You Need To Fire Your Co-Founder
One of the most painful things you'll have to do is deal with your co-founder or early stage employee that was doing good work early on, but now is no longer cutting it. What you do next may likely determine the future of your company.
In this short video, I'll give you my take on how you should handle this very likely scenario you'll face. I hope you like it.
Read The Video Transcript Below:
I remember speaking to a friend of mine, fellow startup CEO, he'd been at it for longer than me. And I remember him telling me one of the saddest things was that he was the only one of his founders left.
He was four years into his company's life, and none of his cofounders had made it through the journey to the point that he had. What a bummer. And I think there's a real lesson here for you when you build your company.
And that is that there's, you know, just like products have lifespans, companies have lifespans, employees and co-founders have lifespans too. And not everybody that you start with is going to finish because different people have different utility to the business at different times.
And this is just a cold, hard reality of building a business. And it's a real bummer, isn't it? Because these are people that you care about that have been there for you.
And yet, at some point it is likely that they're not going to be able to make it. Some of them, not all of them, but some of them.
In fact, I was just speaking with somebody I'm working with about this exact problem where some of his early team members are showing their years and showing their age. And now he's at this point where he has to make this really, really tough decision.
What's he going to do? Because guess what? This is why you're there. This is why you're the CEO is to make the really tough decisions. And one of the really tough decisions that you have to make is saying goodbye to people that you care about, and you know why you have to do it? It's for the benefit of the rest of the team and the rest of the company.
Because the people who are busting their rear ends, who are doing really good, have the expectation, properly, that you're going to do your job and do the tough things. And it's a real tough thing to have to say goodbye to people who can't cut it anymore.
That's the cold hard reality. So I know it sucks. Nobody likes doing it, but that's why you're the CEO. You have to do it. Sorry about that. It really does suck. There's nothing worse than letting people go who've done good work earlier, but can't cut it anymore.
Now, maybe you can get lucky and put somebody above them rather than letting them go. But you still have to do the tough things. Whether it's saying goodbye to somebody, we're doing the tough thing of putting somebody above somebody else and reducing the role in the company. I'm Brett at Brettjfox.com. Have a great, great day.