Private companies that sold for $1 million to $5 million in enterprise value went for about 5.5 times trailing twelve-month EBITDA in the first half of 2025. The $5 million to $10 million band averaged 5.6 times, and the $10 million to $25 million tier averaged 6.2 to 6.7 times, according to GF Data, which tracks private-equity-sponsored middle-market transactions. At the top of the middle market, deals between $100 million and $250 million ran to 10.0 times in 2025, up from 8.5 times a year earlier.
Roughly double, for running a company.
Size explains part of that. Bigger businesses have management teams and diversified revenue, so buyers price less risk into them. It does not explain all of it. The other variable is how many buyers were in the room, and who put them there.
The sellers are arriving all at once. A Raymond James survey of more than 500 owners of privately held businesses, conducted in April 2025, found 88% plan to financially exit their business, partially or fully, within the next decade. More than half, 56%, expect to transition their stake within five years, and 44% said the business accounts for more than half their personal wealth. Baby Boomers still make up close to 60% of owners bringing companies to market, the IBBA and M&A Source reported in their Q3 2025 Market Pulse survey.
The failure rate is the part nobody puts in the pitch deck
Most owners think the hard part is deciding to sell. It is closing. Writing on the Exit Planning Institute’s blog in April 2025, exit advisor Darren Cherry put it bluntly: only about 20% of businesses listed for sale actually sell, which he described as a significant failure rate. That number is a practitioner’s estimate rather than a survey finding, and it circulates in wide ranges. Nobody in the industry argues the real figure is comfortable.
A failed sale costs more than time. Nine to eighteen months of diligence. Financials handed to competitors. A management team pulled off the day job, and in many cases key employees already told. The business then goes back on the market carrying a story about why the last process died.
The broker who came recommended at the club is not necessarily bad at the job. He is usually working the same address book he used a decade ago: two local strategics and whichever family office called last spring. That was enough when buyer competition was informal. It is not enough against a counterparty with an investment committee and forty comparable deals on file.
The buyer pool went institutional and international while the process stayed local
In the same Raymond James survey, 52% of owners said they would consider private equity as a source of growth capital. That is a remarkable number from a constituency that spent thirty years describing outside investors as the people who would ruin the place.
Geography moved too. Research from Moore Global Corporate Finance, published through Vlerick Business School, found 4,143 cross-border mid-market deals completed in 2025, a 16.7% increase on 2024, worth €197 billion. Cross-border transactions made up 39% of all mid-market M&A, up from 33% the previous year. A strategic acquirer in Osaka or Stockholm is not competing on relationship. It competes on price, because the alternative is building the position from nothing.
What the cross-border specialists sell is reach
An advisory model built around that shift has grown up outside the US as well as inside it. Regent Bridge, an independent corporate advisory firm in New York with several international offices, is one example. Its pitch is distance rather than familiarity. The firm says on its website that it has a demonstrated ability to engage with international private equity and trade buyers. American owners meet the same structure through domestic boutiques with alliance affiliations. The questions are identical on either continent.
Sellers are about to find out what the market pays
The shift is happening regardless, because the information gap that protected relationship broking has closed. Benchmarks publish quarterly. Owners compare notes. The conversation that used to happen at a conference two years after closing, when a seller learned what a competitor got for a similar business, now happens before the engagement letter is signed.
Intermediaries expect the volume. In the Q4 2025 Market Pulse survey, 72% said they expect 2026 conditions to match or beat the 2021 peak, and 54% expected deal volume to rise within three months. A market that busy pays the sellers who ran a real process. The owners now interviewing three advisers instead of calling one have worked out which side of that they intend to be on.
