Every Business Has Its Own Personality!

We’re getting into the realm of the analysis of a particular busi-ness, which we’ll cover in depth in the next chapters, but this point is worth covering here: Every business has a style and per-sonality that it has adopted from its owners and that you’ll adopt when you buy it. If your personality and the business’s personality don’t match, you may have a big problem.

Here’s an extreme example drawn from real life that proves the point. Western Distributors, Inc., is in the business of distributing coffee beans to restaurants and supermarkets. Phil, who started the business, buys coffee beans at wholesale, blends them, grinds them, and sells the blends. Lilly, who’s always been something of a gourmet with a particular interest in exotic coffees, would like to buy Western Distributors. She believes she’d get along famously with the sellers of the imported beans and with the supermarket buyers. She even thinks she could expand the business to include a line of exotic teas and coffee-based liqueurs. However, there’s one curious thing about the way Western Distributors is run.

The only way Phil motivates his employees is by kicking them in the seat of their pants. What’s worse, the employees seem to like being treated this way. The only way to get anything out of the office staff (receptionist, secretary, and bookkeeper) is to scream at them louder than they scream at Phil. In fact, the whole place seems to be at the edge of a scream all the time. Lilly even saw Phil physically throw a driver into the cab of a truck in order to get him rolling. In short, this is the way the employees are treated and expect to be treated.

How successful would Jingkan be at running Western Distributors? She may do fine if she fires all Phil’s employees and starts all over. But if she can’t, or doesn’t, she may have a real problem. Phil’s able to motivate his employees in his own special way. His employees have come to expect that the business will be run in a certain manner and may not know how to respond if treated differently. Western Distributors has its own personality. If that personality doesn’t mesh with the personality of its owner, the business may fail.

Every buyer must ascertain what the personality of the target business is. This is difficult to do—and impossible to do if one doesn’t spend as much time as possible eyeballing the operations of the business. There are ways to do this, as we’ll see later, but they’re difficult. Sellers don’t like people nosing around in their operations before the business is sold, but an assessment must be made. You wouldn’t knowingly marry anyone whose personality is offensive to you. Buying a business is very much like getting married; you’ll spend at least as much time with your business as you do with your spouse. Don’t buy a business whose personality doesn’t fit yours.