One more stage in the entrepreneur’s journey
There is an idea about selling a company that is worth dismantling before anything else: the sale is not the end of the entrepreneurial journey, nor is it a surrender, nor a failure. It is, quite simply, one more stage in the trajectory of the shareholder and the company, every bit as legitimate as the earlier phases of building, professionalising, internationalising or consolidating.
But, unlike the earlier ones, this stage has a particularity: it benefits enormously from being approached with time and with energy. Selling from a place of calm — without a calendar imposed by external circumstances, without having waited until the emotional or personal limit of the decision, without pressure from other partners or heirs — is a profoundly different experience from selling under pressure of any kind. The company being sold may be the same. But the conversation, the price, the timelines, the choice of buyer, the negotiation of terms and, above all, how the founder experiences the process, are completely different.
That is why it is worth thinking about the sale not as an event that happens one day by force of circumstance, but as a stage the entrepreneur has the right — and often the interest — to plan on their own terms. And that, in practice, means contemplating it before external pressure imposes it.
Why it is so often postponed, and why that often makes sense
There are legitimate reasons not to rush the decision, and almost all of them are understandable. If the business is growing, waiting means selling a larger company. If the sector is moving, waiting may give access to a more interesting consolidation deal. And on a human level, selling demands an emotional readiness that does not always coincide with what the market’s calendar considers optimal.
Someone who has built a business over decades usually has a better read than anyone on how far it can go. The intuition that there is still room to run is, very often, correct. There is nothing irrational about thinking the next financial year could be better than the current one, nor about wanting to see the team take one more step before letting go of the reins.
The difficulty is not in waiting. It is that the reasons to wait tend to renew themselves every year. There will always be a project under way that deserves finishing, a new client to consolidate, one more year of growth to demonstrate. And when you look back five or seven years later, what at the time seemed like reasonable delays have added up until they turn a plannable decision into a decision that ends up being made under circumstances.
It is also worth stressing that there is an interest in selling a company with growth still ahead of it, in order to make it attractive to a buyer and so that the value creation story is credible — rather than selling a company with no further room to run.
When something pushes, the conversation changes
The most recognisable pattern in the mid-market is that many serious conversations about selling start not from a strategic calculation, but from a concrete event: an unsolicited proposal, a change in the health of the shareholder and executive, a conflict between partners, a generational handover that fails to materialise, a significant move in the sector. When something like that appears, the time horizon shortens — and with it, part of the seller’s room for manoeuvre.
It is not that selling in those circumstances is bad. Many good deals close in all kinds of contexts, and a serious buyer can still pay for a serious asset. But the space to prepare the process calmly, evaluate several buyers, negotiate from a relaxed position and choose the terms that best fit the entrepreneur’s post-sale plan is reduced. And that, without any need to dramatise it, affects the nature of the deal.
The difference between selling with time and selling under external pressure rarely translates into the headline price alone. It translates into how the payment is structured, into how many years the seller remains tied to the company post-closing, into whether they can choose among several buyers or have to negotiate with just one, into whether the conversation is conducted with the calm needed for the terms to be properly discussed.
“Selling is not the end of anything. It is one more stage in the entrepreneur’s journey. Living it with time and with energy is not a luxury: it is what most changes, in practice, the deal that ends up being signed.”
What is worth reviewing from time to time
There are no universal rules about when it is the moment to consider selling. But there are three or four dimensions worth reviewing periodically, without urgency, simply so that the decision arrives informed when it arrives.
Yourself. The energy and enthusiasm with which you face each new cycle of the business. It is not a question of age or health in the literal sense: it is a question about the attitude with which you walk into the office or the factory each Monday, which projects excite you, how much the routines that once motivated you now weigh on you. Selling from a position of full energy is different from selling when that energy is starting to become a scarce resource. Both are legitimate, but the first opens options the second does not.
Family and succession. If there is a natural generational handover, perfectly prepared and with a clear vocation to take over the business, the horizon is one thing. If there is not — or if there are several heirs with divergent interests, or the children have taken different professional paths, or the next generation has shown willingness but not conviction — it is worth knowing it and having discussed it before the question becomes impossible to postpone. Family decisions about the business are always easier when they do not yet have to be made.
The sector. It is not about anticipating that the sector will decline — that is rarely the case — but about reading the dynamics that are moving it. Is a fund entering to build a platform in this vertical? Are consolidation processes closing among competitors? Are new international buyers appearing and looking at Spain? Or, conversely, is the sector’s deal cycle starting to cool after several active years? Sectors have windows, and those windows do not stay open indefinitely. The company can be doing better than ever and yet find itself at a less favourable point in the sector cycle than a few years ago.
To the above is added a fourth dimension, more qualitative and quicker to respond: how the business itself stands in terms of operational stability, autonomy from the founder and the strength of the management team. This is dealt with in detail on another occasion; here it is enough to say that the asset’s position matters, but it usually matters less than the founder assumes, because it can almost always be worked on within reasonable timeframes. What is far harder to recover are the other three dimensions.
When two or three of these dimensions begin to point in the same direction, it does not mean you have to sell. It means it is worth having thought, with time to spare, about what you want to do when the moment comes — so that the moment is, as far as possible, a decision and not a reaction.
Earlier is almost always better than just in time
The paradox of the optimal moment is that it is almost never identified from the inside. Looking back, the entrepreneur who sold well usually says they could probably have sold a year or two earlier without losing much. The one who sold under pressure almost always concludes that they wish they had started thinking about it sooner.
There are no universal rules about when to sell a company. But on when to start contemplating the sale as a real possibility — not as an urgency, not as an immediate decision, but as one more stage to be reached with preparation and calm — the answer, for most Spanish mid-market entrepreneurs, tends to be sooner than is assumed from the inside. Not because there is any rush, but because the sooner it is contemplated, the easier it is to live it on the terms the founder chooses.
