Leave it better than you found it

Every so often a business owner reminds me why I do this work. One of them is a master electrician from a small town in East Texas. He started as an apprentice at 15, became a master electrician after high school, and has spent more than 40 years building the electrical infrastructure of the region. Now in his seventies, he’s getting ready to pass the baton to a younger generation, and I get to help him do it.

Lately I’ve been reading a lot of history. Daniel Immerwahr’s How to Hide an Empire points out that the map most of us picture leaves out millions of Americans.

My work gives me a closer look at the real America, one town at a time. I’ve worked with an auto repair shop owner in Illinois, and with that electrician in East Texas. In Miami, my wife and business partner, Alejandra Barrera, and I have been in the room for bank mergers and divestitures. A small-town shop and a bank could hardly be further apart, yet each talks about what they built the same way: something earned through hard, honest work that they want to leave in good hands.

Owning your own

Jefferson tied freedom to independence, which in his day meant owning and working your own land. Owning a small business is the closest modern version of that idea I know. Frederick Douglass understood the same link, and he saw who was being left out of it. In 1852 he called the founders’ inheritance of “justice, liberty, prosperity and independence” one that was “shared by you, not by me.” That circle has widened since, and the owners I work with today show how far it has come.

It hasn’t come far enough to take for granted. The share of American adults in middle-income households fell from 61% in 1971 to 50% in 2021, according to Pew Research. Per the SBA, small businesses still employ nearly half of America’s private-sector workers, and for generations they have been where people without inherited wealth could build some. They are the backbone of the middle class we still have.

The handoff

The owners who built that backbone are now handing over the keys. How that handoff goes will shape the middle class for decades. When a 40-year business closes because no one was ready to take it over, the jobs leave with it, and so does a ladder that took a lifetime to put up. When it changes hands well, the crew keeps working and someone younger gets their own shot at the independence Jefferson wrote about. That is what’s at stake every time I sit across the table from an owner like him.

Whenever you leave a place, you should leave it in better shape than you found it.

My grandmother used to say that. That electrician has spent his career doing exactly that for his town. Leaving the place in better shape for whoever comes next is a promise all of us can keep.

Alfonso Enrique Moncada
M&A Advisor, Investment Consulting USA