In July 2006, we closed on our first brand, Pert Plus (for North America), which we purchased from Procter & Gamble. The deal made the news the next day. Two months later, in September, we closed on Sure. (There was no tombstone for Sure, so the one above is for Pert.) It took hours and hours of work to get there.
I want to give that moment its due. After a long stretch of effort, it was done. It was ours. We did it.
Then Sure closed, and it got quiet. And in the quiet, a different feeling showed up. It was not celebration. It was closer to dread, and it came in three parts. We did not have an office. There were only three of us. And we now owned two big brands.
If you have ever won something you worked hard for and felt your stomach drop, you know what I mean. The deal is the thing you aim at for so long that you forget it is just a doorway.
The gap nobody talks about
In my last After Hours post, I wrote about losing four brand acquisitions before we finally won one. That story was about what losing teaches you. This one is about what comes after winning, which nobody prepared me for.
Winning a deal and running a business are two different jobs. The first has a clear end: a signature, a close, a moment when everyone agrees it is over. The second has no end. It starts the minute the first one stops, and it does not wait for you to catch your breath.
I have spent 34 years in consumer packaged goods, including time at Dial and Bath & Body Works. Inside a company like that, the buildings, teams, suppliers, and systems already exist. Someone set them up long ago, and you hardly notice they are there.
When you buy a divested brand, you get the brand. You do not get the building or the team. You do not get the machinery that makes the product show up on a shelf. You get a very long list of things that now have to exist.
The list that kept growing
Here is how I remember that list. We needed to build a new office space. We needed to recruit. We needed to find contract manufacturing. And the list went on and on.
That last line is not me being dramatic. Every item had its own list inside it. "Find contract manufacturing" is not one task. It is a pile of them. So is "recruit." The more I wrote down, the longer it got, and the longer it got, the heavier it felt.
There is a kind of tired that has nothing to do with sleep. It comes from holding too many things in your head at once, none of which you can finish tonight. The volume was the problem, more than any single item.
Sorting the flood
I do not have a clever system. I have a way of thinking that I lean on when everything feels urgent.
Ask what has to exist on day one. When everything is important, "what matters most?" is the wrong question. A better one is "what has to exist for this business to function at all?" Some things are needed before anything else can move. Others matter a great deal, but later. The day-one list is shorter than it feels.
Write a short list, and mean it. A list with forty items is a source of anxiety. A list with three is a plan. The long list still exists, and I do not pretend otherwise. I just keep it somewhere else so it stops following me around.
Let the rest wait on purpose. A task that waits because you chose to let it wait is a decision. A task you are quietly avoiding is a weight. They feel different, and it helps to know which one you are holding.
Here is what went at the top of my short list: recruiting. We needed to go from 3 people to 30 quickly, so I opened my rolodex and started calling.
Ask for help
When you are used to being the person who figures it out, asking for help can feel like admitting you were not ready.
I have come to see it the other way. Three people with two big brands cannot hold all of it, and pretending they can only slows things down. A single conversation with someone who knows the ground can save a lot of guessing.
The people who helped were friends and co-workers from Dial, and our private equity team. They helped us map out the next steps and kept us focused on one step at a time. That focus mattered more than any single piece of advice.
Sleep on it
This is the least impressive lesson, and maybe the most useful.
When the list is loud, the answer is rarely in one more hour of staring at it. The list tends to look smaller after sleep. Not gone, just smaller, more orderly, and easier to sort. You cannot solve all of it tonight. You can pick the next few things, put the pen down, and go to bed.
The finish line is the start line
Looking back, the ominous feeling was not a sign that something was wrong. It was the honest weight of what we had just taken on. We had wanted this for a long time, and of course the responsibility felt big once it was ours.
What I understand now is that the close was never the finish line. It was the start line. I had been running toward the wrong one.
That is not a discouraging thought to me. It means the win was real, and the work is real too. Both can be true on the same night.
Here is how it turned out. We signed a lease, built out the office, hired the people, and were in our new office in about three months. That is very fast, and it all came together.
The key was staging for success: having everything in place so we could move fast. Some of that prep felt like a waste of time, because deals had fallen through on us before. It was not a waste. When this one closed, we were ready to go.
If you are standing where I stood
Maybe you just closed something. A deal, a hire, a launch, or a leap you have been working toward for years. And maybe you are sitting somewhere quiet with a feeling you did not expect.
If so, here is what I would say. The feeling is normal. The day-one list is shorter than the one in your head. Ask someone for help. And get some sleep.
You did the hard part of getting here. You do not have to carry the next part alone.
And if you have not closed yet, here is something I wish I had read earlier: 7 GTM mistakes CPG founders make.
