The Quiet Light Podcast The Founder of MaxCDN Explains Why He Sold a Rapidly Growing Business
David Henzel is the founder of MaxCDN a content delivery network that is behind many WordPress sites. The business was doing really well and things were moving along and growing when David found out that his wife had cancer. This was an earth shattering moment for David and forced him to take a step back and reevaluate his priorities. He knew it was time to sell the business.
David is a serial entrepreneur who has built and sold businesses. He is also extremely proud of how he has achieved work life balance and promotes family time. He is also the host of the Managing Happiness Podcast. Today, one of the things we're going to talk about is reasons why people sell their businesses. Sometimes people don't even know why they are selling, but they know it's the right thing to do. For David, the reasons were pretty obvious. We discuss reasons to sell, the selling process, and what to do when life gets turned on its head.
Episode Highlights:- Planning and having everything in order with your business relieves a lot of pressure if and when you need to sell.
- MaxCDN had over 15,000 customers and was integrated on over 6 million websites.
- David knew he wanted to create a larger impact on the world and decided to sell the company.
- Motivations for selling businesses usually tend to be quite personal.
- David had received other offers to buy his business, but when his wife's illness was diagnosed he knew it was time to do something more in line with his life's calling.
- The selling process was quite involved and distracted him from the day-to-day business.
- It's a lot of work to sell a business.
- David wanted to find something where he could offer more value to the world.
- He created a course to apply business principles to family life.
- He also has an outsourcing business and he mentors other business people.
- David is an entrepreneur and is still drawn to business and business principles.
- Because of the resources and knowledge that David had it was easy to start a new business.
- Entrepreneurs see opportunity everywhere.
- How the needs of a buyer are often different than the needs of the business owner.
- When you start a business make sure you spend money on a lawyer. It's so much easier to have a custom tailored operating agreement for your business.
- David spends time making sure that processes are in place, so he can work on the business and not in the business.