The day I sold my agency, my wife made a cake. She wrote the sale value on it in icing & was super proud of me. My family was proud. Everyone kept saying congratulations.
I stood in the kitchen, looked at the number on the cake, and honestly I felt absolutely nothing.
Not relief. Not excitement. Not even tiredness. Just… nothing. Like the moment had already passed before it arrived.
That’s the thing nobody tells you about exits. You spend years imagining this moment; the finish line, the payoff, the thing that makes all the 5am starts and missed dinners and stressful Decembers worth it. And then it happens, and it’s just another Tuesday.
Sam and I had built NOVOS from a side-hustle into a multi-million pound eCommerce agency. 250+ retailers globally. Award-winning. A team of people I genuinely cared about. And when it came time to think about what was next, we didn’t go the traditional route. We chose an Employee Ownership Trust.
It wasn’t always the plan & there was no grand strategy, it just evolved naturally to be honest. We’d built a culture that was genuinely people-led… not the kind of “people-first” that companies put on their LinkedIn banner and ignore on Monday morning, but the actual kind. And when we looked at the options, an EOT felt like the most honest extension of that.
The idea of the team owning the business they’d helped build felt empowering. It felt right.
Here’s what surprised me: the anticlimax.
Everyone imagines the exit as this dramatic turning point. The champagne lunch with the legal team felt surreal afterwards sitting in a restaurant, glasses clinking, documents signed, and me thinking is that it?
Because the work doesn’t stop… the clients still need you, the team still has questions, the business still needs to grow. You just have a different relationship with it now.
A sale isn’t an end point. It’s somewhere in the middle. And there’s still a lot to figure out after the champagne goes flat.
The identity piece was harder than I expected.
When you’ve been “the founder who built the thing” for five or six years, and then the thing doesn’t need you in the same way, that lands somewhere between freedom and grief. You’re still involved, but differently & your role changes. The decisions that used to be yours aren’t anymore, and you have to figure out who you are when the thing that defined you starts running without you.
I’ll be honest, (and I had considered long & hard whether to put this in here but EFFORIA is just a raw dump of my brain), I’m not sure we’ve fully unlocked the value of the employee ownership model over the last few years. This to me is such a shame, and it’s something I think about a lot. The intention was right but the execution is still a work in progress. That’s the truth.
The takeaway:
If you’re building towards an exit, whether that’s a sale, an EOT, a merger, whatever, know this: the moment itself won’t feel like you think it will. The cake won’t taste like victory. The champagne will taste like champagne.
The real work isn’t building to the exit, it’s figuring out who you are after it.
I spent the next 4 years working that out. I’m still working it out. Becoming a father, losing my mum, rebuilding my relationship with the business… all of that came after the sale. The exit didn’t resolve anything, it just cleared the space for the harder, more important questions.
And honestly? Those questions are the ones worth answering.
See you next week.
— Antonio