No Line for Her

The customer in Singapore did not believe us.

I was chief executive of Rangsons Electronics in Mysuru. We had made forays into missile electronics. We had not cracked commercial aviation. This customer converted single-aisle passenger planes to carry cargo, and needed a simple cargo door module.

We pitched fervently. They were anxious, and not quite interested. They doubted we had the chops to take a design through to manufacture.

Then they came to visit.

Their anxiety was gone within hours. Suchitra Royroth C walked them through every step of our process, patiently: requirements gathering, prototype development and testing, end-of-line testing. Not on slides. On real parts we were running on the line for defence and medical equipment. It was a process she had tested, and it showed.

We got the deal. Her confidence was the asset that won it.

That asset had already been bought once. In February 2015, before I arrived, Cyient bought 74 percent of Rangsons for cash. It never published the price. One deal record puts it at ₹290 crore and press reports at ₹360 crore, about $46 million to $57 million then. About a thousand people came with the building. Suchitra was one of them. She had been on that floor more than a decade.

I did not build that floor. I inherited it. She was formed by Pavan Ranga, who built Rangsons. No classroom. A floor, and years, and a man who decided she was worth the time.

I have never seen the deal file. I can still tell you one thing about it. There was no line in it for her. The rules do not allow one.

A business is worth handing on only if what it knows lives in its people. A sale is the one day that knowledge gets a price, and nobody can see it to price it. Form your people before you go, and write down what they can do. You leave something a buyer can pay for and a floor that outlasts you. That’s the argument.

Twelve million more

In September 2026 JPMorganChase counted how many more of these sales are coming. Twelve million American businesses, holding close to $10 trillion in assets, will change hands over the next ten to fifteen years.

Nick Lichtenberg reported it in Fortune, and his last paragraph is the one that stayed with me. For most of these owners, he wrote, the business does not get sold. It gets closed.

The bank’s answer is planning. A succession toolkit from the Small Business Administration. Advisers. Three bills in Congress. I am for all of it. But a plan moves ownership. It cannot move what only the owner knows.

One name is not a bench

Terry Iverson told the Chicago Tribune in 2019 that he thinks about it every day. He was fifty-nine, the third generation to run Iverson & Co., a machine tool firm his grandfather started in Des Plaines eighty-eight years earlier.

His children did not want it. The vice president he had groomed to own it left for another job. The plan had one name on it, and the name left.

He did find a buyer. In 2023 the firm was sold through a broker to a Chicago investor from outside the family. The firm lived. Ninety-two years of Iversons running it ended.

Buyers know what a thin bench means. In July 2026 a man with a finance background asked the Practical Machinist forum whether to buy a small job shop from a retiring owner. A shop owner near Sacramento told him where to look first. If the owner leaves no one behind who can run the floor, he wrote, the value commonly falls to “just retained earnings and an equipment list.”

The tax man has known it since Eisenhower. Revenue Ruling 59-60 is still the rulebook for valuing a private company. It warns that losing the manager of a one-man business can sink the value of the whole thing, especially where there is “a lack of trained personnel capable of succeeding to the management of the enterprise.”

In 1959 the government wrote down that formed people are what make a business worth buying. Then everyone went back to calling it a planning problem.

It runs to the top of the building too. The same Fortune report cited a study of S&P 500 companies. At more than a third of those sampled, the chief executive and the chief financial officer were both inside the retirement window, with no succession plan disclosed. The office is bigger. The habit of waiting is the same.

The one day people get a price

A sale is the one day in a company’s life when its people get a price.

Every other day they are an expense. Wages, benefits, the hours a good supervisor spends beside a new hire. All of it runs through the income statement and is gone by year end.

On the day of the sale a buyer pays more than the machines and the inventory are worth. Often far more. That difference has to land somewhere.

It lands in goodwill. The American rule, ASC 805, says an assembled workforce is not an asset a buyer may record on its own. The international rule that India now follows says the same.

So everything a thousand people knew in Mysuru was paid for, and then poured into one word. Goodwill is accounting for “we bought something we are not allowed to name.” Like Voldemort, except here it is the heroes who go unnamed.

The seller is paid for capability nobody measured. The buyer prices it blind. And a buyer who cannot see a thing does what any careful person does. He marks it down.

The Tax Court has put a number on the markdown. When it allows a discount for losing the one person a company ran on, the figure has usually been ten percent. When Paul Mitchell died, the court took ten percent off a $150 million value for his hair-care company. Fifteen million dollars, for one man. The shop owners on that forum would call ten percent the polite version.

Rangsons made it across. The owners changed. The name changed twice. In 2023 the company went public. In early October 2026 the market valued it at roughly ₹7,100 crore, about $735 million. Suchitra