Over the next ten years, millions of American business owners, many of them baby boomers, will retire and look to sell. McKinsey researchers have a name for the moment: the "Great Business Transfer." And they argue it represents the single largest opportunity to build Black wealth in modern history.
The numbers are staggering. Researchers forecast that roughly 6 million small and medium-sized businesses will be available for acquisition by 2035. If Black, Latino, and women entrepreneurs increase their ownership of these transitioning companies, the report found it could unlock as much as $3 trillion in new household wealth.
"This is the largest ownership transition in modern US history," said Shelley Stewart, a McKinsey senior partner and co-author of the report. "This is a huge opportunity, but there is also a challenge."
From Earner to Owner
For generations, the path to Black economic advancement has been framed around education and good jobs, becoming, in the language of the report, a high earner. The Great Business Transfer reframes the goal entirely: ownership.
Brandon William Jones, founder of Gravy Wealth, is working with the National Black MBA Association to help professionals make exactly that leap. He calls it going from an "earner" to an "owner." "It's more urgent now than ever to be in control and capture the value you create," Jones said. "The world is moving to a place where the workers, the knowledge workers specifically, are now becoming optional."
The Catch: Building the Market
The opportunity is not automatic. Stewart warns that many viable businesses may never successfully transfer because the marketplace connecting buyers, sellers, and capital simply has not been built at scale. Acquiring an existing, profitable business, with customers, cash flow, and employees already in place, is often a faster and safer route to ownership than launching a startup from scratch. But it requires financing, deal-making knowledge, and access to sellers, areas where Black entrepreneurs have historically been shut out.
What is in those 6 million businesses? "You've got retail, you've got restaurants, you've got construction, you've got healthcare, you've got small manufacturing," Stewart said, the kind of labor-intensive companies that will keep needing workers even as AI reshapes the economy.
A Foundation Already Being Laid
The timing matters because Black business ownership is already on a historic climb. The number of Black-owned employer firms reached 200,885 in 2023, up from 124,004 in 2017, a 56.9% surge that accounted for more than half of all new employer businesses started nationally in that period. Those firms now generate around $249 billion in annual revenue.
The infrastructure to capture the transfer is emerging too. Organizations are training would-be owners in deal-making, and a generation of Black-led funds and acquisition entrepreneurs is beginning to target these "boring," profitable businesses that institutional buyers often overlook.
The Great Business Transfer is coming whether the community is ready or not. The question Black Beat will keep asking is whether the capital, the knowledge, and the access arrive in time to turn a $3 trillion opportunity into $3 trillion of actual ownership.