Wow, what a week! I’m writing this just as I come to the end of our first week of our next new Momentum planning cycle, which is always a high energy, back-to-back week of calls, and I wanted to share with you today my thoughts about being a CEO in your business.
Between Melina and myself, we’ve spoken to almost all our members to ensure they are clear on what their next priorities are for the coming months, and I am super impressed with the up level of thinking this year, far more than previous years.
Visions feel bolder.
Targets seemed to be stretched more.
Health and wellbeing being taken more seriously.
One member told me this morning that his most recent contract win was at twice the price he would have considered offering at last year before he joined.
Another shared how her profits have increased tenfold since the start of last year.
And many of the conversations highlighted how much more confident they felt as a business owner.
As I have been processing and reviewing what we have been doing differently from previous years, it’s become clear to me that my focus on transforming our members from being a busy freelancer to being a business owner and then ultimately adopting a CEO mindset, has an integral part.
You see, everyone usually starts their business as a freelancer.
You do everything; from marketing and website copywriting to selling and delivering client work, and what you do sell is usually your time and expertise so it’s a trade of time for money.
At some point, you bring enough business in to merit hiring your first support person and you start to work on what systems and processes are needed to run your business.
You start to become a business owner; you may still be the only one delivering client work, but some of your focus during the week is on how the business works – the marketing systems, follow up emails, proposal templates and creation of products or programmes.
But the bigger the contracts, the more programmes you sell and the more clients you attract, the less of you there is to go round.
The dynamics of your working relationships with your clients start to change and there’s every chance you start to feel overstretched.
When this starts to happen your business can start to feel like project management hell; you begin to drop some balls and you don’t get the chance to catch your breath or take the time out to work on your own development because you are spending all your time either working with clients or working on the projects to support your business structure and processes.
You may think you are a business owner, and call yourself a business owner, but your current work schedule has pushed you back to becoming a busy freelancer again, simply at a higher revenue.
And this is where the importance of having a CEO mindset comes in.
If you want to grow your business beyond a certain point, then you have to stop treating your business as something you do, and start getting clear about who you want to become … the role you want to play, the life you want to have outside of your business (because you do have a life outside of work, yes?!) and the bigger impact you want to make.
And it’s this CEO mindset that can make all the difference to how you think strategically about where to focus your time, resources and energy.
Over the next few weeks I want to share more with you about who it is you need to be and what it really takes to become a CEO, and share how to break the patterns of behaviour that keep you in freelancer and business owner mindset, and how to develop new rituals and practices to harness your CEOship power.
For now, I’d love to know where you feel you are right now. Are you behaving like a freelancer, a business owner or CEO? Have you distinguished the difference between them before?
Leave a comment below as I’d love to know how this resonates with you.
Until next time, do less, be more, play bigger.
