Stepping off is not the hard part. Staying off is.
On the first of November I handed back a boat.
I went on board one last time to take my books off. I put my hand on the tiller. Then I sat in the cockpit for a minute or two.
It was time to let her move on.
I had the electrical panel redone. Four years of hard use and salt water had eaten into it. I checked she was clean inside. Then I sent one message to the man who looks after her now.
“Todo lo eléctrico funcionando.” Everything electric is working.
Three short videos, to prove it. He wrote back two words. “Genial. Gracias.”
Four years, closed with a WhatsApp.
She was never mine
Here is the part I have not said out loud. The Contessa was never mine. I rented her from her owner for about four years.
I sailed her more than most owners sail their boats. I cared for her as if she were mine. And when it was time, I gave her back with everything working.
That is this whole series in one boat. You do not own it. You take care of it. Then you hand it on.
Handing back a boat took one message.
Letting go of a company is taking me years.
The first time I stepped off
I have written about February 2021 before. I stepped back from running the company and handed the day to the team.
What I never wrote about is how it felt.
The first weeks were wonderful. I read. I had time to talk to people outside the daily noise. I felt relieved, full of energy, and above all very proud.
And I was wrong. The people were not ready. I had not prepared them, or the company, for the job. That was my planning and my leadership. Nobody else’s.
Then I started to miss two things.
The first was the rhythm. After twenty-five years of running businesses, I had a way of starting and running every day. I kept it. Same hours, same habits. But the work they were built for was now in other hands.
A routine without a purpose is just a clock.
The second was the people. Twenty-five years in one industry means my social world and my working world are the same world. I never drew a line between them. Stepping back from one meant stepping back from both.
Nobody warns you about that part.
Pieter Walraet, an architect who reads this newsletter, named the cost better than I can. The effort you pour in is what makes the place yours, he wrote. And “that effort stands in the way of giving it away.”
He is right. It does.
What silence cost
In those first months, the decisions I expected did not come. They could not. The team had no context, no way to decide, no real picture of how a company runs. I had never given them one.
I kept quiet. I told myself that was what letting go looks like.
It cost growth. It cost a lot of frustration, on both sides of the table.
Silence is not trust when people have nothing to decide with.
The one thing I took back was the culture. It was slowly wearing away, and culture does not wait for you to be ready.
Almost everything else, I left where I had put it.
The objection
Some readers will say: growth needs a push. The push always hurts. People grew because you threw them in, and maybe there was no other way.
That is half right.
People do grow when the work is hard. Every founder knows the struggle and what it builds. Protect people from it and they never grow.
But it is not a push. It is a balance.
Prepare people too little and they drown. Prepare them too much and they never feel the weight. They need the tools. They need to know it will be hard. Then they need room to try, to fail, to stress, and to celebrate.
There is no formula for it. It depends on the people, the moment, and the storms you cannot plan for. I got it wrong the first time.
The mess I have not made yet
This is the part I did not see coming.
Stepping off is not the hard part. Staying off is.
Five years on, I hold two things. How the capital is spent, and who the one or two people at the top will be. Culture and ambition are owned together now. The rest belongs to the people who run it.
But every time I step back on board, even for a day, I undo part of the work. One meeting where I take the helm teaches everyone that the helm is still mine.
You cannot be half pregnant. And I cannot be half owner, half crew.
When the sea gets rough, that choice gets harder. My own passion pulls me back. So do the people, the partners, the suppliers I have known for decades. They are not wrong to call. I am the one who has to stop answering as captain.
So here is what I learned, late.
Someone has to take the seat I am leaving. Not my shares. My seat. If the seat stays empty, I will fill it again, every single time.
I have not finished this. But I am off the boat, cheering the crew on from the shore. Read this essay as a promise to stay there, not a lesson.
In what condition
In October, Boris Rupnik left a question under one of these essays that I have not been able to put down.
“In what condition will I leave behind what has been entrusted to me and the people who helped build it?”
Here is my answer, unpolished.
Better than I found it. Stronger, with more potential. Still imperfect, still a work in progress. Solid enough to build on. Flexible enough for the current stewards to shape.
With plenty of adventures still ahead for them. So they never have to be caretakers. Or saviours.
Incomplete. Yet with a glorious future ahead.
I keep watching her sail without me. Not as captain. Not as crew.
From the shore.
w. 🌊
Make My Mess My Message is a book written in public, one Friday at a time. This issue first appeared on LinkedIn. Every issue lives here.
Leave a Reply