A CEO shares the surprising lesson he learned from selling his company for $4 billion
bob carr
bob carr

(Courtesy of Bob Carr)
Heartland founder Bob Carr.

Last November, Bob Carr signed a deal to sell his payments processing company Heartland Payment Systems for $100 a share to Global Payments, for a total of $4.3 billion.

The sale, which is expected to close sometime this summer, may make him a very rich man, but the experience has taught him a surprising lesson about the meaning of work.

Both public companies in the same industry, Global Payments had a thriving business abroad but a weak influence in the US, and Heartland's sizeable American customer base among small and midsize merchants was a perfect complement.

Carr, 70, declined a board seat and decided to step away from the company he founded in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1997. Although he hadn't been planning to sell, Heartland's healthy performance and the generous offer convinced him that ending this chapter in his life was worth it.

The move also required that six of his direct reports cash out of the company. Yet, while it made them much richer, it left them unhappy. One C-level executive, for example, is expected to make $65 million on the deal and is 60 years old, but now feels lost, Carr told Business Insider.

"I just never really appreciated that until the sale of the company," Carr said. It made him realize how valuable it is to do something that you love.

"We didn't always talk about how wonderful it was to always be fighting the battle every day," he said. Once that sense of purpose was gone, they became genuinely unhappy — despite being millionaires.

As for himself, he has the Give Something Back Foundation, which he founded 15 years ago to put underprivileged students through college with all expenses paid, to occupy his days. Around 480 kids have gone through the program, and he is working on partnerships with the likes of celebrity performance coach Tony Robbins and NBA player Dwayne Wade. The foundation's team expanded to 10 people last year.

But once Carr has steered it in the right direction, he knows it won't need him to be hands-on any longer, which can be a scary thought.

"The foundation could be enough to keep me busy for the next 15 years," he said, but "I suspect it won't be." The idea of spending the rest of his life on the golf course or in front of a television is out of the question. Even the idea of a week-long vacation feels wrong, he joked.

That's why he's in the planning stages of another company in the community banking space. He said that this moment in his life showed him that he still hasn't lost what an early mentor called his "race with death."