Richard Warner Online

…it’s to sell your company, right? Not long ago, some friends sold their technology firm, finished out their employment agreement and are now rich and bored. But most acquisitions don’t turn out so well. We sold our company eight years ago and bought it back two years later, just before the parent company went chapter 11. Reading the trades yesterday, I came across another familiar name: the first company to kick the tires and offer to buy us back in 1997. Here’s what an analyst said about that company yesterday: “The current environment for production services is very different from when they started nearly 20 years ago… It is plausible that the industry has changed so much that it may not be feasible for them to reinvent themselves.” If we had sold, that statement could have been about us. Lesson: hitching your wagon to a bigger company may leave you wealthy and bored…or it could introduce you to much bigger problems.