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\n\t\tOpinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.\t<\/p>\n
I conducted research interviewing founders who had successful exits and uncovered something I did not expect at all.\u00a0<\/p>\n
One of the founders I interviewed had sold his company after 11 years of scaling it and preparing for the sale, made more money than he anticipated, and a few days after the deal finally closed, he sat at his kitchen table looking at multiple zeros in his bank account but felt nothing at all. Within a week, he could barely get out of bed. He had assumed the sale would be one of the best days of his life, and he could not understand why it was not.<\/p>\n
I heard versions of this from almost every founder I interviewed as part of my research, and what they told me matches what we see in surveys of exited business owners.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Over the next decade, 73%<\/a> of privately held businesses in the United States are expected to change hands, a $14 trillion transfer of wealth. Most of the people selling those companies expect it to be one of the happiest events of their lives, just as the people I interviewed did. And yet, roughly three in four of them will regret it within a year<\/a>, even if they sell on their own terms at their target price.<\/p>\n For my research, I spent months interviewing founders across North America who had sold their companies and considered the sale a clear financial success. I wanted to dig deeper into the emotional journey they went through afterward, as well as their journeys of reinvention. <\/p>\n What I found is that most founders face a feeling of loss after the sale and, unanimously, they all told me that it seemingly came out of nowhere and was not something they ever saw coming. Most importantly, they hid their emotional struggles from others, not wanting to appear unappreciative of their success or to have what one of them called \u201cchampagne problems.\u201d <\/p>\n Unanimously, they were surprised to learn how common the feeling of emptiness and loss post-exit is among founders. For years they\u2019d thought they were alone in feeling anything other than elation and pride.<\/p>\n What I\u2019ve learned is that the exit process focuses entirely on the numbers and the structure of the sale. Exit advisors help founders push up the valuation, structure the deal, handle the tax and hand the operations over cleanly. All of that is necessary,\u00a0and I would even say crucial, yet all of it is entirely about the transaction. None of it is about the founder. <\/p>\n The deal closes, and whether you have an earnout period or not, you wake up the next day in an entirely different role. Whatever you got used to as the owner of your business is no longer the same. And for many founders, the journey of transition and reinvention is emotionally complex.<\/p>\n The reason behind the emotional impact is fairly clear. When you run a company, being the founder is a huge part of who you are. It is how you introduce yourself and what you tend to identify with the most, at least on the professional level. Founders build much of their sense of self around the business they run<\/a>. When the business is sold, that part of your identity is suddenly gone, and you feel that loss regardless of how much money you made.<\/p>\n The founders I interviewed went through the emotional stages that usually follow any serious loss<\/a>. What surprised me most was how consistent those stages were with the typical stages accompanying grief. It was unexpected, as we tend to associate grief with negative events \u2014 death, divorce, loss of some kind. <\/p>\n What we don\u2019t realize is that a business exit also represents loss \u2014 loss of identity and loss of something you had which you no longer do. Most of the founders in my study went through a period of depression after the sale, whatever the size of the deal and however carefully they had planned. <\/p>\n Even though many of them did not name it as such, their descriptions of how they felt matched the symptoms of depression: suppressed mood, low interest in activities that used to energize them, even changes in their sleeping patterns. Many of them missed the daily intensity of running a company and could find nothing in the immediate period that followed that came close. As I already shared, these were all founders with financially successful exits, and yet money made no difference to any of this.<\/p>\nWhat my research revealed<\/h2>\n
Understanding the emotional impact\u00a0<\/h2>\n