Business ownership and succession: a baseline for planning.

Most small businesses have no paid employees

The SBA Office of Advocacy's 2025 U.S. profile reports 36,186,089 small businesses using Census data for 2022. Its breakdown includes 29,811,495 without paid employees. Dividing those counts gives 82.4%, rounded to one decimal. This is SMBRI's calculation from the profile, not a new survey result. ^[1]

That composition matters when discussing succession. A national count includes a very broad range of activity. It should not be presented as a count of staffed companies waiting for new owners. A business without employees may have transferable assets or customer relationships; it may also rely heavily on the owner's own work. Employee status alone does not settle either question.

The useful next question is specific: What could continue if this owner stopped doing the work? Identify the services, systems, relationships and permissions involved before assuming that a change in ownership can preserve them.

Employer firms also vary in scale

Census's 2022 Statistics of U.S. Businesses table reports 6,374,594 employer firms with fewer than 500 employees. Within that group, 5,720,093 had fewer than 20 employees—approximately 89.7%, calculated by SMBRI. These are firms, rather than individual business locations. ^[2]

This narrower population is useful when thinking about teams, management and continuity. It still does not establish how much an owner does personally. A small team may have documented responsibilities and a capable manager, or critical decisions may remain concentrated in one person. The employee count cannot distinguish those situations.

For planning, map the activities that require the owner: winning work, pricing, approving payments, solving operating problems and maintaining key relationships. Then record the proposed backup and the evidence that the backup can act. A person's name on a plan is a starting point for a test, not proof of coverage.

Owner age and business readiness measure different things

Census's Annual Business Survey reports characteristics of owners of respondent employer firms. The 2024 survey covers reference year 2023. It collects information on up to four people holding the largest ownership percentages in a business. An owner table consequently has a different unit and coverage from a count of all small firms, especially one dominated by nonemployers. ^[3]

An age profile can motivate a planning conversation. It does not reveal an owner's intended departure date, willingness to sell, successor preferences or ability to fund a transition. Multiplying an employer-owner age percentage by the total small-business count would mix people, firms and different populations. It would not produce a defensible estimate of businesses coming to market.

SMBRI therefore makes no estimate here of an impending succession wave, businesses available for purchase, or firms ready for transition.

Turn the baseline into a working conversation

Use the national figures to sharpen questions, then build the plan from the business's own evidence:

1. Define the outcome. What does the owner want to preserve, change or stop? Record the preferred timing and which objectives remain unresolved. Continued ownership, family succession, an employee or management transition, an outside sale and an orderly closure raise different questions.
2. Describe what can continue. List the work, customer relationships, operating knowledge and decision authority that currently depend on the owner. Separate an assumption from something another person has actually demonstrated.
3. Assign the next evidence. Choose one open question, the person or role who will investigate it, the document or demonstration needed, and a review date. An advisor can help clarify the question and identify where specialist expertise is needed.

For example, “a manager can take over” becomes more useful when rewritten as: “Ask the operations manager to walk through a recent exception, show the authority available to resolve it, and identify decisions still requiring the owner.” That produces evidence for a further conversation without treating a worksheet as verification.

The next step can be modest: document one objective, one dependency and one unanswered question. Revisit them with the people responsible for the work before choosing a transition pathway.