Are You the CEO of Your Business or An Employee?

Learn how to step into the CEO role in your business and what actions you should take as a CEO to increase the success of your business.

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If you're an entrepreneur or a small business owner, I have a question for you. Are you truly the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of your business or just an employee of your business?

Are You the Chief Executive Officer or an Employee of Your Business?

You are probably wondering what the difference is. Here are some tell-tale signs:

As an employee, you are more likely to be running and gunning to do all of the tasks within the business. You are creating content, designing and scheduling social media posts, handling all of the marketing and sales calls, handling client issues, and responding to emails. You are responsible for all of the tech from your email provider to your website to any other software that you use in your business.

Employees generally don’t delegate, spend time planning ahead, setting goals, or analyzing business metrics. They go through their days and weeks without a real structured plan or a list of priorities, they may not be evolving their services because they're too busy wearing all the hats and they are usually not undertaking many business-building activities.

When you step into the Chief Executive Officer role of your business, a mindset shift occurs. A CEO, in contrast, is going to spend time visioning and planning ahead.

A CEO is going to set goals for their business and they're going to adjust those goals quarterly. They're going to analyze their business weekly by viewing their dashboards and financials.

A CEO will take action each week to build their business through networking, creating leads, prospecting for clients, and putting themselves out there.

They're going to spend time doing deep work which might be creating content or services that will serve their clients. A CEO will also delegate work that's outside of his/her zone of genius. Early on in the business, this may not be financially feasible, but as soon as a CEO builds their path to profitability, they will start delegating work that keeps you in your zone of genius.

How to Step Into Your CEO Role

Focus First on Revenue:

The saying goes that if you don’t have revenue, you don’t have a business. So, the first thing to do is to determine how you will make money? You want to be sure that you clearly understand your ideal client, their pain points, and desires. You also want to have clear offers that build on one another and lead your client on a path to success.

If you don’t have clarity on your ideal client and their pain points, or if you don’t have clear and compelling offers, I would recommend spending your CEO Time creating these. What is CEO Time? Keep reading to learn more. You can’t build revenue if you don’t have anything to sell or if you don’t have the right thing to sell.

Once you have saleable products or services, you can start building your revenue through marketing, promotion, and sales activities. As revenue comes in it will do two things immediately: 1) it will build your confidence so that you can sell more and 2) it will give you a little runway to outsource tasks outside your zone of genius. Even hiring a virtual assistant for 5 hours a week can help you to be more productive by keeping you in the CEO zone.

Set Goals:

As a CEO, you should have a roadmap for your business, with goals that lead to your business' destination or vision narrative. Generally, I recommend that you set goals at the beginning of your business's fiscal year and then review and adjust them quarterly.

If you don’t have goals right now as you are reading this, set them for whatever is the remainder of your business's fiscal year. There is never a wrong time to set goals. Don’t wait until the beginning of a calendar or fiscal year.

Create Dashboards to Track Metrics:

After you create your goals, develop a dashboard to track your progress on these goals. I call this your Strategic Dashboard.

I also like to have an Operational Dashboard that tracks audience, reach, sales, conversion, and revenue metrics. These are lag measures (they lag the effort required to create them) so I also like to track lead measures on my Operational Dashboard. For example, how many social media posts did I do, how many videos did I post, how many lives did I do, how many podcast hosts did I contact, and how many articles did I write?

Your lead measures are important as they show you what you are doing today to drive revenue and sales such as creating client conversations, doing podcasts, building my audience, or creating content every week for example.

Stay in Your Zone of Genius:

Consider really what is in your zone of genius and what tasks are better done by others. Now, some people are great at everything. They can edit videos, they understand social media, they're great at marketing, they're not afraid of public speaking and they can create all the content that they need in the world.

As a CEO, you need to analyze what tasks are a great use of your time and what tasks should be delegated to others. Perhaps your genius is creating content and you outsource the social media posting and the video editing to others for example.

Plan Weekly CEO Time:

To truly be a CEO and not an operational employee running around with your proverbial hair on fire, you will need to take control of your weekly schedule in a few ways.

First, at the beginning of your week (typically Sunday or Monday morning), plan your week according to your goals and priorities. You should slot in all of your client and personal appointments and other non-negotiables.

Next, plan your CEO Time. This should total 4 – 8 hours per week, typically in a large block of time such as 4 hours. This is the time that you will use to update your dashboards, analyze your business metrics, set up systems that help you streamline your business, and to work on business-building tasks.

Business-building tasks are those action items that help you expand your network, audience, leads, and clients. These tasks may include using emails and DMs to reach out to create or nourish relationships. They may include coffee chats to understand a colleague’s business and how the two of you can work together to support each other’s business and clients.

Personally, I like to have Monday mornings and Friday afternoons as my CEO Time but you can plan whatever time during your week that works best for you. Ideally, you will want to use the same consistent day and time each week.

After you plan your CEO Time, guard it with your life. It is easy to let other things slip into this nice, uninterrupted block. You will be tempted but stay true to the original intent of the time. Plan, create and build your business.

In your weekly planning, you also want to set aside time to accomplish your weekly Big 3 priorities. For more information on my “Win the Week!” Weekly Planning System, click here for a free download.

Final Thought: The Pareto Principle

The Pareto Principle is widely touted in business and life. It states that 80% of your output will come from 20% of your input. Said another way, 20% of the work that you do each week will result in 80% of your outcomes. The 20% that you need to be focused on is your CEO Time and specifically, your business-building activities.

Please take advantage of the many free resources here on your website and feel free to email me at jennifer@peaktoprofit.com or DM me on any social platform to let me know how I can help you!

Categories: : Focus, Goals, Habits, Leadership