The closing documents were almost 300 pages. When we signed them, we thought the hard part was over.
Sheila and I took the documents to a restaurant on the 40th floor of a downtown building. We found a table by the window and ordered champagne before we even looked at the menu. We had just sold the behavioral health company we had spent years building together.
The champagne arrived. We raised our glasses.
But instead of celebrating, we started telling stories. About the early days. About the therapists and psychiatrists we had recruited. About the patients who trusted us with their care. About the strange mix of chaos and commitment that comes with building something from nothing.
It was a celebration, but something else was there too. We were also grieving, and we knew it and knew that it was completely natural and expected
When we left the restaurant that afternoon, a quiet question followed us home. If the company we had built was no longer ours, what did the rest of the day look like now?
Part of the agreement was that we would stay on during the transition. It made sense on paper. We knew the staff, the systems, and the organization’s rhythms.
What we hadn’t anticipated was what it would feel like to walk back into our own building as employees.
One day, the new owners walked through the office. One of them looked around the space and said, “Good. All of this is ours now, now we can make this place really work.”
It wasn’t anger I felt in that moment. It was something quieter. An interesting observation. To them, it was an acquisition and a hallmark of their own smarts. To us, it had been something built relationship by relationship over a decade.
Standing there, I found myself wondering something I hadn’t asked before we signed the papers. It was something many owners find happens after they sell. The acquiring company wants to change everything about the business that made it successful.
Working there after the sale was its own education. There was relief in no longer having to carry the full operational weight. But there was also something disorienting about having a deep experience that was no longer needed. We had built the place, and now we were watching it slowly become something else that wasn’t working very well.
About a year later, the CEO called me and asked if I wanted to buy the company back.
I said, “No, thank you.”
But I’ve thought about that call many times since, because it answered the question we had started asking that afternoon over champagne. What we had built was harder to replicate than anyone expected.
There are things in a business that never appear in the closing documents. Not in 300 pages. The culture. The trust. The accumulated judgment that develops when people build something together over time.
You can sell the company.
But you can’t transfer that.
And for many leaders, that realization marks the beginning of the real question.
What’s next after the champagne?
It’s a conversation I now have regularly with leaders who are approaching their own transition. Selling a business, stepping away from a long career, or simply wondering what the next chapter might look like.
If you’re beginning to think about that question yourself, it is definitely worth exploring it sooner than you expect.
