The Road to Succession: How Exit Intention Decisions in Family Businesses Vary Across the North Central Region

Family businesses have a prominent presence around the world, constituting 70 – 90% of global firms (Zellweger, 2017). These businesses play an important role in regional economies and employment rates (Shepherd and Zacharakis, 2000). This article explores how exit intentions among small family businesses vary across the North Central Region (NCR) using data from the NCR-STAT: Small Business Survey (Wiatt et al., 2024). The Small Business Survey contains 1,287 responses from small business owners; however, our analysis focuses only on respondents who identified their firm as a family business, resulting in 494 observations. Chua et al. (1999) describe family businesses as firms in which a defining feature is the intention to transfer ownership and control to the next generation within the family. In this study, survey respondents self-identified whether they considered their small business to be a family business. Our focus is the North Central Region, which consists of the states of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin. Understanding where family businesses are located across the region is an important first step in analyzing their transition decisions. However, location alone does not determine whether these firms are prepared for the future. In the next section, we examine how succession planning varies across family businesses in the North Central Region as an indicator of readiness to transfer the firm to the next generation.