"The Zillow of the $5 Trillion Ownership Transfer"
A guest post by Hannah Sandmeyer, founder of Steward Market
Who will build the “Zillow” of the $5 trillion ownership transfer?
Six million American businesses will change hands in the next decade. But they are happening one business at a time, in a market that still relies on fragmented networks, personal introductions, and limited visibility.
What’s missing: infrastructure to connect small business buyers and sellers. Real estate has Zillow. Investors have AngelList. Job seekers have LinkedIn. But when it comes to the largest ownership transition in modern economic history, the market connecting buyers and sellers barely exists.
The Great Ownership Transfer
Over the next decade, roughly six million businesses employing nearly 30 million workers may change hands, representing about $5 trillion in enterprise value, according to research from the McKinsey Institute for Economic Mobility.
Economists have begun referring to this demographic shift as the Great Ownership Transfer, or the “Silver Tsunami.” The scale of the transition is widely understood. How those transitions will actually happen is far less clear.
The United States has built extraordinary infrastructure for starting companies and increasingly sophisticated systems for acquiring large ones. Venture capital firms, accelerators, and startup ecosystems help founders launch businesses. Private equity firms, investment banks, and strategic acquirers facilitate acquisitions at the upper end of the market.
But the middle of the economy—where most small businesses operate—works very differently.
Where the System Breaks Down
Most ownership transitions still depend on fragmented broker networks, personal introductions, and localized advisory relationships. Buyers struggle to discover opportunities. Founders struggle to identify successors. Advisors, lenders, and governance experts often operate in parallel rather than together.
Markets fail when participants cannot find one another. In 2022 alone, according to McKinsey, roughly 510,000 small businesses exited the market, and 92 percent of those exits occurred through closure rather than ownership transfer.
When businesses close, the effects ripple outward: jobs disappear, suppliers lose customers, and pieces of local economic infrastructure vanish. When businesses are absorbed into distant portfolios, profits and strategic decisions often move elsewhere. Communities that helped those companies grow frequently lose influence over their future. This outcome is rarely malicious; the system is simply designed to produce it.
Even owners who care deeply about the future of their companies can struggle to identify aligned successors or navigate the mechanics of a sale. “I think a lot of people close their businesses because they’re just exhausted,” Alex Gamboa Grand, a Portland small business owner, said to me. “And the idea of figuring out how to sell your business can feel exhausting too.”
What’s Already Working
Yet the same moment that threatens widespread business closures also presents an opportunity to shape how economic value flows through communities for a generation. McKinsey estimates that improving the ownership transition ecosystem could help preserve up to twelve million jobs and roughly $250 billion in annual local economic activity.
The people, capital, and ideas required for this shift already exist:
Organizations like Project Equity and ICA Group help founders transition businesses to employee ownership
Governance innovators including the Purpose Foundation and the Purpose Trust Ownership Network are developing models designed to preserve mission and independence after a sale
Investment firms such as New Majority Capital are supporting a new generation of acquisition entrepreneurs from historically excluded backgrounds
Researchers at The Democracy Collaborative and Transform Finance document how ownership structure shapes whether wealth remains rooted in communities or flows elsewhere
AllHold Capital is developing a trust-based approach that combines catalytic capital with alternative valuation methods that account for the place-based value of businesses beyond traditional EBITDA
Roll-up models and ESOP M&A are potential avenues to scale, and the UK’s support for employee ownership has demonstrated the systems-level effect of good policy
Missed Connections
Despite the growth of this ecosystem, many of the actors involved still operate in separate networks and are often difficult to find at the moment they are needed. As ownership transitions shift from occasional events to a systemic economic flow, infrastructure that reduces search costs and coordinates participants across the ecosystem will become increasingly important. These are the conditions under which new platforms tend to emerge:
Before Zillow, residential real estate markets were largely navigated through fragmented broker networks and opaque listing systems. Zillow introduced centralized discovery and standardized property information, dramatically reducing search costs for buyers and sellers.
Before LinkedIn, professional opportunities moved primarily through personal networks and informal introductions. LinkedIn created structured professional identities and searchable networks that allowed employers and workers to find one another at scale.
Similarly, AngelList organized discovery between startups and investors.
In each of these markets, platforms emerged once discovery became fragmented, information opaque, and search costs high. The ownership transition market exhibits those same characteristics today.
The Platform Solution
Steward Market is our attempt to build that connective layer. The idea is straightforward: give founders, buyers, advisors, and mission-aligned capital a way to find each other before succession is limited to the capacity of their existing networks. Founders can signal their motivations for a transition. Buyers can articulate their long-term stewardship intentions. Advisors, governance experts, and capital providers can make their expertise visible long before a deal is formally underway.
Traditional marketplaces help people find companies to buy. Platforms like Steward Market take a different approach and help people find the right future for those companies.
What Happens Next
Even shifting a modest share of ownership transitions toward employee ownership, stewardship-oriented buyers, or community-rooted operators could redirect hundreds of billions of dollars in economic influence. The effects will show up where people live and work. They will shape whether businesses remain rooted in the communities that built them, whether workers share in the value they help create, and whether this wave of ownership transitions strengthens local economies or slowly drains them.
The last generation of entrepreneurs reshaped the economy by building companies. The next generation will be shaped by whether we build pathways for others to inherit them.
Hannah Sandmeyer is the founder of Up & Over Advisors, a Certified B Corp focused on mission-aligned acquisitions and ethical ownership transitions. She is also the host of the Ethical Exits podcast and the creator of Steward Market, a platform designed to support stewardship-minded business succession, launching this month!
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