Mark Sweeny sold his company at 50 for a sum that meant he never had to work again. Within months he was struggling to get out of bed before half past ten.

This is the conversation that almost never happens on a business podcast. Not how to build and sell a company, but what it actually does to you when you do.

Mark built Certus Solutions from a government contract in South Wales into the pioneer of Oracle Cloud across the UK and Ireland, delivering the first Oracle Cloud implementation in central government. He built it in six and a half years, designed it from the start to be sold, and exited to an American acquirer in 2018. It worked exactly as planned. That is precisely what makes what happened next so difficult to hear.

He describes signing day: six or seven hours sitting alone in a corridor in a law firm with a paper cup of coffee, while the lawyers did what lawyers do. The photograph with the champagne glass and the big smile that he still has. And then the walk back across London Bridge on a hot afternoon, when he realised that by the time he reached the far side, the thing he had spent six and a half years building was simply gone.

What followed was two years he describes without any attempt to dress up, no purpose, a house he didn't need, sports cars he could only drive one of at a time, and a slow spiral into a place he says is far more common among successful founders than anyone admits.

There is a moment in this episode where he talks about his son William, who was a child while Certus was being built, watching a podcast interview with his father three times and then calling him to say: now I get it. Now I understand you. It is the point where the sacrifice and the payoff finally meet, and it is worth the episode on its own.

He also talks about going bankrupt twice at Certus, once coming within ninety minutes of the doors closing. About angel investments that failed and what they taught him about who actually survives. About the collateral damage of building, being physically in the room and mentally somewhere else, and what that costs the people who never chose the journey. And about how his wife Natalie got him back on his feet, on the condition that they moved to Wales to do it.

This episode is for any founder building towards an exit, and for anyone who has already had one and found the other side quieter than they expected.