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5 min read

Grooming the next leader—Succession transition and mentoring with Christine Faulhaber

Mahfuz speaks with Christine Faulhaber, CEO and founder of Faulhaber Agency, about how she found and mentored the right person to take over when she stepped away from day-to-day operations of her PR agency.

 

 

Key takeaways:

[00:09:51] Have a vision for the future of the business and your involvement in it, and then map it out in writing. Revisit the plan often to avoid frustration and hold yourself accountable, Faulhaber says.

[00:12:03] Give yourself and your team plenty of time for the transition. You can't expect things to happen overnight, and some team members will be more comfortable with change than others. Maintaining a presence and regular check-ins can help smooth the transition.

[00:14:21] Be serious about your role as a mentor. Faulhaber points out that the stakes are especially high when your mentee is taking over at the helm of the business you built from the ground up.

Learning from milestones

Christine Faulhaber talks about three milestones from her early days as founder and CEO of the company that would become the award-winning public relations and digital marketing firm Faulhaber Agency.

One was when she had made enough money to withdraw $1,000 from an ATM. “I thought, OK, this is real,” she recalls. “I’m not asking my sister to pay for groceries.”

The second occurred when she was still operating her company out of her apartment—something she’d done since starting out on her own at age 28—and won a big client that “we couldn’t really service,” Faulhaber says. “I remember hiring my mentor, who was a decade older than me, to work on it. It was one of those duck moments where you just paddled,” referring to a situation in which she kept a composed appearance while working frantically behind the scenes.

And the third milestone? “I was away and this big request for proposal came in, and I said, OK, if we don’t go for it, it won’t be the end of the world, but we want it,” she recalls. So, she hired back an old employee who was in between jobs to lead the pitch—and they won the business. “I remember thinking, wow, I let someone else in here and it was a success,” Faulhaber says. “That was a big, big, big milestone.”

It was also an important lesson, because the win showed Faulhaber that she didn’t have to do everything on her own and take on every opportunity herself—that, in fact, she probably shouldn’t. The reality, she says, is that

“You’re never going to scale or, you know, get richer if you’re the only one doing it.”

Write it down

Faulhaber didn’t start her company with a business plan, but as it grew, she started keeping an ongoing written record of her thinking, the agency’s successes and her earned wisdom. One of her agency mantras: “One plus one equals three, because if one plus one equals two, you’re doing what everybody else is doing.”

Her values, too, are an important part of that record, including her commitment to giving back. Faulhaber Agency supports 1% for the Planet, through which the firm pledges to donate 1% of annual sales to environmental causes.

Why write all that down? For one, it preserves institutional knowledge. “Whether you do it at the beginning [of your business] or you do it in the middle, … writing down all those magical things that you as an entrepreneur know and making sure that it’s relatable and that you can show this to other people in your business so that they can repeat it—this is the magic,” Faulhaber says. “If you don’t do that, then it’s all in your own head.” All that information, she adds, “is no longer useful if I’m the only that knows how to do it.”

 

Making the change, being a mentor

In 2021, Faulhaber made the decision to step back from operations and appoint someone to lead the company into its next phase of growth. But the handover of operational duties to a new president didn’t happen overnight—she says it took years to prepare for the succession, in fact.

“Like in a relationship or in a marriage, how do you decide commit to somebody?” she says. “This isn't the type of role that you can go shopping for and put a job posting up and hope someone shows up.”


To find the right candidate, she leaned on her long-standing practice of thorough documentation. She worked up a map for the president position, outlining duties and expectations. And beyond the requisite skills and experience, she had a few criteria that she felt were essential. One was that the successor had to be someone who “has developed a trust bank with you over time.” Another was values: “Are their values aligned with your values?” Faulhaber adds.

Luckily, she had someone within her organization who fit the bill: Lexi Pathak, who became president and partner while Faulhaber herself became CEO and founder. But the work of succession didn’t end with new roles in 2021. In fact, it continues to this day, an ongoing process of mentoring that Faulhaber takes very seriously. “When you’re mentoring somebody outside of your organization, there’s very low stakes,” she says. But it’s different when the mentee is your own employee—and one you hope will take over for you. “Their success is your success,” Faulhaber explains. “I’m the CEO and founder, I’m a shareholder, and I need this business to grow, and I need this person to be amazing.”

Again, “writing it down” was key to her approach to mentoring. She worked with Pathak to develop a job posting for the president’s role. It turned into a document to keep them on track in Pathak’s development and to hold them both accountable. They wrote down key performance indicators (KPIs) for the job, and they included not just what the president was expected to accomplish, but what she was expected to avoid. “That way, everyone knows what the benchmark is,” Faulhaber says, “but also, what does bad look like? Bad looks like, well, they haven’t done any LinkedIn post or bad looks like clients are calling to say they’re not happy,” she gives as examples.

“When you have those things in black-and-white, you can measure against them and both parties are aware that there’s no grey area.”


Stepping back from the company she created was a difficult decision, Faulhaber acknowledges, but she remains deeply involved with the agency, actively working on new business and regularly attending staff, finance and other high-level meetings. The transition has also given her the chance to gain perspective—and the careful, rigorous process in selecting and mentoring her successor has helped.

“I want to add my value to the business and not do all these other things that I no longer want to do or that I'm no longer best suited to do within the business,” she explains. “It’s allowed me to step back and have a look and say, OK, emotionally I might be sad about these things, but practically speaking, [Lexi is] absolutely a better person to be managing the day-to-day.”