How a founder stepped back from day-to-day operations after several failed attempts

Do you own the business, or does the business own you?

Who really owns a business? There are plenty of answers. My favourite: the person who can shut it down. If you can do that, the other decisions are yours too. If you can't, perhaps you don't really own it.

Perhaps it is the other way around.

When you're building a business, your life revolves around it. You put your whole life into it, going to sleep thinking about the company and waking up doing the same.

You'd like a way to get your life back without having to shut the business down.

One of my clients reached a point where he could no longer stand the management meetings he had to attend every week.

If those meetings drive you mad, there are usually two possible reasons. Either something is wrong with the meetings and they need to be run differently, or it is time for you to stop attending and do something more useful and interesting.

For this founder, it was time to stop attending.

We'd been working together for several years. He'd built a successful business and was doing well financially. There was already a Porsche in the garage. But instead of driving it, he was sitting through meetings that bored him.

It's natural to want to step back at that point. But attempts to delegate usually end with the founder stepping back in to fix what's gone wrong.

It turns out that who you put in charge matters. Who would have thought?

There are usually not that many options. You can promote an existing employee or hire someone from outside.

Promoting an existing executive puts a valuable employee at risk. They struggle with the unfamiliar role while you wait for results. Eventually, you start overriding their decisions or making those decisions yourself. Conflict follows. You end up back in operations, without a CEO and without the key employee you started with.

Or you hire a COO or CEO from outside, sometimes with a team of their own. They make everything look convincing: professional managers can be good at that. Then performance starts to slip. You look more closely, discover what's really going on, and fire them. The conflict still happens, only later and at a greater cost to the business.

The uncomfortable truth is that you're unlikely to get it right without some trial and error. You can make the process shorter, less painful, and less risky. Growth Tracking helps you spot problems sooner and make difficult decisions. But learning to delegate also means discovering what doesn't work before you find what does.

This founder had already tried several times, appointing executives and then letting them go. He hired an operations director whom he hoped to develop into a CEO. This time, the team quickly pushed back: they couldn't work with the new hire. At least he found out early.

Then the most important thing happened. The executives said to the founder: “How about you stop coming to our management meetings?”

When your team asks you to stop coming to its meetings, that's a good day. Getting there takes a lot of hard work: helping the team become more independent, training people, sharing business context, and helping them see the bigger picture.

You also need to work on yourself: stop getting in people's way, give them room to make mistakes, and learn to let go.

That second part is often harder and more important. In our weekly progress meetings, my client noticed that he kept volunteering for sprint tasks and then doing none of them. He'd lost all motivation for the work. If anything was going to happen, he had to stop controlling every detail. He wasn't going to do it himself, so he might as well let the team try.

The team tried. And it worked.

One of the executives gradually took on the CEO role. The focus of our weekly sessions shifted from supporting the founder to supporting her. Making that transition work took a lot of effort.

The founder needed to be ready to let go.

The new CEO needed training. Both she and the founder took my programme at Growth Tracking School. They say it helped.

The CEO also needed to take responsibility. That part was straightforward: eventually, she became so frustrated with the lack of progress that she banged her fist on the table. Probably a metaphorical fist on a metaphorical table. But perhaps not.

The founder and CEO needed to learn to communicate differently. In our sessions, we practised having open conversations without deciding in advance where they had to lead.

I often work with a founder and CEO together in these weekly sessions. We change how they work together so the CEO can take full responsibility for running the business and the founder can focus on something else. Their next venture, for example.