One of the hardest parts of growing the business you founded is letting go of it after you’ve hired and trained. Letting go of every decision. Letting go of things being done exactly how you’d like.
You hang on because complexity grows with the organization, and that makes you nervous. Making decisions takes more time. The team iterates more because there are more minds to meddle.
But as the organization grows more complex, your job shouldn’t. In hiring, you’re passing the torch to folks who do a better job at things you don’t have time to do well anymore.
At the start, you feel like a drifter. Jobless. Useless. It’s the founder’s empty nest syndrome. It’s the feeling you get when, at last, the company can probably run itself and you’re left to figure out what’s next.
If you trust your hiring decisions and your team trusts in their abilities, your path should be clear. If you’re a good leader, maybe you’ll spend your time helping individuals achieve their goals as they work to attain the goals of the company. If you were always more of a craftsman, maybe you’ll turn back to programming, or cooking, or whatever got you into business in the first place. Maybe that’ll end up creating a new company, who knows.
But if you don’t trust yourself, you’ll drift towards micromanagement. You’ll call your staff’s decisions into question at every opportunity. You roll up your sleeves and say “here let me just do this”. Your staff loses trust in themselves. Your clients never rid themselves of their dependency on you. You’re not any happier. That’s a downward spiral of trust, productivity, and business.
Once the founder’s nest is empty, you need leave it too. Get out and see the world the company has created. Evaluate the sum, not the parts. Once your absence has proven that the company can survive without you, you’ll appreciate that it’s no longer yours, it’s theirs, and it will be just fine that way. Onwards!
{Craig Bryant is founder and product manager of Kin, and cofounder of We Are Mammoth, a web consulting firm in Chicago.}