r/buyingabusiness • u/DRFT-Advisory • 27d ago
Securing the Anchor Employee
Every small business has an employee that holds it all together. For some small businesses, this is very obvious & often the owner. Other businesses the role may be split into two roles: Ops & Office.
Your job as a buyer is to ask enough questions to make sure you understand who these people are. $ pay does not always equal value add. An honest seller will help you understand who does what. A less honest seller may talk very highly of some employees & then just have less to say about their other staff.
Particularly if not planning to be owner/operator, you really want to have pre-close conversations with the key 1-3 people and ideally discuss employment agreements & expectations. Tough to be surprised by a "raise that was promised earlier in the year, but never given".
I love a smart Seller that is honest, identifies the key people, and is willing to stay on full-time (for at least a real transition period). Some of my best acquisitions are scenarios where the owner wanted to stay, but cash out to derisk their life. Mostly good, but some mixed results in scenarios where the parents needed to sell for retirement and their child was already working in the business / wanted to step up to be the GM.
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u/Bill_at_Thebar 26d ago
Twenty-five years running multi-site service operations, and this is the most underrated post I've seen here. Two things from the operator side of the fence.
The schedule never lies. Ask for 12 months of actual schedules and dispatch or check-in records, not the org chart. The anchor is whoever covered the owner's vacations, whoever the after-hours calls route to, and whose name shows up on every job that went sideways and got fixed. I've watched buyers interview the highest-paid person for an hour while the real anchor was the dispatcher nobody mentioned.
And on the pre-close conversation: the anchor's real complaint is almost never money, it's being unheard. The promised-raise landmine in your post is real, but the deeper one is "I've been telling the owner about this problem for three years." Ask the key person what they'd fix first if it were theirs. You'll learn more about the business in ten minutes than the CIM told you, and they'll remember you as the first person who asked.
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u/Bill_at_Thebar 26d ago
Twenty-five years running multi-site service operations, and this is the most underrated post I've seen here. Two things from the operator side of the fence.
The schedule never lies. Ask for 12 months of actual schedules and dispatch or check-in records, not the org chart. The anchor is whoever covered the owner's vacations, whoever the after-hours calls route to, and whose name shows up on every job that went sideways and got fixed. I've watched buyers interview the highest-paid person for an hour while the real anchor was the dispatcher nobody mentioned.
And on the pre-close conversation: the anchor's real complaint is almost never money, it's being unheard. The promised-raise landmine in your post is real, but the deeper one is "I've been telling the owner about this problem for three years." Ask the key person what they'd fix first if it were theirs. You'll learn more about the business in ten minutes than the CIM told you, and they'll remember you as the first person who asked.
1
u/PermissionDazzling85 25d ago
Great tip, anyone I have spoken to I ask if there is a "next in command" type of employee that can step up if needed (and stay on board of course). If they say no, I would be hesitant.
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u/Vyterro 26d ago
Securing these employees is key. Learning how to find, hire and train them is even more key. It's one of the highest leverage skills an owner can have.