Courtesy / Marshall Communications
Ann Leamon
Updated: March 26, 2025
How to prepare your company for life without you (while making it stronger)
By Ann Leamon, guest contributor
Almost five years ago, I stepped down from daily management responsibility at the company I’d co-founded and run for a decade. Last month, I was welcomed to their winter party.
To my delight, they’ve gone from strength to strength, largely thanks to the software package they’ve developed that performs esoteric tasks particularly applicable to private equity fund managers and investors.
I could no more develop software than fly to the moon. But my successor as COO, a talented physicist and software developer, thanked me warmly for establishing the culture where he could work independently on the project — even to the point of writing arcane formulae on all the conference room white boards and, when he ran out of space, on the windows. Some of the ink hasn’t come off yet.
In January, Nancy Marshall and I published an article in Mainebiz about how to sell a business, stressing the point that businesses aren't bought they're sold. One of the things we didn’t talk about was how to set up your company to exist without you. That’s critical, though, because if you’re an irreplaceable part of the company, its value will be tied to you and selling it will be a lot more difficult.
As I reflected on my replaceability, I came up with three lessons:
Name your company carefully
The investment firm Blackstone was named after neither of its founders, Steve Schwarzman and Pete Peterson. To avoid having someone insist on meeting “Mr. Blackstone," the founders created a portmanteau of their surnames: Black from the German (Schwarz); stone from the Greek (Peter, or petra). This isn’t absolutely required — companies like the consulting firm McKinsey & Co. are thriving— but it’s easier to separate from your company if it doesn’t bear your name.
Choose and train your staff carefully
How companies should be managed evolves over time. Initially, the founder is in charge and allocates tasks to the staff. But with growth, the founder needs to give staff responsibilities, not tasks. How the staff fulfills the responsibility is up to them — and they won’t do it the way you would. Take your “sticky finger off the control button.”
Slowly give staff the freedom to carry out their responsibilities. You should have hired the right people and trained them correctly. They’ll make mistakes, of course, and your job then is to help them sort out what went wrong and how to fix it. Don’t let them to run too far amok in the early days.
Just as you don’t plunk your helmet-less kid on a bike and tell them to take a spin on Congress Street at 4:30 p.m., you don’t dump your biggest account on your new hire. But as you empower your staff, they’ll come up with solutions and innovations you’d never have imagined.
In venture capital firms, where the scarcest resource is partner time, many firms will put a junior staffer on the board of a struggling portfolio company. The person can’t make it worse and at least the partner is freed to pursue a more promising opportunity. Sometimes, the change in personnel improved the board’s functionality and helped the company pivot to success.
Instead of 'No,' say 'Let’s think about that.'
I hadn’t founded my company to become a software firm. When the idea was presented, I treated it as a growth opportunity for the firm and the staff. They did a rough design, then refined it across the whiteboards and windows. There was customer demand. As long as their deliverables didn’t suffer, I let them pursue it. Pursue it they did — caught up with it, tackled it and stuffed it in a bag. When my best data analyst wanted to spend a month overseas with his family, I asked him how we could make it work. He devised the plan and it worked perfectly.
These strategies take you as the founder/boss out of the limelight. You train your staff to take responsibility and think through ideas and changes. Of course you don’t give them completely free rein, but you use the lightest possible touch to guide them. After all, if you didn’t want their ideas and enthusiasm, you shouldn’t have hired them. Over time and with practice, you’ll be able to step away from day-to-day responsibilities — but not matters of leadership and strategy — and let the team carry on. “Look Ma, no hands!” You’ve achieved your goal.
For more about empowering your staff, I recommend Ken Wilcox’s book on management, “Leading Through Culture.”
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