Exclusive: The great boomer business handover just got its own Zestimate

Baton, a marketplace for buying and selling small businesses, has publicly posted valuations and local competitor rankings for two million small businesses across the country: a bid to do for Main Street what Zillow did for the housing market a decade ago.

The launch, called Business Profiles, comes from a company literally built by a former Zillow executive.

Chat Joglekar, Baton’s co-founder and CEO , spent years at Zillow before starting Baton, and he’s explicit that he’s running the same playbook: publish a free, public number, and let curiosity do the rest.

“Our biggest competitor isn’t someone else trying to sell small businesses,” Joglekar said.

“It’s the small business owner who hasn’t considered selling and thinks the only option is to shut their business down.” In an interview with Fortune , Joglekar argued the real obstacle isn’t rival marketplaces or traditional brokers, it’s that most owners don’t know Baton exists at all.

“Awareness is our biggest competition, not other competitors,” he said.

“It’s almost frustrating that millions of small business owners still aren’t aware of us.

That’s why we’re so excited about Business Profiles.” The stakes behind that framing are large.

Roughly 41% of the country’s small businesses are owned by baby boomers, or about 2.3 million companies, employing more than 25 million people and holding an estimated $10 trillion in assets.

More than half of those owners have no documented plan for what happens next.

McKinsey projects some six million small-business transitions are coming by 2035 , representing up to $5 trillion in enterprise value.

The firm’s data found that fewer than one in three owners has an exit plan, and fewer than one in 10 can name their company’s value within 10% of what it’s actually worth.

McKinsey’s Institute for Economic Mobility found that of the roughly 510,000 small and midsize businesses that exited the market in 2022, 92% simply closed, compared with just 5% that were sold and 3% that transferred to new owners, often within a family.

That’s the number Joglekar has in mind when he frames Baton’s real rival.