The 2025 National Exit Planners Survey – Introduction

According to the Small Business Administration and the US Census Bureau, approximately 50% of the six million private employers in the United States are owned by persons 61 years old or older, with a mean age of 70. They were more numerous, more educated and had higher expectations than any previous generation. Advances in medicine and health awareness have allowed them to work longer than ever before.

Despite their greater numbers, education, and higher expectations, the long-predicted “Silver Tsunami” of business exits has proceeded more slowly than anticipated. In the last 15 years, since the first Boomers began turning 65, only about one-third of the businesses they owned have changed hands. As a result, Boomer business ownership has declined from 3 million to 2 million, with a significant percentage already past “traditional” retirement age.

For our purposes, we focus on businesses with five or more employees, excluding most home-based businesses, real estate holding companies and solopreneurships. The total of all small private employers (defined as between 5 and 500 employees) remains fairly stable at 6,000,000.

Many of the businesses bootstrapped by Baby Boomers in the 1980’s and 90’s have, over the last 30 or 40 years, grown into substantial enterprises. Their transfer is far more complex than that of a stereotypical “corner store,” making them a key focus for the Exit Planning industry.

Surveying Professionals

Other organizations regularly survey the business owner community. These surveys indicate that younger business owners, especially Generation X (42 to 60 years old), are adopting plans for the transfer of their businesses at a much earlier age than the Baby Boomers. This trend is driving demand for exit planning, making it an essential skill for professionals across multiple disciplines.

Unlike other advisory specialties, comprehensive exit planning and implementation is almost impossible for a single practitioner to handle alone. The complexity – spanning financial, tax, risk management, legal and operational skills – demands a collaborative team of professionals. This gap led us to launch the National Exit Planners Survey in 2021. In our dual roles as both advisors to business owners and vendors of planning tools to other advisors, we found little information regarding the marketing and billing practices of other professionals.

We believe gathering and sharing this data will help the entire industry develop better approaches to assisting our clients and helping them achieve success.

Unique Characteristics

The NEPS is uniquely positioned in the industry for its ability to cross-reference survey responses, providing deeper, more integrated insights. This approach goes beyond simple ordinal data (like counting ‘yes’ responses) to compare answers across professions, certifications, and experience levels. While labor-intensive, we believe this approach delivers significantly more actionable insights and useful information .

Changing Demographics

The Exit Planning Institute, which grants the CEPA designation, has grown to dominate the population of advisors who use the term “exit planner.” We welcome these professionals and recognize their value both in educating business owners about the need for exit planning, and as referral sources for implementing practitioners.

Many holders of this designation, either by choice or regulation, do not engage in comprehensive planning. Their purpose is to hold an informed conversation with business owners regarding the largest, and typically least liquid, asset in their portfolio. They then frequently refer more in-depth consulting advice to fee-based practitioners.

For the first time, we have bifurcated a portion of our study between those who charge for exit planning advisory and those who don’t. We feel this gives a more balanced picture of the roles of each type of practitioner.

We hope that you find the data interesting, insightful and useful. Thank you to all of our participants and for being part of the industry that is at least partially responsible for facilitating the largest financial wealth transfer in history.

Why Now?

The first Baby Boomers were born three-quarters of a century ago. The youngest are now 55 years old. Much has been written about them, both favorable and unfavorable. It is impossible to argue, however, that they were the most impactful generation of any alive today. That has little to do with their attitudes or their accomplishments. It’s all about the numbers.

Put simply, the Baby Boomers added to American workers and consumers in disproportionate numbers. In a mere twenty years, Boomers added 56% to the population of the United States. If that wasn’t enough, they embraced the two-income households, dramatically increasing the size of the workforce. From the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s the population increased by 11%, but the workforce grew by 29% with over 1,000,000 women added each year. The mere presence of the Boomers fueled a forty-year expansion of the economy.

They overwhelmed school systems (double sessions in K through 12,) higher education (457 new U.S. colleges were chartered in the 1960s) and franchising (from 1975 to 1980 new franchise sales rose from 2,000 to 22,000 annually). Most importantly (at least to the focus of this report), Boomers became entrepreneurs. Between 1976, when the first Boomers turned 30, to 1988, the number of annual new business formations in the U.S. rose from 350,000 to 550,000.

These are the businesses that are being transferred today. According to the Small Business Administration, there are roughly 6,000,000 businesses with between 5 and 500 employees in the United States. In the last ten years the percentage owned by Baby Boomers has dropped from about 2/3 to around 50%. That means there are still 3,000,000 companies to be transferred or sold. Assuming an even distribution over the next 15 years (when the youngest Boomer will be 70 years old), that means an average of 200,000 business owners a year, 16,666 a month, or over 800 a day are looking for their way out.

That is why exit planning has become so much more popular in the last five years. Once again, the Baby Boomers are blazing new paths through the business landscape.