Our family business is going through an exciting period of growth. As its new CEO, I am obviously both grateful and energized. After all, assuming the reigns of a company started by someone else, let alone your father, can present interesting challenges in terms of the way things have always been done and how they may need to be done going forward.

I am not suggesting that these kinds of challenges are, in and of themselves, a bad thing. In fact I firmly believe the old saying that if two people in business are always in agreement, then one is redundant.

While my father has incredible faith in me so that my role as company CEO is not just in title, this does not preclude him from offering his opinion. Nor does it prevent me from respectfully disagreeing with him.

However, and rather than looking at differences of opinion in the context of someone being right and someone being wrong, I try to see it from the other person's point of view. In our case, my father's point of view.

What Type of Runner Are You?
In reading Jessica Bruder's Inc. article The Psychological Price of Entrepreneurship, I began to truly understand what it took for my father to not only start a business, but to build it to the point of passing it to me as a thriving enterprise.

Bruder talks about the fact that building a business isn't easy. However, she indicates that there is a far greater price that entrepreneurs pay beyond that which everyone sees. This latter point goes a long way towards explaining the determined certainty in which my father embraces his ideas and voices his beliefs.

Like the laser focus of a sprinter that zeros in on a short distance of yards, there is little opportunity to look beyond the immediate steps towards crossing an imminent finish line. There is no pacing oneself, or trying a different stride or for that matter contemplating a win. There is just the sound of the gun and a few fleeting seconds between victory and defeat. All you can do, is stay within your lane and run as hard as you can for a very short period. 



This same kind of myopic urgency is also needed in the early days of a new business. You can't waste hours contemplating what the mid to long-term future will look like when you are in a survive and build mode. You just work as hard as you can on the opportunities and challenges that are immediately in front of you.

It is high stress, and it is tiring, as entrepreneurs deal with what Bruder calls secret demons, which are the inevitable moments of "near-debilitating anxiety and despair--times when it seemed everything might crumble."

Once A Sprinter, Always A Sprinter?
In his Harvard Business Review paper The Founder's Dilemma, Noah Wasserman wrote "At every step in their venture’s life, entrepreneurs face a choice between making money and controlling their businesses. And each choice comes with a trade-off."

He then goes on to write "New research shows that it’s tough to do both," and that if "you don’t figure out which matters more to you, you could end up being neither rich nor king."
I thought Wasserman's words were very insightful, although it isn't necessarily just currency that an entrepreneur wants. Sometimes what matters most is the security of sticking with something that is known and has brought you to this present point. Or to put it another way, we have always done it like this, so why change?

Similar to losing control to acquire funds from outside investors in an effort to make the business better, changing the way things have been done is also a daunting prospect. But often times change, like the infusion of new capital, is what is needed to take the business to the next level.

This is when a new type of runner is needed.

The Long And Winding Marathoner's Road
We have all heard the term fear of failure. For many entrepreneurs who start a new business this is a reality that comes with the territory.

That said, there is also another reality called the fear of success. From my standpoint, the difference between the two is that one requires the courage to begin, while the other requires the courage to change.

When a business finally gains the traction and becomes consistently successful, the intense and narrow focus of surviving in the here and now must be expanded to envision a broader horizon of new possibilities. In other words, the need to survive is replaced by a need to thrive and grow.

This requires a different mindset. One in which there is the willingness to see the future in terms of miles instead of yards. What I am talking about is seeing the business not as a series of short sprints, but as a long marathon in which decisions are not based upon keeping the lights on but adding more lights.


For a founder this is not an easy concept to embrace. Perhaps this is the reason why, as Wasserman points out, keeping founders on board is a challenge once a new CEO has been appointed. The statistics he provides support this.
Choosing power: Founders motivated by control will make decisions that enable them to lead the business at the expense of increasing its value.
Regardless of the size of the enterprise, be it a small family business or a Fortune 500 company, all have or will one day have to make the transition from the sprinter's mindset of the founder, to the marathoners expanded view of the future.

The question for both founders and new CEOs alike is simply this . . . how will you facilitate this necessary change?

From my standpoint it starts with recognizing who is the sprinter and who is the marathon runner, and understanding and respecting both for what they bring to the table. From there you will inevitably figure out how to best run the race going forward.