We can’t afford to let Main Street die of old age. Over the next decade, millions of small and mid-sized businesses will change hands or shut down entirely, not because they aren’t viable, but because owners lack a realistic, fundable path forward.
In Arizona and across the country, this is already happening. Strong businesses are reaching a crossroads with no clear exit, no successor, and no structure to support what comes next. What looks like a succession issue is often a deeper problem: the business is still built around the owner.
In this fireside chat, we’ll unpack what the succession crisis looks like on the ground and why it matters not just to Main Street business owners, but to tech founders, operators, corporate refugees, and first-time acquirers looking for their next opportunity.
We’ll explore the most common pattern we see: businesses that perform well but remain founder-dependent, making them hard to scale, difficult to step away from, and challenging to exit on reasonable terms.
You’ll leave with a clear lens to evaluate where you or your business sit on the owner dependency curve, and three practical moves you can make in the next 90 days to create real options: to keep, grow, or eventually sell with confidence.
In collaboration with:
Build Scale Prosper
MZT:1990INC
We can’t afford to let Main Street die of old age. Over the next decade, millions of small and mid-sized businesses will change hands or shut down entirely, not because they aren’t viable, but because owners lack a realistic, fundable path forward.
In Arizona and across the country, this is already happening. Strong businesses are reaching a crossroads with no clear exit, no successor, and no structure to support what comes next. What looks like a succession issue is often a deeper problem: the business is still built around the owner.
In this fireside chat, we’ll unpack what the succession crisis looks like on the ground and why it matters not just to Main Street business owners, but to tech founders, operators, corporate refugees, and first-time acquirers looking for their next opportunity.
We’ll explore the most common pattern we see: businesses that perform well but remain founder-dependent, making them hard to scale, difficult to step away from, and challenging to exit on reasonable terms.
You’ll leave with a clear lens to evaluate where you or your business sit on the owner dependency curve, and three practical moves you can make in the next 90 days to create real options: to keep, grow, or eventually sell with confidence.
In collaboration with:
Build Scale Prosper
MZT:1990INC