The ETA Surge Reshaping America’s Small Business Backbone

By Garth Fasano, co-founder, Raynmaker

The ground is shifting in the small business world. Baby boomer owners are retiring, and a new generation is now acquiring businesses through Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition (ETA).

The data shows a steady rise in small business acquisitions and a larger pipeline of ownership transitions still to come. BizBuySell’s market-tracking reports point to higher transaction counts through 2024 and 2025, even as prices and confidence wobble with tariffs and broader economic uncertainty.

Pair that with the demographic wave: millions of closely held businesses are approaching succession as owners retire, the dynamic often described as the “Silver Tsunami.” Nonprofits that support employee ownership and succession planning have been sounding the alarm for years, underscoring the scale of the handover underway in local economies across the United States.

Transactions are up, confidence is uneven, and operators are buying not just companies but problems worth solving. A major operational difference in the companies transitioned through ETA is that they don’t have the same financial flexibility under new ownership as they did under the exiting generation. The common funding structure includes 80% debt financing with a Personal Guarantee for the buyer. That means the buyer and their partner typically wager their entire net worth on this deal.

As a result, the buyer has a stronger incentive to grow and run a tight ship to build a larger buffer in the business for their own peace of mind. Common challenges in the business, such as inconsistent sales execution and marketing spend that’s hard to connect with ROI, leave new owners with a lot of opportunity too.

Over the past five years, the common playbook for a new owner was a digitization strategy. Convert the business from paper checks to online payments, send invoices and payroll digitally instead of with the post office, and launch a website and start digital advertising. These tactics are still important but are becoming more table stakes as the competitive landscape intensifies.

A day-one ETA operator’s playbook from inbound to income

For ETA owners, those macro facts turn into a simple, high-stakes reality. On day one, you inherit a revenue engine that either compounds or leaks, and at any time that engine can change directions guided by larger market dynamics.

I have spent my career building sales systems for large enterprises and then applying those lessons to SMBs. I ultimately acquired a sales outsourcing firm that served more than 100 SMBs before helping build Raynmaker. The pattern is consistent. Owners buy healthy demand but inherit uneven responses, disjointed tools, and heroic human effort (typically done by the prior owner around the clock). It works until it doesn’t, and it isn’t the type of work most ETA operators thought they were signing up for when they started down this path.

Across hundreds of owner conversations, a few truths keep surfacing.

• Lead response is the profit center. Especially in an industry where response times lag. Before buying, check the response times for all the competitors in the region.
• Tech stacks do not sell. Systems do. Define your ideal tech stack to support sales, and expect significant changes and complexity. Common CRMs are built to manage operations, not accelerate sales.
• Marketing and advertising become expensive when your sales funnel is leaky, and few businesses can identify the holes. Make sure your plan includes clear attribution data and really understand the actual lead sources during due diligence.

The fix is a playbook and methodology, not a shopping list.

First, secure 24/7 lead coverage, so that your calls, texts, and web inquiries are answered within minutes. Then map out your call-to-payment path, so every handoff, booking, confirmation, and collection is visible and auditable. Next, score demand by outcomes and revenue, rather than clicks, and shift spend to channels that produce paid jobs.

Keep humans in the moments that earn trust when you are face-to-face with your customers. Make sure your team will be present with them and not distracted by their next sales call. Ensure your sales system has done as much of the work as possible before you deploy higher-value and higher-cost human labor to the job site. Use technology to qualify leads, bid on jobs, and provide a clear understanding of your value proposition and competitive differentiation. At the most basic level, this can be done on your website and through your brand presence, but more and more will need to be present and visible across every channel instantly (like voice) as access to information accelerates and the use of AI increases touch points from consumers’ agentic tools with your business.

From there, build an autonomy roadmap that advances in clear stages.

• Start with assisted execution where tools guide your team.
• Move to AI orchestration where software runs the mechanics, and your operators approve key actions.
• Graduate to self-optimizing flows that learn from your data.

This is how earnings compound as the system gets smarter and the owner’s workload gets lighter, shifting to higher-value strategic tasks and spending time with your most important customers.

Why “autonomous” selling matters

Words shape how teams operate. “Automated” suggests scripts and sequences. “Autonomous” demands outcomes: booked jobs, paid invoices, fewer heroes needed to save the day. The difference is practical. Owners should ask vendors and teams the same question: What part of the sale will this system own, end to end, without a human bailing it out mid-flow?

For new owners, that distinction protects both revenue and time. Early months for a new owner are packed with team building, customer and vendor transitions, and cash decisions; meanwhile, customers still expect instant replies at 9 p.m. on a Sunday when you thought you would be with family.

An autonomous sales system gives you reliable coverage after hours and during peak days, so leads are answered, qualified, and scheduled while you’re with family or on a job. That consistency turns random spikes into a predictable pipeline, making payroll planning, inventory purchases, ad budgeting, and debt payments far less stressful.

It also reduces “owner dependency.” If every hot lead requires you to personally text, quote, and follow up, the business can’t scale beyond your calendar. Autonomy standardizes the basics—responses, qualifications, bookings, confirmations, deposits—so you step in only where your judgment adds real value: complex scopes, price integrity, and key customer relationships. Possibly most importantly, a scalable business not dependent on the owner is also a more valuable business down the road.

Quality improves, too. When the system owns routine steps, it executes them the same way every time: no lost voicemails, no forgotten follow-ups, no “who has the latest quote” confusion. You get clean data across the full path to payment, so you can see which channels create real revenue and reallocate marketing spending with confidence.

Finally, autonomy creates human boundaries. You can set clear rules for when humans join a conversation and what they do when they arrive—coach the system, handle nuance, protect brand tone—without sacrificing responsiveness. The result is a sales engine that keeps compounding while you keep living your life.

Where ETA and modern selling meet

The most successful new owners I know approach sales like operators, not just marketers. They keep humanity at the center while letting software carry the weight of repetition.

They invest in 24/7 responsiveness, orchestrate the full path to payment, and use their data to buy better demand. That’s how you not only protect margins in a world of rising labor costs and changing customer expectations, but also grow and carry on the seller’s legacy.

Garth Fasano is the co-founder of Raynmaker, an autonomous sales platform designed for small- to medium-sized businesses. He is a business strategist and sales operations expert with over 20 years of experience designing and implementing scalable, customer-focused solutions.

Previously, Garth served as a consultant at Deloitte and BCG, advising Fortune 100 companies on optimizing sales and customer service operations to drive measurable results. He is also a leading voice in the Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition (ETA) movement, guiding new owners in revitalizing local businesses as baby boomers retire.

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