan for how that handoff would actually work. Owners described the process of figuring it out as "overwhelming."
That gap between intention and execution is where the damage happens. The McKinsey Institute for Economic Mobility published a report in February examining what it called "the Great Ownership Transfer." Its central finding: an estimated 6 to 13 percent of small-business closures over the coming decade could be avoided if owners simply planned better. Those closures, McKinsey found, are driven less by failing businesses than by owners who ran out of runway before finding a buyer or successor.
Read that again. These are not companies going under because the market moved on. They are profitable, functioning businesses that will shut down because the person who built them never got around to arranging a sale, a transfer, or a management handoff. The wealth vanishes. The jobs vanish. The community loses a tax base, a supplier, an employer, not to competition, but to inertia.
The problem is not limited to the corner deli or the family machine shop. A New York Post analysis published September 7 found that at more than one-third of S&P 500 companies sampled, the CEO and CFO were simultaneously in the retirement window with no clear succession plan disclosed. The largest publicly traded firms in the country, companies with boards of directors, general counsel, and entire human-resources departments, are sitting on the same time bomb as a two-person plumbing outfit in Ohio.
If blue-chip corporations with billion-dollar governance budgets cannot manage orderly leadership transitions, the odds that a 62-year-old roofing contractor in Alabama has a notarized succession plan in his desk drawer are slim. The failure runs top to bottom.
Small businesses are the backbone cliché that politicians trot out every election cycle. But the Chase data makes the stakes concrete. Nearly $10 trillion in assets, equipment, real estate, inventory, customer relationships, intellectual property, is at risk of being liquidated at fire-sale prices or abandoned entirely because the baby boomer generation that built those businesses treated succession planning as tomorrow's problem until tomorrow arrived.
The downstream effects hit the people who always absorb the cost of elite negligence: employees who lose jobs, communities that lose employers, and younger entrepreneurs who might have bought a going concern but never got the chance because the owner locked up, closed the doors, and walked away.
Dimon framed the broader trend in sweeping terms. But the specific failure here is not abstract. It is a generation of business owners who knew they needed a plan, said they wanted to pass something on, and then described the process as "overwhelming", so they did nothing.
Washington has spent decades layering regulation, tax complexity, and compliance burdens onto small businesses. None of that makes succession planning easier. When the paperwork to transfer a family business requires a team of lawyers and accountants most owners cannot afford, "overwhelming" is not an excuse, it is a policy outcome. And the people who wrote those rules will not be the ones cleaning out the shop when the last boomer turns off the lights.