Most Family Businesses Know They Need a CEO Succession Plan. A New Deloitte Survey Says Most Don’t Have One.
- 1 day ago
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A new Deloitte survey puts numbers on a problem we see every day. Here's what the data means, and what family business leaders should do about it.
A new Deloitte Private Business survey of 300 family business executives found that nearly 8 in 10 expect a CEO transition within the next decade. That’s 78%... And 42% foresee that shift within just three to five years.
Some other important data from the survey:
A full 85% of those same respondents agree that strategic CEO succession planning is critical to long-term success.
Only 57% have established a plan.
Fewer than a quarter are actively implementing one.
30% admit succession planning is behind schedule.
This gap between intention and action isn’t a new phenomenon to us at Stranberg. But seeing it quantified this clearly is worth sitting with. Because the data raises an obvious question: why?
Family Business Succession Gets Delayed for Personal Reasons, Not Strategic Ones
The answer isn’t that family business leaders don’t care. They do. The 85% who believe succession planning is critical aren’t wrong, but they get stuck in the move from acknowledging the need to actually doing something about it. Succession planning asks a founder or sitting family leader to confront some uncomfortable things at once: mortality, loss of identity, loss of control, and the reality of change. That’s a lot to sit with. So the can gets kicked down the road. Month after month, year after year, while the window narrows.
This failure to follow through is driven largely by the personal discomfort of facing what succession actually means.
The Next-Gen Doesn’t Have a Lack of Interest.
A second thing the Deloitte data makes clear: the succession gap isn’t primarily about whether the next generation wants to lead. More and more family companies are moving toward non-family executive leadership, and in many cases, that’s simply because the next gen isn’t prepared to lead.
That distinction matters because interest and readiness aren’t the same thing. Preparing the next generation for leadership takes time, intentional development, and often an outside perspective. Leaving it as an afterthought until a transition becomes urgent is one of the most common and most costly mistakes we see in family business succession.
If next-gen preparation hasn’t been part of the conversation in your business yet, it needs to be.
When Family Business Succession Fails, It’s Almost Always a Governance Problem
The third takeaway is perhaps the most underestimated: when CEO succession goes wrong, governance is almost always at the center.
Generation-one founders resist formal governance structures for understandable reasons. They built their businesses on instinct, speed, and personal authority. The idea of a board with real oversight runs counter to how they’ve operated for decades.
So when succession conversations begin, they often focus on finding a younger version of themselves. They’re looking for someone to carry the founder’s vision forward without putting in place the structures that would actually protect it.
When a founder steps back without establishing governance, the incoming CEO operates in a vacuum of authority and accountability. The founder’s influence and informal control remain, but the structures to channel them constructively don’t exist, and conflict follows. Placements don’t stick. Look closely at families with a long history of failed CEO transitions, and you’ll almost always find an absence of meaningful governance behind it.
Succession planning and governance planning are not separate conversations. They have to happen together.
So, What’s Next for These Family Businesses?
The Deloitte data confirms what we hear regularly in our work with family companies: succession is broadly understood to be important, and broadly under-executed. Start planning before urgency forces the issue. Treat governance, next-generation preparation, and leadership transition as part of the same conversation.
If you’re among the 77% without an active plan in place, now is the right time to change that.
Thinking about CEO succession in your family business? We work with family companies at every stage of the transition process.
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