Shona Joy is closing after 26 years, and if you've been anywhere near LinkedIn these last couple of weeks you've seen the posts. I've read all of them, the AFR piece, Mamamia, Inside Retail, the commentary. And the thing I keep coming back to isn't in the articles because they are coming from various angles based on how this story is being perceived by journalists. No, what I’m gravitating towards are what’s laying in the comments. Because initially when I had read the AFR piece, I had thoughts. Instantly. But that was one source, I didn’t feel I could comment on it from one POV, so I dove and researched to find the facts before adding my commentary to the mix.
The business is profitable.
It's in 32 countries, half the sales are international
There are 33 staff and they're all being paid out in full.
Shona moved to Byron Bay five years ago and has been commuting to the Sydney office ever since.
She's been thinking about this for four years.
She explored a sale and nothing felt like the right fit.
She's keeping the name and the IP.
And she's said plainly that this isn't about the money, it's that she can't keep running the business at this scale and be a mum.
I'm not here to second-guess any of that. She's made a call from a position of strength that most founders never get the chance to make, and I think we should celebrate founders who go out on a high a lot more than we do. We clap for exits and acquisitions and almost never for someone who says I've done extremely well, and then stops. Because to stop, well that would be one of the hardest decisions.
But back to the comments.
Why not sell, rather than close?
Under one of the bigger posts, two comments sat a few lines apart. The first asked, “why not sell rather than close?” Fair question, it's profitable, it's got a global footprint, surely someone wanted it.
The second said, “Think it’s a smart move not to sell it though, founder IP is sometimes overlooked as being critical to success - just look at what happened to Sass & Bide.”
They think they're disagreeing. They're not. They're describing the same business from opposite ends.
Because if the founder is the engine, and Shona has said herself that the four collections a year, 80 garments each, plus bridal and bridesmaids, is the part that got intense, then what a buyer is buying is a business that needs her to keep designing. And Shona is the thing Shona is trying to step away from. So of course nothing felt like the right fit. There wasn't a version of the sale that didn't come with her in it.
And I’ve worked with multiple product based businesses, some brick and mortar, others pure play e-commerce, and each founder as they scale, they are still in the innovation. Brand and vision drive the products that sell well.
It's not that she couldn't let go
The story that usually gets told about founder-led businesses is that the founder held on too tight. Never hired properly, never handed anything over. And that doesn't fit here at all. Shona Joy had a CEO for nine years. The running of the business, the operational layer, had been handed over a long time ago. Four of those years she was looking towards her next step.
However, and this is coming from an outsider looking in, what was never handed over was the creative engine, because it couldn't be. The brand is her name. The product is her taste. That's what made it work, along with her tenacity, and it's also what made it unsellable, and those two things are the same thing.
Then in March this year, the CEO stepped down after nine years, and nobody was named to replace her. Seven months later, it's closing. I don't know what happened in between, and I'm not going to guess. But when the person holding the other half of a business leaves, the whole load comes back to the founder. And if that founder was already carrying the one part only she could do, there's not a lot of room left. The CEO role that she held nine years ago, has outpaced her own capacity. After a certain point you can’t go back, without scaling down. And by the sounds of it, Shona Joy has been doing extremely well to leave on a high.
Handing over the running of a business and the business not needing you are two different things.
You can be completely out of the engine room and still be the one load-bearing wall. In the product, in the relationships, in the one thing that only you do and that you've never written down because it never occurred to you it was a separate job.
Nobody builds a business where the founder can be lifted out by accident. It's one of the hardest things to do on purpose, it’s translation that you’ve never had to learn before and most founders never get asked whether they want to. They just find out when they try to take a holiday, or get sick, or want a kid, or move to Byron Bay. And suddenly they have to make a decision, one that doesn’t feel completely right. Our businesses are living and breathing entities and I’ve always been on the record that you should run the business rather than it run you. But that is easier said than done. You want to grow? That’s fantastic! You want a team? Awesome! But leaning out, and making sure that the brand doesn’t dwindle because of it, that’s tough. It’s totally doable, but it takes a founder going all in. To make that call.
For Shona she weighed her decisions, and she wouldn’t’ have made any decision lightly. That's about as good as that version of the ending gets. But if you'd rather have a third option, the one where the business keeps going without you in it, that's not something you find at the end. It's something you build in, from a long way out. In this world of instant gratification, businesses are actually like athletes training for the Olympics. Your growth needs training. The foundations, the drive, the team, the culture, the systems and the mindset to steer from the front. It takes time, and being so intentional. But the pay off is so much sharper.
At Pinch Studios, we help you build a business that doesn't need you holding it together. We help ambitious women founders of ecommerce and productised service businesses grow their profit, build a team that leads, and get their time and energy back. When I came across the AFR article, and the rabbit hole after that, I imagined a conversation I would have had with Shona if she was my client, because scale and exits, that is what we help our clients achieve. What would that conversation have been like with Shona four years ago when she was just starting to think about the next step.
So I created it.
