Hi Reader,
Someone recently asked me what my role at Aeolidia is, since I mentioned that I am no longer involved in the services we sell. I don't have any part in designing brand identities, developing websites, or planning email strategies for the shop owners we work with. In fact, I don't know how to do most of those things anymore! And certainly not at the level my team does.
What do I do? It used to be mostly marketing type things (blogging, social media, etc.), but I've also gotten away from the day to day of that, and now I spend a lot of time developing relationships. Recently that means networking, chatting with the owners and/or employees of lots of complementary businesses for partnerships, keeping in touch with small groups and larger communities, and quite a bit of teaching and speaking.
I'm responsible for knowing what's working and what's not about our services, our workplace environment, the experience we provide, our marketing and sales process, and always taking steps to improve it. I spend a lot of time honing our message: I've been writing new content for a homepage refresh we're working on for ourselves, renaming some services, and figuring out how to talk about them in a way that makes sense.
Overall, my role fits more closely than ever to a standard description of what a CEO does. When I originally started growing my company, I pushed back against this role, but now I find a great deal of satisfaction in the big picture strategy. I feared that stepping out of a design/development role would lead to a loss of creativity, but it turns out to just be a different kind of creativity that's called for.
Are you still needed in the day to day work of your business? Are you interested in growing beyond that, so things can move forward without your constant attention? I recently read the book Clockwork, which offers advice about how to truly delegate your day to day work so you can dream bigger for your business and grow it into something that doesn't need you as much.
I say "truly delegate" because the author's term for the step before delegating is "deciding" - this is when you give a task to someone else, but you're ultimately responsible for approving it. I was talking to a female founder a few months ago who was completely frazzled by her assistant because she felt like all she ever did was give her assistant tasks, and then serve as a bottleneck when her assistant came back with a million questions and things to approve. She couldn't get any of her high level work done, because she was assisting her assistant with all the projects that she hadn't fully delegated. A fully delegated project passes the responsibility on to the person who takes it over - allowing them to make mistakes and own responsibility for outcomes.
The gem inside the Clockwork book is his idea of the four week vacation. He has step by step instructions for how to get yourself away from your business completely for four weeks, with a year or so of realistic planning and testing with your team to get there. As a person who graduated from the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program and then immediately went on a two week vacation without even a glance at email -- I'm a big believer in this! Once you've left the day to day behind, you're forced to use your time on big initiatives that grow your business, and you're no longer treading water and feeling short on time to move the needle.
Do you have a team? I'd love to chat about where you're at and let you know what has been working for me.
Here are some CEO tips from me.
Here's a helpful post that describes how we structure our business for constant improvement and healthy growth: Entrepreneurial Operating System
