Roughly half of America’s small businesses are owned by someone over 55, and most have no succession plan. BizSleuth maps where those businesses are: every California city, every county, and 48 owner-operated industries, all from federal public records, with every figure sourced on the page it appears.
Three ways into the same dataset. Everything below is free to read.
Population trend since 2020, incorporated versus unincorporated split, and establishment counts for every industry we track.
See Los Angeles CountyEvery incorporated place in California: annual population series, land area, density, share of its county, and neighbouring markets.
See FresnoOwner-operated categories with real NAICS codes. Establishment counts, employment, payroll, and the size distribution that says how many are big enough to buy.
See HVAC & PlumbingThe ranked view: for every industry, which California markets already have the most provision per resident and which have the least. The question most people arrive with.
See the rankingsMost directory sites fill their pages with modeled estimates and let search engines sort it out. We do the opposite. Every page here is held back until a public dataset has been loaded against it. Unsourced pages carry a noindex directive, stay out of the sitemap, and are not linked to.
It means the index grows more slowly. It also means that if a number appears on this site, you can click through to the government file it came from.
Read the methodologyEstablishment counts, employment, annual payroll and size distribution by county and NAICS industry.
Annual resident population for every California county and incorporated place, 2020 through 2025.
Land area, coordinates, and the place-to-county relationships that structure the index.
There is no signup wall, no view limit and no upgrade prompt, because there is nothing behind one. Every page is public, every figure is cited, and the whole index is built from federal records that are already yours.
It stays that way because it costs almost nothing to run. The pages are static files, the data comes from public downloads, and there is no per-user cost to recover. Charging would buy nothing except a reason for you not to use it.
The index reports aggregate statistics only. It never publishes an assessment of a named business or personal information about an owner. See the methodology for where that line sits.
If you finance, broker or advise on small-business transactions in California, the index sends qualified traffic your way: people researching a specific industry in a specific county, at the moment they are looking.