The Great Transition

The businesses that built the American middle class are about to change hands, nearly all at once. The generation that started them is retiring: the people who opened the machine shop, the distribution company, the regional services firm, and ran it for thirty or forty years. Trillions of dollars of privately held value, and millions of companies, will pass to new owners this decade. It's the largest transfer of business ownership in history.

If one of those businesses is yours, none of this is a headline. It's the backdrop to the biggest financial decision of your life, and it drags up questions you've probably been avoiding. When should you actually sell? Will there even be a buyer when you're ready? Will you get a fair price, or just a fair price for a tired market? What happens to the people who built the thing with you, and to the family that leans on it? And after all of it, how much of what you spent a lifetime making do you actually get to keep?

The Silver Tsunami Is Real

Start with the size of it, because the scale is what makes the timing bite. Owners in their sixties and seventies hold a large chunk of the privately owned economy, and most of them have no succession plan and nobody obvious to hand it to. The kids usually don't want the business. The key employees rarely have the money to buy it. So for most of these owners the only exit left is a sale to an outsider, and they're all arriving at that same conclusion at roughly the same time.

That's the part that makes the timing strange. One owner selling into a normal market is a single transaction among thousands. Millions of owners reaching for the exit inside one decade is a supply shock, and supply shocks move prices. Which way, and for whom, is the whole question.