I once sold a business to a pretty fair-sized NYSE company.

And, of course, I was forced to “wear the handcuffs” for some time thereafter. (My goal is always to make “thereafter” the shortest time possible.)

I may have lasted nine months that time, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Shortly after the deal was done, a guy shows up “from HQ”. He has, among other things, a tape measure. He wants to measure our offices and chart their relative locations.

“What’s this all about?” I ask.

“Nobody gets a window unless they are an EVP or higher. Corner offices are reserved for Directors and no one but YOU can have an office bigger than 18’ X 25’.”

I’m thinking, “Eighteen by twenty-five … heck, that’s 450 square feet. I started out with only 300!”

It was ridiculous.

This was early in the acquisition. For a long time after, I saw much more of same. Rules on travel costs…you virtually needed an autographed baseball to get on a plane. By the time you did, of course, the competition had eaten your lunch. The rules for hiring someone became a sport amongst my sales team. We learned to “head fake” corporate, distracting one of their “H.R. Mavens” while others furtively brought the person on board via some back door.

Of course, nothing was more difficult than getting through what my sales guys dubbed the “Corporate Revenue Prevention” department, more formally called Sales and Marketing. Prior to acquisition, we only worried about selling to the customer. Little did we know that, post-acquisition, the much tougher sale would be internal. Sad as it was, these corporate “partners” were told to distrust everything we said and did.

Under these rules of engagement, you can only imagine the results.

I know that some of you now reading this are saying, “What crap! NO company in America would operate this way and stay in business.”

To which I reply, “Have you ever shot an Elephant?” Because it takes a long time for an Elephant to bleed to death, and big corporations tend to make money in spite of themselves.

Anyway, having seen this corporate behavior before, I started to think about why it is that so many big companies lose their edge once they “arrive”; either by going public, or dominating their niche.

After all these years, I have arrived at just one conclusion. IT IS NO LONGER SOMEBODY’S COMPANY! Consequently, it is no longer somebody’s hard-earned money at stake.

C’est tout. Whether one person or five, once an entrepreneurial company is sold, IPOed, handed down to the kids, or whatever other liquidating event we can think of, the simple fact is that no one cares as much about it as that first owner cared. The people who mortgaged their homes to get the enterprise started were now either cashed out or emasculated. And, once an entrepreneur loses his or her entire raison d’etre, CONTROL, he or she also immediately loses interest in the entity,

Try this sometime. Negotiate with an owner. Go ahead --- just TRY it!

You’d better bring a cot. Because, unless it is also YOUR money “on the line” in the negotiation, the person with whom you are negotiating is always going to be a step ahead of you in his or her thinking.

Count on it.

Just as a mother will summon incredible strength and cunning when her children are threatened, so will someone who remembers the twenty-hour days and humiliating circumstances he or she endured to “give birth” to their company.

I long ago concluded that you simply cannot find this relentless drive in anyone who hasn’t “put it all on the line”.

Until this happens, these nimble “PT Boats” --- also known as entrepreneurs --- will forever run circles around the relatively moribund minds and wills of those companies who can barely even remember their entrepreneurial roots.