Although it may seem otherwise, founders are not actually the best at living intentionally. Not in the way they think they are.

Building a business is a lot like climbing onto the back of a bull. You wanted the ride badly, and then you find it is a very hard thing to get off of (In fairness, the only bull I have ever been on was mechanical, and it threw me to the ground almost immediately.) The comparison is relevant because living intentionally asks for focus across several parts of your life at once, and many founders are so locked onto the business that intentionality quietly drains out of everything else. It is not that they are incapable in those other areas…It is that they do not have the time or the bandwidth to be deliberate in more than one place. Building something from the ground up demands a work ethic and a dedication that do not simply switch off when the business matures and the founder could, in theory, throttle back. Those traits, the ones that made them successful, become engrained. Like Robin Sharma’s 5AM Club (a book I love by the way) and the notion of rising at 5AM to start your day until it becomes a habit…they become habits, and habits are hard to unlearn. Unlike the mechanical bull that tossed me so unceremoniously (and non-lady-like), this proverbial one is very hard to climb down from when the time finally comes to consider selling.

What makes it more complicated is that founders usually have good, defensible reasons for the very traits that keep them from living intentionally. They built the business to provide a better life for their family, to give their kids opportunities they never had…to achieve something of significance. That is an accomplishment, and it is, in its own way, a profound act of intention. But intentionality lives in the present tense, not the past. Achieving a pivotal family or personal goal is a success, yet it is not a destination you arrive at and then rest upon. It is not a degree you hang on the wall.

I think of a founder we worked with a few years ago. He was doing around a million dollars of EBITDA per year, and had been for some time. Yet he worked six days a week, had not taken a vacation in years, and was on the front lines of his own company from dawn until dusk…all year round. Perhaps he was being intentional about his business but I can assure you the rest of his life was a distant second as there was no time for anything else.

Years ago, a mentor of mine named Warren Rustand, who wrote The Leader Within Us, defined success as the degree to which we fulfil our potential. He looked at a life through four buckets: family, business, self, and community or spiritual. Success, in his view, was the ongoing pursuit of your fullest potential in each of them. And crucially, it was never something you achieved once and set down. It was something to be constantly pursued and re-evaluated... a picture of what you want your life to look like in each of those buckets, held up honestly against how you are actually living. He called it a life by design. Much like the idea that education is a lifelong endeavour, it never really stops. Working with him was pivotal to my understanding of intentionality and the power it has over our lives.

Living with intention is, I have come to believe, an unlock button for a better life. I can attest to it personally. After working with Warren, I have embodied this notion of living intentionally. The more closely I followed my mentor’s advice, the happier I became, and the better I became as a parent, a partner, and a friend. I know my priorities. I know what I want out of life, and I know how I intend to get there. Years ago I decided I wanted to be an amazing mother, a great partner, a great friend. I wanted to build a leading Canadian M&A firm. I wanted our family to have grand adventures. I wanted to be fit enough to do nearly anything I set my mind to physically. I wanted to help others, which is a large part of why I write Uncommon Capital. And I wanted to be a leading woman in corporate finance. None of these are easy. But they are guiding outcomes, and when you make them a priority they begin to shape a life. I return to them regularly, and I review them properly every quarter. In naming them, I come to know what I want my life to feel like... and in my own way, I am already shaping my own legacy.

And that is the part most founders miss. We tend to imagine legacy as a monument. The building with your name on it. The foundation. The number on the wire when the deal finally closes. Something finished, something that stands still, something that mostly concerns how we will be remembered. But legacy is not a monument. Legacy is a verb. It is not built in a single grand gesture at the end of a career. It is the accumulation of how you spend your ordinary days, and you are authoring it constantly, whether you mean to or not. Which means you do not actually get to choose whether to leave a legacy. You only get to choose whether you build one on purpose or by default. The founder who lives with intention is conjugating that verb deliberately. The one who drifts is conjugating it too, just accidentally, and usually into something no one would have chosen.

When you consider selling your business, you have the ability to press that unlock button. And it’s never too late to do so.

Saying we should live intentionally does not make it easy. Distinguishing the obvious from the nuanced, the merely urgent from the genuinely important, takes real rigor. It takes dedication, constant recalibration, and daily habits, journalling chief among them for me, that keep pulling your objectives back into view. It takes shedding the activities that don’t serve you towards your intentions. Because it is so easy, as a founder, to slip fully into founder mode and let the business become the whole intention. I know this because I have done it. More than once I have had to haul myself out of what I call the blinder zone, where I was so consumed by the business that everything else came a distant second... my family, my partner, my health, even my own happiness. It happens quietly, and climbing back out of it takes exactly the rigor and intention I am describing.

For the founder who is exiting, the chance to live this way, with the freedom and the resources to leave a real legacy, is a profound opportunity that very few people ever receive. And yet so many approach it with more fear than excitement. They imagine post-exit life as rudderless. I was speaking with a founder recently and asked him what came next if he sold. He hummed and hawed and could not give me a clear answer. That lack of clarity is precisely what makes life after the deal look smaller and greyer than it should. He told me how much he had loved owning his business, the relationships he had built, the fun he had along the way. The one constant, running underneath all of it, was that the business had been the intention behind his life, rather than one intention within a larger life he had designed on purpose.

That distinction is the whole thing. The business as the intention, or the business as part of the intention to an exceptional life and legacy.

What has surprised me most in my own life is what intentionality quietly unlocks. One of my guiding outcomes is to be fit enough to do nearly anything I want physically, and I take it seriously. I love to trail run. You will find me doing this nearly every Sunday and often before work. I love being in the mountains, pushing myself, getting outside no matter the weather. I mention it because of what it led to. A close friend and I would run together now and then. She had a few women she ran with occasionally, and fast forward to today and those women are among my closest friends. We have turned a shared love of trail running into real friendships, into adventures and overnight trips and an enormous amount of laughter. What brought us together was a single intentional pursuit, and it unlocked something I now count among the dearest parts of my life, something I could not imagine living without. That is what so many founders forget is waiting for them on the other side of the deal. One founder we worked with began spending twenty-odd days a year heli-skiing after the sale of his business, and built a group of friends from around the world who would gather in the mountains each season to shred some serious pow (I also love heli-skiing and boarding so maybe I am allowed to say that?). It was never really about the skiing. It was that he had finally pointed his intention somewhere new, and it gave him people and experiences he could not have imagined while the business held all of his attention.

Although the above example is about heli-skiing we’ve had many examples of founders who sell and focus on the greater pursuits of life such as being a great parent and grand-parent. We recently did a large transaction where the seller was able to take the many millions of dollars he received for his business and his ability to finally be untethered to the company…and travel with his wife for weeks at a time to wonderful and exotic locations around the world. He began to live intentionally in a way that felt meaningful for him.

Somewhere earlier in my Uncommon Capital articles I wrote about the void... the thing the business so often fills for a founder, the space it quietly occupies in a life. The fear of selling is, underneath, the fear of that void reopening. But intentionality is how you fill it. Not with another business by default, but with a life you actually chose. That is the difference between the founder who drifts after the deal and the one who expands. Both of them walk away with money. Only one walks away with a design. Leaving a legacy was never something you do on the way out. It is something you have been doing all along, in how you spend your days, and the exit simply hands you more room, and more resources, to keep doing it on purpose and on your own terms.

Reece Tomlinson is the Founder and CEO of RWT Capital Corp. and the Author of Uncommon Capital.

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