Mattering After a Business Sale | Identity, Wealth, and What Comes Next | Intentional LLC

Identity and Wealth

At our core, we all
want to matter.

Selling your company does not change that need. It just removes the structure that was fulfilling it. And no financial plan in the world prepares you for that.

Start with the assessment

Understanding how you relate to money starts with understanding what you need it to mean.

Why mattering matters

The thing nobody names
after the wire hits.

In 2021, I had the opportunity to interview Dr. Nancy Schlossberg, professor emerita at the University of Maryland and one of the leading voices on life transitions and human development. Her book, Revitalizing Retirement, is ostensibly about retirement. But what she is really writing about is mattering: the feeling that we are significant to others, that we are noticed, that we are important to someone.

Dr. Schlossberg argues that mattering is not a nice-to-have. It is a fundamental human need. When people lose the structures through which they matter, everything changes. Their identity. Their relationships. Their sense of purpose. Their relationship with time. And, though she is not writing about finance specifically, their relationship with money.

I went to the University of Maryland. I have carried her work with me since I first encountered it. And over the years of working with business owners, founders, and executives navigating major transitions, I have come to believe that mattering is the concept that explains more about what happens after a liquidity event than almost anything else in the financial planning literature.

"The need to matter is not a personality trait. It is a human condition. When the structures that fulfill it disappear, we feel it everywhere, including in our financial decisions."

James Roberts, Founder, Intentional LLC

Here is what I mean. When you build a business, you matter in ways that are concrete and daily. Your executive assistant knows your schedule, your preferences, your history. Your leadership team looks to you for direction. Your clients call you by name. Your employees' families depend on decisions you make. You are noticed. You are significant. You matter.

When the sale closes, none of that disappears entirely. But the nature of it changes in ways that are difficult to anticipate and almost impossible to prepare for without having thought about it in advance.

At Intentional, we believe that understanding how you matter, and what structures of mattering are at risk in a major transition, is one of the most important things we can help a client do before a liquidity event. Not instead of the financial planning. Alongside it. Because the two are not as separate as most people assume.

A personal note

My father and his
executive assistant.

My father founded and ran his company for more than 40 years. He built something real. He was present for it every day, in the way that founders are present: completely, identity first.

When he sold the company, the financial outcome was fine. By most measures, it was a success. He lived another 15 years in retirement.

But I can say honestly, having watched those years closely, that he was never as fulfilled or as happy as he had been when the business was his. And I have thought about why for a long time.

Part of the answer is this: his executive assistant had sat right next to him for the majority of the company's existence. She knew everything about him. She was the person who held the rhythm of his days. And when the sale closed, she stayed on. But he was no longer her boss. There was a new owner. And without that role, he simply did not matter to her in the same way anymore.

It was not personal. She was not being unkind. She had a job to do for someone else now. But I believe my father thought he mattered to her on a personal level in a way that was, at least in part, a function of his title and his ownership. When those were gone, the relationship changed. And I think that registered somewhere deep in him as a loss he never fully named.

That is what Dr. Schlossberg's work helped me understand. The structures through which we matter are often invisible to us until they are gone. And the people who navigate transitions well are the ones who see them clearly before they disappear.

James Roberts, Founder, Intentional LLC

The framework

What Dr. Schlossberg's work
means for founders.

Dr. Schlossberg identifies several dimensions of mattering: attention, importance, dependence, appreciation, and ego extension, the feeling that someone else is proud of what you have done. Each of these is present in abundance when you are running a company. And each of them is at risk when the company is no longer yours.

What makes her framework so useful is that it is not about grief or loss in the clinical sense. It is about transition. And transitions, she argues, are not defined by the event itself but by what changes as a result of it. The question is not just "what did I sell?" The question is "what changes about how I matter to the people around me, and to myself?"

At Intentional, we have adapted this framework into the way we work with clients who are approaching or recovering from a major liquidity event. We ask about relationships. We ask about daily structure. We ask about where significance comes from in their lives, and what is at risk of changing. We do this not because we are therapists, because we are not, but because a financial strategy that ignores these dimensions will eventually fail the person it is supposed to serve.

If you are thinking about what comes next, and you have not yet had a conversation that addresses these questions, we would like to be the people who ask them.

Keep reading

Related topics worth
understanding.

Wealth Identity

How you think about money shapes every financial decision you make

Founder Psychology

What nobody prepares you for after the wire hits

The Intentional Way

How the Enneagram framework connects to your wealth identity

Common questions

What people ask about
mattering and wealth.

  • Mattering, as defined by Dr. Nancy Schlossberg, is the feeling that we are significant to others, that we are noticed, that we are important to someone. It is a fundamental human need. In the context of wealth and identity, mattering is what drives most of the financial decisions people make, often without realizing it. When someone builds a business, they matter enormously: to employees, clients, vendors, the community around them. When the business is sold, that structure of mattering disappears almost overnight. The wealth remains. The sense of significance does not.
  • Founders struggle after a sale because the business was not just an asset. It was the primary vehicle through which they mattered to others. The executive assistant who knew everything about them. The leadership team that looked to them for direction. The clients who called them by name. The employees whose families depended on decisions they made. When the sale closes, those relationships do not necessarily end, but the nature of them changes fundamentally. The founder no longer occupies the role that made them significant in those relationships. That loss is real, and no financial plan addresses it.
  • The need to matter does not disappear after a business sale. It finds new outlets, and those outlets often look like financial decisions. Some founders make aggressive investments trying to build something that matters again. Some give money away impulsively, seeking the significance that comes from being needed. Some become controlling about their wealth because it is the one domain where they still feel they have authority. Understanding the role that mattering plays in your relationship with money is one of the most important things a founder can do before and after a liquidity event.
  • The Wealth Identity Assessment is a structured psychometric process that examines how an individual thinks, decides, and behaves with money. It is built on the Enneagram, one of the most sophisticated tools used in executive coaching worldwide, and analyzes 193 data points across behavioral finance, decision-making, and psychometric patterns. Mattering is one of the dimensions it surfaces. When someone understands how their need to matter shapes their financial decisions, the strategy we build together becomes significantly more aligned with who they actually are. Learn more about how we apply the Enneagram to wealth at The Intentional Way.

Start the conversation

The financial plan is easier
when you know what
you are planning for.

If you are approaching a major transition and you have not yet had a conversation that addresses what matters to you and why, that is where we start. Schedule a conversation with James.

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30 minutes. No pitch. No pressure.