In Factoid #8, I wrote about research showing that the most common reason for a business owner to sell was retirement (nearly one-third of all reasons). Oddly, it turns out that most of them actually don’t retire.
Busy, Busy, Busy
Most such “retirees” continue to find ways to apply their experience and expertise.
The only activity on the list above that surprised me with its popularity, given the founders’ independent lifestyle, is “Larger Company Executive.” Yet at least some of these former owners must be fulfilling post-sale earnout obligations to their company’s acquirer.
Since the sum of all percentages above is more than 100, these activity categories can’t be mutually exclusive — some people engage in more than one thing.
So to get a finer sense of relative importance, I’ve normalized the relative popularity of each activity in the chart below. (That is, I divided each activity’s percentage by the total of all percentages — 141%.)
This approach implies that if the former owner did only one thing, what would it be? Only 9% retired, despite 27% claiming that’s why they exited. Maybe they find the charms of golf have limits?
