The CEO Job Description That Took Me to $20,000,000

This job description that I wrote for myself took me from burnt out and ready to quit to $20 million in revenue, working 20-hour weeks, doing work that I actually love doing. And in this video, I'm going to show you how to write your own CEO job description so you can stop being the Chief Everything Officer and start loving your business and loving your work again. I'm going to give you the same template that I use, the AI prompts that I use, and even I'm going to open the kimono and I'm going to share word for word my own job description if you just want to copy mine. Now look, if you're a founder or CEO who loves your business, but you freaking hate your job, this one's for you. So let's get into it. Here's a harsh truth nobody really warns you about. You will never deliberately grow into more pain. But this is why businesses tend to stall out when their founders burn out. You just don't want to grow your business when more growth means doing more of the work that you really hate doing. But that's exactly what It happens. Over time, we wind up taking on all the little tasks that no one else wants to do or no one else knows how to do until one day we wake up and we realize that CEO no longer stands for the Chief Executive Officer. It now stands for the Chief Everything Officer. And this is when burnout sets in. This is also when we can start resenting our own business, even hating our own businesses. But if there's one thing I've learned scaling 8 companies to 8 figures without burning out and frankly helping hundreds of clients do the same, it's this: you don't hate your business. You hate the job you accidentally built for yourself inside your business. Without even realizing it, you allowed your role to adapt to fit the environment, when what you should have done is adapt your environment to fit the role that you want, the role that you're best at. And that may sound backwards or even a little bit crazy, maybe even a little bit selfish at first. But the reality is, as an entrepreneur, it's actually easier for you to change the world around you than it is to change yourself to fit into the world. And that's why George Bernard Shaw was 1,000% right when he said, "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world, while the unreasonable man persists in adapting the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on unreasonable men." The fix is to redesign the role itself by rewriting your CEO job description. But before we can define your new role, we need to get clear on what your current role is first. Step 1: The task list brain dump. So the first step is really simple. I just want you to do a massive brain dump and write out everything that you're doing right now. I want you to set a timer for 2 minutes and just list out all the things that you do during an average week. Start with your to-do list, then open up your calendar, go back a couple of weeks, what are the meetings that you have? Check your inbox, check your Slack messages, also check all the open tabs on your browser because I can guarantee you there are tasks and responsibilities and need-to-dos hiding in there that never made it onto a list. And then I want you to ask yourself, what didn't get done last week that you wish would have gotten done? You won't remember everything and you don't have to because what you will remember are the really important tasks and the really annoying tasks. And that's what matters most right now. If you connect your calendar, your email inbox, and any project management tools that you use to ChatGPT using apps or Claude using connectors, then you can run a prompt that says, analyze my Google Calendar, Gmail, and maybe my Monday account and identify the tasks, responsibilities, commitments, and recurring activities I currently perform as a founder CEO. Categorize them into themes by meetings, execution tasks, leadership tasks, communication, approvals, admin, etc. Now I'll, I'll include the exact prompts and everything inside the free template pack that I'm gonna give you down in the description. But just know that if you follow this process, it'll give you an 80% complete brain dump in a matter of minutes. Now I know when I did this, it just about threw up in my mouth. I was spending all week, Monday through Friday, jumping from meeting to meeting to meeting, just one meeting after another. I was reviewing legal agreements, I was doing contract reviews, financial reviews, employee reviews, HR paperwork, event logistics, and not one minute of the work that I actually wanted to do was anywhere on my calendar. Things like strategizing quarterly sprint plans and creating YouTube content like this and preparing keynote slides for speaking engagements. No wonder I was so incredibly burnt out because here's the thing, most founders have no idea why they're so overwhelmed because they never actually take a beat just to write it all down. Now that you have your task list brain dump complete, it's time to actually organize it. Step 2 is organize and prioritize. So now that you have your task list just brain dumped onto a page, uh, you need to sort it. Take every single item from your brain dump and plot it on what I call the critical task matrix. Now the critical task matrix has two axes. The vertical axis is impact. So how much does this task actually move the needle for your business? And the horizontal axis is ability or desire. So how good are you at this specific thing? And frankly, how much do you like doing it? So content creation, brand strategy, things like that for me are high impact. So they would definitely go up in the upper right-hand corner. And now we get into stuff like financial reviews, right? And like, you know, finance stuff, it's important, it's high, it's high impact, but honestly, I'm not that great at it. So it kind of goes into the upper left. Same with things like employee performance reviews and HR paperwork. These are all high impact, Low ability, so upper left again. Now we get things like building slide decks. This is pretty low impact. I mean, I'm decent at it, but it's not moving the needle, so lower right-hand corner. And then we get things like submitting expenses. This is low impact, this is low ability. Frankly, I suck at it. I really, really hate it. So that goes squarely down here in the lower left-hand corner. All right, so look at this. The upper right: high impact, high ability. That's your genius zone. That's the kind of stuff that should be on your job description. Then we've got things here in the upper left that's high impact but low ability. Um, this is work that matters, but you're the wrong person to do it. So we need to get this delegated off to someone else who's good at it. Lower right, high ability but low impact. You gotta be careful here because this is the stuff that you can keep doing, but because it doesn't really matter, it just feels productive, but it's not. And then the lower left, frankly, the low impact, the low ability, that's the stuff that should have probably been off your plate years ago. Now, once you have your critical task matrix filled in and all of your tasks have been organized into their appropriate little quadrants, you're ready for the next step, which is step 3, find your genius zone. So now that you can see the whole map, let's zoom in on this upper right-hand quadrant because not everything that's high impact and high ability is technically genius zone work. When we think about the genius zone, these are activities that meet all 4 of the following criteria. Number 1, it's innate. So these need to be tasks that just come naturally, almost effortlessly to you. Number 2, it's energizing. You have more energy after doing this kind of work, not less. Number 3, it's highly leverageable. 1 hour of this work creates disproportionate results compared to everything else. And 4, It's valuable. Your team actively wishes that you were doing more of this kind of work. Now, to qualify as Genius Zone work, you need to check all 4 of those boxes. Not 3 out of the 4, definitely not 2 out of 4, all 4. Now, here's a question that'll help you find out fast whether or not what you're thinking about is Genius Zone work or not. I call it the time raiser. So what I want you to do is I want you to ask yourself, if I were only allowed to work If I had 1 hour per day, what would I do in that hour? Not what needs to get done, not what's on fire, not what's left over that nobody else did. What's the truly high-leverage work that only you can do? Now, for me, when I asked this question, the result was creating content, like literally what I'm doing right now. If I can put out content that nurtures the audience that we already have and attracts people to our brand that we don't have yet, That is my highest and best use, and 1 hour of it creates more long-term value than 40 hours of the stuff that was eating my calendar alive before. But your genius zone task will likely be something totally different from mine. For most of us, there's one thing that we could be doing that would just completely move the needle in our business, and we're not doing it because it's important, but it's not urgent. And the urgent stuff will always win until you write the important stuff into your job description. First, you need to know what not to put on it. Step 4: Define your no-go zone. Look at everything that is not in the upper right-hand corner of your matrix. That's your no-go zone. So for me, leading routine team meetings, conducting employee performance reviews, project management details, you know, timelines, task lists, workflow design, stuff like that. All of these were things that I really super mega ultra hated. Now here's the important distinction. These are all things that I can do. They're things I have done, every single one of them. Some of them I'm even pretty good at, but they're not my genius work. And every hour that I spend on them is an hour I'm not spending on the stuff that's actually going to move the business forward. So the no-go zone isn't about what you're incapable of doing. It's about what you're choosing to stop doing so that you can do more of the stuff from the upper right-hand corner, from your genius zone. And I want you to write it down, not just to think about it. I want you to write it down because here's what I discovered. When I looked at my brain dump, when I looked at my matrix, my genius zone was maybe 10% of how I was actually spending my time. 10%. That means 90% of my work week was spent on stuff that wasn't in my zone of genius. You ready for step 5, which is write, share, and publish your job description. So this is where the talking stops and the system really starts. And there are 3 parts to this, and the sequence really matters. So part 1, I want you to share your lists with your leadership team. So I took my genius zone and my no-go zone, and I emailed them out to my leadership team, and the message was really, really simple: help me do more of this, my genius zone, and help me do less of this, my no-go zone. And 2 things happened that I didn't really expect. First, I actually got help, like, immediately. A lot of what was in my no-go zone, frankly, was already supposed to be someone else's job. So we had managers who were supposed to lead meetings and own employee performance conversations, but I never gave them the room to actually do it. I was hoarding responsibilities and then complaining about being overwhelmed. Maybe that sounds familiar. But when I stopped hoarding, the team actually stepped up. They filled the gap. Now, second, I modeled the behavior. So when the founder publicly commits to doing more genius work and less no-go work, it gives everyone else permission to do the same. And That's when I realized that this wasn't just a productivity exercise, it was a real cultural shift that was taking place. Part 2 of this process, I want you to write, or should I say rewrite, an actual job description for yourself. Not a loose set of intentions, an actual document. So here, let me walk you through mine. So first, I gave myself a new title, not CEO who does everything, but Founder and Chief Strategy Architect. And that may sound kind of corny, but That's what I actually do. I architect frameworks, the content, and the strategy. And just to clarify it, I wrote a one-sentence role summary. I said, my role is to architect the ideas, frameworks, content, and communication that power our brand, our products, and our growth, and to share those ideas publicly so the team can scale their impact. Then what I did is I defined my core responsibilities, and you can see here There's just 4 of them. I create original frameworks, intellectual property. I serve as the company's public spokesperson. I identify and champion growth opportunities, and I collaborate with partners and clients on breakthrough ideas and initiatives. There's some other sections here, you know, that my genius works of framework and model creation, content creation, thought leadership, um, high leverage strategic collaboration, also some supporting activities that flesh it out a little bit more and I wrote what I will no longer do, the things that I just won't do list, and I made it specific. So there's no day-to-day operations or performance oversight. I'm not there to manage employees or to tell them how they're doing. There's no routine meetings without a direct tie-in to strategy or creative output, no tactical execution work, no low-leverage content production, and no task that doesn't require my genius zone regardless of how urgent it feels. And that last one, is the hard one. So the job description is the system that keeps you and everyone else on your team honest. Now there are some other things on here that are pretty optional. So for example, I've kind of got my ideal work environment. That's a good reminder to me and everyone else. You get the idea. I also wrote down, uh, the tools that I use. I know if I'm using these tools, I'm probably doing my best work. I also got into what the team can expect from me. I also put in here what I expect from the team, and this is important, what are the decisions that I'm still going to own and what are the decisions that I'm committing to not own? And this one right here, the decisions that I don't own, believe it or not, this section is more for me than it is for the team. I get into my success indicator, so how I know I'm winning, and then I wrap it all up with a simple statement of purpose to remind me and everybody else why this thing exists. So once your job description is done, you're ready for part 3, which is to publish it to the entire company. So why do we do this? We do this because if your job description only lives in your head, you're going to fall right back into your old habits within a week. But if it's written, if it's visible, now your team has a mechanism to call you out when you start grasping onto tasks that you shouldn't be touching. And if your team is anything like mine, They will, they will do this. So here's the thing. You didn't build a business just to become a well-paid employee doing a bunch of work that you hate. You built it so you could create a better life for yourself and the people that you care about while doing meaningful work you love that actually makes an impact. So stop performing a job that you accidentally inherited and start defining the role that you actually want. And hey, if you want my job description as an example, the template to create your own along with all the AI prompts that I use to build mine, there is a link in the description where you can download everything totally for free. And if you want to see the systems that I put in place that actually allowed me to live out this new job description, I'm going to drop a video in the description that will cover that as well. And again, if this was helpful, be sure to hit that subscribe button and I'll see you in the next one.