Selling Liger Partners gave Eric V. Holtzclaw an unexpected opportunity to decide what kind of company he wanted to build the second time around.
Eric V. Holtzclaw knows what it takes to build, grow, sell, and rebuild a company because he has done all four.
With Liger Partners, the marketing firm he founded, that experience became unusually literal: he sold the company, then bought it back after the acquiring company lost a major client. That gave Eric a chance few entrepreneurs get: the opportunity to reconsider a business he had already let go of.
Liger Partners grew out of work Eric was doing with CEOs who needed help organizing their companies. Marketing kept coming up as part of the problem, so Eric started taking it on. Eventually, that work became a company of its own.
Years later, Liger merged with a technology brand that looked like a complementary partner. Liger brought marketing expertise. The other company brought technology capabilities. Together, the two saw an opportunity to offer clients more and provide the tech business with some much-needed revenue diversification.
Then the technology company lost a client responsible for a substantial portion of its revenue. Its priorities changed, investment in Liger became harder to justify, and cuts threatened resources that longtime Liger clients depended on. Within about a year of selling the company, Eric exercised provisions in the agreement that allowed him to take Liger back.
He suddenly had his company again, plus a pipeline that needed to be rebuilt after months spent pursuing a different type of client.
For Eric, the experience raised a much bigger question than whether selling had been the right decision:
What did he actually want this business to become?
Eric shares the full story in his conversation with Mark OโDonnell, Visionary at EOS Worldwide, on Hitting the Ceiling.
Define Growth Before It Divides You
Eric ran into a version of this question before.
At a previous research company, he and his business partner built an operation capable of handling far more work than they were selling. Eric wanted to keep growing. His partner was comfortable with the companyโs size.
For years, neither fully confronted the difference.
Eric uses a useful analogy for what went wrong. Say the word โskiingโ to two people. One may picture snow. The other may picture water. Both think they are talking about the same thing until the details matter.
That was the problem: they had agreed to build a business without defining what each person wanted from it.
Eventually, Eric gave the company a year to grow. When revenue stayed roughly the same, he sold his interest and left. The experience forced him to learn the part of the business he had previously left to someone else: generating revenue.
Now he had to get marketing. He started writing, hosting a radio show, networking, and putting himself in situations that did not come naturally to him.
That experience points directly to an EOS lesson: Right Person, Right Seat only works when everyone is clear on the seat and the company they are trying to build.
A business built for aggressive growth requires different choices than one designed primarily to give its owner flexibility and a comfortable income. A company intended for eventual sale could demand an entirely different set of choices.
None of those goals is inherently wrong, but problems start when owners and partners assume they share the same definition of winning.
See who fits your Core Values and where people issues need attention.
Choose the Finish Line Before Someone Else Chooses for You
Buying Liger back made Eric realize he didnโt want to build the company up for a private equity payday. He wants to build a firm that can outlast him.
His model looks more like a law or accounting firm. People with deep expertise in different practice areas become partners. Those partners eventually run the company. The firm generates healthy cash flow and remains valuable without relying on Ericโs name or day-to-day involvement.
That goal affects how he thinks about acquisitions, too.
Eric is interested in founder-led agencies whose owners still love their craft but no longer want to take on every responsibility that comes with running a company. They might be excellent at brand strategy, creative work, or another discipline while struggling with hiring, operations, technology, payroll, or the countless administrative jobs that accumulate around the work they actually enjoy.
Heโs not interested in buying those companies, stripping away what made them good, and packaging the combined entity for another sale.
He believes an acquisition can work in a spreadsheet and still damage the company that everyone thought they were improving. Employees may no longer understand what they are part of. Customers may not understand what the new company stands for. Brands that once meant something can lose their identity.
The numbers are only part of an acquisition. Some of the questions that determine whether it works are much harder to capture in a model.
What will people hear internally after the deal closes? What will customers hear? Do the companies believe similar things? Does the buyer understand how the business works? And does the owner selling the company understand what they want life to look like afterward?
Eric remembers asking fellow business owners a pointed question whenever they talked about selling: What are you going to do 30 days later? โThe beachโ is usually not a long-term plan.
Your Own Patterns Can Become the Companyโs Patterns
Ericโs work with entrepreneurs has also convinced him that owners need to understand what truly drives them.
After interviewing more than 1,000 entrepreneurs, he began describing two broad types: โRectifyโ entrepreneurs and โMagnifyโ entrepreneurs.
A Rectify entrepreneur is often building in response to something from the past: a person who doubted them, dismissed them, or told them they would never amount to much. Building the company becomes proof that the doubter was wrong. Many entrepreneurs fall into this camp.
The problem is not the source of the motivation itself; that motivation can create enormous energy. Trouble comes when the entrepreneur never recognizes it.
An ownerโs habits donโt stay contained inside the owner. They shape hiring, goals, relationships, risk tolerance, and the way the company responds when something goes wrong. The same problem can recur under different names.
Awareness doesnโt magically remove those patterns, but it does give the entrepreneur a chance to recognize them before they dictate another decision.
Thatโs also part of what drew him to EOS.
When he was working as a right-hand operator for CEOs, he began using EOS to test whether a leader was truly prepared to confront what was holding the company back.
If a CEO wouldnโt look honestly at the Issues, Eric knew there was only so much he could do. Sometimes, hitting the ceiling is a staffing problem. Sometimes itโs sales. Sometimes the organization has outgrown the way it operates.
And sometimes the owner keeps recreating the ceiling.
AI Can Save the Work and Accidentally Remove the Lesson
One of Ericโs newer concerns comes from a tool he uses every day: AI.
AI has made it much faster for experienced people to correct work. If a junior employee gives Eric something that is not quite right, he can put it into one of his AI models, correct what remains, and finish the job himself.
Thatโs efficient. But it also means the junior employee may never see the correction.
Earlier in Ericโs career at IBM, he learned by taking questions from customers and walking them over to people who knew far more than he did. He had to ask the right questions, listen carefully, bring the answer back, and deal with the consequences when he had missed something.
Those repetitions built judgment.
AI can remove some of those repetitions before a younger employee has accumulated enough experience to know when an answer, design, strategy, or recommendation feels wrong.
Eric sees the same issue in entrepreneurship. AI can help someone create the first version of a website, an application, a business plan, or a marketing program much faster. It can make the first stretch of starting a company look easier than it used to.
It cannot eliminate the years required to build a company that works.
You still have to give customers a reason to buy, hire and develop the right people, make decisions with real consequences, and build the judgment to know when an idea is failing or needs more time.
Speed at the beginning does not guarantee staying power.
Build Something You Actually Want to Own
Eric was asked what advice he would give his younger self. His answer was to enjoy the process more.
Eric spent much of his life thinking about what comes next. The next company. The next stage. The next problem to solve.
Looking back, he wishes he had paid more attention to how unusual and special each opportunity was in itself: getting to build things, solve hard problems, employ people, work with customers, and watch something take shape because a group of people decided to make it work.
There will always be another target. Make sure it belongs to a future you actually want.
That may mean a company you eventually sell. It may mean a business that provides a certain kind of life. It may mean a firm that lasts long after you stop running it.
Define it. Make sure the people beside you mean the same thing when they say it. Then build accordingly.
Listen to the full episode of our weekly video podcast, Hitting the Ceiling, with Eric V. Holtzclaw and Mark OโDonnell, Visionary at EOS Worldwide.
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