At the end of 2024 I was losing a fight with a tooling plant. One of our divisions needed turning around, I had thrown myself at it the way I'd thrown myself at every problem for fifteen years, and it wasn't working. I was spread too thin, the results weren't coming, and I was more worn down than I'd been at any point since founding the business. I was the CEO of Operio Group, the company I had built from a market stall in London, and somewhere in the middle of that rough patch I arrived at a conclusion most founders spend years avoiding: the business no longer needed me in that seat. It needed someone else.

Within a few months I had recruited my own successor, announced a hard handover, and taken what most people would describe as a demotion in the org chart of my own company. Eighteen months later I can say it was one of the best decisions I've made. Here is how it actually happened, and what I'd tell any founder or board facing the same call.

Knowing it was time

The honest starting point is knowing what kind of leader you are, and I mean actually knowing, not the version you'd put on a conference bio. I thrive in complexity and uncertainty. When there's turmoil, when things are changing fast, I know how to step up, take control, and make the decisions that need making. I'm at my best doing that with a small team, anything under about 150 people, where the CEO is close to the work and can get into the weeds and fix things directly.

Above that size, something changes. You start to get politics, middle management, layers between the CEO and the coalface. And there I struggle, because my instinct is still to dive down into the detail and make the decision myself, which at that scale is precisely the wrong instinct. Operio had grown into a business that needed a stability leader, someone who could grow and consolidate what had been built. I am an entrepreneurial change leader. Those are different jobs, and the tooling plant was where the mismatch finally became undeniable. I was working as hard as I ever had and not getting the results I wanted, and that stress told me something the good years never could: I was no longer applying my skills where they made a difference.

Taking it to the board

Formally, the decision was mine to make. We had a five-person independent board; my brother and I held two of the seats, we were the controlling shareholders, and my brother carried a double vote, so between us we could lock up the board if we chose to. Which is exactly why how I handled it mattered. Control means you can force a decision through. It doesn't mean you should arrive with one.

I went to the board and walked them through my thinking: the kind of leader I am, the kind the business now needed, and why the gap between the two was becoming a cost. There was pushback, from one of our lenders and from one of the board observers, and I understood it, because a founder-CEO stepping back reads as instability from the outside. But I was able to make the case that this was in the best interests of the business, and to genuinely put my ego aside while making it. The entire conversation only works if you've put the ego aside first, privately, before you walk into the room.

I didn't use a headhunter. I'm embedded in a network of CEOs through Vistage, through LinkedIn, through the lawyers, M&A professionals, and investors I've worked with over the years, and I ran the search through that network, because I've found a personal recommendation is worth more than any process. A headhunter is second best, and even then you have to be careful, because people can interview brilliantly and perform poorly. An interview measures somebody's ability to sound intelligent for an hour and a half. Performance is a different thing entirely, and the only reliable evidence of it is a track record you can check.

So that's what I screened for. Actual performance: what they ran, what happened to it, and their ability to explain why they did what they did and how they went after it. And then, just as heavily, humility about what went wrong. Not everything goes anyone's way, and what I wanted to hear was the post-mortem, the digging in, the honest account of what they learned. A candidate who has a clear thought process about what they were aiming for, the tactics they used to pursue it, and a genuine reckoning with the times it didn't work is a powerful combination, and rarer than it should be.

The other filter was environment. Running a Fortune 500 company with 250,000 people is a fundamentally different job from running a business where 150 people sit in close proximity to the CEO. At our size a chief executive has to be less purely strategic and far more tactical, because a mid-market business generally cannot afford a CEO who only does strategy and hires other people to execute it. The strategy and the execution have to live in one person. Plenty of impressive CEOs would have failed in our environment, not through any lack of ability but because the environment was wrong for the way they work. Match the CEO to the environment, not to the brand names on their CV.

Why Declan

The situation had one unusual feature: I wasn't leaving. In most CEO transitions the outgoing chief executive disappears, and their successor is free to define themselves against the old regime — throw the old CEO under the bus, frankly, which in a normal succession is a perfectly reasonable tactic. But I was staying, in the business and on the board, which made this closer to a generational transfer of power than a standard replacement.

What tipped it to Declan McLaughlin was that he and I had a shared understanding of what that would take. We agreed that we would disagree in private if we had to. That I would be one hundred percent supportive of his decisions, in public and in private. And, critically, that the final decision was his in most instances; we defined the specific decisions that were reserved for the board, which I felt really helped, because it meant neither of us ever had to guess where his authority ended. And I trusted him, in turn, not to build his authority by tearing down what came before. The risk in a founder staying on is that the organisation splits into two camps, the old guard and the new, and everything we agreed was designed to prevent that. It was not easy, and we worked at it carefully, but it held.

The hard cut

The overlap was deliberately short. We made the announcement at the beginning of January 2025 and did a hard cut: Declan is in charge, everything goes to him. No long co-CEO period, no ambiguity about who decides, because ambiguity is exactly what breeds the tribalism we were trying to avoid.

I stepped into the Chief Business Development Officer seat, and Declan did something smart with it: he pointed my actual skills, the comfort with chaos and the ability to drive projects to done, at specific problems. Over the following months I wound down two business units, stood up a new one, deployed multiple marketing campaigns, and negotiated high-level consignment inventory contracts with major partners. He pulled me into legal reviews where it helped. And I kept my board seat, so I stayed inside the governance conversations. I had gone from running everything to executing a defined portfolio for the person I'd hired, and the surprise, the thing I did not see coming, was that the six months after the handover felt more accomplished than the six months before it. That's what leaning into your strongest skills actually feels like, and I'd forgotten.

What it cost

It does cost you, personally, to hand over the CEO seat, and I suspect it costs more in America. I was born in England, and the cultural weight the two countries put on titles is not the same; plenty of friends and family asked me what the heck I was doing. Inside the business, people started treating me differently almost immediately. People stopped calling. I stopped being cc'd on emails. I was treated differently in meetings. It opens your eyes to the sycophancy that surrounds a CEO's seat, especially an owner in the CEO's seat. You tell yourself you don't want people to treat you differently, but they do; that's just the human dynamic.

Here's the reframe that got me through it: every one of those signals was evidence the transition was working. We wanted the organisation laughing at Declan's jokes, not mine. We wanted them following his lead. The quiet inbox was the success, not the failure, and if you're a founder contemplating this move, I'd encourage you to decide in advance to read it that way, because in the moment it will not feel like winning.

What my successor taught me

Watching Declan run the business I built has been an education in itself, and two lessons landed quickly.

First, culture is top-down, and it moves faster than you think. I am prompt but never early to meetings; I'll arrive on the minute, at worst a minute late. Declan turns up five minutes early to everything, including virtual meetings. It took the company about two weeks to learn this, and the meeting culture around him shifted almost immediately. Nobody sent a memo. He was simply already there.

Second, he starts meetings by asking everyone where their numbers are for the month, and he introduced a monthly business unit review, an MBR, that pushed genuine ownership of each part of the business down to the people running it. I'll be using that tool for the rest of my career. Declan is a more traditional, navigational CEO than I am. There are things he does that I wouldn't do, and things I do that he wouldn't, and that is not a problem to be managed. It's the entire point. If your successor would run the business exactly as you did, you haven't hired a successor, you've hired a mirror.

What I'd tell a founder or a board

Know what kind of leader you are, honestly, because the business will eventually need a different kind and the only question is whether you notice before the results force you to. If you control the board, make the case anyway; the process of persuading people you could simply overrule is what makes the transition legitimate. Recruit through people who have actually seen the candidate perform, screen for the post-mortems as hard as the wins, and match the person to the environment rather than the résumé. If you're staying, agree the rules with your successor before the announcement, then cut hard and cede visibly. And when people stop laughing at your jokes, count it as a win.

I'm now available to other owners and boards facing exactly this: succession, transition, and the interim leadership that sometimes bridges the two. If it's useful, the details are on my leadership and consulting page.