Can you reinvent yourself as your business requires you to take on higher-level roles? Also, are you able to instill greater self-management in your key staff so that you are less often required in day-to-day activities? Most important, are you able to find personal fulfillment continually as your leadership role shifts?

Some entrepreneurs like the rush of starting a new business, but lose interest (or lack the ability to lead and manage) when the business requires them to work through a management team. These so-called "serial entrepreneurs" just enjoy buying and selling businesses, making their living from increasing a company’s value by reconfiguring its products and services, or repositioning its offerings into new market niches. Serial entrepreneurs tend to "do their thing" to a business, then move on to a new situation.

Yet, most entrepreneurs are of the "lifestyle" variety, staying with a company that they founded and built from the bottom-up, nurturing it for their lifetime until they are ready to retire. Unfortunately, these entrepreneurs’ success sometimes leads to their very stagnation or demise.

For example, many small business owners are great sales people or innovative technicians, playing crucial roles that are very much needed when their companies starts-up. But as their company grows, these folks may have difficulty in transitioning into management positions as the company’s sales or technical staff grows.

Consequently, a great sales person or brilliant technician becomes an ineffective manager (and, ironically, the company also then loses them as a good sales or technical person). Conversely, some company owners recognize that they lack sufficient management ability, or just don’t like becoming professional managers, so they maintain their key sales or technical position. This results in the rest of the sales or technical force staying leaderless. Either way, the company is at a risk of failing due to the inability of the owner being able to transition into an effective and fulfilling leadership role.

In other situations, company owners may find themselves no longer personally engaged and passionate about what they are doing as the business grows and their position evolves. One owner found that after years of running his growing and profitable company, he was tired of playing the same old management game.

He struggled with this issue for years. Consequently, his managers and staff, sensing a somewhat stagnant company leader, never fully embraced their own job responsibilities. They left mundane decisions up to the owner, which actually contributed to his feelings of personal stagnation.

This is a prime example of a "Catch 22" that owner-managers put themselves into due to a lack of alignment between what would make their job fulfilling and their role in the business. It often stays this way because, falsely in the owner’s mind, no one else is ready or capable of taking on greater responsibility on his or her behalf. In both these cases, the business owner is no longer in control of their job, but the company is now running them.

This problem does not reflect a lack of ability or commitment on the owner-manager’s part. However, it is symbolic of the owner-manager not being in touch with what is truly and deeply important to both them and their company, and then developing a strategy that will solve the company’s need for leadership, while simultaneously finding a high-contributing, high-value role for themselves.

Successful entrepreneurs can solve this problem for themselves by bringing in capable outsiders to lead and manage their organizations day-to-day. This allowed them to stay with the roles that they were good at and which added high value to the company.

Other entrepreneurs solve this problem by developing young, capable and energetic followers who, over time, take on important company roles that the owner-manager is less interested in playing as they grow more mature, or as their company grows beyond their personal interest and capability.

What’s required from the owner-manager to evolve their role and stay engaged and fulfilled as their company grows and/or they mature:

• Continually get in touch with your true passion, high-value abilities, and best contribution to your firm. Then work to align what you are doing with the best of who you are.
• Let go of areas of responsibility that are better served by others whom you can trust.
• Install the right people (those with growing capability and sound character) in your management team and then help them develop the capacity to act effectively on your behalf,
• Don’t rely on "seat-of-the-pants" management. Have a process for management planning, review and decision making.
• Have a working Board of Advisors or Directors to guide you and help you to reinvent yourself as needed over time.

When you, as a business owner, find true alignment in who you are and what you are doing in your company right now, then you bring a lot more personal energy and drive into your business. That energy will then magically stimulate everyone around you, encouraging them to follow your lead.

Once this alignment occurs, you will find that not only will you be more fulfilled, but that you will attract and more easily motivate the right people (and customers) to your business. Most people love being around those who are passionate and energized by what they are doing, and will be attracted like magnets to who you are and what you have to offer once you are clear about your purpose.


Harvy Simkovits, CMC, President of Business Wisdom, works with owner managed companies to help them grow, prosper and continue on by offering innovative approaches to business development, company management, organization leadership and learning, and management education. He can be reached at 781-862-3983 or .