When a business owner sits down to think about selling, the calculations are almost always personal. What will I walk away with? What are the tax implications? Will I have enough to fund my retirement, my next venture, my family's future? These are the right questions to ask. I ask versions of them with clients every week. But there is another question that rarely makes the list, and in many cases it should: what happens to your community when you sell?

I have been thinking about this a great deal since my conversation with Chad Friesen on ‘The Cash Rich Exit Podcast’, because the story he told put a number on something most of us feel intuitively but never quantify.

Chad is the CEO of Friesens Corporation, a book manufacturer and publishing company based in Altona, Manitoba - a town of about 4,500 people. Friesens is not small. It is a roughly $120 million company that works with the largest publishers in the world. It is, in Chad's words, a large international company operating in a very small community. And it has been employee-owned, in one form or another, for decades - today through a 100% Employee Ownership Trust.

Chad estimates that Friesens generates somewhere between $60 and $80 million in annual economic spin-off at the local level. Sixty to eighty million dollars circulating right there, in and around a town of 4,500 people, year after year after year.

You can practically watch it move. When Friesens makes a distribution to its employee-owners - which it does three times a year, handing physical cheques to people at a celebration - the local economy gets a visible lift the next day. Retailers around town can tell a distribution has happened because foot traffic spikes. A car dealership sees more customers. Money lands in the hands of hundreds of families, and those families spend it where they live.

Now consider the counterfactual, because Chad did. He estimates that without employee ownership, Friesens would very likely have been sold 20 or 30 years ago. The founding family had no shortage of opportunities. Chad keeps a file folder in his desk of the offers that came in over the years - companies and equity funds that wanted to buy the business. Any one of those transactions could have made the family very wealthy. And any one of them would almost certainly have redirected that economic flow out of Altona.

This is the part that founders rarely price into their exit decisions. When you sell to a distant acquirer - a private equity firm, a large competitor, a consolidator headquartered somewhere else - the value of your business does not simply transfer to you. A great deal of it leaves with the buyer. The head office functions get centralized elsewhere. Procurement decisions get made in another city. Profits flow to shareholders who have never set foot in your town. The jobs may or may not stay. And the recurring economic lifeblood that your business pumped into its community - the spending, the wages, the local investment - starts to drain away, often slowly enough that no single person notices until it is gone.

I want to be careful here, because this is not an argument that selling to an outside buyer is wrong. For many founders, it is exactly the right decision, and the proceeds fund everything they worked for. My point is more focused and, I think, important: the community impact of an exit is a real variable, and most owners never put it on the table. They optimize entirely for personal outcome and treat the community effect as an afterthought, if they consider it at all.

For some founders, that is fine. But for others - and I meet a lot of them - the community is part of why they built the business in the first place. They employed their neighbours. They sponsored the local teams. They watched their company become part of the fabric of a place. And when those founders discover, sometimes too late, that a conventional sale would hollow out the very community they cared about, they feel a real tension between their financial goals and their values.

What the Friesens story demonstrates is that these two things do not have to be in conflict. Employee ownership is not charity. The founding family did not give the business away. They chose a structure that allowed them to be compensated while keeping the company rooted in place and sharing the proceeds with the people who helped build it. And the results speak for themselves both in dollars and in resilience. A company that has weathered a century of change, including a genuine existential crisis in 2007 and 2008, is still standing, still growing, and still anchoring its local economy.

This matters more right now than it has in a long time, because Canada is entering a massive wave of business transitions. Roughly half of Canadian businesses are owned by baby boomers, and an enormous number of those companies will change hands over the next decade. Every one of those transactions is a decision point not just for the owner but for the community that business supports. Multiply the Friesens effect across thousands of small and mid-sized businesses in towns across this country, and you begin to see the stakes. The way these businesses exit will shape whether prosperity stays local or concentrates elsewhere.

So here is what I would encourage every founder to do as they begin thinking about their eventual exit. Add the community question to your list as a real factor worthy of consideration. Ask yourself what your business contributes to the place it operates in, and what would happen to that contribution under different exit scenarios. A sale to an outside buyer, a sale to a strategic partner, a transition to your management team, an Employee Ownership Trust - each of these has a different community footprint, and you deserve to understand those differences before you decide.

Your exit is one of the most consequential decisions you will ever make, and its ripples extend far beyond your own bank account. You built something that matters to more people than just you. When the time comes to let it go, you get to decide how much of that value stays home.

If you want to think through what your exit could look like - financially, personally, and for the community you have served - book a one-on-one Wealth Gap Analysis with me. We will map what you need from your business to fund the life you want, and we will look honestly at the options that align with your values. Reach out on LinkedIn - Colleen O’Connell-Campbell - or email me.

TTFN (ta ta for now)

Colleen O'Connell-Campbell

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