There is a real art to the movement of a business from startup to established.

It doesn’t mean you stop operating with a startup mentality, but it often means you have greater responsibilities, often to external partners.

Fulfilling these responsibilities often needs a different skill set.

Fulfilling these responsibilities often means scaling past your original expertise.

You have undoubtedly spent the growth years wearing every hat – founder, CFO, chief strategist, marketer, crisis management, IT support, cleaner, HR, ops – you name, you have done it.

You have done all of these things with varying degrees of success because you needed to run lean and be agile.

Now, you need to employ new people, more people. You might need different systems to support this scale. You might have different reporting requirements.

Scale doesn’t happen by accident. You have grown your business to this point with effort and deliberation. The next steps take the same.

Who do you know in your network, in your industry that has already traversed this field?

If you have secured extra finance, it is normally linked with support and expertise. Avail yourself of this.

These stages might mean you need to jettison some things, and some people.

Your role might shift dramatically.

If you aren’t thrilled by the operational side of the business, employ someone with the right skills to do this.

If your passion is R&D and innovation, consider that the CEO role isn’t the one for you.

Certainly it seems that many founders move into the CEO role but increasingly when we look at the large tech and social companies one would challenge they should be in those roles.

Make sure you keep doing what has set your company on the path to success and build a team around you for the other things.

After all, the magic happens because of your original idea.