Should You Sell Your Business?
Should you sell your business? Garrett Gunderson shares the decision lens he wishes he had used before selling: cash flow, purpose, team, and freedom.
Selling your business can look like freedom from the outside and feel like grief once the wire clears.
I know because I sold mine.
From the outside, that sounds like the entrepreneur trophy.
Grow the company. Get the offer. Sign the papers. Tell the story at dinner.
But if the business was one of the clearest ways you created value, the sale can leave a strange silence behind.
The question isn’t, “Can I get a big enough number?”
The better question is,
“Will this sale create more life, more purpose, more cash flow, and more freedom than the business already gives me?”
In the video below and the article that follows, I’ll show you the decision lens I wish more owners used before selling: what the business gives you, what the buyer may extract, how to define enough, and how to design a life you don’t want to retire from.
The exit dream has fine print
Entrepreneurs get sold a clean story.
Build the company. Scale it. Sell it. Then you’ll finally be free.
Sometimes that story is true. Sometimes the business is draining your health, straining your marriage, or locking you inside a role you outgrew years ago. A sale can be a wise move.
But sometimes the business is the canvas. It’s where you create, serve, mentor, solve, teach, hire, build, and express your Soul Purpose. If you sell that without knowing what replaces it, you may gain liquidity and lose aliveness.
That’s the part deal math rarely captures.
An exit isn’t freedom if it removes the thing that made you feel useful.
When I sold my company, I had to face that. I had built something that once felt personal and creative. Over time, growth made it more corporate. More meetings. More numbers. Less connection to the people we served. I wrote more about that lesson in the truth of why I sold my business.
I thought selling would solve the tension.
It solved some things. It created others.
Define growth before growth defines you
“If you’re not growing, you’re dying” sounds smart until you ask what kind of growth we’re talking about.
Revenue growth?
Team growth?
Profit growth?
Health growth?
Relationship growth?
Freedom growth?
I’ve seen owners grow from $40 million to $100 million and end up with less peace, less time, more complaints, more complexity, and less take-home pay. That isn’t growth. That’s motion with a bigger scoreboard.
The business can grow and your life can shrink.
Before you decide whether to sell your business, define what growth means in human terms. If a deal gives you money but costs the life you wanted money to support, the price may be higher than the offer suggests.
The five-question exit lens
Use this before you let a banker, broker, buyer, or peer group turn your life into a multiple.
