Live acquisition intelligence from Serava.AI's database of 5,527,587 owner-operated businesses across 6 English-speaking markets, with deep coverage of 45 core industries. The headline finding: 98.6% of these businesses have no website — an off-market majority that never appears on BizBuySell or a broker's roster. Data is sourced from OpenStreetMap, Companies House (UK), SBA loan records, and proprietary enrichment.
Key finding: 47% of mapped businesses (2,620,172 companies) show strong succession signals with owners who have operated the same business for 15 or more years. The average tenure across all 5,527,587 businesses is 16.1 years — well above the 8-10 year national average for small business ownership tenure, indicating a market concentrated with pre-succession operators.
The single most important fact about the small-business market: it is almost entirely invisible online. Buyers who source from listing sites are competing over a sliver of the real universe.
of the 5,527,587 businesses in this dataset — 5,450,998 companies — have no website at all. They are not on BizBuySell, not on a broker's roster, and not running ads. They are found only through direct, proactive sourcing: local records, licensing data, and on-the-ground enrichment. This is the structural reason off-market acquisition works — the supply is enormous and the competition is thin.
Website presence is a proxy for "discoverability." A business with no web footprint rarely receives inbound acquisition interest, which correlates with lower entry multiples for a proactive buyer. Source: Serava.AI database, 2026.
Across the 772,672businesses where we can identify the owner's date of birth, the average owner is 50.2 years old. A large and growing share are at or near retirement with no obvious successor — the "silver tsunami" that is expected to drive a historic transfer of business ownership over the coming decade.
Owner date of birth is drawn from the subset with public officer/person-of-significant-control records (primarily UK Companies House) plus enrichment; it is not evenly distributed across every market, so these shares describe the known-DOB cohort, not all 5,527,587 businesses. Source: Serava.AI database, 2026.
Tenure is the single strongest predictor of exit probability. Owners with 15+ years have statistically higher likelihood of considering an exit within 5 years.
Cyan bars indicate the succession-ready cohort (15+ years). Source: Serava.AI database, 2026.
The acquisition fit score (0-100) weighs owner tenure, years in business, rating, review count, revenue profile, and EBITDA margins against buyer-specific criteria.
Green bars indicate high-priority targets (score 80+). Source: Serava.AI scoring model, 2026.
Company count, average owner tenure, and average fit score across all 45tracked industries. "Top Market" is the single largest state, province, or region for that vertical across all six countries.
| Industry | Companies | Avg Tenure | Avg Score |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dental Practices | 357,000 | 15.8 yrs | 61.1 |
| HVAC | 312,000 | 12.6 yrs | 58.1 |
| Plumbing | 246,000 | 22.7 yrs | 60.5 |
| Electrical | 238,000 | 12.6 yrs | 57.1 |
| Auto Repair | 235,000 | 16.2 yrs | 60 |
| Landscaping | 212,000 | 14.2 yrs | 58.6 |
| Construction & Building | 205,000 | 15.4 yrs | 61.4 |
| Manufacturing | 184,000 | 18.6 yrs | 64.7 |
| Janitorial / Cleaning | 151,000 | 17.6 yrs | 56.8 |
| Law & Professional Services | 145,000 | 16.2 yrs | 55.6 |
| Property Management | 127,000 | 19.9 yrs | 50.8 |
| Roofing | 118,000 | 19.5 yrs | 59.3 |
| Child Care / Daycare | 116,000 | 15.3 yrs | 56.6 |
| Pest Control | 106,000 | 11 yrs | 53.6 |
| Painting Contractor | 96,000 | 13.3 yrs | 58.3 |
| Veterinary Practices | 92,000 | 16.9 yrs | 65.5 |
| Concrete & Masonry | 91,000 | 10.7 yrs | 54.1 |
| CPA / Accounting Firms | 91,000 | 19 yrs | 59.7 |
| Insurance Agencies | 88,000 | 14.9 yrs | 58.8 |
| Chiropractic | 84,000 | 17.2 yrs | 63.2 |
| Pool & Spa | 82,000 | 18.6 yrs | 60.2 |
| Physical Therapy | 73,000 | 14.4 yrs | 60.3 |
| MSP / IT Services | 72,000 | 30.5 yrs | 65.3 |
| Security Systems | 68,000 | 16.6 yrs | 53 |
| Software & IT Services | 65,000 | 11.5 yrs | 46.7 |
| Behavioral Health | 64,000 | 16.5 yrs | 65.3 |
| Transport & Logistics | 58,000 | 8.2 yrs | 58.8 |
| Home Health / Hospice | 52,000 | 17.2 yrs | 66.9 |
| Engineering Consulting | 47,000 | 12.6 yrs | 54.7 |
| Facility Management | 44,000 | 13.5 yrs | 47.5 |
| Healthcare Facilities | 44,000 | 10.3 yrs | 57.6 |
| Collision Repair | 43,000 | 14.6 yrs | 57 |
| Energy Services | 42,000 | 15.2 yrs | 69.3 |
| Optometry / Eye Care | 41,000 | 17.2 yrs | 65.5 |
| RIA / Financial Advisory | 38,000 | 37.5 yrs | 62.6 |
| Staffing & HR Services | 34,000 | 10.6 yrs | 52.2 |
| Self-Storage | 31,000 | 15.7 yrs | 58.4 |
| Independent Pharmacy | 29,000 | 17.7 yrs | 63.5 |
| Aged Care | 26,000 | 12.2 yrs | 54.4 |
| Car Washes | 24,000 | 15.7 yrs | 56.9 |
| Urgent Care Clinics | 22,000 | 17.3 yrs | 68.1 |
| Restaurants & Bars | 20,000 | 16.1 yrs | 59 |
| Dermatology / MedSpa | 19,000 | 12.1 yrs | 59.9 |
| Hearing Care / Audiology | 18,000 | 17.2 yrs | 65.1 |
| Funeral Homes | 17,000 | 23.7 yrs | 60.1 |
Data sources: OpenStreetMap (OSM) business listings, Companies House UK bulk CSV (active companies incorporated 3+ years ago), SBA 7(a) and 504 loan records (FOIA public data), and proprietary enrichment via Diffbot, Yelp Fusion, and Wikidata SPARQL.
Deduplication: Companies are deduplicated using a normalized name + location (0.01 degree precision) index. Toll-free phone numbers are excluded from phone-based dedup to avoid false positives across franchise locations.
Acquisition fit score: Scores are computed per mandate using a weighted formula: owner tenure (35%), years in business (25%), revenue profile (20%), rating and review count (10%), and recurring revenue indicators (10%). Scores reflect the match against a specific buyer mandate — the same company may score differently across mandates with different criteria.
Succession readiness: Defined as owner tenure or years in business of 15 or more years. Research by the Exit Planning Institute shows owners in this cohort are 3x more likely to transact within 5 years vs. those with under 10 years of tenure.
Owner tenure: Taken from owner tenure where known, otherwise years in business. Per-industry averages are capped at 40 years per business to exclude a small number of records that carry an inflated incorporation date, so the industry table reflects typical operating tenure rather than data-source artifacts.
Off-market share:A business is counted as "off-market" when it has no website on record. Website presence is the best available proxy for whether a business is discoverable to online-first buyers and listing platforms.
Owner age: Computed from owner date of birth where a public officer / person-of-significant-control record exists (primarily UK Companies House), plus enrichment. Age figures describe the known-DOB subset and are reported separately from full-dataset totals.
Update frequency: The database is refreshed via automated Overpass API scraping on a bi-weekly cycle. This report page reflects live data and updates automatically.
Serava.AI. (2026). 2026 State of SMB Acquisitions Report. Live data report. Retrieved from https://serava.ai/report
For press inquiries or data licensing: sadra@serava.ai
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