Over the past few pages, we’ve covered a lot of ground.
So let’s do a quick recap of five key principles to this point. Then we’ll get back to our example.
PRINCIPLE #1: Focusing on marketing, hiring and systems is what leads many businesses to look good on the outside, while being a hot mess on the inside.
PRINCIPLE #2: Scalable, sustainable businesses are based on three fundamental structures: results, profit and team.
PRINCIPLE #3: It’s not enough to address results, profit and team directly — this will keep you as the bottleneck in your business
PRINCIPLE #4: Truly sustainable scale comes when you focus on how results, profit and team align—through model, operations and culture.
PRINCIPLE #5: All together, this is what allows you to Be The Visionary CEO, where you can just show up, do your thing, and know that everything else is taken care of.
Now. Onto our story.
You may know Denise Duffield-Thomas as a best-selling author and creator of the highly successful Money Bootcamp online program.
But what you may not know is that just a few years ago, she felt completely overwhelmed by her rapidly growing business.
“My business had been doing really great, but it got to a point where I could feel that I was being a bottleneck in the business. I could tell that the way that I had been working was not going to continue working for the company.
I felt that every new person that was coming in was on my back. I’m so used to holding it; how can it survive without me holding it?”
With everything you’ve learned so far, you can probably guess what the underlying problem was.
(Hint: while she had a brilliant model, strong operations, and was building a great culture … they hadn’t ever been designed to hold the business’ structures together. Ergo she had to)
But, just to be safe, we asked Denise to do a simple assessment to validate that we had the right culprit.
Here’s what happened next:
Now, see, that?
That is what happens when you install the Visionary CEO Framework in your business.
It allows you to shift from being down in the weeds of your business, and ascend to truly being the Visionary CEO.
In The Weeds
- Sets sales targets
- Reviews sales pages
- Writes copy
- Shows up on social media
- Records trainings
- Guests on podcasts
- Creates clients materials
- Does coaching calls
- Provides customer support
- Chooses tech platforms
- Gathers bookkeeping receipts
- Meets with the lawyers
- Updates processes
- Hires, trains & fires team members
- Delegates tasks
- Manages performance
- Does quality assurance
- Catches dropped balls
- Puts out fires
Visionary CEO
- Doesn’t need to think about marketing or sales at all—you’ll keep getting more and more perfect fit clients
- Focuses on creating, ideating, and doing new things when you want to—not because you “need to record a new podcast episode this week”
- Chooses when, where, and how to engage with clients—parachuting in when it feels good, but not needing to be there on the day-to-day
- Ends work on time every day, taking real vacations—with 100% confidence that your team and structures are THERE, proactively iterating, improving and growing your business
What Denise experienced is a rapid change in how her business operated and how she was able to spend her time.
(Not to mention, the extra cash & time outside the biz allowed her to buy and operate the amazing Lorn Rose Farm!)
Our guess is that you’d much rather be spending your time doing the Visionary CEO tasks on the right, rather than in the day-to-day, too.
So let’s look at the process that Denise followed, so you can do this, too.
And then we’ll let you decide what you want to do, from there.
