Last week I dove in with a pretty epic episode about the 6 lessons I have learned on this journey to becoming a multiple six-figure CEO of my business.
These are lessons that I see a lot of my peers and clients learning as they start making that transition from being a high five-figure entrepreneur to hitting six-figures and then trending towards multiple six-figures.
$150,000-$200,000 is a professional salary that replaces a lot of our former corporate salaries and then some. And that’s really exciting, right?
But there are a few mindset shifts we need to go through in order to accomplish that.
Most of us start this business because we want to do work we love with people we love and be well-paid for it.
But when you break down the hours, you realize you might be getting to spend 50% of your time doing the actual work that you love and the rest of the time is spent running a business.
What happens to a lot of us is we start off doing all the things in our business and we get to a point where we just cannot grow.
We create this ceiling in how much we can grow our business. We max out on clients, then we max out on our prices, and then what are we to do? Where do we go next?
Here’s a few mindset shifts that six-figure CEOs know that a lot of entrepreneurs who are struggling to hit that six-figure mark haven’t embraced yet.
Focus on the $1000 and $10,000 an hour tasks
What does that mean? I’ve done a couple of Facebook Lives in the past where I’ve talked about this concept called the entrepreneur scorecard.
I didn’t come up with this, this is from the book Marketing 80/20. They basically break out all of the core tasks in a business and they assign them each a value.
There are $10 an hour tasks, $100 an hour tasks, $1,000 an hour tasks, $10,000 an hour tasks and it goes on.
Six-figure CEOs that are creating sustainable businesses, they know that their time and energy needs to be spent doing CEO level work. They know that if all of their time is spent on $10 an hour tasks, they will run out of time.
What are the $1000 and $10,000 an hour tasks?
$1000 and then $10,000 an hour tasks are mostly going to be related to marketing, to sales, and to new business development.
Marketing activities are going to be things like pitching yourself for that new podcast, trying to get new publicity opportunities, running advertising to grow your business, creating high-level content for your business.
Sales activities are going to be writing sales pages, making sales pitches, having sales conversations, maybe creating a webinar or creating something where you invite lots of people to join you in your products, programs, or services.
New business development is going to be creating new offers, doing your strategic level planning, and doing these higher level tasks.
Where you don’t wanna spend your time is in the $10 an hour bucket. These are tasks like answering emails, managing your calendar, sending out invoices, paying and shipping gifts.
These are activities that could easily be outsourced or handed off or even systematized so that you don’t even need to touch them.
Invest in a team
I see so many people struggling with this because they think they can do it.
“If I can do this it doesn’t make sense to pay somebody to do this, because I’m perfectly capable of doing this.”
What you need to start thinking about “is what does paying an assistant $20 an hour free me up to do?”
If all you do is hire somebody to handle your email and manage your calendar and it takes them five hours a week, you might pay $100 for that, but the trade-off is that suddenly you’re freed up to go out there and have the $10,000 an hour sales calls.
You’re able to go out there and create that next level workshop or webinar or training that then invites people into your next program. You’re able to start creating the leverage that you need to grow your business.
You might pay a nominal amount for five hours of somebody’s time to take these $10 an hour tasks off of your plate, but it’s freeing up a lot of your time to then go after the higher value tasks.
Higher level CEOs don’t look at these types of tasks and think “I can do them, so I should do them because I want to save money.”
Instead, they think I want to free up my time.
[click_to_tweet tweet=”Money is no longer the biggest thing higher level CEOs are trying to conserve; they’re trying to conserve their time and invest their time in the right way.” quote=”Money is no longer the biggest thing higher level CEOs are trying to conserve; they’re trying to conserve their time and invest their time in the right way.” theme=”style2″]
They know that they can take these lower level things off their plate and that means they can go after the bigger things that are going to grow their business and help them reach and serve more people.
You can’t just “figure it out.”
A lot of times I see people who have been on my email list for six months, a year, sometimes even two years and they’ll circle and circle and circle around and then finally they’ll join me.
They’ll finally join me, and within a couple of weeks they’ll say to me “I can’t believe it took me so long to get this support!”
If you’re in those beginning stages and you have been brought up by this society that tells you to figure it out and google the answers.
You end up going through this process where you’re just squirreling away all these free trainings and all these free PDFs, but you don’t have a clear roadmap for how you should be taking action or what needs to happen to help you achieve those goals.
This is a big shift because yes, you can get all of the information, you can get all of the strategies for free. But here’s the missing piece and here’s how higher level CEOs look at this differently.
What you can’t get for free is somebody who gets to know you, gets to understand your business, and is there to support you as you are implementing to help you fine tune and make those changes, make those tweaks to get even better results.
That’s something you need to find a mentor to achieve. Yes, all the information is free, but CEOs who are operating at six and seven-figures know that if they want to achieve a goal, the best way to get there is to go out there and hire the expert.
The best way to get there is to get the real support and the experienced eyes on their business so they can get there faster.
[click_to_tweet tweet=”Think of how much revenue you’re leaving on the table, how many people you’re not serving if you spend the next six or 12 or 24 months just trying to figure it all out on your own.” quote=”Think of how much revenue you’re leaving on the table, how many people you’re not serving if you spend the next six or 12 or 24 months just trying to figure it all out on your own.” theme=”style2″]
Hire an expert
This is another huge mindset shift for six and seven-figure CEOs. They know that they don’t want to waste time or energy trying to figure it out and trying to piece it all together.
They want to go straight to the source and hire the expert so they can get those experienced eyes, because for them, time is money. They want to get there as quickly as they can without all the trial and error.
Stepping into this role as CEO is a constant journey of making these mindset shifts into where you want to go and where you want your time and focus.
Return on investment
This has been a big one for me because I’ve gone from in my own business, being entirely by myself to now having a team of several people who are supporting me behind the scenes.
And when I look at how much I pay out every single month to take care of my team, for my business manager, for my CFO, my financial manager to my community concierge and my tech support and all the people who behind the scenes support my team and me, could I do all those roles?
Absolutely.
But I also know that it makes sense for me to have them on my team because not only do I exponentially get my time and energy back, but I’m able to get a significant return on investment now because those are the things I know drive my business forward.
If you’re considering making any big shifts and you’re thinking about how do I level up my business, how do I double or triple my business, you have to make these big mindset shifts. You can’t double or triple your business, take it from 50 to 100 or 100 to 200 just by working harder.
You can’t increase your effort and hope that that’s the answer.
The real answer is you’ve got to start getting laser-focused on where your time and energy is going, and you need to invest in the support and the expertise because it’s going to help you get there faster.
If you want to work with me closer and learn more about these types of mindset shifts, this is the work I am doing inside of the CEO Accelerator.
One of my favorite things that I do inside of the CEO Accelerator is I work with my clients on a very personalized level to have them track what they are focusing on, where they’re spending their time and energy.
I’m helping them do everything from making sure their time every single week is spent on those $1,000, $10,000 an hour tasks.
Holding them accountable every single week because they’re sending me what their value is towards their business, how much time they spend in each of those areas in their business so that I can actually really have some numbers to go on.
This is the work that I love to do.
I’m only getting on the phone with people who have filled out the application, but this is an experience that starts in August and runs through next May to help you double or triple your business without double or tripling your workload.
I’m excited to share the exact strategies I’ve been using behind the scenes to grow my business to multiple six-figures, to pay myself a six-figure salary and do it all in 25 hours a week.
All of these processes are 100% learnable, and I know that because I have been teaching them to my Accelerator clients and they have just been seeing incredible, incredible results in their business. And I would love to support you if this is the next step in your CEO journey.