The Only CEO TRAINING You Will Ever Need

My businesses have made $64 million in the last three years. And today I'm going to break down the process that I've used as the CEO on how I've done that without going insane or having my wife leave me. So, okay, guys, I'm going to go in depth today about what it actually takes to functionally run a somewhat decent sized business. This is not a $100 million business. We do like $33 million a year roughly through how that's broken down. Today I'm going to give you guys a document. I'm going to walk through and actually go through the strategy that I use. And I also do some sort of CEO coaching stuff for like two people and sort of what I really want to do and what I really want to get out today's video is teaching that, like, there is a process that I think needs to be followed in order to scale a business effectively without it falling to pieces. Now, I'm a little bit older than most people in the sort of the game that I'm in. I'm 39 years old. This is also not my first business. I have spectacularly failed a couple of times, which has given me a little bit of insight into what not to do. So today, hopefully you guys come away with this with an idea as to some of the things that you should be doing in order to get where you want to go in a way that isn't catastrophically stupid. All right, so let's go to the document and we'll go through it. Okay, this is my CEO process document and basics. This is a basic document. This is not everything. This is what I think all businesses need. We'll do a high level overview first and then we'll go into some detail. So what it starts with is what is like, leadership. So leadership. And like being a CEO or being a business owner, leadership is an essential quality that people need to have. It's the difference between people that are going to war with you and for you. Like leadership is going to war for you and going to war with you. It's like they're only going to do it if you're there, which is sort of more like management, but it's not true leadership. So there's a great, great Colin Powell quote, which is, the day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you stop leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help them or concluded that you don't care. Either case is a failure of leadership. So I think one of the things that really sets good leaders apart And I think sets me apart from other people is that I will usually give two forms of feedback. The first form of feedback is as your boss, as the owner and leader of this business, this is my perspective with knowing full well that you have to take it with a grain of salt because I want you to stay, I want you to be here, etc. Etc. So this and then I go, even if you would like the completely detached version of that, then I will happily give that to you as well. And like, I will give you the advice that I think is in 100% your best interest, but not necessarily mine. So I try and do that on a regular basis and I try and do my best to not give people advice that is molded towards my self interest. I think that that's what 99% of people do in 99% of situations. However, I feel like it actually breeds mistrust over time. I'm not saying I've been perfect all the time. I'm sure there's plenty of people out there that hate me for whatever reason. When you fire people, they tend to not like you, even if it's fair enough. But at least I can usually hand on hard say that I gave advice that I felt was true. So, okay, so I'd like to use an OODA loop strategy. For those of you don't know what an OODA loop is, okay. It's observe, orient, decide and act. Okay. It's a very well known kind of thought process. And you want to stay in the OODA loop, right? Or you want to get out of it. But I can talk about that in a second. Okay, so what we want to do is first and foremost we need some sort of strategy. We're going to need a strategy for the business, whether it be for 12 months, 24 months, 36 months, 10 years, whatever it may be. There has to be like something that we're working towards in a way in which we plan to do it. Now, the way that we do this is usually through like a revenue forecast for a lot of businesses who are in their infancy. The way that I recommend doing that is actually figuring out what you want to make as the business owner and then from there extrapolating that out. I recently did this for a person who runs a great business and they wanted to pull out. I think it was like 1.2 million. And his initial plan was to sort of grow the business by 3 or $4 million next year over this year at the time of filming. It's like the toward getting in September of 2023. So he wanted to do about $4 million more in 2024. That's pretty significant growth. I think it's going from like sort of like 9 to 13. And so I said, okay, cool, like what's the most important thing to you? Is it to grow the business or to pull the money out? Both answers are correct. It doesn't really matter. He said, listen, for next year, my most important thing is to pull the money out. I was like, okay, cool man. Like, then let's have a look to see if you actually need to do that extra $4 million or if we can figure out a way to do it without it and still and actually like have you have a more relaxed life with more money and kind of do it that way. So we actually figured out that we can do some stuff for the business and then he can do 7.8 million next year, which is actually a drop. But then he actually raises his personal income and, and he can work a bit less and he can start to hand off some of the management responsibilities. So you know, the anti scale. Right, but that's the strategy for the year. So then from there it's up to us to go, okay, cool, what is going to be the dividend or whatever, the owner distribution? What's going to be the tax liability? Because that will usually come before that. Then from there, what is the net profit going to be?

Right?

Then from there, like what is our operating expenses, what are our cogs?

Right.

And then what is our revenue? So, and we can use previous years or if you don't have that, then you can speak to people or do some research as to what averages are within your, your industry. Always remembering that if you're going to aggressively grow, chances are you're going to have an increased cogs and an increased opex.

Right?

So cogs are cost of goods sold. So what it costs you to make money. And then OPEX being operating expenses, right? Net profit being the revenue minus those two things. Taxes are obviously taxes. Net operating profit is that after tax or net. Net or net with two T's. However you want to describe it, there's tons of ways. And then you've got like, you know, like net cash flow as well. Okay, so once we figure that out, then we go, okay, cool. And we create a strat. We create like a forec. So if my plan is to make $5 million next year or $50 million, chances are I'm not just going to evenly distribute that across every single month. It's going to go up towards the year. Or maybe it peaks towards the middle and goes down. Or maybe you ramp it up towards the front end of the year and then you go backwards. There's no wrong way of doing it. It's just the way that you decide. Every business is different, right? If you're a business that sells T shirts about Valentine's Day, chances are you will have a spike around February 14th. You should probably plan for that. If you're, if you're an online marketing business and you don't sell retail, chances are cyber Monday is going to be tough for you. So maybe lower it down towards that time of year. Also retail and E Comm takes to all the space during Christmas, so chances are you should lower your ad spend during Christmas, etc.

Etc. Right?

And maybe that's right, maybe it's not for you, I don't know, I don't care. But that's just some things that you want to consider. So how is that going to be? Because that would just. That will indicate the distribution of your, of your headcount for the year. That will indicate your like the infrastructure that you're going to put in for that year. It will be totally indicated based off when you're going to make the money. Because the money dictates what you have available, how much you're spending to get it, what you have to spend. And then like if you're going to titrate that towards the end of the year, you're going to need a lot more people at the end of the year. So you're going to have to start hiring those, right? Because you don't want to get there, get the revenue, realize you're going to shit the bed because you don't have enough people and then try and ram a bunch of shitty people through all of a sudden. I know from experience, right? So, okay, so we create a strategy. Then what we need is business owners, right? This is a very, very vague, fuzzy version of my strategy. Because I don't want you to have it, right? That's what our corporate strategy looks like. So you've got marketing calendars, product calendars, like everything, everything sort of combined. So like we've got a marketing plan and then we've got like a product plan and, and then you've got a hiring plan and then you've got a promotions plan and then you've got an expansion revenue plan and a joint revenue plan and all this kind of stuff, right? Like this is how we're going to make the money. And if you have multiple business Units like we do. You're going to stack all them together and then from that's going to become your budget, your forecast, et cetera, et cetera. Right now for those of you who want, I will be making this document available in the comments, right? You'll have to request access to do so. And then from there you can have it and you can go and do what you would like with it. Please don't claim it as your own. I mean you can go and do that if you want. I really don't care. It's not like I invented any of this stuff. I just put it together in a way that makes sense. And I've been paying about $20,000 a month for coaching from a very high level CEO for a couple of years. He was the CEO of Smirnoff. Phenomenal guy, great dude, awesome what he does. Anyway, so, okay, so we want to roll out the corporate strategy in a very particular way because we don't really want input, right? This is more of an FYI conversation. So we're going to present it to the team. Okay, so we're going to go over, this is the corporate strategy, this is their outcomes, this is the implied and specific task required to do so, this is the future updates, q and a, etc. Etc. So we're going to go through and we want to present it in a very formulaic way.

Okay?

It's not a question answer meeting, it's a presentation. There's no feedback. Different variants are given to different levels of departments, rank, et cetera, et cetera. You always want to have a two level system. So always remember one big thing. Always remember the chain of command only works when it's in both directions. One of the hardest things to learn as a business owner or a CEO is that you actually make everything slower and worse if you subvert the chain of command and go straight to the doers. If you go straight to the doers and tell them what to do, they have the ultimate trump card because they go, oh yeah, but so and so said. And then the guy goes. And then all of a sudden you've pissed off your managers. You don't have all the context used. Like if I did that and I have done that and I've stopped that now because I wouldn't listen. Like I don't have all the context, I don't know all the things that are being done, so I might just screw things up right? Then from there we got the corporate strategy, then we're going to get forecast and budget. So what I want to do is go, this is the strategy, this is, this is the revenue. Please go away and come up like the leaders of the business. And listen, if you're the one man rock show, you have to do this. If it's two, you do it, you know, but for me, I have 160 odd people and I have a VP team and a C level team and directors and all that kind of stuff, right? So I go to the VPs and I go, hey guys, go. Actually go to the C suite and I go, go marketing, sales, delivery, operations, finance. Go plan, bring back, please. Now I have a good idea as to what's going to happen based off. And I have my own forecast and budget that I've done, but I want them to be, to do one because like if they bring me back some outrageous numbers or they bring back some good numbers or maybe they think they can do it with spending less money.

Right?

That's fantastic. And then from there we will, we will formally execute a budget.

Okay.

A budget can be a lot of things that can just be like, this is the gross revenue, the cogs, the opex, the net, the tax, the net operating profit. That's it.

Right.

Or it can be really detailed. Okay, I have a very detailed one. I'm not going to be showing that to you today. Let me know in the comments down below if you want me to go through what I think a good budget looks like. So then from there, once we have our budget and our forecast, then we have our mind. Okay, which is most important? Numbers and drivers. Okay, so this is when we start to actually formulate what are the most important numbers. Okay, this is an example mind from one specific funnel. This is kind of an old one, but it sort of shows everything I think. Okay, so let's just say I want to make 135 sales per month from this particular thing.

Okay?

Okay, so opt in specialist. That's a, that's a job title for a specific type of marketing. As you can see, I've got like type form specialist. All right, all different, all different marketing things. And I can do another video on how to set these things up and how to do these things. But we'll go through this today. Okay, so let's say I want 135 sales. So five sales a day. From this particular marketing. I need to sit 18 calls a day to sell five. I need to book 37.5 to have 18 sit because not everyone's going to show up. I need to have 125 conversations a day to book 37 to have 18 show to sell five and I need to have, I have a 5% pickup rate across our platform, which is pretty, pretty standard, especially for that. So I need $2500 a day, $15,000 a week, $60,000 a month.

Right.

That's going to be five full time staff, six hours a day.

Okay.

So they're going to do $500 a day, 5% pick up rate, 25 conversations or eight bookings. That is our KPI for the outbound team or a total Talk time of 4 hours, right, etc. Etc. If they don't do that, they'll go to performance review, etc. Etc. So anyway, we won't go through that today though.

Okay.

Now from this we go. Okay, cool, that's fantastic. So if we're hitting that number for hitting $60,000 with a 5% pickup rate, I know we'll get 3,000 conversations, we'll pass through 30%, we'll get 900 bookings, well, 450 sales calls, 135 sales. That means I need five staff and six hours each. So I know that that's going to work out. We can track that, it's really measurable.

Right.

And that will work, work out at X amount of money per month. Right. And it's all based off those figures.

Right.

So if I have five different ways of making my sales, for example, it's like okay, cool, 135 of them are going to come from this. Now I need 10,000 opt ins for that. So the marketing team has to figure out how to get 10,000 opt ins. And they would go through and they would create their mind, right? They would go, how many ad creatives do we need? How many videos do we need? How many copywriters do we need? How many turnover of creative are we going to do? How many ad placements do we do? How many media buyers do we need? How much budget do we need? Like all this kind of stuff and they create that and that gets edified in the yearly plan, okay? That creates your mind for everything. Because now when I know how many sales I'm going to be making and what I do is I set it up for December and they work towards the mind, right? So they might go, hey man, we're 60% towards mind, we're 70% towards mind, we're 80%. And they'll work at it through the year, right? And then we'll have our quarterly milestones of where we should be, et cetera, et cetera. Because like you won't grow like that every quarter. You might kind of grow like that, like a hockey stick. Or like. For us, we tend to have a big growth in the first quarter. It's fairly flat Q2 and Q3, and then it's pretty big in Q4. So Q4 and Q1, we do like 70% of the growth for the year.

Okay.

So I know that it's pretty consistent. It's a good way of doing it. For us, it works, right? So we create that, but then that will also create, like hiring needs.

Right?

So now it's like, hey, we know these copywriters. Sweet. When do we need them? How much are they going to cost? Let's put it in the budget and then from there let's work towards that. The operations department, that has a hiring plan, the finance department has a hiring plan. They have a headcount. I got next year's headcount about three or four days ago. The headcount request was 1.2 million in headcount addition for the year, right? I think it was about 17 or 18 positions. I can't remember. They might have been more, but no, it's 1.2 million. Okay, so from there you're also going to now have projects, right? Because like, now you've got. Well, okay, we're going to have all these clients, all these people, right? All these sales, all this marketing shit. There's a lot of things that go into a business now. So it's like, okay, cool. What are all the things? What are all the. If this and that. That's. It's like each department, you know, you work with the departments to go like delivery. How does it affect you to have triple the amount of sales and customers? Well, I'm going to need seven more customer service reps. We're going to need a more robust portal system. We're going to need a specialist for this and this and this. We're also going to need to like, have this and I'd like to have this. Like to have this. Like, all right, cool. Create your project plans, create what you want, yada, yada, yada. So then that creates like what we're looking for. And then we run that through a wipe rip is called a work in progress report. There's a way of doing it. I can do a specific video on that if you guys want me to just put WIP in the comments and I'll happily do one. But essentially, like, we run, it's the way that we do project management.

Okay.

And the way that we Manage our team. Then from there we need to set a meeting cadence for the business. Because now we have a strategy, we have everyone bought in on it. We have a forecast, the budget, we have our mind, which also creates our KPIs.

Right?

Like as you saw before, that creates your KPIs.

Okay.

That would then go into the job descriptions, right? Which I can go down here and be like, hey, here's a job description.

Right?

So in a good job description, role title, you know, reports to KPI's skills, experience with attributes as well in the new ones. Because we recently had a guy called Rich Dibney, who I'll put here, who was a commander at Navy SEALS for a long time, who did all the attribute assessing for the Navy SEALs. And we had him come in and actually do the attributes assessing for the business. So now we have that and we're going through a process of figuring out the attribute profile for each department.

Okay.

So which is really cool. I highly recommend it. Look him up. Rich Divine. Awesome guy. So I mean, in a meeting structure. So one of the great and annoying things about having an awesome team is that you get tons of ideas, right? Right. Ideas are awesome, but they need to be segmented because you got to keep on track. Okay. So we want to do is have like an innovation meeting.

Right?

So that agenda, everyone has to pre fill it out. Because agendas are awesome. They just go into the Google Doc.

Right?

They just go into the Google Meet or whatever you guys are doing. It all goes in there. Everything gets pre filled out, right. 15 minutes allocated for each member to for a new initiative, pitch and discussion. No more than four new initiatives will be raised per meeting. New initiatives scheduled for discussion prior each month, submissions, yada, yada yada. Then from there I'll take them, the ones that I like. I will ask for project plans to be drawn up and then it might get put into the strategy.

Right.

But then you kind of have a, hey, I have this idea. Sweet. Put it like wait to the meeting, write it out, do it properly. Constructive feedback. I'm a huge fan of a conflict first approach. 99% of the time someone in your department or work is not stuffing you around on purpose. It's just that, just they don't know. So we do a constructive feedback meeting that's every two weeks. The innovative meeting. And they kind of rotate.

Right.

So we have it. It's pre filled out, it's unemotional, It's a good process.

Right.

I kind of made that one up. I'm particularly proud of it. It worked very well. All hands meeting. Okay. Again, I don't like massive amounts of meetings. So these aren't like every week, right? WIP meetings are every week with your team, but you're only going to do that with a very select group of people and then they have it with their people, they have it with their people, etc.

Right.

All hands meeting, which is for executives.

Right.

I have a daily meeting with my ea. Shout out to Beth. She's awesome. There's a great, great way to use your ea. There's an awesome book called CEO Secret Weapon. I use my deep focus sessions. So this is like an example of what a deep focus session looks like. So in my diary I have these deep focus sessions and everything is just hyperlinked, right? Absolutely everything that I have to do for the day. So somebody wants me to do something, they go to my ea, they ask her, she monitors my slack, my email, et cetera, et cetera. They ask her, it goes in there, it's hyperlinked, there's context, I can understand it. And then from there, in the 15 minute meeting every day, she goes through and adds things that are giving me content that I don't have or reminds me to do stuff.

Right.

Those are really important because like without that you just don't get stuff done.

Right.

There's always stuff to do, but there's certain things that have to be done. Here's the work in progress reports. I just use like a Gantt chart to track that. Super simple. And then I get a summary of all the WIPs that are being done.

Right.

And if we're on track, off track, this is obviously an older one, but it's, it's pretty good.

Right?

So I know what's going on. Then from there we get, and I get end of month reports. I'm not going to be giving these out, but end of month reports. So for example, like here's my Chief Revenue Officer template, right? So this gets filled out as turned in by the seventh, right?

Okay.

And then from there I compile that into a monthly report which goes over all of this at the end of each, at the end of each month. Then I compile that with the actuals and the budget and the forecast. I put that into the folder for the month, that goes into folder for the quarter, goes into the folder for the year and then I have the full decision making process for the year.

Okay.

It sounds like a lot, but really, I mean when you think about it, you're the CEO of a business. Like how Hard is it like it's kind of crazy to not do stuff. Having a pay scale I think is super important because you don't want people like you want people to know what they can hire for. So you got a pay scale. For example, you might do vp, this might be a monthly. So we do salaries, but I just have a monthly thing in here. So like 1098, right? It's like cool. Limited experience, modern experience, high experience. They can go on their tiers. They do the same thing for these as well. That means that when we budget, we budget for the highest tier, bring people in at a lower tier, then there's going to be a budget surplus. My VPs get bonus up budget, surgery surplus, right? Then from there, a board meeting agenda. Really only applicable if a board. But it's still important, right? If you have business partners, I highly recommend using a board structure to edify anything that you really want to edify, right? Then from there, off direction reviews, super important, right? Whenever you do anything substantial, do an off direction review. Do it quickly, do it effectively and don't make mistakes twice. This is an agency briefing. Most of the time people like agencies like, oh, hi to marketing agency and they were shit. It's like, well, chances are you were shit, mate. Like I've worked with tons of people because we do have our own marketing agency. It's very boutique, don't ask me about it. We don't work with any many people at all. It's like two or three clients, right? And we don't want more than that. That's a no, thank you.

Right?

But like if I don't get a briefing of exactly what you want from me, like, I'm just gonna, then like I'm gonna ask a bunch of questions. But in the day I'm just gonna do what I think is best, which might not be in alignment with what you want, right? So like we have an agency briefing. It goes over like the objectives, the proposition, the, the audience, the resources, deliverables, timeline review, reporting parameters and fee structure. This trumps anyone's contract, right? I don't give a fuck what someone's contract says. You fill this out and it's like you did not meet the objectives, the scope, the deliverables, the timeline, the reporting. Like that. You didn't meet it, mate. Like we're done.

All right?

Like I asked you to give me reporting every single week, which we do for all agencies that have to have KPIs, they have to fill it out, they have to go through it, etc. Etc, right? And if they don't meet it like they're gone because they have agreed that that's part of the engagement.

Okay?

So it means like mate, like you can try and do whatever you want, but I have a signed document says you will do this and you didn't do it. What do you want to do for. Right, so you got to hold them accountable. There's a whole bunch of other stuff, right, that I've sort of got here. Insurances people should know about. I was at a mastermind the other week with a bunch of like pretty decent earning people and we talked about D and O insurance and no one had it and I was terrified for everyone, right? Errors and emission insurance, all kinds of boring stuff that's probably super important. Cyber is a big one. All these kind of things and just, just little terms and stuff like that. W2, 1099, all that kind of good stuff. Now none of this is financial advice. None of this should be taken seriously in any way, shape or form. This is just one dude with a bunch of stuff, right? Kind of doing my own thing. So you know, use at your own risk type stuff. But that is like on an essential. That is my very high arching overview of some of the stuff that I do as a CEO of a business that does pretty well now we have multi business unit structure, we have licenses and there's all kinds of stuff that we're doing. We're also multinational which creates some complexity with international tax regulations and trees, et cetera, et cetera. But I really feel like the reason why a lot of people don't do that well in business because they don't take it very seriously. There's a reason why Steph Curry is Steph Curry, because he'd be doing Steph Curry things, right? So I think if you are someone who runs a business and you don't have a lot of this stuff in place, I would ask why, I would ask like if you're a business coach and all you do is teach sales and marketing, then are you really a business coach? Because business is one thing, sales is one thing, marketing is another thing. They're all sort of in the same sandbox. However, these systems and structure of a business really does tell you a lot about the size and scope that it can get to. A lot of people say like online businesses are capped at like a million, maybe 1.5amonth. It's completely untrue. It's just that they don't know how to run a business. Like they don't really know how to run a business. They call themselves a CEO, but. Yeah, but. All right, guys, I hope you enjoyed that, like, subscribe notification. All kind of good stuff. And bye. Put that coffee down.