Patience gets a lot of credit in this industry. You hear it constantly. Hold long enough and the right buyer will come. Good names take time. The best sales are years in the making.
And honestly, that's not wrong. Some of the best outcomes I've seen, including ones I've had, came from holding longer than felt comfortable.
But I've also held names that had no business being in my portfolio for as long as they were. And the story I told myself the whole time was that I was being patient.
I wasn't. I was avoiding a decision.
There's a difference, and I think it's worth talking about.
I wrote recently about the EmmaStone.com deal and the fifteen years behind it. That kind of story is what people point to when they talk about patience. Buy a great name, hold it, wait for the right moment.
What gets glossed over is that the patience in that situation wasn't blind. There was clear demand. Recognizable value. An obvious buyer pool. The name had a defined role in the market. It was just waiting for the right moment to fill it.
That's not the same as holding a name because you're not sure what else to do with it.
The test I've started using on myself is pretty simple. If this name sold tomorrow, who is the buyer and what are they using it for? If I can answer that quickly and specifically, fine. I'm probably holding for a reason. If I have to talk myself into an answer, that's a signal.
Not a death sentence. But a signal.
Because there's a version of patience that looks like discipline. You understand the use case, you can picture the buyer, you're just waiting for timing to align. And there's another version that's really just hope dressed up in nicer language. The name sounds decent. It's in a real industry. It checks a few boxes. But the specific buyer? Vague. The use case? Kind of depends.
The tricky part is both situations look identical from the outside. A name sitting in a portfolio. No sale. No urgency.
The difference is internal.
One of them you're waiting for alignment. The other you're waiting for something to change that probably won't.
Time can help a strong name find its moment. I've seen that happen. But I've also watched names just get older without getting better. Trends shift. Naming patterns move. The window you thought you were waiting for quietly closes.
EmmaStone.com was worth fifteen years because the name was doing the work the entire time. Time just let the right moment catch up to it.
That's the part worth holding onto. Not the patience itself, but what the patience was actually built on.