Lesson 85: Celebration
About the Searcher
Last week, I shared how one of my weaknesses is my struggle to take care of myself. This comes from a pressure I place on myself to always perform. To improve, I scheduled time to get more sleep and exercise this past week. (Although I am late to post my newsletter) I slept on average 1.5 more hours each night but had 2 fewer work outs. Growth is a marathon, but each milestone deserves a celebration.
Taking care of myself is not just personal—it is professional preparation. As a future CEO, I will be responsible for taking care of people in my business. This means celebrating teams, developing talent, and making difficult decisions about who leads. One of the highest-leverage decisions a search fund CEO makes is building the executive team.
About Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition
The leadership roles at Booth prepare me for the responsibility of operating a business, where I will need to show employees they are valuable and worth celebrating too. “It is all about the people,” is a common refrain for small business owners. One way to care for employees is ensuring the management team has the right people. Choosing who leads each division of the organization will impact the culture and performance of that team.
Peter Kelly, Sara Heston, and Andrew Freiman published an article in 2023 about the responsibility of choosing the executive team. “Search Fund Team Building Survey Selected Observations” includes the survey results of 40 search fund CEOs. They were asked about their hiring and termination decisions:
One piece of advice from the survey results was, “The leverage provided by hiring the right senior executives is tremendous - make it a focus of CEO energy and attention.” It is all about the people. The data points to the tremendous cultural and performance impact this has on the business.
About the Bigger Picture
My vision is to leverage my influence as a Black business leader to pursue economic justice. The goal of economic justice is to provide pathways for people to participate and thrive in the economy. Small businesses represent 99.9% of U.S. firms, making search acquired businesses significant engines of employment and wealth creation, particularly in communities that have historically been excluded from economic opportunity.
Therefore, my responsibility as a search fund CEO extends beyond financial returns to the economic well-being of every employee whose livelihood depends on the decisions I make. As I learn to take measurable steps to improve my own well-being with sleep and exercise, I need to learn how to choose the right senior executives. They will shape whether employees experience a workplace that develops their talents, celebrates their contributions, and creates genuine opportunity for advancement.
This is Lesson 85: Celebration. Next week is Lesson 86: Reliability.
