A founder's story
My father left his businesses in his mid-60s. It didn't happen by accident.
At 84, he's the hardest person in our family to track down. This is how he planned his way out, and what it taught me about selling my own company.
By Simon Fallows · Six short chapters · About a 6 minute read
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The story in seven moments
Chapter one
Go. Build it.
In 1993 I got expelled from college.
I walked into my father's engineering office and told him I had good news and bad news. The bad news was obvious. The good news was that this was a hostile takeover. A little side business we'd started, built on ideas off his drafting boards, was coming with me.
He didn't argue. He said, "Go. Build it."
He didn't hand it over, either. In 1997 we agreed on a price for that business, Arm Supports: $30,000. I started The Bracket Company, and the $30,000 sat on the books as a debt I owed him. In 2002 I paid him out.
At the time, it just seemed fair. Now I understand what he was teaching me.
Every business has value, even a small one, and realizing it takes a plan.
Chapter two
He built it the hard way.
My father grew up outside Manchester. In 1967, newly married, he arrived in Toronto with no job, a young mechanical engineer with a lot of ambition and not much else. He found work in less than two weeks.
He never set out to start a company. Side work from a colleague, then a layoff in a slow year for automotive tooling, pushed him into it. When the firm asked him back, he said he would only work for them through his own company. He was, as I put it to him, an accidental entrepreneur.
In the '70s he and a partner started Plant Assistance Services. About 20 engineers on drafting boards, running blueprints for automotive and manufacturing companies.
It was never easy. He fought through the downturns of the '80s and early '90s, bought out his partner and worked 80-hour weeks while customers paid slowly, or not at all.
Ask him what he would do differently, and he doesn't talk about money. "I just didn't spend enough time with my family."
Like most founders, he had every reason to believe his businesses couldn't run without him.
Chapter three
Instead, he planned his way out.
By the early 2000s he had split the company in two and put a manager in charge of each half, on the advice of an accountant in Windsor who had once saved him from bankruptcy.
When the managers wanted to buy him out, he let them pay him over time, the same way I'd paid him for Arm Supports.
His advisors thought he was crazy. They wanted cash up front, the only security they trusted. He told them, "No, I trust these guys," and agreed to be paid every month out of the company's profits.
When one buyer hit a rough patch, he paused the payments and added a little interest instead of calling in the debt. Both buyouts were paid in full.
By the mid-2000s, at about 64 or 65, he was out. On his terms. On his timing.
He didn't wait for a health scare or a bad year to force his hand.
He didn't get there alone. Kevin, a financial advisor I introduced him to, helped him build the plan. He had resisted outside advice for years, but once the right people got through to him, he listened.
You can trust someone else to run what you started.
He stayed until the last payment came in. Of his first day on his own, he says, "I thought, hey, this is good. And I never looked back since."
Watch the interview
Hear it from my father.
I sat down with my father to talk through how he built his company, why he trusted his managers to buy him out, and what he would tell an owner today.
Chapter four
I had to learn it for myself.
I wish I could say I followed his example right away. I didn't.
I rode the shift from tube TVs to flat screens. My company became Mediamounts, and by the 2000s our mounts were going into airports, banks, offices and schools by the tens of thousands.
From the outside, it looked like success. From the inside, every decision and every problem came back to me. At 35, I was exhausted.
So I brought in Brad. Within eight months he was my partner and CEO.
One afternoon I was heading into the warehouse the way I always did, to check something or fix something. Brad put a hand on my shoulder.
You're not going back there, Simon.
I was furious. My name was on the building. But I knew he was right.
I went home, packed a bag and flew to Boston to work on the product that would carry us to a sale. Nothing fell apart while I was gone.
In 2011 we sold Mediamounts to a private equity firm. Brad was 56 and got to retire. I was 39, and free to keep growing it without the risk being mine.
That was the lesson my father had been showing me all along. A buyer isn't buying the owner. They're buying a business that works without the owner.
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Chapter five
Life after the business.
My father has now had about 20 years of life after business. He's 84, has been married for 14 years and plays pickleball and tennis three days a week. He's usually somewhere in the world on a plane, a train or a boat.
Next May, he and his wife are flying to Tahiti for my wedding.
He chose to retire. I chose to keep building. We both got to choose.
Chapter six
Getting the business ready is only half the work.
After selling my own companies and working with other owners, here's what I understand now. The other half is getting yourself ready.
Most owners wait far too long to ask themselves these questions. My father asked them early. That's why he had a choice.
Not every owner gets one. In my work I see the four Ds force the decision: death, divorce, disease and distress. None of them waits for a plan.
Would you have that choice today, or would the business make it for you?
I sold my own company in 2011. Today my team and I help founders prepare for what comes next, on their terms.