Cardone Ventures CEO: History's Biggest Wealth Transfer Just Started - Brandon Dawson

So here's the scale of what we're actually talking about.

The US has 36 million small businesses in 2026, which is up from 33 million in 2022.

That's nearly 3 million new businesses started in just the last four years.

Entrepreneurship in America is not slowing down, it's accelerating.

But here's the other side of that.

About 20% of those businesses will fail in their first year, nearly half won't make it to year five, and by year 10, roughly 65% will be gone altogether.

The ones generating real revenue, employing real people, and serving real customers face a different problem.

not failure, irrelevance.

Because of the 36 million small businesses in America right now, approximately 27 million are solo operators.

Another 6 million have fewer than 20 employees.

These are owner-operated businesses, dependent on one person and valued by the market as if one person could walk away and stop everything.

This is called key man dependency.

And that's the problem.

It's not the revenue.

It's not the work ethic.

It's the dependency.

And the timing couldn't be more urgent because over the next decade, the largest generation of business owners in American history, who are the baby boomers, will be looking to exit their businesses.

Trillions of dollars in business value is expected to transfer hands as these baby boomers retire.

So the question is, who captures this value? The owners who build transferable businesses will exit on their terms at premium valuations, but the ones who didn't will either close and hand off their business for less than it's worth or keep working because they can't afford to stop.

The reason I'm excited to bring you this particular guest is he has a track record of helping small business owners get out of this trap.

Through the previous business that he sold for 77 times earnings, the underlying business was helping small independent mom and pop audiologists be able to grow their businesses and outperform their peers and be able to exit in a way where they could truly extract the value that they had built over decades.

So this isn't just theory.

This is how you actually take an owner-operator business and transform it into something that has inherent value.

So Brandon is here with me today for our very first podcast together as part of Keep It Brief.