How to say good-bye to your business
“My father taught me – Don’t fall in love with your business, it is not your wife”
– Jon Ramon Aboitiz
In 2018, the Vice Chairman of Unionbank, Jon Ramon Aboitiz, passed away. I read an interview he gave where he talks about how he is able to manage and let go of various businesses he has run. He says his father taught him the quote above.
I had to close my own business years ago. It was the hardest thing I ever did, it was my first professional failure. I treated my business like a second child. Along with my husband and friends, we gave birth to a retail home store, worked long and late, felt so creative and bold at the beginning, and so confident when we were growing at rates beyond our expectations. Then the political and economic climate changed. Our business got affected, and we made the mistake that many companies make when starting to scale – thinking that our success would last forever. We over-expanded, just when sales started to slow down.
When things took a turn for the worse, we looked for an additional investor, looked to sell the business, but ultimately, decided to close it instead, to cut our losses, before we bled to death. We found new jobs for our workers, bid good-bye to our customers, delivered the bad news to our investors that our venture was closing, and ended a working relationship with our friends (the friendship continued of course!).
It took me many years to process this failure. We looked back, asked ourselves what we did wrong, and it was painful. Eventually, we accepted it was the best choice at that point in time.
I am not sure when, but eventually, my perspective shifted, and I saw the venture as a learning experience. It was the MBA I never took with a real dose of real world experience. The learning was rich, and it enriched my future career as a banker.
About 10 years after I closed my business, I had to retire from my corporate job. My husband had gotten a re-assignment to Calgary, Canada, and our family decided to move. You’d think that I would be happy to be retiring early, but, I was not prepared. And for three (3) years, I mourned the loss of my position, my routine, the thrill, excitement and fulfillment of working with a group of like-minded individuals who shared my passion for innovation.
I had made the mistake of falling in love with my business.
But, as JRA points out, business or my corporate job, is not my spouse. I should never have fallen in love with it. But how does one let go and move on?
- Store the memories – Take the time to remember all the good, and not so good experiences. Giving yourself this time to go down memory lane allows you to leave the memories in a safe place, which you can always access when you need it.
- Give yourself the time to grieve your loss – Don’t rush this. People have different timelines for this. During this time, you can let it all out. You can scream, have a good cry, the only thing you need to remember is that this is meant to allow you to FEEL what you need to feel, in order to move on. Once you let it all out, there is a space and feeling that opens up, that’s like “OK, I am done.” If you omit this step, you can end up in denial for many, many years and get stuck there.
- Accept that it was the best decision at that time for you (and if you have sold your company, for the other party) – Hindsight is always 20/20 and making the decisions in the present is always foggy. But let go of that perfectionism, that desire to be great all the time, and realize that it was the best thing you could do, with the information, experiences and circumstances at that time. Yes, if you could do it over, you may have done it differently, but time travel has yet to be invented, and so, accept your humanity, and know you gave it your all at that time.
- Begin to look forward (and don’t look back) – In time, you will begin to have the energy to look forward again. The future will have space for the new, and the unknown will start to excite you. At this stage, take the time to think about what you want to do with your time, and where your passions lie. And begin to work towards them. In order to move forward, you need to Let Go and let the experience become part of your HISTORY and not your PRESENT.
- Move into a space of Gratitude. Gratitude is that place that gives you the right perspective. Its like standing at the peak of a mountain and admiring the views. You can see your past clearly, and you can be grateful for what has happened, and will happen in the future. For those who have seen the movie “Inside Out”, Gratitude enables you to change the experience from a memory to a Core Memory. Something you can access in the future. And hopefully it will fill you with positive feelings.
Like any loss, time heals all wounds. But I always say, that the deeper and more meaningful the relationship before the loss, the more time you have to give yourself for the healing. And some wounds, will always twitch but they will no longer hurt. You become scarred, but the scars should be seen as a badge of honor – Of someone who has weathered a challenge, and come out of the other side with more experience and wisdom and an enormous amount, of GRATITUDE.