Businesses exist to sell things; that's what they're for, to sell solutions to problems for customers or to provide services for the society or community in which they are embedded in.
Businesses are generally a collection of more than one person; they exist together to provide the products or services for the community in which they're embedded. The collection of people who provide those services then have a series of behaviours, beliefs and values that they share in order to provide the services and solutions for the communities for which they are embedded. In the process of doing this, they develop a model of how to interact with the people that they serve in order to provide that.
When a business is sold, often the product stays the same, because that is the basis for how the money was made within the business, and the business itself has created a niche or a corner of the market that it serves, which allows it to sell the product for more money when it pays to buy the product.
What often happens after the sale, though, is that the model changes, and so perhaps the product is produced differently or sourced differently, or corners are cut, or quality is reduced in order to make a bigger margin or profit for the people who bought the business to make sure they get a ‘return’ on the money that they spent to acquire it.
Fundamentally, though, what changes after a sale is the culture; it is almost impossible to develop a successful family business and then sell it and then expect the culture to remain the same.
It's almost possible to expect the culture to improve, because almost always, the larger company is more detached and faceless and not secure in its values or its vision for the little company that it has acquired.
Companies like Apple have managed to secure a culture in an extraordinarily large organisation, but if you look at that, what happens in that organisation, it is that the people at the head of the organisation tend to stay the same for a long period of time because their job is to decide on the model, their job is to decide on the culture, and inevitably their job is to decide on the product.
Apple, as a business, started around 50 years ago, and since that time has effectively had 3 CEOs. Tim Cook has just retired and passed this down to someone who's been in the business for 15 years already.
If they continue to do that, they're liable to continue to retain the strength of culture that they have; if not, perhaps not. Worth thinking about for all of us, whoever has the opportunity to have their own business or to build a business over time.
Sell your business, sell your culture, it's part of the package.
The ability to change, alter, manipulate, destroy, and burn down the culture that already exists, that's the privilege of the people who buy it.