redactedCounty Business Patterns is the Census Bureau data set that turns “I want to search in the Midwest” into a ranked list of specific counties with real numbers behind each one. Searchers often pick their geography the same way they pick a hotel — by feel, by where they already live, or by where someone else told them deals happen. The problem isn’t that geographic intuition is always wrong. It’s that it produces a thesis you can’t defend, a list you can’t prioritize, and outreach you can’t scale. You end up everywhere and deep nowhere. The searchers who build real proprietary deal flow do something different before they send a single email. They pick a specific county. And then they go deep enough in that county to become the person every business broker, banker, and CPA thinks of when a business owner finally raises their hand. That level of presence requires picking correctly first. County Business Patterns is the data set that makes the picking rigorous instead of anecdotal. It’s free, it’s federal, and it’s almost certainly the most underused research tool in the searcher’s toolkit. What County Business Patterns Actually Is County Business Patterns is an annual release from the U.S. Census Bureau. It counts every establishment in the country with at least one paid employee and organizes that count by county, by NAICS industry code, and by employment size class. The current reference year is 2023, but the downloadable files go back to 1986. The practical output is this: you can ask how many HVAC contractors with 20 to 49 employees operate in a specific county and get a real number back instead of a guess. You can run that query across every county in a state and rank them. You can pull the same industry in the same size class from 2018 and see whether the establishment count is growing or contracting. In twenty minutes, you have more ground truth about a market than most searchers accumulate in a month of calls. What the dataset covers • Establishment counts by county and NAICS code • Employee size class breakdowns • Year-over-year comparability back to 1986 • Annual release from the U.S. Census Bureau • Free to download. No account required. Why Size Class Is the Filter That Actually Matters The Census Bureau breaks establishments into size classes by number of employees. For most searchers targeting owner-operated businesses in the $1M to $5M revenue range, the relevant classes are the 10 to 19 employee band and the 20 to 49 employee band. That’s where most of the businesses you actually want to buy live. redactedFiltering by size class is how you go from “there are 847 HVAC contractors in Ohio” to “there are 23 HVAC contractors with 10 to 49 employees in Franklin County.” The second number is the one that tells you whether the county is worth your time. How to Build the Ranked Market List The workflow is straightforward once you’ve pulled the data: • Pick your NAICS code. • Pick your size class range. • Pull establishment counts by county across the geography you are considering. • Sort descending. What you end up with is a ranked list of markets by how many businesses of the right profile exist in each one. Then you know which county to name. Here is what that output looks like for a hypothetical searcher targeting commercial HVAC contractors (NAICSredactedwith 10 to 49 employees across the Denver metro and adjacent counties: redactedIllustrative example based on a hypothetical search profile, not a live CBP pull. This isn’t a lead list. It doesn’t give you owner names or phone numbers. What it gives you is a denominator — the number of businesses that fit your profile in each market — so your outreach rate and response rate mean something when you calculate them. It also tells you whether a market is growing or contracting, which matters if you plan to operate in it for the next decade. The Growth Trend Signal The dataset goes back to 1986, which means you can look at five or ten years of establishment counts in a specific county and industry and answer a question most searchers never think to ask: is this industry in this county gaining businesses or losing them? A county with 18 HVAC contractors in the 10 to 49 employee band that had 12 five years ago is a different market than a county with 18 that had 24. Both show up the same way in a snapshot. The trend is what tells you whether the market is attracting entrants or watching them exit. For a searcher who plans to own and operate a business for seven to ten years, the five-year trend is at least as important as the current count. Growing markets attract competition. Contracting markets often reflect structural changes in local demand. Neither is automatically disqualifying, but both are things worth knowing before you commit to a geography. How to read the trend Pull the same NAICS code and size class for your target county across two reference years: current and five years prior. A growing establishment count signals market expansion. A declining count warrants a deeper look at what is driving the change before you commit the county to your thesis. What County Business Patterns Doesn’t Tell You It’s worth being direct about the limits. County Business Patterns doesn’t tell you who owns the businesses. It doesn’t give you owner age, which matters because the seller motivation you are counting on depends heavily on where a specific owner is in their career. It doesn’t tell you which businesses are profitable. And it doesn’t tell you which owners have already decided to sell. redactedWhat it tells you is supply. How many businesses of the right type exist in a given county. That’s where the geographic thesis starts, not where it ends. The thesis is confirmed through the conversations you have once you’ve picked the county and shown up. County Business Patterns tells you which room is worth walking into. It doesn’t tell you who in the room is ready to talk. The data also has a lag. The current reference year is 2023, which means the establishment counts reflect conditions from three years ago. That gap matters more in fast-moving markets and less in stable industries. If you’re looking at an industry that has seen significant consolidation or disruption recently, supplement CBP with current local sources before finalizing your thesis. Building Your Geographic Thesis The goal of this exercise isn’t a spreadsheet. The goal is a sentence you can say out loud with confidence: “I am focused on commercial mechanical contractors with 10 to 49 employees in Jefferson and Arapahoe Counties, and here is why those markets.” That sentence — specific, defensible, grounded in data — changes how advisors take you seriously, how sellers assess your credibility, and how efficiently you can build the relationships that produce proprietary deal flow. A geographic thesis built on County Business Patterns has three components: the industry (your NAICS code), the size class (your employee band), and the county (your market). When all three are specific, your outreach becomes specific. Your network conversations become specific. And the business owner who finally decides to have the conversation knows exactly what kind of buyer you are before you ever get on a call. The wrong question is “how do I find more deals.” The right question is “which specific market has enough of the right businesses that going deep there makes sense.” County Business Patterns is how you answer the right question before you spend any time on the wrong one.