In 2015 I sold Initial Care — a health and safety training company I built from nothing — for about a tenth of what it was worth.
I didn't get fleeced. Nobody took advantage of me. I sold it cheap on purpose, fast, because the price of keeping it had stopped being money.
The math nobody puts on a spreadsheet
Initial Care was working. On paper I was winning. But somewhere between the growth and the grind I had turned into someone I didn't like — and worse, someone my wife didn't deserve to live with. The stress came home. The ego came home. I was a bad person to be around, and I was too busy "succeeding" to notice until it was almost too late.
Here's the part that's hard to admit: the business didn't fail. I did. The company was healthy. My priorities were the thing that was sick.
I could have held out for ten times the price. I'd have paid for it with my marriage. That's not a trade — that's a robbery you volunteer for.
So I sold. In under a month. And I learned something that has governed every decision I've made since: selling a company is shockingly easy. Keeping the right things in the right order is the hard part.
What it cost, and what it saved
It cost me a number. A big one, on paper. The kind of number that would make a lot of founders call me foolish.
It saved my marriage to Elizabeth. It saved the version of me that my three boys actually need to grow up watching. You do not get that number back, and you do not get those years back either — but only one of those two things can still wreck a life if you lose it.
If I'm honest, I'd do the exit differently now. I'd structure it as seller financing and sell to my own employee — the person who helped me build it — so the thing outlived me and someone I trusted carried it forward. That's a lesson for another article. But the decision underneath it? Selling to protect the people over the P&L? I'd make that one a hundred times out of a hundred.
Why I'm telling you this
Because I know exactly who's reading this. You're building something real, and it's starting to build you into someone your family is quietly enduring instead of enjoying. You can feel it. You're just hoping the next milestone buys you back.
It won't. The milestone will move.
God first. Family always. Business at 3AM — in that order, and the order is the whole point. I put the business dead last on the list not because it matters least, but because it's the only one that will happily take everything above it if you let it.
I sold a company for a tenth of its worth. Best deal I ever made.
I'm building the rest of it in public now — the wins and the losses both. If you're a founder who wants God first and still wants to win, come build in the light with me.