The Four Roles A Startup Founder Has.

As the founder of a startup or early-stage business, you and your co-founders will need to play many roles, from chief salesperson, recruiter, product designer and visionary, right through to being the do-er of mundane but important things like paying the monthly utilities bill and cleaning the office.

As your businesses grows, it will start to become apparent you should not do everything, nor are you likely capable of doing absolutely everything.

There’s a point where you may have a small epiphany and realise that while you’re still a startup, you’re actually building a Company. Now is the time you can start see at there is another level you need to assess the role(s) you play in the growth and success of your Company.

This brief article may help you to understand that in a formal sense, there are actually four distinct roles you may have…

1. Founder: a largely symbolic role, but critically responsible for vision, values and energy; 

2. Executive: a specific position in the company such as CEO, CFO, CTO, VP of Sales etc that is tasked to deliver measurable outcomes against a business plan, budget, job description and set of key performance indicators;

3. Company Director and member of the Board of Directors: a formal role that is both legally accountable and personally responsible for the conduct, governance and proper running of the company in accordance with applicable corporate regulations; and

4. Investor: a provider of investment funds to fuel growth until the company runs cash positive.

Most founding teams assume that they will all fulfil all of the above four roles, but over time that is generally not going to happen and often ends up being counter-productive to the growth of the business for founders to hang on to all four roles.

Having an honest and direct conversation between founders early on in the evolution of the business to agree on when, why, how and in what circumstances a founding partner may need to formally accept or drop out of any or all of these roles is a very good investment in future-proofing your business.

A good example of this is where you may have 3-4 co-founders and it may not be appropriate for all to be company directors, but each should have a clearly defined executive role and be accountable for delivery of their area of responsibility.

If you're a founder, let me know in the comments how you have handled these multiple roles and the challenges you have faced?