Steve_Jones said:
You have an owner that is not listening to you, and making vague promises of "someday". When you leave, what happens to his company is not your problem (or fault). I say that as someone that employs people, and values them.
I would approach the other company myself and let the chips fall where they fall. If you have your owner reach out, he might poison that opportunity for you. From what I read, he's only out for himself, it's time for you to look out for you.
That really is not the situation with him. I didn't give full details and it's hard to convey in text.
He's not an a-hole, he's an adolescent.
It's not the healthy relationship that I need, but it's not an abusive or actively unhealthy one. It's like being in a relationship with someone who has a lot of potential because they're smart, creative, and caring, but doesn't really know how to realize their potential because they're a bit of a slacker. It's not going between abuse and honeymoon. It's going between saying they're going to get their act together and starting something good, and then a few weeks later realizing they've gotten distracted and are just off playing or gotten distracted by some new task.
I think he has two (or two and a half) major flaws.
Firstly, he doesn't really understand the difference between an Idea and a Plan. He has lots of ideas and gets really excited about them, but doesn't ever actually gel them into fully actionable plans. So we kinda sorta start on something, and then it falls through.
Secondly, he lacks emotional energy to deal with multiple things, or gets distracted by what most concerns/interests him at a given time. Whatever the cause is, he really only deals with one thing at a time and forgets/ignores everything else. Right now, he's getting divorced. He has the kids half the time. I understand family and personal matters being number one priority, but he's worrying about that to the complete exclusion of everything else.
The story we get from him is kind of, "I'll be able to deal with the company as soon as [the current crisis] is over..." But the reality is that life doesn't work that way. There will always be something else.
I think he genuinely would like to deal with things to make the company healthy, but he doesn't really understand how to do that. He's got another source of wealth/income that he doesn't need to rely on the company actually growing and becoming profitable. He just needs it to be more or less self sufficient. He'd like to see it grow, but his approach is to just sort of "wait and see what happens".
On dealing with the other company -
Another problem with approaching the other company is that I suspect the opportunity to take over this location was NDA priveleged information that he wasn't really supposed to share with me, and really only did so to make us feel hopeful to stick around. Our owner has already been talking to the other owner about a possible merger or partnership of the two companies. Going to [other owner] directly would be me effectively telling them, "Hey, I think the guy you've been trying to make a deal with is an idiot and you should drop him."