If you were bigger you'd be looking for a COO - Chief Operations/Operating Officer.
A CEO does strategy, fund-raising, investor relations, and top level PR and interviews. CEOs don't primarily deal with the details you're describing - although in startups they sometimes have to.
If you want to be more down to earth about it, hire an office manager to do stock/order management and perhaps some HR, and a temp or book keeper to do the boring paperwork.
How? The usual places - online jobs boards.
If you don't like the paperwork I'd make sure you get an accountant to keep on top of the even more boring things like tax and PAYE. Otherwise the Revenue will hit you with a giant bill and close you down.
We have accountants who handle that side of things, it's the more mundane collection of receipts, payment of invoices etc. that are a drain on my time.
Thanks for clearing up the CEO/COO point though, I think I was getting a bit confused.
So in addition to the "You need a COO instead" pieces, this comment nails it. If you hire someone with a C title, you don't have room to grow that role upwards in the future. You'd probably be best off with "Office Manager", "Operations Director", "Logistics Manager", etc. Don't title inflate if you don't need to; the flip side being that you can probably get someone very good and very ambitious cheaper by giving them an outsized title.
I was in your position when i bought a (most likely) a much smaller company (200k rev) in a totally different industry (cleaning), the previous owner did everything manually and on paper, like EVERYTHING. I knew i didnt want to do this and also was going to get rid of it anyway. I wasnt that skilled at the "people" part of the business either (much better now) so i enlisted the help of my best friend, hired him to basically run the company day to day. Then i did what i'm good at, eliminating the unnecessary repetition, basically, i automated a LOT of the companies operations.
Now the company doesnt take that long to maintain on a day to day basis and is MUCH easier to deal with and isnt as fragile (less single points of failure). Theres still improvements to be made and we're working on that, but now it takes much less skill to be able handle the day to day, it doesnt need a CEO, just needs an administrator.
* Hire someone that is good with people, because you cant automate that.
* Automate as much of the admin crap as possible.
* For things that you cant automate, but does repeat, you can establish processes to be followed instead.
This might be totally irrelevant to you, but it worked for me very well.
You need a COO and if you can afford one, you should hire one. What you appear to want to do, set the strategic vision and lead the team, is exactly what a CEO does. A COO makes sure that vision is executed on a DAILY basis and that's what you want. A good COO is a beautiful thing for a scaling business, go find one!
This his the nail on the head. You need someone who can turn your vision into reality.
On thing to add is that you need to be very careful about governance. You need to be clear what the COO has authority on, and what they don't. You also need everyone to understand that when the COO speaks, it is as if you are speaking. You can achieve some of this by intelligently designing the reporting relationships. (Did I just advocate intelligent design?) You also have to do it by backing them up. If you give the COO orders, they execute them faithfully, people go around the COO, and then you backtrack, you will kill the COO's credibility.
Good advice. This will be tricky as there isn't a massively rigid structure in place as it is. It's like that that the COO will be asking me to do things at times, so governance groundrules will be very useful. Reminds me of http://holacracy.org/
IMO I'd start the role as Operations Manager or Director of Operations and grow it from there with the company. Lets you get someone for cheaper who can hopefully grow into the role as the company grows. It doesn't sound like you need a full-fledged COO yet anyway.
Sounds more like a COO (i.e. operations head) role rather than a CEO role to me.
Having co-founded a UK company which ended up with a number of CEO/COO folks over the years I would be very careful about the structure you put in place - especially if there is any chance of having outside investors who might align themselves with the new CEO rather than you founders.
Maybe make one of the existing founders CEO, mainly to have someone for the COO to report to?
NB I also found that "normal" managers were appalled at having someone in their team (i.e. who notionally reports to them) who actually had more power than they did.
It sounds like you essentially just want a business manager. A CEO is often the face of the company, heavily delegating and focusing on the big picture rather than personally managing each staff member and handling stock. All of that may simply be semantics, but it really does help set expectations when making that hire. If you hire a business manager, you'd doubtlessly need to hand over some equity, but I don't think I'd label the position as CEO.
From someone running a growing hardware business and living these headaches I'd recommend you take a close look at your systems- accounting, order management, shipping, billing etc and see where there are opportunities for automation and integration. The work is not fun but you're better off understanding how these things work and handing it off to someone to run instead of having them come in and build their own systems and processes. What happens when that person leaves and no one knows how the day to day is setup to run?
I have saved an enormous amount of time transitioning our business off of spreadsheet and manual processes to putting a remote-hosted Quickbooks Enterprise accounting environment, Salesforce CRM, and Hubspot marketing platforms in place. Each of theses platforms are integrated and we have dedicated staff operating in each environment and responsible for them. Constantly switching from one operations area to another is not only time consuming but highly prone to errors, especially shipping. Outsource your shipping asap with someone like Shipwire. Congrats on the growth in the business- I have found that starting up is hard but growth can be even more difficult!
Honestly, any manager who does not have a hands-on approach is a waste (20 years business/it experience).
That said, there is what I call management-craftsmanship, i.e. knowing how the legal environment influences you, understanding accounting etc., stuff you learn in (any) mba. This craftsmanship may be confused with being a good manager. It is not. It is just basics which wear off quickly. These types just do not add value mid- and long-term. They are usually just highly political bureaucrats.
Just be smart and study other companies. Google comes to mind. And be critical (value-adding, benevolent) with yourself.
“It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see..."
"You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?"
"No," said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, "nothing so simple. Nothing anything like so straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people."
"Odd," said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a democracy."
"I did," said Ford. "It is."
"So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse, "why don't people get rid of the lizards?"
"It honestly doesn't occur to them," said Ford. "They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they've voted in more or less approximates to the government they want."
"You mean they actually vote for the lizards?"
"Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course."
"But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?"
"Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?"
"What?"
"I said," said Ford, with an increasing air of urgency creeping into his voice, "have you got any gin?"
"I'll look. Tell me about the lizards."
Ford shrugged again.
"Some people say that the lizards are the best thing that ever happenned to them," he said. "They're completely wrong of course, completely and utterly wrong, but someone's got to say it."
"But that's terrible," said Arthur.
"Listen, bud," said Ford, "if I had one Altairian dollar for every time I heard one bit of the Universe look at another bit of the Universe and say 'That's terrible' I wouldn't be sitting here like a lemon looking for a gin.”
A CEO does strategy, fund-raising, investor relations, and top level PR and interviews. CEOs don't primarily deal with the details you're describing - although in startups they sometimes have to.
If you want to be more down to earth about it, hire an office manager to do stock/order management and perhaps some HR, and a temp or book keeper to do the boring paperwork.
How? The usual places - online jobs boards.
If you don't like the paperwork I'd make sure you get an accountant to keep on top of the even more boring things like tax and PAYE. Otherwise the Revenue will hit you with a giant bill and close you down.