Over the last couple of posts, we’ve been talking about how important it is to let go of what you did as an individual contributor and embrace your role as the leader of a growing firm.
But being an individual contributor was easy. I knew how to do that! I was clear when I had a good day or a bad day just based on what I created. But I don’t understand this new role you’re talking about!
When we want folks to know what they need to be doing and how to evaluate their performance, we write them a job description! Today, we’re going to talk about your job description!
The CEO’s Job scope
The best CEO I’ve ever worked for had a saying about his job. He said that my job is to hire great people, introduce them to interesting problems, get them everything they need to succeed and get out of the way.
I think that’s a pretty good definition of the founder’s role. And so I’m going to start with that and work it into a job description.
Your 4 tasks
- Hiring great people.
You need to make sure that you have the best people on the team. The best people want rapid feedback to improve their performance and clarify how to be successful in their role. That is your number one job. That’s the thing you’ll spend most of your time on. - Setting the vision, direction, and strategy for the firm.
What are you seeing out there? How is the marketplace changing? What are the clients asking for? What are the competitors doing? You need to focus outside the organization looking for what clients need, preparing to adapt your organization to meet those needs, now and into the future. - Allocating resources
What’s the next role we need to hire for? How much money can we afford to spend on tools and infrastructure? We’re also putting some of our team’s time to work on internal projects, our marketing, developing new products, and figuring out how to get the work done better. It’s your job to allocate resources to those things as well. - Closing the biggest deals
The CEO is still the best salesperson in the business. And so, even if you’ve hired a new business person, who’s doing the bulk of the sales work, you are still going to need to show up and close the biggest deals. Why? Because you can make promises that nobody else can keep, you have the credibility that nobody else has. And part of your job is to keep the bad clients out. And so you want to meet those clients. You want to get to know them, and you want to be the one that closes that deal.
Now that you’ve got that job description laid out, I want you to track your time. What percentage of your time are you spending doing CEO work? How much time are you spending on the vision direction strategy, building hiring, and training the biggest deals in the resource allocation?
And how much time are you spending on the rest of the stuff?
How can you improve that week by week? How can you start squeezing out the rest of the stuff and spending more time on your CEO work?
Focusing on getting that CEO work done and getting the rest of this stuff off your plate is the quickest way to accelerate your agency’s growth.
