How to Fire Yourself and Hire a Replacement

How to Fire Yourself and Hire a Replacement How to Fire Yourself and Hire a Replacement This doesnt have to mean dislocating yourself from the organization but it can mean relinquishing the supreme control that founders/CEOs often retain over every part of the business. There are several ways to do it.For example, you could split the CEO role in two and retain control over the parts that you excel in, which could be the more technical or product related areas of the business, and perhaps an external professional could focus on operations, sales and marketing. Or vice versa.Alternately, you could move out of day-to-day operations into a board role or perhaps more of a strategic consultant role so you can focus on what you do best, which could be ideas, innovation or thought leadership.The beauty of it is that having built this great firm you can choose to cherry spielblttchen the role you want, to a degree, as long as it can fit into a sensible operating structure. And after its all done, you might even feel relieved. And of course, just because you dont excel at something you dont necessarily have to relinquish control as long as you can adapt and develop skills in those areas.So, as you can see, there are many quite palatable options and scenarios around voluntarily firing yourself as founder/CEO. And if it is something you are ready to do, one of the first things you should do is take an honest look at your own strengths and weaknesses and begin to develop a range of potential abdication scenarios much like I have described above. Each scenario should constitute, at the very least, an organization chart showing your role and duties in the new structure and the role and duties of the incoming CEO and other key executives. And it goes without saying that you should try and focus your role around your strengths and relinquish areas where you are weak.Having completed this exercise you can go to the market and search for CEO or high-level management talent. Its vital to be flexible, which is why I suggested a range of scenarios, as you can never be sure what talent is available and you may wish to adapt your internal structure in order to fit in a particularly promising CEO candidate.Of course, this is a highly simplified outline of the process and principles of founder/CEO abdication, and in reality, this would be a long consultative process requiring input from a range of key stakeholders.Good luck with your enterprise.