The deal isn't over when the money lands
For most sellers there's a period — ninety days to a year, sometimes longer — where you're not running the company anymore, but you're not finished with it either.
You will never hit refresh more times in your life than on the day you've signed everything and you're waiting for the wire to show up in your account.
And when it lands, it's an incredible day. I don't know that I can describe it properly. For about four weeks afterward you feel amazing.
There is a version of this story where that's the end. You ride off into the sunset, the business belongs to someone else now, and the rest of your life starts.
That version exists. It's just not the likely one.
The far more probable version
For most sellers, there's a period — call it ninety days to a year, sometimes considerably longer — where business is still being conducted. You're not running the company anymore, but you're not finished with it either.
Here's what I can tell you without hedging: your purchase agreement contains items that have to happen after the day of the sale. Every one of them does. Some of those items are things you owe the buyer. Some are things the buyer owes you.
That's not a risk. That's just the structure. The question isn't whether there's a post-closing period. It's how yours is going to go.
And how it goes depends on two things. The first is how you negotiated the purchase agreement, months earlier, when all of this was abstract and you were focused on getting to a number. The second is an honest assessment of what's actually happening in front of you.
Some buyers will take every penny that's available
I want to be careful here, because this isn't universal. Plenty of buyers behave well.
But it's entirely possible to end up across from a buyer who intends to extract every dollar the documents will let them extract — and who understands, correctly, that you are tired, that you have already mentally moved on, and that you are unlikely to have the appetite for a fight. There can be bullying. It doesn't usually look like bullying. It looks like a letter with a number in it and a deadline.
In that moment, what you need is an honest, unemotional read of your purchase agreement and the rest of your documents, so you know whether you're looking at a legitimate claim or a test.
Unemotional is the hard part. This is your company. You built it. Someone is now telling you that what you handed over was worth less than you said, and the instinct is either to fight everything or to concede everything, and both of those instincts are expensive.
The problem with the people you'd normally call
Your attorney will look at it as a legal question, which is their job and is genuinely necessary.
Your accountant will look at it as an accounting question, which is also their job and also necessary.
Your broker may well be gone. The engagement ended at closing.
What's missing is somebody looking at the whole thing at once — the documents, the numbers, the buyer's actual incentives, and what this is doing to you — who has sat in the chair you're sitting in. An owner who has been through it knows something that isn't in the file: what it feels like to get that letter, and which of your reactions to trust.
Where a Texas fight would actually happen
Most post-closing disputes never see a courtroom. They get resolved through whatever mechanism your agreement specifies — often a neutral accountant for true-up disagreements, often arbitration, often just negotiation between lawyers.
Which mechanism applies to you was decided months before the dispute existed, in a dispute-resolution clause you probably skimmed.
It's worth knowing that the Texas landscape here has moved recently. The state stood up a specialized Business Court that began taking cases in September 2024, and House Bill 40, effective September 2025, lowered the amount-in-controversy threshold for qualifying disputes from $10 million to $5 million while allowing a series of related transactions to be aggregated to reach it. Appeals from that court go to a dedicated Fifteenth Court of Appeals.
For a lot of trade-business deals, the numbers in dispute won't clear that threshold, and the fight lands somewhere else entirely. The point isn't that the Business Court is where you're headed. The point is that where you'd be headed is a question with an answer, that answer is already written down in your agreement, and the time to have an opinion about it was before you signed. Your own attorney is the one to walk you through what your documents actually say.
What mine looked like
I had some genuinely interesting post-sale battles. Purchase price adjustments. Indemnity claims. Working capital true-ups. The rest of it.
Interesting is the word I use now, with distance. At the time it was extremely stressful — and the stress was worse because I felt out of my element and largely alone. The people who had been in the deal with me had moved on to their next deal. I hadn't. I was still in mine.
What to do about it
The useful version of this article isn't "get help afterward," though you may well need some.
It's this: the post-closing period is negotiated before closing. Every one of those fights I had traced back to language that was settled while I was thinking about something else.
So before you sign, find the provisions that govern what happens after you sign. How long the representations survive. How the working capital true-up gets calculated and who calculates it. What triggers an indemnity claim and what caps it. Where a disagreement goes and who pays to get it there.
Read those sections as carefully as you read the purchase price. You'll be living in them a lot longer.