Why a $5 trillion small-business wave is hitting right now

Three things are converging simultaneously, and when that happens you usually get a new kind of business. First, owners are retiring: McKinsey expects about a million businesses to sell by 2035. These are people who started accounting practices, insurance agencies, or property management companies in the '80s or '90s, built a loyal client base over 30 years, and now want to retire — their kids went off and did something else, and their employees don't want to run the whole thing. Second, AI can actually do the work now in a way that wasn't true even eight months ago. The repetitive work inside those businesses — typing numbers from a PDF into a spreadsheet, chasing clients for missing documents, writing the same status update 50 times a week — is exactly what agents handle well. Third, service businesses are priced as if their margins are stuck. A normal service firm runs at 5–10% profit, and buyers value them as if nothing can change, because nothing has changed for 30 years. Put all three together and you get a huge wave of businesses about to change owners, full of the exact kind of work agents are good at, and priced as if none of that matters. That gap is the opportunity.