I think this mostly goes against the idea that the owner wanted to exit with significant value in most cases. Companies (even small ones) can easily accrue a lot of value just reinvesting earnings over a moderate amount of time which is likely going to be out of reach of an employee collective or other local funding source.
For the company I was talking about above it definitely didn't have a local or particularly regular customer base - they were well known as a market leader but the sort of thing you might buy every few years at most.
