I’m struggling with my co-founders and need some words of wisdom.

We set up a CIC very recently, and basically, personalities are already clashing. I was under the impression that we’d get more volunteer Directors / volunteers on board to help grow the CIC right from the start – I’m a Marketing specialist and the other two are Tech specialists so we have zero business development between us. The idea was to bring in specialisms so that aspects of business development, fundraising and governance were covered.

But when I put forward that we should start that recruitment phase, he now seems keen to just stay as the three Directors because he doesn’t want his ‘vision’ affected. The problem is that one of them is just sitting doing nothing while they wait for funding to roll in (!) so they can start delivery and then get a paycheck (they’ll be the one actually delivering our services once funding is secured), one of them is the main director who is completely focussed on the Tech delivery rather than anything else involved in growing the business, and I’m fast getting burned out trying to hold the rest together.

We are all working full-time elsewhere, but as the Marketing specialist I’m getting dumped with all the back-end processes and tasks because they may be vaguely related to what I do in my day job. I want to step back from it after 12 months anyway – hopefully having secured a part-time employed marketing person for the role, so do I just sit tight til then?

I have tried to express the fact that there’s a lot to do and I can’t manage this all on my own, but then some quiet moods slip in and we’re just back to square one where I end up capitulating and working more and more hours for free.

I realise this is a large whine and we’re sounding like a bunch of kids here, but I’d love some pearls of wisdom from others about how to gel as a team running a new CIC, or when to know to take a step back.