Cameron Herold argues that CEOs spending hours on $20-per-hour tasks while earning $250 per hour are wasting shareholder value. Hire an executive assistant for $5,000 a month to reclaim 40 hours weekly for strategic work. Delegate everything except your genius work to build high-performance teams.
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I was coaching a CEO recently in one of my group coaching calls, and he said that there was a bunch of stuff that he was doing that was minimum wage job. If I was a board member of yours or an advisor of yours or a shareholder, and I found out I was paying you as the CEO $500,000 a year, right? Which is effectively $250 an hour. If I'm paying you $250 an hour to be CEO and I find out you're doing $20 an hour work, I'm going to lose my mind. Why am I paying you 12 times more than I should be to do that job? Let's say you're going to hire a $60,000 executive assistant. That's $5,000 a month. That's $2,500 every 2 weeks. That's $1,250 a week. What could an EA free up for you if they could get 40 hours of work off your plate to allow you to go out and find one new client or wow one more customer or be more strategic? The amount of time and energy they free up for you, it's like, oh, this was crazy. Why did I ever do this? And we all recognize that when we hired our first cleaning lady, right? That's usually the first role that you outsource is a cleaning lady. Then you hire somebody to like do yard work or do work around the home. And then all of a sudden you realize, wow, the more and more I can outsource the admin, that kind of pain in the ass stuff, it gets better, right? I actually was listening to a CEO the other day of CloudKitchens saying that the cost of food delivery is going to be approaching zero. Where it will be easier to get high-quality prepared food delivered to our home. It'll be cheaper to do that than it will be to go to the grocery store and buy it and actually prep it. So the cost savings in terms of time, you can actually bring those same analogies into the business world. I remember years ago I read a book called The Celestine Prophecy, and many years after that, I watched a movie called The Secret, and it talks about energy, right? It talks about quantum mechanics, that at our molecular level as humans, we are energy, right? We're neutrons and protons bouncing around and and that energy creates more energy, right? The physics of energy, it's like magnets, right? The positive attracts, the negatives attract. Well, the more positive energy you're throwing off into the business, the more positive energy that begets in your business. So as a CEO, you're the chief energizing officer, right? As the COO, your job is to bring that good positive energy to the group. But if you're working on parts of your business that drain you of energy, that you suck at, that you're not really that good at, that you hate doing, and you're spending a bunch of time doing that, you're bringing that negative energy into the workforce. On the counter of that is if you're spending most of your time on stuff you're really good at, stuff you love doing, stuff that gives you energy, you end up bringing that good positive vibration into your workforce, which sends off all the other employees in that positive energy. So something happens when you start delegating everything except genius. To the actual energy at work. And if you can start building those high-performance teams of people that are working on their unique ability, then it just becomes fun to come to work every day because you have people that are doing stuff they're really good at, that they love to do. There's no toxic negative energy swirling around your company anymore. So the, the benefits are very, very high. If you haven't already signed up for my online training where I cover the 12 essential leadership skills for anyone who manages people, Go check out investinyourleaders.com/ch. Close to 5,000 leaders are already going through my content. We don't think about it very often because we're like the fly trying to get out the window. We're just going to work harder, right? I'm going to work hard every day. I'm going to grind it out. I'm going to like, and we've said that I got to grind it out today. I'm working hard. I'm really busy. Well, if you're the entrepreneur, you're the boss, you're allowed to hire people to do your work for you. Why are you choosing to do that grinding work? Why are you choosing to do the $15 an hour task? I was coaching a CEO recently in one of my group coaching calls. And he said that there was a bunch of stuff that he was doing that was minimum wage jobs. And I said, you know what, if I was a board member of yours, or an advisor of yours, or a shareholder, and I found out I was paying you as the CEO $500,000 a year, right, which is effectively $250 an hour. If I I'm paying you $250 an hour to be CEO and I find out you're doing $20 an hour work, I'm going to lose my mind. Why am I paying you 12 times more than I should be to do that job? And the light bulb really went off in their mind that they need to fire themselves from the work that's below their effective hourly
