I Knew My Company Might Be Sold. I Couldn't Tell the People Who Built It.
Early in 2025 I was the CEO of an AIM-listed software company. We had agreed a merger I genuinely believed in. My board recommended it unanimously. I was lined up to become global Chief Operating Officer of the combined group. On paper it was the right deal at the right time, and I was all in on it.
This isn't a post about the deal.
It's about the part nobody warns you about. The months before any of it became public, when I walked into the office every day knowing something that would change my team's lives, and said nothing.
First, why I believed in it.
I want to be clear that this wasn't a deal I was talked into. The strategic logic was strong. The two businesses fit together in a way that would have given our customers a better product and our people a bigger platform to build careers on. I'd spent years growing the company, and this felt like the move that protected everything we'd made and gave it somewhere larger to go. I championed it because I thought it was the right thing for the business and for the people in it.
That belief is exactly what made the silence so hard.
You can only bring a handful of people inside.
In a regulated, public M&A process that isn't a choice, it's the rules. A small group goes "inside" and carries the information. Everyone else stays out. And because no deal is ever certain until the votes are counted, you make a calculation: why put good people through months of fear and uncertainty over something that might never happen?
So you protect them. You keep them in the dark. You tell yourself it's the kind thing to do, and the legal thing to do, and both of those are genuinely true.
It still felt awful.
These were people who had trusted me with their careers. People who had built the thing we were now quietly trying to combine with someone else. I sat in one-to-ones talking about their year ahead while holding a secret that could erase the whole plan. I ran planning sessions for a future I wasn't sure we'd have. At one point someone told me, in confidence, that they were worried about job security, and I had to look them in the eye and give them less than the truth.
I didn't enjoy a single minute of it. Looking back, I don't think I was supposed to.
The loneliest part of the chair.
People talk about the loneliness of leadership as if it's about decisions. It isn't, not really. It's about information. It's the things you know that you cannot share, and the distance that knowledge quietly puts between you and the people you spend every day with. For those months I was closer to my advisers and my board than I was to my own team, and that's a strange and uncomfortable place to lead from. You're protecting people by holding them at arm's length, and you can feel the cost of it even when you're sure it's right.
Then the shareholders said no.
When the vote finally came, the deal I had carried in silence for months collapsed in a single afternoon. 48.68% in favour, 51.32% against. A scheme of arrangement needs 75%, so it wasn't close enough to matter. The thing I had believed in was simply gone.
There is a strange double grief in a moment like that. You lose the deal. But you also lose the version of the future you'd been quietly building toward, the one only a handful of people even knew existed. And I'll be honest about something I'm not entirely proud of: part of what I felt was relief. Relief that the secret was finally over. Relief that I could stand in front of my team with nothing held back.
Within weeks, I stepped aside.
This is what I actually learned, and what I now help other leaders see.
A yes in the boardroom is not a yes from your owners. I had the strategic case, I had the board, I had the logic, and I still lost the room that mattered most. If you lead anything with shareholders, members or investors, the alignment you assume you have is usually the alignment that catches you out. You cannot start counting votes on the day of the vote. The real work of carrying people with you happens months earlier, in conversations that feel unnecessary right up until the moment they're the only thing that would have saved you.
But the lesson that has actually stayed with me is smaller and far more human than that.
Leadership will sometimes ask you to hold things you cannot share with the very people you most want to be honest with. Not because you're hiding, and not because you've done anything wrong, but because the rules, or the timing, or simple kindness demand silence for a while. The real job is to carry that weight without letting it quietly corrode the trust you are trying to protect. Trust is the only real currency a leader has, and these are precisely the moments that spend it fastest if you're not careful.
I won't pretend I got that balance right.
I wish it could have been different. I wish I could have given my team more, and sooner. I still think about it, and I suspect I always will.
What I'd say to the version of me sitting on that secret: the discomfort you're feeling isn't a flaw in your leadership. It's the proof that your instincts are still intact. The day keeping people in the dark stops bothering you is the day to start worrying about the kind of leader you're becoming.
I work with executives and founders now, and a lot of them are standing in exactly these moments. The lonely calls. The things they can't say yet. The gap between what is legal and what feels right. I don't hand them clean answers, because I don't have any. What I have is the scar tissue, and the honest reflection that came after it.
That, it turns out, is most of what good leadership actually is.
Phil Meyers is a former AIM-listed CEO and now mentors executives and founders through the hard, human side of leadership.
