Your age has a big impact on your attitude toward your business and your feelings about one day selling your business.

For example, one person who runs a boutique mergers and acquisitions business refuses to list businesses with owners over the age of 70.  He has found that septuagenarians are so personally invested that they can rarely bring themselves to sell their business – frequently calling off the sale halfway through, claiming they just wouldn’t know what to do with themselves if it closed.

While it’s always dangerous to generalize – especially based on something as touchy as age – a few patterns emerged in the research for the book Built to Sell: Creating a Business That Can Thrive Without You.

Owners age 25 to 46. Twenty- and thirty-something business owners grew up in an age when job security did not exist. They watched as their parents got downsized or packaged off into early retirement, and that resulted in a somewhat jaded attitude towards the role of a business in society.

Business owners in their 20s and 30s generally see their companies as a means to an end, and most expect to sell in the next 5 to 10 years.




To many boomers, the idea of selling their company feels like selling out their employees and their community. That’s why so many chief executive officers in their 50s and 60s are torn: They know they need to sell to fund their retirement, but they agonize over where that will leave their loyal employees.


With few hobbies and little other than work to define them, business owners in their late 60s, 70s and 80s feel lost without their business, which is why so many refuse to sell or experience depression after they do.

Of course, there will always be exceptions to general rules of thumb. But frequently, more than your industry, nationality, marital status or educational background, your birth certificate defines your exit plan.

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