A handover takes ten to twelve years. A sale takes one to two.

Swiss research published in February 2026 puts a family-internal handover at around ten to twelve years, a sale to your own management at around five to seven, and a sale to an outside party at around one to two. So the route is a calendar commitment before it is a preference. Which means that for a good number of owners, age has already made part of the decision.

Three routes, three different lengths of time

The figures come from Nachfolgestudie 2026, Kurzstudie 02, "Nachfolgeoptionen im Fokus: Die Qual der Wahl", by Pascal Zumbühl of UBS Switzerland AG and Dr Marie Klein of the Center for Family Business at the University of St. Gallen, published by the Chief Investment Office GWM at UBS Switzerland AG in February 2026. Table 1 of that study carries a row headed Dauer — duration.

Typical duration by succession route. UBS & CFB-HSG, Nachfolgestudie 2026, Kurzstudie 02, February 2026, Table 1.

Route	Typical duration
Family-internal succession (FBO)	Long: around 10 to 12 years
Sale to employees or management (MBO)	Medium: around 5 to 7 years
Sale to an outside party (MBI, strategic buyer, financial investor, IPO)	Short: around 1 to 2 years

The middle row is the one that tends to disappear when this table is quoted, and dropping it makes the contrast look sharper than the study actually presents it. A management buyout is not a halfway house between the two ends. It is a route in its own right, with its own duration, and for a large number of businesses it is the one that fits.

Why one route takes a decade and another takes eighteen months

The study attributes the gap to two logics. A family handover runs on Entwicklungslogik, a development logic: the successor is built up over years, given progressively more, and the handover happens in stages. An external sale runs on Transaktionslogik, a transaction logic: contracts, due diligence, a completion date, a clean break.

Those are not two speeds of the same process. They are two different things being transferred. In a transaction, ownership of an asset changes hands, and the work is establishing what the asset is and what it is worth. In a development, the capacity to run it changes hands, and that capacity is not a document. It accumulates by being present while decisions are made, and there is no way to compress the number of decisions a year contains.

The arithmetic most owners have not done out loud

Now set the durations next to the ages.

KfW Research surveyed 13,079 German Mittelstand firms between February and June 2025 and published in January 2026. Owners planning a near-term handover are on average 66.5 years old.

In Switzerland, UBS and St. Gallen surveyed 401 SME owners in September 2025. 32% expect to transfer ownership within five years, and the concrete five-year plans concentrate at the top of the age range: 10% of those aged 20 to 45, 17% of those 46 to 60, 25% of those 61 to 65, and 41% of those aged 66 to 90. And 21% of owners aged 66 to 90 have no concrete handover date at all.

The arithmetic is simple, and almost nobody says it in the room. An owner of 66 beginning a family-internal succession today finishes at 76 to 78, if it runs to the typical duration and nothing goes wrong. An owner of 70 finishes at 80 to 82. For a substantial share of the owners inside that 41%, the ten-to-twelve-year route is not an option they are weighing. It is an option that closed some years ago, quietly, without anybody saying so.

A route is not only a preference. It is a calendar commitment — and for some owners the calendar closed the family option years before anyone sat down to discuss it.

I do not write that to indict anybody. The point of saying it plainly is the opposite. An owner of 66 still has two live routes: five to seven years to run a proper management buyout, or one to two years to run a sale. What costs them is spending three more years treating a closed option as open. The years are the asset here, and they are the only asset in a succession that cannot be replaced.

What owners plan, and what they end up doing

The February 2026 study also asked Swiss SME owners which route they intend.

Planned succession routes among Swiss SME owners. UBS & CFB-HSG, Kurzstudie 02, February 2026. Components as published; totals reflect rounding.

Route	Share of owners
Family-internal (FBO)	39%
Management buyout (MBO)	22%
External sale, all forms	39.7%
— of which management buy-in (MBI)	25.4%
— of which strategic buyer	12.6%
— of which financial investor	1.5%
— of which IPO	0.2%

Then comes the number that tells you what actually happens to those intentions. The table above is the route owners name as their plan. Asked instead which routes they are actively weighing, the share considering a management buyout rises from 14% at the planning stage to 41% during implementation.

14% → 41% the share of Swiss SME owners considering a management buyout, from the planning stage to the implementation stage — owners discovering that the family option was not actually available to them.

That is not owners changing their minds about what they want. It is owners finding out that the family route is not on offer: there is no candidate, or the candidate declined, or the candidate cannot finance it, or the family cannot agree. The MBO is where they land once the first choice turns out to have been a hope rather than a plan. Discovering that during implementation rather than during planning is expensive in precisely the currency that matters.

What the earlier Swiss work found actually happened, across 153 completed successions studied by Credit Suisse and St. Gallen in 2022: family-internal 53% — own child 42%, another relative 11% — management buyout 21%, external 21%, with the remaining 5% recorded under other or unspecified routes.

How long a phased handover really runs

That 2022 study measured something slightly different from the 2026 one, and the difference is worth stating rather than smoothing over. 68% of those successions were phased, and the phased cases averaged 14 years from the successor's entry into the firm to majority ownership, with roughly four years between the first shares changing hands and majority. Successors entered the business at an average age of 32 and took over leadership at an average age of 42.

Fourteen years is longer than ten to twelve. The two figures are not in conflict; they start their clocks in different places. The 2026 study describes the succession process. The 2022 study measures from the day the successor walked through the door, which in most families is years before anyone calls it a succession. If anything the longer number is the more honest one, because in practice the clock does start when the successor joins, not when the parents finally raise the subject.

Entered at 32, leading at 42. That is a decade of one person's working life spent becoming somebody who can run it, which is what a development logic means once it is written out in years instead of described as a philosophy.

The route is decided by where the value physically sits

This is the commercial question rather than the family one, and it is the part I am usually brought in for.

The two routes suit structurally different businesses. If the value of the company sits in things that can be handed to a stranger — contracts with terms, systems that produce the same output regardless of who operates them, a brand customers buy rather than a person they trust, a management layer that already runs the operation without the owner in the building — then the business survives a change of ownership. A buyer can see that, verify it in due diligence, and pay for it.

If the value sits in the outgoing owner's head — the pricing judgement, the supplier relationships, the knowledge of which customer will tolerate which delay, the reason the discount structure is shaped the way it is — then an external buyer is being asked to pay for something that leaves the building on completion day. They will not. They will price the business at what remains after the owner goes, the owner will be insulted by the offer, and the offer will be correct.

The same fact, seen from the other end of the table, is exactly why a family handover takes a decade. What the successor is acquiring cannot be conveyed in a contract, because it was never written down. It transfers by absorption, by standing next to the decision often enough to start making it. Ten to twelve years is not inefficiency. It is the honest cost of transferring something that only exists inside a person.

Which makes the first question not "who should get it?" but "what is it made of?" That one is answerable in weeks, and the answer determines which routes are genuinely open. I have written separately about the difference between a business that works and a business you can sell, which is this same distinction seen from the owner's side, and about how a successor should assess whether the business is worth taking over, which is it seen from the other.

What the failure rate is actually telling you

The January 2026 study estimates that 168,000 Swiss SMEs will face an ownership transfer by the end of 2030, and that approximately 59,000 of those successions will fail over five years.

Do the division out loud. 59,000 of 168,000 is 35.1%, which leaves a realistic completion rate of about 65%. Roughly one succession in three does not complete.

Read against the duration table, that stops being a scare statistic and becomes a scheduling one. A process that runs ten to twelve years contains ten to twelve years in which a health event, a family disagreement, a change of mind or a market shift can end it. A process that runs one to two years contains one to two. Longer routes are not worse routes — the family route produces things a sale cannot, and it was still the majority outcome in the completed Swiss cases. But length is exposure, and exposure ought to be priced rather than ignored. It is a very different number from the 1987 one usually quoted at these meetings, which I have taken apart separately.

What this means in practice

An owner reading this is holding two numbers: their own age, and an honest answer to where the value in the business actually sits.

If the value is transferable and the owner is past 65, the external and management routes are the live ones, and the work in front of them is preparing the business to be bought. That is commercial work rather than legal work, and it runs in months rather than years.

If the value sits in the owner and a credible family candidate is already inside the business, the clock started when that person joined, not today. The useful question is how far along it already is. A successor who entered at 28 and is now 38 is not at the beginning of anything.

And if the value sits in the owner and there is no candidate, that is the hardest position, and the one most often described as "we haven't decided yet". It has not been decided because the only route with a realistic timeline is the one nobody wants: reduce the business's dependence on one person first, then sell or hand to management. That takes a couple of years of unglamorous work — pricing written down, customer relationships institutionalised, a second layer given real authority and a real number — and it raises the achievable price on every route at once. It is also the work owners are most reluctant to begin, because it means demonstrating that the company can run without them while they are still in it. Some families arrive at the same place by bringing in an outside chief executive first, which is its own decision with its own consequences.

What this cannot tell you

The durations are typical durations across a population of Swiss SMEs, not a forecast for one company. A well-prepared family handover with a candidate already in place can run considerably shorter than ten years, just as an external sale of a disorganised business can take far longer than two.

The route shares are intentions, gathered at one moment from 401 owners. The completion estimate is a five-year projection, not an observed outcome. The average age of 66.5 is German, not Swiss. The 2022 study is 153 cases. Every one of these is a population average, and no owner runs a population.

What would settle it for a specific business is not more research. It is a written answer to a single question: if the owner stopped tomorrow, which parts of the revenue and the margin would still be there in twenty-four months, and on what basis. Contracts, systems, brand and management layer on one side. Personal relationships and undocumented judgement on the other. A number against each.

Nobody currently at that table produces that answer. The fiduciary reports the year that has ended. The lawyer drafts what has been agreed. The broker markets what exists. The valuation multiple gets applied to a profit figure that no one has tested for how much of it is a person. Which is how a great many owners end up choosing between routes without knowing which routes are open to them.