When do you split the founder roles? | Caroline Chilley and Harriet Greenmount | ScaleUp Radio #651

How do you know when it is time to split the founder roles between you? Caroline Chilley and Harriet Greenmount built Boutique Housekeeping over ten years, and explain why they think they left that decision too late. Caroline and Harriet are the co-founders of Boutique Housekeeping, which places trained housekeepers and house managers with busy families across the UK. They started in 2016 after a conversation on a dog walk, spent the best part of a decade growing deliberately slowly, and then split the visionary and integrator roles between them somewhere in the last twelve to eighteen months. In this conversation they talk about what changed after that, why they compared themselves to cleaning companies for too long, how they manage a distributed team with no checklists at all, and why the two of them may now be the hardest part of the business to hire into. Chapters 00:00 Cold open 00:42 What Boutique Housekeeping actually is 06:52 Your real competitor is the family doing it themselves 07:36 Ten years in, and why the start was slow 08:31 Rocket Fuel, and splitting the founder roles 09:12 Training, pay, and why they did not franchise 14:51 A prison officer and a shoe buyer meet on a dog walk 18:04 Pricing against the wrong competitor 19:08 The Calm Code, and why a run home is a run business 26:41 What the team taught them about managing 33:28 The coaching advice they refused 38:45 Hiring people who have lost their confidence 42:15 The mistake: splitting the roles too late 46:01 The next hurdle, and the quickfire round About the guests Caroline Chilley, co-founder, Boutique Housekeeping Harriet Greenmount, co-founder, Boutique Housekeeping https://www.boutique-housekeeping.co.uk   / caroline-chilley-housekeeping     / harriet-greenmount-59a82b293   Mentioned in this episode Rocket Fuel, by Gino Wickman and Mark C. Winters They Ask, You Answer, by Marcus Sheridan Tony Robbins Slack Indeed About the show ScaleUp Radio is a podcast for founders of established businesses who have hit a ceiling, or can see one coming. More than 600 episodes with the founders who got past it. All 600 episodes: https://smart90.co.uk/scaleup-radio Subscribe on YouTube:    / @scaleupradio   From Smart90 Smart90 is the 90 day planning platform behind this show. If something in this episode sounded familiar, the Scaleup Challenges II report analyses what 305 founders said about the same problem: https://smart90.co.uk/scaleup-challen... #ScaleUpRadio #BusinessPodcast #FounderRoles