Anyone seeking a living breathing example of what a full and rewarding post-exit career looks like could do worse than leaf through the CV of Mike Southon.
Following the sale of a Unix training company -The Instruction Set - to Cap Gemini in 1989, Mike went on to work with a string of start-up companies while also finding time to tour with a band fronted by alter ego Mike Fabgere. Come the noughties, he forged a new career as a best –business author. Today he divides his time between writing columns for the Financial Times and mentoring young companies.
But if Mike’s career has been rich and varied, he is the first to admit the period surrounding his exit from The Instruction Set was difficult on a number of levels. "Exiting the business was traumatic, " he says. "For instance, some people weren’t happy about the sale. There were people there who I’d worked with and liked who were very angry about the whole thing "
Perhaps that wasn’t surprising. Mike and his co-founders had built the business from a minnow employing just five people into a much more substantial entity with 150 people on the payroll. There was a lot of loyalty and commitment to the company and while that was a clearly good thing, a few of the employees felt betrayed by the decision to sell to a major corporate.
In hindsight, Mike regrets the ill feeling but maintains that the sale was ultimately good for everyone involved. "From the point of view of the founders it was the right time to sell," he says. "If we’d hung on any longer we would have been working as a small company in a very competitive marketplace and the value of the business would probably have been lower. As it was were able to get a very good price."
Meanwhile, the employees benefitted from the opportunity to build careers in a major international group. "Some of our people left, some started their own businesses but a lot of them stayed and went on to become very senior at Cap Gemini," he adds.
After the sale was an inevitable period of transition. After completing a two year earn out in which remained with the business as an employee, he found himself on the outside with a lot of time on his hands and a missing sense of purpose. "There was a sense of anti-climax," he recalls.
DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT
Recalling that time, Mike’s advice to newly-exited entrepreneurs is to take some time before deciding on the next move. "My feeling is that you take a long break - travel, see the world," he says.
He is also a believer in doing something different. Having sold his business at the tender age of thirty eight, Mike was not inclined to use the money simply to fund an early retirement, but rather than rushing into new business opportunities, he took the opportunity to have some serious fun. Enter, Mike Fabgere from stage right. With money no longer a problem, Mike created a rock star persona and formed a band that has – at times – featured members of Deep Purple and Iron Maiden in its ranks. Propelled by a combination of good publicity photographs and star names, the project found a home on the University/College entertainment circuit .
A RETURN TO THE BUSINESS FRAY
But it wasn’t long before Mike began to exercise his business skills again. During the 1990s he was involved in a string of start-up companies. As is the way with fledgling businesses, some were more successful than others . As his website biography puts it - two went public three went broke.
Mike’s actual involvement in each of these companies depended on the circumstances. "In some I chaired the company, in others it was more informal – a case of helping out friends," he says. However, there was one common factor. "I was always involved on the sales side, that’s where my skillsets lie."
USING TRANSFERABLE SKILLS
Mike maintains that the skills acquired by business owners are fully transferable from one business situation to the next, regardless of the sector. "If you think about it, the key skillsets in business are delivery, sales and finance, " he says. "On the delivery side, if someone can run an operation in and make things happen in, say, a software company, he will be able to do the same thing in another sector. It’s the same with sales- if you can sell one type of product you can sell anything. And finance skills are also relevant in any industry."
Mike cites the example of a salesman from the software industry moving to florists shop. Yes, you may need to know something about flower arranging in order to talk the language of the customer base but that’s something you can learn about that. The key skill – sales ability is already in place.
MENTOR AND GURU
In parallel with providing sales expertise to start-ups - a total of 17 in the 1990s he was also learning his trade as a businessman. In fact he acknowledges freely that during this time he was mentored by people with even more experience, notably Sir Campbell Fraser, who was chairman of Riversoft one of the companies in question.
Latterly, Mike Southon has recast himself as a business mentor, a role that sees him giving advice to entrepreneurs through books, his Financial Times column, speaking engagements and face-to-face meetings. His latest venture – an online guide for small businesses dubbed Yoodoo – is an extension of this.
Arguably the catalyst for this phase of his career was his emergence as an author. His writing career began at the time of the dot com explosion when someone suggested he put together a book for aspiring business people. Responding to that proposal he sought out author Chris West and together they penned the best-selling Beermat Entrepreneur, which has since been followed by Marketing on a Beermat, Sales on a Beermat and the Boardroom entrepreneur. These books have helped him don the mantle of guru which has in turn helped to underpin his mentoring activities.
Southon clearly relishes the role of mentor, but admits that it wouldn’t have suited him in the period immediately after his exit from The Instruction Set. "I wouldn’t have been ready for it then," he says.
Stepping out of a successful business and forging a new life will always be challenging, even in the current age when the trajectory of entrepreneur from start-up through to exit has been thoroughly documented in countless books. Mike Southon’s approach has been to reinvent himself in a series of very different roles that nonetheless draw on his core communications and sales skills. "Reinvention is a good thing," he says. "There is empirical evidence that everyone should reinvent themselves every six or seven years."
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