can be whatever you negotiate. Now you shouldn’t go and rush the sell, it’s ridiculous to sell. But you should negotiate that, because there are windows where you’re allowed to sell that can’t be too near when you’re announcing how you did. Which makes sense to me. But you don’t want to lock yourself up in an artificial way because what happens is—and I didn’t get this—the lockup then gets used as a mechanism for them to come back and sell you a secondary offering for another fee. Because you get out of the lockup if you hire them to do a secondary, and you don’t get out of it if you don’t. Well, I didn’t know that.
There’s something called a 10b5-1 plan—this plan can’t be launched until your lockup is over, but it has to burn in for a certain number of months, and so you add to your lockup. There’s no reason why they couldn’t let you start your 10b5-1 plans so that by the time the lockup is over you get to start selling. These don’t seem to matter until you’re right there and you know you’ve bought a house, or you’re feeling like, ‘Jesus, everybody else is doing this dance, and I’m sitting here’—not just you but your whole team, is like ‘Dude, what the heck, we’re all walking LBOs, and everybody else has made a zillion dollars.’ And I think you have to stand up to those guys just on principle.”
2) “Make them pay for the jet. The jet will be used against you. Because you will get treated like little Lord Fauntleroy, or little Lady Fauntleroy, on that jet. And you don’t remember that actually you’re paying for a huge chunk of that jet and they will use that to tire you out and pamper you and give you too much really nice scotch…”
(Interjection from Gail Goodman: “You clearly had a better time on the road show than I did.”)
“…and it feels so good to be softened, until you wake up the next morning and say, ‘Ooh, what happened?'”
3) “Open the door when luck knocks.”
4) Hang onto your mission. “It’s just so important to have a mission that’s bigger than you that isn’t you. We have benefited tremendously from a social mission. We actually believe we are here to put operational integrity into health care. There’s not a lot of real opportunities for spiritual mission in our generation, and so we find if you can provide that in the workplace you will get that same kind of bigness, inner bigness, from people. And we’ve needed to rely on that a lot, and it’s worked.”
5) “No advice is ever right, but all of it is incredibly important. So just because it’s wrong, don’t blow it off.”
And a bonus from Goodman:
Don’t rush. “Be ready before you go. The business needs to be ready, the team needs to be ready, the board needs to be ready. And get lots of great advisers around you.”
