WHAT COMES NEXT, YET.
Joined Vistage in 2011
After being on the wrong side of three corporate buyouts in 20 years, I’d had enough. Instead, I opened a cleaning and disinfecting franchise-selling business. I found that I was able to provide an environment where people who had struggled financially were able to become independent business owners, buy homes, have families and build comfortable lives for themselves, and I discovered that my purpose was to help people change their lives.
But as my franchisees did well, I also did well financially. I struggled with that. How could my personal goals and my goals for others run parallel? My Vistage Chair helped me to understand that if you focus on other people, you can also benefit.
I kept that in mind as it got time to think about my next chapter. My plan was to develop from within, relocate full-time to Cape Cod with my wife and semi-retire. Then COVID hit, and the individual I had developed to take over changed his perspectives on life. I was year three into a five-year plan, and the key person was gone.
I decided to sell the business, but I didn’t know what steps to take. A number of my Vistage peers had gone through the process and provided thinking that helped. I worked on the sale for the better part of the year. And then it fell apart in the 11th hour.
It was crushing. But my Vistage group was once again instrumental in helping me to refocus. After a year of concentrating on the sale, it was time to focus on the company again and get it in shape for a sale in 2022. Their insights were invaluable.
I sold the company at almost twice my industry’s historical multiples. Today, I’m living on Cape Cod. I’m reconnecting with my family. Exercising. Recharging my battery. I am not meant to sit on the couch for the rest of my life, but I don’t know what the next chapter will be. We have the good fortune that, because of the sale and the planning that we put in place with the support of my Vistage group, we don’t need to know what it will be yet.
