The Exit Where You Keep the Company
One of the companies I own was built from the first day so it would never need me.
My executive assistant at the time was so good that my clients and friends kept asking if I could find them someone like her. I'd ask her, and she'd say let me see. It happened so often that one day she said, why don't we just make this a company?
I wanted it. What I didn't want was another job. So before we started, I set the terms of how I'd own it. It had to hit $3M within 18 months, and I would never spend more than five hours a week on it, ever.
The first question wasn't the offer or the pricing. It was who would run it, because it was never going to be me.
Earlier in my career I couldn't have built it that way. I was a chaos sniper. Drop me into a mess and I'd have it sorted before anyone else in the room knew where to start. I believed that was who I was.
I always had systems and automations, so plenty of what I built could have run without me. I still couldn't step back. Every time a company stopped needing me for something, I found something new for it to need me for.
Then a concussion took the choice away. I couldn't work more than twenty hours a week. If I pushed past that, my vision blurred and my words came out wrong. Stepping back felt like a death, because I didn't know who I was if I wasn't the one saving the day.
Somewhere in there, my businesses stopped being my identity. I still love building them. I just don't need them to tell me who I am. That's what lets me build one that doesn't need me.
Ask a founder about their exit and you'll mostly hear about buyers: who might acquire them, and at what multiple. The ones who raised money think in liquidity events, because that's the language their board speaks. The ones who bootstrapped often don't think about exits at all. They'll keep running it, they tell me, until they don't want to anymore.
A founder I coach built the kind of company most CEOs aspire to have. In less than four years he’s taken on a giant market by the horns and become the leader in the space with a stellar tiny team. The customers love it. He’s finally “made it”, and he’s thoroughly exhausted.
For months, every conversation ended at the same fork: keep going or sell. Selling looked like the only way he'd ever switch his mind off.
But he didn't want to sell. He loved the company, and he was still excited about where it could go. What was draining him was the job of running it at this stage, the planning meetings and status updates that come with operating at that size. He spent most of his day on work he didn't love and almost none on the product and the customers, the parts that lit him up. Time off didn't fix it. He'd come back from a long weekend as tired as when he left.
What he hadn't seen was a third option, even though he'd described it himself. One day he said that if someone great ran everything else, this would be the best job there is. I told him, "This is the company you built so you could choose your job. You can't give away the fun part now."
Later, someone asked whether he was up for another ten years of this. He wasn't. But when he pictured himself as chairman with a great CEO running the company, he said that sounded better than selling. I told him, "That's not ten years. That's two."
The life he actually wanted didn't need a decade. It needed the right CEO.
That's the exit almost nobody puts on the list. You keep the company, you hire a CEO to run it, and you step back to owner. You can keep the one job you love, or you can step out completely and still own it.
The company keeps paying you. It just stops needing you. Nobody buys you out. You buy yourself out.
And "paying you" undersells it. Take a tiny company doing $3M a year at 75% margins. That's $2.25M in profit. Pay a great CEO $500K and you're still taking $1.75M a year out of a company you don't run.
That's only the cash. You still own all of the growth. If your CEO doubles the business, your distributions grow with it, and so does what the company is worth. A sale pays you once, at one price. The growth goes to whoever bought it.
This exit gets overlooked because founder-world borrowed its whole idea of an exit from venture capital. For an investor, an exit means someone buys the shares and the fund gets its money back. That definition works for them. But if you own a real piece of a company you love, you don't need a buyer to stop running it. You need someone great to run it for you.
Founders also confuse the CEO seat with the company. Giving up the seat feels like giving up the company, so they figure they might as well sell it and get paid. But a sale ends everything you loved along with everything you didn't. This exit lets you keep the parts you'd do for free.
I love options. Founders tell me all the time they want to keep theirs open. What I watch happen, over and over, is that the founder who wants every option builds toward none of them. They get halfway to a sale and halfway to a machine. The company they end up with only runs one way, with them in the middle of it. A company that only you can run has exactly one exit, and it's you getting tired.
The exit you choose decides what you build. If you want to sell, you build the growth story and the clean books a buyer pays for. If you want to own it without running it, you build a company predictable enough that someone new could forecast it and keep growing it, with margins big enough to pay a CEO and still pay you.
This is the exit that keeps the others open. A buyer pays more for a company that doesn't need its founder, and a board trusts a company that can predict itself. If you step back to owner and change your mind in two years, you can still sell. The reverse doesn't work.
If this is the exit you want, there are three ways to own the company once someone else is running it.
Keep one job. You hire the CEO and keep the one piece of work you'd do for free, whether that's the product or the customers. Everything else belongs to the CEO. This is the version my client kept coming back to. It's also the one founders most often talk themselves out of, because keeping the good parts for yourself feels selfish. Keep them. That's what you built the company for.
Chair it. The CEO runs the company, and you sit at the head of the board. You set the north star with the CEO and weigh in on the bets big enough to change the company. It's a few hours a month, and your judgment still shapes where it goes.
Step out. You own it and the company pays you, but you're not in it anymore. If you pick this one, really leave. Most founders are fine handing the company over until they have to watch someone run it differently. Then they start stepping back in, and the CEO stops leading.
Pick the one you want for the next two years, not the next ten. Then write it down with your hours in it: what the company makes, what you take out, how big the team is, and how many hours a week you work. For two weeks, list everything you actually do and mark each item as yours or the CEO's. When the CEO's column is something you could hand to a stranger, you're ready to hire.
The hardest part of this exit isn't finding the CEO. It's letting the company stop needing you. It took a concussion to teach me that.
Nobody is coming to buy you out of the day-to-day of your own company. That one you pay for yourself, with the part of you that likes being needed.
If a great CEO took over tomorrow, which part of your job would you keep? And which part would be hardest to hand over, even though you don't love doing it? Reply or comment and tell me. I read every one.
—Christine
If you want to go deeper
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