Run Your Month Like a CEO

I go on CEO dates with myself. Once every month (as well as on a weekly basis), I take some time to check in on my business and ensure I’m continuing the progress toward the goals I’ve set. This is how I create business plans that I follow through on and adapt as circumstances arise. And in this episode, I discuss how you too can build in self-accountability so that your plan isn’t just another document you’ll never open again.

On this episode of Promote Yourself to CEO:

2:59 – I talk about my monthly CEO date and dive into my check-in process.

7:48 – What kinds of questions can you ask yourself as you look back on the previous month?

11:28 – I reveal another reason why I absolutely love working with The CEO Planner.

14:15 – What are the consequences of not tracking and documenting things in your business on a consistent basis?

20:07 – Your business metrics and revenue help you predict your company’s future. I reveal how I check on mine every month without obsessing over them.

27:20 – What if you discover that you’ve fallen behind (even way behind) on your projected goals? Here’s how I handle it.

32:24 – One of the most crucial things you need to do with your team while setting your top business priorities for the next month.

34:10 – What’s the last thing I do at the end of my monthly CEO date?

Show Links

If you've been following me for any length of time, you've likely heard of my weekly CEO Date, the time at the very beginning of each and every week where I sit down to check in on my business, check in on my 90-day plan, and make sure that we are making progress on all of the goals that we've set for the year. I have another type of CEO date that I do, my monthly CEO Date. In this episode, I'm breaking down how this monthly CEO Date helps us to adapt, adjust, and stay on track with our plan even when facing constantly changing challenges in life, in business, or in the world.

Are you ready to grow from stressed-out solopreneur to competent CEO? You're in the right place. I'm your host, Racheal Cook, and I've spent more than 15 years helping women entrepreneurs sustainably scale their businesses. If you're serious about building a sustainable business, it's time to put the strategy, systems, and support in place to make it happen. Join me each week for candid conversations about stepping into your role as CEO, the hard lessons learned along the way, and practical profitable strategies to grow a sustainable business without the hustle and burnout.

Hey there. Welcome back to another episode of Promote Yourself to CEO, and specifically to Run Your Business Like a CEO Series that we're running this month. This series is all about leading your business like a CEO. The fun part about being the CEO is setting those big ambitious goals, dreaming those big dreams, but the real work of being a CEO is about being able to follow through with your plans to create real momentum and to have the skills to adapt and adjust the plan when circumstances inevitably change.

In the last episode, we did a deep dive into 90-day plans. In fact, this 90-day planning process is a cornerstone of my work with my clients. That is why we've created the 90-Day CEO Planner. That's why we run the CEO Retreat. The entire CEO Collective is built around this 90-day CEO operating system that includes both planning and implementation.

But today I want to dive a little bit deeper. I want to talk about how a monthly practice, a monthly meeting on your calendar to actually build in a feedback loop for yourself for self-accountability will help so that your plan doesn't just become another Google document that you're never looking at again but is actually a living, breathing document that you and your team are actively using, you're actively checking in with to create progress and momentum in your business.

This practice is your monthly CEO Date. I do these at the beginning of each month, usually the first Monday of each month. Because if you know me, Monday is my CEO Date. I have my CEO Date first thing in the morning. It's nine o'clock every single Monday morning. But my monthly CEO Date uses a slightly different checklist, a slightly different approach than my typical weekly CEO Date Checklist. I'm going to talk more about my CEO Date Checklist in next week's episode. Today that I want to talk about the monthly CEO Date.

My monthly CEO Date is about making sure that I'm just getting that touch point as I'm working through and implementing my 90-day plan. This check-in really, really helps me to determine if I'm on track or if I'm off track so I can course correct. If you're off track, you need a chance to adapt or adjust before you completely miss the opportunity to make the moves you need to make in order to catch up to that. If I need to move any timelines or deadlines, if I need to move things around, this gives you a chance to catch it in advance before it snowballs into a problem.

This is the key. I see so many entrepreneurs who are feeling frantic about their businesses. They're always feeling like they're in emergency mode. It's because they don't have a process that includes feedback loops, that include check-ins so that you have this touchstone to make sure you're on track, a place to check in and review your progress.

Let's dive into the monthly CEO Date Checklist. The first step, the absolutely first thing is to pull up your plan. If you don't have a documented plan for the year, for the quarter, then go check out the other episodes here on Promote Yourself to CEO so that you have a documented plan for your business. The first step is to review your plan, reflect on your plan and your progress so far on that plan. I start by looking at my 12-month goals.

Now not that long ago we did the Plan Your Best Year Ever Challenge, and it's still available. You can go sign up for the full five-day challenge at theceocollective.com/bye, the link is in the show notes. That will help you to get focused and to map out exactly month by month the big picture of what's going on in your business over the next 12 months.

Every month, during my monthly CEO Date, I literally am pulling out the worksheets that I give to you in the Plan Your Best Year Ever Challenge. This is not just an exercise I came up with, this is how I run my business, giving you the exact tools so I pull out my worksheets and having this in front of me every single month helps to ground me back into reality, helps me ground back into my goals. It really helps me to avoid jumping into the next shiny object or that new idea I just had.

Let's be honest, that happens for us entrepreneurs quite often. We get these new exciting ideas and our instinct is to just drop everything and chase in that direction. We do not want to do that because if we're constantly chasing after the next shiny object, we're never truly getting momentum on our overall goals. Reviewing my Plan Your Best Year Ever, reviewing my annual plan, it gives me that check-in before I get distracted, before I get off course.

I'm reviewing my annual plan. I'm reviewing my annual goals. I check in and I ask, “What progress have we made? What do we still need to do? Are we on track or off track?” Once I have those answers, I dive into the next part, which is my current 90-day plan. Now, it helps that my 90-day plan is with me all the time because I only use my CEO Planner. I use it religiously and I keep it with me. It’s either on my desk or in my backpack because of course, I have a little backpack that I take to the office with my planner, my notebook, and my laptop. It's always with me so I can easily refer back to it and check in on my progress on my 90-day plan, on how I'm progressing through my 30, 60, 90, and each of my 90-day goals.

Now if you don't know what a 30, 60, 90 is, go listen to the previous episode about How to Run Your Quarter like a CEO because it's part of my 90-day planning process. Once I'm looking at this, I'm looking at my 90-day goals, I'm looking at my 90-day plan, here's what I'm asking myself, “How did I do with my time off?” One of my key values in The CEO Collective is life before business. It's built into this planning process and it's built into the feedback process of doing my monthly CEO Date. How would I do with my time off that I have scheduled for that month, the previous month? Did I really take it off first of all?”

Because we all know what it's like to take time off and then you're not actually taking the time off, you're half present but not really because you're still thinking about work. You're still thinking about projects, or hooked in, in some way. I really ask myself, “Did I really take the time off? Did I truly rest? Did I play? Do I feel restored? Do I feel good? Do I feel energized because I gave myself that space? Do I need to take more time off?” As someone with a chronic illness, this is a huge question I have to ask myself because sometimes I will get overloaded and I have to have these check-ins so I can keep my calendar working for me.

I'm asking, “Do I need more time off? Do I need to make more space this month? Is there anything that needs to move this month so that I can have the space I need for my health, my well-being, my family, my friends, my connection, anything else outside of business that’s important to me?” That's the first group of questions I ask myself is around time off and taking care of myself.

The next questions I'm asking is revenue goals. Did I hit our revenue goal for the month? Then why or why not? This happens. We have different revenue goals that we set for the year and for the month. But sometimes things happen that are outside of your control. Sometimes they're great things like maybe everybody that joined The CEO Collective paid in full and then we have a really high revenue month, which is unexpected, because we don't plan for everyone to pay in full.

But sometimes everybody takes a payment plan and over the year we're still going to make the revenue but we just didn't get as much upfront as we anticipated. Maybe we did a promotion, maybe a CEO Retreat was coming up. Maybe I ran an extra workshop. There are lots of reasons why I may or may not have hit my revenue goal. But the most important part of this is looking at how this fits in with everything that I've planned out for the year and if I did not hit my revenue goal, is there something I need to do to make up revenue?

If I was short for the month that I'm looking at, do I need to do extra promotion? Do I need to reengage some people? Do I need to do anything else to make up for that gap in revenue? This is really important because it ensures that we are, over the course of the year, trending towards our yearly annual revenue goal and not letting a bad month snowball into a deficit or a lack of hitting our goals.

Then the final component here that I'm asking myself is I'm looking through my marketing, what Attract activities have I been doing? I'm checking my Engage strategy. How many people have joined our email list or joined our community? What Nurture marketing did I do? I'm going through and really auditing like, “Did we do the things that we know lead to revenue? Did we do the things that we know lead to sales?” Now this is one reason I absolutely love my CEO Planner, and I'm going to shamelessly plug it again because it works. I promise you. It works.

One of the reasons it works is because I know that when these things are not front and center every single week, it's really easy to have a week or two weeks go by and suddenly you look up and you realize you haven't been doing the marketing that you need to do in order to achieve the sales that you truly want. I open up my planner. I go week by week. I use it. I go through it to do the review. Then I check in on any other goals that I have outside of revenue, outside of checking in on marketing activity.

I make sure that if there were other goals I'm working towards, how are we doing with that? Are we on or off track? Is there anything I need to do to make up what we are missing? Is there something that I didn't pass off to the team? Do I need to ask the team for some support? Do I need to adjust some deadlines? Do I need to clarify to somebody what is missing so that we can move forward? Am I being the bottleneck somewhere and holding the team back from making more progress toward this goal?

That's honestly the most likely scenario. As a CEO, this happens often, your team will be coming to you for feedback or they need your input on something. If you get a little bogged down with all of that, you can end up delaying everybody else's progress, which then gradually just slows down things. I need to ask myself, “Are we on or off track with any other goals or anything else in our plan? Is there anything I need to do to go from being a bottleneck to opening up the progress on that goal? Do I need to make some space in the coming month to make sure that I can do my part on that goal so that I can work on whatever is needed for me to make that goal happen?”

Now if you've been using your CEO Planner, this is the perfect time to pull it out. I love that I have my CEO Planner in front of me because I can go back and see every single thing that has contributed to the results I got that month. That is so powerful. Having this feedback loop, having this tool for self-accountability, I can see whether or not I am completing my top three tasks every single week, whether I'm moving the ball forward on each of the items I am responsible for in my business, and I can see if those tasks haven't gotten completed. I can figure out usually pretty quickly why because I built it into the CEO Planner process.

On our weekly reviews, we ask ourselves, “Did you hit your top three goals for the week? Did you hit your CEO Score for the week and what got in your way? What's working and what's not working?” This helps me to see if I need to make adjustments before things get further off track. Honestly, if things have gone off track, we're not moving through our plan as we anticipated, it's usually because I've overcommitted somewhere. I become the bottleneck somewhere. I have too much on my calendar. Now I need to figure out what I need to do differently. What do I need to do differently in the coming month so that I can get back on track, so that I can make time for the priorities that only I can do?

I also use my planner to review my CEO Score. Now we're going to talk about this more next week. But the CEO Scorecard is another tool that we've built into our planning process because it is a way to have that feedback loop, that self-accountability, and really give value to things that we tend to not value our time and our energy.

Your CEO Score is all about putting the highest-value tasks first and defaulting to higher-value CEO-level tasks versus lower-level maintenance and administrative types of tasks in your business. Again, we're talking about that next week, but it is a powerful, powerful tool that we've built into the planner in our process to make sure that I'm doing CEO-level work and I'm not getting pulled back into things that I should not be doing.

By reviewing my planner, I can ask myself and have more insight, more clarity into what has been working in my business. If I go through my weekly reviews, then every single week, I'm saying to myself and I'm documenting, like my week was too full, and I'm tired, I'm stressed, I can make better decisions moving forward. I can proactively adjust my calendar for the coming month. I could move some deadlines around. I could cancel or reschedule appointments. I could decline things that are nice to-dos but not essential must-dos in my calendar.

This is so important, because I'm making decisions proactively before anything becomes a crisis, before me getting overloaded, turns into a snowball of I have no time to think. Or let's say that in reviewing what's working or what's not working, I realize that I've been taking on tasks that my team is fully capable of implementing. I've been too in the weeds. I've been doing the $10-an-hour work or $ 100-an-hour work instead of the growth-oriented $1,000-an-hour, $10,000-an-hour CEO-level tasks. When that happens, I guarantee I've been getting in my team's way. I've been becoming the bottleneck. I have been trying to control everything or micromanage things.

That is a surefire way to slow down your progress. Great, when I noticed that, when I noticed I've been in the weeds, I can change course and I can pass more things off to the team. I check in with the team, make sure we're on the same page. Honestly, the most important is to make sure my team is fully supported and fully resourced so they can handle that task. Because chances are if I've gotten in their way, it's because something was not going right and instead of communicating to my team and helping coach them up, I've been getting in their way instead, which is totally normal.

This is totally normal. But we need the system that creates this opportunity for feedback, for reflection, for self-accountability, and review. Again, get The CEO Planner. Go to theceocollective.com. Go grab yourself a copy. Truly, it is so helpful and I think it's so helpful because we do not often remember even a few weeks out even what happened last week. We don't remember all the details. When we think we'll remember what happened in the past month, chances are, without some clear documentation, you're making some assumptions, and you're probably overestimating what you did accomplish and underestimating the progress you've made.

Without documentation, without a way to track and measure what matters, that old Peter Drucker quote, then we are operating on assumptions, we've already forgotten things, and that means we can't truly see the patterns. If we can't see the patterns, we can't be proactive. If we can't be proactive, we're not adapting or adjusting our plan quickly enough to see what truly is or is not working.

One thing I want you to keep in mind is the business you have today is a result of the work you did three to six months ago. If you don't have a way to look back at what you did three to six months ago, if you're not documenting these things for yourself, then you are really holding yourself back from being able to make smarter, more informed decisions. This is how we become more proactive and less reactive CEOs.

As you can tell, there is a lot of reviewing things in your monthly CEO Date. Because again, this is your chance to press pause, check-in, make sure you're on track, adapt, and adjust as needed. This is how we're catching the things before it becomes an emergency.

The next thing I'm reviewing is my metrics. I am not someone who is obsessed with metrics. I am not checking in on them every single day. I don't obsess over how many followers I have, how many people are on my email list, or how much traffic we have. I'm not going to get obsessive about that. But I do check in about once a month. We have a spreadsheet that the team has set up. Every month, my admin goes in, pulls all the metrics that we want to track so that all you have to do is look in one place.

I can see, again, I'm looking for the trends. I'm looking for the patterns. Now inside of The CEO Collective, we actually have a training around this, around metrics that matter, and teaching our clients how to put together a similar metrics tracking sheet for their business. This is so helpful as you're moving forward, as you're able to gather more data. Because when you understand the numbers in your business and metrics in your business, when you understand the correlation between the activities you're doing and the results you're getting, when you can understand how many people you need to get in front of in order to make the number of sales you want and get those new clients, you suddenly start to realize like a lot of business is a numbers game.

The numbers start to work themselves out and it helps you to make better forecasts of what you're going to bring into your business because your metrics are helping you predict them. It does get easier and easier and easier over time. It helps you make better and better decisions. I will check in on the metrics because if we are bringing on new clients into The CEO Collective, which is our signature offer, I want to make sure that we are consistently doing the things that put us in front of the right people. That those marketing activities, those Attract, Engage, and Nurture marketing activities are turning into the clients that we want to bring in.

This helps us to forecast how many new clients we are on track to have, how many sales we're on track to have. I look at that and I don't get obsessed about it, again, not overanalyzing. I'm just looking for big-picture trends. Once a month is I think for me just enough to keep my finger on the pulse of my business without getting too anxious or overwhelmed. We do try to make data-driven decisions as much as possible. But the more you're tracking, the easier it will become. The more you're tracking, the easier it will become to forecast the future outcomes and the future results in your business.

Then I check revenue. I'm going to look back on the previous month's revenue. I'm going to ask myself again, “Did we hit the revenue goal? What contributed to that? If we didn't hit the revenue goal, what contributed to that?” Sometimes, again, depending on the payment plan, some months, we'll have amazing months, we'll have lots of pay-in-fulls. Some months, we didn't hit a revenue goal because everybody took a payment plan, and that’s okay. You just have to know what's going on because if there's a shortage, if you didn't hit that goal, then we have to start figuring out what's going on.

Did I not hit the revenue goal because I didn't actively invite anybody to work with me this month? I didn't have anything for sale? Or did I not hit my revenue goal because I didn't make enough invitations? I didn't have enough sales calls because I didn't do the marketing activity? You have to drill down and figure out what slowed things down, what contributed to that result, because again, it'll help you make better decisions.

When I look into the numbers, I can tell is it because I didn't get enough people to see the offer? I didn't follow up with enough people? I didn't have enough people in general? There are so many factors that go into your sales results. But without the data, it's really hard to drill down and figure out if was it the marketing, was is the offer, was it the volume? Was it what? Did I ask myself, “Was I actively or passively selling our offers?” Oh, this is a big one, especially in the first few years and I have been seeing changes in buying behavior and how people buy services, programs, education, training, consulting, and coaching.

Businesses similar to mine, buying has changed. It has changed a lot over the last decade or so as an industry grows, and more and more people enter the industry so more and more peers join your industry, potential clients become more sophisticated because they have access to more information, they have access to more resources. There has just been an explosion of women starting small businesses. As these clients are savvier and more sophisticated, as there are more options out there, passive selling becomes less and less effective.

When people are making buying decisions, if one business is 100% passive and low touch so everything is in an automated sales webinar funnel versus another business that has a higher-touch sales process where there's an application, there's a personal call, and there's time to build a relationship, it becomes really important to get clear about what sales strategy you're going to focus on. I'm always asking this because if you have been depending on passive things, and you're not seeing them work as well as they used to, if you've been focused on evergreen, which is great, I love evergreen, but sometimes overtime it will slow down results unless you're just putting so many people through it.

You have to really do a ton of marketing in order to make that work. But if you're actively selling, then it's actually a little easier, I think, especially if you have high ticket offers, because you'll have to be putting so much marketing energy out there and just will always convert better active selling or high-touch selling will always convert better. Each month I'm asking myself, “Am I doing the things that will lead to great sales? If I didn't hit my revenue goals last month, is there a gap we need to make up? Do I need to add in more high touch, more personalized sales strategies in order to bring on more clients?”

I think it's just so important because if we don't catch these gaps early, then we get further into the year and we realize we're off course, or even worse, we get a few months in and you start to look at your bank account and realize, “I can't keep ahead of my expenses or I can't pay myself what I really need to pay myself.” When you're catching these things earlier, you can avoid these problems. When you find out that you are thousands and tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands behind your projections, that means we need to make sure we're planning forward and we're asking how do I make that up? What are we doing to move forward to close this gap? What is the new revenue goal adjusted for our current situation need to be? What are the chances and changes that we're going to make in order to hit that goal?

Once I've gotten really clear about that, then I want to look at my marketing for the month. Now I'm looking forward and I'm asking myself, “What has worked?” Again, you'll hear me say this over and over and over again, what worked, what didn't work, what worked, what didn't work? I go back and I look into my emails. I use ConvertKit so I'll open my emails and I'm looking at what emails got the biggest open rates or biggest click-through rates, what are people responding to? I look back at our podcasts and I'm looking at what got the most downloads. I might be looking at some analytics on my social media and figuring out what content got the most engagement. I'll pay attention to my DMs or inbox.

Where did we get the most engagement from people? Were they replying from something or were they messaging me? This helps me to figure out what to double down on and where I want to go next. Asking myself this question has helped me to course correct quite a few times, like quite often, and you would not believe the businesses that you follow, trust me, they're of course correcting all the time. They're always looking at what is and isn't working and the ones who start to sink and who start to struggle are the ones who are not course-correcting quickly enough.

When I start to go through this process and I'm course correcting my marketing, it is so incredibly powerful and also it gives me the data I need to know like if I'm overwhelmed by, let's say posting or creating content, this type of review helps me to figure out like, “Hey, is there some best of content here that I can repurpose, and have my team push out again for me?” I think this is so incredibly powerful because chances are if you've been in business and you've been creating content for your business for a long time, you are sitting on a treasure trove of content that you can replay, you can share it again. These are important things to consider.

I also have looked at things like let's say one of my marketing channels just takes a drop, I mean, we've seen this on social, surely if you have been on social for a while, you have seen and gone through the process of a channel that used to work really well for you like Facebook suddenly is not getting reached in organic distribution. This gives you the information you need to figure out if there are things beyond my control, where can I plug into the flow of a platform that is getting better attention?

I've been able to course-correct quite a few times when I realized that video was going to be something that was working really well for me, but I didn't have the bandwidth or the capacity to focus on lives. I tried. There was a period of time years ago when I went live every single week and had a Facebook live show. But it's so much bandwidth and so much time and energy and focus that I just didn't have anymore. But I know video works. I built it into my strategy. How can I make this work for me? For me, part of that has been hiring people to support me, batching that content, doing full video recording days on days where I feel great and I have everything prepped and ready, and then I don't have to come back to it for another three or four months.

I build it into my strategy. I figure out how to make bandwidth for it, how to make time and energy, how can I get the support I need in order to make this happen? I'm reviewing the marketing, what worked, what didn't work again, and then I plan forward. What do I need to focus on this month? This is where I will look forward and brainstorm whatever content I need to create. This is something we teach inside of The CEO Collective but I mean, it's a process I've used forever.

I sit down with a Google doc. I have a template format that I use to plan all my content. I'm literally looking at it right now. I will have podcast episodes coming up. I will have outline story topics. I will have ideas for everything that we're going to put out content-wise, and it's just a few hours at the beginning of a month to plan basically a month's worth of podcasts, newsletters, social, etc. Then I'll block out time to make sure I can create all that. From there, I'm looking at any other projects that I might be working on to see where I'm on or off track and then I set my monthly top three priorities.

One of the biggest things though as you're doing this, this is so crucial, as you're growing a team, make sure you're communicating your thought process to the team. I've heard so many horror stories of people not doing this. Then the team feels like a dog chasing its tail. They just don't know what way is up or what the priorities are because they feel like they're constantly being pulled in different directions. A lot of that comes from people who are maybe even doing this type of process, but they are not communicating to their team. They're just throwing things in their team’s to-do list on their lap and saying, “Hey, figure it out,” but the team doesn't know what the priorities are. It gets confusing and chaotic.

Every month as I'm looking at the big picture for my business, I'm setting the top three priorities for the business as a whole. This is what we are focused on as a team this month and I literally will record a quick video for them and send an update. I'll give them a quick update on how the past month did. I'll give them any changes that we need to make and what is on deck for this month so everyone is crystal clear about where we're going. This helps everyone get on the same page going in the same direction.

This helps us to adapt, adjust, and reset expectations for what's going to happen next. Honestly, the best thing about doing this as a video is that usually, they're short like 15 or 20 minutes, but I don't need to try to figure out how to schedule a meeting with every single person on my team. I can just send this to everyone. They watch it on their time and then they just follow up with me or with Amber, my ops director if there's anything specific that they have questions about.

Now, the final thing I do at the end of my CEO Date for the month is I sit down and I manage my calendar, and we're going to talk about this a ton because managing my calendar is becoming more and more important as my business grows, as my team grows. Chances are it is a bottleneck for a lot of the CEOs who are listening to this. I am in a constant state of reevaluating and refining, reevaluating, refining what I need to do to run my calendar effectively.

As I'm looking for the month ahead, I'm asking myself, “Do I need to take time off?” This is so important because if I'm not making space for it in advance, chances are I will blow right through it. I'll ask myself, “What boundaries do I need to protect my time? Do I need to adjust anything in my calendar? Are there any deadlines or timelines I need to move back? Do I need to block out some time on my calendar for the creative work, for creating content, or for building something new?”

Some of the things that I have to do, if I'm not going into my calendar, I'm literally making an appointment with myself to record this podcast episode, it would not happen or I would be trying to squeeze it in between and then be really stressed and anxious about it. I'd rather be proactive and block that time in advance. Managing my calendar big picture is just a huge part of my monthly CEO day because I want to be ahead of the curve. I don't want to be a week off trying to get something done and realizing my calendar is too full and I don't have the time to get that thing done.

Now I'm holding back the team. I'm becoming the bottleneck unless I stay late, work weekends, or whatever and I don't want to do that. I want to make sure I am far ahead of my responsibilities to tasks that only I can do so that I'm avoiding becoming the bottleneck. I want to block that time weeks in advance. For example, again, if my thing is I need to batch record content at the beginning of the month, I'm plugging it into my calendar, if I am getting my video team to help me record video content, we schedule that way in advance and then we schedule a prep meeting in advance. We're putting these things way in advance on the calendar.

There you have it. That's the monthly CEO Date. As you can tell, this is a process that is not normal for a lot of entrepreneurs I feel because entrepreneurs as a group, we tend to be very future-oriented, focused on what's next and slowing down, pressing pause to reflect back to look at what happened and to really take the time to figure out what you can learn from it, to figure out what you may need to adapt or adjust, what you need to do in order to make sure you're moving forward in an intentional way and not ignoring the challenges, not ignoring those little road bumps that you keep ignoring them long enough and it's going to be a big train wreck down the road, we want to start catching those things early. We want to pay attention to when things aren't working so that we can fix it earlier in the process and we can start getting real momentum in our business.

If you enjoyed today's episode, then I want to hear from you. I am giving away a full year's worth of CEO Planners. That's right. You've been hearing me talk about The CEO Planner and how it's such a huge part of this process, how we built in these feedback loops and self-accountability tools. You have the opportunity to win four CEO Planners, so four 90-Day CEO Planners to anyone who leaves a review for Promote Yourself to CEO in the month of January. Go to Apple Podcasts before January 31st. Leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Take a screenshot of it and share it. Tag me over on Instagram @racheal.cook. We will pull a winner and notify the winner the first week of February. Of course, we would love you to get a CEO Planner because I just know and believe so strongly in this tool to plan and stay accountable to that plan.

I cannot wait to hear your thoughts on this episode. Are you going to do your monthly CEO Dates for your own business? I can't wait to hear from you. Thanks so much for listening to this episode. If you enjoyed it, stay tuned. Next episode we're diving into how to prioritize your CEO-level work every single week.