As a business owner, I’ll bet you spend a good part of your day reacting to the work in front of you. There are phone calls to return, emails to answer, meetings to jump on, items to research. And oh yes, you still have to do the stuff you promised your clients you’ll do. Seems like you’re always running behind or running just on time or just running. 

Like a restaurant, every business has a “front of the house” (client facing) and back of the house (office work). And both sides of that house must be humming at the same time, whether or not you work with a team.  

There’s one thing missing from this picture and it’s pretty important: CEO time. This is the time you need to work on planning, creating, visioning, goal-setting, decision-making. Do you set aside one day of the week for CEO time? One day of the month? Do you laugh when you think of giving yourself the luxury of a CEO day, pushing everything else aside to sit and plan away? 

This is the problem many of us battle continually – we let the Running of the Business take up 90% of our time, promising ourselves we’ll get to the visioning and designing, and then instead of devoting a portion of our schedule to CEO time, we just plop down exhausted from being on the hamster wheel all day. 

We must all set aside time to work ON the business and pull yourself out of the inside of the business on a scheduled basis. I have worked hard on my own calendar, time blocking as much as possible. You can’t schedule an appointment with me on a Monday or a Friday. I’ve set it up that way in Calendly and I’ve told my operations manager what my scheduling rules are.  

I set aside Mondays as a marketing day, Fridays as financial and administrative day. I work the top half of Friday and then my weekend starts. I exchanged that for the bottom half of Sunday when I start my follow-ups and reminder emails. I’ve set aside time for regular meetings with my Operations Manager to keep us both on track. 

My CEO days are typically on a Saturday when I have scheduled nothing else. I may take a break mid-way and bake a banana chocolate chip loaf, and then go back to work. Often, I’ll take my laptop into another room specifically so that I can reset my mind into creative design mode, instead of doing it in my regular home office on the desktop. The baking helps that creative thinking – the coming together of disparate ingredients into something fantastic.  

How will you create your CEO day? My suggestions: 

  • Make it a day of the week in which either you don’t typically work or it’s the slowest day of the week. 
  • Set an agenda for yourself, so you can check off each piece you want to work on, for a set amount of time. 
  • Work in a place that’s not your regular office space. It must be a quiet space – your patio, a park, your living room. 
  • Set that appointment 2 weeks in advance and don’t let anything move it. 
  • Give yourself a bare minimum of 2 hours, but 4 is better. Take a break in between and do something that helps you unleash creative thinking. 

When you invest in working with a strategist, you’re investing in your business development and the future of your company.  CEO work, when you attempt it alone, may have no path or plan or process. So the CEO work you do this month may not have any bearing on what you do next month, because you’re not following a methodology and there’s no accountability. Or you keep changing your mind with your mood or in reaction to what happened just last week. When you’re planning solo, you’re throwing darts at a target that’s a block away.   

Can you imagine driving from your house to Los Angeles without a map, compass or GPS? What do you do, follow the sunset?? That’s the unsettling feeling I experienced when I spent 7 years working my business alone. 

Investing in a coach or a strategist will keep you focused on your goals following a methodology. The one I choose to follow is The Pumpkin Plan, created by Mike Michalowicz and followed by thousands of entrepreneurs every day. It works on all kinds of businesses and it will work for you too.  

Every journey is better with a partner who is invested in getting you to the right destination. If you feel as if you’re doing a great deal of driving but not getting anywhere, or if you’re buried in the day-to-day but have no time or plan for visioning and designing, a Strategy Session is a great place to jump off the hamster wheel. 

For under $250, you can devote 90 minutes to addressing a challenge. Together, we’ll analyze, clarify and identify so your business and your time can be pointed in the right direction.