Picture a business owner who has spent 30 years building a company most people in Cleveland would recognize by the trucks on the road, not the name on the door. He’s 68. He has no plan for what happens next. Not because he hasn’t thought about it (he thinks about it constantly), but because nobody has ever sat him down and walked him through what his options actually are.

He is not an outlier. He is the rule.

Nearly half of small business owners in this country are 55 or older, and only about a third have anything resembling a formal succession plan. Researchers have started calling this the Silver Tsunami. That’s a tidy way of describing something messy: an entire generation of owners approaching retirement at roughly the same time, with no shared plan for what comes after them. Project Equity estimates that 2.3 million of these businesses are owned by people nearing retirement age, representing something like one in six jobs in the U.S. economy. Nationally, this adds up to an estimated $10 trillion in business assets that will change hands over the next several years.

Most of the conversation around this gets framed as a crisis, and I understand why. Businesses without a succession plan tend to close quietly rather than transition deliberately. When they close, the jobs go with them. But that framing misses something, especially for a city built the way ours was.

Cleveland has plenty of founding stories, and they matter. But this is also a city full of businesses that have already changed hands once or twice: shops, manufacturers and trades companies passed down, sold quietly or handed to a longtime employee, long before anyone called it “entrepreneurship through acquisition.” That path isn’t a fallback for people who can’t start a company from scratch. For a lot of founders, it’s the smarter route. You inherit customers instead of chasing them. You inherit institutional knowledge instead of guessing at it. The question stops being “Can I build something from nothing?” and becomes “Can I take something real and run it better than the person before me.” That’s a different skill, and arguably a more teachable one.

None of this works if we pretend buying a business is something equally accessible to everyone. Most acquisition financing assumes the buyer can put up real collateral or a meaningful down payment, often 10 to 20 percent of the purchase price in cash. That requirement quietly screens out a lot of capable people, particularly Black, Brown, and women entrepreneurs who are statistically less likely to have access to that kind of capital, not because they lack the skill to run the business, but because of what was or wasn’t passed down to them. If this transition gets managed passively, the businesses retiring owners spent decades building will simply consolidate into the hands of whoever already had capital and connections, often private equity or other well-resourced buyers. That isn’t expanding ownership. It’s just reshuffling who already had it. Done well, this moment could be one of the more meaningful on-ramps to business ownership this region has seen in a generation, but only if the financing, training and deal structures are built explicitly with that in mind. Getting that right, not just managing the volume of transitions, is the actual work.

Employee ownership is one of the clearest models for getting this right, and Cleveland has more infrastructure here than most cities realize. The Ohio Employee Ownership Center, based at Kent State, has worked with more than 700 Ohio companies on ownership transitions and helped create roughly $350 million in wealth for employee-owners along the way. Evergreen Cooperatives built its Fund for Employee Ownership for exactly this purpose: buying out retiring owners and converting their companies to worker ownership rather than letting them close or get absorbed by an outside buyer. And Cleveland Owns runs its own co-op fund at a smaller, more grassroots scale, providing direct financing to convert existing local businesses into worker-owned cooperatives. What gets called “the Cleveland Model” nationally is, underneath the name, a genuinely practical answer to a question most regions haven’t figured out yet: what do you do when the person who built the business is ready to leave and there’s no obvious successor?

There’s a second layer here that doesn’t get talked about enough. As these businesses change hands, so does the wealth attached to them. Of the roughly $84 trillion expected to move between generations over the next two decades, an estimated $12 trillion is projected to flow into philanthropy. Who receives that capital, and on what terms, is being decided right now. It is happening one individual choice at a time, mostly by owners who have very little support figuring out what their options even are. If Cleveland can build a credible, repeatable model for how a legacy business and the wealth it generates change hands with intention instead of by default, that’s not just good succession planning. That’s a city purposefully demonstrating how to handle one of the largest transitions in its history.

This hasn’t traditionally been a place where JumpStart has played an active role. Our work has centered on starting and growing businesses, not on what happens when an owner is ready to step away. Given the scale of what’s coming, and what it could mean for who gets to own a business in this region over the next decade, that needs to change. Coordinating with the people already doing this work well, the Ohio Employee Ownership Center, Evergreen Cooperatives, Cleveland Owns and others working on succession and acquisition, isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s part of the job of an organization that claims to be the region’s economic development partner.

Two million businesses. Ten trillion dollars in assets. Twelve trillion headed toward philanthropy. Those numbers can mean a quiet contraction: ownership consolidating into fewer hands and wealth flowing to whoever already had access. Or they can mean something else entirely, if the region chooses to build for it on purpose. Which one happens here is still an open question, and the answer will depend on what the region chooses to do next.