Succession without your own children — what then?

That children go their own way, choose other professions or simply do not want to be entrepreneurs is the rule today, not the exception. Saying that about a business you built is hard — but it does not change the situation.

The first step is to admit it honestly, rather than losing years hoping for a yes that will not come.

There are more options than many think: handing over to long-serving employees, to an external successor, to a partner who continues the business rather than taking it apart. Each path has its own questions — but each is better than closure.

What matters is not the form, but that the substance — name, team, customers — is preserved.

Those who only start looking when there is no other choice negotiate under pressure and with little choice. Those who begin early can find the right person and hand over in calm.

A first conversation commits you to nothing — it only sorts your thoughts and shows which paths are realistic.

A look at the orders of magnitude helps. Of roughly 3.6 million companies in Germany, about 3.2 million are family businesses. Of those, 733,000 earn a profit that makes a takeover economically sensible — and from that group, an estimated 186,000 companies face a handover between 2026 and 2030.

How many of them have no successor within the family is not reported separately by any study known to me. I therefore quote no share. What is evidenced is the finding at the other end: 5,620 companies in the chambers' succession advisory work had no candidate at all in 2024, a record high.

And the alternative to a handover is chosen more often than many assume: one in four Mittelstand companies is considering a deliberate wind-down once the owner generation steps back. The most common reason, at 52 per cent, is simply reaching retirement age. These are largely planned decisions rather than failed successions — but every one of them was once a business that could also have been carried on.

IfM Bonn, Daten und Fakten No. 37: Unternehmensnachfolgen in Deutschland 2026 bis 2030, published November 2025 (an estimate based on official data, not a full census).

KfW Research, Fokus Volkswirtschaft No. 526: Nachfolge-Monitoring Mittelstand 2025, published 9 January 2026.

DIHK, Report Unternehmensnachfolge 2025, published 2025 on the basis of chamber advisory statistics for 2024.