Whether you are a student in my course or a client on my roster, you’ve probably heard me ask you to reflect “Is this a CEO task?” I can’t think of a topic more important to unpack during our launch episodes. Let’s move beyond the CEO day this year.
My Hot Take On CEO Days
It’s pretty common for business owners to feel overwhelmed by all the tasks that are trying to gain a piece of their attention and a spot in their schedule. Next they move from a 5 day week to a 4 day week, hoping 1 CEO Day for those miscellaneous general admin tasks will help them feel better.
It might!
But I’d like to challenge this practice and take it one step further by questioning if those tasks should be on your desk at all.
Pretend You Are A CEO For A Day
Think about a business you love and admire. Who is the boss? What does their day look like?
What tasks are on your list for a CEO day?
Are those tasks similar to those of the business owner you admire?
Get curious. . . there might be a lesson to learn from studying the types of tasks successful business owners spend their time on.
An Important Habit for Business Owners
One of my roles as a virtual support provider is to be protective over your calendar. I constantly ask myself “is this a task that can only be done by the CEO?” before finding a home for it on the calendar.
And solopreneurs, I didn’t forget about you. I would argue that if you are the only one running your business, then you might need to exercise the CEO task muscle even more than someone who has a larger team.
If you spend your day with busy work tasks that don’t move the business forwards, and no one else is working to move the business forwards, do you think you’ll reach your big revenue goals?
General Admin Tasks Need To Happen
Invoicing needs to happen – paying my bills is pretty important to me. But do I need to do it or could software handle this task for me? Even if the software could do the 80% that are recurring and easy, that would allow me to get in and out of this task faster to do the 20% that are custom or tricky in some way.
Customer service and client communication need to happen, but could the routine messages be sent by a team member if I gave them access to my SOP bank and templated canned emails? How would that save my strength and allow me to show up as the best version of myself when I reach my inbox in the afternoon?
Keeping my website plugins backed up is important – this website was an investment and I need it to be functional around the clock so that it can serve those who visit. But am I going to stay up to day on how the different plugin versions do and do not play nicely with my WordPress theme. It will literally never happen. I will choose any task but that one and I know that about myself, so WordPress maintenance can’t be a CEO task. It will forever be an Alexis task – she’s a WordPress wizard.
How To Stay Organized As A Business Owner
When we organize a home it feels good to buy clear bins at the store to make all of our things look pretty. But the true transformation often comes when we ruthlessly declutter first, and THEN organize what remains.
Your CEO calendar works the same way.
Ruthlessly remove tasks that don’t need to be on your plate right now so that you can use your strength to really give your goals and dreams the focus they deserve. That’s the superpower that your favorite successful business owner has.
And if this skill is a struggle for you, I’d love to work with you to help develop it.
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Read the transcript:
Janice Cook 0:00 Whether you are a student in my course or a client on my roster, you’ve probably heard me ask you to reflect: “Is this a CEO task?” I can’t think of a topic more important to unpack during our launch episodes.
Janice Cook 0:16 You’re listening to Your Win-Win Teacher Business, a podcast for teacher authors who want to make a big impact in the world for teachers and students and have fun doing it. I’m your host, Janice Cook, here with a pep talk to start your week off strong. Some seasons of running a business feel hard and sticky, but it shouldn’t feel like that all the time. Let’s make your business a win-win, together.
Janice Cook 0:41 A CEO task is something that can only be done by the boss. It might involve strategic planning or be a visionary task. It might involve having the final eye on quality control and brand representation. A CEO task might involve sensitive information that should be shared with as few people as possible for the long term health of the business. As we look at the long list of things that need to happen to keep our teacher businesses running, the list of tasks that truly only can be done by the CEO are generally small in number.
Janice Cook 1:19 Now it may sound like I’m going to encourage you to turn this precious passion project of a business into a large corporation. I’m not here to tell you that it’s time to grow a team today, or ever. But it’s important to have clarity on what tasks truly can only ever be on your desk.
Janice Cook 1:40 Identifying CEO tasks and then gaining clarity on how long these tasks take helps teacher business owners save the appropriate amount of time in their schedule so they will always be able to give attention to those important tasks. It’s easy to say that we want to work five hours a week or two days a week, but until we see the list of must do tasks, it’s hard to determine if that aspirational schedule is possible to achieve. Every business comes with a different list of CEO tasks, and that list will change from year to year as the business shifts.
Janice Cook 2:20 So whether you’re a student in my course or a client on my roster, that’s why you hear me saying, “Is this a CEO task?” all the time. I’ll probably print it on a t shirt one day and wear it to my client meetings.
Janice Cook 2:33 When we identify tasks that could be done by someone other than the CEO, we’re uncovering the opportunity for a streamlined process to be developed. There is likely a repeatable element to the task and the business big picture could likely benefit from the development of a standard operating procedure or SOP.
Janice Cook 2:57 SOPs are beneficial even if you are a solopreneur. Before a single episode of this podcast went live, I worked with my podcast mentor – shout out to the amazing Sara Whittaker – to develop an SOP for the most efficient way to handle the episode description on the podcast player, show notes on my website, and the description box on YouTube. Since this was a repeatable task, if the workflow I developed for Episode One was inefficient and took, say 20 minutes longer than needed, then I would waste 20 minutes every week when a new episode went live for as long as this podcast was running. If I published four or five episodes a month, that’s approximately an hour and a half of wasted time inside my business on a recurring basis, every single month. I know my hourly wage, and I can’t afford to make this mistake. So having a tight, efficient, streamlined workflow from the very beginning is something I prioritize as a business owner, and I encourage you to do the same.
Janice Cook 4:14 When I sat down to create the SOP for an episode of this show, I gathered all of the logins, passwords, and links that I would need to do the task into one place – a template task inside my favorite project management tool, Asana. I made decisions on how each episode would be done, one time, and I documented those CEO preferences. I created templates anywhere I could. Templates inside my podcast host. Templates inside WordPress. Any place where I could embed information to save clicks later and decrease the chance for human error leaving something out. Now was the time.
Janice Cook 5:00 At the time of this recording, I’m still the one doing this task inside my business, but I still benefit from having this SOP in place in so many ways. When I sit down to do this task, the SOP helps me do it quickly. The SOP also helps me do it in a manner that conserves the precious mental capacity I have to give that day. I don’t have to try to remember how things usually look or where things might be hiding. There aren’t any decisions to be made. All of the information I need to do the task has already been gathered into one place by past Janice. This might allow me to tackle the task in a pocket of time, or split the task over two small, awkward time slots that would normally be challenging to make the most of. Having a streamlined checklist might make it easier for me to show my work and identify a stopping point if I need to pause for an interruption. A well developed SOP might even allow this to become a task that I can do at the end of my work day when my brain is tired, because the task itself is so much easier to do now that the heavy lifting was done at the start of the process. Many solopreneurs will skip creating an SOP, but I’d like to challenge this thinking and encourage you to get curious about what an SOP could do for you in this season of business.
Janice Cook 6:32 One day, if I decide to hand this task off to a team member, that time spent developing an SOP will really pay off. Looking at the SOP will help me write a job description that attracts the right person to do the task. I’ll be able to quickly see what the tech stack is that the team member will need experience with. I’ll know how long it takes me to do that task, and that will help me determine how many hours of team support will need to be allocated to the task. Is there someone on my team already familiar with this tech stack who has available hours? Or do I need to look for a new team member? The answers to these questions flow easily when I can see the full task inside the SOP and when I’ve first done the task myself as the CEO. And when it’s time to onboard that team member and teach them the task, they’ll be so grateful to go through the task one time using that SOP. Then they can ask questions, and further detail and clarity can be added to improve the SOP. Then and only then will the CEO be able to step away from the task and empower the team member to move it to their desk moving forwards.
Janice Cook 7:50 And if that team member leaves the SOP and the task can travel back to the CEO’s desk or move to another team member. A project management tool like Asana makes this so easy. The business doesn’t need to scramble, and content can continue to be published on schedule during seasons of team transition.
Janice Cook 8:15 Today, we talked about how to identify the tasks that truly only can be done by the CEO. I never said that you’ll only be doing CEO tasks in your week. In my current season of business, I’m doing a mixture of CEO tasks and tasks that could be done by someone else, like the sample podcasting tasks we used as an example in today’s episode. That’s normal. But as the business ebbs and flows and my CEO capacity changes, having a clear understanding of which tasks can only be done by me, that’s the magic that helps us make great CEO decisions inside our teacher businesses.
Janice Cook 8:59 When I meet with teacher business owners who feel overwhelmed, I see a lot of tasks on their desks that could be made easier if we pressed pause and created SOPs. We step back to gain clarity on what tasks can only be done by them, and find space for the CEO tasks in the schedule. Then we look at what tasks are left and make a plan for those.
Janice Cook 9:26 I hope this episode helped you reflect on your own business to determine what the true CEO tasks are. If you’re feeling curious about SOPs and this path to hiring help inside your business with ease, make sure you have a copy of my free hiring guide. You can find it at cookfamilyresources.com/hiring-guide. That guide is packed with good news about free steps you can take inside your business to make it run more smoothly. It guides you through the questions that help bring clarity about if and when it’s time to hire help, and how to do it in a way that avoids a hiring horror story. I’d really like to get that guide in the hands of every single podcast listener. Can you help by downloading your copy today?
Janice Cook 10:17 Gaining clarity on the true CEO tasks inside your teacher business, will bring you one step closer to it feeling like a win-win. I hope you’ll join me for the next episode where we chat about clocking out with confidence.
Janice Cook 10:33 Thanks for making this podcast a part of your day. I’d love to help you find clarity with your next step in business. Go to cookfamilyresources.com/hiring-guide. I’ll also leave that link from the show notes for you. This guide is packed with good news for those days when you feel like you can’t possibly do it all. It might be time for you to invest in paid support, but the truth is, there are a lot of free steps to explore first. After you dive into that guide, I’ll be in your inbox every Monday morning with more actionable tips to help you enjoy running your business again. See you in the next episode.
