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Stanton Chase: Hiring a CEO for a Startup
Key Considerations in a Unique Business Environment
Tom Savage is a British entrepreneur who founded 3Desk, Blue Ventures and Wholi, a list-based people search engine for which he acted as CEO for five years. Interestingly, Savage emphasizes that a successful entrepreneur — someone who sees a solution to a problem and builds it into a business — isn’t necessarily the right person to manage that business in the long run.
Why not? One reason could be that founding a business requires different skills from managing and expanding it. Of course, founders can certainly learn management skills — and many do. But for the ongoing success of the business, it can be far more appealing to hire a CEO who already has the required abilities and experience to build the business so that in the meantime, the company’s founder can concentrate on what he or she does best — innovation.
Hiring a CEO for the dynamic environment of a startup is a very different process compared to hiring a CEO for an established company. In this paper, we’ll outline a process for successfully hiring a CEO for a startup by addressing the different considerations that need to be taken into account.
From Stanton Chase, here are four considerations for hiring a CEO, having to do with:
- Corporate Governance
- Business
- The CEO's Competencies
- Compensation and Benefits