How do I leave without burning bridges?
I'm in kind of a tricky situation mainly due to relationships.
I joined my best friend's dad's company several years ago because I spotted an opportunity for a lot of growth if we executed a business strategy right. The salary for the position was insanely low given what I could've gotten if I worked elsewhere (or continued my own business), but I made a bet on the equity/revenue upside since I felt like there was a huge amount of untapped potential in that business vertical.
A couple years later and that obviously has not panned out, and I shifted focus away from my own company to work on this new one so my own income has declined significantly since then. I just signed an offer to join a different company at literally 4x the total comp (3x the base salary), but I just have a lot of anxiety over how to break the news to my friend's dad without completely burning bridges.
I feel like he'd be blindsided by the news, and given that I'm the lead for the current projects being worked on it could potentially sink the entire business. I'm still going to offer to help out with transitions, providing knowledge & mentoring, and even some hands-on work here-and-there, but I don't know if there's anything else I can / should do.
Have not talked with my friend about the new position yet, I was intending to earlier but we couldn't meet up due to schedule conflict. New position starts in 4 weeks, so I'd need to give notice either this week or next week.
Just looking for advice on what you would do in my situation. I'm grateful for the opportunity I got to grow and build new thing (even if I think the comp wasn't competitive, but I'm not going to make a big deal about that given flexibility in other areas that a traditional company would not give me).
Classic case of mixing personal relationships with business, it's something I try to avoid but networking is a huge part of how I've even gotten this far with my own companies / lines of work so it's hard to have that separation.