Are You Making CEO Level Work a Priority?


You are an entrepreneur. You’re a business owner. You’re the CEO!

…but you’re probably also the manager, the employee, the bookkeeper, the keeper of the inbox, and a one-woman marketing team.

We tend to wear a lot of hats and entrepreneurship can get overwhelming pretty quickly if we tell ourselves that we’ve got to do it all solo. Even if you get a small team in place, you need to learn a whole new skillset of managing and delegating or else you’re doing just as much work.

But, I learned. I learned how to prioritize the tasks in my business such that my focus and attention stays on the highest-value, CEO-level work.

I learned how to practice efficiency in both the day to day tasks AND my big projects.

And in this episode, I’m sharing the system that trained me how to do all this:

the CEO Scorecard.

Now, I first learned about and practiced the scorecard concept during my years in corporate consulting. Scorecards are one of the first strategies we would implement to help businesses become more effective and efficient.

Every task has a metric, and this ensures you’re utilizing your resources as a company correctly.

So how can you use this strategy as a small business owner? With the CEO Scorecard!

Going forward in business, you can find a one-page guide to the CEO Scorecard inside the CEO Planner. It includes a full breakdown of business tasks and helps you arrange priorities, improve efficiency, and increase value in your business, week after week.

Preparing the scorecard starts by assigning dollar-per-hour values to specific tasks. We keep it simple by making all our valuations factors of 10: from $10/hr all the way up to $10,000/hr.

ceo scorecard

Your $10-per-hour Tasks.

{06:00} Generally speaking this includes all your admin, operations, and customer service work. When you’re just starting out, you’ll be taking care of all of it yourself.

It’s easy to scroll through this list — responding to emails, handling calls, scheduling, invoicing, social media, etc — and think, “It’s all simple stuff, I’ll just get it done faster myself.” But once you start adding up the time it all takes…you’ll see a big percentage of your week going to these tasks that don’t truly grow your business.

Thankfully, most of this work can be automated, systematized, and streamlined. There are tons of tools and trainings for setting up autoresponders, handling FAQs, automatic billing, and scheduling too. Take a little time to set them up, and save yourself hours every week after.

Your $100-per-hour Tasks.

{12:00} This is more specifically-skilled work: design, tech set-up and implementation, copywriting, etc. The to-dos in this list require someone with more niche experience and expertise than most virtual assistants.

DIY CEOs often learn how to do all of this themselves. {I did!} Building your own website, managing Facebook Ads, designing social media graphics, studying copywriting trends… You can learn how to do all this, but it’s not the most valuable use of your time.

The $100/hour tasks aren’t ones that can be automated, but there are amazing professionals out there you can hire to help free up your time and energy for the $1k-$10k work that brings in business.

Your $1,000-per-hour Tasks.

{18:00} From here on up we’re talking about revenue-generating work where you, the CEO, should shine. Starting with CEO Dates, now we’re focused on business development, strategic planning, and marketing.

You also want to value your time developing products and offerings here, as well as any work on scaling your offerings. I also include all the CEO development I do, whether I’m working with my own coach or mastermind, or doing a training that I need. Developing sales campaigns for your offerings is big picture work that should be valued at this level.

Your $10,000-per-hour Tasks.

{30:00} Now I want to be clear, the tasks in this category are not often on the radar for new entrepreneurs and solo-CEOs. This is the work that you have to build up to, and you’ll need a lot of mental bandwidth, support team, and professional network to be able to generate this level of value for your business.

Revenue generating work AT SCALE is what I consider $10k/hr work. When you’re able to make the shift from one-on-one to scaled group offerings, your potential value jumps exponentially. Marketing and selling to more people at once requires a different skillset than handling individual inquiries and trading dollars for hours.

Your marketing includes workshops and webinars where you can serve, engage, and invite your larger audience to work with you. Everything from lunch-and-learns to television appearances, speaking opportunities are really large scale marketing opportunities for your large scale offerings.