Selling your company to private equity eventually means giving up the CEO role, often sooner than founders expect.
Some founders stay CEO for a year or two and then can’t take it anymore. Too many cooks in the kitchen, each with a different recipe.
Some plan for a quick CEO transition and move on. This can be part of the buyout plan or a transition that happens after the sale.
Crazy founders just don’t like to play someone else’s game.
But some founders know it’s a different game and stick around to play new roles in what is effectively a different company.
Matthew Bullis grew up in a mud-brick hut with no running water on a small island off South Korea and was adopted to the US at 11, speaking no English.
After university and a failed dot-com startup, he took over his brother’s struggling concrete-pumping software business — down to about $20,000 a year — for 90% of the company.
He taught himself to code and rebuilt the product from scratch.
From 2016, Bullis built RapidWorks into the operational system of record for heavy-equipment subcontractors: concrete pumping, cranes, hydrovac, and other site services.
RapidWorks helps contractors book jobs, dispatch crews, manage the field, and get paid faster with accuracy and speed, taking dispatchers’ productivity from 20 jobs to 60+.
Today the company is near $20 million in ARR, serving more than 80% of the concrete-pumping market.
In 2023, approaching $5 million in revenue, Bullis sold a majority to Wavecrest Growth Partners and brought in a new CEO, Tim Curran, with a new executive team.
Matthew expected he would be phased out within a year. But his tenacious grit served him well in his new role.
“To stay useful and relevant when you’re not the CEO anymore, you have to be flexible. People overemphasize the value of what they’ve done in the past: look at all the great things I did. But that’s like living in your high school glory days. It doesn’t merit much, and you can’t expect people to give you credibility just for what you built.
“Your real value is surviving anything and solving any problems. Take that to heart: I can survive anything, I can solve any problem, and I can create value for myself and the people around me. Under any difficult situation, people are drawn to people of value.
“So I stopped staying quiet. When I saw things weren’t done right, I spoke up, and the seasoned leadership saw my opinions had value. When people see value in you, and you really help, they want you on their team — that’s how I won the other executives over.”
Most founders get stuck in “My company is part of me, and I want to do it my way,” which served them well as their startups grew, but not when investors have a bigger say.
Matthew accepted the new situation and stayed to add value with “I can solve any problem.”
Check out this amazing interview with Matthew Bullis on the Practical Founders Podcast.
