Who's the Boss???

So, yeah, you're the Idea Ingenue, the Wheeler Dealer, the Startup Czar. Now what? What do you do when you're no longer a startup, you have a couple dozen employees and things aren't as nimble (or easy) as they used to be? What happens when the collective lack of experience but oodles of enthusiasm starts to be a detriment rather than an asset?

Doug Tatum, a management consultant and author of No Man's Land: What to Do When Your Company Is Too Big to Be Small but Too Small to Be Big (BusinessWeek.com, 8/1/07) says many companies encounter similar problems when they grow to around 20 employees. That's when companies typically are forced to make the transition from the high-performance/cheap-labor model that worked in the startup phase of the business and start paying the real costs of labor and productivity.

Facing the reality that the Founder is probably not the "big-time" leader to take a company to $50 / $100 / $200 million is a real gut-check.
Bottom line question: What's more important to you, Top-Dog, your ego or your income?