Think back to the early stages of your sale process. A term sheet landed in your inbox and you read it three times before admitting to yourself that you did not fully understand it. Every question from the buyer felt like an accusation. You second guessed your own numbers, numbers you had lived inside for twenty years, because someone with a spreadsheet asked about them in a tone you did not like.

Now think about month nine. You are correcting your advisor’s math (well hopefully not but its possible). You know which buyer questions matter and which ones are theatre.. You are negotiating points you did not know existed a year earlier, and you are doing it without your pulse changing.

Nobody told you that happened. Everyone around you, including me, was too busy getting the deal closed. But it happened, and it is the clearest evidence you will ever have that you level up when something asks more of you than you have given before.

However, it was not the first time. You have levelled up before in a massive way. Starting your business, taking the risks, reading books on subjects you knew nothing about, figuring out the countless things a founder and CEO needs to know about leading, hosting meetings, dealing with suppliers and clients... the list goes on. You levelled up the day you entered the ring as a business owner. You levelled up again the day you began to consider selling, because selling your business requires a next chapter of your life. A new you, and new opportunities. That is the start of your next level...

An early mentor of mine, Warren Rustand, who had built multibillion dollar businesses, shared a quote with me I have always come back to. “Success is the degree to which you fulfill your potential”. It resonated immediately and it caused me to ask whether what I was doing was anywhere close to the limits of my potential, or whether I could do more. The longer I sit with it, the more I think it belongs to the business owner who is selling or has sold. Selling your business is a significant step forward and a credible notch in the belt of your potential. But in showing you that your potential is larger than you thought, it quietly obliges you to push closer to its limits. And when I say potential I do not simply mean as a business owner or a CEO. I mean that and every other part of you. Being a parent, a partner, a friend, a person on this earth having a human adventure. Getting closer to your potential in any of those requires you to level up.

Personally, I am gripped by this quote and I return to it often. Am I being the best version of me that I can be? Am I fulfilling my potential as a woman? As a woman in business? As a leader? A parent? A partner? A friend, and so on. That constant questioning is perhaps the greatest gift Warren gave me. I use his question almost like a compass. What I have come to realize is that I am nowhere near my potential, and I find that exciting, encouraging and comforting all at once. We can all do better, be better and learn more. It is as relevant to selling your business as it is to every other part of your life. It is as relevant for the owner who wants to sell and start their next act immediately as it is for the owner who plans to spend half the year at the cottage and the other half in Mexico without ever thinking of being a business owner or CEO again. Every one of those scenarios can equate to you becoming a better you.

Levelling up, which is a term I love, comes from gaming, where a character crosses a threshold and gains abilities they did not have access to before (for full transparency I am absolutely horrid at video games). You do not get there by playing longer. You get there by facing something harder than the last thing you faced. To me it means simply becoming a better version of you, and during the sale of your business, or after it, is the single best time to focus on that. It is about growing. It is about being better. It does not matter how old you are, what your relationships look like or what shape your health is in. Levelling up is an opportunity to get closer to the definition of success Warren spoke of.

Selling your business converts a single illiquid asset into financial capital, time capital, credibility capital and relationship capital. Most business owners track the first obsessively and use it as the only measure of whether the transaction was a success, but the other three have far more to do with levelling up. Time is the resource the wealthy value above everything else. Credibility may be the most underestimated of them all. Selling your company gains you access to rooms that would not have opened months before closing. It is a level of prestige, access and notoriety you can only really earn by selling something you built. And most owners never think about any of it, which means they leave the three forms of capital with the highest leverage sitting untouched.

Stepping into any of them requires you to level up.

Almost always, selling your business asks that you, the experienced and tested business owner, step into a new ring as a beginner. That ring might be a new venture, a private or family office, time around the family when that was never your primary role, rekindling a relationship with your spouse, or simply committing to living healthier and happier. Think about what that actually asks of you. You built a business from the ground up. You are the founder and CEO. You know your industry like the back of your hand. Stepping into a new room, even one closely related, such as setting up a family office to invest in the industry you came from, something I have seen work out on many occasions, can feel foreign enough to remind you that you are no longer the expert. You are the novice. That is uncomfortable, because you have been a high performer for a long time and you have built something of real value. The beauty of selling your business is that you get to choose the rings you step into.

But choosing the ring is where I’ve watched very capable business owners make their least ambitious decision. The most common second act I come across is the first act again, only smaller. They buy a business that looks very much like the one they sold. They consult back into the industry they just left. They take a seat doing the same job for someone else’s company, at a fraction of the scale and with none of the upside.

I understand why it happens and I have a real awareness of it. That ring is the only place where your competence is legible to other people. You walk in and everybody already knows what you are worth. Every other room asks you to prove it again from the beginning. But a ring where you are immediately understood is, almost by definition, a ring you have already outgrown. If you are weighing options, choose the one based on what it will demand of you, not on what it will reward you for.

What you likely did not realize is that the business was never your actual potential. It was closer to a constraint on it. The business grew with you, often on nothing more than your refusal to quit, give in or shrink. It required tenacity, brute force and drive. After working with hundreds of business owners through a sale, I am convinced that for many of them, simply staying in the game was the skill that got them to the level they reached.

Here is the paradox. The business demanded an enormous amount from you, and because it demanded so much it looked like the limit of what you had. It was not. It was the shape of what that one thing required, held in place for twenty years and mistaken for a boundary. It asked you to do things a certain way for a long time, with obvious success. But it leaves behind a question you can really only ask afterwards. Could you do it better? Could you be better? What about your business and your operations was genuinely world class? And most importantly, what would you do differently if you stepped back into the ring, or what would you bring to the table as an investor in private companies? Selling your business removes the constraint, and removing the constraint is the step that makes levelling up possible.

So how do you level up?

Change your lens on the future. Bob Proctor had a great line about changing your paradigm to change your life. Most business owners look at their performance through the lens of EBITDA, because it is easy to track and simple to understand. It is also flawed, and it becomes far less relevant the day you sell. Decide what you want the next version of you to be measured by. Is it time? Is it net worth? Is it lives touched? Whatever it turns out to be, choose it on purpose, because a metric you do not choose will choose you.

Recognize that time is the resource the wealthy value above all others. Before you sell you have less liquid capital at your disposal, so trading time is the equation you are asked to solve. Selling flips that equation. You gain the ability to prioritize your time, and recognizing that levelling up requires you to protect it is everything. This is particularly relevant for owners at the tail end of a career or approaching retirement.

Understand that altitude matters far more than volume. Levelling up is not about how much you do. It can be a single pivotal board seat, or backing a few founders you are able to advise, rather than starting another company. Levelling up is not a synonym for more. It is the ability to unleash your greatness while protecting your time and your goals.

We recently sold a company for a nine-figure sum, and when I met up with our client afterwards I asked him what he planned to do now, given that he still had other business interests underway. His answer was that he was going to keep doing what he was doing…he was still working hard albeit on his terms, which included dirt biking and skiing with his kids and spending his summers at his summer home on a lake. He recognized that levelling up meant not idling for too long. You have sold your business. You have earned credibility and reputational capital that almost nothing else could have bought you. But if you wait too long to use it, you quietly become less relevant. Your skillset fades, and so does your work ethic.

In saying all of this, levelling up is not the same for everyone, and I would be doing you a disservice if I let this chapter read as an instruction to do more. For some business owners levelling up is the opposite. It is focusing on the things you missed while you built the business. It is slowing down. It is family, health and time that finally belongs to you.

The distinction I would ask you to be honest about is this one. There is a difference between choosing a smaller life on purpose and staying busy so that you never have to sit still long enough to ask whether you are happy. I have met both. The first is levelling up. The second is the same avoidance that built the business, wearing better clothes. Only you know which one you are looking at, and the question is worth the discomfort of asking.

You are going to sell a company. Some of you already have. That transaction will be recorded as a number and understood by almost everyone around you as an ending. It is not one. It is the moment you find out that the thing you thought was your ceiling was actually your floor, and that the person who built it is capable of considerably more than the building of it ever required.

What you do with that is not mine to decide. A board seat, a family office, three founders you choose to back, or a year of finally being at the table when your children are at it too. None of those is more correct than the others. What matters is that you choose it rather than drift into it, and that you choose it while the capital, the credibility and the energy are still in your hands at the same time.

Success, as Warren put it to me all those years ago, is the degree to which you fulfill your potential. You have just proven that yours was larger than you thought. Go and find out how much larger.

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

‍