029: Harness the Smart CEO’s Secret Weapon & Make Every Second Count!

Hey, have you heard There's a new style of CEO on the block. The modern CEO. And she is changing the way businesses are run. She's setting her own hours and her own salary. She's creating a business around what matters most to her. Freedom, family, and impact. And her corner office looks nothing like what you'd see on Wall Street. It's a kitchen t your grandma's lake house, a spacious home office, the living room floor maybe surrounded by kids and crayons or the local coffee shop. Your business, your way. This modern CEO is here to stay. Because when you embrace your role as modern CEO, you will have more freedom, more profit, and more fun. Most importantly, you'll fall in love with your life and a business in a way you've only dreamed. Trust me, this isn't a pipe dream reserved for only a select few. You are the modern CEO. You are creating a business and life you love because a better business means a better life. Hey, hey, hey. I'm your host, Amber McHugh. Welcome back to the podcast. We are in the middle of our how to Clone Yourself series, and the last two episodes included very specific action plans and steps you can take to start to get more more done in your business and your life and have more impact without actually doing more work. In fact, the first step that we took was to take a look at where the time is actually going anywhere and to complete a time inventory. As unsexy as that sounds, it's actually a hugely valuable tool. So I hope that you are just heading into your third week of completing the time inventory as you listen to this episode. If you're following along live. And then the second week, we looked at how to create your must do list, because for a lot of us, I'm not pointing any fingers, but I will have you know that I am in this bucket. My to do list can get really, really, really long sometimes, but I have to remind myself and check myself to remember there is really a short list of things that I actually must do. And there are a lot of reasons for that. Some things don't really have that much impact, so I don't really need to do them anyway. Other things, I can put a system in place and share that work with someone else. And in even other cases, I shouldn't really be spending that much time thinking about it because there's an expert out there who will be able to do that particular thing much better than I can. We're gonna dive into some of that now today, when we look at the third step in our how to clone yourself process, which is what to stop doing and then who's gonna do all those things that aren't on our personal must do list. And if you're noticing a trend that we're starting to look at how you can shift and change how you are showing up in the world and how you actually show up and take action in, and we're moving into a new way of being. We're totally shifting how you show up in your life and how you do business step by step in this how to clone yourself process. For one important reason, as Henry Ford said, if you do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always wanted. Got these words and this idea that old ways won't open new doors are so powerful and impactful for me and they have been throughout my life. And it's actually what led me to be able to live and work and do life so differently than what I imagined. Because I am right now sitting and living in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. And at the same time, even though I'm living in Africa, I'm still able to run my boudoir photography business with my partner Joanna and our fabulous team over at 3 Boudoir, we're starting a spin off brand called Empower and Rise. Because empowered women empower women and we rise together. And I run a global consulting company where I'm speaking around the world and I'm able to connect and chat with you in this way, which makes my, my gratitude for the Internet so much more, more powerful and real than it ever was before. But the real question is, how in the world are we able to run a photography business that does more than 1,000 photo shoots a year while I'm sitting in Africa? There are four key reasons. My business partner and our team and I can run a business with me in Africa and my business partner, frankly, wherever in the world she wants to be as well. And our team, wherever they want to be. We do this because we focus on, number one, our strengths. Number two, we outsource. Number three, we've got systems in place. And number four, we're transferring ownership. I'm going to break these down in just a little bit of detail. But before I do, to give you some additional context, we do not have a company office. We operate virtually as a company for the most part, and we rarely meet in real life. As a team, we do most of our connection by Slack and Zoom. Of course, that comes with some challenges, right? Virtual communication can be tricky sometimes, especially when you're Working with a lot of people every single year. But our photographers and shoot stylists meet with clients in person more than 1,000 times a year. For me and the way that we set up our business, the way that Joanna, my business partner and I set up this business, moving to Ethiopia was as easy as moving to Florida. As far as our photography business is concerned. Our strengths. We are laser focused on operating in our strengths. My strengths don't require me to be on site and in person outsource. We have a team of more than 20 people helping us run the business so my business partner and I can lead the business. This is the power of outsourcing systems. We have strong systems in place for everything we do in this business that enables everything to run with more ease. It allows for role and job sharing when people are on vacation or we want to change things up. And it enables my business partner and I to focus on the most important things so we can easily support each other. Everything is systematized so we can easily hand things off to other people. And ultimately it takes us less time to get things done as well. And number four, we transfer ownership. Not only are we building a team to support the growth of the business, we transfer ownership to those team members when we transfer ownership, not just task management, we're actually growing a team of leaders, not just a team of people who are waiting around for us to tell them what to do. And that shift right there, that transfer of ownership is powerful. And yes, we'll break that down down later on in the series. And we're going to go into much more detail in the upcoming book how to Clone Yourself, which you can sign up to watch for@howtocloneyourself.com so we built the business entirely with systems in mind because we didn't want to create another J O B for ourselves. We wanted to be able to share the work, share the wealth and be as efficient and effective as possible when we were doing the work. Because if you haven't already heard this story, or if you have, you'll remember that we started this business as a part time side hustle alongside our full time jobs. And we grew the photography business to more than 80,000 in annual revenue as a part time job. So basically, Joanna and I created full time income for ourselves through this side hustle. What started as a side hustle and now it's a full on business. Effective CEOs tend to spend about 11% of their work time improving systems and strategies. According to a study by HBR in 2018 since we started the photography business while we were both working full time jobs, everything needed to be simplified, streamlined, and we needed to focus on the most important things at any given time. We needed to be able to pick right back up where we left off the night before when we sit down to work again. As much as we had going on when we had time to work, we didn't want to waste time thinking, what should we do now? We didn't want to have to remember how we did this system, how we placed this order through our product and our printer for the photography orders the time before. We didn't want to repeat ourselves or duplicate each other's efforts. And that's why systems were so important. They can make you more efficient, they speed things up and they allow you to hand things off to other people when you're ready for that in your cloning journey. Right on time. When we returned to our side hustle after a full day of work at the full time job, we were able to reduce wasted time thinking about where were we again? And we just went right back to our systems, most of which we created on the go, most of which continuously change even today. And that's all okay. What's important is that you just have some key systems in place. You don't have to create them all at once. After all, you also have to focus on growing the business. Nor should you expect your systems will never change. Oh, I created the system, it's never going to change. Nope, not reality. Because they will change and some will change more than others. So not only do systems become a key vehicle for you to outsource and build your team efficiently when you're there, but they're also a cloning mechanism in and of themselves. Because of the time they are going to save you. You can spend that mental energy that you've spent thinking about what you need to do, shift that. And now you can spend that mental energy on your visionary CEO role and on serving your clients. Start building your systems now as you go. And where do you start? I recently heard a great analogy that while you've got a lot of things happening in the business, you've also got a lot of things happening in your body. But if you think about those most important systems, what comes first, what you absolutely need for life. You've got to have a heartbeat, you've got to have oxygen, right? That's where you're going to start with your systems. And outsourcing and building the team will be easy when you have your systems in place. When we started to outsource in the photography business. We realized we weren't enjoying some of the work we were doing and that is what we outsourced first. In addition, we were starting to feel bogged down. Maybe a correction here. I was starting to feel bogged down and it was very clear that I wanted to create this business for freedom. I didn't want to create a J O B. So anything that started to fall into the J O B category I quickly evaluated and built a plan to systematize it or outsource. As Michael E. Gerber says in E Myth, if your business depends on you, you don't own a business. You have a job and it's the worst job in the world because you're working for a lunatic. Yep, I totally felt that way sometimes. The first activities we outsourced were product fulfillment and post shoot customer service in our photography business. 3 Boudoir we outsourced this work to my sister who was living in New York at the time I was in Maryland. Joanna was in Washington D.C. and at this time the majority of our clients were from the Maryland D.C. area. Joanna wasn't ready to hand off more of her work and responsibilities. So what I did is I took a portion of my profit and I paid that to my sister. Did that cause frustration between me and Joanna because I was now technically getting paid less at the end of the day? No, absolutely not. I wanted to maintain a certain lifestyle and I'm all about sharing the work and sharing the wealth. If I make less for a short time, but it allows me happiness, freedom and more long term growth and potential, I am a okay with that. Sometimes we've got to make investments like this in our business and in our lives for the sake of long term growth and the vision that you hold. Joanna and I rolled through variations of outsourcing and compensation models over the 10 years that we've been in business. Over time we make sure that we're each being compensated not only for the work we're doing, but the value we add. Early on it was Joanna or me doing everything. As you can imagine when you're in startup mode, right? We shot at my house to start. Fast forward to today. The team is up to more than 20 people and we're building our management team that further allows us to stay out of the weeds and stay in that leadership position. We're also looking forward to empowering other women on our team to continue to rise. And you'll hear as I'm speaking, some of the values that we hold and some of the ways that we try to operate and infuse through our culture. So we set the tone for everybody to have freedom and be successful, whatever that looks like for them. We immensely trust, love and value the role each and every person on our team plays. And we want them to know it. We want them to grow as much as we want to grow. So we've designed our business, our compensation model, our systems, everything, in a way where we all rise together. We're going to dive into the details of setting up systems and outsourcing. More later, but now I wanted to paint this picture for you of what our business looks like today compared to what it looked like when we started and how it's working so well with me in Africa. Random and our team spread across more than eight cities in the United States. So we only shoot in six cities, but our team is spread across. And actually we also have one other international team member. So before we take a closer look at your systems and the team building plans that you may want to put in place, it's time to think through how you're going to get more efficient in your business. Many times when I speak with business owners about their systems or outsourcing plans, they say, I don't even know where to start. You, my friend, are already ahead of the game because you've been following along in this how to Clone Yourself series. You have a time inventory that outlines all of the things you need to do or need to get done. You also have your personal must do list. Everything else can be deleted or it's going to fall into a bucket in what I call the Get Efficient prioritization matrix. So what is the Get Efficient prioritization matrix? Okay, so this looks great as a visual. So I want you to pop on over to howtocloneyourself.com to make sure you are all set signed up to get the visual when this baby, this book baby comes out. But for now, I'm going to describe it to you and you're going to use in your Get Efficient prioritization matrix four distinct categories. And we're going to use this matrix to get clarity on what you may want to outsource, what needs to be systematized, and what you can simply leave as is. Okay, this matrix is important because so often we want to outsource, get help, declutter, get more organized, but we don't even know where to start. This is going to help you see exactly where to start. No more unproductive wheel spinning, no more rocking, no more focusing on the One and the five dollar bills. Can you guys tell that I like metaphors? Ay yai yi yi. I just keep them coming, keep them coming. Those visuals really help me assess though and check myself. Wait a Second, is that 100? Should I grab that $100 bill or is that a one? And I'm not going to focus on that right now because my attention needs to go to the 100 so I can stop rocking and I can hop off the hamster wheel. So let's take a look at the categories that you are going to want to consider as you to want break down all of those things that are on your activity list from your time inventory but they weren't on your must do list. And yes, things are going to come up. You're going to realize like, oh, I forgot about this thing or one month from now, everything's going to change. That's okay. You're going to grow, change, evolve, think of other things. You are right on time to do this with us right, right now. I want you right now to focus on the things you currently do and that you want to start divvying up so we can get it out of your head on paper. That in and of itself is going to help clear space, help get you cloned so you can focus on the important things and have more impact. So we've got a few different categories here. We're going to start with what you may want to outsource. Do you hate it? Do you spend a lot of time on it? If you hate it, it's an energy suck for you. That's a problem for me because that's taking energy away from things that you love and things that are important to you and things that fuel you. And if you hate it and you're spending a lot of time on it, I want you to think about outsourcing it like yesterday. It's a double ding when you don't like doing something. And on top of that, it takes forever. Think of the energy suck as we're talking about it now. I can almost feel it. I can almost feel that weight on my shoulders. I actually, as I think about things that I spend a lot of time on and I hate doing, I get a little bit emotional. I want all of us, you included, to be spending more time in a space of joy, in space that fuels you because that's how you will have the energy to pour, pour into and serve other people. Think of the time you could be spending thriving and bringing in new business in another area of your company. If you weren't spending your time on this thing and your energy wasn't being drained from it. So think about outsourcing those things now. Of course, not everything can be outsourced, right? We've all got a budget, no matter how big or small our company is. So there are going to be some things that you may want to think about outsourcing and or systematizing for now. So if you hate it and you only spend a little bit of time on it, I think you should outsource at asap. By keeping things you despise on your list, again, you're not setting yourself up for success. You're not setting yourself up to best serve your customers. At the very least, you've gotta systematize these activities. So if you do keep doing them, you spend even less time on them. So you can easily hand them off to someone when the time is right. I personally come back to this challenge again and again. Outsource or systematize. Sometimes it's a combination of both. Laundry gets outsourced for me. I don't do it well, or I just don't do it. I procrastinate it for six months out of the year. In fact, I have noticed now that we live in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and our laundry is actually done daily, we spend less money on clothes because in the past I had to have enough clothes to get through a week or two for the kids. Now I only need basically two outfits because they're washed so fast. They just alternate throughout the week. And yes, one of my children actually does this. Harper has a couple of favorite dresses. So she'll wear the red dress on the Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and she'll wear the black dress with the daisies on Tuesday and Thursday. No joke. I'm not kidding you. So outsourcing in this instance has saved me money. Meals are a mix of both for me. Sometimes they make them, sometimes you order out, sometimes someone else is making them. Technical activities in my business are something I choose to outsource. I did do them for a long time on my own. There are a lot of DIY options out there for us, right? But it was extremely time consuming and I didn't do it well to this day. Yes, I can set up a landing page in Leadpages. While I enjoy sometimes getting in there and tinkering, it's still time consuming because I overthink it all. When there's space in my calendar, I might do it, but usually I get help then systematize in the priority position or Outsource if you love it, but it takes forever to do so. Yes, if you can sense and hear here I am differentiating between outsourcing, outsourcing or systematizing and systematizing or outsourcing because I want to give you a structure and a framework to prioritize based on where you are in your business, the time you have available, the budget that you have in front of you that presumes that you have a budget in place. If you don't, let's definitely talk because we want to make sure you have your budget and your revenue plan in place so you can be a good steward of your company's money. So systematize it or outsource it if you love it, but it takes you forever to do. Anything that takes a ton of your time and is process oriented, absolutely needs to be systematized. But then again, you can outsource it based on priority. Here, for example, if it's a low priority item, you may decide to keep it because it's quick to get done and get out of your way, or it's not something you want to invest in right now. But if it's a low priority item and it tends to take up a bit of your time, it's got to go. Activities that become a huge energy drain and a drain on your time are activities we want to look at closely because your time and your energy are your two most important resources. You need need them both to be at full capacity if you're going to clone yourself and make the most of your high impact activities. Now, I mentioned there was a fourth category which was to keep on keeping on keep on keeping on doing those things you love and aren't going to be a drain on your time. It's a no brainer to keep doing it if you love it and it's simple. Unless of course you find someone who loves it just just as much as you do, or even more. In that case, you may want to train that person up as your backup. Or if it starts to take up way too much of your time and you can't actually perform your role as CEO anymore, then you want to make some shifts, right? But there are some things that you're going to keep on keep it on because it's good for business because you love it. Again, let's think back to Oprah, like we talked about in the last episode, who is still on the COVID of her magazines and still shows up to engage with her audience. So all of this and dividing using the get efficient prioritization matrix what you're going to outsource outsource or systematize systematize or outsource or keep on Keep it on is going to enable you to get back to what you love. As powerful as the act of outsourcing and systematizing are, it's equally as powerful to go through these steps to create mental space so you have the capacity to lead. Getting clear on where your time goes with the time. Inventory, your must do list and what you will systematize, outsourced or keep as is is going to free up your brain power to grow this business and to focus on what matters in your life. Family is what matters to me. Applying the approaches we look at and how to Clone yourself has allowed me to more than double my family time. In the last year we took more vacations than we did in the last 10 years. This is possible for you too. You can grow a business and still have freedom. Now I've got one more team tip for you before we wrap up this episode. If you're working through how to clone yourself with your team again, invite the team to also identify areas that they see are opportunities for efficiency gain. I want you to remember you are not in this alone. Leverage and work with your team to get more of your vision in the world. We are here for you. And yes, please tag me in Amber McHugh on various social media channels using the hashtag howtoclone yourself so we can stay connected. I want to wrap up this episode reminding you there is no time like the present to use the Get Efficient Prioritization matrix to map out what are you going to keep on keeping on? What will you systematize or outsource? What will you outsource or systematize and what do you straight up need to outsource with all of this that we just went through, I am so excited to see and hear from you and how you're progressing in the how to Clone Yourself process. So again, tag me in, use that hashtag and be sure to pop on over to howtocloneyourself.com to get the full scoop on the how to Clone Yourself process. I so loved hanging out with you today and I love seeing more of you in the world world. You are right on time.