Is Your C-Suite “Way Too Crowded”?

In his 2018 Fast Company piece, Russell Fleischer, GP at Battery Ventures and three-time tech CEO, warned that “the modern alphabet soup of C-level titles threatens to slow down innovation.”

So, just how many C-level executives are expected at your company according to market benchmarks?

The Problem with Too Many C-level employees

“If everyone’s a chief, no one is.”

Not to mention the downstream cultural implications where “more people come to the CEO with their hands out looking for their own shiny titles”.

This said, it’s a balancing act. A large public tech company with no CFO, for instance, is likely to be painfully chaotic in a different way.

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C-Suite Benchmarks: How Many C-Level Executives Is Too Many?

Here are the benchmarks from an analysis of 7,272 Pave customers on the median C-suite size by company stage. Note that founders actively employed by their companies are included in these benchmarks, while chiefs of staff are not.

Companies and startups with 1-100 employees typically have a median of 1-3 C-level executives. At the next phase of growth from 101-1000 employees, the median is 3-5 C-level executives. And at larger, enterprise-stage companies with 1001-3000+ employees, the median grows to 6-8 executives in the C-suite.

How does your company compare to the benchmarks?

I will conclude with some final parting words of wisdom from Russell Fleischer:

“I’m not saying that org charts and job titles should never change. Far from it. But my general advice is to tread carefully if you’re considering creating a new C-level title in your company. Doing so might give you a whopper of an organizational headache–one that will take more than a couple of aspirin to cure.”