From dogged commitment to deal stamina—what great entrepreneurs do differently
For most founders, a company sale is the culmination of years, often decades, of risk, sacrifice, late nights, and payroll close calls. It’s also deeply personal. You’re not just transferring assets; you’re handing over a mission, a team, and a reputation you’ve spent a good part of your life building. That’s why, as Garit Lawson, Managing Director at Forbes Partners, puts it, the best outcomes blend rigorous process with a clear understanding of human priorities like legacy, stewardship, culture, and the next chapter for the founder and their people.
Garit distills more than 20 years of experience in mergers and acquisitions, working across technology-enabled manufacturing, consumer products, and business services, into practical guidance founders can use long before they ever sign a letter of intent.
A Case Study in Smart Scale: Lume Deodorant
One of Garit’s recent transactions illustrates the difference the right partner can make. Lume Deodorant, a patented, all-over body deodorant created by a physician, started by selling direct-to-consumer on its own site. In short order, revenue quickly jumped and the company experienced exponential growth.
That growth, however, was largely DTC. To reach its next chapter, Lume needed an omnichannel partner with retail relationships and know-how. Forbes Partners created a competitive process spanning strategics and private equity, ultimately matching Lume with Harry’s, a company that itself had successfully expanded from DTC into large-format retail. The result? Retail rollout, a top vendor award at Walmart, and a step-function change in distribution and brand reach. The lesson is simple: a process that surfaces the best-fit buyer (not just the highest headline number) can accelerate growth, protect culture, and expand impact.
The Universal Founder Trait: Dogged Commitment
Different industries, different playbooks, same core trait. Garit calls it dogged and committed. Whether it’s a patented formula or a new service model, the founders who endure are the ones who keep moving through the desert, often taking out second mortgages to make payroll, maxing out credit cards, and putting in countless hours no one sees. It’s a level of resolve that shows up in the numbers years later.
Avoiding the Founder Bottleneck
Ironically, the grit that births a company can later slow it down. Garit sees the recurring pattern of founders who’ve done everything—product, marketing, manufacturing, sales—but wait too long to hand off critical responsibilities. The result is a stretched leader, plateaued performance, and a team unsure where authority begins and ends. The fix isn’t complicated, but it requires humility:
- Name your superpowers—and your blind spots. Keep the former; hire or elevate leaders for the latter.
- Professionalize early. Build a leadership bench (ops, finance, channel, HR) that scales as volume and complexity rise.
- Define success. Clear KPIs and decision rights reduce re-work and speed execution.
This shift can feel like surrender. It’s not. It’s how owners build transferable businesses, the kind that command premium valuations and integrate smoothly post-transaction.
Two Scaling Paths: Unicorn or Enduring Cash Engine
Raising venture capital isn’t right (or necessary) for everyone. Garit encourages founders to squarely assess product potential and market structure:
- Hypergrowth, category-creation plays may justify earlier dilution to win speed, distribution, and network effects.
- High-quality, durable businesses can compound by bootstrapping, which means reinvesting profits, structuring intelligent bank lines, and growing at a measured pace.
The key is alignment between the company’s true ceiling and the capital strategy that gets you there without needless dilution, distraction, or burn.
Selecting an Investment Banker
At the transaction stage, the banker’s job is to run a competitive process and maintain discipline, identifying not just obvious buyers, but best-fit buyers, then creating a market where multiple interested parties sharpen terms. That competition affects more than price. It shapes working-capital mechanics, earnouts, non-competes, equity rollover, management incentives, brand stewardship, board composition, and the dozens of points that ultimately decide whether the outcome feels as good as it looks on paper.
But there’s a second criterion: fit. You need to like the team you’re going to work with because you’ll be in the trenches together for 6–12 months. Pick the team you trust to manage intensity, keep negotiations on track, and protect your energy and attention for running the business.
Soft Skills Win Hard Deals
Deals aren’t closed with spreadsheets alone. Garit highlights listening and curiosity as edge skills. Entrepreneurs come with their own goals like maximum valuation, employee care, brand legacy, geographic footprint, or their own post-close role. A good advisor teases out what truly matters so the process serves those goals, because the “highest price” isn’t always the best deal if it violates the founder’s sense of stewardship.
This soft-skill layer matters most when surprises hit due diligence. Maybe a buyer finds something that legitimately changes value. Emotions spike, tempers flare, and “walk away” feels righteous. An experienced banker can separate signal from noise, calibrate responses, and keep both parties at the table long enough to solve the problem or pivot to a better-fit buyer.
Managing Deal Fatigue
Every transaction has a moment where both sides are tired. The 73rd term in the purchase agreement, the fifth quality-of-earnings edit, the third HR diligence request. Founders who plan for deal stamina, and advisors who absorb friction, arrive at closing with more runway (and fewer regrets). Build margin into your calendar. Keep running the business. Let your experts carry the process work so you can keep hitting your numbers.
Why Utah Keeps Winning
Garit’s outlook on Utah is straightforward—the state’s economy is powered by small and mid-sized businesses, which creates resilience through cycles. Add in talent density from multiple universities, supportive state leadership, a cost structure that attracts operators leaving higher-cost tech hubs, and a culture that prizes service, grit, and community, and you get a pipeline of durable companies that travel well—from DTC to retail, from founder-led to professionalized.
Practical Takeaways for Founders
Garit offers helpful takeaways for founders at any stage of their entrepreneurial journey:
- Design for transferability. Processes, people, and metrics that run without you are worth a premium.
- Choose your path early. Hypergrowth with dilution vs. bootstrapped compounding. Optimize everything for the path you choose.
- Hire to your weak spots. Don’t wait until the seams show. Build a leadership bench before you “need” it.
- Run a real process. Competition drives better total terms (not just price).
- Protect your why. If employee care or brand legacy matter, codify those expectations up front and choose buyers who share them.
- Plan for fatigue. Keep your execution sharp; let your advisors do their jobs.
A company sale is both an economic event and a human milestone. Founders who honor both sides, by building transferable businesses and aligning outcomes with their values, maximize more than valuation. They maximize impact. As Garit Lawson’s work shows, the right partners and process can turn a strong business into a lasting legacy.
Want the full conversation with Garit?
Hear his detailed guidance on founder traits, selecting an investment banker, navigating due diligence, and why Utah’s ecosystem keeps compounding wins.
[Listen to Garit’s episode here →]
About the MountainWest Capital Network Podcast: Your gateway to the Winners’ Circle, featuring stories and strategies from Utah’s fastest-growing companies. For 30 years, MountainWest Capital Network has celebrated entrepreneurial excellence through the Utah 100, recognizing the state’s most dynamic businesses and their founders.
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