Are you the CEO of Your Business, or the Jack of All Trades?
When you first started your business, you were probably the only person working in that business. You had to learn to be the “Jack of All Trades” in order to get your business off the ground and keep it running. This is a solid way to start a business, but at a certain point if you haven’t transitioned out of this situation, your business isn’t going to grow.
It’s time to start thinking of yourself as the CEO of your business, and acting accordingly.
Get Clear on Your Vision
As the CEO of your business, you need a clear vision: a mission statement that details what your business does, who it serves, and where it’s going. If you don’t have a vision, then you’re just treading water, and you aren’t going to gain any momentum.
If it has been a while since you thought about your vision for your business, it may be time to revisit that. Think about what you really want from your business, and actually write down your big-picture vision. Post it somewhere that you will see it often, but also make sure to share it with your team.
Identify the Roles in Your Business
As part of your vision, think about how many roles your business needs to have in order to function properly and keep moving toward your goals. (It’s important to note that a role isn’t the same as a person; for some roles, you may have several people doing them, and for others you may have one person covering several roles.)
If you have been carrying too many of those roles yourself, it’s time to delegate them to someone else. Get clear about what you want out of your role as the CEO, and put everything else on someone else’s To Do list. As the CEO, you should primarily be your business’s leader, its overseer, and its driving force. You should not be your business’s “muscle,” doing every single task that comes through.
Now is also a good time to evaluate whether you have the right people fulfilling the right roles in your business. If not, it may be time to hire some new folks or let others go.
Communicate with Your Team
Once you have a clear vision and a solid idea of the roles that need to be filled, it’s time to make sure that everyone else on your team understands those things as well. You don’t have to have actual employees for this, though one day that should probably be your goal. For now, if you have independent contractors working for you, make sure they understand the vision you have for your company and their role in bringing that vision to life.
Here are some examples:
- Your accountant probably doesn’t need a deep understanding of your full vision, but they do need to know your financial goals so that they can make recommendations to help you reach them.
- Your assistant needs to have a firm grasp on the vision for your company so that they can help you stay true to that vision in the day-to-day tasks of the business.
- If you have more than one person in an assistant-like role, each one needs to understand the breakdown of tasks they are responsible for and who they report to on a daily basis.
- Your ghost writer or content creator needs a clear idea of the big picture so that they can communicate that with every new piece they create for you.
- Your webmaster needs to understand your goals so that they can make sure that your website is optimized to help you reach those goals.
As you look at your business with an objective lens, are you really doing the work of a CEO, or are you still playing around in “Jack of All Trades” territory? If you need some help getting clear on your vision, your team, and the roles your business probably needs to have, click the link below to book a call with me. Sometimes an outside perspective is all you need to get clear and then start taking action to align your business’s reality with your vision for it.