Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing for Thursday, February 20th.

Today on Forbes, the best small businesses to buy now.

In 2024, small business buyers weren't looking for dessert.

Instead, they were looking to sweat.

Fitness businesses got more expensive and ice cream shops got cheaper, according to data

from Biz Buy Sell, an online marketplace for small businesses, and a division of Arlington, Virginia-based

co-star group, which has a $30 billion market capitalization. Jim's saw their price-to-revenue

multiples jump from 0.72x to 0.85x, an 18% year-over-year increase.

The biggest gain among 23 small business sectors attracts that had greater than the median

number of transactions in both 2023 and 2024.

Ice cream shops, 0.56x down to 0.54x, and hair salons from 0.52x to 0.5x, meanwhile, tied for the

worst performance, with both seeing their price to revenue multiples dropped by 4% from

2023 to 2024.

Price-to-revenues, or sales, represents the amount acquirers are willing to pay as a

multiple of an enterprise's annual revenues.

While many small businesses routinely change hands at less than one-time's annual sales,

the large publicly traded companies in the S&P 500 index trade for an

average of more than three-time's revenues, and tech companies like Apple command more than nine

times annual revenues. The highest price-to-sales ratio among the 9,530 deals that Biz-Buy

sell surveyed in 2024 came from bed and breakfast establishments,

which changed hands for a median price of $1.5 million, which was an average of 2.76

times annual revenues.

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