How To Be The CEO In Your Creative Business
Whatever the stage you’re at in your business, we all forget to take a step back and be the CEO sometimes. It might be that you’re so bogged down in the day to day of emails, calls and projects that it’s been months since you stopped to take stock of where you’re going. Or even if your business is just an idea or starting to get off the ground, you’re so busy trying to push it forward and do things that you’re not steering where you’re going.
Of course, another big problem is knowing how to shift that mindset and start thinking like a CEO. What does that even mean? For me, being the CEO of your business is making sure that the workers (also you!) are working as happily and effectively as possible, and that the business is moving in the direction you want to go. It's making sure that in your day to day you're being efficient and pro-active, whilst also spending time putting things in place so that you're business will be where you want it to be in 3 months or 3 years.To help you get to grips with the how, I've created the Be The CEO workbook for you to download at the bottom of this post. The workbook really digs into the exercises you need to not only think but behave like the CEO of your business.But before you dig into the workbook, here are a few important points to note first...
Make the time
The first step is prioritising and budgeting some time. Obviously that day to day stuff has to keep happening, so schedule CEO time into your weekly and monthly routine. For me, this looks like a quick half an hour review of the week each Sunday, a few blank slots during the week to put elements of that review into practice, and a monthly deep dive to check in on my goals and plan out the next month’s activity.
The most important thing, however, is setting a routine that you will be able stick to. I’m a great believer in not trying to ‘square peg round hole’ yourself into someone else’s formula. So if you want to spend the last half an hour of your day checking in, do that. If you want to do your deep dive every quarter, go for it. The most important thing is that it happens, and happens consistently.
Get a bird’s eye view
With all that slogging away in the day to day, we lose track of the big picture. A lack of clarity comes from just not having a bird’s eye view of your business. This means understanding it’s rhythm throughout the year, your busy seasons and quiet periods, and planning to hit those with the right mindset and activities. Rather than running your business week to week, firefighting all the things that need to be done, a bird’s eye view allows you to shape where you want your business to be months or years into the future. If you know where you want to be next year, you can start making tiny changes of direction now that will take you to that place.
Be ready to make change
Planning is all well and good, but it means nothing unless you enact those plans (I have a post all about turning goals into action if this is something you struggle with). Part of being the CEO of your business is making the difficult decisions and taking the big strategic actions to move the business to the place you want it to be. But change doesn’t have to be big, either. It’s also about looking at your day to day work, evaluating its efficiency, and committing to making small changes that will contribute to big ones. Just remember that nothing happens unless you do something.
In the workbook we’ll dig into these ideas in more detail. We’ll cover the key parts of a business deep dive: defining the rhythm of the business, checking in with goals and intentions, evaluating the day to day and setting improvements and changes.
