When the Founder Stops Being the Operating System
What Humankind’s transition from founder-led to CEO-led taught me about growth, structure and leadership.
Five years ago, I was the operating system at Humankind. Not the CEO on paper, but the thing everything ran through. I held the context. I knew the clients, the team dynamics, the history behind every decision. When there was a hard conversation or a commercial call to make, I got pulled in. And most of the time, I wanted to be.
That’s how it goes when you start something. You run on instinct, care, and a deep sense of what you’re building. And when it’s your company, being the one in charge isn’t really a decision you make. It just happens. You own the thing, so it feels like you have to be the one holding it all together.
But here’s what took me a while to admit, and it’s not an easy thing to say out loud: I wasn’t happy. From the outside, everything looked like it was working. Humankind had grown 40% in a year and was forecasting another 25%. Inside, I was tired, stretched thin, and wondering why the thing I’d built didn’t feel the way I thought it would.
It started with one conversation. A coach asked me what my best days at work were. I didn’t have to think about it. Being in the market, I said. With clients, on the brand, in the thick of the work. He asked, what would happen if you did that every day? And I heard myself say, it would be great for the business.
That question stuck with me. What lit me up and what the business needed were the same thing, and I’d been getting in the way of both. The thing I’d treated as control was really a single point of failure. More and more of Humankind ran through my head, and I’d turned into the constraint on the growth I wanted.
That’s the part founders don’t always want to look at. When a team feels stretched and overwhelmed, it looks like a capacity problem, and the obvious fix seems to be hiring more people. Sometimes that’s right. But more often the business doesn’t need more hands. It needs a different way of working, so it can keep growing without leaning on one or two people to function.
That conversation gave me the confidence to make the change. For us, that meant appointing KP as CEO. She’d already stepped up to lead most of the business. She understood our people, our commercial model, our clients, and the culture we were building. Over time we’d settled into different lanes without really talking about it. She was running the business. I was in the market, doing the work that gave me energy. Making her CEO just made official what was already true.
People ask me all the time if it was hard to step out of the CEO seat. It wasn’t, and I think that surprises people, because we assume letting go of something you built has to be painful. But being the operating system was never my fast lane. Handing it to someone who was better at it than me didn’t feel like a loss. It felt like a relief.
That’s the part I want other founders to hear. When you own the company, you assume the CEO seat is yours. Not because anyone decided you were the best person for it, but because it’s your name on the thing, so of course you run it. I never really chose to be CEO. I just was. It took me a while to separate owning Humankind from having to run it every day. In the end it came down to forgetting about the title and being honest about my strengths. CEO was never where I was strongest or happiest. Once I could say that out loud, letting go didn’t feel like a sacrifice. It just made sense. Moving into my fast lane opened the next one, stepping out of operational leadership gave me room to focus on growth, and that opened the door to what I’m doing now.
It also gave me space I didn’t expect. It’s a big part of why I’ve been able to go all in as Chief People Officer at Tracksuit, a full-time role I love. I’m still Director of Humankind, but completely out of the day to day, and grateful every day for KP and the team running it so well.
And Humankind? Never been stronger!!
This is the stage I see in so many growing businesses. A founder builds a capable team and a strong business, but the day to day still leans too heavily on one or two people holding all the context and making all the calls. That’s usually where the Humankind team starts working with founders and CEOs. Not with a neat answer, and not with an assumption that every founder needs to step out of the CEO seat, but with a real conversation about what’s changed, what no longer fits, and what the business needs now.
For me, the hard part was never the letting go. It was admitting I wasn’t happy in the first place.
These days, my own fast lane is helping other people find theirs. Watching a founder or a leader move into the work they’re brilliant at, and seeing the business lift because of it, never gets old.
So if you’re a founder in the thick of it, here’s what I’d ask yourself. Not whether you can step back, but whether you’re being honest about where you’re actually at your best.
Sam
