Damien Soitout
What the owner keeps is an organization fact. Write the activities that stay, and the daily chair the chief executive takes.
A handshake can mark a split of desks. The useful part is the written line about who decides what on Monday.
What the owner keeps, and what the chief executive takes, is a fact about work. It is not a mood, and it is not a quarrel. I am writing this on 22 June 2022 because a newspaper has already printed one version of that fact, and because owners keep learning the same lesson without needing my household to teach it. On 31 May, PresseLib recorded a division of companies and a naming. I kept the consulting, the pharmaceutical activity, and the import and export of wines and spirits. A trusted collaborator was named chief executive, and the daily responsibility moved with that chair. The piece is here: Changer de vie. That is the printed sentence. The lesson under it belongs to any firm that has both an owner and a person who runs the day.
I am not retelling the road that led to the sentence. A long profile is a document you read once. I have already said how to read that kind of piece. What matters for a business is the line itself. Some activities stayed with the owner. The daily chair went to a chief executive the owner trusted. No second story is required. If your firm is facing the same line, you do not need a newspaper, a village, or a cast. You need a page that says which decisions remain yours and which decisions you will no longer touch.
Owners resist that page because ownership feels like a duty to be everywhere. It is not. Ownership is a claim on the residual, on the activities you chose to keep, and on the right to hire the person who runs the rest. Presence in every meeting is a habit. Habits dress up as duty when the owner is afraid that a firm without their voice in the room will become a different firm. Sometimes that fear is accurate. Then you have not chosen the chief executive. You have chosen a title. The cure is not to sit back down in every chair. The cure is to choose again, and to write the boundary where both of you can see it.
In the printed case, what stayed was a set of activities, not a vibe. Consulting stayed. The pharmaceutical activity stayed. The wine and spirits import and export stayed. I told the reporter those were the parts that take the most time. Time is a clue. The owner often keeps the work that is slow, relational, and hard to delegate on a Tuesday, and then discovers that “keeping” it is not the same as doing every hour of it. Keeping means you remain answerable for the direction of that activity. It does not mean you approve the font on the invoice.
Write the kept list as activities and decisions, not as feelings. An activity is consulting for a defined kind of client, or a trade in a defined kind of good, or a line of products with a name. A decision is the one that commits the firm: a price that changes the year, a partnership, a hire at the top of that activity, a stop. If you cannot name the decision, you do not yet know what you kept. You know what you enjoy. Enjoyment is allowed. It is not a governance document.
The International Accounting Standards Board's Conceptual Framework is not a management manual, and I am not asking a small firm to adopt a reporting standard in order to hand someone the daily chair. I am pointing at one idea in it, because the idea is plain. General purpose reporting needs a reporting entity, and a boundary. An asset, a liability, and equity are claims with edges. A firm whose owner cannot say where their authority ends is a firm whose boundary lives in a mood. Moods change on Fridays. Edges should not.
There is a personal test I use. If I am on a train, or ill, or simply determined not to open the laptop after seven, which decisions stop? The ones that stop are the ones I have not actually handed over, no matter what the title on the other desk says. Those are the decisions to move, or to admit I am keeping. Pretending they have moved, while the firm still waits for my yes, is how owners exhaust chief executives and then blame them for lacking initiative.
The chief executive takes the day. In the printed case that meant the daily responsibility, handed to a trusted collaborator. Trust is the word the paper used, and trust is the right word, provided you do not hide inside it. Trust is not warmth. Trust is a record. You have seen the person decide, repair, and tell you the truth when the repair was ugly. You are willing to hear about a decision after it is made, inside the lane you wrote down, without reopening it for sport.
What the chief executive takes should be as specific as what the owner keeps. The day includes staffing below the line you reserved, the ordinary customer problem, the schedule, the cash routine, the vendor who is late, the meeting that does not need the owner in the room. It includes the right to say no to you when you reach back into that lane. If the chief executive cannot say no, you do not have a chief executive. You have an assistant with a large title. Assistants are valuable. They are a different contract.
I have written about the moment colleagues become a team you lead in from work friends to being the boss. The same awkwardness appears when the owner stops being the boss of the day. People will still walk past the chief executive to find you, because habit is faster than an organization chart. Your job, for a season, is to walk them back. Not with a speech about empowerment. With a sentence: that decision sits on the other desk. You will feel rude the first ten times. The rudeness is the boundary learning to stand.
Qualities of a leader get discussed as if the chair were a personality. Some of that is fair, and I have listed what I think matters in the ten qualities of a true leader. None of those qualities replaces the page. A calm person with no boundary will still be called at midnight. A strict person with a clear page can go home. If you are choosing the collaborator, choose for the decisions on the page, not for the feeling you have in the hallway.
Do this on a quiet morning, not in the week something breaks. One page is enough. Column one: activities and decisions the owner keeps. Column two: decisions the chief executive takes without asking. Column three: decisions you will make together, and how fast. Column four: what happens when you disagree. Disagreement is normal. It is not a scandal, and it does not need a story. The page should say who has the last word in the lane. If every disagreement comes back to the owner, you have not split the desks. You have added a meeting.
The U.S. Small Business Administration's guide to planning your business asks you to describe how the company is structured and who will run it, including the legal form and who is in charge of what. That section exists because lenders and partners cannot use a handshake as an organization chart. You should not use a handshake as one either. The legal form is a separate choice. Sole owner, partnership, company: each has its own rules. The desk split can exist inside any of them. Do not wait for a lawyer to invent the Monday morning line. The lawyer can record it. You have to mean it.
Owners also confuse this split with an exit. An exit is a sale, a closure, or a step away from the residual itself. I have treated that as its own question in what your exit strategy is. Keeping activities and handing the day is not an exit. It is a firm that can run on Monday without you in every chair. Write the line. Then keep it.
