What if you were to stop thinking of yourself as a programmer and become more of a CTO in training? Your value to your team isn't doing code but in helping them work with outside coders and making sure everything runs smoothly. Instead of fighting that role why not embrace it? Code is a commodity, but managing code and being "that gray person" has real value to a company.

That is what the CEO's hope was by bringing me in. However, the company's existing devs(all remote; mostly offshore) have been with them for couple years and are weary of reporting to anyone other than the CEO.

Bottom line: I feel I can get more output done by just working alone than trying to delegate the same programming task among the devs. This won't scale obviously. But the company is pre-rev and not at a point where it needs scaling(the CEO probably disagrees with me on this).

Re-read what you just wrote and you'll see the following:

CEO's hope by brining me in - vs - what i want to get done

I think I'd follow the CEOs lead — my bet is there's something that is making him unhappy with the offshore team and they know it. And frankly it doesn't matter what you or the offshore team team -- what should matter is what the CEO wants. Frankly my bet is that the CEO is seeing something in you that you haven't yet.

Suggestion: Why don't you learn something about managing? Even if you learn to manage your own time it can only help you. I'd suggest reading the "Mythical Man Month" -- it's one of the best software project management books ever written and would help you explain what's needed to management.

Cool, will read Mythical Man Month. Thanks for your tips.