[grizzles]

There's some good advice in this thread, I'd definitely read it all and try implementing whatever's appropriate.

But, let's say you decide to leave anyway. So what. It sounds like you are reselling labor services? (eg. coding?) If so, that's a terrible business and I wouldn't hesitate to encourage you to move on.

Your friends will understand or they aren't really your friends. For you business partners, well that's business. You adapt and move on. A few ways of managing the exit:

Give them plenty of lead time to find someone to replace your role.

Say you want to stop fighting fires and focus on the long term strategy of the company as eg chairman. Cut back your hours, go live your bohemian lifestyle and email in your wise prognostications.

If you want a better way of selling labor services, one of the best ways I've seen is to manage your workforce like a recruiting company. Embed your coders in your customer's companies, on fixed term contracts. I've seen this model work really well. It's the easiest way of scaling a coder services based company.