Hi Reader,
Three founders did something last week.
Could you do it?
Most founders won’t. Even when it would be good for the company.
Last Monday, the founders of Crumbl, the dessert chain with more than a thousand stores, walked away from running their own company.
The CEO. The Chief Brand Officer. The Chief Technology Officer. All three. At the same time.
They could have stayed. They chose not to.
Not because of a scandal. Not because they were pushed out. Not because they were tired.
Because the system they built had grown bigger than the three of them. And they were willing to put it first.
The two co-founders are cousins. They started the company in 2017 in Logan, Utah. They tested their cookie recipes at grocery stores and gas stations. Nine years later, they are looking for someone else to run it.
The CEO will become Chairman. The other two will move to the board. The company has opened a search for new operating executives. The founders said it openly. Getting the right people in place matters a lot more than the current people staying in place forever.
Most founders will not do this.
The brand is them. The identity is them. The story everyone tells about the company starts with their faces. To step away from the operating chairs is to step away from the identity that took a decade to build.
It is the kind of move our book calls the Flat Scoreboard. The founder is not above the system.
When the system needs a different operator, the founder steps aside, not over.
There is a sentence in the chapter on this. Heroes do not scale. Systems scale.
The Crumbl founders just bet on the system. They will know within two years whether they were right.
The harder question is for the rest of us.
If your company needed a better CEO than you tomorrow, would you give them the chair? Or
would you find a reason to hold it?
That is the test of whether you have built a company or built a stage.
Don’t set goals. TAME the effort.
– BJay
See you next week!
PS – If a friend forwarded this to you, you can subscribe at tameyourgoals.com.
