this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2026
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Millions of boomer small business owners will soon retire. Will their companies just disappear? (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 16 hours ago by Powderhorn@beehaw.org to c/usnews@beehaw.org
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Want to buy my business? It’s been very profitable. I’ve run it for more than 25 years. But no, you don’t want to buy it. Like most small businesses in this country, there’s really nothing of value here.

According to the Small Business Administration, there are approximately 33m small businesses in the US. But fewer than 7m actually employ people. The rest comprise freelancers, side gigs and independent contractors. I’m sure many of these people are making a living. But are they building assets? A brand? Probably not. If that “business owner” suddenly disappears, their business disappears with them. No one wants to buy a business like that. There’s no value.

My company is no different. Like so many other business owners, I’m a micromanager and a control freak. My company has a few employees but in reality I’m nothing more than a glorified independent contractor. The business is built around me. If I get hit by a bus, my company crumbles into nothing. No one wants that.

We live in a service-based economy, which according to federal data accounts for as much as 77% of US GDP. My business is part of that. I bill for hours incurred. I manage a handful of open projects at any given time. I’m constantly scrambling for more work. There’s no commitment. There’s no requirement to use us. Unlike big tech companies, my clients are not bound to any contract. And even if they were, there would be little benefit to me – enforcing contracts is too expensive and time-consuming for a company my size. A buyer of my company would not be buying any customers – they’re free to go wherever they want. There’s no value in that.

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[–] InvalidName2@lemmy.zip 4 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

A lot of those will disappear if my anecdotal observations are anything close to being the norm.

The story goes like this in a lot of cases...

Owner's plan was to pass the torch to someone younger in the family and then rely on that younger person to be their retirement plan OR sell the business for enough money that the proceeds become the retirement funds.

Unfortunately, nobody in the family is interested in taking over and no sane person is willing to buy a doomed business for obscene amounts of money required for a comfortable retirement. Owner(s) work until they can't anymore, but by that point they've run the business into the ground, so it just closes or the land/building/assets are purchased for a depressingly small amount of what it might've been worth at its prime only for nothing to ever come of it.

What I call my home town -- the down town area is a literal ghost town of the skeletons of this exact scenario. My hobbies? The first class vendors of 10 - 15 years ago or longer are pretty much all dead and gone, their stock having moved hands to new vendors who literally squandered it all.

[–] Powderhorn@beehaw.org 1 points 9 hours ago

My family has owned a clothing store for a few generations. My cousins now run what I'm not going to doxx myself by naming. But they learned and are thriving, just as their parents did. Sometimes, it works. The Swiss side of the family is all about rigidity and following the rules, which infuriated my dad until perhaps the final 10 years of his life, when he realized playing by the rules in the states gets one nowhere.

Before he died, he finally gave me "I had no idea what we were doing to your generation, and I'm sorry."

[–] KoboldCoterie@pawb.social 4 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

The rest comprise freelancers, side gigs and independent contractors. I’m sure many of these people are making a living. But are they building assets? A brand? Probably not. If that “business owner” suddenly disappears, their business disappears with them. No one wants to buy a business like that. There’s no value.

My father used to run a one-man plumbing and heating business. Before he died, he liquidated his business; he sold his client lists (along with personal introductions) to another one-man business, and he sold all of his tools, his truck, his equipment, and his inventory, as well. Saying that independent business owners aren't accumulating assets is kind of silly. This article is talking about selling a business in the sense that someone else would come in and take over the business and seamlessly transition to running it, which likely would not happen, but there's still plenty of value to cash in on.

Really, selling the client list and contacts is the equivalent of 'selling the business' in this case. I'm sure not 100% of them converted, but the fact that my father, who had been their plumbing/heating guy for in some cases over a decade told them "I'm retiring, but I vouch for this guy - here's his contact information, he'll take care of you" meant many of them did, and that has a lot of value.

[–] Powderhorn@beehaw.org 4 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

In some social circles, vouching is still huge. Be it business or personal, "I know a guy" opens doors (not trying to be sexist here; it's just the trope). And yeah, without the client list and the vouching, you're not really "selling" anything beyond a name.

[–] KoboldCoterie@pawb.social 2 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

In this specific case, it was two-fold: My father would call these people up every year and let them know it was time for their annual furnace cleaning and schedule that, and the other guy was getting the names and numbers but also a record of when that was last done so he could pick up that practice. Then the other half was the vouching that basically amounted to "If you have an emergency outside of regular maintenance, call this number instead of mine".

Obviously not applicable in every industry, though. If someone is, for example, a baker who makes specialty cakes and things, their expertise is the business and when they leave, that expertise goes with them.

[–] Powderhorn@beehaw.org 3 points 10 hours ago

Honestly, I think most successful entrepreneurs had more mentorship than they like to say in their personal narrative. When I worked for a logistics firm, the owner initially liked to talk about how he did it all with his bootstraps. But over time, it turned out he'd learned the trade over the course of several positions, both driving truck and on the warehouse floor. He struck out only after mastering all aspects of the business (well, not all ... he gets married to find comptrollers) for a couple of decades.

I worked at a copy store 20 years ago where the owner was my age and learned the ropes from the guy he bought it from by working there for years. Trade education still exists; we just kind of dismiss it out of hand in modern culture.

But you know what? Those are the owners taking three vacations a year because they put in the effort to learn*.

*offer not valid in journalism