EP # 188 - The Strategic Shift: Moving from Owner-Operator to Visionary CEO

Are you ready to transform from a hands-on business owner to a strategic leader? In today's we'll dive deep into the crucial transition every business owner needs to make to create a sellable asset.

🔑 Key Takeaways:
• Signs you're stuck in the owner-operator mode
• The T.O.P. CEO Formula Breakdown
• The $10,000/hour Test
• Transitioning from Owner-Operator to Visionary CEO Framework
• Common Challenges & Solutions

🎯 Action Steps:
1. Assess your current involvement in day-to-day operations
2. Identify tasks that don't pass the $10,000/hour test
3. Create your strategic vision and plan
4. Start building systems for delegation

Ready to accelerate your transition to becoming a strategic CEO building an impactful business? 

Book a free strategy call to learn how we can help you build a sellable asset.
https://stairwaytoleadership.com/

Transcript

EP 188: The Strategic Shift: Moving from Owner-Operator to Visionary CEO

Audio Only - All Participants: [00:00:00] Hello, Diamond Effect podcast listeners. Welcome to episode 188. Today I want to focus on key transition that you as a business owner need to go through in order to create a sellable asset out of your business. And that transition is from being an owner operator who is involved in the day to day of their business to becoming a strategic CEO who is a visionary guiding the business to achieve its goals and vision.

And the one thing I want to mention here is that transition is gradual. It doesn't happen overnight. It doesn't happen with just one change, because as your business grows, you will be able to pull yourself out more and more out of the regular operation of the business. And sometimes it's not possible to do it just in one [00:01:00] step in one point of your business.

So I'll give you a couple of examples. One of my clients, when we were working together in the business was scaling just from like early six figures to multiple six figures, had to do a leadership transition of them becoming, from them becoming a service provider who is actively servicing their clients to doing less and less of that and more delegating to their team to serve as the clients and then training and empowering their team. And at first they were scared of it. They were telling themselves they're not a leader. They've never led a group of people and so on, but then I helped them with their transition.

Now, another client of mine who has had the team for many years. Their part of the transition is not about necessarily just creating a team and delegating the first steps, it's more about empowering the team even more so to be [00:02:00] more and more sufficient on their own, more and more empowered, not to just do the tasks, but also make decisions, deal with challenges without the involvement of my client.

And that's the part of transition to strategic and visionary CEO they're going through right now. So this episode is going to be a roadmap for you to follow that if you are still in that Business owner, operator mode. And you do truly want to build your business in a way that becomes sellable asset.

The transition you need to do as the owner to become a CEO that's not deeply involved in day to day. 

Let's get started with signs that might be telling you that you're too much of a business owner operator and it's time to start transitioning. 

The first sign is you're working long hours, way [00:03:00] longer than you would like to, that you hoped for in order to keep the business running.

And you never have time to work on the business because you're in the business so much. So you don't have time to create this new marketing channel to bring in new people; or to expand sales and you're telling yourself, I don't have time for this. I need to wait till I get time, because you're so involved in day to day . Another sign is that you're involved in every single decision in your business, especially if you have a team. Of course, if you don't have a team, you get to decide everything, but once you start having team members, some of the decisions should be delegated to those team members.

That's why you have them. They're not just, or they shouldn't be just. It's action takers, but also making decisions within the roles and the parameter of their responsibilities. If you have no [00:04:00] strategic plan guiding you, then you're just an owner operator. You're not the CEO. Every CEO has a strategic plan guiding them, helping them take action towards the vision and achieving goals.

Another one is if you never take time off, or barely ever time off, or if you do take time off, then you're still involved in the business, so you're like pretending you're off, but not really off, or some version of that is that you take time off And maybe you're not working during the time off, but then as you're off, things slow down, things get delayed, things stop because your team doesn't make decisions.

They're not empowered. So the moment there's a challenge or the moment something outside of regular day to day happens, they feel helpless. They can't move the business forward because you're not there.

One last indicator I wanted to talk about is [00:05:00] You taking on things that go wrong or challenges that happen or mistakes that are made and fixing them yourself because you're thinking, "Oh, it's going to be faster than letting my employees deal with it", rather than actually empowering your employees and coaching them to deal with those challenges and fix them, so they can learn, and their skillset can grow and they become more independent of you.

And all those things really limit your business growth. And why? Because you only have 24/7. And there is no way you can be involved in every single aspect of your business if you want to grow it and scale it to a level where just you become its biggest block if you are involved in every aspect of your business.

Just think about it. Even if you tried, at some point, at some size level of your business, you will get [00:06:00] pulled in so many directions that I almost imagine like a person attached to the wheel that spins, and then the wheel expands, expands, and you like just blow up in million pieces. 

Another thing that is happening is that if you do have a team and yet you do everything for them, you are creating a helpless workforce. You're not empowering, you're actually disempowering them and teaching them that everything that happens outside of the box, the boss handles, and that my ideas don't matter, that there's no point for me to even be resourceful and creative because the boss will get in and just do everything.

This is not the type of people that you want to keep. This is not the type of team that you want to raise because then running a business becomes highly expensive. And sellable assets rely on strong people, strong teams, and then streamlined [00:07:00] processes and some great tools that empower them.

But without strong teams and people, processes and tools won't do just the work on their own, especially in a service business.

So now let's talk about what a strategic CEO and visionary mindset should be or what type of mindset a strategic CEO and visionary have and I will tie it in with my T.O.P. CEO formula, so T O P, because that's why I created it. T stands for thinking, and your thinking leads to your decisions. And your decisions drive actions and outcomes in the business.

A strategic CEO thinks strategically. Thinks about long term vision for the business, of course, short term needs and balances it, right? [00:08:00] Strategic CEOs thinks about the well being of their business, not just in the moment, but In the long term. 

Strategic thinking means you have a vision that you want to build something greater than yourself, that you want to impact a lot of people, that you have a big dream, big vision that ultimately That's the key. You will lead your business to accomplish. O stands for operation, and it's not just the streamlined and effective operation of the business, but you as the CEO as well.

So you need to operate at the highest level to then drive your business to do the same. And that means you need to think and feel and act at the highest level. You getting involved in administrative task or fixing stuff that your employees should fix is not operating at the highest level. [00:09:00] Here, I want to give you a tip.

I call it 10, 000 test. If you're doing an activity in your business, ask yourself, Would I pay anybody, including myself, 10, 000 an hour to do this? And if the answer is no, meaning if the value of that work, or if that work doesn't create 10, 000 or more of value, current or future for the business.

Then you want to question that activity and you doing it, and maybe it is an activity that needs to be done. But if it's not 10, 000 worth of value, then somebody else should be doing it.

And P stands for people. People are one of the biggest assets of your business because that's what makes the business great. And you, as the visionary and strategic CEO, need to empower your people to work as a team, as a high performing team at their best level.

And that [00:10:00] means you've got to coach them and train them and delegate properly and not do the things for them. But you cannot do it if you yourself are not high performing.

So what are the key differences between an owner operator and a visionary CEO? The operator is stuck in the day to day in the weeds of the business. The visionary CEO has a great vision and strategic plan to how the business should grow, and they lead the business and their team to do it without being stuck in the minutiae and spending their time there.

An operator doesn't delegate at all. Yeah. If they delegate, they still micromanage and step in to fix the issues, step in to resolve everything because they think it's better this way, it saves time and so on. Whereas, a strategic CEO understands that even if there's issues, their [00:11:00] role is to empower their team to figure out how to solve them. To create effective solutions to solve those issues. CEO builds a high performing team. 

An operator mostly makes decisions in the moment from day to day. They're like, Oh, let's go do this. Let's do that. So there's no really strategic plan driving them. Whereas the visionary CEO has a plan. Follows it. If anything, reviews it, looks back and strategically improve on it or pivot, not in a reactive way, but in a very proactive way as needed.

So how do you become a visionary CEO? You follow my coaching method, Dream, Plan, Do. You start with the dream. You start with a vision. Visionary CEO or strategic CEO always starts there. Then you move on to the planning stage. So then you break out that vision into action. And [00:12:00] that's what strategic plan is.

It's great to have a dream, but if you don't make it actionable, then it's just going to stay a dream. So planning part. Is making the dream actionable, breaking it down into smaller chunks into different sections and thinking, what do I implement when, how, what type of actions have to be done, who is responsible for those actions and then doing it and implementing, of course, not all by yourself, but with the help of your team.

And while you're doing it consistently, then going back and reviewing and improving as you go.

Now, it's hard to do it if you haven't created CEO time for strategic thinking. So the first action you want to make is actually create a dedicated CEO time in your schedule. And it's not going to happen on its own. You have to create it. Once you have that, [00:13:00] then create a dream. And then create a strategic plan.

Now, one important note about creating strategies, it might require you to assess and evaluate the status quo of your business, right? What's going on right now? What's working? What's not working? What are some parts of the business? systems and processes that need improvement. And what would that improvement look like.

So you can really create an implementation plan of your vision, without having a thorough understanding of the current situation, what are the root causes of the problem, and how fixing those root causes brings you closer to the vision. In order to do that and know that once you're implementing, you're moving forward in the right direction, you want to have metrics to track.

Those metrics will tell you if your progress is positive or not so much. And of course, depending on what you're [00:14:00] implementing, depending on what you're working on, there will be different metrics, but I will give you a couple of examples. From my clients. So when we work with one of my clients thinking about making sure that their customer journey was optimized and elevated, we looked at number of clients they had every week, number of cancellations, the reasons for those cancellations, then we adjusted that number to a goal of how many clients they would need a week in order to reach Their strategic plan and strategic goals.

How then we looked at, cancellations and the improvements to reduce the number of cancellations. Another client of mine, when we're looking at their expansion and growth of sales, we look at The speed of response to client inquiries and the speed of, sending clients quotes. We look at the [00:15:00] conversion rates from quotes to clients.

We look at the length of the decision between the client getting a quote and then their decision making to actually starting a project. We look at number of potential new clients that my client could reach out to to build up the lead pipeline. This is all to say that your metrics should be custom to you, to what you're focusing on, where you're driving your business, what kind of improvements you're doing.

Now, common challenges that business owners encounter while moving to visionary CEOs and while making that transformation are fear of letting go. When we're used to control everything and be involved in everything, naturally, A fear of letting some of them go will come up because [00:16:00] your brain will think you're losing control.

As normal as this fear is, everybody feels it, it's not true. What allows you to still oversee everything is the proper processes. Documented and very clear of who is responsible for what; what decisions they can make and so on. Then metrics that you track to see if everything is going well and in the direction you want.

But you don't need to do it all to feel in control. You can empower your team and then lead your team and check through the metrics, regular meetings, strategy discussions to feel like you're impacting your business and you have control over where it's going. 

Another issue that business owners encounter is with delegation. At first, it's a lack of skill set of delegation. So you might not know what to delegate, how to delegate effectively, so people [00:17:00] do what you need them to do. And then after, once you learn that, part of the challenge could be trying to step in and do certain things for your employees, right? Or not delegating effectively.

A, The great solution for us is to learn the skill set, right? Hire a coach like me or any other professional, or read some books, some materials on how to delegate effectively. And then it's practice. Practice, feedback, improvement, and practice. 

And it's the same with the last challenge. It's time management. As a visionary strategic CEO, you need to have your time management down to a science and without proper planning, boundary setting, prioritization, and directing your focus, it will never happen. If you think that time management just happens on its own in one day, magically you'll [00:18:00] have time because you'll hire enough people.

That's not going to happen. Time management and the highest performing people, it's an intentional habit building and structure building around how you operate every day. 

In order to make sure that the actions you take in the business have the highest impact and you're not wasting time on low value, low quality actions. Now, if that sounds great, but you're thinking, Oh my God, how am I going to implement it? I don't know where to start. I feel like I'm definitely lacking this skillset of time management, delegation - I can help you. That's what my T.O.P. CEO formula does. That's how I help my clients. We can talk. All you need to do is book a free strategy call with me. I share the links to my calendar in the show notes, or you can reach out to me wherever you're seeing this podcast and let's talk. See you next week.