What the buyers were really asking

The decision as it arrived

The client founded a robotics company 31 years ago and still owns most of it with her family. 240 people building automated inspection systems that sit at the end of a customer’s production line.

She had decided to hand the company to her operations director in January. He had been there nine years and wanted it, and the family agreed. She had not voiced her doubt out loud to anyone, including him. He had not sold before, and she had won or kept every large account herself for three decades. She could not tell whether that was a gap in him or a habit in her.

The Read

Ammara asked to see how the company wins work, and started with the deals it lost.

Eleven large opportunities had closed in 18 months, and she found the founder in nine, usually late, usually after a technical objection. Then she called seven customers and asked what had made them choose. Six described a conversation with her about a problem on their own line, before anyone designed a system.

She asked the operations director the same question about the same accounts. He described the systems accurately and in detail. On four of the six, he did not know the conversation had happened.

The Pressure Test

The room held two people who had watched a handover from opposite ends. One had received a company. The other buys them.

The first had taken over a family business from its founder and spent a year being compared to her. The comparison is survivable, he said. The silence is not. His predecessor left without saying which parts of the business ran on her personally, so he found them one at a time in front of customers.

The second buys businesses like this one and has walked from two deals over exactly this. The founder relationship is the first thing a buyer tests and the last thing a seller can fix. She asked which customers had met him, and four of six had not. A handover that goes wrong there costs two to three years of that account, upwards of $20m, and the discount lands in the price rather than the sales line.

January was 14 weeks away, and the largest account, worth $9m a year, renewed in March to a buyer who had named her. The room did not think the successor was wrong. It thought January was a date chosen around the family and not around the customers.

The Action Brief

Commit. He is the right person and the timing is wrong.

Move the handover to June and spend those months on the thing the company cannot buy. Put him in the early conversations she has always had alone, starting with the March renewal, where she opens and he closes. Write down which accounts run on her personally, and tell those customers rather than letting them find out.

Two conditions. She sets her last day now and does not move it, and the March renewal happens with both of them in the room, because a handover tested on a small account has not been tested.

She had asked whether her successor was real. The evidence pointed at her own role, and the company had not written any of it down.

Where it landed

At the debrief she said June held, and the March renewal came in at the same volume after two more meetings than usual. Three customers called her afterward anyway, and she sent them back to him. The hardest part was not the leaving, she said, but hearing him answer a customer differently than she would have, and staying quiet.

Ammara read the deals the company had lost and the reasons its customers had stayed, and put both to a successor and a buyer who had each lived a rushed handover.