The Exit

“You gotta keep the water in the bottle.”

That’s what he kept saying as I tried one small swing after another. The problem was that there was no water and no bottle. Later I’d know this was a chipping stroke with a less lofty club, and that both the water and the bottle were imaginary visuals to help me learn to keep my forearms and wrist strong through the swing, but at this point I didn’t have any clue about that. In fact, I didn’t understand most of what he said to me for two years. He spoke figuratively and used a lot of analogies. Like Jesus.

Amanda’s idea for how we would get the company to the next level was quickly taking over my life, and although I was constantly confused, I was hooked.

Amanda had worked with me at my company, Paramore Digital, for 7 years at this point. We were both single and I spoke at conferences across the country as a way to build the business.  As VP of Business Development, Amanda was often with me during those speaking engagements, working the room while I was being the voice of authority, so to speak. Her point was that while we were in our hotel rooms working, all the men were on the golf course at the conference tournament, doing deals.  She felt that we should be there.

When Amanda had an idea she was passionate about during those days, she’d come sliding into my office like Kramer on Seinfeld and it would all come out in a rush, most of it nonsensical. I said, flatly, no. I am not interested. And I wasn’t. Why would I go outside on purpose in the heat of the day to swing a golf club? I’d never even held one. Nothing about it appealed to me. Not the setting or the clothes or the time it took. Nothing.

But Amanda was convinced, especially after the Golf Pro she had her eye on ran a 2 for 1 Groupon special. She was a thoroughbred, so she did the thing she knew she needed to do to get me to show up at a lesson; she bought the Groupon and signed us up for a tournament in Florida.

Still, I canceled 4 times until we were only 6 weeks away from the tournament and I couldn’t procrastinate any longer. It was 103 degrees at 6:00 PM on a day in mid-July when I showed up at Harpeth Valley Golf Center in Bellevue, Tennessee for my first lesson with a PGA Professional. 

He said “Show me your swing.” I said, “I don’t have a swing.” 

“Still,” he said. “Swing.”

I’m 100% sure he was unimpressed, and no wonder. I was voted “Least likely to go outside on purpose” in my family. My younger sister, Miriam, was the one who liked to get sweaty. I preferred baking and playing piano. 

After that unimpressive start, the Golf Pro put my hands on the club the right way and guided me through a short 5 to 7 swing (think about the numbers on a clock face). Then he put a golf tee in the ground.

“Now, clip the tee,” he said. I did that successfully a few times, relieved when I made contact.

He bent over and put a ball on the tee and said “Now, clip the tee.”

I adjusted my grip and, for the first time in my life, looked down at a golf ball. I broke out into a cold sweat that had nothing to do with the 103 degree heat, and had my first golf-is-life epiphany…

“I’ll never be able to hit this golf ball if I think about my business.”

By July 2011 my company, Paramore Digital, was 9 years old. I didn’t know it at the time but we were headed into the biggest growth years of the business; the period of time when we would produce the best work in the life of the company. It’s a good thing I didn’t know that then because we’d already had 9 almost uninterrupted years of growth and I was a little tired. Except for a short dip after the recession, we’d had almost nothing but good news. I was traveling to grow the business and the work was good, sometimes great.

At the same time we were on the edge of the toughest period the company would go through; the losses of our biggest clients, the technology changes that would challenge us beyond words, and the effect of the all-Millennial talent pool inside the company.  Owning a business by yourself is a blessing and it is hard. Like a frog that stays in a pot of water while the temperature steadily increases to deadly levels, many entrepreneurs stay heads down fighting through one crisis after another paying no attention to the boiling point building inside themselves.

On this scorcher in July, the Golf Pro didn’t know any of that and I hadn’t acknowledged most of it. And I didn’t know why I was out there, until I looked down at the ball.

The next day in the office that ball on that tee was all I could think about. At the end of the day I drove back out to the range, borrowed clubs from the pro shop, headed to the practice green and tried to remember what the Golf Pro had said the day before. A few minutes went by before he noticed me as he was walking by with another student. He stopped in his tracks and said, “What are you doing back here today, Miss Hannah?”

I said, “I don’t know.”

“Let me ask you one question,” the Golf Pro said, “do you like being alone? Because if you are going to be serious about this game you’re going to be alone a lot. You’re going to have to practice alone and sometimes play alone. Golf is an individual sport.”

And I said, “I’ve been alone all my life.”

It was true. Although I’d been married a few times and enjoyed raising my children, I had felt alone most of my life. That was never more true than the years I owned the business; surrounded by people but ultimately alone. That’s the way it is at the top.

At the midpoint of my business, just about 3 years before my first golf lesson, David C. Baker became my coach and advisor. He’s accomplished at many things, but the most interesting one, to me, is that he races motorcycles, crazy like a fox. In one of our coaching sessions he asked me what my hobby was. I mumbled through a half-answer, and he was quick to tell me that agency owners need to have a hobby that is expensive, time-consuming, and dangerous. At the time I brushed him off. I didn’t understand any of the three aspects of the perfect hobby he described, and I couldn’t imagine how I could fit in a time-consuming hobby when it took 70 hours a week to run my company.  My business was my livelihood and my hobby. 

And that was exactly the point. My business was my feel-good place. It’s where I had success and authority. It’s where I was respected. It gave me a platform in the city and opportunities to travel. With a failing marriage and the responsibility to provide, It’s also where I put almost 100% of my focus. 

I was happy there, but I was also terrified. Though I was surrounded by success, I couldn’t sleep without Ambien because as everything around me settled down at night, the spreadsheets and numbers and problems ran through my mind in a never-ending loop. All I did was to deal with problems. I had no break from it, which was David’s point.

I was complaining about this reality - that all I dealt with now was problems - to another business owner one day and his response was eye-opening. He said, “Of course all you deal with is problems. Everything else gets handled before it gets to your door.”

The truth of that was startling. The most important thing a CEO does is to grow and mentor the leadership team. To do that right you have to give them autonomy and responsibility...and credit. If your company succeeds, you will find that the fun stuff gets handled by your team while you deal with problems. At the time of my first golf lesson, I was learning that lesson and struggling to deal with the emotional impact it had on me.

For the first few weeks of my golf life I continued to borrow clubs from the pro shop for my lessons and my short practice sessions. But with a tournament looming I had to commit to equipment. So following the advice of my father, a long-time golfer, I went to Jack’s Golf in Belle Meade and said “Sell me some clubs.” I purchased the most beautiful set of Lady Adams clubs with interesting burnished rust colored shafts. I selected a very Jetson’s-cool bag and took their advice on the putter. Excited about my purchase, I called my dad. He asked me one technical question after another that I could not answer until I finally hung up, a little frustrated that he didn’t trust the experts who’d sold me these beauties. I cherished them. I took pictures of them.

With just three lessons under my belt, and two weeks after buying my clubs I was in Fort Lauderdale, teeing off in my first tournament with three men I didn’t know, all career tourism guys who’d spent a lot of time on the course. It was scary to stand over the ball with those men watching.  I sort of connected with my first few shots but it took a lot of them to get to the green. As I was standing on the tee on the third hole one of the men finally asked me…

“Hannah, why don’t you have a driver?”

I was stunned that such an experienced golfer would ask such a stupid question.

“I do!” I replied. “I’ve got three of them. See? There’s the 4 and the 5 and the 6.”

He stifled a laugh when he realized I was so new to the game I didn’t know the difference between a hybrid and a driver. I’d assumed the hybrids were drivers for girls. I mean, the heads were bigger than those other clubs. He said, “Let me show you.”

“Why didn’t you tell me I didn’t have a driver?!?” I asked the Golf Pro as he approached me at my next lesson. I was not all that happy.

He obviously didn’t know I’d already made my tournament debut because he said, “You’re not authorized to have a driver yet, Miss Hannah. We learn the game from the green backwards. You’ll get to a driver soon enough. We’re still working on keeping the water in the bottle.”

So of course you know where I went next. Back to Jack’s Golf after picking up my dad, Jack, at the airport for his first visit to Nashville since the start of my golfing career.

Jack’s Golf was located in an old bank building in Belle Meade so there was no area outside to hit drivers. Instead, they took me to a back room and put a plastic golf ball on the tee and told me to hit into a net. Over the next 20 minutes I tried a half dozen different drivers, never once actually connecting with the ball. I mean, it is counterintuitive to hit a golf ball indoors.

As the club whiffed past the ball on every swing, the technician and my dad would grunt, “Mhmmpf,” until I finally said “Just give me the white one.”

I paid and we immediately drove to the range, which was packed on this beautiful October Saturday. I put a real ball on the tee, took one practice swing and hit the ball in a perfect LPGA arc a good 100 yards just as the Golf Pro walked by.

“Well, Miss Hannah! You got a driver!” he exclaimed.

I said, “Watch this, Golf Pro!” and hit another.

My golfing career was now serious even though I discovered the next week that the plastic wrap was still on the heads of my irons. My clubs rarely left the trunk of my car. Once I found out that you could walk on at the local municipal courses I’d drive to the one nearest me every time I had a couple of spare hours. If I couldn’t get on the course there, I’d drive to the next one. 

For all my life I’d been a girly girl. I didn’t go to the gas station without looking good, but after a few weeks of golf lessons I’d go anywhere with my hair stuck like plaster to the side of my head, as long as I got in some golf. Along with my clubs, the trunk of my car was filled with golf shoes, hats, and clothes in various states of cleanliness. A golfer will wear the same clothes day after day just to get on the course - clean or not.

Every morning, instead of checking email before I got out of bed, I’d look at the weather on my phone, then my calendar. Anything above 40 degrees and no rain and I’d start rescheduling meetings. I graduated from the range to the little par 3 course, then Percy Warner’s executive 9-hole course and eventually McCabe, which felt like Augusta National to me. My white driver and I were making history out there. 

I played. I practiced. I never missed a lesson. I asked questions. I did not waste time. 

Somehow, with all this golfing going on, business was still getting done. During the first 3 years of my golfing life the business reached its highest levels of revenue and profit. But immediately at the end of our most successful years with our two biggest clients, we lost them, unexpectedly. We worked hard to overcome setbacks, with some success, but we were hurting from the senselessness of those losses.

When I struggled to the lesson tee, the Golf Pro would stride toward me with a broad smile and say, “Miss Hannah, has your day been filled with great happiness and joy?” I would think, “No, it hasn’t,” and mumble something non-committal. Picking up on my mood, this experienced Golf Pro would redirect me toward a game, focusing my mind on rolling a white ball into a hole, reminding me over and over to focus. Saying, “Remember, what you focus on increases. If you focus on the negative, that will increase. If you focus on the positive, that will increase. Don’t think about the misses, think about the best shot you’ve ever made here.” 

At my toughest moments I would share a bit about the struggles of the business. The Golf Pro would share a shot he had missed. At first I cringed at that, thinking how much more important my business was than a single golf shot. Later I envied the simplicity of this focus. I thought, “Could I focus on simplicity? How can I get to that life?” 

The thought lingered.

Life continued apace, and I became impatient with the stress of running a business and things that took me away from my playing and practicing time. While there was still some joy for me in the business, I felt a distance from it. I was less attached to the people and the culture; more objective and dispassionate about our clients and the work.

By now I was in my mid-fifties. As balance began to creep into my life, I began to wrestle with the big question all business owners face. What am I supposed to do with the company I’d built? Is there any value in it? What would happen to the business if something happened to me? 

I had no clear successor but I had a talented leadership team, so I set out to find the answers to these questions. My first stop was a meeting with my attorney, Tommy Estes to discuss succession planning. He started the meeting with this stunner of a question…

“Why would you want to do anything at all?” he asked.

I was surprised at that. “Well, in case I get hit by a bus! I want to make sure the leadership team has the resources and the structure they need to keep the company going and a clear path forward.” Of course, you idiot, I thought.

“Why?” he continued. “You’re dead.”

I leaned forward and said “Tell me more about that.”

Tommy continued, “Respectfully, you’ve built a nice business here, but it’s not Ingram Industries or the Frist Foundation. It’s not, shall we say, foundational to the city. The truth is that if something happens to you, your clients would find another agency within a couple of weeks and all of your employees would find new jobs quickly.

“What you really want to consider,” Tommy continued, “is what you want to do for your family.”

“We’re good there,” I replied.

“Well, then you might have a non-profit you want to benefit,” Tommy said, “Or…”

And then he said the thing that changed me…

“... you might want to think about how you want to spend the last third of your life.”

I was stunned. I’d never thought of the business in those terms. I thought I had no choice but to keep the business going. I sat there in silence for a minute or two, then I thanked Tommy for his time and he left the office and I didn’t do anything at all about succession planning.

I thought about my business differently from that moment forward.

Through books and mentors and peer groups, business owners get the message that they are supposed to create a 5-year exit plan and prepare their business for transition. What that transition looks like for a custom creative services business is different than a product company.

Preparing your company for an acquisition is risky. It’s expensive and time-consuming. It’s disruptive to the culture. If word leaks out that you are thinking of selling your business, your staff and your clients question your commitment; and rightly so. You’re looking for a way out. They start to bail. If they bail, what do you have to sell?

However, for most small businesses a sale isn’t the most likely outcome. Most will dwindle and eventually close, or fold in with another company and fade away with no equity transaction that benefits the owner. The founder will be left with the scraps and probably debt, and she will have years left to find something else to do.

The most important question is not “What is the succession plan for my business,” it’s “What will I do when I no longer have a business?” 

The answer to that one will settle the succession plan question.

Our businesses are such a big part of our lives, that we often think we are stuck with the business we’ve built, long past the time when we stop enjoying it. After it’s less profitable than it used to be. When we’ve become the limiting factor in the business. When we are ready to move on to something else in our lives. We hang onto it because it has taken over our lives. Like a codependent relationship with an addict, we can’t imagine our lives without it even when we are no longer happy in it.

In her book, Option B, about overcoming grief after the death of her husband, Dave Goldberg, Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, talks about psychologist Martin Seligman’s findings that three P’s can stunt recovery after major setbacks: (1) personalization - the belief that we are at fault; (2) pervasiveness - the belief that an event will affect all areas of our life; and (3) permanence - the belief that the aftershocks of the event will last forever.

I believe we can apply the same three P’s to our relationship with our businesses. 

1. Our business is not personal; it’s an asset we are building to enhance and enable our lives and to create good in the world.
2. Our business is not pervasive; it’s a part of our lives, it’s not all of our lives.
3. Our business is not permanent; it will end.

Everything is temporary. Including success. Including failure.

Including your business.

Everything is temporary. Including success. Including failure. Including your business.

My stress, and dissatisfaction went into overdrive as my mindset changed after my meeting with my attorney. I became more and more impatient to get to my new feel-good place, the golf course. My game was improving. I finally understood the water in the bottle! My focus shifted even more as the golf pro took a more prominent place in my life. After 5 years as his student, we married and I started to yearn for a complete change in my time commitment to Paramore Digital. How could I go to an office to deal only with problems when he was playing tournaments? Nothing about that is right.

I was dumbfounded and conflicted when a chance for that change came about a year after my meeting with Tommy. 

It is just crazy how things work out. One of my mentors always said to me that nature abhors a vacuum. Another said to speak things into the universe and watch it respond. Another said be true to yourself. I don’t know which one of those worked, but it doesn’t matter. I embraced all of them, and a buyer showed up.

During the year after that pivotal meeting, as my mind opened to new possibilities and my focus shifted even more to a golf-is-life perspective, I joined the board of a regional bank. I attended my first board meeting just after signing the LOI for the sale of my business. At the end of the meeting the other board members asked me to tell them a bit about my company. I did, including that I’d just signed an LOI to sell it. They nodded, not that impressed, and we all left the room.

At the next board meeting they asked me how things were going on my deal. My answer was unintelligible. Being only 10 days away from closing I was starting to feel physically sick at the thought of giving up the business, disappointing my employees, telling the clients, stepping out into the unknown. I was worn out by the due diligence process, afraid in turns that it wouldn’t close and afraid that it would. I ended 90 seconds of sputtering with, “I don’t know if I can do it!”

Those men leaned in, pounded on the table and, like a coach, brought focus to that moment in my life. Almost in unison they yelled, “YES YOU CAN! Of course you can! This is why you start a business! Get this across the goal line! Finish it!” 

One of them more calmly said, “When else will you have the chance to make this much money?”

The lesson I had begun to learn a year before through the words of the coaches in my life, my business associates, my consultant, my lawyer, and my golf pro, came together…Your business isn’t supposed to be your life. It’s supposed to enable your life.

Your business isn't supposed to be your life, it's supposed to enable your life.

David C. Baker was right about the requirements for the perfect hobby, and now I understood. It must be expensive so that your company has to be successful to support it, time-consuming so that you learn to balance work and play, and dangerous so that it demands your full attention in order to succeed, giving you a real break from your responsibilities, and time to recharge.

Golf was all those things for me. It brought focus and simplicity to my life, and gave me the courage to finish what I started; to capitalize on the asset I’d built that enabled my life. After the sale closed I experienced months of grief and loss. I also experienced the downward trajectory of my handicap, which in golf is a good thing. For you non-golfers, it’s not bad to go from a 23 to a 13 handicap. 

My Golf Pro was also right. What you focus on increases.