The most powerful thing about being a business owner or CEO is realizing your ambitions, and turning your vision into being an operational reality. At the end of the day, the buck stops with you. But this driver, this motivator, has its drawbacks – the Owner’s Trap, specifically.
How many times have you been on the beach on holiday, maybe thousands of miles away from the job, but can’t stop looking at your phone, sending emails, or drafting new ideas to bring up during weekly huddles and team meetings?
Being distracted can happen on vacation, or as simple as not being able to focus 100% while watching a movie or a sporting event, be it live or on TV.
With the holiday season in full swing, and with Christmas rapidly approaching, it’s important to have your ducks in a row as we think about and plan for 2023 – but equally important to trust in your process and build your business so it may thrive without constant monitoring.
As CEO, you are the sole member in charge of your business, and despite that, you’re usually juggling a million problems. That math doesn’t add up. And simply, it can become overwhelming fast.
What is the Owner’s Trap?
As businesses grow, owners tend to pick up more responsibilities. This means more teams, decisions, and, naturally, more meetings. While ideally, you’ve built a competent and driven team around you, it’s easy to get swallowed up by the increased dynamics. Most CEOs will find themselves spending time in increasingly less important meetings as they, and their team members, look to leadership to land the final blow on new impactful initiatives.
The Cost of Being Stuck
If that time doesn’t seem serious now, just wait a few months. You lose track of your time, your money, and you start acting like Superman, muscling through every challenge. This tends to continue as unanticipated things happen, such as hitting a financial roadblock, needing to use working capital for unintended uses and possibly having to rely on short-term, more expensive borrowing options to cover ground that might have been lost.
The chain reaction continues until something breaks. Like a house of cards, the whole tower can crumble once enough supports fail. And this carries over to your personal life, where you’re taking calls during your son’s football game and getting managed by the clock – not the other way around.
Are you in control of your business or is your business in control over you?
The Great Escape
The first step is awareness. And once you’re ready, you likely have some people, mechanics, and teams built into your business that can drag you back out of the trap. If you don’t, creating them is easy in comparison to exponentially losing your time.
Start with your goals because even writing them down in terms of getting from point A to point B will give you perspective. You might be shocked at how many functions can continue smoothly without your constant input. Developing a financial flight plan will allow your pilots and trusted managers to get the cabin there, with you dictating the journey more passively from the command tower.
Maybe you don’t have all the right people in place. We all know that people are the key, the x-factor, of business.
Start building a robust force with people capacity at the center. If you have not taken the time to forecast capacity, that is a project worth taking on.
From project managers to individual sales team members, you need your people working in the system, by your methods, and without your direct oversight. Sounds nice, right?
It’s Normal to Get Trapped
Acceptance is the difference maker. And honestly, it’s hard to let go of duties in a business you started from scratch, even just a little bit. But if you don’t let it go, your personal life, family, friends, and business will fall further out of reach.
At the end of the day, think about what’s healthy for you, the business, and your financials/cash flow long-term. Running a business is addictive – that’s partially why we do it, right? But there’s a way to follow those thrills without painting yourself into a corner along the journey.
Foresight is here to help, it is worth Scheduling a 25-minute Discovery Consultation with me