The Unsaleable Business

Part One

The point at which most founders discover their business is unsaleable is the point at which they try, for the first time, to describe what the business would be like without them in it.

The description does not go well. Every time the founder attempts to sketch the company running on someone else, the sketch is slightly wrong. The culture goes. The standards go. The client relationships go. The judgement at the top of every important decision goes, because the judgement is hers, and it has not been distributed, and it has not been documented, and it has not been transferred. The business she has built, which looks from her LinkedIn profile like an independent entity, is in fact a vehicle for the exercise of her specific personal capacities. Take her out and the vehicle stops in a specific place on the road.

This is not usually the founder's fault in any moral sense. Almost every growth-stage business goes through a period in which the founder has to be the engine, because there is no one else and no infrastructure and no time to build the infrastructure. The founder becomes the bottleneck because becoming the bottleneck is what gets the business through that phase. The problem is that the phase ends, or should, and the infrastructure has to be built, and the bottleneck has to be dismantled, and most founders quietly keep being the bottleneck because dismantling it is uncomfortable in a way that building the business never was.

The reason it is uncomfortable is not that the founder does not know how to do it operationally. Many founders know exactly what needs to change. They have read the books. They have heard the advice. They could write the SOPs and hire the right people and document the processes and reorganise the reporting lines. They know. What they do not do is act on the knowledge, because acting on it requires them to become someone who is less central to their own business, and that is a specific and uncomfortable identity shift that does not happen by reading another book about it.

Part Two

The work I do with founders at this stage is not about the SOPs. It is about the founder who has not yet been able to implement the SOPs.

The specific question the work addresses is: what is it about being indispensable that has been serving you, emotionally and identity-wise, for the last five years. Because it has been serving you. The feeling of being needed, of being at the centre, of being the one whose judgement makes the decisions, is not a neutral operational state. It has meaning. It is producing something in you, and that something is part of why you are still in the position of being indispensable. Until this is addressed, no amount of operational restructuring will hold. The founder will unconsciously rebuild the centrality that has been removed, because the centrality was meeting a need she had not yet named.

Once the need is named and addressed, the operational work becomes possible in a way it was not before. The founder can actually hire, actually delegate, actually let the business run on people and systems rather than on her. The valuation changes accordingly. What was a job with revenue becomes a business with enterprise value. An exit becomes designable, whether or not the founder ultimately chooses to take one.

The move that makes this possible is a move in the founder, not in the business. The business simply starts responding to who the founder has become.

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