The usual advice to an owner with more ideas than hours is to hand off the present. Hire an operator, give them the day-to-day, and go back to the big picture. I think that gets the split backwards. The owner should keep running the business they know, and bring in a partner who holds the same vision, turns it into a map with dates and owners, and then leads the team down it alongside them.
That is the work I do as a fractional executive, and the order matters more than the org chart. It also runs against a frame a lot of mid-market owners already carry. EOS, which many leadership teams run on, describes the visionary as the "what" behind the business and the partner as the "how" in its Rocket Fuel material. There is a lot right in that. Two different strengths at the top beat one person trying to do both, and one of the first questions EOS asks the pair is whether the two of you agree on long-term goals. Where I part ways is what happens after that.
Why handing off the day-to-day can lose the vision
When the owner hands over the present, the vision goes with it, whether anyone means it to or not. Whoever runs the day makes hundreds of small calls a month about what gets done first, and each of those calls reads the vision through their own eyes. A year later the company can be running well toward a place the owner never picked.
The owner also knows things nobody else in the building does: which customers matter most, which promises were made and to whom, which manager will carry a hard project without being asked. Take the owner out of the daily work and that knowledge leaves the room with them.
Share it, map it, then walk it together
My model has three steps, and the sequence is the point.
First, both of us hold the vision. The owner does not hand it to me. We agree on a destination we can each describe the same way, in our own words. If we cannot do that, nothing after it will hold.
Second, the owner keeps running the business day to day while I build the map. That means the roadmap from where the company is to where we agreed it is going, with a date and an owner on every step, plain enough that anyone in the company can follow it.
Third, the two of us lead the team in walking it. This is the step most plans skip, and it is where they stall. A roadmap that only the two people who drew it can explain will sit in a drawer.
Two leaders at the top work when the roles are clear
The best evidence that a pair can beat one leader comes from companies much bigger than most of the ones I work with. Among 87 public companies led by co-CEOs, a Harvard Business Review analysis found average annual shareholder returns of 9.5%, against 6.9% for their benchmark indices, as Russell Reynolds lays out in its piece on the co-CEO model. Two chief executives at a public company is a different arrangement from an owner and a fractional partner, but the conditions the article attaches carry straight over.
Shared leadership, the article says, takes "chemistry, clarity, and the right governance." Without precise boundaries, accountability leaks away, and the pair has to look unified to their own people. That last condition is the walk. A team that hears two versions of the plan from the two people at the top will follow neither one.
So the boundaries get settled before the plan does. The owner owns the vision and the business as it runs today. I own the map and keeping it honest: the dates, the owners, and the number we said we would hit. We both own the walk, and we show up to it together. If your team runs on EOS, the Accountability Chart is a natural place to write that down. My own standard for it is plain: an agreed upon path with an accountability partner is a wonderful thing I will work hard on.
When an owner should hand off the day-to-day
Some owners are ready to leave the daily work for good. They are stepping back, preparing a sale, or moving to the board. That owner needs a full-time leader to run the company, and a part-time partner building a map is the wrong tool for the job.
The other poor fit is an owner who wants to set direction alone and have someone carry it out. I do not take that work. Direction handed down without agreement breaks the first time it gets hard, and the person carrying it has no standing to hold it together.
Test it with one sentence
Before you hire anyone to help you execute, write one sentence about where the company is going in three years. Then ask the person you are considering to say it back in their own words. If the two versions match, you have the start of a partnership. If they do not, you found out before it cost you anything.
The same agreement has to reach the managers who carry the work, which is why I wrote about getting a decision through managers to the work. You can read what a fractional COO or CFO does in the seat on its own page. If you have a vision and no map for it yet, I am glad to talk it through.
John Wyatt · John Wyatt's page · All posts · RSS