Most owners think about succession as an event: a sale, a handover, a retirement date. In practice it is a long process of making the business function without the owner, and that process is the part that takes time.
A business that depends on one person for its key relationships, its judgement calls and its institutional memory is harder to transfer, whoever the buyer is. Changing that means delegating decisions, documenting how things work, and building a team that clients trust independently of the founder. None of it happens quickly.
The financial side runs on a similar timeline. How a business is structured affects what a transition costs, and structures are easier to adjust years ahead than in the months before a closing. Whether the proceeds will support the owner afterwards is a question best answered while there is still time to change the answer.
There is also a personal question that owners tend to postpone: what the years after the business actually look like. Owners who have not answered it often stall a transition that was otherwise ready, and stalling has its own cost.
Ten years is not a rule. It is an acknowledgement that the useful work here is slow, and that the owners with the most options are the ones who started while a sale was still hypothetical.
