Sourcing

How To Find Owner-Operators About To Exit - Before They Go To Market

Richard Besier•2 October 2026•7 min read

If you find a retiring owner on a listing site, you found them last.

By then the owner has probably received dozens of exit advisory pitches and offers.

I’m going to show you how to find a business to buy before the owner gets crowded with offers, by building a list of retiring owners in one state and one trade. A spreadsheet and a few public websites, no code. An afternoon of your time.

Hey, I'm Richard. We find US owner-operators approaching an exit, and we've helped brokers and investors find and close $20M+ in deal value. Before that I spoke with probably thousands of owners and watched what they did before they initiated an exit process.

"the silver tsunami remains a trickle"

Retirement is the reason owners give most often when they plan to sell. In BizBuySell's Q2 2026 Insight Report, 45% named it, ahead of a new opportunity (29%), burnout (21%) and economic uncertainty (13%).

The pool behind that number is huge. The Census Bureau's Annual Business Survey (2019 release) found that over half of US business owners were 55 or older. The Exit Planning Institute's 2025 Generational report cites its 2023 national survey, where 75% of owners intended to transition within ten years, and says 58% of Baby Boomers plan to exit in the next five.

Yet only 13% of respondents in that same report have a formal exit plan. 52% say on BizBuySell that they have one, though only 14% have had a professional valuation. Different surveys, different meanings of "plan". Either way, very few owners have done the hard part.

And they're not on the market yet. One broker in BizBuySell's report put it as "the silver tsunami remains a trickle".

So the wave is coming. It just hasn't fully listed yet, and most of these owners have no real plan. So, now’s the time.

Although nobody publishes a list of 66-year-old HVAC owners in Tampa, owners leave more public footprint and retirement evidences than you think. There’s literally a whole library of every owner’s lifetime online, and I’m going to show you where to find that library.

what a retiring owner looks like in public records

No filing says "I'm retiring" (obv). Instead, they’re leaving footprints:

• A license first issued 30+ years ago. Most people get licensed in their twenties to forties, so a license from the 1990s usually means a career that started decades back. The owner is probably somewhere between 55 and 70 now.
• A company formed decades ago with the same officers on every annual report. Nothing has changed at the top in a very long time.
• Nobody younger on the paperwork. No son, no daughter, no junior partner listed as an officer.

You kinda act like Sherlock Holmes. Take one step after the other until there’s enough EVIDENCE that someone is retiring.

The third one matters most, and here's why: a business with a visible successor already has an answer to "what happens next". You don't want to be the question they've already answered.

None of these proves anything on its own. Each one is a guess about age or plan. Stack two or three and the guess gets better. These are what I call public-record signals, and retirement is only one of them.

build the list in an afternoon

Florida is my worked example for a simple reason. The state's licensing department (DBPR) publishes free downloadable licensee files that include an original licensure date, and the company registry, Sunbiz, shows who the officers are. If you’re not living / searching in FL, don’t worry. The method works with filings of every state. FL is just the easiest one.

Texas is the counter-example though. Its open data portal lists business names and owner names for each license, but no issue date, so there you'd use the company's formation date from the Secretary of State instead.

step 1: pick one state and one trade

One trade means your first message can sound like it was written for them. One state means one registry to learn. Pick a trade you would actually want to own: HVAC, plumbing, electrical.

step 2: download the license file

On DBPR's public-records pages, download the licensee file for the board that covers your trade. It's a CSV. Open it in Google Sheets or Excel.

The columns you care about are licensee name, DBA name, address, primary status and original licensure date. The DBA name matters more than it looks: it's usually what the business calls itself, and it's what you'll type into Sunbiz. DBPR refreshes these files weekly, so you can rerun this next month and see what moved.

step 3: filter it down

Three filters, in this order:

• Primary status: current. A dead license isn't a business.
• Your trade class. This keeps the list to one kind of company.
• Original licensure date: 1996 or earlier. That's 30 years, and it's your proxy for age.

Treat 30 years as a starting point, not a rule. If you get 4,000 rows, push it to 35. If you get 30, loosen it.

step 4: check each company on Sunbiz

Look up every company name on Sunbiz. Open its detail page and read three things: when it was formed, who the officers are, and what the annual reports say about whether that has changed.

Then cross out anyone with a younger officer who shares the owner's surname. That's most likely a son or daughter with a seat at the table, which means a succession may already be settled.

Mark anyone whose officers have never changed. And mark anyone where a younger officer appeared and then disappeared. You'll want those in a moment.

This is the slow step, because Sunbiz is one company at a time.

step 5: check the business is worth buying

Two minutes each: website, Google reviews, team page. Why bother? A license-holder who is the business, with one truck, no employees and no reviews, retires and the company retires with them. You want a team and repeat customers, something that can run without the owner.

step 6: get in touch

The licensee name is already in your file. Sunbiz gives you an address, and the company website usually gives you a phone number.

Don't open with their age or the word "retire". It lands like a data broker who found their birthday. Open with the trade, the town and one real reason you're writing.

where this goes wrong

A 30-year license finds old owners. It doesn't find sellers.

I've called on retiring owners many times who already had it sorted: the business was going to their family, and my call went nowhere. And I've had owners who looked ready on paper and wanted to keep going for another five to ten years. Some simply like the work. No filing tells you that.

The data has its own holes. A license date isn't a birth date. The person on the license isn't always the person who owns the company. Officer lists on a registry can be out of date.

So treat this list as candidates, not sellers. Expect most calls to end in "not yet", and expect some to end in "my son's taking it over". That's the price of a free list.

Don't throw the "not yet" owners away. Write down the date, what they said and when they suggested you check back. A 66-year-old who says "not yet" this year is a better conversation next year than a stranger, because you're already the buyer who asked politely and didn't push.

add a second signal before you pick up the phone

The fix for the family-handover problem is a second signal that says the plan didn't work.

The one I trust most next to retirement is a failed succession. On the registry it looks like this: a younger officer joins, then leaves, and the older owner is back on the paperwork alone. Read it plainly. A handover was tried and it didn't hold. The owner is still out of time, and now has no plan.

Here's the rule of thumb I use:

• Retiring, with a successor still on the paperwork: cross out.
• Retiring, with nothing else pointing anywhere: keep, and call later.
• Retiring, with a handover that came apart: call first.

Doing this by hand works for one state and one trade. It's proprietary deal sourcing at its most basic, and it's a fine way to start. Across every state, with more than one signal, refreshed on a rolling basis, it stops being an afternoon. That's what we built Seastone for: we run 13 signals across every state.

For owners in those situations, our data shows most went on to exit within 3 to 18 months. And campaigns built on signal-based lists reply at 3 to 7% or more in our experience, against 1 to 2% for lists built by industry and headcount filters. Those are our own numbers, not a market benchmark.

what I would do this week

• Pick one state that publishes license dates and one trade you'd buy.
• Download the file and filter it to licenses from 1996 or earlier.
• Check the first 50 on the state registry. Cross out anyone with a younger officer.
• Flag anyone whose successor came and went.
• Contact ten owners, and write down which ones already had a plan.

That last tally is worth more than the list. After ten calls you'll know which of your filters is doing the work.