Seventy-three percent of privately held American companies plan to change hands within ten years. The Exit Planning Institute prices that transfer at roughly $14 trillion. The same organization reports that only 20 to 30 percent of the businesses that actually go to market find a buyer.
Both figures get quoted constantly, usually by people selling something, and almost never together. Put side by side they describe a market in which millions of owners intend to sell and most of them will not.
Regent Bridge, a corporate advisory firm in New York, built its practice on the second number rather than the first. Its argument cuts against how the industry usually sells itself. The sale process is not where exits fail; it is where the failure becomes visible. Customer concentration, thin management, a founder who is the business rather than owns it, all of it settled years before anyone hires a banker. Nine months of process design does not undo any of it. The firm was named winner of the 2025 Award for Disruption in Global Business Exits by the Global Recognition awards.
The owners with the least time have done the least work
More than half of the baby boomer owners EPI surveyed plan to leave within five years. Twenty-seven percent have had the company formally valued. Nine percent have an estate plan. A separate 2025 EPI survey found that 58 percent of boomer entrepreneurs expected to sell inside five years, while 14 percent treated building an exit plan as a priority.
An owner who has never had the business valued cannot tell a good offer from a bad one, and more to the point has no idea which fixable problem is costing him two turns of EBITDA. He usually finds out during diligence, at which stage the information belongs to the buyer and gets used accordingly.
The penalty has widened. GF Data figures cited by Forvis Mazars put the average private-equity purchase multiple at 7.2x EBITDA through 2025. Deals between $100 million and $250 million cleared at 10.0x, up from 8.5x the year before. Manufacturing went the other way and reset to 6.5x. Between a prepared asset in a favored sector and an unprepared one in a sector that has repriced, the gap now runs to several turns.
“It’s a privilege to work with owners who spent thirty years building something they intend to outlast them. This award belongs to our team and to the companies that trusted us with the biggest transaction of their lives.” — Bob Gates, CEO, Regent Bridge
The market reopened on its own schedule
Middle-market volume rose 10.7 percent year over year in the first quarter of 2026, against 6.6 percent in the same quarter of 2025, and closed deal volume grew 12.5 percent quarter over quarter. Four constrained years are unwinding at once, and the sellers absorbing that capacity are largely the ones who spent the slow stretch getting their books in order.
Foreign buyers bring a premium and a clock. CFIUS opened initial reviews on 209 written notices in 2024, each capped at 45 days, then moved 116 of them into a second 45-day investigation. A February 2025 presidential memorandum titled America First Investment Policy instructed the committee to streamline reviews for investors from allied countries. That helps at the margin. It does not alter the underlying arithmetic, which is that the approval clock runs in parallel with the seller’s trading performance, and only one of the two can deteriorate.
Nobody has proved the method works
The argument has a hole in it. No independent study shows that early preparation causes the better outcome. Firms selling two-year preparation programs report stronger multiples for the clients who finish them, but owners who commit to a two-year runway have already selected themselves: disciplined and numerate, running businesses sturdy enough to survive that much scrutiny. Those companies were going to price well regardless. Separating method from asset would take a controlled comparison, and no boutique has a reason to fund one.
Then there is the invoice. A firm advising owners to begin two years before a sale is a firm billing for two years before anything closes. Clients are entitled to ask how much of that advice comes from the data and how much from the fee structure.
