The CEO Personal Journey, stop doing everything and start doing what a CEO does
What does a CEO do?
As the company’s founder, you do what you have to do to get the company off the ground and to the place where you can begin hiring other people to take things off your plate.
In the early days, it’s fairly standard for the Founder/CEO to do just about everything from incorporating the company and product development to writing social media posts and responding to customer inquiries.
But as you begin to scale your company,
How do you know which things to offload and delegate?
How do you move from doing absolutely everything to doing things that are just for the CEO?
What are the things that only a CEO can do?
These questions get to the heart of real leadership and being the visionary of your company instead of working in it all the time.
We developed a mental model to answer these exact questions, and we call it, “red line, blue line, black line.”
How to determine what a CEO does
Try this activity: Red Line, Blue Line, Black Line
Think of the model laid out horizontally:
Red line activities on the far left
Blue line activities in the middle
Black line activities on the far right
Objective of this activity
As the CEO/Founder of your company, your eventual goal should be to delegate black line activities as fast as possible and spend your time in the blue and red line. Eventually, once you reach a certain scale, you should aim to be in the red line most, if not all, of the time.
Red line activities are things that only the CEO can do.
As the CEO of your company, you have a singular perspective. You’re the only one in the company who has purview over everything — sharing the vision, talking to investors, making hiring decisions, having financial information, attending all of the important meetings for the company, etc.
With that perspective, your highest and best use to your company is to do red line activities as much as possible. So, what’s a red line activity? As CEO, you should be focusing on the following:
Setting company vision: this means continually answering the questions, “Why do we exist? What is the hard problem that we’re working to solve? Who are we as a company?” You’re in charge of setting the overall vision for the company and messaging that vision internally and externally.
Not running out of money: while everyone else might be aware of it, the CEO is the one who wakes up at 4am thinking about how to keep the company solvent. Not running out of money is your responsibility and yours alone.
Set company culture: you need to get the best people and keep them in the best positions that you possibly can. You also need to continually be thinking through what type of culture you want the company to have and modeling that behavior. While you might have an HR director, there is only one person who has the overall responsibility of building the team and company culture (read: it’s you).
Pathfinding: for those of you who are old enough, let’s think about good ole’ Oregon Trail here. When your wagon got to Denver, you needed someone to go out and find a path over the Rocky Mountains. That’s the CEOs job. As the leader of the company, you need to be finding new paths for the company, coming up with new ideas, and continually looking for new opportunities. Ideally, up to 30% of your time should be spent here.
Blue line activities should, at some point, be reserved for your executive team.
These activities are anything you do that requires executive thinking or proactive thinking — think things that the CTO, CMO, CRO, etc would do. For example:
Technical things.
Marketing.
Finance.
Black line activities should, at some point, be what staff does.
These are activities that have clear instructions and don’t require executive-level thinking. For example:
Social media.
Program management.
Product management.
Human resources.
After-activity Reflection
Ask yourself,
What do you notice?
Where do your daily activities fall?
How much of your time do you spend in the red line?
What changes can you make to spend more time in the red line?
Repeat this exercise annually or quarterly to see what’s new, what’s changed, what staff you need to hire or restructure, and to see other insights about your workload. We find this is a fabulous tool to use during strategy days.
Have questions or thoughts about how to do this? We’re happy to help. Give us a shout.