Meet Lysa
The thing that drives me
A few years ago, I was running a successful marketing agency with three partners, Two silent, one who may as well have been. To me the company was like a third child, to them it was always a chip they intended to cash.
It's funny all the hugely important things you don't discuss when you're starting a company together.
So when the VCs called, I was pulled very quickly in a direction I didn't want to go. M&A specialists chasing a quick sale, forceful emails through the night. But I wasn't ready to leave so while my partners sold their shares at boot fair prices and pretty much skipped away, I chose to stay at the table.
And in the very first meting, I was bulldozed. They made it abundantly clear my company wasn't mine anymore, decisions were no longer mine to make. I left a year later without a penny from a 30% share in a multi-million pound agency.
But this isn't a sorrow story, or a horror story. It doesn't define me, but it certainly shapes me.
I never want for you- or any other business owner- to feel the way I did. To look back knowing you did the wrong thing, or to sell your company without getting maximum value. Or to jump into the fray without knowing what you really want off the back of a sale. In short, I want to give you all the advice I wish someone had given me.
email: lysa@shemakesadifference.co.uk tel: +447816395983