Why you ARE the CEO (and it’s time to act like it)

* Transcript created by AI – may contain errors or omissions from original podcast audio

 Four years I resisted, and honestly, I kind of disliked the word CEO. It felt too grown up, too corporate, too serious. I thought, I’ve just got a small business. Who am I to call myself A CEO? Well, here’s the thing. If you’re running a business, you are a CEO. And whether it’s just you and your laptop or a team of 20, you are actually leading an organisation.

And in today’s episode, I’m gonna share with you why it’s time, not just to own the title CEO, but to actually act like it. Because when you shift your identity from being a busy business owner to being a confident CEO, that’s where the real growth begins.

 Maybe you’ve resisted the term CEO like I had, and honestly, many creative and female business owners do. It feels foreign or too egotistical, like it doesn’t fit the vibe of what it is that you’re trying to do. But reframing and positioning yourself and calling yourself a CEO, it’s not about ego, it’s about ownership.

Because you are running a business. You are the boss, the visionary, the leader, and even if your team is just currently you, you still are leading an organisation. And the mindset shift is the first domino in scaling. I’ll say this again and again. I know that I’m a an accountant, but in business, so much of it is rooted in mindset.

Your beliefs create your reality, and everything that happens in your business starts with mindset. So when you start to think like a leader. You start acting like a leader, and when you start acting like a leader, your results follow suit. You don’t just wake up one day with a seven figure business and then suddenly go, okay, today’s the day I am now A CEO.

It starts with a shift. It starts with a conscious decision. Okay, I’m gonna stop identifying as a little business owner. And I’m gonna step up into my CEO shoes. So when we talk about, like, he might be thinking, well, why do I need to identify as a CEO? Why do I need to, you know, call myself a CEO or even just identify that way?

And here’s the thing, if you are listening to my podcast, I know that you are here because you have big dreams. If you were just happy to keep on chugging away, you probably wouldn’t be here. This podcast is all about helping you to be empowered and to make more money. And as you start to grow, as you hit that six and multi-six figure a year mark in your business, you can’t keep doing everything yourself.

It’s just not possible. You will completely be limiting your capacity. So leadership is around building and managing support around you. When I say leadership, people often think go, oh my gosh, I’ve gotta hire a team of 20. No, it doesn’t mean a massive payroll. It could simply be hiring a VA for a couple of hours a week, getting a designer, hiring a coach, you know, bringing a coach into your business is still bringing support into the team.

Hiring a bookkeeper. Whatever that support looks like. We are different for different businesses, but the key thing is that I wanna share with you, if you want true freedom, you must stop being the only one carrying the business. And here’s a big truthful I’m gonna hear you with. No one is excellent at everything, right?

Lemme say that again. No one is excellent at everything. There are gonna be certain things that you, you know, that are your zone of genius and that you absolutely thrive at, and there’s gonna be other things that you’re not. I know for me, give me a spreadsheet, you know, I’m mean, I’m a pig in mud, but when it comes to anything visual, creative, I’m, I’m, it’s just not my jam.

And I know that it’s far better for me to outsource that to people who are really clever in this area to allow me to focus on the things that I am good at. So hire people who are excellent where you’re not, and also sometimes you need to hire people who are excellent where you are. Excellent. I’ve got a bookkeeper, even though I love spreadsheet, and I’m really good with numbers, but I also recognise I cannot be reconciling all of my transactions and be showing up on social media and recording a podcast and serving my clients to the level that I want to.

Leadership isn’t just about managing people, it’s about empowering others and creating more capacity for you to be in your zone of genius. If you wanna stop feeling like you are on the hamster wheel and that basically you are an employee. Of your own business, you feel like you’re a victim of this thing that you’ve built.

You’ve gotta stop acting like an employee and start acting like a leader. So let’s talk a little bit about the concept of, of being a CEO and scaling. I wanna share a story with you about creating systems for scalability. So I have a confession to make. Up until very recently, every time I signed a new private coaching client, I would, you know, I had an email drafted, but I would change a bit few of the details in the email.

I would go and get a copy of my contract. I would save it down. I would edit the details. I would go into Xero. I would create an invoice, and I would attach the contract and the zero invoice to the email that I then sent to my new client. Now I am not signing hundreds of clients a week, so, you know, it wa it didn’t feel like a hugely cumbersome thing.

However, every time I’m doing this, it adds up. And I’ve just recently engaged and I helped me create a system around this. Create an automation, and of course there’s my beautiful assistant Sally, who hats off to her. She did all the hard work of actually implementing it, but we now have this beautiful onboarding process for my new private coaching clients.

I could just send them a link, and not just the, the contract and the payment, but all of the details for onboarding them, capturing all of the information I need, giving them all of the access to the courses that I give them access to. It all just happens automatically. Now maybe for you, you have clunky things that you do in your business.

You might not even know what they are ’cause you’re so used to doing them like I was with my private coaching onboarding that it’s not systemised. Sometimes it just feels easier just to do it all manually. But what happens when you introduce systems, is it creates freedom. There’s a bit of a pain in the ass to do in the first place, I’m gonna be honest.

But it actually creates more freedom for you over time. There is a lot of your energy. You see your energy that is a leaking in doing things manually versus the ease of automation. And here’s the thing, the CEO of McDonald’s isn’t racing around flipping every single burger in every single store and answering the you know, going, can I take your order?

Can I take your order? It, it’s impossible. CEOs don’t do that. They design systems to get things done. And something that you’ll find is that if your backend is chaos, if your systems, or, or lack thereof, if your systems are duct tape together or, or you just don’t even have some systems in place, your business will always feel heavy.

You won’t even want to get new clients because you’ll think, I don’t even have capacity. I’m, I don’t have time to bring them on. So one last thing that I wanna talk about is scalability and your product mix. So as I mentioned earlier, if you’re the only one delivering, you’ll always cap your income. So there’s a couple of paths that you can go down to create scalability in your business, building a team, people underneath you, who are actually doing and implementing the system or the process that it is that you do.

Secondly, you create a premium. Premium and pricing around what it is that you offer or you create leveraged offers, programs, courses, masterminds, products, digital assets, you name it. I know for me that I had that shift in my business many years ago where I realised, oh my gosh, I’m gonna cap out how many people I can serve in a one-on-one capacity.

So that’s why I created the Profit Collective, my mastermind. That’s why I’ve created some of my programs that I can do a instead of one-to-one, one to many, because you need to build a machine that creates results, as I mentioned, you know, with the, the pricing, even if you put your price up, up, up. You’re still gonna cap out at how many people that you can serve.

So to close out, you are the CEO. Own it, act like it, systemise it and scale it. And the moment that you start to embody the CEO version of you, that is when your business starts to transform. So if this conversation is hitting home for you. I wanna personally invite you to my free CEO training series that’s happening this week.

The time that you’re listening to this podcast. It is happening. It’s two 60 minute live master classes with me, which are designed to help you to step into your next level, not just as the hustling operator, but is the confident profit driven CEO your business deserves. The links in the show notes, grab your spot, bring your lunch.

It’s totally free, and you can ask me any questions as we go through, because I wanna help you to step out of the overwhelm and into your CEO era because CEO energy isn’t worrying about a power suit and having a big team. It’s about stepping into your power because when you own it, your business success will follow.

Thanks so much for tuning in again this week to the Clare Wood Podcast. I, I deeply appreciate you. Thank you for being here. And if you know anyone who needs to put their CEO boots on, step into their confidence and own this, please share this podcast episode with them. Have a fabulous week. I’ll see you next week.

* Transcript created by AI – may contain errors or omissions from original podcast audio.