What To Focus On In Each Stage Of Your CEO Journey

TRANSCRIPT AUTOMATICALLY GENERATED Hey, Hey, it's my first solo episode of the year. And I'm so excited to be back chatting with you. And I've really been giving a lot of thought to what I want to bring to the podcast this year. And I think before I dive into some of the deepest stuff that I want to talk about, I really want us to take a step back so that you can look at where you are right now, what your focus is on in this current phase of your business and for us to chat about how that might change as your business develops. Remember when you first started your business and it was really just you. You were essentially the chief everything officer . They was nobody to CEO at that point in time. Your focus in that phase, in your business was really about attracting leads, selling to them and then delivering. Depending on your business model, you may stay a solopreneur for a really long time. And the difference between that being a comfortable place for you to live, it's not a bad place to live if your business model supports it, and it becoming a really uncomfortable place is how well, you know yourself. How well you've set up your business. To support you. Because what often happens in this phase? Is we cycle between. I need to sell. I need to bring in money. So I need to sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, and then you sell and you go, oh my goodness, I've sold all of this stuff now I need to deliver. And so you swing your focus and to delivery because you're only one person. So you're not doing both of the things at the same time. And now you're suddenly focused on delivering, delivering, delivering, delivering. And you look up and you're like, Ooh, And like a city days, time, all of these jobs are going to be finished. Now I need money. And so we swing back into sales. Now that in itself is exhausting to live in that constant, almost stressed zone of like, I need to make sales. I need to deliver it right. So if your goal and your business model is to stay in this chief, everything officer stage. There's no judgment around that. If that's working for you. Great. If it's not, it's going to be a recipe for burnout. Because that. Desperation to sell and then that kind of desperation to deliver. Is going to translate itself into broken boundaries all over the place. So this is you and you are making a conscious decision and this is where you want to stay. I really want to encourage you. Two. Pay attention to the activities that you're doing. And pay attention, not just in terms of this takes me a really long time. I want you to look for the ones that are draining for you. Because often the chief everything officer will have a VA or some contractor will help on the side. And these are the tasks you want to look at. Offboarding the ones that drain you. Energetically. Not just things that take up your time. If something takes up time, but it's in your zone of genius. That's not necessarily something you need to get off your plate immediately. I also want to encourage you to look at. How you were doing things. How does your sales process work? How is your marketing working? How does your delivery process work and ask yourself if there's a different way to get that result that feels better to you. That feels more fun, more exciting. More. Yay. I can't wait to get to my desk tomorrow morning to do this again. Once you've made the decision to grow beyond what you can support. As a chief everything officer, as a solopreneur with maybe a really small team of one supporting you. So when you first entered this phase, you're usually. Have a small team that needs lots of supervision and you're delegating at a task level. So what I mean by this is you are saying to somebody, I need you to take over posting of social media. Here are the standard operating procedures I want you to follow. And you're checking that that work has been done. As you progress. As a team and as your team becomes more accustomed to your business, As they grow in their roles, maybe you start to move towards delegating an outcome. And what this entails is saying to somebody. I want you to grow social media by X percent. I want you to make X number of sales this month. I want you to reduce our email response time by X amount. You are delegating the result that you would lack to somebody. And allowing them to figure out how to do that, the best way that they can. And I like to think of this phase as the chief entrusting officer. You start off trusting somebody with small tasks. And by the end, you've hopefully got to the point where you are entrusting somebody with outcomes and really starting to free up your space. If you're in this phase of your business. What I want you to think about is what have you offboarded onto your team? A lot of the time we hire when we were in pain. We all responding to the fact that we feel overwhelmed and overloaded. And as a result, our. Frantically trying to get work off of our plate. So that we can deal with the business side of things in this space. You're probably still involved in the sales. You're probably still involved in the delivery. People are still coming to the business because of you and your name and your reputation. So really what you're looking for is just to offload stuff. What can happen then as we start to look for that team , we have hired based off of what we need to offload. So we have gone, I need to get rid of social media. I need a social media manager. I need to. Offload my podcast editing. I need a podcast editor. And we are looking very specifically at a job title. Rather than, Who's best suited to this thing that I need done, whether that's a task. Or an outcome. we have a tendency to hire ourselves. As well. We can sometimes have a team of like many MES. And so if you're in this space, whether you're starting to hire for the space. Or whether you're managing your team in the space, it's really important to step away for a second, from all the job titles. And really ask yourself. What needs to happen in the business and who is naturally suited to each of those tasks? And this includes you. It's about you asking whether or not somebody else. And this is how you get from task to outcome. Asking yourself is somebody actually naturally better at something than me? Does this person naturally make connections on social media and have these epic long chats with people where when you do that for a day, you need to recover. And it doesn't matter what you hide the mass. You might have hired that person as your VA. But actually, when you're looking for somebody to help you sell in the DMS, maybe they're the perfect fit. So in this interesting. Officer space, this chief and trusting officer space. I want you to think about how can you move from interesting tasks to interesting outcomes. And how can you let go? I have the idea that you might be the best person for everything. If you're still hiring into the space. I want you to think about the type of person that you need to hire more than the job title? Now if you want to stay. In the middle of your business, you love being the face of your business. You love being part of the sales or the delivery. Maybe this is as far as you want to grow the business and that's totally fine. If, however, you're starting to look to scale. You move from being a chief and trusting officer, which is about a small team running the business. Under your supervision to a chief expansion officer. Usually this is signified by the fact that you cannot hire fast enough. Your business is experiencing growth and you need to hire us simply to keep up with the demand for people trying to get your services. And this is going to include those areas that have been traditionally your spotlight moments, whether that's sales or delivery. All of your focus is now suddenly shifting onto how do I build a team as quickly as possible. Get them up to speed as quickly as possible so that we can keep growing at this rate, right? You want to keep that momentum stoke that fire. But you need people to help you do it. It also means you have to let go. All of the sales and marketing of the delivery of the tasks that you've been holding onto. So that you can turn your attention to attracting and onboarding new talent. You have to hope that when you arrive in that chief and trusting officer space, That you had moved into a delegation of outcomes. Model with your team. If you hadn't, that's where burnout is going to come in here. Because you are now. Focused on trying to bring in new people while also trying to up-skill the current people that you have so that you can delegate. An outcome, like, whether that is. Delivery. That's always five store or it's X number of sales a month. Those KPIs that belong to you. I have to move off your plate so that you can focus on who are we hiring? How are we bringing people in? Who do we need to attract? Who do I need to talk to? So this is going to feel like a super hectic space in the business. You're not looking to stay in this. We're growing so fast. We can barely keep up kind of phase of business. It's extremely stressful for everybody who's involved in it. So you want to grow through that as quickly as possible. And move into what I like to call the chief evolution officer. Your team is well-established. You've started to put team leads in place and you're beginning to focus on what's next. You're looking at, how do we grow the business? What am I strategic partnerships looking like. How do we evolve into our next iteration of delivery? What's the next market we want to deliver. What's the next product we want to launch. You're focused on being the face for your business and doing all of these activities while your team. All looking after your client experience the whole way who, and you become an employee. In inverted commas or team member. Four members of your team. And what I mean by that is. You've at this point, you've. Handed over. Marketing to a team lead. Let's say for example, They have their outcome, their KPI that they need to deliver on. However, what they need from you is to shoot five videos. Rot a social media post or whatever it is, so you not almost report into them in that. Respect But they own the KPI. The same with sales, where you might need to do a big push by going on a podcast to generate leads for your sales team to convert. They need you to do that upfront work so that they can do their job, but they own that KPI. The onboarding and delivery team may need you to show up once a month to do an onboarding call with all the new members of your group program. They may need you to do a 30 minute welcome video that explains your. Thought leadership on a particular topic for your course that people have just bought. They may need you to do a half hour milestone call with somebody in the program, when they reach a certain stage, they earn some face time with you. And then when the person is finished working with your team, they may need to receive a personal email from you, inviting them to stay in the program or to become a referral. So you still have these touch points. Throughout your client's experience. But here's the key. When you are in the state where you in this chief evolution officer. Your team is running your client experience. You are contributing to it. They are running it. They are going to determine how your client. Feels about your business. And this is the piece that everybody misses. Your job at this point. Is no longer your client's experience. Your job at this point is your employees. And I use the word employee, but teams experience. It's going to let that sink in for a moment. Your job has stopped being to manage your client's experience. And now. It's your job to manage your team's experience. Might because they are responsible for your client experience. So. When you're in this phase. When you're looking at the next evolution, the last thing that you want to have happen is for you to be pulled back into the day-to-day, into the maintenance of the business, into those key touch points that your clients need. Into the admin tasks into firefighting. And so your key role at this point of the business is. First of all growth from a business perspective. But second of all is managing your team's experience so that they have everything that they need. To be able to support your client experience because they now own your whole client experience. They are responsible for that experience. You want to be thinking about how do you bring in the best team possible? How do you get them up and running? How do you develop them in those roles? So they can grow and deliver an even better client experience. So we want to make sure they have everything they need to deal with that. But also, we want to make sure that they have everything they need to feel fulfilled in their jobs. Happy in the team and excited to come to work because if they're not enjoying their experience as part of your team, Your client experience is going to suffer. The business is going to suffer, and then you are going to be pulled back into that day-to-day and you are going to have to look away from those growth plans and those next evolution plans that you have going. So while your primary focus is on growth, it's really important that you don't forget that part of that growth plan is making sure. That you don't drop the ball as you reach for the next new shiny one. That business as usual can carry on at the same time. So if we go back through the whole process, first of all, you're the chief everything officer, you're a team of one, your sole focus is on client experience, selling and delivering and where you need to focus is making sure that you are having a good experience at the same time so that you don't burn out. Then we move into that chief and trusting officer. Where we start off with delegating some small tasks. Building a small team. Delegating outcomes to members of the team all still with supervision and also with your fingers in the whole client experience PI. Your team is there to help you deliver on that client experience. And they may own parts of it. Then we move into that chief expansion officer. This is that frantic moment where the business is scaling and you're trying to keep up with that growth and not drop any balls. You're focused on attracting talent and getting them up and running as quickly as possible. While still, maybe having your finger in a couple of pies, like made me a, so part of delivery. And maintaining that kind of KPI level. Oversight. Of your team and the outcomes that you've delegated. And then finally we grow into the chief evolution officer while your team is well established. You have a leadership team. And your team now owns your client experience. And your role is not a manage your team's experience. Because they manage a client experience. So if your team suffers client experience or suffer, If client experience suffers the business suffers. And this is the piece. That I see a lot of entrepreneurial CEOs. Have on the nice to have list. We're really good at growing a team. We're really good at being the face of the business and thinking about what's next. But really do we have this team experience, plan or strategy? In our back pocket, along with our revenue plan and our profit plan and our growth plan. And this is ultimately going to be the center of your business cog. If you think about everything else is going to rotate around that. Your team touches everything in your business. So, if you see yourself as the CEO, it's your job to make sure that they have what they need. Now, I know this was a lot. I want to be clear though, that there's not any particular stage of the CEO that you need to be in. If you decide to stay a team of one in your business model and it supports exactly what you want from your life. That doesn't make it any better or worse than somebody who's decided they want to grow a big team that have big revenue goals, big impact goals. But I want you to really take away from this is what level am I at at the moment and where do I need to be focused in order to be successful at this level? I also really want to encourage you to be successful at that level. Before you try that level up.