Leadership Quote by Kit Bond

Cold numbers, warm warning: Bond doesn’t need a rousing speech when a survival rate can do the scolding for him. By invoking the Small Business Administration, he borrows institutional credibility and frames the claim as boringly factual, which is exactly the point. In politics, “boring” is a weapon. It signals seriousness, competence, and a kind of moral neutrality that lets the listener supply the emotion: anxiety for parents, dread for successors, vindication for reformers.

The statistic’s structure is also doing rhetorical work. “Second generation” sounds like a natural handoff, the American story of continuity. Bond punctures that expectation, then twists the knife with “8 percent” making it to the third. That last figure lands like a cliff edge: the future isn’t just uncertain, it’s statistically unlikely. The subtext is not simply that family businesses are hard; it’s that nostalgia and grit aren’t a business plan. Something in the system - succession planning, access to credit, tax policy, professional management, internal family politics - is failing at scale.

Context matters: Bond, as a longtime Republican senator from Missouri, is speaking from a political tradition that loves small business as civic icon and economic engine. The quiet implication is policy leverage. If small businesses are sacred, then their fragility justifies intervention of some kind (training programs, estate tax relief, SBA support) without sounding like “big government.” It’s a politician’s pivot: turning sentiment into a mandate, while letting the spreadsheet carry the blame.