Ed, give me 90 days and I’ll get you £250,000, that I can promise you.

Ed, give me 90 days and I’ll get you £250,000, that I can promise you.

He was doing that sales thing that disingenuous sales people do where they say your name an uncomfortable amount but I liked him the best of the three brown suits that came to see me.

I was moving to Denmark and we had set the clock at 100 day from decision to moving and I had to sell my gym and healthcare business fast.

I’d never sold a business before so I decided to enlist the help of a professional.

I’d almost fallen over when I heard the figure I could expect to receive. In my notes I’d written £20,000 but what did I know?

I was only selling it because it would have costed £12,000 to close and I wanted my employees to keep their jobs and it would have been cool to see the place continue in my absence.

The phone started to ring though and people started coming in to see the place and were genuinely interested.

That’s when it started to become really stressful.

We were selling the house, sending our dog and 90% of our belongings to Denmark.

Had to continue growing the business so that we’d have something to sell.

Had to tell our family and friends what we were doing but keep things quiet from our staff in order to keep them with us and working for growth and not rock the boat and create uncertainty for them.

We had to find somewhere to live and get the girls into school in Copenhagen.

I certainly learned a lot about what I was capable of during those 100 days but I was seriously stressed. Potential buyers wanted to understand all the numbers in depth and talk all the time. One of the potential buyers turned out to be a sociopath and did all sorts of weird things.

The stress continued for 50 days. I needed to go for walks for 2 hours a day to clear my head, I was drinking a couple of beers every night, my back started hurting, and had a nervous agitation in my stomach all the time.

Then on day 50 I walked into my office at home and opened the note book that I had written in when we first decided to make the move and read the note that said.

“Gym - sell off kit for 20k or find a pt to take over and just walk away. Main priority - find the staff work and avoid paying to close.”

I laughed my ass off, the feeling in my stomach went away immediately.

It’s funny, we so easily fall into the trap of thinking that stress is about reality but that’s rarely the case. It’s more often the story we are telling about what’s happening. It’s the meaning that we have attached to what’s happening.

I got caught up in someone else’s story and tried to make reality fit the story and was stressed because it wasn’t.

The business sellers didn’t look at my building rental contract. Didn’t look at how integral I was to the business and those bits of information were pivotal to the price.

That’s not the big takeaway though, the big takeaway is this, don’t believe everything you think. Especially when reality is showing something different.