The CEO Strategic Shift

This blog post has been authored by Stand Out Online Member Kelly O’Neil, Innovate Media Services

As your service business grows, sooner or later you will reach a point where you need to make a choice. You can maintain it as a practice and remain a practitioner working in the business. Or, you can choose to scale it into a larger company—one that will ultimately create a lot more profit and freedom for you.

In Michael Gerber’s book, The E-Myth Revisited, he says that everyone who goes into business has three people within them:

The entrepreneur, or the inner visionary who strategically drives innovation and change towards an ideal future
The manager, or the inner pragmatist who creates systems and structures that support smooth functioning of the business
The technician, or inner craftsman, who systematically produces value
In the early days of running a business, we often spend a lot of time as technicians involved in the day to day operations of our business. As the business grows and we hire people to help, we spend more and more time managing others. But if we want to scale and grow our company and really create a business that allows us the profit and freedom we desire, we ultimately have to step into that visionary role.

And that means we need to make that strategic shift into the mindset of leadership, as opposed to management.

5 KEY THINGS YOU NEED TO DO TO STEP INTO THE ROLE OF CEO

As we all know, it’s often much easier to “know” we need to do something than it is to actually do it. This is especially true when you’re trying to make changes in the business as you’re running it.

The following checklist of action steps will help you stay focused on exactly what needs to happen for you to make that critical shift to CEO.

Give yourself a promotion. Yes, I mean formally promote yourself to CEO in your business. It’s vital that you start seeing yourself as an actual Chief Executive Officer, who holds the roles and responsibilities of a CEO. To do that, you have to be absolutely clear on what it means to be a CEO. One of the things I recommend to people is to write their own CEO job description. Remember that CEO is primarily a strategic position. That means you will be doing less work in the business and more work on the business. Make sure your job description reflects that.

Remove yourself from as much of the day to day operations of the business as possible. This means you need to build a high-performance team that builds your business for you. For example, think about the way Bill Gates builds his company. You will never find project managers talking directly to Bill Gates about what’s going on. Instead, you have a hierarchy, which frees the CEO from the day-to-day running of the business and lets him or her focus on the big picture strategies that will enable the company to move forward. Even if you have a really small team, you need to start actively creating a hierarchy so that fewer and fewer people are actually reporting directly to you. It cuts down the chaos—a lot!

Create an intentional culture. Creating a hierarchy doesn’t have to result in a rigid or tyrannical structure. To the contrary, the most productive companies have corporate cultures that really puts their team in the driver’s seat of building the company. This doesn’t happen by accident, so you will want to intentionally design a culture that aligns with your corporate values and supports each individual to work to their highest potential.

Create internal systems and processes, and document them. As the company grows, you will need to invest time and money into the infrastructure of creating and documenting everything from how bills are paid to how things are marketed to how clients are managed. Even if you are alone in your company right now, you need to start documenting your systems and procedures so that there are established ways you get things done in your company. That way, as the company grows and you want to bring people in, there will be uniformity and efficiency in your business growth and operations.

Set up systems and protocols for training. Ideally, these should be both effective, so that new employees can be productive right away, and efficient, to minimize time spent in training, both for new employees and those responsible for training them in. The way I recommend and the way we do it in our company is to create webinar-based trainings that allow new team members to join the team and get up to speed swiftly on all areas of the business.

So, you may absolutely know you are ready right now to make this shift to CEO in your business. But even if you are the only one in your business right now, or if it’s just you and an assistant, it is never too early to start.

In fact, while your business is still very small is the perfect time to do this. When you start getting in the habit of thinking strategically, creating systems, and automating your business, you can avoid a lot of the growth issues that plague businesses as they scale. It’s much easier to incorporate these things into your business as you go than to have to go back and start everything from scratch in the middle of all sorts of things falling apart and being stuck in the role of firefighter in your business.

READY TO PROMOTE YOURSELF TO CEO?
The five key steps outlined above provide an essential framework you can use to make the shift to CEO. But each step does require strategic planning, and experience helps.

If you’re ready to promote yourself to CEO and would like to know more about how to make it as smooth and easy a transition as possible for everyone in your business, schedule a strategy review with us today!

Kelly O’Neil is a multi-award winning entrepreneur, affluent marketing and brand-marketing expert for the next generation of innovative companies and thought leaders.

As a highly successful marketing consultant for service-based businesses, Kelly knows exactly what it takes to exit a recession stronger than when you entered it. Her ability to tap into and understand the affluent mindset has made Kelly America’s leading expert in selling to the millionaire market.**

She has been featured in Entrepreneur Magazine, Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Forbes, NBC, and Huffington Post among others! Kelly is a best-selling author, has shared the stage with industry legends including Tim Ferris, Jack Canfield and Brian Tracey, and was named by Seth Godin as “One of the Most Innovative Companies in America.”