How a CEO Date Keeps Me Focused Each Week

Here’s how I know every solopreneur needs a CEO Date practice…

Do you ever find yourself feeling frustrated and unfocused in your business to the point where you know you aren’t doing the things that need to be done to get you to those business goals?

If so, listen up, because today we are talking about the one practice I have put in place in my business that ensures that I’m staying focused and staying on track every week, month, and year towards achieving those big business goals.

One of the most significant challenges I hear from women entrepreneurs is we set those big dreams. We set those big goals at the beginning of the year, but a few weeks, a few months in, we find ourselves off track.

We find ourselves struggling with those shiny objects that keep asking for our attention, begging for our attention, and, as a result, we’re not getting where we need to go.

Do you relate to that feeling of sitting down at your desk and just feeling completely unsure of where your time and energy should be focused every day?

If that’s you, you’re in luck, because today we are talking about a practice that I call my weekly CEO date.

Now, if you’ve taken my Fired Up and Focused Challenge or you followed my Plan Your Best Year Ever Challenge, both of those happen earlier on in the year.

But if you happen to follow any of those, you know that the CEO date is a practice I have had in my business from the very beginning.

It is simply a meeting with myself, the CEO of the business, to make sure that I am not just planning for the week ahead, or the month ahead, the quarter ahead, the year ahead, but also holding myself accountable to that plan.

Because a plan isn’t worth much if you’re not holding yourself accountable and sticking to the plan. This CEO date has become a massive part of my regular business practice.

If you follow me on Instagram, you will see that sometimes on Mondays, I’ll walk through and share with everybody what I’m doing on my Monday CEO dates.

This is a time that is carved out in my calendar, for me, it’s Mondays at 10 a.m., where I go through this checklist.

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CEO Date Item 1: Review Your Metrics

{06:00} My weekly CEO date starts pretty simply by tracking. I’m tracking the numbers that are most important to my business. In the business world, these are called your metrics.

Metrics are something that can become kind of a rabbit hole for a lot of people because there’s a lot of numbers we can track in our business.

  • You could track how many people go to your website
  • You could track how many people like you on Facebook
  • You could track your Facebook ads analytics
  • You could track how many followers you have on Instagram

You could be monitoring all sorts of things. But there’s two metrics that I want you to be paying attention to and tracking on a regular basis.

Until your business is bigger, I would say until your business is in the six-figure range, you don’t need a lot of complicated metrics to track. It will just become TMI, too much information.

[click_to_tweet tweet=”We want to track the things that are directly correlated to your results, which are directly correlated to your revenue.” quote=”We want to track the things that are directly correlated to your results, which are directly correlated to your revenue.” theme=”style2″]

The first is your leading metric. A leading metric is a metric that predicts your lagging metric. When most people think of what are you tracking, they think of I’m tracking my revenue, which is essential.

Do you track your revenue every single week?

Are you guys tracking your sales every week?

Are you tracking your revenue every single week?

That is the lagging metric.

It’s the final metric in a whole series of things that you can track. So if you can track that, you’re going to have some useful information about your business. But we want to get a couple of steps ahead of revenue.

We want to figure out what predicts revenue.

This is one that you’re gonna have to sit here and think about. But if you can unlock this information, suddenly, this is a big key to understanding what activities generate revenue for your business, what actions you’re taking generate revenue for your business.

In my business, my leading metric is email subscribers, and, even more specifically, it’s people who are opting in, signing up to watch the free master classes that I have.

Every week, I’m looking to see how many new people signed up to watch a free master class. That predicts revenue for me because we know that if 100 people sign up for our free master class, then, currently we’re at about 2%, so two people will become paying clients.

That’s compelling information, because if I want to impact that lagging metric, revenue, I know the things that increase the number of people getting into my email list through a master class.

This might sound a little complicated right now, but it’s information you need in order to figure out your lagging metric.

What predicts revenue?

For me, it’s people joining a master class. Now, for you, it might be referrals. It might be requests for a consult.

What are the things that are happening that then lead to people becoming clients?

This is must have information for any entrepreneur, and it’s something that you want to be tracking on a weekly basis.

So what about all the other metrics? You can track those, but we don’t overwhelm ourselves on a weekly basis with all of the numbers.

I track the more prominent metrics to see trends on a monthly basis. But on a weekly basis, I want to get laser-focused on what drives results.

Once I track those bits of information there, and I’m starting to review where I have gone, by then, I can take a look and see if am I on track, am I off-track with my revenue goals.

Then, I want to start planning.

2: Set Your Weekly Top 3

{12:00} The most important thing that I do when I’m planning is my top three. Every single week, I have three must-do activities.

The top three for the week are the most important and most impactful activities that you need to be focused on this week.

These are usually going to be related to marketing, compared to sales, related to business development. They are not going to be things like emails unless you’re writing emails for your audience.

I’ll set my weekly top three, and I’ll also plan out the marketing activities and sales activities for the week. This is so important. That’s why it’s part of the CEO date checklist.

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3: Plan Your Marketing Activities

{14:30} If you’ve followed me for a while, you know that I have a marketing framework that I use, that I teach. I think about it regarding the journey people go through from the first minute they hear about me.

Attract. Engage. Nurture. Invite. Delight.

Every single week, I’m thinking to myself, “What am I doing in each one of these buckets to ensure that I’m constantly attracting, engaging, nurturing, inviting, and delighting potential clients into my business.”

This is one of the secrets to avoiding that feast or famine cycle.

This is one of those secrets to building a business that brings in predictable profits, is consistently marketing your business, instead of having significant times of marketing, and, then, nothing for a long time. You’ve probably seen businesses that do that.

This is all about consistently showing up.

4: Block Time in Your Calendar

{18:00} This is so important. If you followed me for a while, you know I’ve talked about having a model calendar where I have very clear blocks of time in my schedule that I accomplish certain things.

The goal of this is to block the most important things into your calendar. Otherwise, you know how it goes. You don’t lock things in, and ultimately, you don’t get the most important things done.

On Mondays, I’m taking those top three, and I’m taking those most important marketing activities, and I’m blocking time in the calendar to make sure they get done that week. Because if they don’t get done that week, I’ve not done the work that will move my business forward.

I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to block these big, important tasks into your calendar and treat those times like real appointments.

5: Update Your Project Management System

{22:45} I use a project management tool called Asana. There are several others out there: Trello, Basecamp, etc.

And you may not have a project management system quite yet. But as your business grows beyond just you, it’s constructive to use a project management system.

Every week, my team and I update this because we all are using this project management system to see where things are in process.

If I’ve just planned out what this week’s content is going to be, I will go into Asana and tell my team “here’s the topic for this week”.

We have a checklist for each Facebook Live that we do or for each thing that we do so that everyone knows what’s happening and what’s going on.

6: Update Your Team

{24:30} I have a team meeting with my operations manager, Amber, every single week, every Monday, right after my CEO date. We can check in once and we can both ask each other questions and get on the same page.

One of the things that I love to do is I will record a little video for my team. I use a little program called Loom.

Loom is a screen capture tool that allows me to make a quick video for my team. Then, I can send it to them and say,

Hey, guys, here’s what I’m working on. I’m working on the Facebook Live show for the rest of the month. Here are the topics I’m thinking of. Here’s what I would like to do. Here are the downloads I would like to have. Here’s what I need your help with.

I find, especially as your business grows, these last two steps, updating your project management tool and updating your team, become more and more critical.

What tends to happen with us entrepreneurs is we get excited, and we get new, fresh ideas, and, sometimes, we forget to communicate those ideas with the people who are trying to help us.

Even before you have a team, I use this as a reminder to myself to update my husband, to update the babysitter, to update anybody who is not just on team Racheal Cook, the business, but who’s on team Racheal Cook, the human being.

So I sit down with my husband every week, and we talk about:

  • what’s on your calendar?
  • what times do you need the house to be entirely silent so that you can do your Facebook Live show?
  • do you have any appointments I need to be aware of?

We talk about anything else that we need to do to support, not just me, but him and the kids as well.

Every week after my business CEO date, we have a home CEO date as well, to make sure that things continue to run as smoothly as they can.

In this checklist, I’ve also included how I do the yearly CEO date, how I do my quarterly CEO date, how I do my monthly CEO date. So going from the bigger picture all the way down to what you’re doing week to week.

This is a practice has made such a huge difference in my business. It is the one that ensures that my business is pretty steady and consistent without any huge swings, highs or lows.

I have to tell you, that brings a lot of peace of mind when your business is consistently bringing you those clients that you are looking for.


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Show Notes

The Customer Journey Marketing Strategy

Break Free From the Feast or Famine Cycle

How a Model Calendar Helps Me Work Just 25 Hours a Week

 

Claim Your CEO Date Checklist

For every hour you spend planning, you save 10 hours in implementation! That's why I always start my week with a CEO Date. Download my checklist now!

Powered by ConvertKit