PurposeAging is the most important social-demographic issue worldwide, supported by the initiatives of the World Health Organization (WHO) in its global strategy and action plan for aging and health ...(Rudnicka et al., 2020). The average age of business owners in most industrialized countries is on the rise. In the United States, fifty-one percent of small private businesses are owned by someone age fifty-plus (SBA Office of Advocacy, 2018).Design/methodology/approachThe authors shed light on small business owners, who age in place. The authors suggest that their importance as long-term actors in entrepreneurial ecosystems nor the issue of “Main Street churn” have not been meaningfully explored. Understanding the risks they face offers an opportunity for academics and practitioners to provide insights for business owners, the next generation of the acquirer and advisors. The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has elevated the status of many of these businesses from invisible (and perhaps taken for granted) to “essential” and amplified the co-dependence of business and the local economy.Findings The anticipated “silver tsunami” caused by the retirements of Main Street business owners is not a national and homogeneous wave. Rather, each wave will land on beaches locally. Small business owners age in place, and their importance as long-term actors in entrepreneurial ecosystems nor the issue of “Main Street churn” have not been meaningfully explored. They become embedded in their community and possibly stuck there in retirement.Originality/value The embeddedness of these owners – who likely have social connections, community identification and feelings of responsibility to the community directly impacts the places that they care deeply about – is often unquestioned. However, their retirements call for increased visibility within entrepreneurial ecosystems and translations of scholarly work from several kinds of literature into policy and practice.
The succession literature frames a leader's reluctance to let go as the single largest deterrent to succession planning, and early literature pointed to the stronghold that mortality can have on ...letting go. The notion has not captured our continued curiosity, preventing a full understanding of the tensions and antecedents of family business succession. Most scholarship on letting go describes a quest for immortality and in this sense, ‘mortality’ has been misapplied and one dimensional. In an interdisciplinary boost to family business, we turn to palliative care, where it is believed that the acknowledgment of one's mortality will facilitate letting go. We develop four typologies of letting go by combining elements of mortality awareness and planning that offers nuance and insights into long-held beliefs about this most vital and finite ‘soft issue’. We discuss emotion governance tools that help change the mortality awareness trajectory and support family business succession.
In the United States, there are over 20 million companies (about 90% of small businesses) with less than 20 employees, and the majority are owned by "owner-managers." More than half of small business ...owners are over age 50, and so the next 20 years will bring a wave of owners who will age out of business ownership. In surveys, many business owners answer "never" to the question of when they will retire, an honest but worrisome response. Using employee retirement preparation as a benchmark, the author asks: Is retirement preparation different for the self-employed business owner? Intuitively, a different retirement landscape emerges from the issues of exiting the business in order to retire. This likely will cause a business owner's retirement preparation and timing to differ from that of an employee. The article focuses on the self-employed owners of smaller companies, whose association with the business is about 20 years on average and for whom retirement likely will be their one and only business exit. Most of what is written and discussed about retirement preparation is focused on employees. Using data from the Federal Reserve's 2013 Survey of Consumer Finances, the author makes comparisons with the generally accepted "three-legged stool" model of U.S. employee retirement preparation, which broadly drives employee retirement age and preparations. It does not, however, account for key differences between the retirement preparation of the employee and the small-business owner. These differences range from the lack of a socially defined retirement age for business owners to the need for disengagement from, and disposition of, the business and a frank assessment of whether or not the business can even be considered an asset for retirement.
In their groundbreaking study of family business leader succession, Sonnenfeld and Spence (1989) found that the heroic self-concept, consisting of heroic stature and heroic mission, prevents the ...incumbent patriarch from letting go (retiring, stepping aside). For all the impact that their study has had on succession scholarship, we assert that they failed to consider female family business leaders. We re-examine their findings, through a generalizability replication with extensions grounded in recent scholarship. We thereby extend the original study and broaden its reach, stressing the need for exploration of letting go by female leaders in family businesses. When introducing gender in the heroic self-concept/letting go relationship, we find that heroic mission and heroic stature are each significant to males, but not females, suggesting a gendered difference in letting go. Our analysis confirms the original study’s findings for male leaders and we expose limits to the generalizability of their work to female leaders.
•We examine Sonnenfeld & Spence’s long-standing and undertested work about the parting patriarch and letting go.•Heroic self-concept/reluctance to let go relationship is different by gender of the leader.•For males, gender positively moderates the relationship between both heroic mission and reluctance to let go.•Heroic mission nor heroic stature are significant to the entrenchment of female family business leaders.•We extend the original study and yet broaden its reach by stressing the need for exploration of letting go by female leaders in family businesses.•Gerontocracy or rule by elders may be the domain of male family business leaders.•Future directions include examination of a theory of female leadership and letting go.
Which entrepreneurial firms exit by merger or sale, and which exit by closing? We draw on resource dependence theory in order to explore how new venture dependencies on the founder and industry ...affect the type of firm exit. While previous researchers have concluded that early stage firms rely on the human capital of the entrepreneur to survive and thrive, we suggest that certain dependencies can act as barriers to exit through a merger or a sale. Likewise, we suggest that industries that are low tech and industries that experience high firm turnover create dependencies on the local market, and exit is less likely by a sale or a merger. We test our model using binary logistic regression on a 2012 sample from the Kauffman Firm Survey of 451 firms founded in 2004. We find that firms that are operated as sole proprietorships and firms that are operated out of the primary owner’s home are significantly, negatively related to exit by a merger or a sale. Firms operating in high-tech industries are significantly, positively related to exit by a merger or a sale. These findings hold even when controlling for the size, performance, and competitive advantage of the exiting firms. Our findings offer preliminary evidence that resource dependencies affect exit outcomes.
A side hustle is a small-scale business activity in addition to one’s primary job. Our learning innovation is the student side hustle (SSH), a small-scale business in addition to the student’s ...academic work. It fits within an existing entrepreneurship course, allowing students to launch small scale ventures on a campus-based peer-to-peer marketplace platform. The SSH contributes to the broader category of side hustles and to the existing category of experiential learning exercises that result in student businesses. We position the concept in the appropriate foundational literature, and offer insights into the details of our “stimulation” and its outcomes, evidence of its effectiveness, lessons learned, and extensions of the exercise.
Purpose Miller (2011) revisited his influential 1983 work on entrepreneurial orientation (EO) and remarked that its underlying drivers are fully open to debate, fresh scholarship and connection with ...new theories. Indeed, the genealogy of the EO construct is rarely questioned. We take a “making masculinity visible” approach, engaging with a lens of masculinity, precarious manhood theory (PMT) and double standards of competency, to define and test the masculine elements of EO in the setting of family business CEOs. Design/methodology/approach Using the 2019 Successful Transgenerational Entrepreneurship Project (STEP) dataset, a comprehensive database of family business chief executive officers (CEOs), we examined the construct of EO, in whole and in its masculine elements. Stepwise multiple regression method was used to test the hypotheses of this study. Control variables entered the equation first, followed by the variable of interest for this study. Findings We find differences by gender when EO is tested as a whole construct. Further in testing its masculine dimensions, we find that being male is significant to the elements of autonomy and competitive aggressiveness and that gender is not significant to risk-taking. Originality/value Although research on the widespread and influential EO continues to proliferate (Covin and Wales, 2019), there is not an understanding of its applicability across genders (Fellnhofer et al ., 2016). It is possible that EO may not explain how women do business. Our study contributes to the understanding of between-gender differences in EO, and our findings suggest that the masculine elements of EO vary by gender.
It is important that students across university disciplines and class years explore their attitudes about ageism, aging, and older adults. Yet few if any ageism interventions in academic settings are ...directed at business students, instead targeting disciplines such as health sciences. In this paper we offer requisite detail of ageism workshops we developed for use in an undergraduate entrepreneurship course, including discussion of our results. Business curricula at the university level can serve to reinforce age gaps through the study of functional areas such as marketing (target market segmentation) and finance (retirement planning). In entrepreneurship, stories of youthful startups persist despite recent findings that strongly reject the notion that youth is a key trait of successful entrepreneurs. In the context of workplace ageism, ageism interventions, and age in entrepreneurship, we modified the Disrupt Aging curriculum offered by A.A.R.P., which facilitates an examination of one’s personal attitude about age and aging. Our twist was to focus the curriculum on entrepreneurship and have our students work in groups with an entrepreneur from the Baby Boom generation. This innovation to our curriculum provides promising evidence of effectiveness as measured in pre- and post-workshop attitudes about ageism and entrepreneurship.
