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Key Takeaways After watching a once-thriving business lose momentum as markets changed, I learned a hard truth: Company value is based on a buyer’s confidence in the future, not a founder’s belief in what’s possible.
The best time to sell is often when you don’t want to — because that’s usually when your company is worth the most.
There are moments in every entrepreneur’s life that seem permanent while you’re living them. You convince yourself you’ve finally crossed some invisible finish line — that all the years of uncertainty, sleepless nights and wondering whether payroll would clear have finally given way to something durable. For me, that moment arrived during Covid.
The world had changed almost overnight, and so had our business. Real estate agents suddenly couldn’t meet clients in person, hold open houses or spend their weekends driving buyers from one property to another. Almost overnight, the service we had spent years building became one of the safest and most effective ways for agents to continue growing their businesses.
Demand exploded. We were opening offices faster than I ever imagined possible. Money was coming in faster than we could deploy it. Investors wanted to invest. Employees wanted to join. It felt like every decision we made worked.
When you’re in a season like that, it’s hard to imagine it ever ending. I certainly didn’t.
The future I was betting on
People occasionally approached us about buying the company, and I barely entertained the conversations. Looking back, some of those offers were extraordinary. At the time, they didn’t feel extraordinary at all because I wasn’t comparing them to what the business was worth. I was comparing them to what I believed it would eventually become.
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