EP 84: CEO Power Hour: How to Manage Your Business Like a Leader
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Hey everybody, welcome back to the Aquaria podcast where we talk about everything from sales and lead gen, launches, mindset, and a little bit of stuff in between. And today we have, I feel like we have a really great opportunity to get into something that we don't talk enough about. And this is going to be about the CEO mindset. So if you're running a business and you have an online business and you are wearing all of the hats, take a stop like right now, just

Find a comfortable spot. You want to listen to this. We have the amazing expert that's going to talk to you about this today. It's Donna Dubé, and she is fantastic. She's a certified director of operations. She's a business growth strategist. She has her own podcast, which is awesome, called Amplify. And Donna's on a mission to help established service-based business owners ditched

the hustle. I like that. I was in that spot and definitely work smarter and not work as hard as we all do and really confidently step into that CEO role. So Donna, thank you so much for being here.

Thank you, Debbie. I'm so happy to have our discussion. Absolutely. You've got years and years of experience helping six and seven figure business owners do exactly what we're going to talk about today. And this is a little bit of a selfish podcast because as I've been running this business for 13 years, I have worn all the hats. I've been working really hard for a number of years now to step into my own CEO mindset. So I'm going to use this as a little bit of a gauge as to how I'm doing.

but also teach and share with the audience on what they can do. So this is going to be fun. I'm looking forward to it. Good. Yeah.

I guess the first thing that I want to share is like, how did you get into this? Like what, what brought you into doing this? Was this always, you know, like this six year old Donna, like I want to be, you know, an operation specialist and teach people about CEO mindset. Like where was this journey? Absolutely not. So for most of us, my journey to entrepreneurship was windy and curvy, not straight and narrow.

And so I actually started my career in healthcare. I was an ICU nurse for a number of years and then left that. And, you know, really, what am I going to do? What am I going to do with my skill sets? How can I help people? I'm very much into serving, but what was that going to look like?

And so at the time, I had a friend who was running a business and she asked if I could help with project management for her business. Well, maybe I can. Let me see. And so I always have been a planner. I've always been a strategic thinker. I always like to, you know, when you say you give me a big idea, I can already map out all the steps on how we're going to get there. The suitcase must be packed and the vacation must be planned. I'm not spontaneous by any means. We're going to be best friends. I am the exact same. Yeah.

Right. I'm packed like nine days out. Right. Packed. Yes. It actually gives me a little anxiety when I hear someone else saying, oh, last minute, they're going somewhere and they haven't planned a trip. Oh, that like bothers me and I'm not even going. So, yeah. Have you thought of this? Have you thought of that? Did you get this? Did you do that? No.

Yeah, right. Yes, exactly. So this is a windy path for you. Yeah. So I helped this business owner with project management and then I started doing it with other businesses as well. So I'd come in the back end, say, okay, I want to write a book or I want to have a launch or I want to do something new in my business. Help me manage that. And what I quickly realized was that many business owners, well, it looks great on the outside.

They're drowning on the back end. So they're working 24 seven. They're doing a lot of repetitive admin tasks. If they do have a team, they're struggling with how to delegate and how to give that team ownership of the things they are giving them. So it really doesn't come back on their plate.

And so that's when I decided to dig more into the operations side, sort of the back end of the business and say, how can we set up systems? How can we set up processes? How do we hire? How do we fire? Because that's part of the game. You know, how do we look at our numbers? How do we make informed decisions and strategic decisions moving forward?

And so that's sort of where I hang out now with business owners most of the time. Yeah. I love it. I love it. I know that people think that this ops stuff is not sexy, but it is truly like when you think about the fact that this is the stuff that

that keeps things moving and running well. And if you do it, your business runs so much more effectively. Like I find it dead sexy. I think it is awesome. Yeah. I love it. I love op stuff. So it just makes it so much easier to make those decisions. Right. I remember working with a client once and she was looking to hire another social media assistant. She had one already who was at capacity and,

And that person was saying, I can't do, I can't post, I can't follow, I can't comment on all that you want. I need help. And so the business owner was like, do I? I'm not sure about the budget. Can we really afford to? So I said, okay, before we look at the budget,

Let's look at where we're posting now and what return we're getting from all those hours that your social media assistant is putting in, right? And as it turned out, she had a few channels where people were taking action. So they were actually following what she asked them to do. A few channels where people were actually doing what she wanted and other channels, it was silent, right? She wasn't reaching her people there. So we're putting a lot of effort and money into posting on those channels when we weren't getting that return on investment.

So when we cut back and she only focused on those one or two channels, one for engagement and one for, you know, advertising her next thing coming up.

It really reduced the amount of time that that social media assistant needed to spend now. And now she could double down on the channels that were actually working. Yeah, being much more effective. And that has to be part of the CEO mindset. So let's talk about that for a little bit. What in your brain when you're trying to describe to a potential client what you do or how they need to be sort of stepping into that CEO role, what do you tell them? And why do so many business owners struggle with this?

Yes. Okay. So I'm going to start with why we struggle with it first. And that's because when most of us start our business, we're solopreneurs. We're doing everything because we're just trying to get the thing off the ground and start to make some actual money, right? But we need to be able to get out of that phase as we grow. And that's where a lot of this trouble comes is that we get stuck in the weeds. We may even hire someone to help us

But the big decisions are still coming back to us. We're still going in and fixing things. And so really, yes, we have a team, but we're the bottlenecks still. So when you think about, well, I'm not really a CEO. I hear that a lot from business owners, right? Because they're thinking of Microsoft. They're thinking of Nike. They're thinking about these big businesses where we have a board of directors. We have a ton of VPs under us. And of course, that's not what we have in the small business entrepreneur world, right?

But you are still responsible for the strategy and the vision. And if you don't have time set aside each week to be responsible for those, who's going to do it? No person you're going to hire is going to take on that role, right? That has to be your role. And you have to be able to communicate to that, to your team, if you have a team. And so really getting some of the other things off of your plate so that you don't have to work 24-7 and you do have time for that bigger picture.

Absolutely. That's the CEO mindset that we're looking for. That's a really great way to put it. I don't know about you, but I think a lot of people also resist because they're coming. A lot of entrepreneurs are coming from either a high pressure environments or corporate, which is my story.

And the thought of having a CEO mindset has a little bit of a sour taste, right? And we're not talking like the board of directors stuff. And we're not talking about making it a, you know, a uncomfortable or, you know, just a really bad experience. We're talking about the mindset where you understand that you have to own all the pieces, but that you don't have to run all the pieces. Right? And I think that's a really important point.

When you're supporting an entrepreneur, when you're helping people, how do you tell business owners or how would you share with business owners how they can identify the tasks or roles that they should be delegating in order to get out of the day-to-day operation? Yes. So this one's simple. I break it into two buckets. So imagine all of the things that happen in your business can fit into two containers. One is growth and the other one is maintenance. Okay.

So things that go in maintenance are the admin work, fixing landing pages on your website, setting up emails, social media posts, bookkeeping, invoicing. Do those things need to happen? Yes, they do. They definitely can happen. But question whether they need to happen by you. Is there some of that you can automate?

Is there some of that you can then delegate to another human being, right? So that it's not five hours on your plate every week doing those kind of tasks. The growth level task is where we see the real return on investment. So that's things like our networking, our partnerships, getting in front of other people's audiences, sales calls, if that's something you have in your business, education one-to-many.

You see where I'm going with this, right? Those are not things you're going to be delegating to a team member. But you need to have time in your week to dedicate to those things. And if you're stuck doing maintenance, there's no time for those growth. Exactly. Absolutely. And I think a lot of people have the challenge of,

of defining what those maintenance tasks are because we are service-based business owners that love what we do. Like we love building the pages or we love, you know, doing the support tasks, but it's those support tasks that keep us in the weeds. And I, you know, I don't know if you know this, but I started as a VA.

Ah, I did not. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I started as a virtual assistant. And so I did all of the tasks and I also ran the business and I did all the backend. I'm also tech savvy. I, you know, I used to do accounts payable and receivable so I can do that. Like I've done all of the jobs and,

So being a business owner, it was like, I can do all of these things. But as the business has grown, it gets more and more difficult to do those things. Those things have to be. But I love your containers. I love the growth and the maintenance. I don't think I've ever looked at it that way, but it makes perfect sense. I really love that.

And I remember, you know, sometimes it's hard to give up those things because they may be things, like you said, you're good at doing. They may be things you actually enjoy doing. I remember working with a client. She was very creative. And so getting in Canva and playing with images, she enjoyed doing that. Right. Yeah.

But again, when we did a time audit, and I know some people gringe at doing the time audit, but it really does help to see where and how you're spending your time. So she did a time audit for three days and realized, whoa, I'm spending three hours this week in Canva playing with images when I have time.

people on my team who are quite capable of doing that, right? Oh, but I don't want to give it up. So then I said, okay, let's look at the objective data. If you were to charge a customer for the hours you work, how much would it be? And she tells me, and then multiply that by the three hours that you spent doing that. That's an expense, if you will, towards your business, right? The three hours that you spent doing that can be image. When we have Sally Sue, who, you know, we're paying in a much lower rate,

who's available has capacity to do those camp images, right? And so just balancing that out and, you know, not to say that you can't be creative, but find an outlet that's not bottlenecking your business. And this is really good because I want to talk about bottlenecks. I have been the bottleneck.

I occasionally and still am. I know a lot of my clients are the bottleneck. We talk about this a lot when we're doing launches because if I need the business owner to take care of all the things before they can get me the stuff that I need in terms of a launch that I might be doing with them and they're the bottleneck, everything's late. And so,

What are common operational bottlenecks that you see with entrepreneurs and how can they overcome them? Yeah. So a few common ones. One is related to decision making in the sense that I have someone on my team who

I've mentored them. I showed them how to do task A, whatever that is. They've done it a few times. I've given them feedback, but I don't get out of that feedback loop. I'm still continuing to check their work week after week, even though they're meeting, let's say, 80% of my standard, right? Or I'm going behind the scenes to look at what they've done, and then I'm actually adjusting it before it gets sent out.

So I'm stuck in that loop where I haven't actually given them ownership. Make these social images. You've done them before. You know what the product or program is. Tweak them from the ones we used last year and put them out there. Let's go. Right? I don't have to look at them once I'm confident that that team member has the ability to meet those standards. Totally. Yeah.

So that's a bottleneck that happens frequently. Now, there's some steps that we have to do to get there, right? Recognize that we have to train them. We have to give them what success looks like. We can't just expect them to walk in and read our minds because...

Because we hired them. I think that's a really, so that's part of the part that I hear a lot of people say, like, I'm like, that is blocking them from being able to do this is I would, you know what, Donna, I'd love to be able to bring on a virtual assistant, a copy, you know, a copywriter, a graphic designer and a podcast editor, but then I have to train them all. And that takes a ton of my time and I don't have the time. And that's what I hear a lot from people is,

Because I have a lot of people that I've worked with and, you know, over the years that have said, I'd love to do this, but I just don't have time, you know, or people to do it. How do you deal with that? Because you and I love ops, right? So we're looking at SOPs, we're looking at training opportunities, we're training, you know, training videos and so on and so forth. Yeah. How do you justify that to somebody who's just like super resistant? Yeah. So I think what it comes down to is, are you looking for growth?

Or do you want to be stagnant where you are right now? Because yes, when you hire someone, there's going to be some short-term pain, but there's going to be long-term gain.

Right? When you want to see that growth, you have to get out of doing the stuff in the weeds. And so ideally, it would be better if we were looking at hiring someone before we reach capacity or over capacity. But many of us don't, right? We get to a point where we're stuck and then it's, you know. So if we can do that earlier on in the process, that makes it easier because we still have some time on our plate to train that person. But if we've waited and we're, you know, we're really stuck,

If we want to grow further, we have to go through that short-term pain. Now, there are ways that we can make it easier on ourselves and easier on them, certainly once we hire them. But I'm not going to sit here and brush it over and say it's no time on the business owner because that's not the case. It is going to be time.

on you. But, you know, setting up some documents beforehand, setting up a central hub, you know, with what's my brand in colors, what's my mission, what's my value, who are our target audience, these are all things that you can build before you even hire someone. And they have access to this document. So they don't have to tap into your brain every time they have a question, they can go there and get some of the resources, right? Setting up SOPs, whether that's written or video, you know, I'm a fan of both depends on the learner and

The good part about Visio is it's easier to do. The bad part about video is that software changes. And so the video has to be updated, right? But if we start with a video and then that team member can then write out an SOP, because I don't believe that you, the business owner, are responsible for writing all the SOPs. I feel the same. Yeah, right? You're responsible for making sure that team member knows what they need to do and what success looks like and when it needs to be done by you.

But they're the owner of the task. Yeah. Right. So keeping that front and center. So in short answer, are you looking for growth, really? And if you are, then we have to go through this to get there. That's the real answer, isn't it? That's the real thing that you have to be able to answer. Like, if you want to grow, it's going to hurt a little in the short run. And it's going to be so much better in the long run. So much better. Yeah. And remember that delegation is like a muscle.

We have to work it and train it, right? So delegation may not come easy to you the first time you hire someone on your team. It may not go as smooth as you want, but that's a muscle you have to work and get used to, just like you do leading people. If you're talking about delegation the way you are, and you're talking to entrepreneurs that are listening to this conversation and going, Donna, I want to do this so bad.

What's the first hire they should consider? I wish I had an easy answer for that. It really depends on the business and where they're at. But what I like to do is before we even get to hiring, there's a few steps we can do first. And so number one is what are we doing that we can actually stop? Yep, I said stop. Because most of us are doing things that aren't bringing us a return on investment.

So that means a business owner has to do a little bit of digging, looking at the data and saying, okay, I'm doing three reels a week. Is that benefiting me? Are people seeing it? Am I getting action? Are people commenting? Are they coming to my email list? Whatever it is.

And so, you know, not to pick on social media, but that's a big one that comes up a lot when people are looking at, am I wasting my time? Right. Yeah. And so looking at what strategies am I currently doing and am I getting a return on investment on them? And if I'm not, then I need to stop it. And for some people, that's scary. You know, I've worked with business owners think, oh, I can't stop that. That's necessary. Right. And so what we'll do then is say, OK, let's stop it for 30 days.

Stop it for the next month and let's see what happens. And most of the time our business doesn't fall apart, right? Because we weren't actually getting a return on investment from that thing anyways. We just weren't confident to let it go. This is where I think having a CEO dashboard is essential. Not enough people in our space do their own reporting and have metrics to look at a CEO dashboard. And it doesn't have to be complicated because,

It can be pretty easy. Honestly, it's, you know, the starting numbers at the beginning of the month, as an example for social and the ending numbers at the end of the month for social and how many times you posted in that month. Right. And to see if there's been any effect. Right. Yeah. And I had a client that honestly swore up and down and even got a little uppity about

having their videos posted on YouTube. This isn't going to work. YouTube doesn't work for me. I hate YouTube, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, have you ever tried it? No, but I just know it's not going to work. And I said, okay, we're going to try it for 60 days. I know 60 days feels long, but you only have to record with me for two. So I literally did two days of Zoom recording. Like I was on Zoom with them directing the YouTube videos. Mm-hmm.

Right. And so they, they had our own setup. They were recording and I was sitting there and I'm like, okay, next video, here's what we're going to do. So we did two days of video recording and that well lasted over the 60, just so you know, and we created a CEO dashboard just to prove this. And at the end of the 60 days, we had a hockey stick.

Like full hockey stick. Like we had, we went from zero subscribers. We went up to like 60. Then we went to 120. We went from views of like 39 views up to, you know, 1100 views and so on because they had great content. I knew they would kill it, but you just have to get out of your own way. And sometimes I think people don't look at the numbers enough and I love numbers, even though they don't love me sometimes, but I love them. And so I have a love hate relationship, but I have a CEO dashboard. Yeah. Right. Yeah. One of the best hires I ever did,

and this relates to this conversation is I hired a virtual assistant about four years ago, four or five years ago. And just starting off with little itsy bitsy things, right? Just helping me out here, there and everywhere. And that person learned the ins and outs of a lot of areas of my business.

I've since promoted that person into operations. That person trains all the other VAs that come on board. Yes. Right. And records the videos that get turned into SOPs that live in our, you know, repository. And that person runs that. And I don't have to do that anymore because that is, for me, that would be the bottleneck that would keep me from hiring the next VA that I need to support my business and my growth. And simply by doing that, the growth increases.

starts to add up. So I'm a complete convert and a complete, like, I preach your message, right? You know, do you want to grow or do you want to stagnate? And if you want to grow, these are the steps. I love it.

Yeah, 100%. And I think the big thing now too is that you have this person who knows the ins and outs of your business. So when a new team member comes on, the questions aren't being directed to you. Right? There's a middle person who is aware of what's going on. Sure, she's going to bring some things to you, of course. That's the point of her role. But a lot of things she can handle and say, oh, it's over here, it's over there. We'll do this, we'll do that. And you don't even have to be in the middle of it. Exactly. Yeah.

Exactly. I love promoting from within. It makes me so happy to do it. Yeah. If people are sitting and listening to this conversation, if you've made it this far in this podcast, thank you. But if you're listening to this and what Donna is saying is resonating with you, Donna, what would you tell people is the next three steps they need to take to move in this direction more?

successfully. Yeah. So number one is set up what I call a CEO power hour. And so it's very similar to this dashboard that you're talking about, but it's one hour for you to review, reflect and set your priorities.

And so you do it each and every week. It's in your calendar as a recurring task, recurring meeting, the same time each and every week. And the reason for that is we want to build a habit. Oh yeah, it's Tuesday morning, that's my CEO power hour timer. It's Friday afternoon. The day of the week and the time doesn't matter as much as consistently doing it week after week. And so you're going to review your top metrics. You're going to look at where you're at, where you're going. You're going to look at your next week.

And say, what do I need? What are my priorities? What are my goals? What's the next step that I have to do to get to that goal? And if I have a crazy week, where can I ask for help? Because it's a big thing that we don't do, right? Maybe you're traveling. Maybe you've got extra things with the kids that week, whatever it is, where can you ask for help? Whether that's within your business or at home. But just looking at what is my week and being realistic with what you can do with the time that you have.

I love it. So that's number one, your power hour. And then number two is actually getting the top priorities on your calendar. And so this may seem kind of funny, but to a lot of us, there's three systems that we need running in the background, rinse and repeat. We need marketing, we need sales, and we need client delivery. But if you go and look at your calendar right now, do you have blocked off time for the things you're responsible for in your marketing department?

in your sales, and in your client delivery. Client delivery, most of us have because we either meet in clients one-on-one or we have a group or whatever that looks like. So that usually gets on the calendar. But what about onboarding and offboarding? What about collecting testimonials? That's all a piece of that client delivery, right? And so making sure that we have time set aside for the pieces that we're responsible for in each of those processes so that it's happening rinse and repeat every week.

We're not dropping the ball in marketing while we're doing client delivery and then, oh, I got to rush and find clients. I don't have any, right? That feast and famine we want to avoid, obviously. So that's the second thing. Do we have time set up in our calendar for those things, right? And then third is, are we spending enough time in those growth level tasks, right? So we were talking about growth and maintenance earlier in the podcast. Do we have time set aside for those growth level tasks each and every week?

And so when I work with clients, we kind of gamify it a little bit. We use something called a CEO score. And so you score yourself each week. You're trying to hit a certain target of how much time you're spending on growth of all tasks. And that just kind of helps keep you motivated and keeps it front and center so that you are doing that each and every week. And we're not getting to the end of the week and going, oh, yeah, I'm

I didn't do any networking. I didn't do any because I was doing admin or whatever else instead. So those are the three steps. Those are great. I really, really like those.

I think I could implement some of those even more than I am right now. Fantastic. Donna, you're amazing. I'm so happy to get to talk to another Canadian. Yeah, it's great. And you also live in my old neck of the woods that I lived in very briefly, but still not far from where I was, which is cool. And so I'm just glad that we're just getting to connect. The last thing I wanted to chat with before we sort of wrap up is for the past...

past couple weeks now I think you've been one of the contributors in the bundle that I have so many bundles and I'm so happy that you have been I'd love if you could just share briefly like what's your experience been like and this is not a solicited testimonial I literally want to know like the good bad and the ugly how has it been for you

Yeah, thank you. So when I saw the concept of the mini bundles, I was like, this is interesting because, you know, I've participated in bundles before. I've hosted bundles before, but they've always got what seemed to be a short timeline, like get all these things and you've got seven days. Right. So the concept of being spread out over 90 days is wonderful. That really intrigued me. So I was like, I want to be a part of this and see. Yeah.

And so I definitely am getting signups. I like it from that perspective. One thing I do find a little bit hard to track, and now I'm going to my calendar to actually put reminders in there, is to remember to promote. Because I have, I did at the very beginning, and I have my week, but then, you know, you kind of lose sight of it because it's not just a seven day thing.

Yes. Right. So just, you know, that little reminder to say, hey, I can still promote this thing this week or Saturday or whatever day, even though it's not my, you know, featured week. So that's one thing I found a little bit tricky from a contributor standpoint. But otherwise, I like the idea from a participant's standpoint. Thank you for telling me that. That's great feedback. We are always working to improve. And that's

And that's a big opportunity. I love that. I love that. I'm glad you're getting leads. I'm glad you're getting that. That was the whole point. And many bundles is just something that's going to keep growing. We are surpassing what our goal was for this point in the bundle, and it's going to be a continuous bundle.

And we're going to keep it going. So I'm really excited by that. We're surpassing some of the goals that we had initially when we planned it back out in October and it launched in November. So I'm really grateful that you've been part of it. You've got a great gift in Many Bundles. So if you go to manybundles.com, you can go register for free. You can get Donna's gift at the time that we're recording this. It is still there. So go and get it. And then Donna, where can people get in touch with you and connect with you?

Yeah. So my website is CEOamplify.ca. So welcome to go there. I've got some free resources there. And then of course, love listening to podcasts. You can hear me natter away a little bit more. No, they're short episodes, I promise. At CEOamplify is my podcast name. Amazing. Thank you so much for doing this, Donna. And I appreciate it just beyond belief. So thank you again.

Thank you. Absolutely. And if you are listening to this podcast and you've made it this far, I appreciate you. And make sure that you are subscribing or liking or following this podcast because it gets in front of more people just like you that need this information. And to learn more about what I do and how you can connect with me, go to JennyWright.com. Check out Many Bundles at ManyBundles.com.

and make sure that you are getting all the goodies that are in that to help you motivate and grow and scale your own business. Thanks so much for being here and we'll talk to you all soon. Take care.