Younger Generation Flocks to Mom & Dad Inc.

"The closer John Welsh came to earning his graphic-design degree, the worse the job market seemed. By the time he was ready to graduate in 2022, he was seriously considering ditching his chosen field and taking up his dad's offer to work for the family metal-fabrication business.

"It feels so impersonal just sending off your resume to whatever job you see," said Welsh, who is 25 years old and has worked for three years as a purchaser at his dad's company in Plymouth, Minn. "Versus going back to a place where I grew up working and was already familiar with everyone."

Welsh now plans to eventually take over Seelye Craftsmen alongside his older brother, who also surprised their dad, Tom, by going to work for the family firm.

A young generation is taking a bigger interest in joining the family business, spurred by a cooling labor market that is making it more difficult to land entry-level jobs, economists and business analysts said.

At the same time, their parents and grandparents -- baby boomers and Gen Xers who own the most of the U.S.'s businesses -- are feeling more urgency about making succession plans as they look toward retirement.

The share of small businesses that employ a young adult child of an owner has doubled since 2018 and is up 13% year-over-year as of January to about 1,200, according to an analysis by payroll provider Gusto. The company analyzed 400,000 payrolls searching for companies where the last name of an owner over 50 years old matched the name of an employee under 30. The analysis purposely excluded 100 of the most common names in the U.S.

It is still a small share of small-business owners who employ their children, Gusto economist Nich Tremper said. "But that movement is significant," he said.

Children who go to work for their parents also tend to stay at the companies for years. "This is suggesting all parties are benefiting from this arrangement," Tremper said.

Mark Valentino, the head of business banking at Citizens, sees this moment as a reversal from recent decades in which the children of business owners tended to stigmatize returning to the family firm in favor of striking out on their own.

"For the first time in a generation, there's more excitement and interest in taking over a business that already exists," Valentino said.

For many, that interest is driven by economic realities. Covid-19 upended the career paths of many young people, then a boom in artificial intelligence and more recent trade-war unease began reshaping the entry-level job market.

After graduating from college in 2020 with a major in music performance on the euphonium, a member of the tuba family, Max Swisher had no plans to go work for his mom's consulting firm. But when his postgrad job teaching English in Japan was derailed by the pandemic, ValMom -- as his mom, Val Swisher, now signs her emails to him -- offered an alternative.

Max's job as technology director at content consulting firm Content Rules has turned into his mom's succession dream. Max isn't entirely sold.

"I'm trying to figure out if I'm really trying to work at this company for my entire life," said Max, who is 27 and lives in Easthampton, Mass.

Val said her son has proved himself to their 30-person team and to their clients. But she has struggled at times to find the balance with giving priority to both Max's happiness and Content Rules' success.

"You never want to see your kid not happy, happy, happy," said Val, who is 62 and lives across the country from her son, in Calistoga, Calif. "But the job is the job. Sometimes we have to do things and they aren't things we want to do," she said, like appeasing a difficult client.

Forty-two percent of the 8,754 small-business owners surveyed by market-research firm Barlow Research in 2024 said they planned to transition ownership of their companies in the next five years, up from 36% in 2019. Of that group, 28% said they were looking to a family member to take over.

Family business strategist Gary Plaster of the Fairhope Group said he has been seeing more of his clients hire their children in the hopes of passing their companies onto them.

While it sometimes works out, he said, there are pitfalls. Young family members who haven't worked in the business before might be entering it as young adults without training or experience.

"What's happening seems like it's better for the kids than it is for the business," Plaster said. He advises his clients to be cautious with their succession planning hopes before hiring progeny who might just be using the job as a placeholder while they wait for their dream role. A few years ago, he wrote a blog post entitled, "When to fire your child from the family business" with tips for effective parent/child working relationships.

Brothers Curtis and Cliff Hovis aren't worried about making room for their children in their family auto-parts business. The Hovis brothers are convinced the family business is the best way for the next generation of Hovises to build wealth.

"I want them not to struggle trying to achieve an American Dream that I believe is harder to get than ever," said Curtis, who is 56 and lives in Grove City, Pa.

Both of Cliff's children are already in the business, and one of Curtis's four, 23-year-old Nichole, just joined. An older daughter works as a dance coach, and the two youngest are still in college but plan to join.

Curtis's daughter Nichole took a job in inventory and pricing at the roughly 530-person company in January after graduating from college. She grew up knowing she wanted to work for the family firm, which she said has always felt like a "home away from home."

She is earning $55,000, in line with her department's starting average. But unlike other employees, she will start receiving stock shares within a few years.

University of Colorado college senior Alexandra Jones never took seriously her dad's offers to come work at his political staffing company. She was set on a career in fashion marketing. Then she started sending out resumes.

"The idea of working with my dad is becoming way more appealing," said Jones, who is 22. Still, she hopes to make it on her own, in part because using family connections feels to her like taking the easy way out.

Hannah Pisani has learned to ignore the judgment she has sometimes felt from her peers in going to work for her mom's real-estate communications firm after graduating college last year. The 23-year-old had long planned to work at the family business.

"People think, 'oh, she's going right to the top,' when that wasn't the case," said Pisani, who lives with her parents in Park Ridge, Ill. She said that she works even harder to prove to the firm's 20 other employees that she deserves to be there.

After watching her mom take over the business from her own mother, Pisani also thinks that she is more invested in its future than an ordinary employee might be.

"I want to continue the line," Pisani said. "And I think that's a really special thing."" [1]

1.  Younger Generation Flocks to Mom & Dad Inc. Wolfe, Rachel.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 16 Apr 2025: A1.