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Episode Summary
You and your siblings have been running this thing for thirty years. The oldest is starting to ask how long they want to keep going. Then two buyers show up in the same year. That’s where Chris Goebel and his family found themselves with Hopkins Airport Limousine Service and Lakefront Lines, a 175-vehicle bus and limousine operation across four Ohio cities and the 16th largest privately held transportation company in the country. Chris came on to walk through the whole arc: how six siblings divided the seats by birth order, how they built contract revenue from 3% to 21% to smooth the seasonal swings on the bus side, how the deal closed in less than six months when Fenway Partners came calling, and what changed when Stage Coach Group acquired them out of the PE rollup three years later. The piece Chris would do differently isn’t the price. It’s the runway and the role clarity after the close. The longer he stayed under the new owners, the more he watched contracts walk away because the acquirer’s vision and his family’s vision were never made explicit. And the third leg of the stool, who you are when the business no longer occupies your day, is the one nobody plans for.
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## Top 10 Takeaways- Family businesses don’t fall apart at the sale. They fall apart when the roles after the sale were never defined.
- Building contract revenue from 3% to 21% smoothed seasonal swings and made the business easier to value.
- A six-month deal feels fast because the prep work happened over the prior twenty years, not the prior six months.
- The dollar amount is the headline. What you keep after tax and wealth structuring is the real number.
- Your earnout works when you’re a gem in the portfolio. It frays when the new owner’s vision diverges from yours.
- Selling to PE feels different from selling to a public company. The reporting cadence and culture shift hits your team first.
- The third leg of the stool, your identity after the business, is the one nobody plans for and everybody trips on.
- A vague shared vision with your acquirer costs you the contracts you could have won together.
- Plan your personal finances first, then your business value, then your transition. Skip the order and you skip the upside.
- Most owners assume the planning will take care of itself while they build. It doesn’t.
Sound Bites
“I wish we would have planned further out, given ourselves a longer runway in order to exit the business. There were things I thought we could have done differently to actually even increase our price, maybe not necessarily the dollar amount of the deal, but obviously what we were able to keep in our pockets through different tax opportunities or savings.” (@TBD) — Chris Goebel
“Make sure that you have a more definitive and clear understanding of what their expectations are and where they want to grow the business. We had opportunities to grow and had some major contracts come through that we weren’t able to take advantage of because the direction the equity firm or Coach America wanted to go was a little different than what our business model was.” (@TBD) — Chris Goebel
“The first couple days it’s like, this is nice, I don’t mind sleeping in a little bit. But then as the weeks go on it’s like, boy, I need something to do. I have to work. That part of it I didn’t really do well.” (@TBD) — Chris Goebel
“How many of them are just so ill-prepared from the standpoint of having any type of documentation or any type of formal roadmap. I think entrepreneurs are so involved in building their business that planning is one of those things they realize they have to do, but it’s not a priority.” (@TBD) — Chris Goebel
About This Episode
Chris Goebel was an executive in his family’s transportation business for over twenty-five years, Hopkins Airport Limousine Service and Lakefront Lines, founded by his father in 1962 and grown into a four-terminal operation across Ohio with roughly 400 employees. Chris and his brother Tom spearheaded the sale to Fenway Partners in the late 2000s, stayed through the PE hold, and continued into the second transition when Stage Coach Group acquired the rolled-up Coach USA platform in 2012. He stepped out about three years later to launch Crossroads Consulting Group, where he now works with privately held owners on transition planning. He holds the CEPA certification from the Exit Planning Institute.
Resources Mentioned
- Crossroads Consulting Group LLC — Chris’s consulting practice for privately held businesses working through transition.
- CEPA Certification (Exit Planning Institute) — The program Chris and Ryan both went through; the basis for much of the framework Chris references.
- Chris Snider, EPI — Referenced as an instructor in the CEPA program who shaped Chris’s thinking on the value acceleration model.
- Fenway Partners — The private equity firm that acquired the family’s transportation companies into Coach America.
- Stage Coach Group / Coach USA — UK-based publicly traded acquirer that bought the platform from Fenway in 2012.
Connections
Phase + Module:
- Module 1 — Ownership Goals — The decision to sell came from a collective family conversation about how long the executive team wanted to keep going
- Module 9 — Operator Transition — Role clarity after the close, and what happens when the acquirer’s vision diverges from yours
Concepts referenced:
- The Owner-Operator Trap™ — Chris’s “third leg of the stool” naming the same tension: identity after the business
- Independence by Design™ — The pre-sale ordering Chris lays out at the close (personal financial plan, business value, transition) is the same logic
- Revenue Architecture — Building contract revenue from 3% to 21% to smooth seasonal swings on the bus side