A hundred thousand Swiss companies are looking for someone. Almost none of them have been priced.

The figure comes from a Dun & Bradstreet study, published through the Swiss Confederation's SME portal: 101,427 companies were seeking successors in 2024. Not planning to, one day. Actively looking.

Set against that, a second number from the KMU Next foundation: roughly one in three Swiss SMEs disappears because it cannot find a purchaser. Not because the business failed. Because nobody bought it.

And a third, which is the one I find hardest to look at. Companies that are successfully transferred show a 95% survival rate after five years, against about 50% for newly founded firms. So these are not marginal businesses being mercifully wound down. They are the sturdiest organisations in the economy, and a third of them evaporate for want of a transaction.

Where they actually go

Credit Suisse's work on succession in practice broke down where owners expect to hand over: 42% to direct descendants, 11% to other family, 23% to employees or management, 3% to a business relationship — and 21% to none of these.

That last fifth is the group in trouble, and it is larger than the group going to management. One in five owners, at the point of being asked, has no route out at all.

What makes it worse is a finding from EY and the University of St. Gallen: only 3.5% of graduates from business-owning families initially intend to take over, rising to 4.9% within five years. The children are not queuing up. The 42% who expect to pass to a descendant are, in a meaningful number of cases, expecting something the descendant has not agreed to.

This is a pricing problem wearing an emotional coat

Here is where I part company with most of the succession advice I read. It treats the handover as primarily a psychological event — letting go, family dynamics, the founder's identity. All of that is real, and I do not dismiss it.

But a business that cannot find a buyer usually cannot find one for a commercial reason, and the emotional layer is what stops anybody saying so out loud.

The reasons repeat. The business is not separable from the owner — the relationships, the pricing decisions and the key accounts all live in one head, so what is for sale is a job rather than an asset. The margins have never been examined, so the seller's number is a feeling and the buyer's number is a spreadsheet, and they are three years apart. The customer base is concentrated in a way nobody has quantified. The pricing has not moved since 2019 and the buyer can see the repair job coming.

None of that is a family problem. It is a commercial one, and it is fixable — but only in the years before the sale, not in the negotiation.

The window is narrower than it looks

If you intend to hand over in five years, the work that determines the price happens now. Separating the owner from the operations takes two to three years, because it means documenting what was never documented and letting somebody else hold relationships that were never shared. Repairing a margin takes eighteen months of pricing decisions with lag before the number moves. Diversifying a customer base takes as long as it takes to win customers.

Do that work and you are selling an asset. Skip it and you are asking someone to buy your job, at a price set by your hopes, in a market where a hundred thousand other companies are also for sale.

One in three of them will not find anybody. That statistic is not about luck.