Situation: A founding CEO wants to cut back to 1-2 days per week with someone else overseeing day-to-day operations. Her timeline to accomplish this is 3 years. Currently she splits her time between engineering and sales support, managing operations, overseeing the CFO and managing the company. How do you accomplish this transition? What is your 3-year plan?
Advice from the CEOs:
- Advertise for and hire a General Manager/engineer who can understand the company’s applications and develop unique solutions.
- Advertise for and hire an understudy for the sales person. This could be someone in their 40s who is experienced, and who can act both as the sales person’s back-up and develop additional accounts to diversify the business.
- As
the company continues to grow it will take more time and effort to manage all
the activities. Plan the company’s organization chart and infrastructure to
account for this.
- Be careful not create an infrastructure during good times that is unsustainable during down times.
- As the new GM gains familiarity with the company, this individual will and should start to take control. This automatically means that the founding CEO will have to agree to release some of her control. Prepare for this.
- Consider
several alternatives for the GM:
- Super President – $400K.
- GM with engineering talent – perhaps a consulting or engineering sales background. Hire at $150-200K and develop into the President.
- Given the 3-year lead time this individual could be a Technical Lead or Project Engineer. The objective will be to develop a very talented person into the GM or President. This alternative opens a larger pool of talent, at lower initial cost.
- Where
are these people found?
- Trade association contacts.
- A high-quality engineer that another CEO won’t be hiring over the coming months. Talk to friends and industry contacts.
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