This one isn’t about code. It’s about a thing I learned the hard and expensive way, and if you’re about to buy a small company and run it yourself, you need to hear it before you sign. Every small company has an invisible subsidy holding it together, and it’s usually the founder. Not their salary. Their absorption. The hours nobody counted. The problems handled quietly at midnight so no one else had to know there was a problem. The payment that was late so someone else’s could be on time. For years I was that subsidy in my own company, and here’s the part that matters to you: none of it was on any document, because a subsidy you provide for free never shows up as a cost. It just shows up as “things are fine.” They are fine. Right up until the person providing the subsidy stops. I spent a long time telling myself I was being a good partner by absorbing everything. Being understanding. Not making a fuss. And I want to be honest about what I actually learned, because it’s the real lesson: I wasn’t protecting the company. I was hiding its true operating cost, from everyone including myself. The day I finally stopped absorbing and said “here’s what this actually costs,” it didn’t feel like being reasonable. It felt like being the bad guy. It wasn’t. It was the first time anyone had told the company the truth about what it took to run. So here’s what this means for you as a buyer, in plain terms. When you buy a founder-run company, you are not just buying the software and the customers. You are buying a machine that has been quietly running on one person’s willingness to absorb cost, and that willingness leaves the building the day the founder does. The “it just works” you saw in diligence was partly a person, working. Once you own it, you either become the new subsidy, or you find out what the real cost was all along, usually at the worst possible time. The uncomfortable questions are the useful ones. What does this founder actually do in a week that isn’t in any job description? What gets handled by them personally that nobody has written down? Where is the company quietly running on their patience, their unpaid hours, their availability? Because every one of those is a real cost that’s been hidden as a favor, and the invoice comes due right after closing. I learned the founder-absorbs-it lesson from the inside, as the guy doing the absorbing. If you want someone who’s been on that side to help you find the hidden subsidies in a company before you buy it, reach out. For the operators here who’ve either sold a company or bought one: how much of “it just works” turned out to be a person? I already know my answer.