Many business owners I meet hand me a business card that says “CEO and President.” I did the same thing when I started my first business, partly out of ignorance and partly out of ego, because I liked sharing a title with the titans of industry.
Here’s the short answer to what those titles actually mean. The CEO is the visionary. They watch what’s happening outside the company and try to anticipate the future, so the business ends up in the right place. The President is about execution. They focus on what’s going on inside the business and use past results as the reference point for improving it. The Chairman leads the board of directors, not the company. And Owner describes who holds the equity, not a job. These are roles, and in a small business one person often holds more than one of them.
Two People on Top of the Pyramid
In my workshops, I turn that into a picture. Imagine the business as a pyramid. The President sits at the top and looks down through it. The pyramid is the organization itself: the people, the processes, the numbers. Everything the President needs to see is below them, inside the structure.
The CEO sits right next to the President at the top of the same pyramid. But instead of looking down, the CEO surveys the land all around it. Is the ground shifting? Is something better over the next ridge? The question the CEO keeps asking is whether the pyramid is still in the right place, or whether it needs to be moved somewhere more productive.
That gives you two dimensions. The first is focus: the President looks inside the company, and the CEO looks outside it. The second is time: the President works from the past to the present, while the CEO works from the present into the future. Where the two overlap is the company itself.
Peter Drucker framed it as efficiency versus effectiveness. Efficiency is doing things right. Effectiveness is doing the right things. The President is responsible for the first, the CEO for the second.
Another way to picture it is with a house-building metaphor. The CEO is the architect, creating the blueprint based on a family’s future needs. The President, in contrast, is the general contractor, overseeing the subcontractors and ensuring the house gets built to that blueprint.
Roles, Not People: Why Most Owners Wear Three Hats
Most small business owners don’t start out as a CEO or a President. They start out as a technician. Michael Gerber, in The E-Myth Revisited, describes what happens next as the entrepreneurial seizure. Someone is exquisitely good at their trade, and somebody in their network says, “You’re so good at this, why don’t you start your own business?” So, they do. And somewhere along the way, they order business cards that say “CEO and President.” They’re copying the titles they see at the top of big companies, without understanding the roles behind them. I know, because I did it too.
They’ve actually taken on three jobs. There’s the technical work they were already good at. There’s the President’s work of running the business day to day. And there’s the CEO’s work of figuring out where the business is headed. Gerber calls these the Technician, the Manager, and the Entrepreneur. I call them the Technical, President, and CEO personas.
When I talk about the President and the CEO, I’m talking about roles, not necessarily different people. A small business usually doesn’t have the margin to pay someone to fill each role until it reaches a certain size, so the owner wears all three hats. At that size, that’s normal.
The trap is that strong technical skill can work against you as an owner. Gerber’s point is that your job is to work on the business, not in it. Working on the business is the role of Presidents and CEOs. Working in it is the technical role. The rub comes when you’re good at the technical side but not yet good at running the business. When things go sideways, something predictable happens. You revert to what you know. You grab the tools, fix the job, and put out the fire yourself. It feels productive, but in the end, you’ve taken your hand off the tiller, and nobody is steering.
The fix is to divide those tasks out deliberately, first in your own calendar and later between different people. Separating the roles is part of what makes scaling possible, because getting good at any one of them is hard work on its own.
Farmers and Hunters
Why are some people natural CEOs while others are natural Presidents? It’s not just personality or preference. I think we’re wired differently, and the answer goes back a long way.
For most of human history, natural selection favored people who made good hunter-gatherers. A hunter-gatherer had to be multidisciplinary and deal with change every day. They didn’t control anything. They worked with whatever nature put in front of them, and once a group had foraged an area and hunted its animals, they moved on. They were highly mobile and flexible, a lot like the modern entrepreneur.
About 12,000 years ago, people began settling into agrarian society. They gave up the nomadic lifestyle, planted crops, and domesticated animals. That was the real shift. Instead of taking what nature offered, farmers set out to control it. Life settled into an annual cycle of making improvements and managing yields on a finite piece of land. That pattern carried into the industrial era, and it’s where things like annual budgets come from.
The President is the farmer, improving the yield on known ground. The CEO is the hunter, scanning uncharted territory.
The two also think differently. Researcher Saras Sarasvathy describes two kinds of reasoning. Causal reasoning starts with a fixed destination and works backward to the steps needed to get there. That’s the old business-planning model. Effectual reasoning starts with the means you already have: who you are, what you know, and who you know. Then it lets the destination take shape as you go. Presidents tend to reason causally: here’s the target, here’s the budget, here’s the plan to hit it. CEOs tend to reason effectually: here’s what we’ve got, here’s what the world is offering, what can we make of it?
Some of the traits that made a good hunter, the ones we now label dyslexia and ADHD, are the same traits that make a good CEO today. For hunter-gatherers, those traits were vital to survival. But as we moved into agrarian society and then the industrial era, the same traits turned into liabilities in a world that rewarded planning, predictability, and repetition. Thom Hartmann made this case in ADHD: A Hunter in a Farmer’s World. They’re better understood as remnants of our hunter-gatherer wiring than as flaws.
Dyslexia is in many ways a spatial adaptation. The dyslexic mind can picture an object from multiple angles, even the sides it can’t see. For a hunter-gatherer, that was a survival skill. You had to picture the terrain from above, imagine where an animal would be on the other side of a ridge, and find your way back to camp without a map. Seeing what wasn’t directly in front of you meant the difference between eating and going hungry. That’s exactly what a CEO does with a business. They turn it around and look at it from the customer’s side, the competitor’s side, and the side of whatever trend is coming next.
ADHD brings intensity. When something grabs their attention, people with ADHD can hyperfocus on it, blocking out everything else until they’ve got a handle on it. For a hunter, that was essential. Once you spotted the gazelle, you had to shut out the world and stay locked on that one target for hours, filtering out every distraction until the hunt was over. Then you shifted to the next thing without missing a beat.
Put those together, and you get the polymath. A hunter-minded founder dives deep enough into a subject to gain a working knowledge, then moves on to the next. It might be employment law or sales tax. But just as often it’s something with no obvious connection to the business at all, like a news story, a shift in technology, a bit of history, or a trend showing up in a completely different industry. The result isn’t deep expertise in any one thing. It’s breadth. And breadth is exactly what the CEO role demands, because the CEO’s job is to compare unlike things and spot connections nobody else sees. A change in interest rates, a new app your kids are using, a competitor’s odd move. Any one of them might matter. So, the role rewards breadth more than depth, and the CEO has to be something of a polymath.
The President’s strengths come from the other side of that history. Farming made specialization possible, starting with the farmer. You didn’t just farm. You became a wheat farmer, or a cattleman, and you got better at it every season. That focus produced higher yields. Higher yields meant fewer farmers were needed to feed everyone else, freeing others to specialize as potters, smiths, and millers. That’s the President’s world. As a business grows, it gets more complicated, more specialized, and more repetitive. It needs someone with patience, consistency, and a taste for routine. Someone who can manage a team of specialists, compare this year to last, and keep improving yield. Those aren’t lesser traits. They’re the traits that let a business last.
Good Presidents are, at heart, good project managers. They stay on top of things, track the details, and make sure what was started actually gets finished. I’ve always thought of myself as more of a CEO than a President. I come up with unusual ideas, and I can get a room fired up about them. But taking something from the first step to completion takes meticulous attention to detail, and that’s not my strong suit.
That’s also why people with strong President skills often make ideal franchisees. In a franchise, the franchisor does most of the CEO work: designing the business, building the brand, and deciding where it goes next. The franchisee’s job is execution. If you’re a natural President, a franchise lets you buy the CEO work instead of doing it yourself.
Where Each Role Sits on the Business Model Canvas
The Business Model Canvas makes the split easy to visualize. The President owns eight of the nine boxes that define the core of the business model: Key Activities, Key Resources, Value Propositions, Customer Relationships, Channels, Customer Segments, Cost Structure, and Revenue Streams. Those are about execution.
The one exception is Key Partners, which sits between the two roles. Once a partnership is in place, managing it day to day is execution, so that falls to the President. But finding the right partners and negotiating the deal falls to the CEO, because partners come from outside the business.
[Image: your Business Model Canvas with the four environmental forces (Key Trends, Industry Forces, Market Forces, Macroeconomic Forces), alt text: Business Model Canvas surrounded by four environmental forces]
As the company’s interface with the outside world, the CEO also deals with investors and shareholders, brings in new partners, and handles most legal matters.
CEO vs President at a Glance
I use the table below in my workshops to bring it all together. It compares the two roles side by side, from where each one looks to how each one defines success.
Area
CEO
President
Focus
Outside
Inside
Vision
Strategy
Execution
Success
Sustainability
Growth
Financial
Stockholder/Investor Value
Yearly Profit
Definition
Define Our Business
Drive the Business That Is Defined
Investment
Balance Investments
Maximize Output
Values
Shape Values and Standards
Behaviors to Match Values
Role
Link Outside to the Inside
Make Inside Productive
Planning
Plan
Implement
Being Right
Doing the Right Things
Doing Things Right
Timeline
Present to Future
Past to Present
End Game
Legacy
Performance
View
Long-Term View
Short-Term Focus
Where the Chairman Fits
The Chairman comes up often enough to warrant a brief mention, even though most of the small businesses I work with will never need one. In larger corporations, stockholders elect the board of directors, and the Chairman leads the board, not the company. In many public companies, the Chairman and CEO roles are held by different people.
In the multinational, publicly traded Coca-Cola corporation, all three titles exist. It has a Chairman, a CEO, and about 10 Presidents who run its operating units worldwide. That’s no accident of org-chart taste. As I’ve written before, when a business adds locations or operating units, the President role multiplies because each unit needs someone to run it day to day. The CEO role doesn’t multiply the same way. A company can have many Presidents, but it has only one CEO.
Owner: What Your Legal Structure Actually Calls You
Owner isn’t an officer title. It tells you who holds the equity.
If you’re a sole proprietor, you are the owner, full stop. In an LLC, the owners are called members, and a manager-managed LLC also has managers. Beyond that, the titles are up to you and your operating agreement. In a corporation, the shareholders own the business, the board of directors appoints the officers, and the bylaws define what those officers do. Many states expect at least a couple of named officers, and President and Secretary are the traditional ones.
I’m not a lawyer, so check your state’s rules and your own operating agreement or bylaws before you settle on titles.
What Title Should Go on Your Card?
If you truly are one person doing everything, from creating value to making sales calls to taking out the trash, your title is Owner.
If Owner doesn’t fit, use President. For a small business, I rarely suggest the title of CEO unless a separate person actually performs that role, and I almost never suggest both. Most of the small businesses I work with are in the trades, offer services, or run small retail operations, where the work is about 99% execution and 1% vision. That’s the President’s job.
But the title on the card isn’t the whole story. Even with President on your card, you still have to do the CEO’s work. Someone has to climb up, look out over the land around the pyramid, and decide where the business is headed. The title just reflects where most of your time goes, not the only role you play.
When responsibilities are clearly divided, as they often are in larger businesses, each person should take the title that reflects the role they mainly play. The one looking outward and at the future is the CEO. The one running the operation is the President.
When I see both titles on one card, I usually think two things. The person is trying to project that they’re all-powerful. And the business is small enough that one person does both jobs. Those are two jobs that require very different skills, which probably means they’re not especially good at either. It’s even more telling when I’m the customer. When someone comes to my house to do work and hands me a card that says “President and CEO,” I know I’m looking at a one-man show. He’s wearing all three hats and doing most of the technical work himself.
A single title, on the other hand, tells a different story. When someone hands me a card that just says President, I assume there might be a CEO somewhere behind them, someone else focused on where the business is headed. Whether or not that’s true, it suggests the business has more than one leader and that the owner understands the roles. As a customer, that reads to me as size and sophistication.
A change is on the horizon worth watching. In most organizations, far more effort goes into the President’s work than into the CEO’s. Execution has always taken more hands, so companies spread the load across Presidents, Vice Presidents, and layers of managers below them. Artificial intelligence is starting to change that math. As AI absorbs more of the President’s effort, fewer layers may be needed. That doesn’t make the President obsolete. Someone still has to make sure the work gets done right. It just means more execution tasks, the details that have always been the President’s domain, can be offloaded to AI.
Hiring a dedicated President so you can grow into the CEO role is one of the clearest signs a business is starting to scale.
So go back to that business card. The title on it doesn’t say how important you are. It says which role you understand, and which one you’re actually doing.
