There’s something exhilarating about being a scrappy start-up venture. You’ve seen your ideas and innovations take hold, your customer base and revenue pipeline grow, and your faith in yourself justified.  Although the vision was yours, the goal was never to remain a one-person outfit. You set and hit growth targets, and built both a thriving business and a successful team of people. You did all this so well, in fact, that you’ve completely rewritten your own job description. It’s no longer possible for you to wear all those hats or continue to handle all the tasks that you routinely took on in the past.

The company needs to be headed not by an owner or founder, but by a CEO. Are you ready to meet the challenge of engineering your own promotion to a position of executive leadership? Here are some of the key issues and challenges you need to consider:

• Executing your evolution. You can’t make a genuine shift from owner to CEO without making some hard choices about your role in the company.
• Defining your management style. It takes a combination of constantly reinforcing your company’s mission and the top priorities and promoting a culture in which it’s everybody’s job to be well-informed, aware of the marketplace, and aware of the customer.
• Maintaining vision through growth. It’s about leading a collaborative approach to individual and organizational growth that works to consistently redefine vision and spark the company’s evolution to achieve continued growth.

Becoming a CEO is an ongoing process, not a one-time shift. The way you define the role will change as your company continues to mature, achieves certain milestones, and sets new performance targets.

Read the fourth in our series of Connections to Growth guides, Entrepreneur to CEO: Making the Transition, to learn how you can use technology as a catalyst for growth.