The Phone Call That Saved a Company — and the Faith That Sustained a Family

At 1:00 in the morning, Dick Aderman lay awake thinking about the people whose lives were about to change. The private equity–backed company he led was expected to close later that day, and the employees were scheduled to gather at 8:30 a.m. to receive the news.

Then a text arrived from his CFO: Have you seen your email?

Throughout the night, the private equity team and the company negotiating to purchase the business continued providing updates. Dick still did not know what the morning would bring. He could only think about the employees and families who would be affected if the company closed.

Then, at 7:30 a.m.—just one hour before the planned employee meeting—the call came. The company was being purchased. Instead of announcing its closure, Dick and his team were told to carry on as though it were a normal business day.

“We didn’t get our payout like we had hoped,” Aderman says, “but the company’s still going and it’s still doing the things that we really wanted it to do.”

It’s a small line for what was, in the moment, an unbearable weight—the kind of weight only a person who has carried final decisions alone in a room can fully understand.

The Loneliness Nobody Warns You About

Aderman has led turnarounds, run venture-backed startups, and coached CEOs across industries. He knows the particular isolation of the corner office better than most. "People think being a CEO is this cool thing where everybody kind of admires you," he says. "But when you have to make decisions, you're in a room by yourself and you've got to come to that conclusion. Some of those decisions are really tough."

He learned early that different environments demand different kinds of faith. Corporate life, he says, tempts leaders with flattery that can quietly distort judgment. Private equity often pushes leaders toward purely financial decisions that can clash with compassion for the people affected. Venture work, by contrast, runs almost entirely on trust — betting on people and ideas before there's proof they'll work.

"You're putting a lot of faith in them to take that investment and grow it. So — five talents, four talents, one talent. What are we doing? Are we burying it? Are we investing it? How are we being good stewards of that?"

That question — stewardship over hoarding, movement over stagnation — became one of Aderman's guiding principles. "When a company gets stagnant, it dies," he says, pointing to Xerox as a cautionary tale of an organization that failed to innovate as the world moved past it. "You have to keep striving, or the company dies."

A Year That Tested Everything

Long before he could articulate any of that with confidence, Aderman lived through a season that stripped his faith down to its studs. In 2009, his father died on New Year's Day. His wife had her thyroid removed. He lost his job in the fallout of the 2008 economic collapse. Then, after a routine surgery to remove a mass in her colon, his wife's surgical connection burst, flooding her abdomen with bile. Sepsis followed. Then ARDS — a condition that kills most of the people who develop it. She spent 90 days in the hospital. His mother died that November.

"I had a knockdown, drag-out fight with God," Aderman remembers. "I said, you can't take her. Our angels need her." The week before her surgery, the couple had wandered through an old church converted into an art gallery, its walls filled with paintings of children as angels. His wife has always had a gift with kids. The image stayed with him through every dark hour that followed.

Two years later, two physician friends admitted they'd seen her chest X-rays and hadn't had the heart to tell him she likely wouldn't survive. She did. "My prayer was answered for sure," Aderman says, "and others have been as well." The experience didn't just deepen his marriage — it recalibrated how he defines success in every room he walks into.

Picking Teams as a Ten-Year-Old

Aderman traces his leadership instincts back further than any boardroom — to gym class, choosing sides for kickball. "You'd get down to the last four or five kids who just weren't that good," he says. "I always wanted to make them feel like they were part of the team. I'd put them in a position where I thought they could succeed, then coach them on the field."

That instinct — find the right seat for the right person, then invest in their success — became the throughline of a four-decade career. It's also why Aderman describes his professional identity in three words: leader, mentor, multiplier.

"I have somewhere in the mid-twenties — 24, 25 people — who have worked for me and gone on to be presidents, CEOs, or owners of businesses. That, to me, is the legacy."

He's candid about where his own strengths end. "I work for an engineer and an emergency room doctor. Their eye for detail is incredible. Mine is not. My eye is on the relationship — how do we move people, move teams, move products."

What Winning Actually Means

Faith, for Aderman, isn't a separate compartment from his business life—it's the anchor underneath it. “When I first started leading in corporate life, I'm like, how do you make decisions on stuff? What do you anchor this on?” he says. “The beliefs I came up with are based on biblical principles—even more so today, in how I treat people, and how I respond when I'm not treated so well.”

He rediscovered Scripture as an adult through a men's Bible study called Heart of a Man and through a daily devotional habit that led him to read the entire Bible in a year. “It's the craziest thing,” he says. “I know I've read the Bible. It still looks brand new to me every time.”

For Aderman, winning has never been about one gifted leader carrying the entire organization. What truly excites him is seeing every member of a team understand their role, work together, and remain aligned around a shared purpose.

What gets me truly excited is when the teams I lead are playing their roles, working together, and aligned with the goals of the team. That is what winning looks like, and I have been blessed with teams that have pulled together to accomplish amazing things.

He sees that same principle operating in his Bible study. The men may bring different experiences, strengths, struggles, and perspectives, but they are growing together around a common foundation. “I think the same is true for our Bible study group,” he says. “We've seen tremendous growth in all the men in our group.” It is another expression of multiplication: people becoming stronger not only through individual effort, but through the encouragement, accountability, and shared faith of the group.

That renewed faith reshaped his definition of a life well spent. “When you take your eye off what's really important, you can lead yourself astray,” he says. “In your thirties, you're building your career, raising kids, trying to hold your marriage together—and you think making more money will make it all better. It doesn't. What matters is the relationships. The memory of sitting with my wife when she was sick. Helping my daughter get her first job. Being there when things got hard.”

The Legacy That Outlasts the Title

Today, through his work with Boomerang and his ongoing mentorship of executives, Aderman keeps returning to the same lesson he wants younger leaders to learn without having to survive what he survived: the score that matters most isn't measured in dollars or titles.

"How you define what's the most important thing changes as you get older," he says. "It's not how much money is in the bank. It's whether we were successful at setting out to do the things we set out to do — and who we brought along the way."

For leaders wrestling with the loneliness of the top, Aderman's story offers a different kind of scoreboard — one built on stewardship, relationship, and the quiet, costly faith it takes to keep choosing people over profit, even when no one is watching you make the call.