Yesterday I told you about the blind man and the Pharisees and how the experts who were supposed to see most clearly were the ones who couldn’t see at all.
Today let’s talk about what that blindness actually costs you when you’re the one running a business.
I spoke with a business owner last year who had been running a professional services firm for 22 years. He had built a strong revenue with good profitability and was finally ready to step back and enjoy the life he’d been promising himself and his wife since the kids were small.
The kids were grown now.
He went to market expecting a number that reflected two decades of hard work, late nights, and personal sacrifice. What he got back from potential buyers was a fraction of what he expected.
Because every buyer who looked under the hood saw the same thing.
- The business couldn’t function without him.
- He was the key relationship holder with every major client.
- He was the one who signed off on every decision.
- His team was capable but had never been given the authority or the systems to operate independently because he always believed no one could do it the way he did.
- He was right about that. No one could do it his way. And that’s exactly why no one wanted to buy it.
Twenty-two years of being the expert and believing he could see his business more clearly than anyone. And the one thing he never saw was that he’d built something that only worked with him standing in the middle of it.
His wife got a smaller retirement than she was promised. His plans for travel and time with grandchildren got scaled back.
And the business he poured his life into sold for a price that didn’t reflect a fraction of the sacrifice it took to build it.
That’s the financial cost of staying blind.
But the costs that doesn’t show up on a balance sheet are the ones that hurts most.
- 22 years of missed moments he traded for the belief that being indispensable was the same as being successful.
- The school events he left early.
- The holidays where his phone never stopped.
- The conversations with his wife that always circled back to the business because it consumed every waking thought.
He wasn’t building an asset. He was serving a sentence and calling it ambition.
The Pharisees threw the blind man out because they refused to consider the truth that was staring them in the face.
This owner never threw anyone out but he never let anyone in. And so he stayed blind to what his business actually was until the market showed him the truth.
The question isn’t whether you can see.
It’s whether you’re willing to look.
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George Sotiropoulos continues the blind man and Pharisees series with the financial and personal cost of business owner blindness, telling the story of an owner who spent 22 years building a professional services firm only to discover at exit that the business was unsellable without him. The article illustrates the difference between being indispensable and being successful.