Founder Fundamentals 10/10 – The Job of a CEO
"I can write job descriptions for my whole Senior Leadership Team, but not for myself. What is my job?"
I get this question frequently, and it's a great one. It shows self-reflection and scaling progress. Because every founder who asked me this used to know exactly what their job was. That certainty only faded when they started to work less in the company and more on it.
Delegation is at the core of this. The change from doing everything yourself to making sure it gets done through others is profound and difficult, and progress can feel fuzzy. You come from a place of clarity and control – that is the benefit of doing things yourself – and now you work through other people, whom you can never fully control and whose actions you can never fully observe. But above all, it’s a process, a gradual, probing handover of responsibility with slowly increasing levels of scope and autonomy. The start and end states are clear. Start: you do everything yourself. End: you have fully transferred autonomy for an area of responsibility and only keep oversight (because you can never delegate accountability for outcomes). It’s the time in between that’s fuzzy. It’s when you’ve handed over some responsibility but are still unsure whether it works, when you still have to give a lot of feedback, when you still need to take corrective action, when you still get surprised by what hasn’t been done the way you wanted it.
Still, you need to keep handing over responsibility if you want to grow your company. Because your attention is the scarcest resource your company has, and every hour spent on work someone else could own is stolen from the work only you can do. Because doing it yourself is the most expensive way to staff a task. And because every delegation done well creates an owner. It isn't unloading work – it's building your company. There simply is no other way.
But it’s what makes your job description complex: it is defined not only by what you are responsible for, but also by how deeply you still need to do it yourself.
Four responsibilities make up the what. And the degree of delegability differs across them:
Run. You are responsible for the success of your company's operations – delivering products or services to paying customers. This is the most delegable responsibility of the four, and it’s the handover that you need to drive hardest, because this is where your business needs to scale the most. What always remains yours is oversight – the systems and information pipelines that show you operational health, and stepping in when things deteriorate – and directional control. The big decisions are yours to take. The biggest value you can create here lies not in making your company do things – it lies in telling it what not to do. Focus is just as important as oversight, and nobody can bring it but you. 2/10 – Decisions are Icebergs and 4/10 – Workload Tetris get into this in more detail.
Build. You are responsible for turning today's company into a more competitive one tomorrow – working the strategy, developing your SLT, hiring ahead of the curve, evolving structure and process, shaping culture. You always keep one eye 12–18 months ahead. Most of this series happened here (3/10 – Don't Avoid, 5/10 – A Hard Choice, 6/10 – Don't Run Tabs, 7/10 – Your Worst Employee, 8/10 – Hiring Well, 9/10 – Hard Feedback). That’s because Build sits at the other end of the delegation scale – the doing largely remains yours – and its weight grows with scale: a bad organisation with a great product is fine at 20 people, a competitive disadvantage at 100, and a growth-fumbling nightmare at 200.
Fuel. You make sure the company never runs out of money. If the company is profitable, this boils down to planning and steering cost, investment and reserves, most of which can be delegated to a Head of Finance or CFO. You only need to make sure the necessary monitoring systems and controls are in place and are being actively used. If you need funding, you also need to control runway and steer the company toward the best possible valuation (a product of growth × story × not needing money fast). Because fundraising starts long before the raise, you own investor relations. You can delegate a lot of the repetitive work (e.g. reporting), but you build and maintain the personal relationships with your (potential) investors. During a fundraise, your performance is key, and your team can’t compensate for that. Fuel does not change shape a lot – later-stage investors are a different class with different priorities, but the craft remains largely the same.
Self. You are responsible for your own development. Your company grows; it needs you to grow with it – your mindsets, your skills, your views. This series began with 1/10 – Training vs. Playing for a reason: Self is the field all the others depend on. When it's broken, it ruins everything else. You are the only person in the company without a manager – nobody develops you, gives you feedback or watches your energy. You need to build discipline and structures for this yourself. Your energy is a company asset, and managing it is good governance.
Here’s where all of this becomes relevant: you can use it to shape your job description.
Start with analysis. Colour every calendar entry of your last four weeks in one of four colours, one per responsibility. What you get is your current job description.
Whether it's the right one depends on your particular situation; there is no simple one-size-fits-all answer. But usually Run is massively overweight, because Run is what you used to do. It feels safe and productive, and you know you're good at it. So you keep doing your old job, being your company's best employee instead of its CEO. For a CEO, the minimum amount of time spent on Build and Self is 15% – assuming you are not in an existential crisis or at the height of a fundraise. Make that 25% if you're growing fast (15+ hires a year or 30%+ headcount growth) or approaching the 50 or 150 people thresholds, where your company will change the most.
During a fundraise, Fuel will take up most of your calendar for a few months. Still, you need to protect at least 25% of your time to stay on top of Run, prepare post-money Build and maintain a sustainable level of energy – or all of this will bite you hard when you can least afford it, which is when the funds are in, and your investors want to see you put them to work.
Yours is the most complex of all job descriptions. But you own it, and you get to shape it. And that is a privilege.