Your company will probably be sold earlier than you expect, and for less than its maximum value. Here's why.
1- You will create a problem for a large competitor and they will offer to buy you out – to get you out of their hair. Your alternative to selling at their price is to wait for them to grind you to a pulp.
2- You will get divorced and the settlement will require liquidation of all your assets.
3- You will suffer an untimely death; and your heirs will not want to run the business.
4- You will be hit by a bus and disabled. By the way, disability is much more likely than early death.
5- You will have a falling-out with your partner(s).
And the biggie...
6- You will simply tire of it and decide to quit.
I wrote about this particular phenomenon a few weeks back. Here's an excerpt from that post.
In a recent post on Inc.com, Joel Spolsky recalls asking Jessica Livingston (author of Founders at Work) to speak about why start-ups fail. "That would be boring," she told him. "They all fail for the same reason: People just stop working on their business."
Spolsky goes on. "The more I thought about it," he says, "the more I realized Jessica was onto something. Why do start-ups fail? As she pointed out, it's usually a collapse of motivation -- everyone wanders back to civilian life, and the start-up ends, not with a bang but a whimper."
Think about that. "People just stop working on their businesses."
Wow. They just plain run out of gas. They exhaust their supplies of MOXIE.
So, you will probably sell out earlier than you planned, and realize less money than you expected. UNLESS, of course, you anticipate the various contingencies and protect yourself and your business from their possible ill-effects.
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