Becoming The Chief Executive Entrepreneur

By Mike Roberts

My mother was a CEO

As I grew up, each of us eight kids cleaned our own rooms, and had a system that rotated to different areas of the house that we took turns being responsible to pick up, wash, vacuum or sweep and mop, including the dishes and cleaning the kitchen. There were also established standards that let us know when we had done it correctly. After a while, mom didn’t even have to check our work, she just asked if we had done everything on the list to her standards. 

At about age 14 we started doing our own laundry. For extra fun, we also spent most Saturday mornings either cleaning out the garage or working in the yard, which in Southern California, was a year round thing. It meant mowing, weeding, planting or transplanting, and caring for a pretty good sized vegetable garden and a couple fruit trees. As we got older, we even participated in the cooking and meal prep. As if all of that wasn’t enough, most of us also participated in most if not all of soccer, basketball, baseball, football and piano. It was all part of our family culture. I grew up thinking this was normal. 

I soon discovered, however, that most of my friends did none of that. Their mothers kept the house clean, did the dishes, all the laundry, many even cleaned the kids rooms. None of those homes had eight kids, generally just one or two. On occasion their mothers would discover how much work was done at our house by us kids and would say something like “I don’t have the time or patience to make my kids do all that. If I want to get it done, it’s easier and faster just to do it myself.” The net immediate result was that their homes were often more tidy than ours was, especially since they were managing a family of four rather than ten. 

As CEO of a fully trained staff of 8, with production and quality control systems in place, my mom was never overwhelmed. She even accepted leadership roles in women’s organizations outside of the house. We occasionally had extended family members or friends, sometimes entire families move in and live with us for over a year, sometimes by surprise. The extra people effected operations not at all, was not even noticed, barely a blip on the radar. We regularly had, and still have, huge holiday dinners and events that within minutes are cleaned up leaving no trace. 

By shedding responsibilities, teaching and creating systems and checklists, mom created a home that functioned well in every circumstance, even when she was sick, injured or away from home. Our “growth” was only limited by the number of rooms we could stuff people into. That CEO culture is also scalable, and has now been scaled to each of our 8 homes, plus the homes of over 10 adult grandchildren, and counting. 

My friend’s moms, who operated like the typical entrepreneur, found the quickest, easiest and most efficient way to get things done, which was to do it themselves. What happened when mom was sick or out of town? What about when there were holiday events, parties, or guests that stayed for a week or longer? Despite having just as many rooms in their houses and less than half the kids, they had very limited “growth” potential. They stayed small because they had to. 

The “entrepreneur mom” culture did not scale at all as my friends left their homes with zero domestic skills. Their adult homes look more like the aftermath of a tornado (a line my mom occasionally used to describe my bedroom) than the clean and organized home they grew up in. They just didn’t have the skills or mentality to change it. Essentially, their loving mother had disabled them by doing too much for them.

From Entrepreneur to Chief Executive

As the entrepreneur of your business, you carry the primary responsibility for product development and quality, for marketing and sales, for product delivery and customer satisfaction, for general management and accounting, and essentially everything else. You may not be the person directly performing every one of these functions, but you are the acting executive directly responsible for them. It’s also very likely that you are performing most if not all of them. Since that is the case, who is responsible for growth? Who has their eyes focused on the future, on creating success and preventing failure? Who is the one turning this venture into the vehicle that will create the future you envisioned when you started it in the first place? In a typical entrepreneurial venture, the answer is no one. 

Since growth is required for business security and sustainability, and a lack of growth inevitably leads to failure, someone needs to take proactive responsibility for it, and that person needs to be you. Your entrepreneurial mindset has built the company to its current levels, to where you are generating revenue, cash flow, and maybe even profitability, but staying in that role, doing the same things, you will be limiting the growth of your company, you will be the one holding it down. To get your company to the place where it can grow into the enterprise of your dreams, you need to shed the entrepreneur role and become the Chief Executive Entrepreneur. 

Transitioning to Chief Executive Entrepreneur

Fulfilling the role of entrepreneur, however, does not offer much spare time. For efficiency sake, and to save money, you’re schedule is typically more than full. To make the transition to CEE, you will need start to move your focus from day to day, hands on production to director of company growth, a creator of productivity, which is effectiveness and efficiency. This needs to become your job description, your most important task. But since you don’t have time, you need to start shedding some things but you need to do so strategically. As CEE, you start to be a level removed from many front line things. But if you just step back and start delegating you will experience:

• Loss of quality
• Loss of customer satisfaction
• Loss of efficiency and profitability
• Loss of peace of mind.

Your anxiety regarding this is much more than justified. So you need to do it intelligently, methodically, and strategically. Below are seven steps that begin the process of making the transition from entrepreneur to chief executive. 

Step 1: How are you spending your time? Keep a Task Journal

1. Take a note pad with you everywhere you go for a month. On it, keep a journal of every task you do, all month long. List every phone call, text, communication and note who you spoke to, what it was about and why. 
2. What questions did people come to you for (internal, external). 
3. Track proposals offered or received and what information was required to produce them.
4. Note decisions made and the processes that went into them. 

Step 2:  How is your time divided?

1. Categorize each task by project and/or functional area. Example:
   1. I spoke with Jim Smith four times regarding a proposal for his business: Sales
   2. I spoke with Jill Johnson twice regarding progress at her site: Customer Service – Johnson Services
   3. I collected hours from 8 employees: HR/Payroll
   4. I spoke with Jack at Consolidated Products regarding a past due bill and ordered more product: Accounting-A/P, Purchasing
2. Not just customer projects, anything. Accounting issues is a project, time cards is a project, etc.
3. How much time did you spend on each project?
4. How much time did you spend in each functional area?

Step 3: What is important?

Prioritize them by importance to the company overall. 

1. Critical – absolutely has to be done
2. Important – serious problems if not done
3. Should be done – Needs to be done, consequences if not
4. Not that important – Minor consequences if not done, but easily overcome
5. Unimportant – No real consequences if this does not happen

Step 4: Why am I the one doing this?

Identify those things that must be done by you, and what can and maybe should be done by someone else.

1. I am the only one that can do this.
2. With training/systems, someone else could probably do this.
3. This could easily be done by someone else. (employees, customers, vendors, outsource, etc.)
4. This should not be done at all.

Step 5: Self-Awareness: The Aptitude/Enjoyment Scale

Take a second to identify the tasks that you spend your time on against the following criteria:

1. I enjoy doing this and am really good at it.
2. I don’t enjoy doing this, but am really good at it.
3. I enjoy doing this, but am not very good at it.
4. I don’t enjoy doing this, and am not very good at it. 

Step 6: Why only you? Who should really do this?

While looking at the things you do, there are generally only a few reasons why you are the one doing them, and why you are the only one that can do them. 

• Trust: I am the only one I trust to do this. This is common for financial things like signing checks, transferring money, access to financial accounts, creating financial obligations, etc.
• Education, Experience, Expertise: No one currently on my staff knows how to do this. Judgement may be required and the impact of mistakes may be high. 
• Relationships: Entrepreneurs often have a “trusted advisor” relationship with key individuals who might be customers or vendors, etc. These relationships can be critical to the success of the organization and the trust earned over a long positive history is invaluable. 
• Legal requirement: For many functions, a specific license or designation is required to perform this task, as is the case with doctors, dentists, attorneys, other certified agents or officers, etc.

Step 7: Systems and Training

The first impulse entrepreneurs once they decide to shed tasks is to train someone to take over some of them. Resist that temptation. If you do that you’ll still spend too much time managing, measuring, and checking their work and it will still take too much time out of your week.  Besides, the training will be never ending.  Instead spend that time developing systems such that, in a best case scenario, anyone off the street could come in and do it with very little training and little to no oversight. 

For example, if one of your critical tasks is to check on the progress or completion of a project, you know intuitively what to look for, you have a mental checklist. That it is a mental process is the problem. As long as it is in your head, it cannot be performed by anyone else, especially if there is anything at all that is intuitive. As you perform that function, note everything you check. Then create a system, a checklist or worksheet that you can give to someone with moderate training so that they can perform that same check. Then, either periodically, at milestones, or upon completion of the project, they just turn in the worksheet, maybe with the customers approval signature. Management like this takes seconds from your day, not hours.

Summary

Entrepreneurs who become comfortable doing everything because it is faster and easier, are disabling their companies and creating a culture that limits their capacity and potential for growth. Entrepreneurs who want to grow beyond their current limitations need to create a company and culture that operates without a hitch, even in their absence. They need to obsolete themselves as entrepreneurs so that they can become a CEO. The growth and success of their companies depend on it.

The next article will go into more detail about how to establish systems that improve productivity and quality, while reducing management headache.