Business Succession: The $14 Trillion Opportunity Hiding in Plain Sight
With nearly $14 trillion in business ownership transitions ahead, banks must engage earlier. Learn how succession planning becomes a relationship opportunity.
Over the next decade, nearly three-quarters of privately held businesses expect to transition ownership. This represents an estimated $14 trillion in wealth transfer (Exit Planning Institute, 2025). While Baby Boomers nearing retirement account for much of this activity, younger generations are also contributing to the succession wave, often with very different levels of expectations and readiness for an exit.
For banks, this transition represents both risk and opportunity. Ownership changes are one of the most common points of client attrition, yet with the right engagement, they can also become opportunities to deepen relationships, retain wallet share, and support business owners through one of the most important and consequential decisions of their careers.
The average small business owner is 64 years old (Barlow Research Associates, Inc., Small Business Banking Program ($100K–<$10MM)). Yet, regardless of age, one thing is clear. While the scale of the opportunity is massive, most business owners are unprepared for an exit (Exit Planning Institute, 2025).
This lack of readiness creates risk not just for owners but for employees, buyers, and financial institutions alike. Succession, therefore, is not simply an M&A wave; it is a relationship inflection point for banks and the broader ecosystem supporting small and middle-market businesses, including wealth managers, advisors, accountants, attorneys, and estate planners. Institutions that engage early can help owners maximize the success of their exit while establishing long-term trust before, during, and after the transition.
Why Most Business Owners Aren’t Ready and Why Banks Feel the Impact
There is a disconnect between business owners’ intent to exit and their preparedness to do so “successfully. Although 75% of owners expect to exit within the next decade, only 13% have a formal plan, and a mere 5% have a fully assembled advisory team (Exit Planning Institute, 2025). Now, for the banks, this gap represents a critical inflection point where risk and opportunity converge.
Baby Boomers, who continue to represent the largest ownership cohort, are also the least prepared, even as time works against them. Only 35% have completed a formal business valuation in the past two years, and just 41% have an updated estate plan (Exit Planning Institute, 2025). These gaps directly increase the likelihood of rushed decisions, value erosion, and relationship disruption.
For banks, poorly planned exits often translate to client churn. Long-standing relationships can disappear overnight when ownership changes occur without continuity planning, particularly when successor owners already have established relationships with advisors, lenders, or capital partners in place.
The High Cost of Being Unprepared
There is a steep cost to exiting unprepared or underprepared. Failing to adequately plan often results in business owners being faced with rushed sales, diminished enterprise value, operational disruption, employee uncertainty, and customer attrition (Wintrust, Passing the Baton). By contrast, successful exits tend to unfold over time, allowing owners the ability to preserve value, retain key relationships, and ensure continuity.
Succession planning is not a single transaction; it is a multi-year journey that, when planning is deferred, shifts from strategic to reactive (Wintrust). Banks frequently inherit the fallout in the form of attrition and declining wallet share.
For relationship managers, this reality emphasizes the importance of early engagement. Therefore, being able to proactively identify when a potential exit may be on the horizon and initiating appropriate conversations must be part of the client engagement strategy.
The Banker’s Blind Spot: Succession Signals Are Already There
Owners Signal Exit Intent Long Before They Say It
For most business owners, succession is not a single decision. It’s a gradual realization. According to Barlow Research Associates, Inc., approximately 41% of small businesses anticipate an ownership change within the next five years, yet far fewer have taken formal steps to prepare.
Research from the Exit Planning Institute helps explain this disconnect. While most owners claim exit planning is important, only a small percentage have documented plans or assembled full advisory teams in place. Many owners know they will exit eventually, but feel unready, overwhelmed, or unsure where to begin. As a result, early exit planning often unfolds quietly through online research, peer conversations, and informal outreach to specialized advisors, frequently outside the banking relationship.
These behaviors generate signals such as leadership changes, increased interest in valuation or strategic options, and shifts in professional relationships. Yet, these signals rarely surface in traditional bank systems. Without visibility into these early indicators, banks often miss the window when engagement would be most timely and impactful.
Why Banks Enter the Succession Conversation Too Late
Even with long-standing relationships, banks are frequently missing from the earliest stages of succession planning. Of business owners anticipating an ownership change, just 10% have engaged with their primary bank or another financial institution in conversations about their plans (Barlow Research Associates, Inc., Small Business Banking Program ($100K–<$10MM)).
This gap is not driven by a lack of trust. Exit Planning Institute data reiterates that Millennials and younger owners rank bankers among their most trusted advisors, on par with attorneys. The challenge is timing. By the time the succession planning conversation reaches the bank, decisions are often already in motion, with outside advisors, buyers, or lenders already involved.
The result is a familiar pattern, and the outcome is predictable. Banks learn about ownership transitions late, precisely when risk and churn are at their highest.
Although bankers are rarely the first advisor business owners consult when thinking about succession, they are uniquely positioned to integrate the advisory network. Unlike specialists focused on a single transaction or issue, bankers maintain long-standing, multi-dimensional relationships that span across the owner’s personal, operational, and financial considerations.
The Banker’s Strategic Advantage: Orchestration, Not Expertise
This positions bankers uniquely as orchestrators in the succession process, not as exit planners or legal experts, but as trusted connectors who know when to engage and who to bring in. By introducing the right advisors at the right time and helping coordinate conversations across wealth, legal, accounting, and strategic partners, bankers can create meaningful value well before a transaction is ever on the table.
When executed effectively, this role strengthens trust, deepens relevance, and positions the bank as a continuity partner through transition, rather than a service provider reacting after key decisions have already been made. In practice, this requires a shift from reacting to announced exits to proactively identifying transition signals and coordinating the right conversations years in advance.
To learn more about orchestrating these connections for business owners, check out the Banker’s Field Guide to Business Succession Planning.
The Overlooked Opportunity: Younger Owners Planning Earlier Exits
While much of the succession conversation centers on aging owners, younger generations are quietly redefining what an exit looks like. According to the Exit Planning Institute’s 2025 State of Owner Readiness™ report, Millennials and Gen Z place equal or greater importance on having an exit strategy than Baby Boomers, and they are more likely to pursue multiple ownership cycles over a lifetime.
Younger owners also tend to approach business ownership differently. Many view ownership as a chapter rather than a destination, which shapes how they think about growth, liquidity, and transition. This mindset often results in earlier consideration of exit options, partial liquidity events, or strategic succession planning, sometimes years before a transaction occurs.
At the same time, confidence and enthusiasm can outpace execution. Fewer than half of Millennial business owners have written action plans, and many lack fully coordinated financial, legal, and succession strategies (Exit Planning Institute, 2025). For banks, this presents a powerful opportunity. Younger owners are educated, open to advice, and relationship-driven, but they need coordination, not just capital.
Institutions that engage early with these owners can build durable relationships that extend across multiple growth and exit cycles, rather than competing for attention only at the point of sale.
From Awareness to Action: Why Data Changes the Equation
For banks, the question is no longer whether exit intent can be identified early, but whether they have the data and analytics in place to recognize it when it appears.
Succession planning does not begin with a transaction. It begins with awareness. Long before an ownership change occurs, business owners start researching exit strategies, exploring valuation, reassessing leadership structures, and clarifying personal and financial goals. These early behaviors rarely trigger a meeting or a loan request, but they do create signals for institutions equipped to see them.
This is where data and analytics change the equation. Instead of relying solely on relationship manager intuition or lagging indicators, banks can use market and relationship intelligence to surface likely exiters across their footprint. Signals such as ownership demographics, leadership changes, professional activity, and exit-related research provide early insight into which businesses may be approaching a transition.
RelPro was built for this moment. By combining firmographic data, relationship intelligence, and real-time Buyer Intent signals, RelPro helps banks identify potential exiters earlier, prioritize outreach, and equip relationship teams with context for more relevant conversations. The goal is not to predict an exact transaction date, but to enable proactive engagement while there is still time to influence outcomes.
For banks that act early, the payoff is retention. Early insight allows institutions to support sellers through preparation, introduce trusted centers of influence, and engage successor owners before relationships are at risk. Succession becomes not just a risk to manage, but a growth opportunity to capture.
To help banks translate these insights into action, we created a practical field guide outlining how relationship teams can use data and analytics to identify exit signals, prepare for succession conversations, and build stronger advisory networks.
Closing: The Opportunity for Banks Starts Now
Business succession is no longer a distant concern. It is already reshaping the small and mid-market landscape. With nearly three-quarters of privately held businesses expecting to transition ownership in the coming decade, the question is not whether exits will occur, but how prepared owners and their advisors will be when they do.
Banks that identify exit intent early, engage thoughtfully, and maintain continuity through transition are better positioned to retain relationships and grow alongside the next generation of owners. Education, coordination, and early action are among the strongest predictors of successful outcomes for business owners and the institutions that support them (Exit Planning Institute, 2025).
For banks willing to shift from reactive to proactive engagement, succession planning represents more than risk mitigation. It is an opportunity to deepen trust, expand relevance, and build relationships that endure well beyond a single ownership transition.
This article explains why succession planning is a relationship inflection point. Our companion field guide shows how relationship teams can identify exit signals, prioritize outreach, and engage earlier with confidence.
Download our companion field guide to learn how banks can identify early exit signals, engage business owners more proactively, and build continuity across ownership transitions.
Get the Field Guide to Business Succession
