Fascinating article, but reading it I kept asking myself: Why not promote someone to CEO? Surely any top-level manager already working at the company will do a better a job then someone who's only qualification is working there 18 years ago.
The author had business experience having founded and running the successful CB Insights so it's not like some naive well-to-do kid took things over.
By the end you realize the author 1) researched the industry, 2) improved the product mix 3) grew the highest-margin product and 4) sold to a buyer with values that protected his workers and his dad's legacy.
Someone with that quality/ability is really hard to find, even at really big companies.
1. He died suddenly so would have been a good thing to explore and do with time. It certainly would have made my life easier :)
2. Building a business that is small to medium-sized with no brand recogntion in a tier 2 city in India doesn't afford you access to tier 1 talent. India's talent and talent preferences are incredibly different than the USA.
1. Most importantly, we didn’t have the talent internally to do that. Running the biz requires a set of generalist biz skills and the company was comprised of specialists. They could tell me about issues in their domain but business requires skills across many domains. And running a biz of this size in a location as challenging as Nasik/Sinnar requires someone being the top dog as decision by consensus wouldn't work (rarely does).
2. Capital availability / accessibility - The team just wouldn't have had it. Indian credit and debt markets would not be available.
3. Non-traditional structure would have required a lot of education - Even if capital was somehow available (0% chance), this would have been an exercise in 'herding cats' and wasn't something I had time for. I was running a business here in the USA plus had a wife and 2 young kids. My work hours were already insane just operating the businesses. I was optimizing for a simple, clean deal for many reasons and a co-op would have been an amount of 'brain damage' I wasn't game for especially given factors above.
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Finally, I'll say that I don't think this would have been feasible in India at the scale and location we were at for one other intangible and cultural reason.
And that is because the employee to owner mentality transition would be non-trivial to impossible. The gulf is just too big. The reality is that reimagining yourself as a founder or owner requires a different mindset. There is no 'leaving the office' especially at the scale of Atlas (small/mid-sized). You're always on call to some extent and all problems seek you out (or you have to go find them). This is not the kind of responsibility and weight most people want at the end of the day.
