Six Lessons I Learned from Selling My Company

? I sold my first company when I was just out of high school. As some of you may know, I sold my second company last year.

Between that first sale – of a flower business I’d built in Victoria, Canada when I was 17 – and my second – of a mid-sized translation company based in Paris, France, I learned a great deal.

Although what I know best is the language industry, these six lessons may have resonance for you no matter what line of business you are in.

1.?????Step back … to move forward

In 1986, I was fresh out of university, and freshly arrived in France, when I founded Eurotexte, the translation agency that is today known as Lexcelera. Those first years, I worked long into the evenings, and had my hand in every facet of the company.

Thankfully, this became unsustainable and I teamed up with my business partner Ros to share the burden. My failure to do everything led me to the most important lesson I have learned as a business owner: you have to step back (and let others take over) in order to move forward.

This is even more important when you are getting ready to sell your company.

In the early days, you probably hired people who were strong where you were weak. One of my first employees was a bookkeeper because working with numbers is not even in the same galaxy as whatever I’m good at.

But when you’re getting ready to sell, it’s time to hire people who are strong where you are also strong. Why? Because if you are critical to your business, then its valuation may be lower without you. A potential buyer may even conclude that without you, there is no company.

When I sold Lexcelera, the team was so tight and well managed that the new owners didn’t need me to stay on. Since it would have been painful to hang around while others made decisions about my baby, I was ecstatic. I was also free.

2. There’s only one number that counts

As they say, revenue is vanity and profit is sanity. But when it comes to selling your company, profit may be more than that. In most industries, profit is practically the only figure anyone is looking at when attaching a monetary value to your enterprise.

Unless you’re a tech company, a multiple of profitability is the foundation of most deals. So if you’re preparing to go to market with your company, now may not be the time to make investments that will only pay off down the road.

In my experience, nothing focuses you like a multiplier!

3. Don’t go it alone

Like many entrepreneurs, you may have started your company alone. But don’t make the mistake of selling it alone. This is the time to surround yourself with the very best. Get yourself a well-recommended M&A lawyer: you’d be surprised how much negotiation there is, even after the main terms have supposedly been agreed. You could lose out on more than the difference in cost between a so-so lawyer and a really good one.

Your lawyer will need to work in tandem with your broker (and no, the two are not interchangeable). Unless you’re a master negotiator, and have time to manage the whole process, I would not advise doing without a broker.

Some brokers are like matchmakers, introducing you to companies that are potential suitors. But I decided to go with a full-service brokerage, and I’ve never regretted that decision.

My brokerage identified potential buyers from both inside and outside the language industry, consolidated the accounts from our offices on three continents into a unified format, and wrote the marketing prospectus. When the offers started coming in, my brokerage advisor led meetings, fielded offers and handled the negotiations.

But that didn’t mean I had nothing to do, as I would discover.

4. Selling your company is a full-time job

I knew what I wanted in a buyer: a culture fit, job security for my staff, and some degree of autonomy so they could continue their successful path. But I wasn’t prepared for how much time it would take to sift through wannabe buyers to find what I was looking for.

Some days I would spend ten hours in back-to-back meetings, explaining our strategy and business plan over and over. Along with my advisor, we winnowed the candidates down to an exciting short list of buyers before deciding on an organization that I felt would capitalize on the talents of the team, and take the company where it deserved to go.

And that was when the real work started. It’s hard to prepare anyone for how much work due diligence is: you just have to live it. My advice is to leave plenty of time to prepare the dozens of documents that will need to be produced, from insurance contracts to deep-dive excel analyses.

In the end, we got through due diligence, the deal was settled, and we were ready to sign. Or so I thought.

5. Keep the champagne chilling, but don’t expect to pop the cork right away

The pandemic didn’t slow down our sale as I expected, but there were a hundred tiny details that did bog us down. We were 99% there. Then 99.1%. Then 99.2%. You get the idea. The months crawled by after the Letter of Intent was agreed.

It was two years from start to finish before we could pop that bottle of champagne.

It has taken another year for my life has to become what I dreamed of. Which brings me to the final thing I want to say.

6. If you can afford to do it now, do it now

If running your company is what you want to do for your whole life, then I wouldn’t be in any hurry to sell. But if there’s something else you’d rather be doing, then do it as soon as you can afford to.

As I write these words, I am at my writing desk in the south of France.

The truth is, I’ve always wanted to be a writer. What I’ve learned since I sold my company is that time you spend doing something other than your dream is time gone forever.

That is not to say I’m living in regret that I didn’t sell my company sooner. I miss the people I used to work with. I loved seeing their faces every day and marveling at how whip-smart and talented and plain nice they were.

Yet, there hasn’t been one single moment that I wished I were back in the office. There hasn’t been one day that I haven’t been grateful that I can live my dream as a writer.

This week I submitted the final draft of my book – the one I wrote after selling my company – to my literary agent in New York. She’s one of the top agents in the business, so when she said my book was ready, I was even more excited than when I sold my company. My dream is coming true. Stay tuned for my next chapter.