40% of Family Businesses Expect a CEO Change — Fewer Than Half Are Ready

Forty percent of family businesses expect a CEO change within the next decade, yet only 46 percent have broad, well-developed succession plans. Those numbers come from Deloitte's 2026 global family business research, cited by Berryman Products vice president Beau R. Blankenship in a Newsweek opinion piece published on the widening gap between knowing change is coming and preparing for it.

Blankenship leads a family-owned automotive chemicals company with four generations of his family behind it. The Blankenship family acquired Berryman Products in 1970. His argument is blunt: leaders confuse ownership with responsibility, and the cost of that confusion lands on employees, customers and suppliers.

What does the succession gap actually cost?

A family business can spend a century building trust and lose it in a single generation, Blankenship writes. When an unprepared successor takes control, the cascade is predictable: experienced employees leave, product standards slip, and customers take their loyalty elsewhere.

The company may keep its name while losing the qualities that gave the name value. Blankenship frames the stakes in hard economic terms — a failed succession threatens livelihoods, disrupts supply chains, and removes trusted products from people's lives. A successful one preserves jobs, supports local economies, and gives future generations careers.

"Every consumer who depends on a reliable product, every employee who needs a stable income, and every small supplier awaiting payment has a stake in how a business changes hand," he writes.

Ownership is not leadership

Blankenship draws a sharp line between two decisions owners make. Passing the business to a son, daughter or another relative is a decision about ownership. Preparing someone to protect the company's people and future is a decision about leadership.

He practices what he describes. Blankenship has a newborn son, and he wants to leave him an opportunity, not an obligation. "The company must be worth inheriting, whoever eventually leads it," he writes. He credits leaders outside his family for shaping his own judgment, and he rejects the assumption that a surname guarantees competence — or that a different one diminishes it.

The best-equipped successor, he argues, is the person who has earned employees' trust and understands customers most deeply.

What about selling to private equity?

Blankenship doesn't dismiss the option. A sale can make financial sense for an owner who spent decades building a valuable company, and private equity firms are not all alike — some bring capital and growth expertise.

The danger, he writes, lies in treating the transaction as the end of the owner's responsibility. The purchase price measures only part of what is being transferred. Before signing, owners should examine the buyer's plans for employees, manufacturing standards, customer service, and long-term investment. A lucrative deal can still carry a heavy human cost if the business is stripped of the capabilities that made it valuable.

How stewardship shows up in a downturn

Stewardship becomes most visible when circumstances turn difficult, Blankenship writes. Rising raw-material costs once forced Berryman to pull back on marketing spend. The discipline required understanding which parts of the business deserved protection.

His operating principle: spending can be adjusted; trust is much harder to rebuild. Long-serving employees carry institutional knowledge that cannot be replaced overnight, and decades-long loyal customers provide validation no advertising campaign can manufacture.

What's forcing change now?

The industry backdrop adds urgency. The International Energy Agency reported that electric car sales exceeded 20 million worldwide in 2025 — roughly one in four new cars sold. Automotive businesses must respond to evolving vehicle technologies while continuing to serve millions of existing vehicles.

What should owners do before it's too late?

Blankenship wants Berryman to exist for the next century, even if the decisions carry his generation's fingerprints less visibly than he might like. His prescription: start before retirement or financial pressure forces the issue, identify capable successors, give them real responsibility, and build clear plans for transferring knowledge and authority.

He poses three questions to every owner:

• What am I responsible for protecting?
• Who am I preparing to carry it forward?
• What must change for this business to remain valuable?

The answers, he writes, should determine the company's next chapter — even if they bruise the owner's pride. His closing line doubles as the thesis: "Leadership is a temporary privilege with lasting consequences. If we want family businesses to survive, their leaders must learn to let go while they still have the power to shape what comes next."

With 40 percent of family firms facing a CEO transition by 2036 and barely half prepared, that letting-go window is closing for a large share of the market.