One of the biggest mistakes I see business owners making is not spending time ON their business. It’s easy to get caught up in just the day-to-day client work, but it’s important to take a look at the back-end of your business, too. So, in this episode, I’m walking you through how to schedule in more “CEO time” and what it can look like for you!
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TRANSCRIPT:
Welcome to the Work Your Wellness Biz podcast, a podcast for nutrition and fitness professionals. I’m your host, Jess Freeman here to help you save time and look good online.
When is the last time you worked on your business and not just in your business? And if you don’t know what that means working on your business is working on the back end the systems, the processes, even the marketing, versus working in your business is working with those clients being on client calls, responding to messages, you know, teaching your group program, teaching in your membership, those kinds of things.
Most people just spend time working in their business, and they don’t really work on their business. And you might think, well, but I’m posting on Instagram, and I’m, you know, sending out newsletters, and those technically do count is working on the business. But when are you actually investing time into your business to improve the systems and the processes and your strategies for different things?
Like, when’s the last time you worked on your website, when’s the last time you pulled up a workshop replay and watched something that you missed? When’s the last time you pulled up that course that you bought and never finished, or maybe never even started? These are the things that are going to help your business, you need to fine tune your business consistently, and not just let it live.
And you wake up one day and you’re like, man, I haven’t really done anything with my client onboarding experience in a year or two, for longer, or maybe you’re like, I don’t have a client on boarding experience. I don’t have one, they become a client. And that’s it. These are things we need to work on. They make our business more efficient, they help save us time.
And specifically with the client experience, that is beneficial because people care about what it’s like to work with you. So they want to make sure that they you we want to make sure that they feel taken care of and that they’re educated and that they understand how things work and what’s expected and so on. So today, I want to kind of share how I set aside this time that I call kind of CEO time or some people just call it admin time, I want to share how I do that in my business and how you can do the same so that your business continues to improve and therefore grow.
So the first step is choosing the frequency. How often are you going to have this CEO time? When is it going to happen. So if you have have not done this at all, like you’re like, I literally don’t do this. I would not say like jump into just doing this every single week. Let’s start with once a month or maybe even twice a month, whatever that looks like whatever you have space for right now, which that’s another kind of step is you may need to rearrange your schedule or just how your week looks. But you want to choose the frequency.
Now, this could be Monday mornings, from eight to noon, this is your this is your CEO time, it could be Friday afternoons, it could be an entire day. Whatever that looks like, again, whatever you have space for. Choose a frequency that is doable for you right now. No, this can change obviously. But choose something that’s doable for you right now. Now really, really important.
Really, really important here. You have to protect this time. Meaning you cannot just say okay, Friday mornings, from eight to noon are my CEO time. And then you’re constantly sleeping in scheduling doctor’s appointments during that time grabbing coffee, saying oh, I’m behind on this other stuff all I’ll skip SEO time and work on client work instead. or whatever other excuse you want to add into that pile.
You have to protect this time. No doctor’s appointments, no meetings with friends. Now obviously if you’re going on like a week vacation that’s the exception. You don’t have to tell your spouse Sorry, we have to come back on Thursday because I have CEO time on Friday. But it’s so so easy to break promises to ourselves, in our lives and in our businesses. Because we’re the only one that has to deal with that.
That consequence. Think about if you had a standing coffee date breakfast day with your best friend, Friday, every Friday morning, and week after week, you’re like, oh, sorry, I can’t Oh, sorry, out when this came out. Oh, sorry. I scheduled a dentist appointment. I’m sorry. Your friend is gonna stop scheduling breakfast with you gonna be like, um, yeah, so like, I feel like you don’t want to hang out with me, you’re not prioritizing this time together.
So you may need to play around with what time works for you. If you find that you keep scheduling it, you know, Friday morning, but you’re like trying to catch up on everything during the week that you missed, or you’re behind on, maybe Fridays aren’t a good time. Maybe it’s better to push that to Monday mornings. And that’s how you start the week.
So pick a time and I do recommend that you actually set a time. Because if you’re just like, okay, so I’m going to want to have some CEO time this week. Sometime? No, this is not what I it’s too easy to fill your schedule, with other calls with other tasks. And, you know, you might be I know some people, they spend Sunday kind of like filling in their planner or planning out their week and like, Okay, this is what I have on each day, this is what I’m going to do.
And theoretically, yes, you could be like, Okay, so this week, it looks like Wednesday afternoon is free. But then what if something else comes up. So have that set time. And the other thing with protecting the time from a very like techie standpoint, if you use something like calendly, or acuity to, you know, schedule calls with clients, or prospective clients block off that time, I my calendly does not let anybody schedule calls on Mondays or Fridays.
And really, this year at the beginning of 2021, I actually started instituting that Tuesday’s where my call days. So most of my calendly availability is only on Tuesdays, I occasionally have to make exceptions if Tuesday’s get to full and I have a client who needs a strategy call, and we need to have it this week or you know, whatever. Okay, then I can open up a Wednesday or Thursday, but that’s something that I instituted is Tuesdays or call days. That’s it. That’s podcast interviews, client calls, prospective client calls, anything.
Tuesdays are call days, I even try and schedule my therapy on Tuesday. Because then I have the rest of the week to divide out to client work and my CEO time. And that way, I find that it’s more disruptive to start work on Wednesday, and then Okay, now I have an 1130 call. Okay, now, let me work for two and a half hours. Okay, now I have another call. And then I’m 20 minutes or 30 minutes, and then I have one more call, and repeat.
So I just want all my calls on Tuesdays, I don’t get a lot of work done in between calls, because it’s usually pretty packed. But that’s okay, because I have the rest of the week to be super productive. So you may need to do something like that, where you block off an entire day for CEO time or you put all your calls on one day. It really you could whatever works for you.
You could even split your CEO time if you’re like, Okay, I’m gonna do a little bit on Monday mornings. And then again on Thursday afternoons or whatever, you could split it up. If that’s easier for smaller chunks. There’s no set time I’m not I’m not here to say you have to have four hours of CEO time every week. But I do recommend it’s at least a few hours more than one hour because there’s not a whole lot that can be done in just one hour. So that’s the first step is choosing a frequency, adjusting your schedule accordingly. and protect that time.
Do not schedule things over it. The second step is keeping a list of what you’re going to do during the CEO time. This is helpful because you don’t want to schedule in Okay, I have my Tuesday morning CEO time and then you walk into the office and you’re like I What am I supposed to work on? I don’t know what I want to do. It’s CEO time and I’m not sure so a few things you could do.
Work on just, I’m just spitballing ideas here for you, this could look totally different depending on what you do in your business. And if you have team members, etc, but one, you could update your website plugins, you knew I was gonna start with a website task, right? You could work on some SEO, work on optimizing your blog post, you could plan out your content, whether that’s for Instagram, or the blog, or your podcast or whatever. If it’s not already planned out, you could plan it out for the next few weeks. You could work on look at your data, look at your analytics, look at your website analytics, look at your email analytics for your newsletter, you could if you have a lot of cold subscribers that need deleted, clear amount. You could work on bookkeeping. I do not like that.
But it’s necessary. But think about the things that you need to do. And then you could also add in so maybe you have a list of kind of my, like, I have a list of go to things that like if I have nothing new. Here’s some things that I can kind of run through, do I need to check on this? Do I need to check on that? Etc. The thing, you could also have a list somewhere, it could be a post it note. It could be in your planner, it could be in Asana, Trello, whatever however you keep your your notes, and just throw in there throw ideas in there for when you think of something maybe it’s something someone says on Instagram, maybe you’re like, oh, Annie said XYZ about, you know, emails or about her contract, Oh, I should look at my contract for does it does it include that just have a place to keep notes.
And just save that for later. Okay, and he told me this, I saw this on Instagram, I saw this in an email, that’s something I could look into and research during CEO time. Just keep a running list doesn’t mean that this running list has to be done every single week, especially if you start getting lots of notes, it might be that you have time for three or four. And then the rest get, you know, you look into them or do those things the following week.
It’s not that this whole list has to be done every single week, but it’s just kind of like, Uh huh, you know, this might be something I could look into Someday, I’ll look into it during CEO time or, you know, a slower period in business, whatever. But keep a list so that you have things to do. The other thing that that I didn’t mention that is sometimes on my list is going back and looking at workshops, I missed memberships, I’m a part of courses that I didn’t finish.
So this can also be education time, whether it’s you’re just reading blog posts, or like I said memberships or courses, that could be one of those kind of go to things that you just when you have time, if you’ve finished everything else, you know, you could do that. I also know people if you really want to, to lean into this, I know people who have CEO time and also separate education time.
So might be like Monday mornings are their CEO time admin tasks, etc. But then, you know, whatever it is Friday mornings are education time. So they just sit down and watch a few workshops, the course etc. So that’s something else you could do if you really want to lean into the education part. And then the third and final step, which is very optional. This is this totally depends on your schedule and your personality and you know, whatever, but might help is finding a buddy, the buddy system.
So find a business friend that also wants to implement some CEO time and decide what time works for you. Maybe it’s the first Friday of every month that you guys hop on zoom, and you just quote unquote co work together and knock out some CEO time. If you’re thinking of someone right now, that would be a good fit. Why don’t you send this episode to them? say, look, we should do some CEO time Listen to this.
Let me know if you’re interested. Shoot them a text with this episode and say let’s do some CEO time I have a friend that we do that occasionally we don’t do it. We each have our own CEO time consistently but occasionally we like to do it together and we use that as an excuse to Like, go get chick fil a or Starbucks and treat ourselves for some co working and CEO time. So you know, you can make a little virtual date out of it. But having that accountability can be really beneficial. And if you’ve not done virtual co working before, if you’re like, wait, what are you talking about?
This is how I do it. My friends and I, this is how we do it. Very simple. We hop on zoom, we chit chat for like five to 10 minutes. And then we say what are you working on today? What’s on your list? Oh, I’m, you know, gonna look at this thing and Convert Kit. And then I need to fix a blog post on my site. And then I have a few workshops to watch. Cool, what are you working on? rattles off the list?
And then we say okay, do you want to check in and like an hour, an hour and a half? Sure. Then we mute ourselves, one of us sets a timer. And then when that timer goes off in an hour, we speak up on zoom and like, hey, it’s an hour time to check in. And we just say like, what do you get done? Did you finish this? And sometimes it can be nice, because it’s like, yeah, so I got stuck trying to figure this out. Have you done this in ConvertKit? Or have you figured this out? Yes, no, I know someone who can help or you know, whatever.
So sometimes there’s a little bit of brainstorming or whatever. But a lot of times, it’s just, you know, we pretend that we’re in the same coffee shop working together. And it’s just that accountability to really focus on the CEO tasks. So that is the rundown of setting aside time to work on your business, figure out when you want to do it, what you’re going to do, and if necessary, who you will do it with.
This is so important, again, for your business, because you don’t want to just let the systems sit there and idle for three years. And not check on them not try to improve them. I mean, just this morning, I hopped in and tweaked like three little emails in my client onboarding sequence. They weren’t total rewrites, but it was like, Oh, I should add that in. And it was just a little CEO tasks that I easily marked off. But that little edit could make a big difference in my client experience.
So I really encourage you to start doing this as soon as possible. If you have any questions as always, you can DM me on Instagram at Jess Creatives. Otherwise, I will see y’all next week.
