The next supply chain crisis may begin not at a port, but with a business owner closing the doors for good. America must make succession a normal part of small-business planning, because when viable logistics companies disappear, workers lose jobs, communities lose employers, and consumers eventually pay for a less competitive supply chain. Think about how ordinary life works.
The food on a grocery shelf, the parts that keep a factory running, the equipment used by a hospital, and the packages delivered to a front door all depend on a chain of businesses moving goods. Many of those links are not giant corporations. They are small trucking companies, freight brokers, warehouses, and other logistics providers built over decades by people who know their customers, employees, routes, and markets intimately.
Now those businesses are approaching a cliff. According to the McKinsey Institute for Economic Mobility, about six million small and midsize businesses could face ownership transitions by 2035 as baby boomers retire. More than one million may be viable candidates for sale, representing as much as $5 trillion in enterprise value.
Yet the same report estimates that, in 2022, 92 per cent of small-business exits ended in closure, compared with only 5 per cent through sales. That is not a shortage of good businesses. It is a failure to connect owners with successors.
In logistics, that failure has consequences far beyond a seller’s retirement. When a transportation company shuts down, its employees do not simply disappear from a spreadsheet. A dispatcher who spent 20 years mastering a customer’s operation loses a livelihood.
A driver loses a familiar employer. Customers must find another provider. And another piece of the supply chain becomes concentrated in larger hands.
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