Ryan Tansom

I grew up around a family business

I grew up in Minnesota watching my dad build Imaging Path, a copier and IT company. He mortgaged our house to buy copiers because he wanted to build something of his own. I heard the stories when he came home from work, helped move offices as the company grew, and got to know the people who worked there. Employees became family friends. The business was part of our lives long before it became my job.

I also grew up wanting to know why I was doing something. School was a struggle when I couldn't see the point. Give me a goal I understood, whether it was soccer or a sales target, and I could put a lot of energy into it. I wanted to understand the game and have some say in how I played it.

I'd sworn I wouldn't work for my dad. Then I graduated from Saint John's University in 2009, in the middle of the financial crisis, and joined the company full time.

Later that year, I sat in a bank meeting with him and learned we'd lost $940,000 on $21 million in revenue. I was beginning to understand how much could be happening underneath a number that sounded impressive.

Over the next several years, I worked with our team to rebuild the business. We changed our accounting and operating systems, developed the managed IT services business, rebuilt the team, and won work I was proud of. I could listen to a book on the way to the office, try an idea, and see what happened. The learning had immediate consequences. Payroll still had to clear.

There was a lot I loved about it. We were building something together, and I could see the effect of our work on the company and the people around us. We got the business back to healthy profitability.

My dad and I also wanted different things. I wanted to reinvest and keep building. He wanted more income from the company and a path toward retirement. We were trying to make decisions about the same business while wanting different things from our lives. Our roles, money and identities were tangled together, and I didn't have a clear way to separate them.

Selling at 27 changed more than my work

We sold Imaging Path to Loffler in 2014. I was 27. We'd rebuilt the company and completed a successful transaction. I went home, sat on my bed and cried.

The sale changed the community we'd built. People I cared about lost their jobs. Friends and colleagues who'd been part of my everyday life were suddenly going in different directions. The company that had occupied so much of my time and attention belonged to someone else.

I lasted about 60 days working for the buyer. I struggled with the loss of autonomy and with who I was once I wasn't running the business.

Those questions had started before the sale. In a journal entry from October 2013, I was already trying to work out who I was apart from my job and what kind of life I wanted to build with Megan and our future family. The business had become a large part of how I understood myself.

I wanted to understand what we could have done differently. How could my dad and I have made room for both of our goals? What did the business need to earn? What was it worth? What other choices did we have, and what would each one have meant for our time, our money and the people around us?

I kept learning and trying things

After the sale, I spent time in financial services, built businesses that helped owners understand their finances and prepare for growth or a sale, and started a podcast. I wanted to understand both the mechanics of ownership and the experience of the person making the decisions.

Talking with other owners gave me a way to compare what we'd lived through with what they'd done. Learning about cash flow, valuation and investing helped me understand choices I hadn't known how to evaluate. I could see more clearly how a company could be valuable and still demand a life its owner didn't want to keep living.

I was also learning through my own businesses. I could build something that worked for a customer and still create a job that didn't fit the life I wanted. I had to apply the questions to myself, including when the answers meant changing what I was doing.

The podcast became a way to spend time with people I was curious about and learn things I could use. Books, conversations, workshops and coaching kept giving me ideas to test. I enjoyed making connections between them, trying something in practice, and coming back with a better question.