The Long Game

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Fasha Mahjoor stood at the precipice.

“I felt like I could do anything,” he said.

This was last year, 12 months before he would sell the Torrance business he built from scratch 34 years ago for an estimated $700 million.

Back then the precipice he faced was a very real one: he was about to jump off one of three London skyscrapers to raise money for Outward Bound Trust, a British charity that provides outdoor adventure and education for underprivileged youth.

At the same time, however, Mahjoor had in the back of his mind the persistent courtship of Danaher Corp., the Fortune 150 company that wanted to buy his business, Phenomenex, a maker of chemical separation technologies. At the brink of another big decision, he came to believe the deal would work as long as he was able to stay on and maintain the culture of the business he built.

Terms were reached last week and the deal is set to close by the end of the year.

On its face, the sale of Phenomenex is yet another immigrant success story. Mahjoor was born in Iran and lived in the United Kingdom before moving to the United States in 1978, not an unfamiliar path for many successful people in the L.A. region. What makes the deal a bit more interesting (a $700 million deal is already interesting) is that Mahjoor spread about $12 million of the proceeds from the sale among most of his 800 employees. (He’s not the first local entrepreneur to build a business, cash out with a fortune, and share some of the windfall with his workers. Donald Friese spread about $86 million of the $1.3 billion he made on the sale of glass company CR Laurence last year among his employees.)

Tales coming from Phenomenex tell of an environment where work was rewarded and play encouraged, of a business that built loyalty long before the promise of a cash bonanza. It’s a strategy that may not have figured directly in the valuation, but certainly in Phenomenex’s success.

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