The Questions Finnish Business Owners Should Be Asking Themselves This Summer

By Lasse Mäkelä, Founder, Larzon Capital

If you are reading this from a summer cottage somewhere in Finland, you are probably in one of the few genuinely quiet moments your year offers. The phone is slower. The inbox can wait. There is water nearby and nowhere to be.

That is actually a valuable state of mind for a business owner. Not because you should be working, but because distance from the day-to-day is exactly when the important questions become easier to hear.

I have spent a good part of my career around Finnish business owners who are approaching significant decisions: selling a company, making an acquisition, raising capital, or simply figuring out what they want the next phase to look like. The conversations that go somewhere useful rarely happen in the middle of a busy quarter. They happen when someone has had a chance to step back.

So here are the questions I think are worth sitting with this summer.

What would I do if someone made me a serious offer tomorrow?

Not a hypothetical lowball. A serious offer, at a fair price, with a credible buyer. Would you take it? Would you hesitate? And if you would hesitate, do you know why?

The answer tells you a lot. Owners who know exactly what they would do are usually in a good position, regardless of which way they would lean. Owners who genuinely do not know often have some important thinking left to do about what they are building and for whom.

What does my business look like to someone who does not know it?

You know your business from the inside. You know the good years and the difficult ones. You know which customers matter and which relationships are at risk. You know what the numbers do not show.

A buyer, an investor, or a partner sees something different. They see the financial statements, the customer concentration, the key-person dependency, the documentation of processes. They form a view quickly and on limited information.

It is worth asking, honestly, what that view would be. Not to be defensive about it, but to understand where the gaps are between what the business is and what it looks like from the outside. Those gaps are almost always closeable. They are just easier to close when you have time on your side.

Am I building this for myself, or for someone else to take over?

These are not mutually exclusive, but they require different decisions. A business built for the owner to run indefinitely looks different from a business built to be handed off cleanly, whether to a family member, a management team, or an external buyer.

There is no right answer. But there is a significant cost to not having an answer, which is that decisions get made by default rather than by design. The owner who has thought this through makes better choices about investment, hiring, governance, and growth, because those choices are oriented toward an actual destination.

What is the one thing I keep not doing?

Almost every business owner I have worked with has one thing they know they should address and have been putting off. A customer relationship that needs a difficult conversation. A key person who has become a single point of failure. A market opportunity that has been sitting on the side. A shareholder structure that made sense ten years ago and no longer does.

Summer is a good time to name it. Not necessarily to act on it immediately, but to take it out of the background and look at it directly.

What do I actually want?

This one sounds obvious. It rarely is.

Business owners spend most of their time solving problems, managing people, and responding to what the company needs. The question of what they personally want, from the business, from their work, from the next ten years, often gets deferred indefinitely.

A few quiet days at the cottage can be a reasonable place to start answering it.

If any of these questions land somewhere interesting and you would like a conversation about what the options actually look like, I am available. No pitch, no agenda. Just an honest discussion, whenever the summer feels long enough to allow for one.

Lasse Mäkelä is the Founder of Larzon Capital, a cross-border M&A advisory firm based in Switzerland, focused on the Nordic-DACH corridor.