Fabi Preslar, who moved to Charlotte at 17 years old carrying only what she could fit in her mother’s car, has spent nearly 30 years helping other people frame and showcase their stories.
The small business she founded, SPARK Publications, is technically a custom design and publishing company with a client list that spans the globe. Or something like that. But because of who she is, and because of her own journey, at its core it’s an excavator of purpose. SPARK has helped entrepreneurs and mid-career professionals who are at pivot points in their lives dig deeper to find the meaning of their story, to root them before they move to the next chapter.
Along the way Preslar has been named one of Charlotte’s 50 Most Influential Women. Earlier today, she hosted “Denim and Dreams,” the annual fundraiser and scholarship awards program for the nonprofit she founded to help people from marginalized communities tell their stories.
It’s all powerful stuff. But now, as Preslar slides into her 60s and considers what retirement might look like, she’s realizing that her family-run business isn’t exactly one she can sell in the traditional sense, at 3x revenue or whatever. Her 38-year-old daughter, who’s worked with her for 14 years, has already indicated that she doesn’t want to assume ownership of it.
So Preslar and her husband, Larry, who also works with her, are starting to use the term “refirement.” They’re not giving up the work anytime soon, but planning important. So they’re considering a number of options — maybe finding an operations-minded person who could take over parts of the business — that allow them to continue to work on things they’re passionate about, without fully retiring.
“Honestly we want to exit knowing and feeling like the work we did was valuable,” Preslar told me in a video call earlier this month. “Maybe that’s the perfect exit for us, is just to do the next thing.”
Preslar is one of nearly 10,000 business owners in Mecklenburg County who are 55 or older. They’re a generation that helped shape the city’s 21st century economy and culture, and now they’re entering a career’s ultimate transition. The buzzword for this, nationally, is “silver tsunami.”
But as I’ve talked to people over the past few weeks about the potential implications for Charlotte, I’ve come to think of it as less of a wave than a transmission: Of businesses and potential wealth, sure, but also of wisdom and responsibility and, in some cases, a personal stake in the city’s future.
How this era plays out, and how many of those 10,000 businesses remain local, could reshape everything from neighborhoods to customer service to economic mobility. Ten thousand decisions, often deeply personal and emotional, will congeal into a much larger one about what the city’s small business landscape will be a generation from now.
As Preslar, ever the storyteller, puts it: “We’re entering into an era where that gray space is where a lot of careers start and end.”
Dee O’Dell was a 50-year-old corporate and investment banker in 2014 when he read the reports of Charlotte being ranked 50th out of 50 in terms of economic mobility, meaning it was more difficult for a child to move out of poverty in their lifetime here than in any other metro in the country. He was already involved in community work, but after that demoralizing Harvard study was published he joined Novant’s Ophelia Garmon Brown as co-chairs of the Opportunity Task Force, which spent more than two years identifying the barriers to mobility and mapping out solutions.
When the task force wrapped up, “I realized that I was more passionate about the work that I was doing in the community than I was about the day job I had,” O’Dell told me last month. “And I was too young to have lost the passion for the work that I was doing.”
He looked around his company, U.S. Bank, for ways to take what he learned from the task force — connecting with people, listening to their challenges, and thinking about structural solutions rather than silver bullets — into banking.
He’s now U.S. Bank’s Head of Business Banking Sales, working closely with businesses that have between $2.5 and $50 million in revenue. Many of them are family owned, and many were founded by people who are experts in their field but novices on the business side. Bakery owners or HVAC pros launch because they have a particular set of skills and enthusiasm for the work, not because they like spreadsheets.
O’Dell spends his weeks traveling the country to listen to and coach up U.S. Bank’s 1,200 bankers, who in turn are listening to and coaching those small business owners.
I ran into O’Dell at the groundbreaking for the I-277 pedestrian bridge last October, and we got to talking about the surge in retiring small business owners in Charlotte, a conversation that was the genesis for this story.
Last year, U.S. Bank released a report with eye-opening findings: 85 percent of business owners say they became owners to create something they could pass on, but only about half of them (54 percent) currently have a succession plan, and nearly two-thirds (62 percent) find succession planning overwhelming. That’s creating a tension point: while a number of businesses will soon reach a life stage where they need to be purchased, many aren’t operationally sound or sellable businesses.
That has cascading effects. Remember those 10,000 businesses owned by people 55-plus in Mecklenburg County? They have about 122,000 employees and $5 billion in payroll.
They all have a suite of options: transitioning the business to a child or family member, finding creative ways to sell to a key employee, selling it to all employees, selling to a larger company in their field or to private equity, or dissolve.
About half of business owners plan to transition the business to a child or family member, according to the U.S. Bank findings. Only about 10 percent say they plan to sell to someone outside the company.
Who inherits or purchases that smaller sliver of businesses is a key question for our community.
Under current patterns, only about 28 percent of potential business value transfers will accrue to women and Black and Latino people, combined, according to a recent McKinsey report. Often when Charlotte leaders talk about economic mobility, they focus on funding nonprofits and education and housing and other civic efforts. But another avenue is finding creative ways to make sure that people from disadvantaged backgrounds are able to find capital or reasonable loan rates to participate in this Great Business Transition.
One thing I heard consistently from people I talked to for this story, though, is that Charlotte is in a better position to lead the way on these challenges than other cities. The region is a hotspot for recent graduates. All you have to do is walk around South End on a nice day to see how many young professionals are in our midst. And we have a robust community college that continues to retrain people for new careers.
Also, O’Dell and others say, the city’s history of partnerships between government and business and nonprofits leads to more innovative solutions.
“I’ve talked to bankers in some of these other cities about, like, ‘What’s your relationship with the mayor or the city manager, the county manager?’” O’Dell told me. “It’s quite adversarial (in other cities). That’s not the case here.”
Michael Stier is a Boomer. His son, Jason, is a millennial.
Back in 2018, Michael sold his 18-year-old business, Adhesion Wealth. The sale was a complicated, years-long, 80-hour-a-week process — “a complete pain in my ass,” he laughs now.
Stier hates golf and loves work. So after about nine months of “retirement,” he got bored. He had his own “refirement,” going to work with a company, Focus CFO, that helps small and mid-sized businesses become sustainable and transferable. Now he was working with people who were, in some ways, like his slightly younger self. Michael launched the firm’s Carolinas division, and he’s essentially a franchisee.
Business was so plentiful in Charlotte that Michael’s team grew to more than a dozen fractional CFOs. He needed help managing it all. (“I was the bottleneck for growth in the Charlotte market,” Michael says.) So last year he recruited Jason home to Charlotte from Colorado to work with him.
Their job puts them in the middle of the wealth transition on a daily basis. They coach business owners on how to think about their companies as more than a job, and help them build multi-year plans to sell or pass it down.
What they see is at once concerning and encouraging. Over half of private businesses in North Carolina and South Carolina are owned by Boomers, according to Michael’s research, and a significant chunk of them are not remotely close to ready to be sold.
Many are built around a single person and don’t have systems or processes or key employees who could keep the business running if that owner walked out or passed away.
“If they’re not ready and attractive (to a buyer),” Michael says, “those employees are then, you know, at some point, the lights are going to just turn off, and where do they go?”
The good news is that, at least in places like Charlotte, buyers do exist. They range from recent MBA graduates who’ve teamed up with investors, to former executives who want to own something. They’re all part of a recent trend of “entrepreneurship through acquisition,” in which younger entrepreneurs are asking themselves, Why build something when I can just buy it?
That’s where Jason comes in. He says his job, most days, is running hard at networking. On Thursday he drove from Huntersville to Mount Holly to southeast Charlotte before eating lunch.
One key thing he’s learned is that for most sellers, the final sales price is hardly a top priority. Instead they ask more intimate and human questions.
“Who am I selling it to? What’s my legacy going to be?” Jason says. “Are they going to take care of the employees after I leave? Are my clients going to feel like they’re well taken care of? Do I feel like I’m making someone’s life better through the sale of the business? When I drive around town after I sell this business and I see my old company’s trucks, does it make me feel good?”
Michael and Jason are a potential succession story themselves. Michael’s agreement with Focus CFO includes a framework for transferring his book of business. He says Jason is “wired like me,” and could inherit the book one day, if he wants. Jason, who’s 36, says “it’s trending that way.”
“I can’t go a single week without going somewhere where somebody’s like, ‘Oh, you’re Michael’s son,'” Jason said.
There is one hurdle in that scenario, though. Michael is in no hurry to retire, not after the nine months of boredom in 2018.
“It’ll be a race,” he said, “to see who retires first. Him? Or me?”
“The race is on,” Jason replied.
The 2008 financial crisis hit Charlotte harder than most other cities. About 30,000 people lost jobs during the collapse, with the unemployment rate scraping bottom at 12.9 percent. Buildings stood half-built. And many mid-career workers walked out of the towers wondering what to do with the rest of their lives.
Some left town. Some found other corporate jobs. Many others started small businesses. At the same time, consumers who’d grown disillusioned with corporations were re-committing to spending their money in locally owned restaurants and breweries and shops. It made for an accidental but ideal match. Now, with the Great Recession turning 18 this fall, a good number of those owners are entering retirement chapters.
A dip in birth rates caused by that recession is now fueling concerns over everything from college enrollment to military recruitment, while artificial intelligence stands to reshape entry-level white-collar work — pressures that are landing on the same generations that watched their parents lose jobs in the towers.
One thing’s certain: The past 18 years have produced a generation of young professionals who are less enamored with the traditional corporate climb than their predecessors.
“I see in younger people an expectation, really soon, that there’s a sense of purpose in their work,” O’Dell told me. “This covenant relationship that existed between employee and large company — if I show up every day and I do the work that’s asked of me, there will be continuity here and security in that — and I think that’s just not the case. … If it’s not going to be that level of security, then what’s the purpose?”
So now the conditions are set for another accidental match. Back-to-back generations of Millennials and Gen Zers whose early chapters were shaped by a recession, and Boomers and Gen Xers who rebuilt the city’s small business landscape now entering their retirement, or “refirement” chapters.
I mentioned some of these generational thoughts to Jason and Michael, and naturally the topic of AI came up. Jason had a prediction:
“If I had to look back 20 years from now,” Jason said, “my guess is we’re seeing a lot of blue-collar millionaires being made.”
For more: As it happens, U.S. Bank is hosting a summit on business succession and legacy planning this Wednesday, March 18, 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., in SouthPark. Michael and Jason Stier are keynote speakers. Register here. Sunday is the deadline to RSVP.