Ed Weeks talks to a business owner caught between selling or growing. The real choice isn't binary: a cash offer forces a transaction decision, but owners can explore partial sales, capital infusions, or partnerships instead of choosing all or nothing.
Sell, grow, or take capital? The question comes before the transaction. I've been talking with a business owner who's trying to figure out whether he should sell his company or keep growing it. And the more I listen to him, the more I think maybe that's the wrong question. Not because selling is wrong, not because growing is right, but because he's already reduced a pretty consequential decision to 2 choices: sell or don't sell. And business ownership doesn't actually work that way. This guy has built a real company. He's relatively young. He's not exhausted. He's not sitting there telling me, Ed, get me the hell out of here. He'd stay involved. He thinks there's more opportunity in the business. But he's also reached that point where somebody could put a meaningful amount of money in front of him. And when that happens, everything gets real pretty quickly. Because now you're not talking theoretically about what your company might be worth someday. There's potentially a check, and a check has a funny way of turning a long-term business question into an immediate transaction question. Do I take it? Do I keep going? And that's where I think owners have to be careful, because the transaction somebody puts in front of you isn't necessarily the decision you actually need to make. I've changed the way I think about this quite a bit over the last couple of years.
