By Alexander Peter
Most business leaders and agency founders aim for two fundamental things: Keep growing their profits or successfully sell the business. The former is more in your control and the latter needs patience, tact and understanding.
Sold the agency now what?
Maintaining a positive mindset
The mindset shift needed from being an agency founder to an employee is steep. One moment you are making all the decisions and the next, you are an employee (regardless if you are in the leadership or not). No amount of success stories prepares you for being part of a larger team. While reeling from the feeling of epiphany of this new life, you will soon be judged on a variety of things like your ability to collaborate with others, your ability to manage other people, and working with cohorts of people who you normally wouldn’t hire.
Trust
While the founder is figuring out their footing in the new set-up, creating a sense of trust and understanding with the new team would be of paramount importance. For them, you are someone new in their agency which they spent years building. It will be important to accept there will be a change of dynamics at the decision-making level.
Being Graceful
As a newly integrated decision maker, one should resist the urge to frequently correct the existing founders and fellow leaders on many aspects thinking that it’s “something I wouldn’t do”. End of the day remaining graceful about those decisions and reminding yourself why you sold the agency to them is what would get you through the curve.
Courage to Ask
In the event of an acquisition, there are two nodes of leverage – Negotiation Leverage, which determines who wins on deal-breaker points. There’s little you can do to change your negotiating leverage — you either have a competitive acquisition process or you don’t.
The second is Knowledge Leverage, predicated on knowing what issues you can win on without jeopardizing the deal – this can be changed; contrary to what the acquirer might say, most points are not deal breakers. You just need to know what to ask.
Care for the team that joined with you
The acquisition journeys normally come with a two to three year lock-in; it is a slow long journey. One needs to be mentally prepared about a whole bunch of things during this time and the biggest part of it is your employees who joined with you into the new agency. Their well-being, compensation, title, earn-outs etc have to all be pre-negotiated before the deal and post the deal; it should be seen through.
The author is a career coach for business leaders