8 Tips For Becoming a Successful CEO

One of the things I often hear from CEOs is that they get frustrated with their COO saying no and what's really actually happening. More often than not, the COO's not saying no. They're probably saying not.

Now.

The reality is most of these entrepreneurial CEOs have been thinking about their project ideas maybe for months or days or weeks or even hours. And then they walk up to their COO and kind of drop it on their plate and expect them to run with it. And most COOs tend to ask seven or eight questions to understand a project, or maybe they put in place the.

Systems or the playbook to be able.

To run with the project. So often when they're asking the ideas or the questions, they're just trying to catch up with the CEO. My suggestion to all COOs is instead of saying no or not now, say this. When the CEO walks up to you with their new projects, I love that idea, I love that project. Let me ask you a bunch of questions so I can understand it better.

Then we can actually roll it out.

Then the CEO will sit down. They'll let you pepper them with questions all day if you need to, because they know you're engaged in the project.

And you're excited about putting it in.

That will help everyone in the organization.

If you're the CEO of a company right now and you haven't written your own book, it's kind of irresponsible of you. It's such an easy way to actually build your brand, build authority, connect with your customers, be a recruiting tool for you to bring new key people into the organization. And it's cheaper than ever and easier than ever to get your book published. So I've now written five books. I have two more that I'm working on the rough frameworks for. And one of my business partners, I guess in a way is a company called Scribe Media. This is who I've used to write three of my books, by the way. If you ever want an introduction, just drop me an email or a comment. I'll introduce you to the team at Scribe. The process that I used with them to write three of my books, Vivid Vision, Meeting Suck and Free PR is they do a series of interviews with me about, I think it's six or seven one hour meetings where they ask me questions about my book and they pull all the content out of my head. And then each meeting the book gets to be kind of more and more built and they start filling in the gaps. So by entrepreneurs thinking out loud and getting the Ideas out of our head. They get the book actually written for you. So it's an easy process. It's not a very expensive process. And there's massive leverage that comes off of that. And in today's day and age, again, if you don't have a book and you're a CEO of a company, you're really missing a huge opportunity.

So one of the best traits that I've seen for entrepreneurs is called introspection. It's about the ability to blame yourself for the problem or look at your own contribution to the problem versus blaming the external world. It's all too easy to blame your employees or blame your suppliers, or blame the economy or blame the market, or, you know, blame, blame, blame. But the reality is, at the end of the day, everything stops with the CEO. It really is your responsibility. It was your responsibility to hire the team. It was your responsibility to find good marketing consultants. It was your responsibility to grow the team's skill set. So if you take responsibility for all of that, your team gives you a lot more respect. And then your team will stop externalizing and blaming the outside reasons as well. If they realize, wow, you're always taking blame for stuff, they feel like in a no blame environment where you're not really blaming the other things, they realize that if they blame themselves, you're going to be there to support them as well. So I think introspection is a really strong skill for entrepreneurial organizations to have.

So there's a real big difference between.

A wartime CEO and a peacetime CEO.

And the terminology was really popularized recently in a book by Ben Horowitz called the Hard Thing About Hard Things. One of the things I love about the wartime CEO is during a time of stress, during an economic downturn, during a recession, during a time like we just went through with COVID when everything starts to freeze up, people get nervous and they're looking for a leader to lead. Leaders need to make decisions with confidence, make decisions and roll them out. Think and act quickly because people will just follow that. But if you're slowing down, if you're nervous, if you're fearful, that sends massive negative vibes through the organization. The other thing that needs to happen with the wartime CEO or the real tough times CEO, you need to make some of those tough decisions. And sometimes those tough decisions are to take care of the A and the B players, sometimes at the expense of.

Some of the C players.

The reality is there's always average companies out there that are hiring. Government's always hiring. So those C players will get a job somewhere, but cut any of the dead weight and take care of your A players, your racehorses, take care of your B players, the workhorses, but make the tough decisions.

As a wartime CEO, one of the.

Mistakes that most CEOs will make, regardless of how much planning they do, is they'll continually focus on the next goal, the next project, the horizon. They keep driving to that horizon. Friend of mine Dan Sullivan from Strategic Coach talks about getting caught in the gap that if you're so focused on the horizon, you forget about where you've come from and you're getting stuck in that middle. Most COOs often will keep focusing on driving and going and they forget to praise people, they forget to thank people, they forget to show people and celebrate all the things that are getting done every single day.

So one of the systems I try.

To put in place is if you set three new goals for your company, celebrate three things you just accomplished. If you're finding three problems you need to fix, say thank you for three.

Problems that just got fixed.

So while you're driving towards the horizon, keep looking in the rearview mirror to see how far you've come as well.

The worst comments I've heard from business.

Leaders right now, entrepreneurs and CEO COOs about the recession or this oncoming downturn that we're coming into is it's not coming that we're just going to continue to grow as we've always been growing. The reality is it ain't going to happen. This has been coming for a long time and we always go through these boom and bust periods. We always go through these economic ups and downs and this one's actually going to hurt. It's real interest rates are coming. You can bank on this thing. I've built companies through three major economic downturns. The 89, 1990, the 2000, 2001 when the NASDAQ crashed by 78% and the 0809 global financial crisis. This is the fourth big one. What happened two years ago during March was simply a blip where we dropped by 15%. This is real and you need to not ignore it. Now if I'm wrong and we actually turn around, at least you've actually put in place the really strong financial underpinnings and strong positions because you'll still grow off of that. But if I'm right, at least you've made those decisions when you need to instead of reacting in panic. But I would actually get prepared right now. I would make the decisions you need to. One of my chapters in my first book, the Double Double, was How to Grow When It's Slow. I would make sure your entire leadership team devours that chapter.

How do I not obsess about criticism? Was a question that I got.

The reality is, like Ray Kroc who.

Built McDonald's, used to say, when you're green, you're growing. When you're ripe, you're rotting. The criticism is just an opportunity to improve. It's an opportunity to grow. And as a leader, as a CEO or an entrepreneur, I'm always telling my team or my employees or my suppliers areas that we have to get better at things, we have to fix things, we have to improve. If it's easy for me to tell them the stuff to improve, then I need to be willing to receive that feedback as well. In fact, not only willing to receive it, but I need to be out there looking for feedback on how can I get better. What can I do more as an entrepreneur or leader? One of the reasons why I joined so many different mastermind groups and plug myself into these groups is so that I can talk about the struggles in my business or the opportunities in my business. And I have other leaders who I like and respect that will give me feedback that won't necessarily feel like criticism, but in my mind, I've already started to change the feeling that criticism isn't a bad thing, it's just feedback. And feedback is the breakfast of champions.

Every COO needs a day, a month to think, sometimes even a day, a week to think. And it really comes from the genesis or my thought process around it came from Bill Gates Think Week. I think it was once or twice a year Bill Gates would go away from the office, take a bag of books with them, no technology, and he would go away just to think about the business himself, his growth strategy, the economy, and just to actually immerse himself in thinking. We so often get caught up working.

In the business, right? We've heard that famous saying of it's.

Time to work on the business, not in the business. But that means moving yourself away from the business. So I like doing that off site, either going to a tennis club or a golf club and working, maybe going to a chalet or a cottage, renting a breather space or a fractional office space, or even sometimes going down to a big nice five star hotel and just sitting down in the lobby with my laptop and doing work for a few hours. Often it's also getting rid of the laptop and the phone and leaving those in the car and just going in with a notebook and a pen and starting to think about different areas of the business. How could I coach my team better? How could I praise them more? What areas of the business could we be working on? How can I wow my customers better? And literally just taking that good old fashioned notebook and pen and. This is not a dated idea, but removing yourself from technology allows your brain to open up and just give you time to think.