What Remains When You Take the Family Out of the Business?

When you decide to sell your business ... it's so much more than placing a sign on the door.

I’m an entrepreneur. We have a family business.  Full stop.  That has been my identity for as long as I can remember.  Now as we prepare to transition to the next phase, I am faced with a daunting task.

This is the blog I wrote in May 2024 as we began the process of succession of our family business.

Sure, we hired an assessor, we gathered the financials, we called a realtor, we dreamed about lazier weekends and not taking the cellphone to the beach. But are we serious? And if we are, then what?

My entrepreneurial journey was born in family, my father worked on the ‘town’ and on the side ran Sonny Jessome Backhoe Services from our backyard. The kitchen table was littered with notebooks of phone numbers, dates, quotes, sketches and ideas. The Autotrader was read cover to cover on Sunday morning  – with the ‘good’ deals circled in ink and torn from the pages and stuck to the fridge with magnets from Canada’s Wonderland and the CN Tower. 

Winter snowstorms that meant sleds and forts for the neighborhood kids brought a sense of urgency in our home as the phone wailed and we feverishly wrote down the names and addresses of stranded neighbours. As kids, my sister and I learned to send coded messages via pager (pre-cellphone) to let our dad know to come home for updated customer lists.  

And later, while juggling accounting and finance classes I would meticulously balance debits and credits in those endless teal colored columns in the pages of the Blueline journals and writes cheques for payroll and someone known as the ‘Receiver General.’

But we were no different than countless other families across the country where the family business was in fact the business of the family and the lines merged with oh so faint boundaries between the business and the personal.  No different than others in our small town — the family that ran the butcher shop, the garage, the restaurant….moms, dads, kids all immersed in the day to day – knowing that the sign in the window might say ‘closed’ but in fact the business never really closed for the day it had just gone home, with the family, living as a constant presence in the home, like a member of the family.  It was living, breathing and in fact, defining the family.

And so when I saw that ad for a button maker and t-shirt press in the classified section that day in 1994 – it was not strange that I circled the ad and tore it from the page.  And as I piled the boxes of button parts, decals, and supplies into the trunk of my car alongside the used button maker and worn out t-shirt press…somehow I knew I was welcoming home a new entity – one that would live and breathe and become part of my future family for the next 30 years.

How do you let go of all you ever knew?

And now the kids have grown with homes of their own and still the business waits for them to return, still here, still present – a constant in a sea of change.  We know it’s time to release it, to let go, to live on in a new family.  Yet, what will it take? What remains when the business is no longer part of the family?

This was a blog a wrote in May 2024 as we started the process of selling the business. It and more business related blogs can be found here: https://thehubns.ca/how-do-you-take-the-family-out-of-the-business/