Success stories often sound much cleaner after the fact. Someone starts a company, grows it, sells it, and moves on to the next opportunity. What usually gets left out are the mistakes, difficult decisions, and moments when the business almost did not survive.
In Part 2 of our conversation with Glenn Poulos, we get into that side of entrepreneurship.
Glenn has started companies, sold companies, worked through an acquisition, nearly lost a business, rebuilt, sold again, and eventually became a buyer himself. That experience has given him a perspective you do not get from simply reading about entrepreneurship. Some of his most valuable lessons came from the deals and decisions that did not work as expected.
About Glenn Poulos
Glenn Poulos has spent more than four decades working in technical sales, entrepreneurship, and business leadership. After beginning his career in electronics, he entered technical sales in 1985 and founded his first technology distribution company in 1991. He later co-founded Gap Wireless, which grew into a major Canadian distributor serving the mobile broadband and wireless industries before being acquired in 2022.
Today, Glenn is President of ProgUSA, a U.S.-based company serving power utilities and service organizations with electrical test and measurement equipment, technical support, service, and calibration. He is also the author of Never Sit in the Lobby, which shares practical lessons from his career in sales and business.
Connect with Glenn on LinkedIn or learn more about his work through his website.
A Successful Exit That Wasn’t So Successful
Glenn’s first company was eventually approached by a well-known public company interested in acquiring the business. The offer looked impressive. Glenn and his partners would receive some cash, but most of the value came through millions of shares in the acquiring company. On paper, Glenn became a multimillionaire and one of the company’s largest shareholders. There was one major problem. He could not immediately sell those shares.
Within roughly 18 months, the acquiring company went bankrupt, and the shares became worthless. Glenn had sold a valuable business but received nowhere near the value he expected from the transaction. That experience taught him a lesson that would influence future deals: the number written at the top of an acquisition agreement does not necessarily equal the money you will eventually receive.
It also taught him something about due diligence.
The buyer had thoroughly investigated Glenn’s company, but Glenn and his partners had not done the same investigation of the buyer. Because it was a public company and a recognizable name, they assumed that was enough. It wasn’t.
Due Diligence Goes Both Ways
This is an important lesson for developers, consultants, and founders because we often focus on proving ourselves. A potential employer interviews us. A client evaluates our proposal. An investor examines the company. An acquiring company reviews the books. But evaluation should work in both directions. Glenn later realized that more investigation might have uncovered warning signs within the company acquiring his first business. That experience changed how he approached future transactions.
The same principle applies outside acquisitions. Before accepting a major client, investor, partner, or even a new job, ask what you need to know about the other side of the relationship. A recognizable name does not eliminate risk.
Growth Can Take You Away From What You Do Best
Glenn’s next company eventually became highly successful, but getting there was not a straight line. By 2019, the business was in serious trouble. Part of the problem was expansion. The company knew how to buy technology from manufacturers and sell it to customers. Because they were successful at that, it became easy to assume they could move into adjacent businesses. Why not install the technology too? Why not expand into another product category?
Those ideas sound reasonable until the new business requires completely different expertise, employees, equipment, inventory, and risk management. Glenn calls what happened the “reverse Midas touch.” Instead of everything turning to gold, new ventures began creating problems. The company eventually found itself about $1.3 million in the hole. The solution required difficult decisions.
Glenn and his partner dramatically reduced the size of the organization, transferred a problematic service division, exited another difficult product area, and refocused on the company’s core strengths. Those decisions helped turn the business around and ultimately positioned it for a successful sale. There is a valuable lesson here for technical professionals. Being good at one thing does not automatically mean you will be good at the thing next to it. Expansion needs more than opportunity. It needs the right expertise and someone capable of owning it.
Be Careful With the Money Attached to Growth
Another theme in our conversation was financing.
Glenn is careful to point out that his experience comes primarily from running traditional operating businesses rather than venture-backed startups. Within that context, he prefers avoiding outside money for as long as practical. Debt has a cost. Equity has a cost. Partners have a cost. Those costs are not always measured only in interest rates or percentages.
Taking an investor may mean giving someone influence over how the company operates. Bringing in a partner means sharing the value you eventually create. An earn-out may make an acquisition price look larger, but some of that money depends on hitting future targets after control of the company has changed.
Glenn’s experience has made him particularly cautious about large earn-outs and long post-acquisition commitments.
Choose Partners for More Than Proximity
Glenn also offered a warning about business partnerships through something he jokingly calls “vice president in the room syndrome.” A few friends start talking about creating a company. Someone becomes CEO. Someone else becomes VP of Technology. Another person gets sales. Someone else happens to be there, so they get a title too. The company has barely started, but ownership and leadership positions have already been distributed based on who was in the room rather than what the business actually needs.
That can become extremely expensive later.
Glenn has successfully worked with partners, so his point is not that partnerships cannot work. It is that ownership decisions made casually at the beginning become very difficult to undo once the company has real value.
Experience Is Often Learning What Not to Do
One thing I appreciated about Glenn’s story is that the lessons do not come from pretending every decision was correct. Some worked. Some didn’t.
His first company taught him how dangerous an acquisition can become when you fail to investigate the buyer. His second taught him how quickly expansion outside your core strengths can consume a profitable business. Selling to private equity taught him about earn-outs and what happens when you are no longer the person controlling a company you built.
Those lessons eventually influenced how he approached buying and running his current business.
For developers building a career beyond the code, that may be the most useful takeaway. Entrepreneurship is not simply about having a good idea or building a product. It requires understanding money, people, partnerships, risk, operations, and sometimes knowing when to stop doing something that is not working.
The technical problem may actually be the easy part.
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