Michael Bacon long had designs for expansion of his Sun Valley company Rack and Roll Inc., which makes metal racks for stacking palettes in warehouses. Bacon believed the company had a lot of potential for growth, but he had a phobia of going into debt for the money he would need to expand.

His solution involved expanding the role of one of the company’s suppliers by making the supplier the owner. Bacon told interviewer Wade Daniels how this solved the expansion problem and allowed him to redirect his career.

It was about three years ago that I decided I wanted to sell my business, which I have owned for about 13 years. We manufacture the metal racks that warehouses use for stacking palettes full of goods.

We’ve done about $7 million a year in sales for the past three years, and I knew we could be doing double that in two to three years. But I would have to borrow $1 million to $2 million to buy all the equipment for that, and the truth is, I sleep better at night when I don’t owe anybody anything. So I never took out a loan. I also wanted to sell because I was tired of being mired down in administrative tasks and wanted to get back to doing sales and marketing. I wanted to actually work with people again like I used to.

I decided that I would sell the business to a company that could do the expansion, and right from the start I knew who the buyer would be.

One of our raw-material suppliers was a local company called Hannibal Industries Inc., and for about a year and a half I cajoled their people at business lunches and at meetings and during phone chats, nudging them about how good a fit Rack N’ Roll would be with their business. I got them to understand that with their investment, Rack and Roll could grow substantially and that there was a lot of potential for it to introduce new products that would use the material they sell. Everybody would benefit.

Finally, after a year and a half, I blatantly told them I wanted to sell the company and they ought to buy it.

I guess I must be a good salesman because they agreed and we arrived at a price right away. The sale was complete in December, meaning I’ve been an employee instead of the boss for about a month now.

Being part of a working team again is what I wanted, but it’s been kind of a strange transition for me since Hannibal took over last month. Part of the difficulty of transition has to do with ego now I’m just another among the 50 or so employees here, instead of the one that people look to for answers but most of it has to do with watching a corporate body make the big decisions and make them more slowly than I used to. I have to learn to respect how they do things now that it’s their company.