He Sold for $200M – Then Watched the Business Implode
Moneywise
Hampton
4.7 • 701 Ratings
🗓️ 14 October 2025
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Stop making million dollar decisions alone. Hampton gives you a personal board of eight vetted founders in your city who meet monthly to tackle your hardest problems. Find your group: joinhampton.com
Kory Mitchell built a blue collar asbestos business and sold it for $200M. When he stepped back, everything started to fall apart. A new CEO lost millions. The culture cracked. Kory came back to fix it, then walked away on his own terms. This is what happens when scaling works…until it doesn’t.
Here’s what we talk about:
- Buying blue collar businesses: the unsexy but ultra-profitable path to serious scale
- Why adding debt transformed their trajectory – and nearly broke the company
- What not to do after an exit: the new CEO that lost $12M in 6 projects
- The hidden tax of scale: how managing founders who’ve “already made their money” can kill your business
- How to build trust during M&A, and the warning signs that should make you walk
- Lessons in culture, integration, and the real cost of bad communication
- The burnout that followed a $200M exit, and why Kory walked away
- Sabbaticals, Porsches, and starting over: what post-exit life really looks like
- The secret to finding off-market deals, and why PE firms keep asking Kory for help
- Who shouldn’t do M&A (and why doing it while your house is on fire is a terrible idea)
Cool Links:
- Hampton https://www.joinhampton.com/
- Lower Street https://www.lowerstreet.co/
- Kory Mitchell https://www.linkedin.com/in/korylmitchell
Sponsors:
- Get US caliber talent at offshore prices with https://www.oceanstalent.com/
- Achieve your dream body with https://www.dailybodycoach.com/moneywise
- Protect your upside and get your time back at https://www.cressetcapital.com/moneywise
Chapters:
- (01:54) Growing Up Blue Collar & Family Business Roots
- (03:09) Taking the Leap: Debt and Aggressive Growth
- (05:53) Merging, Scaling, and Learning from Private Equity
- (08:19) Managing People: The Human Side of M&A
- (13:18) Integration and Building Company Culture
- (19:25) The $200M Exit and Stepping Away
- (21:48) Crisis: Post-Sale Struggles and Turnaround
- (25:22) Burnout, Sabbatical, and Starting Over
- (27:47) Lessons Learned: Who Should (and Shouldn’t) Do M&A
This podcast is a ridiculous concept: high-net-worth people reveal their personal finances. Inspired by real conversations happening in the Hampton community.
Your Host: Harry Morton
- Founder of Lower Street, a podcast production company helping brands launch and grow top-tier podcasts.
- Co-parents a cow named Eliza.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | All right, so here's the deal. I just came from our 25-person all-hands meeting with all my staff at Hampton. |
| 0:08.6 | About four of the 25 people there, they were people we found via a company called Oceans. |
| 0:15.3 | Offshoring, it gets a bad rap. And it gets a bad rap because a lot of people think that the people you hire via |
| 0:21.8 | offshoring firms are low-level talent and do low-level work, or they just do stuff that AI is |
| 0:28.0 | already replacing. That is not true at all. The people who we have, they help us with marketing, |
| 0:33.4 | they do operations, and we treat them as fully part of our team because they are. |
| 0:39.5 | And what's great about oceans is you can get top talent and finance marketing operations, |
| 0:44.0 | basically any role that you're hiring for, for only about $3,000, at least that's the starting |
| 0:48.9 | point. |
| 0:49.6 | And you can get amazing, talented people in like two weeks. |
| 0:52.9 | I think we've got one of these folks who work for us. I think we've got her in like five days and she's amazing. We've worked with her for like a year now. If you don't want to burn a lot of cash, but you still want the best high caliber people, you guys got to check them out. It's oceanstalent.com. And please tell them that Sam sent you and they're going to give you a little bit extra special treatment. |
| 1:12.0 | Again, oceanstalent.com. |
| 1:18.2 | If it seems too good to be true, it is. |
| 1:25.5 | The deals that went sideways. |
| 1:27.1 | I've had businesses where I had to fire all of the owners post-transaction because they all wanted to kill each other, stabbing each other's backs. |
| 1:36.3 | Founders at war. |
| 1:37.3 | So I found myself on a plane every week convincing someone not to quit. |
| 1:42.3 | The hidden tax of scale. You know, I've had a guy that we bought at a huge, for us, a huge purchase price, |
| 1:50.0 | who started his own company after we closed with one of his key guys. |
| 1:55.0 | He made sure the guy didn't sign an uncompete. |
| 1:58.0 | He secretly funded the business and became our main competitor and took that |
| 2:02.3 | business we acquired effectively down to zero. |
... |
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