Become the CEO of Your Business (and Life!)
It’s a big shift from employee to entrepreneur. It’s a big shift from entrepreneur to CEO too.
To become a CEO is to craft your ideal experience as founder and chief executive. It’s an opportunity to build your business (or your life) around your talents, your audience, and the culture you want to create, and potentially change the world.
Now you may think it’s premature to think that far ahead. Maybe you consider yourself more of a solopreneur or don’t have anybody to influence (yet), but playing big and thinking long-term is advantageous.
Thinking like a CEO can accelerate your growth and explode your potential — you are creating the future, so why not make it ideal?
Step One — Foundation
A lot of entrepreneurs make the mistake of thinking credentials or experience matters most. And those things help, no doubt about it, but even more essential is a foundation of habits that will allow you to start, build momentum, and carry on to see it through.
You will be learning on the fly for the foreseeable future, so that means you’ll need to keep yourself out of the weeds, focus on the bigger picture, and take decisive, strategic, and intentional action, with the self-awareness and confidence to evaluate what’s working.
A strong foundation is equal parts process and mindset. If you can be ok with being where you are and unwavering about where it’s leading, humble but resolute, chart the course, and then rise to the occasion (again and again), you’ll get there.
Step Two — Vision
Speaking of knowing where you are going, building a business is only partly about serving your customers and audience; it’s also about creating the experience and environment of your dreams.
I’m prepared to catch some flack about that. Many think of servant leadership as the epitome of the CEO evolution: Putting the customer first, meeting an urgent need, and delivering the right product at the perfect time while exercising authority instead of power is the be end-all.
