If someone looked at your calendar from the last couple of weeks, would they know that you own your business? If your week is full of tasks and approvals and meetings and sales calls and putting out fires, you would not look as though you're the CEO. You might own a business, but there's a difference. There's a difference in owning a business and actually performing the role of CEO. CEO is way more than a title. There are real responsibilities that are essential for your business to succeed as it scales, but you're still way too involved in the day-to-day work. You still have way too much on your plate. Earlier this week, I was talking with a client, and she recently hired a couple of new team members, and we were chatting about what's possible now that those team members are in place. And she made the comment something along the lines of, I see it now.

I finally understand with these people now in the business, these two new team members in the business, they can run the day-to-day. And she had this aha moment that it's actually possible for her to step out of so many of the things that she's been holding onto. It's possible for her to actually step into her CEO role. Before, she knew logically that one day she'd get there. It kind of would make sense. But now she sees a clear path to that happening. And as we were talking, I reinforced that by asking her, how many projects do you think a CEO should personally own or be responsible for? Like, if you have a certain number of priorities for the quarter, how many of those should you own? And she thought about it for a second, and then she gave me the right answer, and that answer is zero. I want you to let that sink in because that hadn't been her reality, and it's probably not yours either.

You probably own a good portion of the priorities in your business. You're involved in and are the one day-to-day focused on getting those things done or managing the people who are getting them done. You're the one following up, checking in, ensuring that things don't get off track, but that's not actually what a CEO should do. So what should your role be? If it's not doing many of the things that you've been doing, then what will you spend your time on? If we don't define your CEO role, you're going to default back to implementation. You're going to default back to managing the day-to-day. But when we get really clear about what you own as the CEO, you shift what your week looks like and you change your role in your business. So let's do that together today. Let's break down what you should own.

There are 5 essential responsibilities of a CEO, and you need to tailor the job description to you. But if you're truly in the CEO role and not serving in any other function in the business, any other functional role, then these are your 5 responsibilities. And if your business requires you to still be in a functional role, that's okay, but that's a separate job description. And you need to be really clear about the fact that's a part of your role, not because you're the CEO, but because you have more than one job in your business. It's kind of a side tangent there, but an important point. When you're ready to step fully into the CEO role, that's going to involve these 5 core responsibilities. The first one is vision casting. Vision casting is all about defining the vision, the direction for your business, setting that and communicating that.

You're going to define that vision and cast that vision. That means you're going to help your team connect the dots and understand the short, medium, and long term. They're going to see where you're headed at each of those time horizons. You're going to repeat it to them. You're going to continue to cast that vision until it becomes ingrained, and then you're going to keep repeating it some more because you never stop talking about vision when you're the CEO. You're going to translate that big picture vision into some top priorities for your team, and then you're going to hand off that vision for someone else, for a strategist, to take that and turn that into a plan. Part of this vision responsibility is also creating a vision big enough that your team can see themselves in it, a vision that's big enough that they see that there's still room for them to grow within it, and to keep bringing people back to the vision, to keep aligning people with the vision and protecting that vision anytime distractions arise.

So owning the vision casting responsibility means consistently spending time thinking about what's next and communicating what's next to your team. Then you're gonna use that lens, that vision as a lens for your next responsibility, and that's strategic decision-making. Now, as the CEO, I wanna be clear that it's not your responsibility to make every little decision in your business. It's really just the high-leverage decisions. So CEO-level decisions are about fewer decisions, but bigger decisions. You should not be exhausted from making decisions. You should not be experiencing decision fatigue. If you are, you haven't delegated decisions properly in your business. You aren't holding on to the decisions that only you can hold on to.

Because the strategic decision-making for a CEO is going to look like those bigger picture decisions that shape the trajectory of the business. They're the high-stakes decisions, the irreversible decisions. And again, using that vision as a filter to decide what not to pursue. You're going to have a lot of ideas and you're going to have a lot of opportunities, and you can't pursue all of them. So part of your role is running all of those through the vision and sharing the vision again with your team, like we talked about before, so that they can do this as well, to stay the course, to stay focused on what's going to help you get there and not distract you. So that second responsibility is strategic decision-making.

Third is team leadership, but there's a difference between leadership and management. So this is not managing the day-to-day operations. Ideally, you elevate someone else to a role that's responsible for the day-to-day. You're responsible for developing leaders, for establishing values and enforcing them, for shaping the company culture, for building trust and autonomy, for inspiring and motivating your team. Leading as a CEO is at the highest level. It's not the day-to-day management. The skillset is different. The responsibilities are different. So this third level is all about team leadership, but at that CEO level, strengthening the leaders and the culture of your business, not managing the tasks or the day-to-day.

The fourth responsibility is relationship building.

And to get to where you are, you've had to build relationships. But a lot of the relationships that you've built have been with clients, with your team, and now we need to switch the focus to bigger picture external relationships. There's a theme here. I keep saying bigger picture or bigger or higher level because at the CEO level, every single area that we're talking about is leveling up. It's an upgrade. It's not that these are all brand new skills, but it's a different level. When we're talking about relationship building at a higher level, we're talking about seeking out mutually beneficial partnerships. Now your focus shifts from the internal day-to-day to the external future, and you begin to build relationships with people that could open up opportunities to help you get to where you're going.

And when you do this right, you're doing it in a way, again, that's mutually beneficial. And so you're working together with others and you're helping each other reach your respective goals. The right relationships can completely change what's possible for your business. So that's why that's the fourth responsibility.

The fifth is thought leadership. Thought leadership goes beyond creating resources for clients or processes for your team. It's about creating long-term assets, intellectual property, proprietary frameworks that moves not just your business forward, but creates a ripple effect across your industry. It's about shaping how your industry sees the problem, how your industry sees what's possible, how they think about and approach the work that you're collectively doing. It's about making a bigger impact. It's about showing up with a unique perspective and creating impact and legacy beyond what your business will do directly. So this is way bigger than posting content every day. This is creating long-term brand equity, and it's creating massive value to help so many more people than will ever actually work with you in your business. And trusting that the work that you do will still benefit you in some way, trusting that helping other people, helping the industry, moving your whole category further will also benefit your business.

I want you to think about what your week would look like with your time spent on these responsibilities. I started out by asking you if someone would know that you're the owner, the CEO of your business by looking at your calendar. I want to circle back now to that calendar, and I want you to imagine that your time was spent on these 5 responsibilities.

What would that require? What would need to shift? I'm curious how many hours you spent on CEO-level responsibilities in the last week. I wouldn't be surprised because I've asked this question to my clients, so I understand where they start and I know what they get to and how much this changes over time. But oftentimes there's little to no time spent on these 5 things on a week-to-week basis. These are very easy to overlook, to undervalue, to push off. But they're also some of the most important things that you could spend time on. So you need to block CEO time off on your calendar. You need to build these into your routine, into your schedule, and you need to protect that time fiercely. You need to delegate everything else that you can delegate in order to make room for these responsibilities and not just make room, but to prioritize them. You have to refuse to step back into old patterns.

You have to refuse to overlook these. You have to continually ask yourself, are you operating as a CEO? Are you protecting this role? Do you have the title, or are you actually doing the job of a CEO? Your business needs it. If you're earning multiple six figures, you should be dedicating time to these responsibilities. And as you pass seven figures or get into multiple seven figures, this should become an increasingly larger portion of your week. You can start out by blocking just a couple of hours a week, and then you can, over time, build in an hour a day. Eventually you'll get to the point where you block off an entire day to focus on CEO-level work, and then you'll continue to evolve to the point where the majority of your week is spent on doing these 5 things.

I'll leave you with this. If your week does not include these 5 responsibilities, then who is protecting the future of your business? All of these are about the bigger picture, the longer term, the future, where your business is going. In some way, shape, or form, all of these are protecting that. They're protecting the long term. And what will you commit to? Will you go block time on your calendar right now to make sure that every week you're spending time on these responsibilities? That's my challenge for you.