Ex-Foursquare Founder Takes On The $5 Trillion Small Business Exit Crisis
Ex-Foursquare Founder Takes On The $5 Trillion Small Business Exit Crisis
Publish Date: 2026-06-29 21:18:00
Source Domain: www.forbes.com
Eric Salazar, co-founder of Iconic
Iconic
Six million small businesses will change hands over the next decade as baby boomers retire, representing up to $5 trillion in enterprise value, according to a McKinsey analysis published earlier this year. The problem: more than half of those owners have no exit plan, and the infrastructure to help them sell has historically been reserved for deals ten times their size, says Eric Salazar.
He thinks artificial intelligence can close that gap.
Salazar is the co-founder and CEO of Iconic, an AI-enabled mergers and acquisitions advisory firm launched in 2024 that targets small businesses under $20 million in revenue. The company’s premise is that the same technology transforming dealmaking on Wall Street can now be deployed for the owner of a regional plumbing company or a family-run restaurant group.
“Iconic is giving Main Street business owners a Wall Street experience,” Salazar says.
A Market Without Infrastructure
The scale of the coming transition is massive. More than half of all small business owners in the United States are now over the age of 55, up from roughly 30 percent in 2002, according to Project Equity. Small businesses collectively account for approximately 43 percent of U.S. GDP and employ 62 million Americans. Yet fewer than a third of owners have a documented succession plan, and 27 percent of those over 55 say they plan to simply close their business when they step back, according to a 2025 Gallup survey.
The consequences extend beyond individual owners. When a business closes rather than transfers, employees lose jobs, communities lose anchor institutions, and the economic value an owner spent decades building disappears.
The advisory infrastructure to prevent this outcome is largely absent at the small business level. When large companies change hands, investment banks deploy teams of analysts to value the business, prepare documentation, and manage the process end to end. That apparatus does not exist for most…
