📍 Hello and welcome to the Hybrid School Builders Podcast. I am your host, Rebecca Foley, and I am so glad you are joining me today. I am a fellow grassroots founder who is hoping to make your journey toward founding a sustainable hybrid school a little bit easier.

If you are dreaming of starting a hybrid school—or perhaps you’ve already gotten started—you are in the right place.

Join me as we dive into real stories, practical tips, and hard lessons I’ve learned to help you launch and grow your program with confidence. Remember, building a hybrid school is not just about creating a business or creating jobs. It’s not even just about serving the children who attend the program.

It’s literally about reshaping the landscape of education. And we can do that one community, one entrepreneur, and one program at a time.

Hey guys, welcome back. Today I wanted to tie together some of the loose ends from the last couple of episodes.

In the most recent episode, I talked about the executive director position from a broad nonprofit perspective—especially how that role works with a board. Before that, I talked about founder burnout and founder syndrome.

What I want to do today is talk more about how a director actually works on the operational side of the organization—not so much with the board—because most of their time is spent as a staff member leading the organization day to day.

I also want to connect that to how this usually works for founders, especially in the early stages.

When you’re a founder, you’re the one who birthed the whole thing—the idea, the model, the vision. And it’s amazing how many of us in alternative education felt like we were doing this completely alone.

I know my co-founder and I felt that way. When we started, we could find maybe a few programs online, scattered across other states, that were doing something kind of similar. And it wasn’t until years later that I realized, oh, there are actually quite a few of these programs out there.

Still not that many—but enough that people kept telling me the same thing: I thought I was the only one doing this.

So you end up feeling like this pioneer, trying to invent a model from scratch. And on top of that, you’re trying to figure out the nonprofit thing, the board thing, and the operational thing—all at the same time.

That’s the founder-entrepreneur burden.

So how do all of these things tie together? And why is it so common for founders to end up wearing both governance and operational hats?

It’s extremely common.

You start small. Maybe it’s one or two people thinking, let’s try this microschool or hybrid program a couple days a week. You’re figuring out homeschooling, figuring out logistics, figuring out money. Then you realize, well, maybe we should become a nonprofit.

So you’re learning as you go:
What does that involve?
We need bylaws.
We need a board.

You ask some friends, maybe family—who you’re technically not supposed to ask, but everyone does—and you say, Hey, I need people on my board. I don’t really know how to do this.

That’s extremely grassroots, and extremely common.

So what happens next?

You have a board meeting. You sit down and think, Okay… what do we do now? Nobody really knows. And I say that with total empathy—this is exactly where we were in the beginning.

You inevitably start talking about operational stuff.
We’re looking at a building.
We’re hiring people.
We held an open house.
I met with families.

And who’s doing most of the talking?
The founder.
The one who toured the building.
The one who talked to the families.

So naturally, the founder ends up conducting the board meeting.

Very normal. Very understandable.

The problem is what happens later.

Six months. A year. Two years. Five years down the road.

The board meetings still look the same.

The founder is still running the program day to day—meeting families, managing staff, handling the facility—and then also showing up at board meetings, giving updates, asking for feedback, and often still running the meeting.

Functionally, the founder ends up acting like the board president.

They may even be the president officially.

And what that does is blur the line between governance and operations even more. It becomes unclear which hat the founder is wearing at any given moment.

That confusion is one of the biggest contributors to founder burnout.

For sustainability, it is much healthier to separate those roles.

The board president—also called the chair—should be the one conducting board meetings: calling them to order, managing the agenda, and closing the meeting.

The executive director should be focused on operations.

When those roles are mixed together in one person for too long, the board often becomes more of an advisory, operational board rather than a governing board. And that’s not how the nonprofit model is designed to work.

In an LLC, there is no separate governance layer. You own the business, you make the decisions, you keep the profits.

In a nonprofit, the entire reason you have a board is to create a separate governing body responsible for oversight, compliance, transparency, and long-term strategy.

That means founders have to decide—ideally early on—where they want to sit long term:

As a governing board member, or

As the executive director / head of school

In the very beginning, things may be a little scrambled—and that’s often unavoidable. But you want to start using the right language as soon as possible and heading in the right direction.

If you plan to be the executive director, you need to name it.

You need the board to formally appoint you, define the role, and establish accountability. That doesn’t mean they don’t trust you—it actually creates clarity and support.

And you need to be honest with yourself about what that role really involves.

Being an executive director is not just supervising the program. It means overseeing:

Administrative systems

Finances

Strategic planning

Staffing and supervision

You can hire help. You don’t have to do everything yourself. But you have to be willing and able to oversee it.

If you don’t want that role, that’s okay too.

Some founders want to focus on curriculum or teaching. Others want to focus on systems and strategy. In that case, someone else needs to hold the executive director role.

What doesn’t work long-term is trying to do everything while also running the board.

If you’re already a year—or five—down the road and realizing, oh wow, we’ve been doing this wrong, the best thing you can do is hit the reset button.

You can say to your board:

“I realized we’ve been acting as an advisory board, and we’re actually supposed to be a governing board. And I should have been appointed as a director, because that’s the job I’ve been doing.”

Then you train.
You clarify officer roles.
You reset how meetings are run.

And you give people space to decide whether this is still something they want to be part of—because they may not have known what they were signing up for.

If there’s tension, frustration, or clunkiness in decision-making, that’s usually a sign there’s too much crossover between governance and operations.

That’s not personal.
It’s structural.

And once you clarify the structure, most of that tension eases.

So to sum this up:
The goal of this episode was to help you connect founder burnout, founder syndrome, and the executive director role—and to help you look honestly at where you are right now.

If you’re just getting started, use the right language early.
If you’re already down the road, it’s okay to reset.

Clear roles create sustainability—for you, for your board, and for the organization.

📍 Thanks so much for listening today. Don’t forget to subscribe, and make sure you check out the resources I’m developing at startahybridschool.com.

Send me an email anytime—I would love to hear from you.
Until next time