A. Jeff Ready answers:
Surprisingly, uncertainty is a positive sign when your business is transitioning and growing. At this stage, many entrepreneurs have those feelings, and as a result will sometimes make the mistake of hiring someone else to “take over” where they lack confidence and feel uncertain.
Hiring someone can be the right move, but this is not automatically the case. The challenge is in managing the company through this transition stage. It is far more difficult to find executives who have done that than it is to find those with experience that begins on the other side of the transition. This is why you see so many failures when executives are brought into these situations too early.
The challenge is often one of transitioning your responsibilities over to those you have hired. At an early stage, the entrepreneur often takes on vast amounts of responsibility and decision-making, hiring employees to help with tasks but not necessarily with strategy and management. Later, this becomes an unmanageable and unsustainable situation, because the company can not grow further until the responsibility and decision-making is delegated to other members of the team.
This is not an easy thing for entrepreneurs to go through, as they pride themselves on flexibility, quick thinking, and seizing the moment – giving up control is not something they are necessarily good at.
Before thinking about giving up control completely by hiring someone to take over, I would certainly consider engaging in some executive coaching. There are many executive coaches who have helped entrepreneurs through these very questions.
Likewise, there are many organisations which offer mentoring and discussion for CEOs. You will be surprised by the number of people you meet who have already gone through these same questions.
Finally, at Scale Computing one of the things we’ve found successful is “teaching” entrepreneurship to all of our employees: how to write a business plan, pitch to investors for capital, engage with customers, and grow a business. We find that this helps create a culture of entrepreneurial thinking throughout the organisation, and creates a situation where there is less angst over giving up responsibilities, because you know that your employees are thinking like you do.
Jeff Ready is a serial entrepreneur. He is CEO and co-founder of Scale Computing, which launched in the UK this year after building up success in the US. Its clients include the City of London.
www.scalecomputing.com