When you start a business, you are ‘CEO by default’. But what if you could become the CEO you’ve always wanted to be? A remarkable CEO for your team, your investors, and your business.

What does remarkable leadership look like? How can you achieve it?

Becoming a remarkable CEO means developing a specific skillset and mindset, much like a great developer or successful salesperson. At the heart of being a great founder CEO, whatever the stage of your business, is the ability to inspire with a vision, convene people around that vision and execute on it. How a successful CEO achieves this differs based on the current size and goals of the company as well as their own personal preferences and experiences.

No two founder CEOs are the same and the founder CEO role is not static. As your company changes your role will change and you will need to change. What you need to know is how you fulfil your potential as founder CEO so your company can realise its potential.

It is possible to actively plan and manage your role and your development. In fact, it is critical if you are to stay ahead and lead your company’s growth.

The journey starts with examining three key areas:

Who are you? Take stock of who you are today and what stage of business you are in.
Time to change. Acknowledging that there will be a time that your role needs to change and how to recognise it.
Make the change. Making the required changes in how you perform your role in anticipation of your company's growth.

1. The founder CEO you are today

To know where you are going you first need to know your starting point. Consider a) what you bring to the role of CEO today and b) how to define your role according to the stage of your business.

A: What you bring to the role

What you bring to the role of Founder CEO is a mixture of vision, personal preferences, and experience. Part of what makes a great scaleup CEO is self-awareness. Knowing what you bring to the table plus where your limitations lie will help you uncover and address your blind spots.

The need to have a clear vision for your company is obvious. What has been less explored are the founder’s motivations and preferences in how they deliver on this vision. A lack of clarity could mean that instead of feeling fulfilled and successful, you find yourself isolated, burnt-out, and feeling trapped, wondering where it all went wrong.

The good news is that it is possible to scale a business sustainably, enjoy the journey and create a business both for purpose and for profit. It is up to you as a founder to set the company on track through your leadership, management practices, business culture, and design.

Your experience and individual strengths shape how you execute your vision, as well as how you shape and perform your role.

Perhaps you’ve started a business previously, worked in a startup, or have experienced working for other leaders or founder CEOs. These are all reference points you can draw on to decide how you want to do the founder CEO role, not to mention where and when you will need support.

Your individual strengths and preferences will be clear in the tasks you are drawn to and how you like to go about your work. A strength might be that you are motivated by personal growth and exhaust yourself with your work ethic. Knowing this, you can look for growth opportunities in activities you’d otherwise procrastinate.

Discovering what you bring to the founder CEO role through reflective exercises, psychological tests, and feedback from others can be a tremendously insightful process. A founder coach can help guide you through this process, providing structure, accountability, and encouragement.

Then you’ll be ready to define your role as founder CEO.

B. How to define your role

Some responsibilities will always fall to you as founder CEO. Championing the company vision, capital raising, and managing key relationships are all good examples. Other activities will depend on the stage and size of your company.

Your company stage will dictate the focus of your role. When building an innovative business from idea to scale most businesses will go through these four stages:

Problem/Solution fit - building a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). Pre-seed investment.
Product/Market fit - customer acquisition and retention. Seed investment.
Growth - acquiring a greater market share. Seed or Series A.
Scale - growing revenues with minimal additional investment or overhead. Series A +

As your company moves through these stages your team will grow, which requires changes to your role. The Leadership Pipeline model identifies six transitions and the change in behaviours each should trigger. The six transitions are:

Here I’ve mapped them to the Leadership Pipeline role transitions:

Remember, if you are a founder CEO you are a business manager from day one. Even in the early days, it’s important to create time to step back and think about the big picture.

Reflective Exercise: Write yourself a role description and review it every six months or annually. Consider including:

A brief overview of your role considering your company’s vision, structure, and strategy.

Areas of responsibility and your role in delivering them.

Objectives associated with those responsibilities with measures of success.

Competencies required to deliver on those objectives.

Key relationships required to perform your role.

Development goals.

Input from peers, advisors, and feedback from your team.

A good question to ask is “What would you do differently if you were in my role?” This can garner valuable feedback even if you are a serial entrepreneur.

If this sounds important but you’re wondering when you’ll make time for it, a service such Aata’s Leadership Check-in can provide focus and accountability. Designed for growth-stage Founder CEOs, you'll gain insight into the CEO you are today and identify areas for professional development to support the next stage of business growth.

2. How to recognise when it’s time for your role to change

Once you are clear on your starting point, the next step is to look ahead. What got you here won’t get you there. How can you stay one step ahead of your company’s growth?

The key is recognising when it is time to review your role and upskill. Ideally, you want to be doing this before it is mission-critical.

A review of your role may be prompted by anticipated organisational changes. You may sense intuitively that what you’re doing is no longer working. Alternatively, trusted advisers or members of your team may tell you explicitly that it’s time to change.

Anticipating organisational changes

You can anticipate changes in staff numbers and organisational structure that will require you to review and transition in your role as founder CEO. If you scale up your company with external investment (vs revenues) the time to review your role is when you start capital raising.

Changes in company stage, staff numbers, or fundraising are each trigger points to review your role.

An intuitive sense that what you’re doing is no longer working

As the company grows, you may feel that you no longer know what is happening in the business. You may not be clear on your role or how you’re adding value. You may be tempted to revert to familiar tasks and find that your team doesn't always respond well to your involvement.

Feeling uncomfortable, uncertain, and unnatural are all perfectly normal feelings as you make changes to your role. If you’re going to continue as Founder CEO you will need to get comfortable with being out of your comfort zone and enjoy learning and growing.

Below is a list of the transitions I see successful Founder CEOs make in their roles. Do you recognise any signs of reluctance to give up activities in the Founder column? Or a recognition that the business and your team would benefit from you performing more activities in the CEO column?

Moving into the Scale stage, raising Series A funding. As the Management Team and Board take greater accountability and starting to hire at pace:

Other tell-tale signs you’re holding back your business

It isn't easy to let go of control when you’ve built a business from scratch. But holding on too tightly can hold your business back. Your business might be suffering from Founder's Syndrome. It happens and it can be rectified if you catch yourself early.

Your employees are your canary in the mine on this one - if they are willing to tell the truth.

Here are some tell-tale signs:

Founder becomes a bottleneck for decisions
High turnover of senior roles
Management lacks necessary skills to scale
Unwillingness to trust external experts
Unsustainable expectations placed on employees

3. Making the change from Founder to CEO

Knowing is one thing, doing is entirely different. As discussed earlier, it’s not unusual for the transition to feel uncomfortable, uncertain, and unnatural. It is also an incredible opportunity for learning and growth if you’re open to it.

Here are three things you can do to make these transitions easier:

Set your business up ‘right’ from the start.
Challenge your perspective.
Create space to digest what you’re seeing and hearing.

1. Setting your business up right from the start

A clear vision, an aligned culture, and a team you trust will make it easier for you to let go of the details and focus on the bigger picture; the future of the business, and the legacy you’re building. Building a sustainable business – one focused on people, impact, and growth - is both possible and exciting.

2. Challenge your perspective

The fastest way to upskill is to see your role in a new light. You’ll achieve this by challenging your perspective and creating space to digest what you’re seeing and hearing.

In a recent conversation, a VC summed up the greatest challenge in a Founder CEO’s journey from Seed to Series A perfectly:

“[It’s] the transition from being the ‘hero operator’ who can fix everything, to the ‘coach and visionary’ whose role it is to lead the organisation.”
- Venture Capital Investor.

Once a founder shifts into the ‘coach and visionary’ mindset, their top three challenges become easier to deal with:

Ensuring there’s sufficient money in the bank through fundraising
Hiring, and keeping, the right people, and
Getting along with your co-founders.

Seeking out colliding perspectives

Seek out advisors, mentors and peers with different experiences and perspectives to yours. Perhaps there are people in your own business who offer very different perspectives. Look for individuals who have a different worldview and will challenge your thinking.

Asking open questions and listening are fundamental to creating a relationship dynamic to hear what you need to hear. These are skills you will enhance through professional group coaching.

3. Making sense of what you’re hearing

All too often, Founder CEOs are so engrossed with putting out the latest fire that they don’t prioritise the conversations with their network and time to reflect that will allow them to learn, grow and more easily deal with the next challenge. This is where the additional accountability of a professional business coach or peer group can help.

Consider how far you want to go as Founder CEO

This is something to consider both when you start your business and as it grows. You may be particularly well suited for one stage of business growth but not the next. That’s ok.

Consider this when planning for investment and consider speaking to your preferred investor about how they handle founder transitions.

If you want to stick with the Founder CEO role, a question you should ask yourself is whether you are willing to be coached. Investors commonly ask about the founding team and founder CEO, ‘are they coachable?’

What they are asking is whether you are open to feedback, willing to reflect, and seek and value other perspectives.

When doing team due diligence on the founding team, investors can tell those who are coachable, demonstrated with comments such as:

“They weren’t defensive or asking what to do. They listened and were open.”
“You raise a logical issue. She’ll take time to think about it and come back to you with what she thinks is right.”
“Stays curious and holds a strong vision of what could be.”

If you start to feel that the Founder CEO role is no longer for you that’s perfectly normal too. Many founders have successfully handed over the CEO role. It is far better to know this and transition out than to hold on and have your investors or Board ask you to step down.

A great Board will help you recognise when it’s time for change and support you through the process. Your Board includes your investment partner so choose them wisely and ask how they support founder transitions.

Next steps

1. Assess what you currently bring to the Founder CEO role and where to put your focus:

Assess what you bring to the role in terms of your experience and what you know about yourself.

Assess the current stage of your business, the most recent leadership transition you have made and your business priorities.

Seek feedback from your team to identify areas for improvement.

Draft a job description for yourself.

2. Identify the next transition you will need to make:

Make an assessment of the next transition you will need to make based on anticipated organisational changes.

Identify the Founder to CEO shifts you intuitively know you need to work on or are getting feedback from your team that it is time to make.

3. Set yourself up to successfully make the transition:

Review Aata’s scaling sustainably article. Have you set up your business to support your successful transition to Founder CEO?

Review your support and peer network. Do they offer different perspectives on the business challenges you are facing and are you getting to hear them?

Choose how you wish to make sense of your experiences as Founder CEO. Through journalling, business coaching, peer conversations for example, or a mixture.

As you consider your stage of business and choose your investment partners, ensure you choose wisely and pick a partner who matches your values as well as your business goals.

We’ve done some of the hard work for you and investigated investors with a difference; those interested in both female founders and investing for impact as well as growth.

Download our guide to find the right investor for you.

Download VCs with a Difference

What does remarkable leadership look like as a Founder CEO?