Angie Stocklin: We sold our company and didn’t ask enough questions

In previous posts, I have outlined the details of the decision to sell One Click Ventures and the somewhat mundane process of putting the business up for sale and being acquired.

If you are following along from home, you might be wondering what the business looked like after the acquisition. Did I hop a plane the next day for Fiji and fly off into the sunset, never to return? Or perhaps find myself promoted to a high-level position inside our new public parent company?

Not quite. Our transition and my role in it took a different road, with some unexpected twists and turns.

Most of the mistakes we made during the transition originated during the negotiation process. We negotiated a variety of topics and decisions for months with our acquiring company. Some of those topics, like our desire for our entire team to stay on after the acquisition, were executed exactly as we planned. Other topics, like the idea that we would continue to operate as a separate entity, were a little murkier.

Was this our fault? Absolutely. We didn’t ask enough questions about how our new parent company defined this plan and naively assumed that operating on our own would look similar to what it had looked like before the acquisition.

From a leadership perspective, the new parent company didn’t install someone from its office or make any changes to our websites or our marketing plans. But starting on Day 2 of our acquisition, they started moving on their plans to revamp our supply chain and delivery services, and we all were caught off guard. I respect and like the leadership team from our acquisition company and don’t believe it was any kind of bait and switch. We just didn’t ask enough questions.

In their eyes, these decisions didn’t impact the day-to-day operations of the business and had nothing to do with us continuing to run the business as we always had. But they didn’t understand the level of empowerment our team enjoyed. We had strong and long-standing relationships with our vendors and factories—factories my team and I had visited in China and Taiwan and people we had chosen to work with from a long list of potential suppliers. We trusted them, and they had pulled through for us again and again.

You can say it is just business, but business is made up of people and relationships. We knew that, in a few cases, moving our business away from these vendors was going to cause a significant loss of revenue. My merchandising team members were no longer empowered to choose which vendors they thought were best for our business and instantly felt less valuable as a result.

And, because we weren’t looped in on these decisions before the acquisition, they largely felt a disconnect from a values perspective. As a leadership team, we were always as transparent as possible with our team, and it was a major jolt to realize there were already decisions out of our control and that these decisions would impact our ability to maintain the culture we had created before the acquisition. We, again, didn’t ask enough questions about what life would look like after the acquisition. We didn’t ask if decisions would be made on our behalf without our input; we naively assumed we would at least be looped into conversations that were happening about our team and our brands.

Randy and I signed a contract to stay with the company for two years after the acquisition. We felt strongly that we needed to guide and protect our team into the next phase and were excited to watch the company grow.

I struggled during the acquisition process, and these struggles only intensified once the acquisition was finalized. I did not enjoy decisions coming from the top nor navigating a corporate hierarchy nor feeling like we were no longer able to operate in a way that lived up to our core values and mission statement. So, after six months with the new team, I asked to be relieved of my contract and stayed for a few more months to make sure there was time to offload responsibilities and get a new operational structure in place. Randy was much better at navigating this new world and stayed for his full two-year commitment.

I realize this article makes us sound like rookies, and we were. We started the company with the two of us in a home office, and every step of our growth was a new experience and one we had to learn along the way. After 12 years of building a successful company, we were still in uncharted water.

I share these experiences with you because it is easy to gloss over these types of mistakes and focus on the shining achievement of selling the company. I want to paint a more accurate picture of that time in our history. Next time, I’ll dive into another topic that we don’t talk enough about: How it felt to sell my company.•

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Stocklin is an angel investor and exited founder who currently teaches entrepreneurship at Purdue University.