First, fire thyself
One of the hardest things for first-time founder/CEOs to figure out is what role to play as the company starts to grow.
All CEOs, founding or not, have a center of gravity. It can be sales, product, engineering, marketing, finance, etc. It’s the place they feel most comfortable, most grounded. It’s where they grew up in their career, or if they haven’t had much of one yet, it’s the place where they feel they have insight or instinct.
At the start of a company’s life, founding CEOs are often also doing the jobs of other “skill” positions (being the head of product, for example). But, inertia is a very powerful force. It’s very easy to just keep doing what you were doing. If you were a coder in the early part of your company’s life, it’s easy to just keep coding. If you were a product person in the beginning, it’s easy to stay deeply involved in product.
The error I see, far too often, is that founding CEOs do these skill positions way too long and don’t recognize the cost to the organization.
For example, let’s say a founding CEO is a really good product person. As the company adds its first few engineers, the CEO keeps playing the product role (in addition to, usually, the BD role, the sales role, and the marketing role). As the business grows more, the CEO realizes they need to add more bench strength by bringing in some senior specialists — let’s say a head of BD. Then the same happens for marketing. Then sales.
But the last thing to go is usually the CEO’s “comfort zone” skill (what they grew up in their career doing and, in this example, product).
Founding CEOs usually don’t give up the role for a few reasons:
- They’re incredibly picky. They know what they want (they’ve been doing the job) and they don’t believe any one else can do it.
- It’s hard for them to spend money on something that’s already getting done.
- It’s WAY too easy for the CEO to undervalue the opportunity cost of remaining head of product themselves.
- It’s hard to recognize how much better the product would be if someone were focused on it full time instead of them multi-tasking.
- They fear that they won’t know what value they’re adding any longer if they give up their skill position.
If you’re a founding CEO, I believe that you are doing your company a disservice if you don’t fire yourself from your skill position. Your goal, crazy as it sounds, is to free up 50% of your time by constantly firing yourself from whatever skill position you’re playing.
Why do I think this is important? Two reasons:
1) As the founding CEO, you’re one of the very, very few people who can hold the whole business in your head. You understand all aspects of the company. You know its founding. You know what the original insights were that led you to start this business in the first place. You have memory of your early mistakes. You know the history of all the product decisions you’ve made. You likely have an intuitive sense of customers, what it takes to entice and sell them, and what messages they respond to.
In short, you know the whole business like no one else does (your co-founders might be able to as well, but they’re likely going deeper into their skill positions). That’s what makes you unique and irreplaceable. That’s your highest value-add.
2) Given that you’re one of the only ones who can hold the whole business in your head, you need time to THINK. You need time to be able to consider where your business is heading. You need time to read. You need time to talk to customers. You need time to respond to a new, interesting opportunity that no one else has time for.
Slack time has tremendous (and tremendously underappreciated) value. A CEO with slack time and the drive to use that time to continually consider the future of the business is a fantastic combination.
With the whole business in your head and half of your time free, you can:
- Spot new big opportunities earlier. Given slack time, you can synthesize new information you’re getting in the market, in what you read, in conversations you’re having, in letting your mind wander, and you can use that to spot new, big opportunities earlier than others.
- Think longer term about how you want your business to look in one, two or three years. Skill positions don’t have that luxury.
- Think about how your company might get killed.
- Think about your *business*, not just your product. (Product-oriented CEOs confuse these two sometimes).
- Consider if you’ve got the right people leading the skill position roles.
So, I encourage all founding CEOs to ask themselves the question — how would I free up 50% of my time? It probably involves (a) getting comfortable that getting slack time is actually very value-creating for the organization, and (b) hiring your replacement for the skill position you’re spending your time on.
Go ahead and fire yourself. You’ll be really glad you did.
Great article and something I will try to keep in mind when my company (hopefully) continues to grow.
Especially love this: “getting comfortable that getting slack time is actually very value-creating for the organization”.
I only just started out in my own web marketing business, and already I find that the personal skills I have that caused people to hire me in the first place (SEO, lead generation) , I am HAVING to delegate. We have about 10 clients and I cannot possibly do the work required any more, without assistance. So instead of employees, we hire on a job by job basis on Odesk and similar places. I have given myself the 2 minute rule. Can I do a task in 2 minutes? Yes – do it myself. No – delegate.
The biggest Catch-22 of the recession: It’s the people on the bottom, who do the actual work, not the people at the top, who get fired.
Because the people at the top aren’t going to fire themselves.
Nor are they going to reduce their pay. University of California administrators are getting raises at the same time classes and student aid are cut.
Joe, this is awesome. My partner & I have been toying with this idea for a while now.. actually got some advice from a consultant that said to: “Hire over the top”
You’re 110% correct when you say one of the reasons CEO’s don’t fire themselves.. “They’re incredibly picky. They know what they want (they’ve been doing the job) and they don’t believe any one else can do it.” <– unfortunate, but true.
Our company (http://www.webmechanix.com) is 100% service-based right now but I bet you can guess what I'm going to say next..
We're trying to develop a product & I think this post gave us significant motivation to "fire ourselves", "hire over the top", and focus on the bigger picture
Thanks for the clear vision
Very profound thoughts! Firing oneself can really lead to better things, but many are afraid to do it! You really shed light on the topic and I wish this would get more screen time.
Thanks!
As a writer, I hate not knowing a phrase that’s thrown out as if everyone knows it. The New Yorker did that recently with comments on the stock market, the market being characterized as corrupted by “asymmetrical information” (?)
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Excellent! I 100% agree. Vision + direction = Founder/CEO
Amy
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I completely agree with you on this one.
My partner and I had a lot of a tension a couple years back as our the business was slowing down. Although she was one of the best at her profession, there came a point when we had disagreements as to what we needed to do in order to increase our sale. Because she has seniority in they industry, we went with her strategy. As time passed, it didn’t change much because in my opinion it was the same formula, hence, the result were still not satisfying. This of course, led to more disagreement and so i basically handed the company to her to save our friendship and to know that I wouldn’t have to deal with it and focus on the future. Sometimes you win, many times you lose, but i did learn one thing in pocker. that it is that one big hand that really matters. However, while I was looking at other opportunities, I felt emotionally attached to the business and so I came back one day to see how she was doing. During that conversation, she was mainly concern about sales and how the economy had slow down the business. And after a few days of doing some sales research, I realized that.
1. I had more time to plan our strategy
2. although my partner and I didn’t get along before, we could still work together but not in the same office. Our relationship became much better.
Had I not fired myself, We would had never bounced back and change the entire structure in which, I ended up in business development. =]
Sebastien Lormier
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As I prepare for startup I have been given similar advice. At this point passing the batons becomes hugely important. For all the hats I wear, turning one over is like passing a baby from my arms to the arms of another. You don’t let go until you know the other person is holding the baby. Once you do you go on to the next baby to pass on to another. Team-building and delegating so you can direct activities from a higher perspective, but not from an ivory tower. I know what I have, I’m in process of turning hats over, and freeing up attention for things that only I can do… until the day I fire myself from that role! Great article.
~ S
Like Larry and Sergey. Many of the founders, with bad luck, were fired only after they went bankrupt.
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