The seven-iron feels heavier than it did 24 hours ago. It’s 10:04 AM on a Tuesday, and the sun is hitting the fairway with a brutal, unearned brightness. I’ve been staring at this ball for 14 seconds, and the silence is starting to hum. Behind me, the clubhouse is full of people who think I’m the luckiest man in the state. I have the wire transfer confirmation sitting in a deleted folder in my brain, a number ending in far too many zeros, yet I am currently paralyzed by the realization that I have no idea where I’m supposed to be at 10:44 AM. The business was the gravity that held my atoms together. Without it, I’m just a guy in expensive shoes standing on a patch of grass, wondering if anyone would notice if I just kept walking until I hit the treeline.

Losing Context

Zoe L., an online reputation manager I know who spends her life curating the digital ghosts of the ultra-wealthy, once told me that her busiest season is the six months following a major acquisition. It isn’t because her clients are doing something scandalous. It’s because they’ve lost their context. Zoe L. watches them try to reinvent themselves in real-time, pivoting from ‘SaaS Disruptor’ to ‘Philanthropist’ or ‘Angel Investor’ with a desperation that smells like ozone. She told me about a client who spent $4,004 on a single dinner just to feel like he was still a person of consequence, only to go home and refresh his LinkedIn notifications 84 times before dawn. We build these monuments to our productivity, and when the monument is sold, we realize we were the ones trapped inside the masonry.

It’s a specific kind of grief that nobody lets you talk about. If you complain about feeling empty after making $14,000,004, the world has a very limited amount of sympathy for you. You’re expected to be happy. You’re expected to be ‘winning.’ But the transition from being the primary decision-maker for 154 employees to being the guy who decides between wheat or white toast is a violent downshift. The brain, which has been calibrated for high-stakes cortisol for a decade, doesn’t know how to process a Tuesday morning with no fires to put out. I actually missed the crises. I missed the 4:04 AM phone calls about a server outage in Singapore. I missed the frustration of a missed quarterly target because at least those things told me who I was. I was the person who fixed things. Now, there is nothing to fix except the swing of my golf club, which is currently a disaster.

The Mirror of Worth

I think we lie to ourselves about why we do it. We say it’s for the freedom. We say it’s for the family. But for a certain breed of person, the business is a mirror. Every growth spurt in the company is a validation of our own worth. When you sell that mirror, you’re left looking at a wall. I’ve seen founders go back and try to ‘consult’ for the new owners, a move that is almost always a slow-motion car crash. They show up to meetings they no longer lead, offering advice that is no longer wanted, like ghosts trying to move furniture in a house they no longer own. It’s pathetic and deeply human. We are terrified of being irrelevant. We are terrified that the most interesting thing we will ever do is already behind us, documented in a 234-page purchase agreement that is now gathering dust in a lawyer’s filing cabinet.

There’s a technical side to this that we often ignore because we’re too busy looking at the tax implications. We plan for the capital gains, but we don’t plan for the identity loss. We need a different kind of advisor for that-someone who understands that the transaction is only the beginning of a much longer, much weirder journey. Finding a partner like KMF Business Advisors can sometimes bridge that gap, not just because they handle the mechanics of the deal, but because they’ve seen the wreckage of the ‘Monday after’ enough times to warn you where the holes are. They understand that a business isn’t just an asset; it’s a social ecosystem and a psychological scaffold. When you pull that scaffold away, you need to know if the building can stand on its own.

The Tourist in Your Own Life

I remember talking to a guy who sold his logistics firm for a staggering amount of money. He spent the first 4 weeks traveling. He went to four different countries, stayed in four-star hotels, and ate at the best restaurants in the world. By the 34th day, he was sitting in a bar in Tokyo, staring at a glass of whiskey, and realized he hadn’t spoken to a single person about anything that mattered in a month. He wasn’t ‘free.’ He was untethered. He ended up flying home early just to walk through his old office building. He didn’t go inside; he just sat in the parking lot for 14 minutes and watched the employees walk in. He felt like a tourist in his own life. That’s the danger of the romanticized exit. We think we’re escaping a cage, but sometimes we’re just leaving the only place where we knew the rules of the game.

Maybe the mistake is in the naming. We call it an ‘exit,’ which implies a way out. But it’s really an ‘entry’ into a space where you are forced to confront the parts of yourself you’ve been ignoring with 64-hour work weeks. For me, that meant realizing I didn’t actually have any hobbies. I had ‘networking activities.’ I didn’t have many friends; I had ‘strategic partnerships.’ The realization was a cold bucket of water. I had outsourced my personality to my cap table. And now, at 10:04 AM, the cap table is gone. I am left with the raw materials of a person, and I have no idea how to assemble them without a mission statement and a set of KPIs. It’s a profound, disorienting vulnerability that makes you want to go out and start another company just so you don’t have to deal with yourself.

Building the Porch

I’ve started doing this thing where I count things. I count the 44 steps from my front door to the mailbox. I count the 14 seconds it takes for the coffee machine to prime. It’s a way of grounding myself in a world that no longer requires me to be a visionary. It’s a small, perhaps silly, habit, but it’s mine. It isn’t for the board of directors. It isn’t for the shareholders. It’s just for me. This morning, I spent a long time looking at the ceiling, and for the first time, I didn’t just see the 44 tiles. I saw the way the light from the window hit the corner of the room, a specific, shifting geometry that has probably been there every day for the last 14 years, but I was always too busy checking my phone to notice. It was beautiful, and it was terrifying, because it was a reminder of everything I had traded for the ‘exit.’

If you’re approaching that finish line, my advice isn’t about the EBITDA or the earn-outs. My advice is to start building a porch. Metaphorically or literally. Find something that doesn’t scale. Find a person you can talk to who doesn’t care about your valuation. Find a way to be okay with being ‘just’ a person. Because the Monday after is coming, and no amount of money in the bank can fill the hole where your purpose used to be. You have to build a new purpose, piece by piece, and it usually starts with something as simple as standing in the grass, taking a breath, and finally, after 24 years of running, letting the club swing just for the sake of the swing.

Foundations for the Next Chapter