Being the person who can explain everything about your company is useful. Until everybody needs you to explain everything about your company.
“Everybody just asks me.”
Well, yeah.
You started the company.
You know why the weird-looking service that seems unrelated to everything else actually exists. You remember the customer who asked for it in the first place.
You know why the company stopped doing that other thing, even though it’s still on the website.
You can explain why two offerings that look almost identical solve completely different problems.
You know why the new market matters, why the acquisition made sense, and why the thing your sales team keeps leading with is not actually the thing you want to be known for.
You know the whole story.
So when somebody doesn’t quite understand it?
Everybody just asks you.
This works great. Everybody has a guy. You’re the guy.
The salesperson is talking to a prospect who doesn’t quite get how the pieces fit together.
“Let me bring Sarah in.”
Marketing is working on a new campaign and needs to know which part of the company to emphasize.
“Sarah will know.”
A potential partner likes what they’re hearing but has a slightly outdated understanding of the business.
“Have you talked to Sarah?”
The new VP has been there six months and is still trying to understand why the company describes one of its most important capabilities as a “solution.”
Sarah?
Sarah knows.
Sarah always knows.
Sarah would also like lunch.
Here’s the problem. Sarah may not be confused at all.
This happens all the time in successful founder-led companies.
The founder knows exactly what the company does.
Ask why it matters and she can give you the history, the context, the nuances, the exceptions, and where it’s all going.
She can probably explain it differently depending on who’s asking.
Customers get one version. Investors get another. Employees get another. A journalist gets the good one.
She’s not struggling for clarity.
She has twenty years of it.
Everyone else has Sarah.
And because Sarah is very good at being Sarah, this arrangement can last a surprisingly long time.
The company grows.
More people join.
New services appear.
More money goes into marketing.
And Sarah gets better and better at explaining a business that everyone else seems to be getting worse at explaining.
So naturally, we decide Sarah needs to become more visible.
Excellent. Let’s get her a podcast.
And speaking engagements.
And a LinkedIn strategy.
Maybe a book.
Because after twenty years of building something, Sarah has developed some ideas.
Good ones, presumably.
Ideas about the industry. Leadership. Customers. What’s changing. What everyone else is getting wrong.
Maybe she’s becoming known for something larger than the company itself.
Which is terrific.
Except the person everybody relies on to explain the company is now increasingly busy being a person outside the company.
So eventually somebody asks:
“How do we make the business less dependent on Sarah?”
Good question.
Get her out of everything.
Done.
Next?
Well, not quite.
The company may operate perfectly well without Sarah and still have no idea how to sound without her.
She doesn’t approve every expense.
She isn’t interviewing every employee.
She has a leadership team.
She delegates.
She takes vacations.
There are entire Slack channels she has never seen, which is probably why she still sleeps.
Operationally, things may be fine.
But take her out of the way the company communicates and things get weird.
The story gets flatter.
The distinctions start disappearing.
Sales describes what the company sells because that’s easier than explaining why the pieces belong together.
Marketing produces language that is polished, professional and almost impossible to object to.
Unfortunately, it could also belong to six competitors.
Meanwhile, Sarah is out there becoming more interesting.
Now the founder sounds like a person and the company sounds like a company.
You know what I mean.
So who gets what?
This is the question I find more useful than “How do we separate the founder from the company?”
Maybe we shouldn’t.
There are things Sarah should carry.
Her perspective. Her experiences. Her convictions. The ideas she wants to spend the next chapter of her career exploring.
There are things the company has to carry.
What it stands for. How it sees the customer’s problem. Why its different capabilities belong together. Why somebody should trust the place even when Sarah isn’t in the meeting.
And there are things they should share.
That’s where this gets good.
Because Sarah becoming more visible can be extremely valuable to the company.
And the company becoming easier to understand can give Sarah room to evolve without everybody wondering whether her latest LinkedIn post means they need to redo the About page.
Again.
Companies change. Founders do too.
New market.
New service.
New leadership.
New acquisition.
New ambitions.
Maybe Sarah is becoming a public thinker while the company she built is finally becoming capable of standing on its own.
That sounds like success to me.
But it does create a new job.
You have to decide what Sarah carries now.
What the company carries now.
Where they overlap.
And how somebody who encounters either one understands why the other matters.
Then sales can carry it.
Marketing can carry it.
PR can carry it.
Leadership can carry it.
The new VP can finally stop pretending she understands what “integrated solutions” means.
And Sarah?
Sarah can still explain the company.
She just doesn’t have to be standing nearby every time somebody asks what it does.
Because eventually somebody is going to ask when Sarah isn’t there.
And it would be nice if the answer weren’t:
“Hang on.
Let me get Sarah.”
If you’ve reached the point where you and the business need to carry different things, but nobody has quite decided what those things are, that’s work I do.
I help founders and the institutions they’ve built get clear on what each should carry, where they should reinforce one another, and how to make that understanding usable across the business.
Want to talk about yours? Grab 30 minutes with me.