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The silver tsunami is coming — and financing the sale, not finding the buyer, is the real bottleneck. Employee-ownership reform gives retiring founders another succession option. But whether the successor is an employee, a family member or an outside entrepreneur, someone still has to pay for the business.
In a recent piece on succession in the The Irish Times, Oliver Browne argued that the retirement of thousands of Irish business owners is a national economic issue, not a series of private family decisions. He’s right — and the problem runs deeper than ownership structure alone.
Over the coming decade, owners who built businesses through the 1980s, 90s and 2000s will decide what happens next. Some companies will pass to children or other relatives. Others will be bought by employees, managers, competitors or outside entrepreneurs. Where no successor can be found, otherwise valuable businesses may simply close. Ireland does not track this directly, but in the US, where the data exists, McKinsey estimates that 92% of small-business exits in 2022 ended in closure — with only 5% sold and 3% transferred to new owners. Most of those closures are the smallest, least-saleable firms; but a meaningful share are viable businesses that never found a financed buyer — and that is the group policy can actually help. There is little reason to think the dynamic here is any different. (McKinsey Institute for Economic Mobility, “Sell, close, or continue? The transfer of US businesses is at a crossroads”, Feb 2026.)
Employee Ownership Trusts deserve a much more prominent place among Ireland’s succession options. As Browne argues, reforming their legal and tax treatment could let founders hand ownership to the people who work in their companies, while preserving jobs, culture and Irish ownership.
But changing the ownership structure only answers part of the question. Whether the next owner is an employee trust, a family member, a management team or an independent buyer, the transaction still has to be financed. That is where Ireland has a serious gap.
The scale of the problem
Small and medium enterprises make up 99.8% of Ireland’s active enterprises and 66.9% of employment in the business economy. More than nine in ten are microbusinesses employing fewer than ten people — engineering firms, retailers, cafés, distributors, professional practices, technology companies and trades businesses that rarely make headlines but collectively anchor local employment and spending.
Ifac Ireland‘s 2026 Family Business Report found that 61% of Irish family businesses have no succession plan, 44% haven’t even put it on the agenda, and two in five owners would consider selling within five years. The same research found 77% of owners have all or most of their personal wealth tied up in the company.
That is a difficult combination. A substantial number of owners are considering an exit, most have no formal plan, and many depend on the eventual value of the company for their own financial security.
This is the so-called silver tsunami. It is not simply a retirement-planning issue. It represents a large transfer of productive Irish assets, customer relationships, employment and accumulated knowledge from one generation to the next.
The obstacle on the buyer’s side
I first ran into this after moving home from the US in late 2023. I had previously bought small software companies through online acquisition marketplaces there. Looking for the same kind of opportunity in Ireland, I found a far thinner market — reliant on brokers, accountants, private networks and word of mouth.
Around the same time, my aunt asked me to help sell a food business in Waterford she had run for 32 years — customers, recipes, a recognised brand, decades of goodwill, and no obvious process for preparing it for sale, finding the right buyer, or handing it over in good order. We achieved a successful exit to an industry partner, and that led me to start Bizmark, a marketplace and brokerage for Irish SMEs.
Since then, one obstacle has come up again and again: even when a capable buyer exists, financing the purchase is often the hardest part. A buyer might have the industry experience, a sound plan and some capital. The business might have loyal customers and years of profitable trading. But in many small companies, much of the value sits in goodwill, customer relationships, intellectual property and future cash flow — assets that are hard to offer as conventional loan security. So buyers get asked to put in an outsized personal contribution, secure the loan against their own home, or persuade the retiring owner to accept a large share of the price over several years.
Seller financing has its place. It can bridge a gap and signal the seller’s confidence in the business. But retiring owners should not have to act as Ireland’s informal small-business lenders.
Financing decides who gets to own businesses
This is not only about whether deals complete. It shapes who gets a real shot at ownership. Where acquisition finance requires substantial personal capital, strong collateral or enough cash flow to repay goodwill over a relatively short period, credible successors can be placed at a disadvantage — the employee who knows the operation better than any outsider, the manager ready to step up, the returning emigrant with the right experience, the local entrepreneur who wants to buy and grow it.
What is left are the buyers who already have money: larger competitors, investment funds, established groups, overseas acquirers. These are not inherently bad outcomes — many will keep people employed and invest in growth. But a healthy succession market should offer owners more than a choice between the best-capitalised bidder and closing the doors.
Employee Ownership Trusts face the same underlying financing question. An EOT still has to work out how the founder gets paid — through borrowing, company cash flow, deferred consideration, or some mix of all three. Funding stays at the centre of the transfer, whichever route an owner picks.
What Ireland can learn from the US
The United States tackles this through the Small Business Administration’s 7(a) loan programme. The SBA does not usually lend directly — private lenders issue the loans, and the SBA guarantees part of the exposure, typically up to 85% on loans of $150,000 or less and 75% above that. The programme explicitly covers full or partial changes of business ownership, with loans of up to $5 million.
In practice, a buyer typically needs to fund only around 10% of the deal — and as little as 5% in their own cash, with the rest covered by a seller note held on full standby for the life of the loan. That is a materially lower bar than an Irish buyer faces today, where a bank wants a large personal contribution up front and the seller note, if there is one, comes with none of the same structure or protection.
The scale is real, not symbolic. In fiscal year 2025, the SBA guaranteed roughly 77,600 loans worth $37 billion through 7(a) — up from 70,242 loans and $31.1 billion the year before. And from 4 July 2026, the SBA is doubling the combined financing available under 7(a) and its sister 504 programme to $10 million. The US is actively expanding access to acquisition capital. Ireland does not have a starting point to expand from.
The lender still underwrites the deal, and the buyer still owes the full debt — the guarantee simply makes it worth a lender’s while to finance a business whose value is not sitting in bricks or machinery. And the programme does not dictate who the successor should be: an employee, a family member or an outsider can all use the same mechanism.
Ireland should not copy the American system wholesale — different economy, different banking system, different business population. But the underlying principle transfers directly: government can share a defined slice of lending risk to unlock private acquisition finance without becoming the buyer, the lender or the owner.
Ireland has some support, but no dedicated pathway
Ireland is not starting from nothing. The Strategic Banking Corporation of Ireland already works with banks, credit unions and non-bank lenders to improve access to SME finance, including through risk-sharing guarantees. Microfinance Ireland will consider applications to acquire an existing business, although its maximum exposure is €50,000, while previous government credit-guarantee rules have also allowed acquisitions where a change of ownership creates or preserves value. But the gap is not a total absence of acquisition lending. It is the absence of a visible, permanent, properly scaled national product built specifically around SME ownership transfers.
An Irish Business Transfer Loan Guarantee
Ireland should introduce a Business Transfer Loan Guarantee, run through the SBCI and delivered by participating lenders. A pilot could offer acquisition loans of €50,000 to €1.5 million, terms of up to ten years, and a State guarantee covering 70–80% of an eligible lender’s loss. Funding should cover shares or business assets — including goodwill and intellectual property — plus working capital and reasonable transaction costs, and it should be open across every succession route: family transfers, management buyouts, employee-led acquisitions, EOTs and sales to outside entrepreneurs.
It should not be a blank cheque. Buyers should put in meaningful capital of their own. Businesses should supply verified financials. Deals should carry independent valuations and conservative cash-flow testing, and the lender should keep skin in the game. The goal is not rescuing failing companies or propping up inflated prices. It is stopping viable business transfers from collapsing purely because the value sits in goodwill rather than in the physical collateral a conventional loan demands.
The Department of Enterprise‘s new Small Business Unit, established in 2025 to give small firms a stronger voice across government, is the obvious place to coordinate a pilot alongside the SBCI, before deciding whether to scale it up.
Preserving businesses deserves the same attention as starting them
Irish enterprise policy leans heavily toward encouraging people to start companies. But buying and continuing a viable one is entrepreneurship too. When an established SME closes for lack of a financed successor, Ireland loses jobs, apprenticeships, customer relationships, supplier income and decades of accumulated know-how — losses that hit hardest in smaller towns, where a modest company can be the biggest employer on the street.
Keep reforming EOTs. Keep encouraging family succession and management buyouts. Keep helping owners prepare their businesses for sale. None of it reaches its potential unless there is a credible way to pay the outgoing owner.
Ireland has spent decades building the infrastructure to help people start businesses. The coming wave of retirements means we need to get just as good at helping the right people buy and keep running them.
Fixing succession is not only about who is allowed to own a business next. It is about making sure someone can actually afford to.
Gareth Cuddy is the founder of Bizmark.ie, a marketplace and brokerage for buying and selling Irish businesses.
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