Steve Ells founded Chipotle and built the fast-casual burrito concept, but scaling it to thousands of locations required different leadership skills. CEOs typically excel for 5 to 10 years, and matching the right leader to each growth stage matters more than one person doing it all.
Let's use Chipotle. There's the guy who invented the burrito. If you think about it, that's like the founder of the founder, right? Then there's Steve Ells, the guy that started Chipotle. He went, hey, burritos are great food. Let's scale this up. Let's turn this into a fast casual concept. Then there's someone who came in and scaled it to a bunch of stores, right? I think that was still Steve. That's kind of a different skill set. He went from 1 store to, say, 20 stores, and then they scaled it to like thousands of stores, and then they managed a public company. These are all different skill sets. The guy who invented the burrito is very different than the person who would be great at scaling Chipotle to 1,000 stores. CEO is really effective between 5 and 10 years, and every once in a while you get these special cases that can go the distance.
