I’m leaving a great gig as Fractional Director of Operations for Forget The Funnel.
Why? Well, that’s another piece. In this one, I want to explore the how.
As my roles have gotten more senior over the past few years, the relationships that have formed have followed, and exiting a company/team has had increasingly higher stakes.
Even if/when the stakes weren’t as high, an exit is still an opportunity to strengthen relationships, over deliver, and leave you & the organization better set-up than when you started.
The exit plan we built at Forget The Funnel (FTF), which I outline here, is being executed for the first time, but I’ve learned a lot navigating it & plan to use these guiding principles moving forward.
As with anything, take what’s useful and disregard what’s not. This plan worked quite well for me. If I were in a different position, I may take a different approach, but I’d follow the same principles.
Let’s set some context first.
The Context
The role: I’ve been working for FTF since January, 2023. I came on as a Program Manager & lead the launch of our book, then took over as Director of Operations in August, 2023.
I was working Fractionally, at 20hrs/wk. Over time this number became roughly an average; some weeks/months were over, some were under.
The why: At some point along the way I realized that I was ready to sink my teeth into a new challenge. I wasn’t in a rush to leave, I had no ill feelings toward the company or people (quite the opposite), and my top priority was to leave the company in a way they (and I) feel good about.
Situational dependencies: A couple scenarios in which I would not execute this exact plan:
- I had a start date for a new job that was less than a month away.
- I could not deal with (financially, emotionally, etc.) getting fired on the spot.
- I didn’t particularly care (or it wasn’t warranted) to do anything special beyond a standard 2-week notice.
If you’re looking for the key takeaways of my exit plan and we developed it, here they are:
One-Paragraph Summary:
-
- If you’re financially & emotionally prepared to be let go on the spot , there’s upside in sharing your desire to leave to a trusted manager and, more importantly, that your highest priority is help facilitate a smooth transition. In my case, I was, and it ended up being received well.
- Next, we developed an exit timeline. How? We identified our priorities between now and my departure, and worked backwards. For us, our priorities were documenting my work, hiring replacements, and sharing with the present team.
- More details of those priorities are below, but we prioritized transparency in our communication, as well as getting our ducks in a row as a leadership team before we shared with the wider team.
The plan starts with the riskiest step up front: sharing your desire leave.
This is where I waffled the most.
As with anything, my decision was rooted in weighing the tradeoffs of both paths.
On one side, I wanted to give my team ample notice and I knew if we all knew with 1-2 months of lead time, we could prepare well.
On the other hand, I didn’t want to get let go on the spot, nor did I want there to be any tension during my remaining time there due to the knowledge I’m leaving.
In the end, the relatively-low likelihood of my concerns coming to life + the huge potential upside of sharing steered me toward sharing. However, if I wasn’t prepared (financially, emotionally) to be let go on the spot, I wouldn’t have taken this risk.
So I shared it with my direct manager on a Monday morning. I didn’t want to set off any alarm bells and increase the likelihood of the conversation being derailed, and I knew how I positioned the conversation would matter.
Looking back, I feel I did this well, and this captures the essence of the positioning:
“I wanted to share that, after reflection, I don’t think this is the best fit for me long term. I know we’ve been looking ahead 1+ years in the future and were planning my involvement. I’m in no rush to leave, but I think we should make plans to take a different long-term direction. I want to make it clear that leaving the company in a good way is my highest priority around this exit.”
In this case, it worked quite well.
How We Identified an Exit Timeline
Our next step from there was to determine a timeline for my exit.
To do this, we identified our priorities we wanted to handle while I was still on the team, and worked backwards from there.
In this case, our priorities centered around documentation, filling team gaps, and sharing with the current team thoughtfully.
We landed on a timeline of 2 months from my initial share. At the time of writing this I’m only one month in, but given our trajectory I’d say this has been a good amount of time given our priorities. We haven’t had a ton of room for dilly-dallying, but we rarely have that anyway.
Internally, I was prepared to continue for up to 4 more months. I would have considered longer if it was valuable, but I wasn’t prepared for an automatic yes to a timeline longer than 4 months.
Let’s quickly look how I’m going about tackling these priorities with my time left.
How We’re Documenting My Work
Unsurprisingly, sound documentation around everything I have my hands in is high priority before I leave.
A Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) includes written + video step-by-steps.
I’ve been doing this in two ways:
- If a SOP has little to no nuance, I record myself going through the process with Scribe.how. The tool takes your video and splits it up into a written walkthrough with pictures, links, etc.
- If it’s valuable to include nuance / gray area in the SOP, I’ll record my video + audio with Loom as I’m doing it, then write out the step-by-step. You can edit your work with Scribe.how, but I find it more annoying to go back and edit each step in Scribe than I do to simply use my more manual method from the start.
Then, as I use this to train people, I (or they) adapt the documentation to reflect any inconsistencies.
Filling Team Gaps
Part of our exit plan involved ensuring we have the team bandwidth to take over my work, which for us involved bringing two new folks on.
There isn’t much to divulge here without getting into company details, but one important seed I want to plant: One month away from my departure we’d already hired who we wanted to; our remaining time has been spent on onboarding and getting them comfortable in the role. Onboarding is a vitally important piece of the hiring process, and if you don’t leave time to do it effectively, it can set the role & relationship off on the wrong foot.
Sharing With the Present Team
Our highest priorities here were to not keep this news a secret, share it transparently, and have a plan in place to show them there won’t be extra burden on them.
And in order for us to share it transparently (confidently), we wanted to have our ducks in a row with the previous two items beforehand.
And, when we did (4 weeks prior to my departure), the team handled it well, and we were able to answer any questions & concerns with tangible items we’ve either put, or were actively putting, in place.
Would I do this again?
After living out this plan for the first time, I would absolutely do it again the next time an exit needs to be thoughtfully considered.
And regardless of the exact plan that’s created next time, I know that I’ll lead with transparency, understand my boundaries before going into a collaborative conversation, & agree on a plan as a team before executing it.
I hope you took away something useful from these reflections. If you’re looking for additional support in exiting your company, or building intelligent operational systems for yourself or your organization, please don’t hesitate to reach out at alex@alexcartmill.com. If I’m not the best fit for you, I’ll do my best to point you in a better direction.
