When you start a business you usually begin as your best employee. Really, you’re probably your only employee. But you have big dreams about all the things you’re going to do once you’re a “real” business. Once you have employees you’ll be able to stop being the Chief Everything Officer and become a real CEO and leader.
But, more often that not, those dreams stay just dreams. You may hire some people but it’s not going quite as planned. You could probably just do everything better and faster yourself. Right?
If that’s your mindset, you’re stuck in the space of being your best employee. You’re now holding your business back and there’s a ceiling to your growth. Long-term strategies and planning aren’t really getting done and growth feels hard - much harder than it needs to be.
Here are 5 steps to help you break out of being your best employee and step up and lead a real business.
1. Get clear of where you’re going
One of the characteristics of great entrepreneurs is they have an endless supply of ideas. A client of mine swears she has 50 new ideas every morning while having her cup of coffee.
One of the characteristics of great leaders is they have a strong and simple vision. In Good to Great by Jim Collins, he calls this the Hedgehog Concept: understanding what you can be the best in the world at, what you love, and what you can make money from, and then focusing on that one thing that encompasses all 3.
These two characteristics feel at odds, right? Nope.
Having hundreds of great new ideas every month is a gift that so many business owners wish they could have. But knowing how to filter these ideas so you are only choosing the ones that move you in the right direction is essential. That’s why it is crucial for business owners to have a clear vision. It doesn’t need to specifically lay out where you will be in 5, 10, or 15 years. But your vision does need to focus on the direction you’re heading, the type of company you’re building, and the value you are creating.
Once you have a clear vision, you can easily filter your ideas to only focus on the ones that are in line with your bigger business vision, and set aside the ideas that are going to steer you off track.
2. Bring the right people on board
This is a crucial step. The right people will move your business forward. The wrong people will cost you time, money, and energy.
A common complaint I hear from business owners is they can’t afford to bring the right people on board. The right person is going to cost too much and not be interested in working in their business.
They’re a little bit right.
There are some roles where you need to bring in a rock star (and pay them appropriately) and there are some roles where if you set them up well, you can get someone who doesn’t want to make a lot doing the work that doesn’t require you to pay a lot. The key is making sure that these are different roles.
When looking at hiring, it’s important to not just lump together all of the things that aren’t getting done and try to hire someone to fill that gap. You’ll end up with a mix that leaves everyone unhappy. Instead, create ideal employee avatars (a spin on ideal customer avatars).
List out the tasks that you’d like to bring in an employee to do. Next to each of the tasks, write down the most important attributes of the perfect employee to do that role. Identify things like detail oriented, creative, self-starter, or even-tempered (especially important in a customer service position). Patterns and groupings will begin to emerge and you’ll have a clearer view of the type of person you need to hire.
In some cases you may need to hire a rock star employee who is going to lead new strategies in a certain area of your business where you’re lacking. In other cases, you can hire someone who likes following processes and does what is required of them, but isn’t looking to do more. Each of those people will be treated and paid differently, and each can play an important role in your growing business.
3. Set your most important goal
Secretly, this is my favorite thing to do with my clients. Setting (and tracking) the most important goal can bring so much clarity and focus to an overwhelmed business owner. Everything in your business is important, yes, but there is one thing that is the most important. And in order to lead your business and your team forward, you need to find that one most important goal.
The best way I’ve ever seen this broken down is with the book, The Four Disciplines of Execution, by Chris McChesney, Sean Covey, and Jim Huling. They suggest that instead of asking “what’s most important?” you should ask “If every other area of our operation remained at its current level of performance, what is the one area where change would have the greatest impact?”
This simple reframe makes all the difference. Suddenly you’re not saying that everything is important. You’re really thinking about what is the most important for you to focus on right now. It’s the best way to bring clarity, quickly.
4. Delegate with results and expectations, not step-by-step instructions
No one wants to be a micro-manager, but when your business is on the line it’s hard to let go. If you’ve gotten the right people in you need to trust them to perform, rather than continue to hover and tell them how to do things best.
With that said, they still need direction. They need to know what your expectations are and what results the team is working toward. Share your clear vision for the business, explain what role they play in it, break down the most important goals for them, and be firm with the results you expect. If you hired well, it’s time to trust them to take the direction you’ve given them and deliver on the results. They may even come up with a better way of doing things that can accelerate your business faster.
5. Track your progress
It’s amazing how often tracking metrics gets dropped from the to-do list. I know, there’s a lot to track and if you’re taking time tracking, you’re not spending time doing.
But tracking progress doesn’t need to be that hard and it doesn’t need to take that long; especially now that you have your most important goal.
I recommend that figures related to your most important goal get tracked weekly, if not daily. Let’s say you want to increase conversion rate after you send a quote to a customer. You’d probably track your conversion rate weekly, but daily you would want to track all of the things that you do to influence whether you reach that goal – the drivers of your success. That could be tracking the number of customers you call to personally follow up, the length of time it takes to send a quote after they’ve requested it, etc. Those are the figures you’d want to track daily.
At least monthly, track your high level financials, to ensure your business is on track financially. This would include revenue, expenses (both fixed and variable), profit, and aged receivables.
Taking action using these five steps will help you move from overworked and overwhelmed employee, to strategic business owner.
Want more help stepping into your role as CEO? Join me for my free live workshop series CEO Summer School where I give business owners easy to implement strategies to help their business thrive.