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Part
01
SMB Business Sales: Top Industries
According to BizBuySell, the top five sectors in small business sales are the service, retail-other, retail-restaurant, other, and manufacturing sectors. Over the last few years, the service sector has been accounting for the highest number of small business sales in the United States. A detailed overview of the research findings and the research strategy follows below.
Top Industries in Small Business Sales
- According to BizBuySell data for the second quarter of 2020, the top 5 sectors in the sale of small-sized businesses in the United States are service, retail-other, retail-restaurant, other, and manufacturing.
- In q2 2020, there was a total of 1,481 small business sales transactions. The sectors above accounted for varying percentages in q2 sales by sectors i.e. service - 44%, retail-other - 22%, retail-restaurant - 18%, other - 13%, and manufacturing - 3%.
- As yearly figures from BizBuySell were unavailable, the q2 figures from 2019 and 2018 were analyzed to get a sense of how the top sectors in small business sales have been changing over the years.
- In q2 2019, there was a total of 2,444 small business sales transactions. The sales by sector was segmented into: service - 38%, retail-other - 23%, retail-restaurant - 23%, other - 12%, and manufacturing - 4%.
- In q2 2018, there was a total of 2,705 small business sales transactions. The sales by sector was segmented into: service - 38%, retail-other - 27%, retail-restaurant - 22%, other - 8%, and manufacturing - 3%.
- From the above analysis, it was concluded that the sales percentage of each of the major sectors has been relatively stable over the years.
Research Strategy:
After conducting an exhaustive search for the requested information, we were only able to find the top sectors/industries that have the highest number of small-sized business sales in the United States. This is because similar information for medium-sized businesses was unavailable in the public domain. However, because small-sized businesses currently account for 99.9% of all businesses in the country, we figured that the top industries in the sale of small businesses only will provide an equally clear picture of what is happening in the market. Our research was primarily focused on private business statistical resources such as BizBuySell, which maintains a database of all the business sales that take place in a particular year. Even though we were able to find reports that contained useful segmentation information, data for medium-sized businesses remained unavailable. We attributed the lack of information for medium-sized businesses to the specific nature of the targeted information as available information mainly focused on the sale of small businesses.