“No, no, no, stay away. Let this other gentleman actually lead the organization. He has the ability to do that.”
I said some version of that to one client again and again. He was profitable and at retirement age, ready to sell, but his profits weren’t big enough to support the price he wanted. He had let some employees go, and he told me there was one person in the company he believed could be a great leader. Could I develop him and let him lead?
After two or three months with that man, I agreed with the owner. So I went back and told him, “You can’t go into your business any longer.” I explained that if he let this gentleman lead, and kept putting a team around him that supported higher productivity and higher profitability, he would get what he wanted. He kept coming back and asserting himself in the business anyway.
let’s take you out of the equation and set up the business so it runs well without you.
— Gary B. Henson, Founder
I don’t know what was going through his head on those days, and I won’t pretend to. What I can say is that I meet owners at the end of their careers all the time, and they almost always carry what I call an inflated picture of what the business is worth. My advice to them is the same each time: let’s take you out of the equation and set the business up so it runs well without you. That is a plan for the company. Nobody in those conversations is planning where the owner will be on a Tuesday afternoon.
My read is that this is partly an identity problem. If the business is the one place an owner knows he is needed, then leaving the building means leaving the only place he is sure he matters. That doesn’t show up in the sale paperwork, so it rarely gets planned. When it goes unplanned, the owner keeps walking back in, and you can see why: a business that still depends on him is also a business that still gives him somewhere to be.
There is research on the other side of this, and it comes with limits. A team led by Dr. Karen Mak at University College London analyzed five long-running national surveys (opens in new tab) covering 93,263 adults aged 65 and older in 16 countries. People who reported a hobby had fewer depressive symptoms and reported higher happiness, better self-rated health and greater life satisfaction, with life satisfaction the most strongly linked of the four outcomes, according to UCL’s summary (opens in new tab). The pattern held after adjusting for partnership status, employment and household income, and it showed up in later survey waves four to eight years on, not only at a single point in time.
Now the limits. It is observational, so it can’t prove that hobbies cause anything. Mak herself said the relationship between hobbies and wellbeing “may cut both ways,” meaning people who feel well may simply be more likely to take up hobbies. In three of the five surveys, the word “hobby” was never defined for respondents. And these were people already past 65. The study did not look at business owners, or at anyone still running a company. I’m stretching it to say it applies to a 62-year-old owner, and I want you to know I’m stretching.
adults aged 65 and older across 16 countries in the largest study of hobbies and wellbeing in later life. Those with a hobby reported fewer depressive symptoms and higher life satisfaction, though the study can’t show cause. Nature Medicine (Mak et al., 2023), via UCL News →
Here is why I still think it is worth your attention. The explanation the researchers offered for why a hobby might help is that people feel in control, find a purpose, and feel capable of handling daily problems. Most owners I work with get all three of those from the business and nowhere else. If that is you, the research is a reason to build a second source before you need one.
Start with the question I open every engagement with, asked about your life instead of your company: what do you want? Write it down the way you would write a vision for the business. Where will you spend your time, and with whom? What have you been promising yourself you would get to “someday” for the last 15 years? Then pick one thing from that list and start it this quarter, while you still own the business: a class, a club, a volunteer role, the guitar you put down years ago. You will probably be bad at it at first. You have spent years telling your people to fail forward, so take your own advice somewhere nobody reports to you.
Then let the business prove it can run without you, in stages. Take a full week away and don’t call in, then take two. Every time your team handles it, you learn something about the business and about what you do with the time. When we get an owner out of the way and let somebody in the organization run it, the owner can be there 70% to 80% less, and the business becomes easier to sell. I wrote about what buyers look for in preparing to sell a business, and the structure for getting there is the Inside-Out Method™.
If stepping back stirs up something heavier than restlessness, like grief that won’t lift or a low mood that hangs on for weeks, please talk with a licensed counselor or your doctor. That happens to plenty of people in a major transition, and it deserves support from someone trained to give it.
This week, write down what you would do on the Tuesday after the sale, then book the first thing on that list.
