Baton, a marketplace for buying and selling small businesses, has posted public valuations and local competitor rankings for two million small businesses across the country. The company says the new tool, called Business Profiles, is meant to do for Main Street what Zillow did for housing.
Chat Joglekar, Baton’s co-founder and CEO, said the company is following the same playbook he knew at Zillow: publish a free public number and let interest build from there. He said the biggest obstacle is not another marketplace or a broker, but the owner who has never thought about selling and assumes shutdown is the only option.
'Awareness is our biggest competition, not other competitors,' Joglekar said. He said he wants small business owners to think of their companies as valuable assets.
The numbers behind the opportunity are large. Roughly 41% of the country’s small businesses are owned by baby boomers, or about 2.3 million companies. Those businesses employ more than 25 million people and hold an estimated $10 trillion in assets. More than half of those owners have no documented plan for what happens next.
McKinsey projects about six million small-business transitions by 2035, representing up to $5 trillion in enterprise value. Its 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 is actually worth.
McKinsey’s Institute for Economic Mobility also found that of the roughly 510,000 small and midsize businesses that exited the market in 2022, 92% simply closed. Just 5% were sold, and 3% transferred to new owners, often within a family. Joglekar framed that 92% as Baton’s real competition.
Baton says its valuations use millions of data points on small businesses, including estimated revenue, team size and customer satisfaction, plus tens of thousands of comparable sales. The company says owners can type in a business name and see roughly what it is worth and how it stacks up against the shop down the street before talking to Baton or paying anything.
The free valuations are only the front end. If an owner decides to sell, Baton runs the process for a monthly retainer and a success fee. The company says it has operated for nearly five years, has worked on hundreds of sales, and is now closing seven deals a week.
Baton’s valuations are not based on an owner’s actual financials unless someone claims the listing and engages with the company. Instead, the first number can rely on PPP loan data and other public records. That makes the opening estimate more of a market signal than a formal appraisal.
The market has already voted on the problem Baton is trying to solve. Too many owners delay decisions, and too many businesses disappear with no sale at all. Capital rewards clear rules. When owners know what they own, and what buyers might pay, the result is more liquid markets and fewer dead-end closures.
That is the larger point here. Main Street does not need more sentiment. It needs prices, comparables and an exit path. If Baton’s public listings push even a fraction of those boomers toward a sale instead of a shutdown, that is not just a software story. It is a market correction.
