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Miller (2011) revisited his influential 1983 work on entrepreneurial orientation (EO) and remarked that its underlying drivers are fully open to debate, fresh scholarship and connection with new theories. Indeed, the genealogy of the EO construct is rarely questioned. We take a “making masculinity visible” approach, engaging with a lens of masculinity, precarious manhood theory (PMT) and double standards of competency, to define and test the masculine elements of EO in the setting of family business CEOs.

Using the 2019 Successful Transgenerational Entrepreneurship Project (STEP) dataset, a comprehensive database of family business chief executive officers (CEOs), we examined the construct of EO, in whole and in its masculine elements. Stepwise multiple regression method was used to test the hypotheses of this study. Control variables entered the equation first, followed by the variable of interest for this study.

We find differences by gender when EO is tested as a whole construct. Further in testing its masculine dimensions, we find that being male is significant to the elements of autonomy and competitive aggressiveness and that gender is not significant to risk-taking.

Although research on the widespread and influential EO continues to proliferate (Covin and Wales, 2019), there is not an understanding of its applicability across genders (Fellnhofer et al., 2016). It is possible that EO may not explain how women do business. Our study contributes to the understanding of between-gender differences in EO, and our findings suggest that the masculine elements of EO vary by gender.

Aging is the most important social-demographic issue worldwide, supported by the initiatives of the World Health Organization (WHO) in its global strategy and action plan for aging and health (Rudnicka et al., 2020). The average age of business owners in most industrialized countries is on the rise. In the United States, fifty-one percent of small private businesses are owned by someone age fifty-plus (SBA Office of Advocacy, 2018).

The authors shed light on small business owners, who age in place. The authors suggest that their importance as long-term actors in entrepreneurial ecosystems nor the issue of “Main Street churn” have not been meaningfully explored. Understanding the risks they face offers an opportunity for academics and practitioners to provide insights for business owners, the next generation of the acquirer and advisors. The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has elevated the status of many of these businesses from invisible (and perhaps taken for granted) to “essential” and amplified the co-dependence of business and the local economy.

The anticipated “silver tsunami” caused by the retirements of Main Street business owners is not a national and homogeneous wave. Rather, each wave will land on beaches locally. Small business owners age in place, and their importance as long-term actors in entrepreneurial ecosystems nor the issue of “Main Street churn” have not been meaningfully explored. They become embedded in their community and possibly stuck there in retirement.

The embeddedness of these owners – who likely have social connections, community identification and feelings of responsibility to the community directly impacts the places that they care deeply about – is often unquestioned. However, their retirements call for increased visibility within entrepreneurial ecosystems and translations of scholarly work from several kinds of literature into policy and practice.