Episode 52: 6 Things That Modern CEOs Just Do Differently

Get ready, because everything is about to change. There's a new way of living life and doing business that will blow your mind. This is a podcast all about the timing of life and the timing of success. It's what we call the Right On Time life. And you are listening to the Right On Time podcast with Amber McHugh. Hello. Hello, Amber McHugh here, your host for the Right On Time podcast. Excited today to dig into what is the modern CEO? What am I even talking about here? And what are six things that modern CEOs do differently than your average CEO that do differently than all of the entrepreneurs you know and love out there? There is a different way of leading that moder CEOs embrace. And we're going to dive into six of those things today. Some of them you may be doing, some of them you might be surprised on. So listen in. But first, what is a modern CEO? Modern CEOs are doing things different. Yeah. They can live and work from wherever you define what it means to win. And you're operating different from an entrepreneur in that we are stepping out of an employee, all the things mindset, and we're elevating into a growth mindset from a leadership and a CEO perspective. I love this idea of the modern CEO because as we're growing, businesses like you are, no matter what stage you're at, this role exists. Yes, it does. No matter what stage you're at, even if you just started your business yesterday, this role of modern CEO exists. Maybe we're ignoring it, but it's there. But it's different from entrepreneurship and we stand out. And it's different from our employee mindset where we are cranking it out every day. We are working, we are making it happen. And yes, we might still be cranking it out and making it happen, but as you grow and as you elevate, I need you to carve out time to identify what is it that I should be doing as I'm leading my company forward? Right. As I'm leading my business forward, what do I need to be thinking about? And I want to get really specific on some of those things that modern CEOs do that you may again or may not be doing. Because when we can set you up for success as a modern CEO, your growth will come faster. It's going to feel easier. You will feel more empowered, not by anyone else, but entirely by yourself and the way that you are showing up in your business. And I want that for you. Because so often I hear from entrepreneurs that we start our businesses for Freedom. But how free are you feeling right now as you are running your business? Think about your colleagues, your business BFFs, how free are they feeling? Or is there stress? Is there overwhelm? Is there fear? And we want to shift that and we want to elevate. So that's what we're diving into today so we can elevate into that modern CEO role. Thinking about six things that modern CEOs do different. The first one is the one I love the most for its creativity. I learned this approach and this strategy from the Zappos and more specifically, the Delivering Happiness team. The Delivering Happiness team taught me that when we are leading in businesses, right, whether you're an employee or a CEO, but definitely if you are running your company as a modern CEO and freedom seeking entrepreneur, you have to be able to. To flip pancakes. What do I mean by that? I actually burn my pancakes quite frequently, especially the first three or four. Anybody else, please do not leave me hanging on this. I burn those pancakes. But you know what? On the other side of the burnt pancake is opportunity. It might be burning on one side, but when you're looking at that pancake, I have not burnt the other side of this pancake yet. So we can flip it and we can see opportunity and find opportunity on the other side of that pancake. And this is part of us stepping into that modern CEO role. We've got to become professional pancake flippers. And as things are on fire, as things aren't going as we expected, we cannot sit and we cannot dwell that. Modern CEOs are not dwelling on that, on what's not working. We're learning from what's not working. And we're flipping that pancake and we are identifying where the opportunities are. This leads me to item number two. This one might surprise you. Number two. Yes. Modern CEOs and leaders of growing businesses, entrepreneurs who are starting growing businesses have vision. You have a vision for what you want to create. You have a vision for where you want to be going. You may be familiar with the term visionary, that this is the role in the organization that only you, as the leader of this team, of this company, of this business, hold on to. So, yeah, you've got vision. However. However, the Most successful modern CEOs are also able to adapt and respond to what is happening in the market. I've got a vision, yes. But I don't know exactly how I'm going to get there. I am not so married to how I get there that I will derail myself and Take myself off the path, right? I have a vision, but I'm going to adapt as I get there, based on what is happening in the marketplace, based on what I'm learning as I go, based on how my marketing is working and how I need to adjust and adapt my message to serve my audience better, to sell my products and my services so I can show up for my audience and so ultimately I can reach my goals as well. So yes, hold onto your vision. But vision isn't the end all, be all. This is only part of what it is to grow a business. And you have got to be able to adapt. The most successful CEOs are adaptable when it comes to executing and stepping in to getting results and moving toward that vision. As I sat with them like, oh yeah, okay, it's not necessarily all about the vision, right? And Even low performing CEOs have vision, but if you can't adapt, you're not going to be able to get ahead. So that is number two, number three, modern CEOs understand digital marketing. Period. That's it. What's encompassed in digital marketing, right? Social media, email placement, ads, right. Running online. We're basically so online right now. You know, I used to think about the modern CEO was working from everywhere. Everyone's working from any everywhere right now. And CEOs, business owners, entrepreneurs who don't understand the digital landscape, we're going to struggle. So I want to make sure that you understand how to operate online and you can pick your path. Organic versus paid. Right? You're either going to invest your time or you're going to invest some money in growing this business, even in the digital landscape. And it's always changing. So this ties in what we just talked about on adaptability. But you've got to be able to dial in your digital marketing strategies and you've got to understand how digital marketing works. You don't have to know how to Update Facebook for iOS updates. No, that doesn't necessarily have to be your zone of genius. We can pull in experts for that. Which leads me to item number four. Modern CEOs know when it's time to pull in an expert. If you're working on something, if you're intrigued by something, but you don't understand it, but you think it could help your business if you know that you need to execute on something, but it's not happening because you have no idea how it's time to pull in an expert. In fact, in the book Business Brilliant, which I talk about a lot, self made millionaires and billionaires will pull in an expert 9 out of 10 times when they know that someone else can do it better than they can do it. Conversely, it's those people who stay in the middle class that keep trying to DIY it. So if you are still in that DIY mindset, I want to invite you to start to shift out of that right now. Yes. In the digital marketing world, in the age of online businesses, we can do a lot more on our own. But please don't do everything on your own. Please tap into mentors, experts, advisors. Right? Because it's a lot for you to carry alone and you don't have to do it all alone. Right. That's how you'll shift into the lifestyle that you want, the freedom that you want, the financial success that you want if we lean on each other. In fact, just thinking in my head right now, I am working with a number of experts as I move into a new season of my business. Working with an SEO expert, talking to ads experts on different platforms. There reached out to the CEO of another company who I'd be interested in connecting with because I think we can probably collaborate more. She has a tech based platform, tech based business and mine is less of a tech based business. Right. It's more service oriented in both businesses actually. So I think we can help there. I am also, I'm working with a messaging expert, I'm working with a videographer. I'm tapping in. Could I DIY some of these things? Absolutely. Have I tried to DIY the video stuff before? You know it. I mean, it is what it is. It's time to level up. Is it time for you to level up too? Let's do it together. Come on in. Come on in. Because we're going to take responsibility for what we are doing and what we are creating as modern CEOs. And item number five, you gotta take responsibility for your numbers too. If you don't know your numbers, we're gonna be in trouble. As we are growing your business, what are your profit margins? Where do you want your profit margins to be? What's your revenue month to month? What's your revenue in different product lines? If you have multiple product lines, we wanna know that. What's your cost of delivering services? What's your conversion? What's your average lead value? There are things that we want to dive into depending on your business and the marketing campaigns and the strategies that you are setting up and how you deliver your products and services, they're going to be different for each one of our businesses. What is not different is that we all, as entrepreneurs, business owners and modern CEOs, we need to know those numbers inside and out. And if you were just starting out, please, I'm begging you, start collecting the data now. Start dumping all those numbers into a spreadsheet. I still have all of the numbers from my early years of doing business all the way back to 2008, actually. 2008, all in a spreadsheet. And there are still everything's all in a spreadsheet. There's less and less in the spreadsheet and now more and more is in our systems. But I'm still going back to a spreadsheet to play with those numbers. As I do my business planning, I go back to those numbers and I dial things in like, all right, we need to change this. We need to update this. Numbers aren't going to look like that. Oh, numbers are better than I expected. Oh, this is really working. We need to keep doing more of that. So I'm constantly going back to my numbers. You need to know them. You need to know them. I was actually in a clubhouse room. I haven't been on clubhouse much lately, but I would just sit in those rooms and listen to people pitching. Barbara from the Shark Tank popped into one room and was listening to a pitch and the advice from the investors in businesses. The first question they would ask was about numbers. If somebody didn't know their numbers, number one advice, first step, you gotta know your numbers. Take it back. There's an old show. Was it the Profit? I think it was called the Profit. It was all about turning businesses around. What are they daggiving into the numbers again? If this isn't your area of expertise, if this makes you uncomfortable, partner up with someone who loves to look at the numbers, who can explain things to you so you can start to understand the numbers as well. And don't worry, even Richard Branson is known to not love and understand the numbers. In fact, there's a story that one of his financial managers would give him this analogy to help him understand gross versus net. Gross is the big pie, right? If you were getting a paycheck from a company, that would be your salary, that would be the top line. Then all the benefits come out, all the taxes come out, and what's left over at the end of the day is the net. So to help Richard Branson remember this, his financial manager would say, everything in the pond is what we have. That's our gross. And what you scoop out in the net is what's left over at the end of the day after we pay all of the bills and pay all of our expenses. So I thought that that was a really interesting story to help ground in two things. Number one, even Richard Branson, who's doing pretty well and has been pretty successful on Necker Island, I just read an article about him, actually. He's been hanging out on Necker island and he was sharing about some success strategies for staying healthy and well for the entirety of his life. And so that's one thing that it shows us, but it's also a really cool story on how we start to get some hacks to better understand our numbers. I recently hosted a workshop about building your million dollar marketing plan with my clients and it ended with the numbers, right? If we're going to build a million dollar marketing plan, we're going to build a hundred thousand dollar marketing plan. We're going to build a 10k a month marketing plan. We've got to understand what's going into this from a marketing perspective so we can see if we're getting our output from a revenue perspective and profitability. We don't want to forget about these things. So at the end of that, I popped up the spreadsheet. Everybody's like, I don't like spreadsheets. No, no, no. Because I always, you know, how do you feel about money? How do you feel about spreadsheets? Check in as I go along. And at the end of it, like, this is my favorite spreadsheet ever. I finally like spreadsheets. So team up with someone who can help you understand things and be clear on things as you dive further and further into your numbers. And lastly, number six, what I want you to know and embrace as you step further and further into this modern CEO role while we're on this journey together is so often we're looking at the parts of our business I need to do marketing. I need to look at my numbers, I need to hire someone. I want you to start looking at your business as a whole. One thing impacts the other. And when we start to see how one thing impacts the other, we're going to be able to make decisions faster, we're going to be able to get results faster because we'll be making decisions faster and getting in action faster. And we're going to be able to operate in alignment with our values from end to end. Hey, girls. My girls just got home from school. I forgot it was an early release day. Oh, Harper. Yeah, babe. What's your question? I'm recording a podcast right now. Is it urgent? Okay, what's the question. I have a play day at the park at 3:03 today. Okay, we're gonna talk about that when I'm off the podcast. We gotta regroup on that. Harper has organized a play date. This is actually today. This is actually a great place to land because we've walked through six things that you may want to be thinking about. If you want to elevate and grow your business without working all the time, without working harder than everyone else, you can do this. We can make this happen. And this is part of my life. I have mentioned in the past that one of the things I love about working from home and running my business from home is that my kids will pop in anytime. And, yeah, sometimes I got a lot going on. Okay, okay, then we got to do this. But ultimately, it is one of the most beautiful things and I'm so grateful for that. And you can also design the life and the business you want to and accelerate how you are going to get there, how long it's going to take, have more ease in how we get there, have more joy in how we get there. And part of that is understanding, understanding what your role in your business is and stepping further and further into that. So I'm excited to hear which one of these elements that you are going to pull out and consider in your business. Are you going to start flipping pancakes? Are you going to step further into the digital marketing space and understand that more and more, are you going to embrace adaptability, more holding on to the vision but also being able to adapt? Are you going to dive into your numbers or are you going to start looking at your business as a whole? And that can feel and seem overwhelming, but we're going to stay on this journey together. And we are preparing a training series for you called the Modern CEO Way. And if you want to hop on the wait list for that, it's coming summer 2021. You can pop on over to Amber McHugh ModernCEO and we'll let you know when it's fully ready for you. And for now, this is goodbye. This is good luck. This is I love you. You are awesome. Keep doing what you're doing. You're creating something big in the world and you are right on time. Off to hang out with the kids by Sam.