Say a Lancaster County landscaping and lawn care company is doing $1.6M in revenue with $410K in SDE.
The owner is 62. He’s thought about selling “in a few years” for most of the last decade.
Business is good. Crews are solid. He’s not in a rush.
Here’s the problem with “in a few years”: a lot of other Lancaster County owners are telling themselves the same thing, at the same age, on the same timeline.
The math behind Lancaster County’s aging owner base
About 20.5% of Lancaster County residents are now 65 or older, and the county’s 65+ population has been climbing steadily for years, with a growing share of the workforce sitting in the 55-and-up bracket. That’s not just a retirement-community statistic. It’s a small business ownership statistic.
Most owner-operated businesses in this county — landscaping, HVAC, cleaning, auto repair, the trades — were started or bought by people who are now somewhere in that same 55-70 age band.
Nationally, more than 58% of small business owners have no formal transition or succession plan, and fewer than one in three baby boomer owners have one either. Most aren’t ignoring the question. They’re just assuming there’s more runway than there actually is.
Here’s where it gets dangerous.
When a large cohort of owners all decide to sell within the same 3-5 year window, the buyer pool doesn’t grow to match them. It’s still roughly the same number of private equity groups, individual buyers, and strategic acquirers chasing deals — except now they have more businesses to choose from.
More sellers. Same number of buyers. That math doesn’t favor the seller who waits.
What that actually does to a deal
Go back to the landscaping company.
At $410K SDE, a clean, well-documented business like that is realistically worth 2.6x-3.0x SDE right now — call it $1.07M to $1.23M.
That range assumes buyers are competing for it. Multiple offers, some negotiating leverage, maybe a bidding dynamic between a strategic buyer and an individual buyer using SBA financing.
Now picture that same business hitting the market in 2029 or 2030, alongside a wave of other landscaping, HVAC, and cleaning companies whose owners all hit the same “I’m ready” point at once.
Buyers get pickier. They can afford to.
The businesses with clean books, documented processes, and management that doesn’t depend on the owner still sell well. The businesses that look like every other tired owner cashing out late get squeezed on price, terms, or both — sometimes all three.
That 2.6x-3.0x range doesn’t hold steady just because it held steady last year. Multiples move with buyer-to-seller ratios like anything else with supply and demand behind it.
Financing supply is a real constraint too, not just buyer appetite
There’s a second piece to this that owners often miss: buyer financing capacity isn’t infinite either.
Most acquisitions of businesses this size get financed through SBA 7(a) loans, and larger ones — especially anything involving real estate or equipment — often layer in an SBA 504 loan, which pairs a conventional lender’s 50% with a Certified Development Company’s 40% and the buyer’s 10% down. Lancaster County has its own CDC handling 504 deals locally, which helps.
But lending capacity, underwriting bandwidth, and the number of qualified buyers with financeable balance sheets don’t scale up automatically just because more owners decide to sell in the same window.
When deal volume in a county spikes, the buyers who can actually close — not just the ones who make offers — become the scarce resource. That favors early movers, not owners who wait until everyone else is selling too.
The practical takeaway
None of this means panic-selling a business that isn’t ready.
It means understanding that “I’ll sell in a few years” isn’t a neutral decision. It’s a bet that the current 2.6x-3.0x market holds steady while a large cohort of same-age owners heads toward the exit at the same time you do.
That bet might pay off. But it’s still a bet, and most owners who make it haven’t actually thought about it that way.
The owners who come out ahead aren’t necessarily the ones who sell first. They’re the ones who get their financials clean, document what makes the business run without them, and put themselves in position to sell on their own timeline — not because the market forced their hand.
If you’re a Lancaster County owner in your late 50s or 60s who’s been thinking “a few more years,” the honest question isn’t whether you’re ready today. It’s whether you’ll still like your options once a few hundred other owners your age start asking the same question at the same time.
Curious what your business is worth today, and what that number might look like in five years if you wait? That’s a conversation worth having now, not after the wave hits.