The Stairs I Used to Climb

My father parked in the same spot for 23 years.

I know this because he told me, standing in that exact spot last weekend, pointing to a cracked square of asphalt like it still belonged to him.

We'd taken our bikes out for a ride with no real destination in mind, and somewhere along the route he steered us toward a building I'd actually seen before. Not just heard about. Seen, up close, as a little girl.

My mom used to bring me there to collect his paycheck. I remember climbing the stairs with her, my hand in hers, the smell of diesel and the low hum of the warehouse behind the office door. That building wasn't an abstraction to me. It was a place I'd been.

Last weekend it looked nothing like I remembered. Faded signage. Windows boarded over with plywood gone gray from years of sun. A chain-link fence with a padlock nobody had opened in a long time. The stairs were still there. There was just nothing left to climb toward.

I got off my bike and followed my father into the parking lot.

He walked straight to a spot near the loading dock, third row, second space from the end, and stood there like he was clocking in. He pointed to the dock door and told me about backing his truck into it thousands of times, about the rhythm of loading pallets before sunrise, about the years he spent on long-haul routes before he took the local run so he could be home for dinner with my mother and me.

He talked about the guys he trained. The dispatcher who covered for him when I had a school thing. The satisfaction of driving the same roads well enough that people trusted him with the freight that mattered.

Then he told me the rest of it.

The company sold to a private equity firm a few years back. Within two years, the doors closed. No transition plan for the workers. No community outreach. Just an acquisition, some restructuring, and a shutdown that left a building full of memories, mine included, standing empty on a road most people drive past without a second look.

I didn't say much while he talked. I just stood there, in a parking lot that held both our histories, and watched my father grieve a building I used to walk into as a child.

What This Has to Do With You

I've spent my career building and selling businesses. A construction company that grew to $40 million across multiple states. A fly-fishing resort in Montana that needed a full turnaround before it could sell. I know the mechanics of an exit. I know what a private equity firm looks for, what due diligence uncovers, what makes a company worth buying versus worth walking away from.

What I didn't fully understand until I stood in that parking lot with my father is what happens on the other side of the transaction. Not to the balance sheet. To the people, and to the families standing behind them.

Every business owner touches generations of people who show up, do the work, and build their lives around the rhythm of that job. The paycheck a daughter climbs stairs to collect. The parking spot someone claims for 23 years. The identity that comes from doing something well, day after day, for decades. When an owner exits without planning for what comes next, they're not just cashing out of a company. They're making a decision, whether they mean to or not, about what happens to everyone who gave that company their years, and everyone standing behind those people.

The numbers back this up. The Exit Planning Institute reports that 75% of business owners plan to exit within the next 10 years. But 79% have no written plan for how that exit will happen, and 49% have done no formal planning at all. Most owners are walking toward one of the biggest financial and human transitions of their lives with no map.

That gap is where stories like my father's come from. Not because every PE acquisition ends in a shutdown. Plenty don't. But because when an owner hasn't built a business designed to survive their exit, whoever buys it inherits all the fragility that owner never addressed. Fragile leadership. Fragile systems. Fragile culture. And fragile things break under new ownership, especially ownership focused on returns instead of legacy.

Succession Isn't Sentimental. It's Strategic.

I work with founders and business owners to build companies that don't depend on any one person to run well, including the owner. That's not a soft goal. It's the difference between a business that survives a transition and one that collapses under it. It's the difference between an exit that honors the people who built the place with you, and their families, and one that leaves a daughter standing in a weed-choked parking lot decades later, remembering stairs that no longer lead anywhere.

You don't owe your business your entire identity. But if people gave you their years, and their families gave you their evenings and weekends around that job, you owe them a plan for what happens when you're gone. A business built to outlast your involvement. A leadership team that can run it without you. A succession strategy that protects the value everyone helped create.

My father drove that route for 23 years. I climbed those stairs as a little girl. The building's gone now, or as good as gone. But what he built during that time, the trust, the training, the reliability he brought to that dock every morning, that mattered. It should have been protected by someone with a plan.

Look at your own business. If you exited tomorrow, what would remain of the people who built it with you, and the families who built their lives around them?

That question is worth sitting with. It's worth more than most owners give it.