The Habit That Changes Everything, Ten Years Later
He did not set out to build a company that would sell well. He set out to build one that would not embarrass him. A decade of small, boring, correct decisions — and why they mattered enormously.
He did not set out to build a company that would sell well. He set out to build one that would not embarrass him. So from the very first month, every contractor signed a proper agreement. Every invoice got filed the same day. It felt excessive at the time — a single person running a company nobody had heard of, filing paperwork like it mattered.
Ten years later, it mattered enormously. When a buyer's team opened his records, they found exactly what they expected to find: nothing missing, nothing to explain away. The due diligence process that typically runs twelve weeks closed in six.
The habit he started out of simple discomfort with mess turned out to be exactly the infrastructure a transaction requires. Not because he planned it that way. Because the habits that make a company easy to run are the same habits that make it easy to sell.
The most common refusal reason in CIFSO certification is not a technical problem or a financial problem. It is a documentation problem. Revenue figures that cannot be substantiated with billing access. Software rights that were never formally assigned to the company entity. Security assessments that were planned but never commissioned. These are not signs of a bad company. They are signs of a company that never built the habit.
The founders who navigate sale processes most cleanly tend to share one characteristic: they prepared for a transaction they were not sure they would ever want. The preparation was its own form of discipline. The transaction, when it came, was a test they had already studied for without knowing it.
Write everything down. Not for the buyer. For yourself. The moment you can hand the company to someone else for two weeks and nothing breaks — that is when it is worth something.