They handed a stranger their life’s work and got on a boat.
He slid a car key across the desk.
“I bought it on Saturday. Champagne colour, full option. You start tomorrow.”
That was 2004. I was thirty one. Three days earlier I had sent him a proposal that fitted on one page. A salary, a performance component, and a Mercedes 4×4. I put the car in as a bargaining chip. He went out and bought it before the meeting.
I knew them from my time at Barco. Their business in the south of Spain was one of our biggest accounts in Europe. Everyone had warned me about him before my first visit. We hit it off in an afternoon.
Then Barco decided to sell the division I was running, and I left. I bought my grandfather’s old car, loaded it with a bag of clothes, two boxes of books and all my windsurf gear, and drove south.
Two weeks later the phone rang.
“I heard you are out of a job. Come for lunch. Tomorrow.”
And he hung up.
He was waiting for me with that giant smile. “I have one question. If you say yes, we eat at my place. If you say no, we go to the restaurant round the corner.”
I told him to shoot.
“Would you be interested in running my business?”
I asked him what he meant.
“Yes or no.”
Fifteen minutes later I was in the passenger seat of his convertible on the way to lunch. A hot July day, a beautiful garden, good food, and one of the best interviews I have ever sat through.
I sent the proposal on Friday. The answer came on Saturday. Come over Monday.
The next morning I walked in to forty people waiting for me. I did not speak a word of Spanish. The owners stood in front of everyone and said I would be running the commercial side from now on, and that they should all help me get up to speed.
I was proud. I knew nothing about running that business, and I was proud.
Then he added one line.
“We are off to the United States with the boat for six to eight weeks. We will call twice a week.”
And they walked out the door.
Twenty two years later it is still the most generous thing anyone in business has done for me. They were not absent people. They worked seven days a week. They handed a stranger their life’s work and got on a boat.
The plan was said out loud. Get a grip on the business by running it. Over time, take the whole thing over.
No date. No structure. Nothing on paper. I did not ask for any.
Here is what I believed about myself at thirty one. I had built something on my own. I had built a ten million dollar business in China. I had launched a brand worldwide.
I thought I was good at sales, marketing and strategy.
I was all potential and healthy ambition.
They had courted me as the man who would take the ship, and I happily believed it. Inflating someone’s ego is a game of two sides. The ones who do the inflating, and the ones who enjoy it too much to ask a question.
The question I never asked was whether anybody had sat in that chair before me.
The job was clear enough once I was inside it. Things were discussed with me in the office. Everything was decided at home, at the weekend. Finance, hiring, every call that mattered stayed where it had always been.
Nobody lied to me. The job simply was not the job. They needed bandwidth. I heard succession.
And then something worked.
He and I got close. Long conversations about the business, real arguments in both directions, decisions we made together. Those decisions went home for the weekend and came back intact. They stopped being reversed.
That is the job working. That is exactly what I had been hired to do.
It also broke the machine. His partner felt the grip go. Twenty years of running that business as two people, and a young man from outside had changed how the answers were arrived at.
I had broken the dynamic they had run all their lives.
Getting close to one of them cost me the other, and the day I understood that was the day I decided to go. Months later a venture we had built together was killed by a decision taken above us. I told them the truth. I could not represent it with conviction any more.
Twenty months, start to finish.
Before I left I gave them a plan. Split the business into four small businesses of four to six people. Give each one to somebody already on the team. Step back and let them run.
Years afterwards I learned I had not been the first. There had been others in that role before me. Three, maybe four. I still do not know the number, and that is the part that matters. Nobody had counted, because nobody thought of it as a pattern.
I lasted longer than the others and I moved the business further. It ended in the same place.
What that business needed was somebody from the inside.
They had made that impossible years earlier, one sensible decision at a time. Hire the person who can do the job you have today. Train people to be better at the job they are already doing. Decide the important things yourself, quickly, the way you always have.
Every one of those is reasonable on the day you make it. Together they remove the only people who could ever have taken over.
I would like to tell you I carried that out of there and built my own company on the opposite.
I did not.
I hired for the job in front of me, plenty of times. Then I got stuck, because in a team that grows that way the queue decides who becomes the manager. Order of arrival is not a qualification. I let it act like one more than once.
I waited far too long to bring in outside help to develop our people, especially for leadership.
And I held on. Or I was the loudest voice in the room, which is the same thing wearing a better suit. When the time finally came to hand over the rudder, people wondered whether I meant it.
Years of weekends and holidays I did not take. That is the visible price and it is the cheap one.
The expensive one is everything I never saw, because a man involved in everything has nowhere to look from.
I read that business from the outside in twenty months. In my own I needed seventeen years.
Two years after I left that business, they became one of my biggest customers. We still see each other once or twice a year. I drop by, we talk, and neither of us goes very deep. There is real respect on both sides and we have a common beautiful version of our time together.
So here is the question I would ask before you hire your next senior person.
The one you are bringing in to take work off your hands. Are you building them to replace you, or only to hold the job?
w. 🌊
Make My Mess My Message is a book written in public, one Friday at a time. Every issue lives here.