Need A CEO But Can’t Afford It? Here’s How To DIY It.
Need A CEO But Can’t Afford It?
Here’s How To DIY It.
There’s a false belief that if you are a small business owner, you also need to be a master at business.
This is so far from the truth.
Being a master at your craft (aka the product or service you’ve created) is completely different from building a money-making business.
This is why you see so many external CEOs step in as soon as a startup makes it big. Often times, the creator doesn’t have the expertise to build a moneymaking sales machine.
And who can blame them? If you’ve already put your 10,000 hours in to becoming a master at your craft that has birthed a great product for your startup, how would you possibly find the time to also become a master at running a business?
There’s this myth that learning how to run a business that generates money, operates like a small country, and is also building an audience is something you can superbly side hustle while you’re creating your product.
Sure, you can do it, but it’ll take you several years to get really good at it.
This is where the friction comes in. Small business owners want to build a business that creates a living wage for them ASAP, but the mastery it takes to gain those skills takes a significant amount of time.
How To Change This
To change this, you have two options — do it yourself or hire someone else to do this work for you.
A lot of small business owners opt to hiring a team of freelancers to do the work for them in their nascent years, but I don’t love this option and here’s why.
When you let someone else figure out your business for you, you give them the power to mold your business’ vision for you. You allow them to determine your business’ mission, its brand voice, and who its target customer is without your input.
It’s totally necessary to hire a team after you’ve figured out the initial vision, just don’t let that team figure out your initial vision for you.
Since most small business owners can’t afford to hire a CEO-type to take the reins and lead, what I recommend instead is a creative spin on the do-it-yourself option.
Supercharged DIY
The best way to gain the knowledge of someone who has invested their 10,000 hours into the art of building a business and generating revenue is by intimately learning from them.
Using this individual as a guide to give you their knowledge while also training you to adopt their decision-making frameworks is a fast-track to getting the best of their expertise.
This is the best way to “hire” a CEO without having to search and pay a salary for one. By investing in how you can stoke this skill within yourself, you learn how to be the CEO your business needs until you’re capable of hiring a CEO.
Mentors are great, but coaches are better for this.
If mentors have a full-time job in addition to mentoring, it’s likely that they haven’t spent a whole lot of time understanding how to export their knowledge and make it teachable to an external party.
At face value, this doesn’t seem important, but it’s actually everything.
90% of the value that an expert will bring to you is the curation of their must-knows. Unless they’ve practiced and trialed the “must-knows” with a large pool of people, mentors will not possess this knowledge.
Coaches will because it’s their full-time job to develop this curation.
There are a lot of coaches out there nowadays, work with the ones who have the exact experience and professional background outside of coaching that will be helpful for you.