Baby Boomers Are Retiring in Droves. Private Equity Is Waiting.
By Doug Lepisto, The Wall Street Journal, Oct. 28, 2026
A generation of baby boomers, aging into retirement, are starting to sell their machine shops, plumbing companies and dentistry practices to private equity firms…
The mass retirement of baby boomer business owners is helping accelerate this shift. The scale of this “silver tsunami” is difficult to fully appreciate. More than half of America’s small businesses have owners over the age of 55. These companies earn $6.5 trillion in revenue each year. And many of their owners do not have a succession plan…
In 2024, private equity firms had completed over 1,500 acquisitions under $25 million, an over 40 percent increase over the last decade…[end quote]
On the grand scale of, say, AI investing, this isn’t a huge amount of money. The problem is that private equity is buying in concentrated, targeted niches, such as ferries, independent HVAC, plumbing and electrical companies, garage door repair and roofing businesses.
This can create local monopolies where the private equity firms raise prices and cut service. And the profits go to the private equity owners out of the local area instead of to small business owners who live and spend in the area.
In a similar vein, farmland is being bought up by housing developers.
Whether selling the business for big bucks (your article), or selling your land for big bucks (local farms and dairies), the value of the asset is assessed to be too high. So of course they sell it. Instead of scraping by as a farmer, I’m paid millions for my land so I can retire? Where do I sign?
Rao’s pasta sauce just sold out to Campbells. $2.7B. That’s a lot. I like Rao’s, but am expecting the quality to go down in the name of “efficiencies”. Not private equity, in this instance. But bigger companies swallow-up smaller companies, and it all gets homogenized. Not sure what we can do about it, except maybe antitrust. Which is spotty.
The locality in Michigan where private equity bought all 3 ferries and jacked up the price sued the company. The company then threatened to shut down all the ferries which would have cut all access to an island where people live. That’s what the article said. I don’t know what happened after that.
In May, the Michigan legislature passed a bill to allow the City of Mackinac Island the
authority to regulate all aspects of ferry service to and from the City, including
ancillary fees and charges to consumers. Governor Whitmer signed it on June 3. 2025 Senate Bill 304 – MichiganVotes
Looks like private equity needs to walk a fine line between maximizing profits and pushing consumers over the line to where government regulates them or breaks up their monopolies.
Wendy