Because the employees we lost were never going to be partners in the LLC, we were able to find decent replacements for them, but a third employee just quit. In this case nobody's heart is really broken. He was good at what he did, but for some reason never really mixed in with everyone else. Plus, from his perspective, he had a long commute, and when the opportunity to cut his commute drastically came up, he told me he had to take this position.
He also didn't have a vote of confidence from one of the LLC partners, George. They seemed to get along okay, but whenever a new project came up for George to run, he never asked for this employee to work with him -- and I do mean never. We recently started a new project that George would run, and it would have made for a much shorter commute for this employee, but George said no, he already had some people in mind for the project. I made it clear that this would be a shorter commute for this employee, but it was clear that without me forcing this employee on George, he was not going to work with him. And now that the employee has resigned, I'm not terribly happy with George. He may not have been a leader for us technically, but financially he was worth $200K in revenue per year.
I thanked the employee for his work with us, and told him I appreciated everything he had done for us. What I didn't tell him was that based on his 8-to-5 mentality, and his lack of relationships with other employees and customers he was never going to be an LLC partner anyway, but that's just not something I was going to share.