Succession is now the top driver of mid-market deals. A crowded exit is a buyer’s market.

Around 85% of dealmakers say succession will be a key driver of mid-market mergers and acquisitions this year, up from 37% a year earlier. If you are thinking about selling in the next few years, that jump should give you pause rather than comfort. A wave of owners reaching for the exit at the same time is good news for buyers and advisers. It is a harder story for the seller standing in the queue.

What the data shows

The figure comes from the Pitcher Partners Dealmakers 2025 report, which tracks sentiment across people who actually do mid-market deals. The headline is the share of dealmakers naming succession as a key driver: 85% in 2025, against 37% the year before. Around 80% expect succession to lift overall M&A activity, and roughly 35% expect that growth to be significant.

The cause is demographic. A generation of business owners built their firms over the past few decades and are now approaching retirement at roughly the same time, the so-called silver tsunami. Many of those businesses still carry founder-led or family leadership structures, with the owner at the centre of everything.

The same report flags the catch. Nearly one in four sellers are unprepared, which the dealmakers identify as a real obstacle to getting transitions done.

What it means for you

When a lot of similar businesses come to market together, buyers can afford to be selective. They stop chasing and start comparing. Price and terms drift toward whoever is buying, not whoever is selling. In that environment, the thing that sets your business apart is not timing the market, because everyone is selling into the same window. It is readiness.

Here is where the standard advice falls down. Plenty of advisers will tell you the silver tsunami means there has never been a better time to sell. For a buyer with capital and patience, maybe. For an owner whose business cannot run a week without them, a flooded market is exactly the wrong place to be holding an unprepared asset.

The businesses that will clear in a crowded market are the ones that run without the owner in the chair every day. A buyer looking at twenty tired, owner-dependent businesses and one that has a functioning team, clean records, and a leader who has genuinely stepped back will pay for the difference. That gap is built over years, not in the months before a sale.

If an exit is anywhere on your horizon, the useful question is not when to sell. It is whether the business could survive your absence today, because that is the question the buyer will be asking, and a market full of sellers gives them every reason to ask it hard.