The Rocky Road to Overcoming Early Doubts

Today, we sold the business. The purchase agreement was signed, and the money was transferred to our bank accounts. The deal is done. We are millionaires!

All the work we did to build this company from scratch culminated in this sale. This business, which, in the beginning, wasn’t working, is now deemed by this buyer to be very valuable. I still remember the early days.

Hearing a prospect say, “Why would I need that?”

Employee says, "This place is a hellhole. All we do is work all the time. I have no life.”

Customer says, “You know, this would be a more useful product if it just had..."

I remember the arguments with my business partner—those moments when we both knew we were right. Each of us knew in our bones that we had the answer to getting unstuck: growth. Looking back, I am not sure how we even resolved these arguments. But we must have resolved them. Look where we are now. We just sold this company we built.

We went to work every day.

In the beginning, we were there seven days a week. If we weren’t there, we were thinking about it and talking on the phone. We were so focused on solving whatever problem was holding us back from success at the time.

And there were problems. We had partner problems, equity split issues, a product that was not working, people not doing their jobs, the wrong people who failed, the right people who failed, and the support person who left a note on his desk as he went to lunch. It said, "I quit."

The investors who offered a whole menu of stupid ideas—or even good ideas—that we couldn’t implement or even think about because there weren’t enough people or money. The insults from the bankers and industry influencers.

Then, there were the days that proved what we were doing was beginning to work. Prospects became customers. All of a sudden, we stopped trying to figure out how to make this business work, and we were all trying to serve customers. We were shipping the product. Yes. We were two partners in the business. And we were also:

Teaching classes.

Writing code to fix the software.

Taking calls from clients who couldn't figure out how to use the bloody thing.

Making collection calls to make payroll.

In the midst of this everybody doing everything, we had to hire people. And we needed really good people. We didn't have time to hire them, much less train them. We needed self-starters. The kind of people who see what needs to be done and do it. The people who know more than we do about the business stage we are at. We are startup people. We needed people who think in terms of process. What's a process? We didn't know.

Soon after all this hiring took place, we realized people needed to be organized and managed. Who knows how to be a manager? It wasn’t us. HR issues started to arise, and we answered them with contempt: "Come on. Grow up. There is a lot to do here." But then we got sued. And then the Department of Labor showed up. What the hell happened to us? Is this what it means to have a business that is finally working?

The professionals started to show up on our calendars. We needed more office space for all these people. Does this mean we have to move? Who's going to do that? Space designers, furniture salespeople, decorators, phone and computer salespeople. Yikes.

Then the lawyers and accountants.

The tax implications. The generally accepted accounting principles like revenue recognition. What is ARR? Isn't that revenue? One of the letters means revenue. But now the investors and bankers are telling us it is not revenue. Do we need to learn accounting? One of us is a salesman, and the other a programmer. Now we are CEO and COO. How do we do these jobs? We had the titles from the beginning, but neither one of us ever did those jobs.

People quit at the most inopportune times, like the support manager who was to teach next week's classes, who quit via email on Sunday afternoon. I was back teaching classes again. But now I didn't know the software well enough to do it. So I called someone who did know the software and said, "Here are the PPTs for the class. You have to teach starting in the morning." And their answer was, "I never taught a class in my life." That was an interesting conversation.

This day-to-day chaos eventually ended in what someone, a buyer, considered a very successful company. A company that served many clients, some of whom were raving fans. Employees hung in there and became highly effective managers and business leaders. We had?products that created a whole new category in the industry. And other products that were so good, the industry-leading products paled in comparison and went away.

Yes.

Today is a great day.