From Operator to Owner: The CEO Blueprint for Freedom and Scale

0:28How do I run a business on one hour a week? the owner, the CEO's real job when you're building a$100 million business. Learn how to shift from doing the leading and embracing the four hats of a CEO, visionary, builder, leader, investor. You'll get it on today's episode. So what's the CEO's real job when you're building a$100 million company? If you're becoming that$100 million entrepreneur, what do you need to do? Well, first of all, let's understand that most operators stay stuck as operators, okay? They're not really entrepreneurs. They're not even just business owners at this point. Business owners own one business.

1:02An operator works in one business. Entrepreneurs build capital value assets and ultimately build multiple companies. I jokingly said to someone one time, listen, I don't want to be the CEO. I want to employ CEOs. There's a big difference in the mindset of having CEOs run my business. How do I run a business on one hour a week? Really simple. I put a CEO in place or I find a great partner who is the CEO of the operating entity of the business and I coach them. Ultimately, what you want to do is be the coach of the CEO of your company, the GM, the MD, whatever title you want to give that person running the business.

1:39One day, you want to be able to one hour a week have a conversation with them and coach them on the success of the business. Read the numbers one hour a week. Now, the roles of a CEO when we're building a$100 million business for you to be a$100 million entrepreneur. I'm going to break it down two different ways. The first, okay, visionary, you got to set the direction, you got to be the one who comes up with the vision and sells the vision and communicates the vision and you got to do that day in day out week in week out. I run town halls, I do weekly training sessions with my people all this now, obviously technology makes this easy to do all over the world.

2:15Given that action coach, we now have offices in 84 countries at the time of this filming. It's really important for me to stay in communication with everybody and technology allows me to build that vision. The second thing, I got to be a builder, okay? I got to scale the systems. I got to look at what systems need growing. Where do I need to, how do I build? What do I build? All those sorts of things, bringing the right people to be able to make that happen, whether it's technology systems or day-to-day or even soft systems like scripting. And even if it's systems like what I'm doing here with you today creating knowledge base for you, creating a knowledge base for my team, for our customers at Action Coach, creating a knowledge base for the world on how you build a$100 million business.

2:55Here's me having done$2.5 billion in sales,$100 million a year we do easily these days. I sit back and say as a$100 million entrepreneur, visionary is number one, builder is number two, leader is number three. I got to develop my people. My job as a leader is to continuously keep developing my people. And mostly that's my executives. But as I travel the world, we just got back from Rio where I had my top 100 business coaches in the world. And I spend a week building my team, building them up, teaching, educating, growing, challenging them. The coaches need coaching sometimes is a big part of it.

3:33And fourth is that investor. How do I allocate capital? Raise capital, allocate capital. that's a big part of it because when we're building a hundred million dollar operation we're going to need capital and we're going to need to work out who do we raise it from where do we raise it from how do we do all that stuff so that we can keep growing and keep building the business if you're growing at scale it's very hard to bootstrap at scale you're going to need capital to grow at that level and so learning how to build capital is another aspect of something that we do i'll make sure i do an episode on that at some stage here so keep keep coming back so that I keep teaching you more and more things.

4:07So what should you never delegate as a CEO? Vision, culture, key people, key hiring decisions. You as a CEO want to be a part of those sorts of things. Setting the goals, setting the vision, the strategic planning, those are a big part of it. Defining the culture. Yes, you can get input from everybody, but ultimately it's down to you to make the call. Ultimately, it's down to you to hold everyone accountable for living the culture of the organization. So really big part of it. If I look at the, this is the second way I want to break down the job of the CEO in time, okay? How do I break it down in time?

4:46I believe as a CEO, I need to spend 25 % of my time with my customers. So be out with the customers. I had a client of mine who's in the construction business and he never went to job sites. And a big, big construction company. I'm like, dude, when do you go to a construction site? And I said, you've got to start going. So he started on a, it was basically every Tuesday and then it became every Tuesday and Thursday on the way to his office, he would go to a construction site and start seeing what's going on. And amazingly enough, what did he learn? Some of the dumb things that were happening and some of the great things that were happening out there in his company helped him become a much better leader.

5:2225 % of your time needs to be with the customers, whether it's new customers, making sales, existing customers, focus groups, whatever it needs to be. but you need to get in touch with the real consumer of your product or service and hear what they're saying, what they're thinking, what they're feeling, their experience of your business. The second way I allocate my time is team. I want 25 % of my time to be with my team. When you think about training them, working with them, coaching them, asking them for feedback because it's not just a one-way street with your customers. It's not a one-way street with your team members.

5:59it's a two-way street. When I'm with my team, I'm learning as much as they are. I'm learning from them. I'm listening to them. When they ask me questions, just the other day, I had a Zoom call with my master coaches from around the world asking them some questions about what's going on, where's this at, where's that at. And when I had those 30 people in the room, I was getting more knowledge than they were because I'm learning from them. They're on the ground every day. They're teaching me what's going on in the company, but I'm learning and helping educate them at the same time. Third area is numbers.

6:30I want to be in the finance, in the marketing. I want to be in those things knowing the numbers. I want to get drilled deep. Where is the profit? Where did we hit this? Where did we not hit this? Why is this there? What's that? I got to spend a quarter of my time in the numbers and that's not just finance, that's marketing as well. But it's also employee engagement scores. It's also net promoter scores. The numbers are where you will find a lot of the answers. And today's world, dang, it's so fast to throw your numbers into an algorithm or a GPT of some sort and say, okay, help me understand what's going on here.

7:05And boom, it shoots out to you what's going on in the organization. The fourth area is the future. So I allocate 25 % of my time to the future. Doing this is part of the future. Hiring people, recruiting people, being out there recruiting great coaches to join my team is part of my 25 % of my time. Visioning, planning, strategic partnering, these are future direction things that are a big part of what I have to do as a CEO. Remember, being a$100 million CEO, a lot of it is about what you say no to. Yes, you got to learn how to work with the board, they're part of your team. You got to learn how to work with your senior people, your investors, your strategic partners, You got to learn all of that stuff.

7:46But how much you say no to is a massive part of your success as a CEO. In fact, I'll give you a hint. Great executive assistant or personal assistant or both if you're in that level of business, that's going to save you a lot because once you define to them, where does my time get allocated, they allocate it strictly. You know, I always have the perfect week defined and my team, my assistant, she knows that's what gets in. None of the other stuff gets in. In fact, it gets to a point where at the end of the year, we literally sit down and define what 20 % of the tasks last year will make it into next year type thing.

8:2280 % of the stuff I do every year cannot be done by me again the next year. It has to be either delegated, moved off, moved to someone else. But you got to do that 80-20 thing. Get rid of 80 % of the stuff you're doing every year. Cycle it out to someone else. Teach it to someone else. Hand it off. Employ someone. Do something so that you're more effective as a CEO in your organization. so signs that so if you don't ever delegate the vision the culture the key people decisions those sorts of things uh invest allocation of capital those sorts of things where you've got to get your your your nose in there the signs that you're still operating the business rather than owning the business or that you're still that day-to-day person rather than if you're experiencing any burnout any micromanagement if your family is saying hey we don't ever get to see you anymore you know that you're not doing this right okay you know you're still operating if you're working 80 hour weeks then there's a problem okay i remember lee iacocca of all the things he said there's one that i really take value out of and that was that if you're not at home at six o 'clock at night for dinner with your family then you're probably not running the business properly that's paraphrasing of course but ultimately if you're still in the if i don't do what it won't get done you've got to shift your mindset you got to build people so they build it now i know there's a cash thing and you've got to balance that up.

9:44You've got to build more revenue so you can afford more people or you've got to raise more capital so you can afford more people. Either way, you've got to start building that mindset of eventually it's got to be not you running that aspect of it. So when I first transitioned and the first time I retired sort of thing and allowed a CEO to run the business, I was lucky because I had just had my first daughter. She was just, you know, and it took my time. It gave me something to do. It kept me away from the business type thing. In fact, I tried to do it when I was 26. I went and started playing golf and realized, no, this is not me.

10:22I'm a driven person. I have goals. I want to achieve things. And so having a business that could run without me didn't mean I could, let's just say, emotionally let go of the business. And eventually I had to learn how to let go and trust and allow my team to do it. So the second time I did it, it was much easier because I'd built the systems, delegated, trained the people type thing, and I had the measures in place. Ultimately, you've got to build a business that works without you. You've got to become that person that can do that. So big thing I want you to do today, let's start a stop doing list.

10:55What are the things you've got to stop doing as the CEO so that you can go on to become a$100 million entrepreneur? Thanks for joining me on the$100 million podcast. If you've got value from today's episode, make sure you've subscribed and share this with all of your friends. Never miss a strategy that could change your business and your life. And remember, the fastest way to scale is to learn from those who've done it. That's what this show is all about. See you on the next episode.