The CEO Shift (Part 1) – From employee mindset to confident CEO

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

 Hello, lovey human, Clare here, and surprise, I’ve decided to drop a couple of bonus podcast episodes for you. This week I ran a live training series called the CEO series, and honestly, the feedback was so positive that I wanted to make sure that you got access to it too. In this first part of the series, we’re talking about what it actually means to step into your CEO era.

Not just hiring a team or ticking off to-do lists, but truly shifting how you think, lead and make decisions. We’ll be diving into the mindset structure and leadership changes that separate the hustling business owner from the strategic, confident and profit driven, CEO. So if you’ve been stuck in the weeds, super busy doing all the things and wondering why it still feels so hard, this one is for you.

Alright, let’s dive into day one of the CEO series. And don’t forget, there’s a part two coming where we’ll go even deeper into simplifying, scaling and freeing up your time. So make sure you tune in for that one too.

 So to set the scene, you’ve built a business that works, you are booked, you’re making money, and on paper it all looks like you’re very successful.

But behind the scenes, you’re exhausted. Your to-do list is longer than your patients. And if you have a team, sometimes your team actually feels like more work than health. You know, this isn’t sustainable. If you can relate to that, welcome to your CEO era because this is the moment you are going to stop hustling and start leading.

You are gonna learn the truth about why you are struggling to scale. You are gonna learn how to let go of control without your standard slipping. We’re gonna talk about the CEO identity shifts. It’s gonna unlock your freedom and more profit, and we’re actually gonna do a bottleneck audit.

So we’re gonna find out exactly where you’re holding yourself back. This is a two day training and I really wanted to make it two days because if you’ve been in my world before, you’ll know that I am a really practical person. I wanna go really deep and give you as much value as possible. So on the second day, what we’re gonna talk about is how to hire for profit, not ego.

We’re gonna talk about delegation. That actually works. You’re gonna have clear. Repeatable and confident delegation strategies. We’re gonna talk about building systems that help you to scale out of the day-to-day chaos, and we’re gonna talk about how to structure your team and look at systems for growth that feels spacious and not suffocating.

Now, I am gonna provide you with a ton of value over these next two days, but you know, complete transparency. The reason I’m doing this high value training is because I am also gonna invite you at the end to come and check out my Mastermind, which is called the Profit Collective. I’ll share more about that at the back, but there is no pressure regardless, I want you to really take some changes out of the work we do over these next two days, and there’ll be some practical actions that you can take each day.

But if you love what we cover over the next two days. The opportunity to take this work even deeper exists inside the Mastermind. So I look forward to telling you a little bit about that a bit later on if you are new into my world. Hello, I’m Clare Wood. I am a business profit coach. I am a qualified CPA, which means that I’m a certified practicing accountant by trade, which is one of the reasons that I’m so passionate about helping business owners build profit led businesses.

And I’m a bestselling author, an Amazon bestseller of the book called Intentional Profit. Many of my clients come to me because they are sick of doing everything themselves. They might be stuck in perfectionism, overwhelmed and unsure how to actually grow without burning out. And the work that I’ve done with my clients of the years, hundreds of clients I’ve worked with, we’ve made powerful mindset shifts, implemented scalable systems, and stepped fully into a CEO identity so they can create more profit or freedom and a business that finally feels sustainable.

Just quickly wanna share a couple of my client wins, because if you’re thinking, Hmm, this all sounds good, but is it actually possible for me? I have had multiple clients of mine who’ve scaled to over a hundred thousand dollars months hit their first million dollar revenue years. People have purchased their investment properties.

I’ve had many clients of mine who have bought their dream homes. Their dream cars. One of my clients had a dream to buy a motor home when we worked together many years ago, and she’s now traveling around and working remotely in that. Clients who want just more time freedom, they’re like, I wanna drop to three days a week, four days a week, wanna be able to do the school run or take holidays.

And I’ve had other clients who’ve really had their focus around wealth creation, so growing their savings account, scaling in a sustainable way. And whatever your goals are, I wanna let you know that they are possible for you. But the one thing I say again and again, if you want to change your life, you are going to have to do things differently.

I can. You know, take the horse to the water, but you actually have to do the hard work. You’re the one who’s gonna have to go, okay, I’m willing to get uncomfortable. I’m going to do things differently. I’m actually gonna follow through on these actions. And over the next couple of days, you are gonna have some actions to take.

So again, I’m here to support you. I’m here to, um, help you as you work through them, because I really want you to create the changes in your life that’s right for you.

So what I wanna do is start by talking about the difference between the people that are scaling and those that are staying stuck.

It’s not talent. Have ever seen someone who is less talented than you. Take the strides ahead. In your particular industry, maybe you know someone who isn’t as creative as you. Their design work isn’t as strong as you. Maybe you know someone who is actually a terrible communicator, or their social media sucks.

One of my sayings is to do something with the confidence of a, a middle aged white man. My husband runs a recruitment firm and he said it’s always so interesting watching the difference between, female, applicants and male applicants because male applicants will always tell you that they’re 20% better than what they are, or 50%, and whereas, females tend not to be, bigging themselves up as much.

But the reason I want to share this is because it’s not about talent. I know when I first got started in business, I had all these stories about the reason why she’s got more followers is ’cause she’s in her twenties and she’s gorgeous and very instagramable, and that’s why it’s working for her.

The truth is this, to get to that next level, you can’t keep being a doer. You have to start being a leader and we’re gonna talk a lot about exactly what leadership is and specifically how it will support you to be growing your business. So before we dive into some strategies, I need to bust some of the stories that exist, first of all, because people always get frustrated when I say, let’s talk about mindset.

They’re like, no, just give me the thing. It’s all rooted in mindset. We’ve got access in today’s day and age to a lot of the same information, and there’s a reason why some people get there and some people don’t. And as the comment said earlier, it’s about mindset.

So what’s a CEO mindset look like? Well, the first story that I hear a lot, if I want it done right, I have to do it myself. If you’ve ever hired someone, you might’ve said, well, in the past I’ve done it and they didn’t do it right. So if I want it done the right way, I have to do it myself. Here’s a big, fat truth bomb that I wanna hit you with. This belief is the biggest ceiling in your business. If you have a belief that if I want it done right, I have to do it myself, this is what is going to stop you from getting to the next level. Now, I know that might be a little bit triggering because you’re like, but it’s true. No one else can do it as well as me. But this is the first shift that we are going to have to create in your thinking if you want to create scalability.

The next myth that we need to bust is that hiring people will just make things harder. Now, I wanna put a disclaimer on this because sometimes hiring people will make things harder. However, this is only going to be the case if firstly, you don’t have the right systems in place. Both the right hiring systems and also the right leadership and skill systems, and having the mindset of A CEO.

Let me share a little example here. One of my, she a former client of mine, she’s become a very dear friend of mine. She said to me one day that she was listening to a podcast episode of hers and that her assistant had clipped it incorrectly. And she was telling me how frustrated she was and, expressing a lot of emotions about it.

And I said, oh, I don’t listen to my podcast episodes back again. And she was like, what do you mean? And I said, well, I’ve outsourced that. I, you know, at the start when I first handed the process over, I was micromanaging it. Of course, I was making sure that it was all done correctly. And then once we had the confidence, once we had that system in process in place, I just stepped back and I let the system tick along and she was in absolute shock.

Similarly, we were talking about things like emails and follow up emails and things along those lines, and I said, for me to be thinking like this next level, I cannot be cross-checking and micromanaging every single step, every single part of the business. It’s just not possible. This is why some people find hiring people harder.

Firstly, they’ve got the wrong people. Secondly, they aren’t getting rid of the wrong people fast enough. Thirdly, the systems aren’t set up to support them. I know for me, I’ll tell you a story. When I was back in my corporate life, I started a, a job, for a brand new company. I was very excited. Came in on day one with my suit on and all fired up to do an amazing job.

And, someone’s looked at, they looked at each other and someone said, did anyone get Clare a laptop? And everyone was like, uh, nope. And they’re like, okay, well we better order a one now. And I’m like, what would you like me to do? And they handed me a copy of the annual report and said, can you read the annual report?

And so I diligently and sat there and read it for about an hour. And then I’m like, now what? I didn’t even have a desk. I literally was sitting on a chair in the corner of the office with a copy of the annual report. Now I know that that’s a bit of an extreme example, but I’m also willing to bet that in the past you haven’t brought team members on

to a fully systemized onboarding process. Like, Hey, here’s day one, here’s what we do. Here’s day two, here’s what we do. Setting your team up for success and managing their performance as you are leading them is imperative to have a high functioning team. And yet a lot of business owners unfortunately, don’t do this.

The next myth that I hear again and again from a lot of the, the busy creatives that I work with, a lot of the service-based business owners, it’s just easier to push through. Oh, Clare, all this strategy stuff that you talk about, you know, working out my scalable system. Yeah, it’s hard. A lot of times it is just easier to rock up and keep just slugging away because at least you’ve got control of the end-to-end process.

At least that’s what you think. Here’s the thing though, you will cap out every single time from doing this, and it doesn’t matter how wealthy you are. If you are absolutely exhausted, overwhelmed, anxious all the time, and sick of your life, you are not successful. Sure you’re busy, but you are not running a successful business and you cannot get off the hamster wheel while you are stuck in a busy mindset.

You’ll continue to be working late nights, you’ll continue to be working every weekend. You’ll be missing holidays doing all of the things because you just have this story. It’s just easier to push through than it is to step back and do the uncomfortable thing. Now, again, I know I sound like a broken record, but if you wanna create changes in any area of your life, you have to do things differently.

And doing things differently is uncomfortable. And that’s why most people don’t create extraordinary results. People say, I wanna get, you know, fit and healthy, and yet they’re eating frozen pizza for lunch and dinner every day. And they’re not exercising. People say, I wanna have an incredible relationship, and yet they’re not willing to go to counseling or do the inner work on themselves or have the uncomfortable conversations.

And when it comes to your business, you’re like, it’s just easier to keep slugging away. And what really isn’t an ideal situation, but it’s just easier than attempting to change. Exhausted is not successful. So let’s talk about the identity shift required. This is this mindset stuff. If you are wanting to say, yes, I’m fricking sick of this employee mindset.

I’m fricking sick of being busy and I wanna be leading, I wanna be making more money without more work. So here’s what needs to happen. This was, this is my sad face from my photo shoot. It was a very funny day. I had quite a few of my biz friends there, and they’re like, we need to have all kinds of faces for your socials collect.

Give us a sad face. This was my sad face for this particular photo shoot. Look, I am sad here because I’m being the operator, not being the CEO. A CEO means that you are leading, not doing, and if you want to be a CEO, you have to start acting like a CEO because the truth is this, the biggest bottleneck in your business is you.

I’ve seen it again and again and again and again, and I’m like, why aren’t we doing it this way? And people are like, I’m the one who e everything needs to be approved by me, or this has to be done this way. You are ultimately the one stopping your next level of growth because when everything relies on you, growth stops.

What we’re gonna do now, this is gonna be our first practical exercise of our two day masterclass, and we’re gonna do it as a group. So what I want you to actually do here is think about three things that you do daily that someone else could do.

I’ll give you some examples of some things that you might wanna outsource, the first one I was gonna say is your emails. You can outsource your inbox to someone else. You can outsource answering your phone. You can outsource writing your social media content or creating your social media content. Again, there can be a system. We’re gonna talk systems tomorrow, but we’re talking specifically about outsourcing.

Someone else can do that. It doesn’t need to be you. Funny how sometimes we need to step back and really see these things.

I hope all of this is starting to inspire you to think a little bit differently about what doesn’t need to be you. And let me tell you a story again, back when I was in my corporate days, so I was working as an accountant and you know, we’d have to print off lots and lots of reports. And we had this, we had an administrative assistant, but she was a right little miss. She was like 20 early twenties, and she would strut around the office and you know, like, she’d be like, can you please get me a coffee? And a few times I found myself getting my assistant or the officer’s assistant coffee, I feel, and it became a bit of a joke. People like, she hates doing anything that’s helpful to other people.

So anyway, what we all did was we just all tiptoed around her. Instead of someone saying, actually no, you go and get our coffees. Everyone tiptoed around her. And one day I was at the photocopying machine and I’m printing out all of these things and my boss came up and said to me, why are you doing that? And he said, Liz should be doing that. And I said, oh look, it’s fine. It doesn’t, you know, it’s just printing. It doesn’t bother me. And he actually got really cross at me and he said to me, I’m paying you a senior wage because I expect you to be doing senior work. She gets paid an admin wage because she should be doing admin work. And he was really cross. And that’s when I had a real big aha moment because we think, oh, don’t worry about it. I can do that. I can do bookkeeping. I’m great at doing my social media posts and reconciling my accounts. I can do that. Of course you can do that. Is that the best use of your time? And this is something really interesting that I want you to start to think about, like, what is my time worth?

Maybe you have an hourly rate, maybe you have, projects that you could implement that could make you a ton more money, but you never have time to do those strategic projects because you’re too busy doing admin work. I want you to think about this boss of mine and think about him being cranky, you being like, oh, it’s, it’s fine.

I don’t mind doing these things. And he, he’s like, I’m actually really disappointed in you. I am paying you to be acting at this level, not to be doing that kind of work. So I really want you to start to have a bit of a bit of a bottleneck audit during your workday and think, is this something that should be being done By a CEO or is this something that someone else could do? And that is exactly what I want you to ask. What’s the cost of me holding onto these things? And maybe you’ve got a bit of a story that my profit at the moment doesn’t justify it. Maybe you’re saying, you know, once I’m at this level, then I’ll outsource it.

But the truth is like, what’s it costing you to not be implementing the projects, fixing up the website, streamlining your systems, getting out and pitching for new work. You might be like, I’m saving $40 an hour from not having a cleaner, but yet you are missing out on thousands or tens of thousands of dollars worth of potential new business. Have a lot of my clients who are like, I don’t have time to post on social media. I don’t have time to email my list. I don’t have time to go and set up a marketing funnel. And I’m like, you, you’re never gonna get the time if you’re too busy doing all of the doing stuff.

So I want you to really every day be thinking, what’s this costing me doing all of these things? Who’s leading the ship? If I’m busy steering it and pulling the ropes and doing all of the things and polishing the deck, you are the captain of the ship.

 Quick pause before we keep rolling because if you are listening to this and thinking, yes, I need more of this in my business, then I want to invite you to join the Profit Collective.

It’s my high level mastermind for six and multi six figure business owners ready to scale towards seven figures without working themself into the ground. Inside, you’ll get direct coaching with me, access to a powerhouse community of CEOs who get it, and the strategies to build more profit space and fun into your business.

If you are ready to actually act like the CEO, not just to do a click on the link in the show notes to find out more, and book a call with me to chat about the profit collective.

 Intellectually you understand, I can’t keep doing things like the way that I’ve done them, and yet you keep on repeating the pattern again and again.

So what’s the reason or what are the reasons that you are doing that? The first one, the perfection trap.  The first step is creating change in any area of your life is identifying that it’s an issue. You cannot get someone to quit gambling or quit drinking if they won’t even acknowledge that they’ve got a problem. It starts with admitting that you’ve got a problem.

So the first step, are you a perfectionist? Thank you. I’ve got some people who are putting their hands up and saying they’ll, they’ll recognize that. And look, there’s a reason why a lot of entrepreneurs are perfectionists is because we’re high achievers. Ordinary people don’t decide to come and start up a business.

It’s bloody hard work. And your perfectionism has got you to a certain level, which is great, but the problem with perfectionism is that it’s not scalable. You can’t scale perfection. You can scale systems. Now, this might be a little bit triggering, but hear me out. Perfectionism is often people say, no, I’ve got high standards.

But the truth is, is that it’s a fear of letting go. Does anyone else here love grilled? I love grilled burgers. I love grilled burgers. Now, I could be completely wrong. I dunno the backstory of grilled, but let me give you a story about what. A theory I have about how good could have stopped. There might’ve been someone who made these burgers.

They put just the perfect amount of sauce in the right amount of onions in, and people would always be like, holy smoke. This is the best burger I’ve ever eaten. It might’ve been this incredible chef. Now this chef might have said to someone else, here’s how you make the burger. And they don’t quite make it the same, right?

And so he could have then said, no one else will ever make this burger as good as me. I am the best burger chef in the world. And anyone who ever wants to eat a grilled burger, it must be hand prepared by myself. Or he could say, I’m gonna build a system around this. I’m gonna build the exact volume of sauce.

I’m gonna give the exact formula of exactly how to make the saucer, and it might not quite be as good as the way that I do it, but. At least I can make more burgers to make more people happy.

Now again, this is gonna be triggering for my perfectionist out here, Andrea. My stomach’s grumbling too ’cause I bloody love grilled burgers. And now I’m thinking about eating one.

I personally would way rather the fact that I can pop to my local grilled and get a grilled burger than the fact that there is one chef somewhere in Australia or the world. I don’t even know where it it’s source from. Who makes these amazing burgers and has to sell ’em at $1,000 a burger because no one else could possibly do it as well as them.

Are you starting to see where I’m going with this? Now? I am sure that the teenager at my local grill doesn’t do it. Quite to the same level as the original person did. It’s probably 80% there, but it’s done and it’s scalable. It’s not the a hundred percent, but it’s done and it is scalable.

If you want to become a leader, if you want to start to have more freedom, more time, and more money, you can’t keep being the guy making the perfect grilled burger in one particular location. You’re gonna have to say, do you know what that is close enough, and I’m gonna be okay with that because my dreams to get grilled burgers to more people or legal services, or whatever it might be, is bigger than my desire.

To have everything at absolute perfection. Like I said, I am not re-listening to my podcast episodes after they’re recorded. I’ve had to let go of the fact that there might be mistakes, there might be stumbles, and that is the price that you need to pay to have a CEO mentality. Okay? So what we are going to do, how are we gonna sort this out?

How can we reconcile just having some shitty job done? I’m not saying do a shitty job. We need to have standards. You’ve gotta have standards to have the reputation that you are to con, to maintain the reputation that your business has. But we’re gonna learn this skill. This is starting to weave in a few of those systems.

Learn the skill of delegation. So what I want you to do this week. Is you are going to let you someone else deliver a task that you would normally redo. Let me give you an example of this. Something that’s happened in my own business just today. An email went out, about the Profit Collective retreat and it had a typo in it.

Now, how much easier is it for me to go, right? I’m gonna recall that I’m gonna quickly go and fix it. I’m instead, I saw it as a coachable moment. I went back to the person and I said, Hey, I noticed that this had happened. Can I please get you to go and fix that? Now what am I doing in that moment when I.

Let someone else deliver a task that I’m normally redoing or that I could have redone. Let me know all my perfectionists in the room. Let me know what is happening. You are like, ah, a mistake’s happened. Ah, it’s a disaster. What are we doing?

I’ll tell you a truth bomb. When you fix someone’s mistakes for them continually, you are not empowering them and you are not educating them. I told someone this the other day and they were mortified. If my kids forget their hat or their water bottle for school, I don’t take it in and we’ll be at school.

Drop off. My kids are, I forgot my water bottle. And I’m like, well. That sucks. I forgot my homework. I’m like, sucks to be you. I reminded you about that. And now you’re gonna have to drink water out of a bubbler like I did my entire childhood and I survived. I know you’re not gonna have your beautiful chilled Yeti water bottle with ice cubes in it, but I reckon you’ll survive the day.

And what I’ve done is had a teachable moment, which is like, maybe you’ll remember. And I’m not saying that we need to treat our staff like children, but a lot of the times if we are fixing things and not even letting people know, they don’t even aren’t even aware that this is an issue. I’m sure they’ve heard this story about someone who kept eating the, the favorite meal from their partner and they kept eating this meal. And then one day they said, I don’t even like this. And someone’s like, why didn’t you tell me? My maiden name, um, is actually Daniels, and when I was in my corporate job, one of the big bosses walked past one morning, said, good morning, Daanielle. I said, morning. I didn’t wanna upset. The upset the big boss. Anyway, about 12 months later, we were in a meeting and we were talking about a job that needed to be done, and he’s like, we’ll get Danielle to do it. And he pointed at me and everyone’s like, that’s not Danielle. And he’s like, yes it is. He’s like, oh, it’s a hello, hello Danielle. And she always says Hi. And then I said, my name’s not Danielle.

I, I’m sorry, I, I just didn’t, um, I didn’t correct you. And he looked at me like I had two heads. And the irony of this, the funny thing is we probably do something similar. We don’t wanna pull someone up. We people pleasing mode. And so instead of saying something, we just leave it. And then it gets to the point where it’s like.

It’s so far down the track that it’s actually really, really hard to pull it up.

Again, what you do when someone makes a mistake is that you’re saying, okay, what’s the process you’re gonna put in place? Maybe you even need to systemise it right before you hand me my bookkeeping for the month. I want you to check the following things. Go and double check all the numbers. Go and check that you haven’t put this in that account there.

You can actually create a process around it, a system around it, so that the same mistakes don’t happen again and again.

When we are in our own business, I am taking total accountability for what’s happening in my team. I’m not like, oh, my assistant made a mistake. That’s her mistake. It’s like, yeah, sorry. We made a mistake. Let’s move forward. So your opportunity this next week, don’t fix it, coach through it. My perfectionist in the room. This is gonna give you the heebie gbs, but this is your teachable moment. This is what I want you to be doing to start to put your CEO hat on.

So the next thing that I wanna do is talk about decision making. Because a lot of CEOs that I see successful CEOs are making decisions based on data, not emotions. When you know your profit capacity, we’ve spoken a lot about this. Inside the profit collective capacity planning and costs, you are leading with clarity and not chaos.

Let me explain a little bit more what I mean here. As someone who is a profit coach, I am telling you that the top CEOs are looking at the raw data and not the emotion. For example, when you are hiring, you know, big leadership teams, I’ve sat with CEOs, I’ve sat with CFOs of big, big corporate companies.

When you are sitting in these kind of rooms. We can’t be like, oh, but the sale, I know that sales have dropped, but our new sales person, she’s so lovely. She’s so nice. The shareholders don’t give a shit how nice the new sales person is. The shareholders care how much money they’re making in your business.

You can either have the, a lovely person, my husband had someone who worked for him and it was like, she was so nice. He really liked her. And I’m like, so we ran a, reports that were profit by employee and I’m like, at the end of the day, she’s not delivering a profit for the business. We are not running a friendship group here.

We are not running a charity, we’re running an organisation. Now, it’s not to say that you need to get rid of, you know, team members as, as ruthlessly as that, of course not. But if over time, if you can’t be making non-emotional data led decisions, it’s really gonna bite you in the bottom. I had someone who, a client of mine, when we looked at her numbers, I was like, you are aware that you were paying this person more than you were paying yourself?

Do you, do you understand? Like, that’s fine for a short period of time, but if you were doing that month on month, year on year, which she had been doing for years, and like, is, is she more important than you are? We need to be looking at what the data is telling us. But the biggest thing that I see with a lot of business owners who are saying, I wanna make more money, I want more freedom.

They’re not looking at the data. They’re not looking at their numbers. I’ve been doing this for coming up 10 years next month, and I can count on the number of. Fingers on one hand, the business owners who are consistently right across their numbers, who every single month were looking at their profit and loss reports, who were running, who were running structured systems, having a look at their KPIs, most business owners aren’t doing that.

And so here is your next action. Next piece of homework from me. You’re thinking, I didn’t know I was getting homework. I thought I was just rocking up to a free training. My gosh. Um, you’re gonna love me because this will create change for you. So what I want you to do is run a profit and loss report for the past month and year to date.

And I want you to really check what’s my profit and what’s my profit margin. And if you don’t know, if you are like, I don’t even know how to tell what my profit margin is, I don’t really know how to read this report. There you go. That is your first leadership action to take. And by the way, these exercises will be coming around in the email, the replay email that you get afterwards. So if you’re struggling to keep up, you either take a photo on your phone now or, um, check your email when it comes around.

Now the fourth step that I wanna take you through is the energy of A CEO. So what exactly is CEO energy?

I want you to think about the great leaders that you have known and hear some of the common traits that I see in really fantastic leaders. Number one, they calm, if you’ve ever worked for a chaotic manager, I know that I have. We were in a creative business and he’d come in, he’d be like, where’s my effing this?

And everyone would be like, oh, and other days he’d come in, he’d be your best mate. We never knew who we were walking in to. Confident as a leader, you at least wanna portray the perception of confidence. Have you ever worked for someone or played in a footy team with someone or whatever your thing is, and the coach is like, um, I don’t know.

I think, um, just try harder. They’re like, this is where we’re taking the ship. They’re owning it. They’re like, yes, this is a direction. You are gonna be the captain of the sinking Titanic, but do it with confidence. And great leaders are also very decisive. They’re great decision makers. My first boyfriend was a Libra.

No offense to any Libras in the room. The man could not make a decision to save himself, and it used to drive me crazy. We missed out on opportunities. We missed out on a property once because he just couldn’t decide. He’s a fantastic employee. A very, very hardworking human.

You don’t wanna hustle harder. That’s not what it’s about. It’s about thinking smarter. So here’s some little tips to shift into your CEO energy. If you are feeling indecisive, if you’re not feeling confident, if you’re feeling like you are not calm, alter your physical state. It’s a really tiny neuroscience thing that you can do.

I had to do this this morning. I’m a mom. My two kids, I was getting ’em out the door for swimming lessons. Geez. And I got in the car and I was like,

my son’s looked at me and he is like, what’s going on? And I am like, I am practicing regulating my emotions. And he got to witness me altering my physical state and then instead of yelling or flying off the deep end at him, I took a couple of moments, got back into a calm state, and then we could have a conversation about what had unfolded prior to that. Alter your physical state. You can do this as the boss. If you are in a meeting with someone and you are like, I am so freaking angry at you right now. You can leave the room. You can go. Let’s chat about this later. Leave the room. Calm yourself down. This is also applies to with clients or any other situation to your physical state.

The next one is to change your environment.

I truly believe that your best work is done when you are operating from a state of calm. And I know for me that when there’s chaos around me, I feel chaotic. How do you need to change your environment? Do you need to get an office space? Do you need to set up a nice background? Changing your environment is a big one.

And the last tip that I have for you to step into your C, your energy is to uplevel your circle. Get into spaces where people are having high level conversations. You become the people that you are around. And you know, if you are around people like, who are constantly saying, oh, stop with those big dreams, like just keep working harder.

That’s what’s gonna become the conversations that you’re surrounded by. Most of my friends, particularly biz friends, are running million dollar a year or multimillion dollar a year. Businesses. The conversations that we have aren’t like petty low level conversations. They are directional, like game changing.

Like, hey, you know, they’re really, really big thinkers. And the more that you can be around big thinkers, the more that you will start to think differently about your business. So the mindsets, the mindset thoughts of a CEO. Number one, I don’t do everything I lead everyone. The captain on Below Deck is not in there making every cocktail.

They’re making sure that overall the ship is running well. The second things I trust my systems. And I trust my people. If you don’t trust your people, there’s one or two things going on. You got the wrong people or you got some trust issues and here’s the truth bomb. Either way, guess whose problem it is Yours really triggering.

Right? But I will say this, as someone who came from a corporate background, I, when everything is my problem, I actually love that because when I was in corporate, and I would say, we’ve got the wrong person in this role, and my boss would say, too bad. Even though I was the manager, I just had to suck it up and get on with it.

If I’d say, we need to uplevel this system, this process doesn’t work, and they’re like, Nope, we’re not doing it, you’d be like, okay. Yes sir. When it’s your business, if the system’s not working, fix the system. If the team member sucks, you hired them, you fire them. You need to be in a place where you trust your systems and your people. Both those things are your responsibility.

Next one is I make decisions that serve profit, and that’s obviously the word profit. We’re not chasing mindless sales. That’s why I wanted you to look at your numbers and peace.

So here is your final bit of homework for this week. You are going to choose one EO behavior that you’ll adopt this week. It might be that you have a daily CEO hour, one hour every day where you simply work on the business. You might even have quite a few of my clients over the years have had a CEO day. You might have a CEO week. You might block a whole week out of your calendar and go lock yourself in a cabin somewhere and really work on the business for a full week. You might implement team huddles where you go, do you know what? This team is really freaking not working for me, and because this is my problem, I’m gonna bring it all back together.

And that’s the next one. KPIs. You might be setting really clear KPIs for what the team looks like and saying no more often. It’s so easy to say yes to all of the opportunities that come our way. A lot of entrepreneurs have a ADHD, and we love the new sexy, shiny object ’cause that’s fun. But sometimes we’ve gotta say no to the fun, exciting thing. To do the strategic needle shifting thing, like looking at our finances, reviewing our KPIs.

So to sum up, you can’t scale chaos but you can scale clarity, confidence, and leadership.

So if you have loved what we’ve started the conversation around today, I’d love to share a little bit more about my Mastermind, which is called the Profit Collective.

So let me introduce you to this mastermind. We have multi six and six figure women in business. These are all service and creative based businesses who are turning success into more take home profit while working fewer hours. So inside the Profit Collective, you’ll learn how to refine your product suite and pricing.

So we have a look at what are the offers that you’ve got? How much are you charging? We talk a lot about is it right time to put those prices up so that you can be earning more while working less? We are also gonna be covering how to launch, how to have passive and leveraged income streams to grow your sales without working more hours.

We also talk a lot about leadership, stepping into your CEO leadership and how to build a high performance team that works for you, which allows you to focus on more leading than doing. And you’ll also learn about money, mindset and understanding the energetics around money so that you can attract and earn more.

So here’s what you get inside. We do two 90 minute calls each month. Now, these calls, this is not a course. These calls are not, a framework. It’s very, very much tailored to the needs of who’s in the community. I’m looking at the conversations that are happening in our calls. I’m looking at the conversations that are happening in our Facebook group, which I’ll talk more about a little bit later.

And we are having conversations, mentor led, but peer conversations around these topics. They’re things like mindset, leadership, all of those topics that we covered before. It’s not basic entry level conversations. They’re scaling conversations. We have an intimate Facebook community. So this is a community where you can pop in and say someone in the community popped in and said, I got my car.

And it’s a space where they can share the picture with a beautiful big bow on it and be absolutely celebrated something that you might not wanna do with certain of your family or friends. Um, equally it’s a space where you can be really vulnerable and be like, oh my gosh, everything feels like it’s going to the shit at the moment.

What do I do about this? Or, my team member quit and I’ll jump back in. And other collective members will share their advice too. So it’s not just me who’s coaching you actually being led inside this peer led community by very, very clever strategic next level people. Next you get matched with an accountability partner.

So we have an accountability tracker, which says, these are the actions that I’m gonna take. And your accountability buddy, and you sit down once a fortnight and you check in and they’re like, why haven’t you done this thing? It’s that little handhold nudge that can make all the difference between these CEO EO strategic actions and just being in the busy doing of day to day.

Next, we have two in-person day retreats, so a day retreat means that we get together for a full day and we are just immersed in each other’s energy and this strategic work of working on the business. We are having our next one next month in Melbourne, and I know that I’ve got someone, so I’m not too much, but I will just say that this is gonna be a planning day for 2026.

We’re gonna be having a look at what the goals are and mapping out a strategy to get there.

The next two bonuses that you get are my two courses. There’s the Profit Academy Foundations, which is how to master your business, finances and the Profit Academy Accelerator, which is all about mindset, manifestation, and really helping you to think differently about your money. So scaling your profits starts right here.

This is a community where conversations around wealth are normalized and success is celebrated. Now, people always ask me, how long do I like? How long is the commitment? And the truth is, this is a space that I want people to come into and stay because popping into a Mastermind for three months or six months and then leaving, you aren’t really gonna get the true leverage that you get over time.

So there’s a minimum six month commitment. But most people stick around because they’re building beautiful friendships, connections. They’re getting excited about the next retreat that’s gonna be coming up, and they’re feeling supported in this space. So the Profit Collective, is $1,200 a month Australian dollars a month. This is a space for six and multi six figure business owners. There is also the opportunity to get a VIP upgrade, which means that you can have private coaching with me and you get a second day of your retreat. So your retreats twice a year, end up   being two days long. If you do have further questions on that page, you can book in a one-on-one call with me and we can have a really objective chat about whether it’s right for you.

 Well, that’s a wrap on day one of the CEO series. I hope you loved it as much as I enjoyed teaching it. Remember, this work is all about helping you to stop being the overworked operator and start leading your business like the CEO it needs. And don’t forget, day two drops tomorrow. We’ll go even deeper into strategy systems scaling and how to make your business both wildly profitable and sustainable.

You do not wanna miss it, and if you’re ready to take this work further, come join us. In the Profit Collective, you’ll get coaching community and the clarity to grow your business to seven figures with ease.

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