December 30, 2025 • 20 mins
In this practical episode, Scott Ritzheimer, shares a simple exercise to reclaim control of your CEO schedule. If you struggle with endless pulls on your time and unclear priorities, you won't want to miss it.
You will discover:
- How to rate current time use across key categories like planning and mentoring.
- Why envisioning your ideal schedule six months out reveals big shifts
- What setting goals for top movers turns insights into actionable change
This episode is ideal for for Founders, Owners, and CEOs in stage 5 of The Founder's Evolution. Not sure which stage you're in? Find out for free in less than 10 minutes at https://www.scalearchitects.com/founders/quiz
Scott helped start nearly 20,000 new businesses and nonprofits and with his business partner started led their multimillion-dollar business through an exceptional and extended growth phase (over 10 years of double-digit growth) all before he turned 35.He founded Scale Architects to help founders and CEOs identify and implement the one essential strategy they need right now to get them on the fast track to Predictable Success.
Want to learn more about Scott Ritzheimer's work at Scale Architects? Check out his website at https://www.scalearchitects.com/
Mentioned in this episode:
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Scott Ritzheimer (00:00):
Hello, hello and welcome. Welcome once again
(00:03):
to the start, scale and succeed.Podcast, the only podcast that
grows with you through all sevenstages of your journey as a
founder. And today, we're goingto talk about an exercise that I
use about this time of year,toward the end of the year, the
beginning of the new year, withjust about every one of my stage
five CEOs that I work with. It'sa ridiculously simple exercise,
(00:24):
but one that I have found isremarkably powerful. What does
it do? It helps you to controlyour schedule. Now, don't worry,
we're not going to look attimesheets or calendars or sit
you in a bunch of meetings, butthere's this question of like,
what as CEO, do I need to spendmy time on? Because you're
(00:45):
you're being pulled in 1000different directions. And I
remember a CEO coming to me, andhe's like, we have all of these
opportunities. We have all ofthese ideas. The problem is
knowing which one to work on.And that's the same thing with
your time. And so I want to walkyou through this exercise. It's
gonna be a nice, short, sweetepisode. And this is something
that you can do by yourself. Youcan do it with your coach. You
(01:05):
can do it with any of our scalearchitects. If you wanted
someone to do it with you,they'd be happy to do so. And so
here's how it works. I'm goingto list off a handful of
different, what I'll callcategories, things, buckets,
that you can put your time into.And what I want you to do is,
I'm thinking through each one.You can jot the category down if
you'd like, and you'll need apen and paper for this. So pause
(01:29):
it if you're doing it. If you'redriving, don't, don't use a pen
and paper. Just check thisepisode out later. But you're
going to take this in. You'rejust going to jot down each of
these categories. We're going towork through them one at a time,
so you don't have to list themall off. And then what I want
you to do is I want you to thinkabout how much time you spend in
that category. It might be someof my clients like to do it in
(01:52):
terms of hours. So they spendfour hours in team meetings a
week. Or they might like to doit in terms of a percentage, and
so they might say they spend 20%of their time planning or
working on the business. Eitherone doesn't matter. Whichever
one works best for you, it's alot easier if you use the same
thing the whole way through. Sodon't switch back and forth.
(02:14):
That's really the only rule.Now, as we're going through
these, what I want you to do israte each one as I share the
category with you. So I don'twant you to think of the whole
thing and try and, like, put itall together. All I want you to
do is just think of the gutinstinct, what your very first
response is, and then write thatdown. So here's, here's, we're
(02:37):
gonna do it. We're gonna gothrough I'm gonna go through
these quickly. You might have topause between each one, but for
folks who are just listening,we're not going to pause for
like five minutes on every oneof these would be crazy. All
right, here we go. So firstcategory, this is kind of the
obvious one. This really iswhere you want to move towards
spending the lion's share ofyour time, and this is planning
or working on the business. So Iwant you to think right now
(03:00):
about how much time do you spendon an average week, thinking
about planning for working onyour business or nonprofit, jot
down either the number of hoursor the percentage of your time,
and then we'll move on to thenext category. All right, next.
This next category isnetworking, or relationship
building. This is high levelnetworking, high level
(03:22):
relationship building, veryfuture oriented where you're
meeting with your top clients oryour most impactful members.
This is time spent intentionallygetting out of the office and
meeting with other folks in yourindustry or that can help your
business or nonprofit Sonetworking slash relationship
(03:44):
building, go ahead and jot downabout how much time you spend on
average. Now with something likethis, you might not do it every
single week, and that's why wewant to average it out. And I
found it's usually helpful tothink back over the last month
or so. Doesn't have to be rocketscience, but just take that,
average number of hours orpercentage of your time that you
spend, all right? That's numbertwo. So we have planning working
(04:06):
on the business that was numberone. Networking, relationship
building. That was number two.The next one is actively
marketing, or actively doing bizdev, where, like you're writing
the marketing copy or setting upthe ads, or you're out there
doing business dev in someactive capacity, maybe at trade
shows or smiling and dialing, assome of you might. If you are in
(04:29):
stage five, this is where wereally want to be conscientious.
Is one of the categories thatyou might still be hanging on to
some of but if you're doing it,it might be a great part of part
two of this exercise. We'll getto that in just a moment. So
think about that might be goodfor part two, but for right now,
all we want you to do is say,How much time do you spend in
that area, actively marketing ordoing business development. All
(04:53):
right, next one. This iscategory four, and this is
selling or closing deals. Sowhere you are an act. Part of
the sales process. Maybe you'vestill got a full book of
business that you'remaintaining. Maybe you're still
the one who closes the big dealsfor the organization. Maybe
you've just got one or twoclients that you still work with
(05:13):
closely. What percentage of yourtime or hours of an average week
do you spend actively selling orclosing deals. That's category
number four. Category numberfive is fulfillment or client
delivery. So what do you want tothink about here is, what are
the parts of whatever it is thatyou do or sell or offer that
(05:34):
you're still responsible for?That might be the act of doing
of it, it might be decisionmaking of it, and more likely,
it's the active management ofthe people who are doing it. And
so if you're regularly reviewingprocesses or following up with
team members handling issueswhen they come up, that might
(05:55):
fit in another category we'lltalk about here in just a
moment. But if you are either inor actively managing the
fulfillment or client deliverythat's going to fall in this
bucket. All right. Next categoryhere is administration, and this
is, you know, to be fair, it'skind of the junk drawer of what
executives work on. Sorry to allyou really wonderful people who
work in these areas, but there'sa whole lot of stuff that
(06:16):
doesn't actually fit together,but all really falls under this
category of administration,things like finances and the
bookkeeping and reviewingfinancial reports, things like
HR and hiring and pay bands andall the crazy stuff that we have
to pay attention to these days,things like it. If you're still
(06:37):
one of those kind of techforward founders who's like the
main IT person for your company.That's another high quality
candidate for part two of thisprocess. But again, how much
time do you spend in these areascombined? So all the
administrative stuff, likefinances, HR, IT other systems
and processes that you guysmight have to keep up with. All
(06:59):
right, that's the next bucket.We've got a few more. We're
almost there. Next one,mentoring and coaching, and this
is in particular one on one. Sohow much time are you
intentionally spending with yourdirect team of executives, with
your up and coming managers, andmaybe one or two or five or 10
other people throughout yourorganization that you're
(07:20):
actively mentoring? This couldbe anything from one on one,
same page meetings. It could betaking folks out to lunch just
to hear how they're doing. Mightbe spending time with a new hire
when they come in. But anyenvironment in which you are
actively mentoring and coachingin a one on one circumstance.
(07:41):
That's the next bucket here.Three more. We're almost there.
Third to last is team meetings.And I'll be honest, this one
makes folks cry every once in awhile when they really look at
how much time they're spendingin meetings at this stage. And
team meetings is really if itdoesn't fit into any of the
(08:02):
previous categories. That's whywe've got it pretty late in the
process here. So it's notnecessarily time that's a
meeting that's specificallydedicated to working on the
business, for example, thatwould go in the working on the
business category at thebeginning. But this is all the
other team meetings that happen.So if you do some kind of a
weekly leadership team meetingor monthly leadership team
(08:23):
meeting that would go in here ifyou're part of the Client
Onboarding team, or there's1000s of meetings that we're all
in, all those meetings that youfind yourself in all the time,
whether they're pre scheduled ornot, those are team meetings.
They're going to go in thiscategory. All right, two more.
(08:43):
This one's often overlooked, andit's real hard for a lot of
folks to think of on a weeklybasis how much time they spend
here. And to some extent, that'sokay, but it's a really
important category for CEOs, andthat is training. You have an
enormous amount of institutionalknowledge in you singular. And
if your training program existswithout your active involvement,
(09:06):
you might be missing out in areally big way. And so while you
might not do it every singleweek, almost certainly won't.
You might want to allocate alittle bit of time on average to
your training if you aren'talready so for right now, all
we're doing is saying how muchtime you do spend there on
average. We'll talk about steptwo here in a moment before we
get there the very last one, thedreaded one, and it is
(09:29):
firefighting. Hopefully, ifyou're in stage four, it's
nowhere near what it was back instage I'm sorry. Hopefully if
you're in Stage Five, it'snowhere near what it was in
stage four, but it can sneak upon you, especially during busy
seasons. And so if you arespending any material amount of
time firefighting, you're goingto want to write that down here.
(09:50):
If it's an hour a week, 10% ofyour time, whatever that number
is, that's what you're going todo. So if you missed any of
those, go back and record them.I'm not going to say all of
them. Again here just yet,because we're going to listen
one more time, you'll see why.But what I want you to think
about here, just as you'relooking at that, is one where
are you spending your time? Didanything surprise you? Is
(10:12):
anything strike you as no longerappropriate? Is anything too
high or too small, anything thatyou'd like to change. Does any
of that represent something thatyou really don't like doing and
you're probably doing too muchof it. Take some time to reflect
on each and every one of these.And as you do, we're going to
(10:33):
start building out list numbertwo here, or score number two.
And so if you think of all thosecategories, all those buckets
for your time. What I want younow to think about is on July 1,
or whenever you're listening tothis, six months from now, six
months is seems to be the righttime. Three months some changes
(10:54):
can happen, but not a whole lot.A year you'll have forgotten
that you did this exercise. Butsix months is about the right
timeframe for a CEO to makemeaningful changes to some of
these numbers. So take a datesix months from now and write it
down. We'll use July 1 for thisrecording. And now what I want
you to think about is if youwere to really give it a
(11:16):
concerted effort, if you were tosolve for some of the issues
that are currently pushing youto spend more time doing stuff
that you don't want to do. Ifyou were to think about what a
CEO for a company or a nonprofitlike yours should be doing and
how they should be spending yourtime, what I want you to do is
(11:38):
take all of that and thinkthrough for each of these how
much time you'd like to bespending realistically on each
of these categories in July orsix months from now. So a couple
of recommendations. Some of thethings that I've seen as common
patterns is that for the vastmajority of my clients, they're
spending too little time inthose first two categories,
(12:01):
they're not planning or workingon the business. They're not
networking or buildingrelationships, especially for
the future. And that's a bigproblem, because for CEOs, I
would go so far as to say themajority of your time, at least
51% really should go into thosetwo buckets, if you're doing it
right, if you're steppingespecially into that CVO role,
(12:24):
that chief visionary officerrole, which really is a great
fit for founders, then you'll bespending more and more of your
time doing that. Now you can'tjust add this exercise is real
easy if you just create morehours out of nowhere. But the
reality of it is, is youshouldn't be solving problems by
working more hours anymore. Youshould have learned that lesson,
(12:44):
hopefully a long time ago.Sometimes it sneaks back up,
doesn't it? Instead, what we'vegot to think through is, well,
if we're really going to spendmore time in those areas, where
can we buy back our time in someother areas? And so for most
folks that I'm working with inthe stage five, CEO, chief
visionary officer, stage theyshould not be spending a
(13:06):
material amount of time sellingor closing deals. They should
not be spending a materialamount of time doing
fulfillment, client delivery ordirectly managing the people who
do. They shouldn't be spending aton of time in finance. HR or
it. You should have an executiveteam that handles that, or at
least managers that can handlethat as well. Where you should
(13:29):
be investing your time is namelyin planning, working on the
business, like we said at thetop, networking and relationship
building, depending on yourindustry, that might be a bigger
or smaller chunk, and then alsoin mentoring and coaching. Now
there's going to be a couplethings that you know,
realistically can't get to zero,and so most of the time, we'd
(13:52):
love to see firefighting go low,but realistically it's probably
going to sit somewhere around 5%of your time. We'd love to see
team meetings disappearentirely. Sorry, that's just not
the nature of how you win as anexecutive. So we're not going to
see those disappear altogether.However, they don't have to be
40 and 50% they don't have to bea huge chunk of your time. So
(14:14):
just to be clear, what is parttwo, the exercise? The Part Two
the exercise to go through thesesame categories and list off how
many hours or what percentage ofyour time you'd like to be
spending in these areas by July1. Now, there's going to be a
lot of them that are basicallythe same or the same, right, you
(14:34):
might be spending, you mightalready be spending 5% of your
time on firefighting, and you'relike, hey, that's great. I just
need to keep that there. That'sfine. Most of these will
probably be pretty similarbetween now and July. In fact,
you can't really change all ofthem in that time timeframe, but
what I found is you can make areally big change in two or
(14:54):
three of them. And so as you'relooking through that, I want you
to pick the two or three. Uh,different categories that were
the biggest movers, maybe you'respending way less time in team
meetings, or maybe you'respending way more time mentoring
and coaching your team for thefuture. Take the two or three
biggest movers, either up ordown, and set a goal for each
(15:17):
one. What is one thing that youcan do to dramatically improve
it. Now, for some of my clients,the goal is the move itself. I
want to go from 15% of my timespent firefighting to 5% of my
time spent firefighting. Forothers, it's a little bit more
result oriented. I want todevelop great relationships with
(15:40):
five new real estate agents,because we're going to be moving
in a few years, and I want tomake sure we've got the right
location. So either way is fine,but what you want to do is say
what is a goal that's going tohelp move you to that ideal
schedule that you laid out forsix months from now, July 1, and
(16:00):
you'll find, at least for mostof my clients, they find a ton
of clarity in that they'reactually doing a lot of things
well. There's a lot of thingsthat are working great. They're
spending their time on a lot ofthe right things, but there's
also some room for improvement,and this is a great time to do
it. This is a much morepractical take on an episode.
(16:21):
This is an actual exercise I usewith my clients, and I wanted to
share it with you because I'vefound that it's super, super
helpful, and it's one that Ihope translated over the
podcast. So if this was helpfulfor you, fantastic. Again, I'm
going to give you thosecategories one more time. These
are categories that areespecially helpful for those of
you in stage five. If you're inother stages, you will have to
(16:43):
change these categories a littlebit for that to be more
relevant. But here they are.Category number one, planning,
working on the business. Numbertwo, networking, relationship
building. Number three,marketing and biz dev. Number
four, selling and closing deals.Number five, fulfillment and
client delivery. Number six,administration, like financials,
(17:05):
HR it. Number seven, mentoringand coaching. Number eight, team
meetings. Number nine, trainingand number 10, firefighting.
Hope that's a helpful exercisefor you. Let me know what you
choose, what you find. If youwant to send us your goals, let
us know what they are. We'll berooting for you, and would love
to see your progress as well. Ihope this episode was helpful
(17:27):
for you. I hope this exercisegave you some new insight into
how you can better spend yourtime as a CEO, and I cannot wait
to see you on our next episode.You know your time and attention
mean the world to us. I hopethis was as fun for you, as it
was for me, I can't wait to seeyou next time. Take care.
Hello, hello and welcome. Welcome once again
(00:03):
to the start, scale and succeed.Podcast, the only podcast that
grows with you through all sevenstages of your journey as a
founder. And today, we're goingto talk about an exercise that I
use about this time of year,toward the end of the year, the
beginning of the new year, withjust about every one of my stage
five CEOs that I work with. It'sa ridiculously simple exercise,
(00:24):
but one that I have found isremarkably powerful. What does
it do? It helps you to controlyour schedule. Now, don't worry,
we're not going to look attimesheets or calendars or sit
you in a bunch of meetings, butthere's this question of like,
what as CEO, do I need to spendmy time on? Because you're
(00:45):
you're being pulled in 1000different directions. And I
remember a CEO coming to me, andhe's like, we have all of these
opportunities. We have all ofthese ideas. The problem is
knowing which one to work on.And that's the same thing with
your time. And so I want to walkyou through this exercise. It's
gonna be a nice, short, sweetepisode. And this is something
that you can do by yourself. Youcan do it with your coach. You
(01:05):
can do it with any of our scalearchitects. If you wanted
someone to do it with you,they'd be happy to do so. And so
here's how it works. I'm goingto list off a handful of
different, what I'll callcategories, things, buckets,
that you can put your time into.And what I want you to do is,
I'm thinking through each one.You can jot the category down if
you'd like, and you'll need apen and paper for this. So pause
(01:29):
it if you're doing it. If you'redriving, don't, don't use a pen
and paper. Just check thisepisode out later. But you're
going to take this in. You'rejust going to jot down each of
these categories. We're going towork through them one at a time,
so you don't have to list themall off. And then what I want
you to do is I want you to thinkabout how much time you spend in
that category. It might be someof my clients like to do it in
(01:52):
terms of hours. So they spendfour hours in team meetings a
week. Or they might like to doit in terms of a percentage, and
so they might say they spend 20%of their time planning or
working on the business. Eitherone doesn't matter. Whichever
one works best for you, it's alot easier if you use the same
thing the whole way through. Sodon't switch back and forth.
(02:14):
That's really the only rule.Now, as we're going through
these, what I want you to do israte each one as I share the
category with you. So I don'twant you to think of the whole
thing and try and, like, put itall together. All I want you to
do is just think of the gutinstinct, what your very first
response is, and then write thatdown. So here's, here's, we're
(02:37):
gonna do it. We're gonna gothrough I'm gonna go through
these quickly. You might have topause between each one, but for
folks who are just listening,we're not going to pause for
like five minutes on every oneof these would be crazy. All
right, here we go. So firstcategory, this is kind of the
obvious one. This really iswhere you want to move towards
spending the lion's share ofyour time, and this is planning
or working on the business. So Iwant you to think right now
(03:00):
about how much time do you spendon an average week, thinking
about planning for working onyour business or nonprofit, jot
down either the number of hoursor the percentage of your time,
and then we'll move on to thenext category. All right, next.
This next category isnetworking, or relationship
building. This is high levelnetworking, high level
(03:22):
relationship building, veryfuture oriented where you're
meeting with your top clients oryour most impactful members.
This is time spent intentionallygetting out of the office and
meeting with other folks in yourindustry or that can help your
business or nonprofit Sonetworking slash relationship
(03:44):
building, go ahead and jot downabout how much time you spend on
average. Now with something likethis, you might not do it every
single week, and that's why wewant to average it out. And I
found it's usually helpful tothink back over the last month
or so. Doesn't have to be rocketscience, but just take that,
average number of hours orpercentage of your time that you
spend, all right? That's numbertwo. So we have planning working
(04:06):
on the business that was numberone. Networking, relationship
building. That was number two.The next one is actively
marketing, or actively doing bizdev, where, like you're writing
the marketing copy or setting upthe ads, or you're out there
doing business dev in someactive capacity, maybe at trade
shows or smiling and dialing, assome of you might. If you are in
(04:29):
stage five, this is where wereally want to be conscientious.
Is one of the categories thatyou might still be hanging on to
some of but if you're doing it,it might be a great part of part
two of this exercise. We'll getto that in just a moment. So
think about that might be goodfor part two, but for right now,
all we want you to do is say,How much time do you spend in
that area, actively marketing ordoing business development. All
(04:53):
right, next one. This iscategory four, and this is
selling or closing deals. Sowhere you are an act. Part of
the sales process. Maybe you'vestill got a full book of
business that you'remaintaining. Maybe you're still
the one who closes the big dealsfor the organization. Maybe
you've just got one or twoclients that you still work with
(05:13):
closely. What percentage of yourtime or hours of an average week
do you spend actively selling orclosing deals. That's category
number four. Category numberfive is fulfillment or client
delivery. So what do you want tothink about here is, what are
the parts of whatever it is thatyou do or sell or offer that
(05:34):
you're still responsible for?That might be the act of doing
of it, it might be decisionmaking of it, and more likely,
it's the active management ofthe people who are doing it. And
so if you're regularly reviewingprocesses or following up with
team members handling issueswhen they come up, that might
(05:55):
fit in another category we'lltalk about here in just a
moment. But if you are either inor actively managing the
fulfillment or client deliverythat's going to fall in this
bucket. All right. Next categoryhere is administration, and this
is, you know, to be fair, it'skind of the junk drawer of what
executives work on. Sorry to allyou really wonderful people who
work in these areas, but there'sa whole lot of stuff that
(06:16):
doesn't actually fit together,but all really falls under this
category of administration,things like finances and the
bookkeeping and reviewingfinancial reports, things like
HR and hiring and pay bands andall the crazy stuff that we have
to pay attention to these days,things like it. If you're still
(06:37):
one of those kind of techforward founders who's like the
main IT person for your company.That's another high quality
candidate for part two of thisprocess. But again, how much
time do you spend in these areascombined? So all the
administrative stuff, likefinances, HR, IT other systems
and processes that you guysmight have to keep up with. All
(06:59):
right, that's the next bucket.We've got a few more. We're
almost there. Next one,mentoring and coaching, and this
is in particular one on one. Sohow much time are you
intentionally spending with yourdirect team of executives, with
your up and coming managers, andmaybe one or two or five or 10
other people throughout yourorganization that you're
(07:20):
actively mentoring? This couldbe anything from one on one,
same page meetings. It could betaking folks out to lunch just
to hear how they're doing. Mightbe spending time with a new hire
when they come in. But anyenvironment in which you are
actively mentoring and coachingin a one on one circumstance.
(07:41):
That's the next bucket here.Three more. We're almost there.
Third to last is team meetings.And I'll be honest, this one
makes folks cry every once in awhile when they really look at
how much time they're spendingin meetings at this stage. And
team meetings is really if itdoesn't fit into any of the
(08:02):
previous categories. That's whywe've got it pretty late in the
process here. So it's notnecessarily time that's a
meeting that's specificallydedicated to working on the
business, for example, thatwould go in the working on the
business category at thebeginning. But this is all the
other team meetings that happen.So if you do some kind of a
weekly leadership team meetingor monthly leadership team
(08:23):
meeting that would go in here ifyou're part of the Client
Onboarding team, or there's1000s of meetings that we're all
in, all those meetings that youfind yourself in all the time,
whether they're pre scheduled ornot, those are team meetings.
They're going to go in thiscategory. All right, two more.
(08:43):
This one's often overlooked, andit's real hard for a lot of
folks to think of on a weeklybasis how much time they spend
here. And to some extent, that'sokay, but it's a really
important category for CEOs, andthat is training. You have an
enormous amount of institutionalknowledge in you singular. And
if your training program existswithout your active involvement,
(09:06):
you might be missing out in areally big way. And so while you
might not do it every singleweek, almost certainly won't.
You might want to allocate alittle bit of time on average to
your training if you aren'talready so for right now, all
we're doing is saying how muchtime you do spend there on
average. We'll talk about steptwo here in a moment before we
get there the very last one, thedreaded one, and it is
(09:29):
firefighting. Hopefully, ifyou're in stage four, it's
nowhere near what it was back instage I'm sorry. Hopefully if
you're in Stage Five, it'snowhere near what it was in
stage four, but it can sneak upon you, especially during busy
seasons. And so if you arespending any material amount of
time firefighting, you're goingto want to write that down here.
(09:50):
If it's an hour a week, 10% ofyour time, whatever that number
is, that's what you're going todo. So if you missed any of
those, go back and record them.I'm not going to say all of
them. Again here just yet,because we're going to listen
one more time, you'll see why.But what I want you to think
about here, just as you'relooking at that, is one where
are you spending your time? Didanything surprise you? Is
(10:12):
anything strike you as no longerappropriate? Is anything too
high or too small, anything thatyou'd like to change. Does any
of that represent something thatyou really don't like doing and
you're probably doing too muchof it. Take some time to reflect
on each and every one of these.And as you do, we're going to
(10:33):
start building out list numbertwo here, or score number two.
And so if you think of all thosecategories, all those buckets
for your time. What I want younow to think about is on July 1,
or whenever you're listening tothis, six months from now, six
months is seems to be the righttime. Three months some changes
(10:54):
can happen, but not a whole lot.A year you'll have forgotten
that you did this exercise. Butsix months is about the right
timeframe for a CEO to makemeaningful changes to some of
these numbers. So take a datesix months from now and write it
down. We'll use July 1 for thisrecording. And now what I want
you to think about is if youwere to really give it a
(11:16):
concerted effort, if you were tosolve for some of the issues
that are currently pushing youto spend more time doing stuff
that you don't want to do. Ifyou were to think about what a
CEO for a company or a nonprofitlike yours should be doing and
how they should be spending yourtime, what I want you to do is
(11:38):
take all of that and thinkthrough for each of these how
much time you'd like to bespending realistically on each
of these categories in July orsix months from now. So a couple
of recommendations. Some of thethings that I've seen as common
patterns is that for the vastmajority of my clients, they're
spending too little time inthose first two categories,
(12:01):
they're not planning or workingon the business. They're not
networking or buildingrelationships, especially for
the future. And that's a bigproblem, because for CEOs, I
would go so far as to say themajority of your time, at least
51% really should go into thosetwo buckets, if you're doing it
right, if you're steppingespecially into that CVO role,
(12:24):
that chief visionary officerrole, which really is a great
fit for founders, then you'll bespending more and more of your
time doing that. Now you can'tjust add this exercise is real
easy if you just create morehours out of nowhere. But the
reality of it is, is youshouldn't be solving problems by
working more hours anymore. Youshould have learned that lesson,
(12:44):
hopefully a long time ago.Sometimes it sneaks back up,
doesn't it? Instead, what we'vegot to think through is, well,
if we're really going to spendmore time in those areas, where
can we buy back our time in someother areas? And so for most
folks that I'm working with inthe stage five, CEO, chief
visionary officer, stage theyshould not be spending a
(13:06):
material amount of time sellingor closing deals. They should
not be spending a materialamount of time doing
fulfillment, client delivery ordirectly managing the people who
do. They shouldn't be spending aton of time in finance. HR or
it. You should have an executiveteam that handles that, or at
least managers that can handlethat as well. Where you should
(13:29):
be investing your time is namelyin planning, working on the
business, like we said at thetop, networking and relationship
building, depending on yourindustry, that might be a bigger
or smaller chunk, and then alsoin mentoring and coaching. Now
there's going to be a couplethings that you know,
realistically can't get to zero,and so most of the time, we'd
(13:52):
love to see firefighting go low,but realistically it's probably
going to sit somewhere around 5%of your time. We'd love to see
team meetings disappearentirely. Sorry, that's just not
the nature of how you win as anexecutive. So we're not going to
see those disappear altogether.However, they don't have to be
40 and 50% they don't have to bea huge chunk of your time. So
(14:14):
just to be clear, what is parttwo, the exercise? The Part Two
the exercise to go through thesesame categories and list off how
many hours or what percentage ofyour time you'd like to be
spending in these areas by July1. Now, there's going to be a
lot of them that are basicallythe same or the same, right, you
(14:34):
might be spending, you mightalready be spending 5% of your
time on firefighting, and you'relike, hey, that's great. I just
need to keep that there. That'sfine. Most of these will
probably be pretty similarbetween now and July. In fact,
you can't really change all ofthem in that time timeframe, but
what I found is you can make areally big change in two or
(14:54):
three of them. And so as you'relooking through that, I want you
to pick the two or three. Uh,different categories that were
the biggest movers, maybe you'respending way less time in team
meetings, or maybe you'respending way more time mentoring
and coaching your team for thefuture. Take the two or three
biggest movers, either up ordown, and set a goal for each
(15:17):
one. What is one thing that youcan do to dramatically improve
it. Now, for some of my clients,the goal is the move itself. I
want to go from 15% of my timespent firefighting to 5% of my
time spent firefighting. Forothers, it's a little bit more
result oriented. I want todevelop great relationships with
(15:40):
five new real estate agents,because we're going to be moving
in a few years, and I want tomake sure we've got the right
location. So either way is fine,but what you want to do is say
what is a goal that's going tohelp move you to that ideal
schedule that you laid out forsix months from now, July 1, and
(16:00):
you'll find, at least for mostof my clients, they find a ton
of clarity in that they'reactually doing a lot of things
well. There's a lot of thingsthat are working great. They're
spending their time on a lot ofthe right things, but there's
also some room for improvement,and this is a great time to do
it. This is a much morepractical take on an episode.
(16:21):
This is an actual exercise I usewith my clients, and I wanted to
share it with you because I'vefound that it's super, super
helpful, and it's one that Ihope translated over the
podcast. So if this was helpfulfor you, fantastic. Again, I'm
going to give you thosecategories one more time. These
are categories that areespecially helpful for those of
you in stage five. If you're inother stages, you will have to
(16:43):
change these categories a littlebit for that to be more
relevant. But here they are.Category number one, planning,
working on the business. Numbertwo, networking, relationship
building. Number three,marketing and biz dev. Number
four, selling and closing deals.Number five, fulfillment and
client delivery. Number six,administration, like financials,
(17:05):
HR it. Number seven, mentoringand coaching. Number eight, team
meetings. Number nine, trainingand number 10, firefighting.
Hope that's a helpful exercisefor you. Let me know what you
choose, what you find. If youwant to send us your goals, let
us know what they are. We'll berooting for you, and would love
to see your progress as well. Ihope this episode was helpful
(17:27):
for you. I hope this exercisegave you some new insight into
how you can better spend yourtime as a CEO, and I cannot wait
to see you on our next episode.You know your time and attention
mean the world to us. I hopethis was as fun for you, as it
was for me, I can't wait to seeyou next time. Take care.
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