A Seat Still Being Earned

"There is very little room to negotiate the price," said the entrepreneur. I understood this quite instinctively. After a decade and a half of building a business that has stood on its own, it is natural for an entrepreneur to feel that way. The words were meant for three aspiring buyers, who barely knew each other and faced a simple choice. Are we going to work together to take over the business? As one of the three, I knew we had to overcome many barriers before even considering bidding together. Aspirations, motivations, a plan. Enough to justify his price. This is a multiparty negotiation. Would this ask make it harder and kill motivation? I wondered aloud. I also set my own boundaries. I felt there were other natural successors to this business, and I would not line up to lead the deal. However, if we could agree to work together, I would put in the work to earn my place. The answer would unfold in the coming weeks.

As the meeting ended, the buyer side decided to get coffee together, to see how we might work together and what our aspirations actually were. Very quickly, we understood the deal now rested in two hands, the natural incumbent's and mine. I gave him that authority. Now I wait. This will take some time to close. I'm excited about the business. I also know it's small for the number of hands reaching for it, and the risks ahead are real. For this reason, even as we respect the owner's wishes on price, we need to be careful about the commitments we make, in both labor and capital, before and after the deal.

As I walked out of a conversation that had lasted over four hours, in German, on a business I had little background in, I opened my phone to see what I had missed.

"Please delete the message you just received." That was the subject line from an outplacement firm, sitting in my inbox next to the message it was asking me to delete. Curiosity did what curiosity does. I opened the original before the apology. It was a list. Over 1,300 email addresses, names, and the specific programs attached to each one, every one of them a person who had lost their job in Switzerland and was now a client. Executives next to senior business leaders, all of it sitting in one spreadsheet that had gone out to everyone.

I had seen this before, twenty years earlier, in business school. A similar slip sent the confidential grade point averages of the entire class, all six hundred of us, along with a stack of other sensitive data, out to everyone at once. No malice in it, just someone moving fast inside a system built to move fast, and six hundred people's private numbers loose in six hundred inboxes before anyone could take it back.

Like the meeting in the opening, with its non-negotiable price and its cast of potential co-buyers, I had simpler meetings too with entrepreneurs these past two weeks. One, to look at buying a single-person business outright. Another, to advise a partner setting up an entity in Switzerland, and what to watch for. One more with a fellow searcher, also hunting for a business to buy, backed by PE-style investors. Every conversation left me with a concern. Real emotion, every time. And almost always, something I'd have done differently. Sometimes someone felt like a competitor. Sometimes I watched a person walk a path I would not walk myself. Sometimes I could feel a quiet judgment in the room, about my past, or about what working together might actually cost each of us. But one thing stood out above the rest. I came to this world of small businesses a little late, but I belong here, and I'll make my space patiently.

The email brought back the large corporate world I came from, and what human error costs there. But that error hid behind something faceless. No one to call. No one to look in the eye. No ownership, just a policy and an apology after the fact. I knew, reading it, exactly what I had left behind, and exactly what I wanted instead. Everything I found myself doing instead was entirely human. Negotiating a price with someone, not a system. Making room for someone else's years of experience before my own ambition. Choosing to grow slowly and honestly rather than fast and false. Doing it face to face, in a language not my own, over four hours at a table, rather than behind a screen.

Nobody at this table has asked me to delete anything. Nobody has needed to. Whatever goes wrong here goes wrong in front of me, with a name attached, in a room I chose to sit in.

I did not walk into this new world with the credentials that used to open doors for me. No brand behind my name here, no flat world of connections doing the introducing on my behalf. What I have instead is time, and a willingness to spend it slowly, at tables like this one, with people who have every reason not to trust a stranger yet. One of them will, eventually, and I suspect the rest will follow. We share the same appetite, after all, the willingness to give up the comfort of a paycheck to build jobs for others instead of just holding one down ourselves. Once they see what I'm made of, I trust them to take the same kind of risk on me that I just took on my second intern.

I left a world that could lose 1,300 people's private lives in a single email and call it an accident. I walked into one that hands me its honesty, its stubbornness, its unfinished business, face to face, four hours at a time, in a language that is not even mine. I will take that trade every time.

Some things are worth building slowly enough that nobody ever has to ask you to delete them.