Why I stepped down as CEO

tl;dr: After running my own company for 13 years, I decided to step down as ceo because I was looking for new challenges and a fresh view on how organisations work.

What the role gave me

Personal growth

The role gave me much more than I bargained for. When I started out, I was just a nerd in an attic. I wasn’t antisocial, but saying I was normally social would be pushing it.

As we grew the company, the role forced me to become a social optimist, becoming the motivator for the team. This might have been the biggest challenge for me, since people often mistook my stoic way of thinking for being pessimistic.

Sometimes I try to imagine my alternative life, where I would have continued as a programmer instead, how different of an experience that would’ve been.

Professional growth

Since learning new things was the main reason I accepted the position in the first place, the role made me learn a lot about cool stuff like finance, tax, law, HR, getting products around, marketing, sales, managing projects, and loads more.

What the role took from me

Outsourced all the fun work

As a CEO, you’re supposed to lead and grow a company. The way I did this job meant that I usually gave the cool tasks to my team and was left with the boring bits.

As we grew internationally, we became more and more a target for competitors and the tax office. Once, the German tax office decided to hold back a third of our free cash for a whole year. While they were figuring out if we were running a Tax-Carousel or not, turned out we weren’t. This legal battle took a year and drained my energy more than I ever could’ve imagined.

Then there were multiple smaller disputes which popped up from time to time and needed my energy to squash.

Repeating cycles

I noticed that we were repeating the same cycles every 3 years, where basically the same challenges came up in a different way. Which we needed to tackle, as we got bigger and the market got tougher. The challenges got harder, but at their core, they were the same old stuff.

In the retail space, it was becoming more and more about efficiency, which isn’t really an interesting challenge at all. These repeating cycles eventually wore down my enthusiasm for solving them.

Then why is it so hard to step down?

Personal traits

Stubbornness and naivety are attributes I possess in great numbers, luckily for me, these traits have been dampened over time. But these traits are what keep you going, thinking, “If I just sort out X, then we can get to Y, and that means we can hit Z.”

The personal attributes that made the organisation successful, are the same that keep you from stepping down.

Perceived social status

Stepping down meant I didn’t hold the title anymore and I wouldn’t drive the flashy car anymore. It meant a downgrade in ‘perceived social status’.

The role also gave me a networking opportunity since it’s very common to connect with other founders and CEOs just because you hold that role.

What eventually persuaded me

Minimalism

In the midst of all of this, in my personal life, the idea of minimalism started to grab my attention, ‘why do I have all this flashy stuff?’. What do I actually need? Doesn’t all this stuff also wear me down? Am I not identifying my personality with some of this stuff?

I decided to downgrade my lifestyle and my expenses. Even though I was never really into cars or the status they bring, selling the flashy car was somehow the toughest thing to do. Nowadays, I rarely own a car that is not at least 20 years old.

Traveling & surfing

I started traveling more in my free time and discovered surfing, surfing, in turn, pushed me to travel more. I started to see how this was a flywheel and I needed more time to pursue this path, which didn’t fit the role.

Also, all the time you spend in the water doing nothing except waiting for the waves, made me reevaluate my earlier ideas about work and life in general. This made me realize that, lying on my deathbed, I would not be happy with the conclusion of ‘having a great career but didn’t experience the full extent of our world’.

Now what?

For now, I am not holding the CEO role, I am focussed on parts of the organization that interest me, rather than every aspect of it. Most supporting aspects of organizations don’t interest me that much, to be honest.

Does this mean I will never take on the role again? Nah, I am stubborn, remember? I’ll probably give it another shot in a few years, when the right opportunity and the right conditions arise. This time around, my focus will be on making it a fun role for myself!

January 2024