The CEO Shift (Part 2) – Systems, team & profitability

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

 Welcome back to part two of the CEO series. Yesterday we talked about stepping up your CEO identity, the mindset, the leadership, and the way you show up as a person running a seriously profitable business. Today we are going deeper into the strategy side, how to actually scale your business with less chaos, less busyness, and a whole lot more profit. We’ll talk systems, structure, pricing, and how to get your business running like a well-oiled money making machine. So if you are craving more cashflow and more freedom, you’re in exactly the right place. Let’s get into it.

 A big warm welcome to day two of the CEO shift. Today we are gonna be talking all about systems, team, and profitability. So yesterday’s training, we shifted from being in the operator state to the CEO. And today what we’re gonna do is make that CEO role run smoothly. So let’s just think about what the dream is.

The dream is a business that earns more, runs smoother and gives your freedom. But the reality is that most entrepreneurs accidentally build a job, not a business. So you end up basically having, somewhere that you have to be all the time, just like having an ordinary job with a ton more responsibility.

So let’s change that. This is your CEO era. So step one is that you wanna be thinking about hiring. For profit, not ego. And you might be wondering, well, what exactly does that mean to hire for profit, not ego. So don’t hire because it sounds fancy. And I’ve seen unfortunately, quite a few business owners fall into this trap where they love the idea.

They’re like, look at my team, or I’ve got five people in my team. You wanna hire people to come into your team because it either makes you more money or it saves you time. So before every hire, what you wanna do is work out, will this person increase my profit or my capacity? And the best way to do this.

Is to create a budget for each hire. If you’ve done my course, the Profit Academy Foundations, there is a template in there and inside we actually get you to map out what is my employee gonna cost me, not just their salary. There’s a lot more cost that come on top of that. You might have insurance work cover equipment for them.

Et cetera, et cetera. So create a budget for each hire and work out how long will it actually be before this new role is profitable. How long will it actually take? I also refer to this as the, an ROI or a return on investment calculator. So what you wanna do is have a clear un understanding, and I do this with my husband’s business all the time.

I say, Hey, if we’re gonna pay someone that much money, it’s probably gonna be three months before they are actually delivering a return. Do we have the capacity? From a cashflow perspective to pay for three months until they even start making any money. And that’s assuming that they’re good and that they hit the ground running.

Really wanna be very mindful about the way that you are building. And the next thing is that you wanna really ask, will they free me up to earn more? Or make CEO level decisions. So there’s a couple of different kind of hires that you might be making in your business. The first one is a, a role that actually has a direct return on investment.

So for example, if you run a social media agency and you hire a new Facebook ads manager, you would then, you know, sell that person’s time essentially at a premium. My husband has a sales team, so when he brings on a new recruiter, are they going to make more than enough money to pay for themselves, or alternatively, there might be roles that are bought in to help you to free up your time to earn more.

So this is sort of how I’m building my team, is that, ’cause I love coaching, I want to free up my time to be doing the work that I love. And you need to find, you might be asking, well, how do I know if I need someone to free up my capacity or someone who’s actually gonna deliver an ROI in and of their own?

Right? And truthfully, it just depends on where you’re at in your business, on what you are prioritizing. And again, the biggest tip that I’ve got for you is just to put it all into a spreadsheet and work out. What exactly that looks like. If I’m bringing someone into my team, I am saying, okay, that person is gonna free up this many hours a week for me, and in that time I am going to, I don’t know, bring on three new clients, or I’m going to finally launch a second podcast.

That will make me a lot more money. Not that I’ve got any plans to do that, but you get my gist. It’s about. Really being mindful about this because one of the things that you have to remember is that if you’re bringing someone in for that second type of role, will they free me up to earn more? That kind of role is essentially what we call an overhead, which means that it adds to the cost to the business without having a direct positive increase in revenue.

So that those are the kind of things that roles that we need to be very mindful of so that we can ensure that there’s not just an extra cost there with no upside.

So what we’re gonna do right now, I want you to do an audit of your current team. So basically what this looks like, I, when you think about everyone who’s in your team, and when I say team, I don’t mean. You, you might be like, I don’t have a team. I don’t have anyone who works full-time for me. That’s okay.

You might still have team, you might still have, a cleaner who helps you out around the house. You might have, an assistant who only works a couple of hours a week. You might have a bookkeeper, you might have an accountant. Have a think about everyone who is supporting you at the moment and then. I want you to think of those roles.

Who is actually making you money? Who outta these roles in and of their own right is delivering extra revenue to your bottom line, and who is actually costing you money? Now if you aren’t sure. How to undertake this assessment, how to actually have a look and work out how profitable is my team. I do suggest you get some help with this, so you can ask your bookkeeper, Hey, can you please help me to calculate a profit per employee?

Can you actually assign particular amounts of revenue to this role or. Can you not? And like I said, there’s not, not necessarily a right or wrong here, unless of course you have a team member that the intention is that the role will make you money. And when you’re looking at the profit per employee, you are like, well, hang on.

You know, and they’re not gonna make a profit every single month. But if you’re looking at three months, at six months, you might start to say, this person isn’t actually delivering any extra money into my business. And really need to assess are they the right fit? If you have, a role that is costing you money, it’s really worth evaluating the profitability from a perspective.

Okay, this role isn’t delivering any X revenue, you know, straight off the back of it, but what is that freeing me up to earn? How much additional revenue am I bringing in as a result of this role? And that will help you to determine the profit per employee. Okay. Let’s dive on in to step number two, which is around delegation.

Yesterday we spoke a lot about perfectionism, about how challenging it can be to let go of tasks, how there can be the tendency to think other people aren’t gonna do it as well as me. What we’re gonna dive into today into with this step is talking about how to actually delegate. So the three rules of successful delegation, step number one.

Is give clear instructions. Now, I myself have been on a little bit of a learning journey with this, and my assistant, Sally has been with me for, I can’t remember the exact amount of time, but it’s somewhere around six, seven years we’ve been working together and we’ve worked closely together for such a long time that she’s really come to understand.

But my vague instructions, let’s just say, so for example, I can say, Hey, can you please pull together some social posts for my launch? And she just goes and creates the most beautifully curated graphics she knows. She pulls together a mix of carousel tiles of stories. She really just. Knows how to interpret that for me and my brand, and she just rolls with it.

However, when Sally is unavailable and I need to ask someone else to do some of the things that she does, I am very aware that the way that I give directions to Sally is not suitable for other people. So for example, someone new came into my team and I said to them, Hey, can you please go and create some social content for this?

I can’t remember what it was, masterclass it might’ve been. And they came back and said, what kind of social content do you want? Do you want Instagram stories? Do you want posts? What do you want it to look like? What’s the aesthetic? And I had to be wow, aha, moment, and realize that I hadn’t been g giving clear instructions.

Similarly chat gPT taught me a few lessons about this when we were first working together. At the start, I would say give it some vague, vague directions. Can you please write me a. Social media post and it would spit out this nonsense, not nonsense, but you know, I think that is nothing like my tone of voice.

However, the more that I work with it over time, it of course is starting to understand my tone of voice. It’s also being able to, ironically enough, understand vague instructions. If I say, write me, you know, help me write a newsletter, it will know my tone of voice. It will know, the kind of. Content that I like to provide and it will be able to provide me with a good starting point.

So the point I’m trying to make is that the first rule of successful delegation is to give clear guidance, to be able to very clearly articulate what it is that you want, also, and the timeframe in which you want it. So again, that’s a very important metric of success. The next rule of successful delegation is confidence.

So when you are asking someone to help with something and you are really unsure about yourself or their capacity to support you, you might not be giving the directions in a leadership style way. So for example, you are saying. Can you please maybe help me out? Oh, no problems. If you are too busy, that’s fine.

I’ll just do it myself. You really need to be projecting the confidence of a leader. Hey, here’s what needs to be done, and here’s why. It’s very important that you aren’t wishy-washy, that you are also leading from a place of confidence. And the third rule of successful delegation is that the task or the way that you are delegating it is made into a repeatable system or framework.

So for example, with, excuse me. Oh my goodness. I’ve been awake very early. My son, went off to camp today and there was a lot of excitement in the wood household. And with repeatable, it’s creating a system around it. So for example, with the social media tiles saying, Hey, like, if Claire asks for social tiles for a launch, here’s the things that we need to create.

It needs to be Instagram stories, some carousel styles, et cetera, et cetera. This is the usual format that we do. I like to make sure that there’s different, images. I like to make sure no problems at all, have a good day. I like to make sure that we need to make sure that there’s different, a different aesthetic, that there’s different images. Throughout the social context that it doesn’t all look the same. We wanna have a repeatable system or framework around the more that we can be systemizing, the more that we can say, how can we put this on autopilot on repeat, the better.

Here’s the thing, delegation isn’t dumping tasks. It’s about transferring ownership. And one of the leadership skills that you will learn over time is how not to just be like, do this. It’s actually saying, Hey, I want you to own this. I want you to use your intuition. I want you to step up and end to end.

Take responsibility for that. And I have to say I’m very blessed with Sally and my team that that is something she absolutely does. For example, when I say, you know, pull together a draft of a newsletter, she doesn’t just pull together a draft of a newsletter.

She might actually think, oh, hang on, who does this need to go to? What’s the messaging around it? She’ll go and check that it actually sent out. Okay. She is really taking end to end ownership of it, and that’s really what you want your team to be doing, which means that there are two parts to that.

Firstly, the direction, the guidance that you are providing. I am, you know, this is what success looks like for me is that I can hand you something and I don’t need to check back in on it. And part two is actually empowering and providing the feedback to your team so that they aren’t sort of scrambling around hoping they’ve done the right thing.

You’re saying, Hey, thanks so much for doing that, but look, moving forward, I wouldn’t use that kind of language. Or, here’s what we want that to look like. Part of ownership is actually empowering the team to take the ownership and not micromanaging. Alright, your exercise. Your next exercise is when you are thinking about this process of delegation, I want you to actually create one standard operating procedure, procedure or SOP this week.

So yesterday we spoke about identifying some tasks that could be done by someone else, and you might have thought, do you know what? It’s just easier for me to do it myself. Your challenge for this week is to actually go and create a standard operating procedure. Now, there’s a couple of different ways that you can do this.

You can just write out. Step one, I want you to open my inbox and put things into the right folder, step two, et cetera, et cetera. Another great way that you can do this is using a tool like Zoom or Loom to actually record you doing the task and then get that transcribed, and then you can ask a tool like ai, Hey, can you please convert this into a standard operating procedure?

I have a place in my, project management tool that is all about my SOPs. So then when you’ve got this SOP, you’ve got this procedure in place. Think about where are you gonna store it so that when you bring on new team members that they can actually find it and follow it. When you record yourself doing recurring tasks, it’s an excellent opportunity to hand it over.

 Quick little pause before we go further. If you’re listening to this and thinking, I am so ready for my next level of business, the profit collective is where that happens. It is my mastermind for ambitious six and multi-six figure business owners in what is scaled towards the million dollar revenue mark profitably, sustainably, and having fun.

You’ll get coaching with me, high level strategy, and a circle of biz besties who are walking the same path. The link to find out more or to book a call with me and have a chat about whether it’s the right fit for you is in the show notes for today’s episode.

All right, let’s dive into step number three, systems that scale. So systems, the word systems has a bit of a bad rap. I mean, it sounds kind of boring, unsexy, but here’s the thing. Systems create freedom. Actually save your brain from decision fatigue. Because instead of going, oh, what am I gonna write back to this person who wants to work with me these days?

It’s like it’s pre-written. It’s already there. Your brain doesn’t need to try and think what I need to write, because there’s a system in place that automatically has, here’s what we send back to someone. As I mentioned earlier, when you’ve got the systems in place, when you’ve got the SOPs, the standard operating processes, they make delegation effortless.

Because instead of bringing someone on and being like, hi, how do you do this? You’ve go, Hey, the, the whole process to upload my podcast is saved in my s SOPs. Go there. Can you please go and implement it? You don’t have to be reinventing the wheel every time you’re bringing on someone new. If you don’t have systems, you are the system.

And what that means is that you are the one who’s basically always having to retain and remember all the different steps along the way, and that’s not the best use of your CEO energy. So your exercise for this step is to start your system, and I really want you to think about one area. That you can systemize this week.

And I don’t just mean write a standard operating procedure, I mean actually create an automated process around it. So some examples could be client onboarding, inquiries, invoicing, or content creation. And I’ll give you an example. Up until recently my client onboarding, if I was bringing on a new private coaching client, I would literally go and get a copy of the contract, save it down, edit their name and the a BN, update the amount in, then go set up an invoice in zero, and then hand write them an email and attach that all on.

Now what I’ve done is I’ve got a system where I have one link. And I’m like, I’m delighted to be working with you. Please go here. And there’s a copy of the contract, there’s a payment portal and a whole onboarding process that automatically comes off the back of that one process. So this week, start your system, and step number four is to create a structure for sustainable profit.

If you’ve been in my world for a while, you will know that I am all about profit and in particular sustainable profit. Because scaling isn’t just about more money, it’s about structure. Now, I’ve shared with you a little quote here from my business coach, which is business is boring. And what business is boring means is that, you know, if you spend your whole life like jumping from thing to thing, oh, that’s fun, that’s sexy and you aren’t building systems around it.

If you aren’t looking at your numbers, then you are are really going to struggle to find success. The truth is scalability and next level success in business. Happen from doing the same thing over and over again and getting better each time from making sure that the structures are in place for scaling success.

So here is your scalable foundation. Firstly, I want you to map out a clear organization chart. So if you’re not familiar with an organization chart, it’s basically like. Little boxes with lines between them that says, who reports into who? Kind of looks a little bit like a pyramid. So you’ll have the CEO at the top and you’ll have the different roles underneath.

And what I want you to do is think about who does what currently. So map out your current org chart and then map out the vision. So maybe right now the org chart is. You. You are the only person inside a box there. And then you think about like, what does success look like? In an ideal world, you might say, okay, firstly I’d have a bookkeeper who’s doing that.

I have an assistant who’s helping me out with some of the administrative stuff. I’ve got a sales person, I’ve got a social media manager. You can actually map out what your dream organization looks like to give you something to get excited for and something to work towards. The next part of your scalable foundation is to have a profit focused bank structure.

So that means separating out, having a separate account for tax and superannuation, having a place that you actually put aside some separate savings for those, times when you are in one of those troughs in business. Actually set up your money for success. And the last thing that you wanna be doing is having a forecasting and reporting rhythm.

So what this looks like, how am I truly in my CEO mode? What am I doing each week to have a look at what the forecast is, what’s coming in and going at when? How am I continuing to make sure that I am across my numbers on the regular? Am I sitting down with my accountant every single month? Really setting up some structure is setting you up for scaling success so that you can make data led decisions.

Again, as much as you know, we like to follow our intuition as business owners. Sometimes the numbers are just telling us what we need to hear, what’s working, what’s working on your social media, what’s working in terms of your sales process, what’s not working, and how can we leverage that information to be growing.

Because you can’t lead what you don’t measure, and your numbers are your roadmap. So I want you to set in a little scale like a CEO exercise. And what I want you to do is book in a money meeting with yourself. If you’ve got a team, if you’ve got a finance team with your bookkeeper, and every single week, I want you to review your cash inflows.

And cash outflows. And also to have a look at your capacity plan. Have a look at like, how many clients could I fit in at the moment? How many clients do I have at the moment? And what do you need to be doing to start to bridge that gap? Here’s the thing. Freedom doesn’t come necessarily from working less.

It comes from building systems that let you work smarter because the goal is that you are leading, your team is executing, and your business is growing sustainably. So I have another little exercise for you, which is that I want you to write your CEO vision statement and what your CEO vision statement is, is getting really clear and excited about what your business looks like when it runs without you.

And I know you’re gonna think, oh, I don’t even, what does that even mean? And what does an example of one looks like? Let me share my CEO vision statement. Here we go. My business is a profit machine. It grows whether I’m at my desk or lying on the beach. The Profit Collective is full of self-led, ambitious women building empires with a funnel that attracts new members on autopilot.

My team run the show like a well-oiled machine. I can take weeks off at a time and nothing slips because the systems are tight. The clients are obsessed, and the cashflow is predictable. I spend my working hours doing the high impact, high vibe stuff, coaching, creating, speaking, and marketing. I’m not hustling.

I hold the vision and I steer the ship. I am the CEO. So your activity can be, can you go and map out what your CEO vision statement might look like? So to wrap up, you now know how to hire profitably, delegate effectively, systemize operations, and lead with structure. You’ve done the mindset work. We spoke about that on day one.

You’ve got the strategies. So now it’s time for implementation, accountability, and support. I spoke to you yesterday about my program to Profit Collective, and today I wanna share with you a couple of testimonials. So this is one of my beautiful clients, Annise, who’s the founder of her speaking coach, and Annise in the time vast working together, said, I’ve doubled my pricing, built a dream team, and I finally have time to think again.

And this is Maddie. And Maddie said, I cracked seven figures within 18 months while working three days a week. She went from being totally burnt out to running a wildly successful business. And this is exactly what we do inside my Mastermind, the Profit Collective. This container is about helping you to step into your million dollar CEO era.

It’s for the business owner who’s done being the bottleneck and ready to run her business like a true CEO. It’s a high level mastermind for six and multi-six figure entrepreneurs who wanna scale intentionally, not through more hours. It’s where strategy meets mindset meets money. It’s where you stop trying to keep up and start leading with calm confidence and cash flow.

If you’ve ever looked at your business and thought, there’s gotta be a smarter way, this is it. So just a quick refresher of what’s inside. There’s two 90 minute calls per month. We have an intimate Mastermind Facebook community where you can have your successes celebrated. You can share what you’re struggling with and get support, and just a beautiful place to build community with like-minded business owners.

You are also matched with a handpicked accountability partner so that you can do fortnightly check-ins on your progress. There are two in-person luxe retreats a year. Our next one is happening in Melbourne next month, and they’re just a really beautiful way to hang out, have a high vibe, experience, and opportunity to work on the business instead of in the business.

And you of course also get access to my two courses, the Profit Academy Foundations and the Profit Academy Accelerator. So here’s the thing, scaling your profits starts right here. This is a private entrepreneurial community where conversations around wealth are normalized and success is celebrated. Now, one of the questions I often get is.

You know, how long do I need to join for? The minimum commitment is six months, but I am wanting to build a container, a space where everyone rises together. So I don’t want people to come in and be like, I’m gonna give it a little try. Then jump out. Like this is a space where, you know, most of the people who’ve come in are still inside the container.

They’re sticking around, they’re building those relationships, they’re getting the wins, they’re scaling. In a profitable way while working less.

And that’s a wrap on the CEO series. I hope you are walking away with fresh energy to step into your CEO shoes. You don’t have to do this business thing alone and you don’t have to keep spitting your wheels to make more money. If you are ready to take what you’ve learned inside the CEO series and actually implement it with accountability and the support of a mentor and a high level peer group, please come and join me.

It’s where six and multi-six figure business owners scale with strategy and accountability. The link to join is in the show notes for today’s episode.

Thank you for joining me for this bonus CEO series, and here’s to becoming the profitable CEO you were born to be.

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