Waiting to Retire? Your Kids are Waiting, Too.

In my role as a family business consultant, I frequently receive phone calls from exasperated adult children waiting to take over the family business, but the parent doesn’t seem to want to retire. The incoming generation of family business leaders can become very frustrated when the current business head shows little interest in moving the succession forward. The younger generation have often left big cities where they lived exciting lives to return home and help run the family business they have been tapped to take over at some point. But as the years go on, and the heir of the family business gets into their 30s and 40s, they start to wonder why they ever came home in the first place, and if their parent will ever retire from the business. In some cases, they feel duped.

Retirement can be a “scary” word for many baby boomers. And although their initial intentions were good, they often find they are ambivalent and/or resistant to the actual process — for a myriad of reasons. For the next generation, this resistance feels like a broken promise. In most cases, neither the parent nor adult child saw this type of situation coming, but it often does — regardless of the best laid plans. So, how did we get here? In my experience, it is most often one of the following two issues: