Opinions expressed by business partners are their own.
Key takeaways
- The transition from a founder to a strategic CEO is essential to growing a business, which requires trust in a well-chosen team.
- Effective CEOs foster a collaborative environment, empower division leaders and focus on the big picture rather than micromanaging.
- As CEO, success is measured by strategic KPIs and shifts from task completion to fostering sustainable business growth and market adaption.
When you take a leap of faith to bring your vision, your idea to life, and start your company, you wear many hats and perform many tasks. You develop the business plan and deck pitch, help create a great product or service offering, create and implement marketing strategies, make sales, handle customer service and get takeout for everyone working late at night. You are on the front line.
Once you get your company off the ground and running, however, it’s time to grow, which means scaling everything and letting go of micro-controlling. This requires a shift in mindset from founder to leader and CEO.
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Trust your team
Take your time with the initial jobs in your startup. Having the right people in the right positions is critical so that when the time comes, you can feel good about leaving every task, every decision, and every interaction that you’ve been used to while building the business.
You want a team that is ready and equipped to lead in their areas of expertise when you take over the CEO reins.
Give up control
While getting a company off the ground, you’re used to being involved in every detail, so it’s hard to let go. You have built your reputation on certain standards and feel secure that, if you continue to control everything yourself, these standards will not fall. It requires accepting uncertainty and trusting others to meet – even exceed – those standards – and act in a way that protects your reputation and profitability.
But to be an effective CEO and take the company to the next level, you need to get out of your own way. If every decision requires your approval and oversight, it only creates obstacles that prevent progress. Morale also suffers when your staff feel frustrated and powerless to contribute to the company’s success. You’re missing out on fostering a collaborative environment where different voices can inspire fresh perspectives.
Redefine your value as a CEO.
The vision you had as a founder made your product or service marketable and your hard work made the business successful. Now is the time to move from being a builder to an architect of that vision, expanding it. Focus on strategy and the big picture, not execution. This goes back to micromanaging workflows, staffing and letting go of day-to-day operations. Communicate what needs to happen and by whom and why. And leave it to your team.
Ask for advice, ask for feedback.
As a CEO, you want to continuously learn to reinforce your vision. Seek advice from experienced leaders who can mentor you and provide you with insight and perspective to make better decisions, avoid costly mistakes, and focus on long-term growth.
Continue cultivating leaders
As your company scales from 10 or 20 employees to a few hundred or more, continuing to nurture leaders is critical. As CEO, you want to shape and empower the people who will run each of your divisions. Your role is to create an environment where people thrive, take ownership and are accountable for their work. You want leaders and their teams who are invested in the company’s success, who realize that, when the business improves, they will improve.
For example, the founder of a small managing general agency built a firm serving several niche markets into a billion-dollar company with national reach in a few years. Initially, he was involved in every task and transaction – from hiring staff to developing products, working with underwriters, negotiating terms and contracts with insurers, providing input to the tech team to build a proprietary quote-bind platform, acquiring additional products to expand offerings, working on marketing and sales strategies, and more.
He pressed the reset button as CEO to grow the business, with each division leader taking full ownership of strategy, operations and results in their respective regions. Today, the company is an industry leader in its space.
Measure long-term success.
As a CEO, measuring progress moves from assessing completed tasks (checking those boxes) to focusing on key performance indicators (KPIs). These KPIs include sales growth rate, which measures how fast your revenue grows over time. your gross profit margin; cost of customer acquisition; customer retention rate; and the flexibility of your business model, which measures how well you can adapt the business to market changes.
Staying disciplined on these metrics requires surrounding yourself with experienced advisors and professional partners who have helped businesses like yours scale. They help you establish the right measurements, solidify your foundation and guide the way forward.
How well the company does will depend on how well you do as a CEO, not as a founder who is in full control. Confidence in your leadership skills and trusting your team to execute on your vision will enable you to grow the business and achieve sustainable growth.
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Key takeaways
- The transition from a founder to a strategic CEO is essential to growing a business, which requires trust in a well-chosen team.
- Effective CEOs foster a collaborative environment, empower division leaders and focus on the big picture rather than micromanaging.
- As CEO, success is measured by strategic KPIs and shifts from task completion to fostering sustainable business growth and market adaption.
When you take a leap of faith to bring your vision, your idea to life, and start your company, you wear many hats and perform many tasks. You develop the business plan and deck pitch, help create a great product or service offering, create and implement marketing strategies, make sales, handle customer service and get takeout for everyone working late at night. You are on the front line.
Once you get your company off the ground and running, however, it’s time to grow, which means scaling everything and letting go of micro-controlling. This requires a shift in mindset from founder to leader and CEO.
