The Profit Scale

Working as The CEO vs The Employee in your business - Ep. #5

Episode Summary

Salutations friend, and welcome to another episode of The Profit Scale! This is the podcast for service-based coaches, consultants, and creatives looking to stop living paycheck to paycheck, pay themselves more and scale their business beyond the 6-figure plateau all without being overwhelmed by working 60+ hours work weeks. I’m excited about this week’s conversation because we’re going to talk about what it looks like to be a CEO vs an Employee in your business! It's really important to know the difference between the two so you'll be able to learn which task you should focus on and which one to delegate to your employees. Thus, today's topic is addressed to help you ensure that your business is are moving forward in the direction you want it to go, so you can grow further, faster!

Episode Notes

Salutations, friend! Welcome back to another episode of The Profit Scale podcast.

For today's episode we will start off by defining the role of the CEO and the role of an employee. After that, we’re going to break down key differences between the two roles to help you identify which role you fall into. 

I am also going to breakdown the process on how you can make your CEO Days work without dropping the ball on any of your client work AND without missing out on coins.

Steps:

  1. Schedule your time period.
  2. Plan out what you’re going to work on.
  3. Run through the Critical questions below to complete the process:

Links:

 

Episode Transcription

TPS Episode 5 - Working as The CEO vs The Employee in your business

I’m excited for this week’s conversation where we’re going to talk about what it looks like to be a CEO vs an Employee in your business! There are a few important differences between the two. As the CEO, you have to make sure you’re doing this one thing regularly because it’s crucial to both the growth and sustainability of your business and without it, you could find your business failing. On the other hand, employees are the ones taking up the groundwork for your business. 

Today's topic is addressed to help entrepreneurs ensure that they are moving forward in the direction they want to be moving, and not just moving for the sake of moving. 

Introduction 

Salutations friend and welcome to an episode of the profit scale! This is THE podcast for service-based coaches, consultants and creatives looking to stop living paycheck to paycheck and who wants to pay themselves more and scale their business beyond the 6-figure plateau all while without being overwhelmed by working 60 + hour every week. 

 

I’m your host and Income Strategist, RJ Connell, and if you’re looking to collect more coins, stop dropping coins, and grow your business sustainably, then you, my friend are in the right place! Turn up the volume and lean in, cause we’re about to get started!

Episode Content 

Salutations friend, and welcome back to another conversation, I’m your Income Strategist, RJ Connell and today we’re discussing what it means to be the CEO vs being the employee of your business!

Let’s keep it real, you’re working hard to grow your business while having your head down and doing the work. And as you’re building your business, I’m sure there have been times when you looked up and realized how exhausting it can be to do it all by yourself.

Well, here’s the thing, even if you’re currently the only person who runs your business and doing all the work such as customer support, social media manager, project manager, bookkeeper, Human resources AND sales there is still a crucial role that you MUST fill if your business is going to grow, and that’s the role of the CEO. 

 So let’s start off by defining the role of the CEO and the role of an employee. After that, we’re going to break down 5 key differences between the two roles to help you identify which role you fall into. Sound good? Awesome, let’s jump in!

I define the role of a CEO as that of the leader in business. The CEO is responsible for establishing and casting the vision of the business and aligning the actions of the leadership and working team to serve the vision. They are responsible for protecting the vision by ensuring that new opportunities, systems, programs, and procedures support it while also ensuring the business is moving constantly in the right direction while making corrections when the business veers off track.

For me, the role of an employee is to execute the vision of an organization by applying their skills in a particular section or area of the business. 

To sum it up, the CEO is concerned with the business as a whole while an employee looks only at their specific department, job, or role. In addition, the CEO is responsible for establishing and casting the vision while the employee is responsible for the hands-on day to day actions that help to bring that vision to life, but they don’t necessarily play a role in establishing it. 

As a CEO, you'll have a different daily schedule from an employee and this includes meetings with potential partners or sponsors, reviewing the financials with your accountant, checking in with the leaders on your team to see how you can support them, and organizing and communicating your goals, for the week, month, quarter or year. Meanwhile, an employee's workload could be answering client support emails, creating your opt-ins or your webinar deck, writing the transcript for your podcast, posting on your social media pages, or writing copy for you. As you can see, these two days look very different, and yet both of them are crucial and important! 

You might still be the only employee in your business, which means that you’re playing all the roles from customer support, graphic design, and social media manager to bookkeeper and content creator!

Trust me when I say I know how that feels! You’re literally all the departments at any given time. One instance is when a client has a question about their invoice and that e-mail comes to you but you're still working on your bookkeeping role, you'll have too much on your plate and has no choice but to multitask.

And as an all-rounder, you'll also be responsible for fixing your website when it won’t let people schedule their discovery sessions properly, figure out the problem when your email marketing software is sending out the wrong e-mail sequence, and when client payments are late, guess who’s sending that “hey just a friendly reminder that your invoice was due two days ago” e-mail? Yup, that’s you too!

 

I know you’re thinking YES RJ, I am literally “ALL THE THINGS!!” I feel ya. I’m laughing because that was me too and let me tell you, friend, it gets exhausting and can feel overwhelming!

As your business grows, your to-do list also grows, and yet the amount of time and energy you have available to do ALL THE THINGS continues to decrease, not to mention you also have more clients to serve.

So listen, the good news is that there’s a way to manage it all, (here me now, I didn’t say DO it all, I said manage it all).

But before I dive into it, let me clarify something first. In order to manage it all, it requires you to step OUT of your business and to work ON it, instead of IN it. The struggle of playing the role of the employee in your business is that you become reactive. You do things as they come instead of planning for what you want to see. You start fixing problems when they happen instead of preventing them from happening at all. You then take random opportunities and clients without thinking twice if they're right for you or not. Thus, you miss the opportunity to position yourself in attracting your ideal clients, who are willing to pay top dollar for what you offer. 

In order for you to grow your business, you’re going to need a strategy, and strategy is not the employee’s job, it’s the CEOs.The employee’s job is to execute the strategy and that’s why you have to step out of your business and work ON it instead of IN it. Also, don't forget to put a strategy in place so that all the things can still get done by either you or your future/current employee.

This is what I call CEO Days! The idea behind it is to have a regularly scheduled time period where you work ON, instead of IN in your business. And here's a BONUS for you! You don’t have to stop running your business in order to do this, you can make it work no matter what stage you’re at in your personal business and I’m about to tell you how.

Okay, so let’s breakdown the process on how you can make these CEO Days work without dropping the ball on any of your client work AND without missing out on coins! 

Step 1 

You need to schedule your time period. I recommend setting aside a minimum of a full 8 hours per day (once every quarter) to work on your business. If you can take 2 full days to do this, it's even better. However, since you're still starting to apply this strategy, a minimum of 1 day a week works fine for now as well.

 If you have a really heavy client load or you’re still working your 9-5 job and can’t afford to be out of your business or off of work for a full day, then break up the 8 hours into 2 hours sessions by splitting it to 4 consecutive days. But you need to remember that they need to be consecutive and not on separate days!

 

However, if that’s still really tough for you to do, then break it up further, into 8 one-hour sessions spread over 8 consecutive days. So pull out your calendar, decide which time frame works best for your business, and actually block that time off on your calendar. And before you proceed to the next step, do this first and do it now!

Also, you need to be careful in applying this step because if you don’t take control of your calendar, it will take control of you. It will then contradict the whole point of this CEO days, which is to be proactive, so pull out your calendars now and start planning your schedule.

If you’re busy right now and physically can’t access your calendar, tell Siri, Google, Alexa, or whichever artificial intelligence you use, to set a reminder for you to block off time in your calendar and come back to it when you can. 

Step 2

Now that there is a designated time that you set aside to work on your business, Step 2 is to plan out what you’re going to work on. Yes, you’re going to plan out and strategize your next move to keep your business moving forward.

If you’re naturally a strategizer, you'll get yourself excited by just planning out your workload for the whole week, month, or even years! You’re breaking out the special stationery with your planner and 10 of your calendars while brewing your tea and getting ready for what's ahead of you and your business. And If you’re naturally an executor, you’re already thinking about ways to get out of this. You'll start to think about things like “I wonder if this is something I can outsource to my VA?”, “I’ll finish this episode, later, (when really you mean, never) or “I already know what I have to do, and I’m already doing it”

Trust me when I say this is not the same kind of “doing” what you’re used to. And no, you cannot outsource this to your VA and don’t you dare pause this episode because we’re gonna get this done and I promise it will be as painless as possible! 

There are 4 pillars of your business that you want to plan for during your CEO day or CEO hours. I call these the 4’C’s of Scaling and I’ve actually put them together inside of a worksheet for you so that you can download and follow along, or at least revisit when you have more time. 

So you can click the link in the show notes to download the worksheet, or you can head over to rjconnell.ca/5 and you can access the worksheet there. 

So let’s jump in, these are the 4 C’s they the following: 

  1. Captivate 
  2. Coin Conversion
  3. Capacity
  4. Cash flow

Let me briefly explain what each category means, and if you have the worksheet in front of you, there’s already a description written beside each category for quick reference.

Pillar #1:Captivate

This pillar refers to how you attract your ideal clients to you. It’s the methods and systems you have in place to increase awareness in your business and let other people know you’re here. You can do this by posting a video on YouTube, guest blogging, being a guest on other people's podcasts, speaking on stages, growing your Instagram account, or through paid advertisements. 

Captivating deals with awareness and attracting your ideal clients to you.

Pillar #2:Conversion 

This Pillar deals with how you convert those ideal clients into paying clients. At this stage, we’re talking specifically about converting potential customers into a paying client and not just another collection for your email list, engagement, or anything like that because we're talking coin conversion here. 

You can do a webinar,  sales calls, hold a live event and sell from the stage when you’re ready to accept new clients. What we’re dealing with here, is how you make your sales, and how you get people to pay you.

Pillar #3: Capacity

This pillar is less often talked about and it refers to your ability to serve your client. In the product-based world, this is also referred to as fulfillment. Now, capacity looks at things such as "how many clients can you take on with the time you have available" but it also looks at other parts of your business that deals with things like "who do you need to hire in order to help you answer client support requests" or "to make sure that the invoices are sent and paid on time". After captivating and converting your ideal clients, you'll then have to ask yourself "What will I need to serve them?" and "Do I have any gaps in that area?", and this is where your "Capacity" is evaluated.

Pillar #4:Cash Flow

If you want to grow a business, you need capital and that doesn’t mean you need to borrow money, but it does mean you have to manage what you have extremely well. In its simplest form, cash flow is tracking and tracing the in's and out's of money in your business. It allows you to see and navigate your financial state. This is where you will know how much money you have available to do things like hiring an associate photographer to help you shoot more weddings, or a VA to help you with the day to day organization and client support.

Each one of these pillars is crucial to both sustaining AND growing your business. Now that you have a better idea of what they are, let’s breakdown some questions to help you navigate your CEO Days.

Step 3 

You need to run through the Critical questions below to complete the process. The questions you’re about to ask and answer will help you prepare for your CEO Days and are meant to get your brain turning so that when the time comes to strategize, you know exactly what to work on.

Apply all the questions below to the Pillars mentioned in step 2. You don’t have to answer them in full right now but get at least 1 answer down for each question and each pillar.

So here are your questions:

  1. What systems or processes do I have in place to support this pillar?
  2.  What systems or processes are working well?
  3.  What systems or processes (or lack thereof) are preventing me from working with more clients, or serving my existing clients better?
  4.  Which process in this pillar do I need to focus on this quarter to see the most growth in my business?

Here’s an example of what your answers should be if you were a nutrition coach.

For Captivate:

Question #1: What systems or processes do I have in place to support this pillar?

Answer: I currently run daily Facebook and Instagram ads to my free masterclass on how to change your relationship with food. 

Question #2: What systems or processes are working well? 

Answer: My Instagrams ads are performing really well, and I have a .40 cent cost per lead 

Question #3: What systems or processes (or lack thereof) are preventing me from working with more clients, or serving my existing clients better?

Answer: If I take on more than 10 clients at a time, it’s hard for me to keep up with the volume of questions I get from client support questions, and I want to work with more people, but I’m still working at my 9-5. 

Question #4: Which process in this pillar do I need to focus on this quarter to see the most growth in my business?

 Answer: creating a solution for client support, so that I can serve more clients and do it better

This is just an example of how you would apply each question to each pillar, which would help you identify what you need to focus on during your CEO days or hours.

The last and final step towards making your CEO days into reality is executing your strategy in creating solutions and planning ahead.

Now that you know what you need to work on, the last thing you’re going to do is create a plan on how to solve the challenges you’re currently facing using questions 1-3. Question 4 is going to help you be proactive about growing your business and doing the tasks that will get you to where you want to go. 

Based on the example I just gave, on your actual CEO day, you could create a plan to make an FAQ document and implement 1 live group support session each week to answer everybody’s questions all at once. HOWEVER, you’re not actually going to start making the FAQ document at that moment, you’re just planning it out so that after your 2 hours of CEO work, you know exactly what you need to do to move your business forward.

The time you spend in the CEO role will help you identify the tasks that are going to have an impact on your business and help move you forward once you jump back into the employee role. The few hours you spend working ON your business will help you create your action and growth plan so that you know exactly what to execute on when you jump back INto your business. It’s going to help you go from being reactive to proactive, and transform your busy work, into efficient, coin-collecting work!

Friend, if you have some free time, use to answer the 4 questions I gave you earlier for each pillar of your business. That alone will help you understand where to focus your energy and time in a way that will help you grow further and faster.

Download the worksheet for this episode, and take some time today to complete it. You can click the link in the show notes to download it or head over to rjconnell.ca/6 to access it there. 

Now before we sign off today, I’m going to give you an accountability challenge! After you’ve set aside your CEO time, take a picture of it and post it to your Instagram stories and tag me in it  @rjconnellconsulting. You’ll be surprised at the difference a few hours of being the CEO can make, so don’t forget to tag me in your picture @rjconnellconsulting so I can give you a shoutout!

In our conversation next week, we’re gonna talk all about why selling IS in fact serving. And I’m going to show you just how these two are the same. We’re gonna talk about why you need to sell before you can serve and why your pricing affects “how charging more will actually allow you to serve your clients BETTER”! 

Not convinced? Well, I’m going to look at some case studies and will not use a fortune 500 or even a fortune 50 company but a fortune 10 company to help me make my case! Can you guess which one? You’ll have to tune in next week to find out!

Alright, friend, I will see you at the same time and the same place next week and until then, leave no coin left behind!