The Succession Gap in “Boring” Businesses
There's a demographic story running underneath a lot of what we've been posting about, and it's worth naming directly.
A good number of the electricians, HVAC contractors, plumbers, and other trade business owners behind these code-driven and compliance-heavy businesses are approaching retirement. Many built genuinely durable companies over decades, but don’t have a family member, employee, or other natural successor ready to take over the business.
Now, that's not a new observation, people have been talking about the coming wave of small business owner retirements for years now. But it matters specifically for the kinds of businesses we've been digging into, because these owners often built something genuinely durable, recurring, code-mandated demand without ever really professionalizing the business past themselves. The demand isn't going anywhere. But the person running it might be, within the next five to ten years.
That gap, a durable business with no clear successor is one reason we’ve become more interested in going industry by industry and understanding where those businesses actually sit, rather than simply waiting for them to appear on a marketplace.
Curious whether others are seeing the same thing in their own searches. Is the succession gap as real on the ground as the broader demographic story suggests, or is it still more talked about ?