After about a week I couldn't take it anymore, and I moved out of my office. I told Chris, in whom I had absolute confidence: "Look, I can't be here anymore. You've got my home phone number. I've still got some deal-related things to do that don't involve the operations of the company. I'm going to work at home. Maybe I'll come in once a week. Maybe you won't see me for a while; I don't know." And I left.
The deal closed at the end of December 1989. In the three months following my move out, I'd doubt I came into the office more than five times. I just didn't show up anymore. I talked to Chris and MCA's CEO constantly by phone, but I never was really back at the office again.
Being away from the office had some good points and some bad points. There was always the threat that the deal could fall through. I was dismayed when I realized changes that I hadn't signed off on were occurring in the company. It was not so much that I thought the changes were bad but that I was no longer in the loop. I wasn't controlling the decisions. It was as if I were an artist and someone else had begun to paint over my canvas. It didn't feel very good.
I had known going in that if I was going to have a dynamic, growing company -- one that wasn't dependent on a single human being -- I had to be able to take tasks, bundle them, and hand them off. I had to let go of the notion that I was an all-knowing expert. To return to the analogy of the artist, delegating a management task to a subordinate is like handing your apprentice a paintbrush. While I was CEO, I imagined I was a little like the Italian masters who painted portraits while their students filled in the background landscapes. But when I stepped down, I was worried that the entire portrait I'd painted might be obliterated.
Still, when I wasn't worried the deal might fall through, I mostly felt tremendous relief. I didn't have to show up at the office. I could take long walks. I could begin thinking about what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.
Added to that emotional brew was the fact that on Wednesday, September 9, 1989, the day after we reached the final verbal agreement, my father suddenly died of a heart attack. He was in his first week of retirement from his work as a physician and teacher at Stanford's medical school. So in the middle of selling my company, I experienced a terrible loss. I flew from Boston to California to be with my mother and brother. The death of my father was certainly much more significant than selling my company. But in my mind they are linked as part of one emotional event.
The worst part of any business deal -- and I've been through a lot of deals -- is the day of closing, because out of a million details, there are always about a thousand that haven't been attended to. But when the time for the final signing arrived, we were ready. On December 19, 1989, I flew down to Dallas, where MCA was based.
There was a huge table in the lawyer's office. I walked around it and signed what seemed like hundreds of pieces of paper, and we all shook hands. I had nothing further scheduled until the closing dinner that was to be held that evening at a country club.
I remember walking out of the lawyer's office and saying to myself, My God, it's done. I felt fantastic. I went and bought myself a bag of caramel corn, which I never eat, and I walked along the streets of Dallas just popping caramel corn into my mouth. I must have walked for an hour and a half. I went back to my hotel room to change, showed up for the closing dinner, and flew home to Boston. And that was that.
For the first time since junior high school, I did nothing. When I say I did nothing, I mean I did nothing. I slept late. I had no calendar, no schedule. I had no idea what I was going to do each day. After a couple of weeks, I grew uncomfortable with doing nothing. I needed to perform. Just as I thought of MediVision as a painting I had created, so I believe that an entrepreneur is like an artist. And artists must perform, because it's in their nature. Three months after I sold MediVision, I went back to work, first on a temporary turnaround assignment. In 1991 I decided to try the public sector, and I became Massachusetts governor William Weld's chief financial officer for two years. Now I'm back in the private sector again as the CEO of another Inc. 500 company.
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I'm not sure selling your company is ever something you can prepare for enough that all the negatives disappear and only the positives remain. The negatives come with the territory. The only way you might avoid them is to have never been the creative force in the first place. If you think of what it must be like for a farmer to sell his land rather than harvest the crops that grow from it each season, that's close to what it's like to sell your business.
And if you think of entrepreneurs as artists, some powerful implications emerge. Since the workplace is the artistic medium of expression, transitions of any kind are painful. Most artists simply can't hand over a half-finished canvas for others to complete. Mozart would undoubtedly criticize the "official" version of his unfinished Requiem, and some actors can't bear to see their own movies after the editor has chopped up the scenes. So an entrepreneur, even with the best of intentions, has a difficult time delivering his or her masterpiece into the hands of a successor.
My father was an artist. He made his living as a doctor, but throughout his life he was a serious painter and sculptor. I have many memories of him in his studio, painting. I'd watch him paint until he reached a point when he said, "That's it, the painting's finished." Somehow, intuitively, he knew it was done.
I believe my approach to business is intuitive, and that I gather information and do analysis to justify my own intuition or to convince others my instincts are right. My business intuitions are a lot like my father's looking at the canvas and saying, "It's finished now."
Selling my business was far more painful than starting it. But I knew viscerally it was the right thing to do. I knew that my portion of the MediVision painting was finished.
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Eric Kriss is CEO of MediQual Systems Inc., a medical-software company based in Westboro, Mass.
