As changemakers, we carry the weight of the world on our shoulders. When we succeed, we feel like we’re exactly where we are meant to be. That is why exit planning is both essential and excrutiating.
To enable our initiatives to fly, we must become irrelevant. Obsolete. It is the greatest gift of our leadership.
Having explored in detail what exit may mean for your venture, let’s consider what it may mean for you. Much of that will depend on whether the exit happens on your terms. Regardless, however, it is likely to be bittersweet. Or, if we opt for accuracy, sweet-bitter.
Exit can feel like the best compliment you ever receive
If you have planned for exit, your experience will likely conjure a wonderful, flattering, affirming feeling of knowing that your creation is vital enough to warrant a life of its own; that the world beyond you wants or even needs it; that other people who you may have never met see your vision and want to take it to the next level.
Whether you are selling (private), being taken over (government), or handing over to the first independent CEO (nonprofit or social enterprise), the prospect of a planned exit is both a relief and the best compliment you may ever receive.
Image credit: 피어나네 from Pixabay.
Bittersweet or sweet-bitter?
That said, the better you do, the worse it is likely to feel in the moment. Why? While this is complex, in essence, a successful exit ushers in your own obsolescence as the founder. After all the blood, sweat, and tears, that can feel like absolute crap.
So crap, in fact, that most founders sabotage (usually subconsciously) their legacy partially if not completely just to avoid that feeling.
Remember all that I said about nonprofits running their course? All of that equally applies to the founder. See that post embedded below.
Most non-profits should shut down. It’s for the best.
If the title irks you, this post is for you. It is also for you if you’d like to supercharge your efforts to create meaningful change in the world.
While I appreciate that it is not a universal experience, growing a venture is akin to parenting: if you are any good at it, you want your baby to become an independent, contributing member of society while standing on their own two feet and even if it brings feelings of sadness and irrelevance.
The reverse holds just as true: if you insist on being invaluable and irreplaceable, you will most likely sabotage your venture and any impact you hoped to have.
Let me continue to illustrate this on Pollinate.
If you feel obsolete, you have done exit right
In 2016, two momentous things happened:
Pollinate’s first independent Board was established, with my role shifting from the Advisory Board to an inaugural Director, and
Alexie Seller, the last of the co-founders still on staff, stepped into the newly minted CEO role.
While Alexie had no tangible plans for leaving, she and I both knew that at some point, she would — as the rest of the co-founders had by that point — do so. So, I advocated for the immediate establishment of the Succession Committee, which I was honored to chair. On behalf of the Board, I was already responsible for mentoring the CEO via fortnightly calls, which Alexie and I went on to leverage to help her prepare the organization — and herself — for her exit.
This remains my most cherished exit experience because, having bought ourselves the time, we managed to align all the stars, so to speak.
Alexie helped identify the capabilities that would allow the leadership team (the CEO and the executives) to take Pollinate beyond the limits of its co-founders, extraordinary as they were. Alexie got to let go of a few key people in the ensuing year, thoughtfully and painstakingly aligning the team to the mission that needed to survive her unique leadership style. We had enough time to settle, all bumps notwithstanding, on a professional recruitment firm to hire the first independent CEO, and to see the process through.
Warned that if she did her job, she would feel redundant, useless, and even a distraction, Alexie had the time to prepare for those feelings enough to ward off any resentment.
In the end, it took two years and nine months to engage the new CEO, Sujatha Ramani, and a few more months that Alexie supported the handover even as she crafted the next stage of her life. By the time Sujatha was onboard and Alexie went into hand-over mode, Alexie reported feeling enjoyably extraneous, basking in her last month in India.
Here’s a reflection on that experience, in Alexie’s own words:
“The honeymoon period of starting a changemaking venture is intoxicating, but the reality is that at some point, you might realize you're not the right person to continue leading its growth.
For me, there was a mix of reasons behind a decision to exit. Some were personal (the workload and living overseas, apart from my husband) while other were organizational, such as my discomfort being a foreign leader of an organization that I believed required more locally led decision-making and leadership.
Whatever their reason is, the most valuable support anyone can grant an entrepreneur considering an exit is to ensure that the best outcomes are achieved. I was fortunate to have an incredibly empowering board who understood where their responsibility started and ended.
I view it as one of my proudest moments that I was able to exit in good faith and with overwhelmingly positive memories of my team and our impact, and that the organization has continued to evolve and create impact in new ways under its new leadership.”
– Alexie Seller, Co-Founder and former CEO of Pollinate Group
Well executed, an exit plan is your ultimate gift to your venture
To exit well, you must make yourself obsolete. That is an experience that is deeply personal and unsettling. However, your ongoing legacy depends on it.
Rather than an admission of defeat, an attempt to keep one foot out the door, or an indication of anything short of utmost commitment, planning for your exit is one of the best gifts you can give to your venture and to the investment you will have made into your legacy whenever the time comes to part.
This concludes this 5-part series on Exit, accessible as a playlist right here on Changemaker’s Substack!
To see how planning for exit fits into your entire roadmap to impact — from identifying your transformational ideas through vetting, funding, implementing, and scaling them to putting yourself in the best position to thrive — get your copy of Change-maker’s Handbook (2023).
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