Today, I want to tackle a big question:
How do you become a leader capable of guiding your company to 7 figures and beyond?
If you’re a typical solopreneur, there’s a good chance you’re still doing most (or all) of the work yourself: you’re writing emails, testing ads, editing your website, and so on.
That’s how I started, too.
But as your company evolves, your role must also evolve if you want to continue to grow without burning yourself out.
So in this post, I’m giving you 3 mindset shifts to help you grow as a leader during this process — including:
- Why the meeting schedule is your friend (even if it can feel frustrating)
- A question to ask yourself every week to become a better delegator
- 1 thing most business owners neglect that hurts long-term growth
But first…
Do Less Driving and More Navigating
About 5 or 6 years ago, I reached the point where there was too much work to do it all myself. That’s when I started to step back from doing “actual work” and focus more of my time and energy on guidance and management.
And it was tough at first.
After all, I was used to being a solopreneur. I was used to driving the car, to having control over everything — from copy, to creative, to ad settings, to the font I used in my pitch decks.
But as my company grew, I learned to hand over the steering wheel to other people so I could do something even more important than driving, and that’s navigating.
As a leader, your most important job is to decide:
- Where the company should go
- And the strategic vision for how to get there
That’s navigating. And it requires handing over the day-to-day stuff so you can focus on the big picture.
But it’s hard to relinquish control, and honestly, you may not like it at first. So to help make this transition a little easier for you, here are 3 mental shifts that were game-changers for me in my journey as a leader.
Leadership Shift #1: Embrace the Meeting Schedule
As my company grew, I found myself spending more time on calls and meetings. This bothered me, because I felt like I didn’t have time to actually do things anymore.
And because I felt unproductive, I started showing up to these calls with low enthusiasm. That was a problem because, as the leader, my energy influenced the energy of everyone else I interacted with.
But the truth was that I needed to be on these calls. I couldn’t change my schedule. So I had to change my attitude instead.
And you know what I realized?
The calls and meetings that took up my days weren’t a waste of time. In fact, just the opposite: they gave me more power over the direction of the company than I’d ever had before.
When I was doing everything myself, I could only influence the tasks I was directly working on. But as a leader, every time I joined a call I was helping my team move forward with their projects. I was giving them the direction and feedback they needed to do their best work.
And the more employees I met with, the more influence I had to help my team be the best it could be.
Now I feel great about jumping on calls, and I’d like to think my enthusiasm is contagious. I’ve embraced my role as a facilitator for my team, and that’s raised our overall productivity to new heights.
Leadership Shift #2: Delegate Something New Every Week
Another mental shift for me was the decision to delegate as many tasks as I possibly could.
So now, once a week, I look at everything that I did over the past week and I ask myself, “Did I personally do any work that I didn’t have to do?”
For example, the previous week maybe I:
- Logged into Google Analytics to find some data
- Manually updated something in Klaviyo
- Or built a spreadsheet
Those tasks can be done by someone else, freeing me up to do more important work that only I can do.
The key to this shift is to do this process weekly. Delegation isn’t a one-time task — it’s a continuous process.
As a founder or CEO, your job is always changing because your company is always changing. So the tasks you need to delegate will change right along with your company’s shifting needs.
Today, maybe it’s important for you to come up with ad creative. But six months from now, perhaps you’ll be ready to hand that process over to someone else so you can focus on something new.
Leadership Shift #3: Make “Time for Wandering”
So far in this article, I’ve talked a lot about how your job as a leader is to take care of the big-picture stuff (i.e., navigating).
Those are big questions to tackle, tough problems to solve.
That’s why, in order to give your company the best guidance, it’s important to create the space you need to think deeply.
Jeff Bezos, one of the greatest company leaders of all time, made a deliberate decision to protect his morning hours. He called it “time for wandering” — or., time for thinking and ruminating.
You don’t need to do this every day, but shoot for once a week. Block time off on your schedule and give yourself one task:
Think.
You don’t have to necessarily think about a specific thing. This time doesn’t need to be structured. I think that’s why Bezos called it “wandering” instead of “thinking”, because there’s value in letting your thoughts wander and find new discoveries and associations.
This sort of thinking is really undervalued in our society.
Most people are too focused on seeing results now. But by creating the space to let your mind wander, you’re putting yourself in position to generate more meaningful long-term results.
Try it out. It’s one of the most powerful practices any leader can adopt.
* * * * *
There you have it, y’all: three mindset shifts that have made me a better leader over the years.
And if you make these same shifts by embracing the value of meetings, delegating, and creating space to think, you’ll find that you’re in a better position to lead your company to 7 figures and beyond.
Thanks for reading!
