Yikes! I sold my company – now what?

I sold my company of 20+ years a few weeks ago.

On paper, it was everything I had worked toward for years. The transaction closed, the wire arrived, champagne was opened at an hour that would have felt irresponsible in any other phase of my life. For a brief window, there was validation, relief, and the quiet satisfaction that comes from knowing you’ve finished something properly.

But then there was the transition period.

For one to two months after the sale, I stayed involved to help hand things over to the new owners. Operationally, it felt familiar. The calendar was still full. Emails came in. Calls were scheduled. Decisions were still required. In many ways, it wasn’t that different from being a CEO the week before the sale. The machinery was still running, and I was still part of it.

That continuity masked what was coming.

Because gradually – almost politely – the volume started to drop. Fewer emails. Fewer meetings. Calls that used to be weekly became bi-weekly, then optional, then unnecessary. Calendar invites stopped appearing altogether. The dependency unwound itself faster than I expected, and with far less ceremony.

And then one day, without anything dramatic happening, it became obvious:

I was no longer needed.

Not disliked. Not pushed out. Just… irrelevant. Professionally, at least.

It’s a strange sensation to go from being central to a system to being entirely peripheral to it – especially when nothing “went wrong.” The business was fine. The new owners were competent. The machine simply didn’t require me anymore because I had built it this way.

That’s when the real question surfaced – not the celebratory one, but the unsettling one:

Now what?

I find myself facing reality. What am I going to do with my professional life going forward? At my age, I’m too young to do nothing or play golf all day long.

The Itch to Build Something – Without Knowing What

Once the noise finally stopped, something else surfaced almost immediately.

Restlessness.

Not panic. Not regret. But a familiar internal hum – the urge to build, to create, to make something exist where nothing had existed before. That impulse hadn’t disappeared with the sale. If anything, it had been lying in wait, buried under the obligations of transition and handover.

I’ve never been particularly good at standing still for long. At my core, I’m a builder. That’s the identity that survived the sale, the title change, the inbox going quiet. The problem wasn’t a lack of desire – it was a lack of direction.

I wanted to start something again. I missed the early pulse of creation. The energy of shaping a system, designing a tool, solving a problem that mattered to someone. I wanted to feel that quiet excitement of watching something take form under my hands.

What I didn’t want was just as clear.

I didn’t miss meetings.
I didn’t miss administration.
I didn’t miss HR conversations, performance reviews, or managing ever-expanding teams.
I didn’t miss the slow creep of corporate process and political noise that inevitably comes with scale.

Those things had been necessary once. They were never the point.

When I stripped business down to the parts I genuinely enjoyed, a pattern emerged: I loved building systems. Applications. Tools. Solutions that removed friction and helped people do their work better. I loved clarity, structure, and leverage. I loved the early stages – the phase where intent is high and bureaucracy hasn’t yet arrived.

What I didn’t love was what happens after success – the overhead, the weight, the constant management of complexity for its own sake.

That realization was both liberating and unsettling.

Because it left me with a very honest but very uncomfortable truth:
I wanted to build again – but not the way I had before.

And I had no idea, yet, what that actually meant.

Closing

So this is where I am.

The company is sold. The transition is complete. The inbox is quiet.

I know I want to build again – that part is clear.
I know what I don’t want to rebuild – that’s even clearer.

What I don’t know yet is what shape the next thing should take, or what kind of structure would allow me to focus on the parts of building I actually enjoy without recreating everything I don’t.

For the first time in a very long time, there is no obvious next step. No default path. No externally imposed urgency.

Just space.

That’s unsettling and, if I’m honest, slightly exhilarating.

Something will emerge from this. I don’t know what it is yet, or how long it will take. But I can sense that this in-between phase matters more than it appears from the outside.

For now, I’m paying attention

With gratitude,

Thomas Michael