Episode 6: Wearing ALL the Hats in Your Business Without Going Crazy

Episode 6: Wearing ALL the Hats in Your Business Without Going Crazy

How do you plan – whether for a year or a month – so that your workflow is smooth and effective, and you can still take care of the day-to-day situations that demand your immediate attention? Join Pamela as she shares the 3-Step Planning Process that keeps her clients moving forward and on-track.

In this episode, you’ll discover:

• The 3 hats you NEED to wear in your business, and when to switch.
• How to know when you’re doing a good job in each role, and how to improve.
• The critical mistake that can derail your plans, and how to avoid it.

Timecode Guide:

02:56: Pamela shares the secret to keeping your sanity. Discover why you need to limit the number of hats you wear to three and get her strategy for using these Three Modes.
11:03: Learn about the one critical mistake that can derail your plans and throw off your business entirely, and get the steps to stay on track.
12:55: See how to set measurable business goals and implement processes that align with your objectives, and Pamela reveals why this will enable you to reach your goals like never before.

Podcast Transcription

Episode 6: Wearing ALL the Hats in Your Business Without Going Crazy

The Introduction to Not Going Crazy

Intro (00:00):
You’re listening to ‘A Profitable Impact.’

Pamela (00:02):
How do you plan what you’re going to do? Whether it’s a month, a week, a day, so you don’t feel like you’re going crazy wearing 27 hats in your business. There is a way to do it that’s much, much simpler, and more straightforward.

Gene (00:16):
Welcome to ‘A Profitable Impact,’ where every single week we help coaches and healers to expand their reach, to increase their impact in the world, and to be well-paid for their extraordinary skills and talents. My name is Gene Monterastelli, and I am the lead coach in Pamela Bruner’s Impact Accelerator coaching program. And now please welcome my friend, my colleague, and the CEO of Attract Clients Online, Pamela Bruner. How are you doing, Pamela?

Pamela (00:40):
I’m doing very well, Gene, and looking forward to talking about wearing all kinds of different hats.

Gene (00:46):
Yeah. We are in a circumstance where those of us who are small business owners and solopreneurs, depending on any day of the week, we might be doing six, eight, a dozen different things to make our business go forward. And it’s good for us to recognize that we are in the right place, doing the right thing, in the right moment. As we have the conversation today, listeners, if you’re in a circumstance where you recognize the fact that you’re struggling to figure out which hat you’re supposed to be wearing at what given moment, as you are executing your business and making an impact in the world, we would invite you to reach out and have a conversation with one of our coaches to help you to get some clarity about how you should be investing your time to ensure that your business is moving forward. To do that, you can go to BookMyBreakthroughCall.com, that is BookMyBreakthroughCall.com, and you can have an opportunity to sign up for a conversation, absolutely free, with one of our coaches to help you to figure out the best way to invest your time and energy on any given day to help you to be successful in your business.

Pamela (01:46):
Let’s talk about hats. Because as you said, in a given week, you may feel like you’re wearing six, eight, 10 hats. But in this episode, I want to talk about the three hats that you need to wear in your business on a regular basis; and when to switch between hats, how you do that. Also, we want to go over how to know when you’re doing a good job in each one of those roles, each one of those particular arenas, and how to improve it. And then, the critical mistake that can often derail your plans and how to avoid that.

Gene (02:17):
I think, Pamela, this is such a valuable conversation for us to have. You know, as I am coaching our clients, one of the most common questions I get from our clients is, “What should I be doing now? What should I be doing today?” They have the big picture of knowing the different pieces that need to fit together, but it becomes the execution day-to-day and moment-to-moment, which I think a lot of small business owners, a lot of healers and coaches have a real problem figuring out how to navigate that time.

Pamela (02:46):
Exactly. Which is why I titled this ‘Wearing All the Hats in Your Business without Going Crazy.’

Three Modes for Small Business Owners: CEO, Manager, and Employee

Pamela (02:50):
So, let’s start talking about these three hats. Because I think just having this distinction is going to help people know how to structure, how to plan, and how to shift between big-picture planning and just getting the nitty-gritty done. In order to do this, I’m going to talk about the three hats as three different modes that you need to operate in, in your business. And the first mode is ‘CEO-Mode.’ Now, CEO is a term that a lot of transformational entrepreneurs, a lot of coaches and healers won’t use because they see a CEO as someone who’s running this multi-multimillion dollar business with hundreds of employees. But the truth is, the CEO is responsible for creating the vision of the business and setting the goals of the business.

Pamela (03:41):
And every business owner, solopreneur, on up, needs to create a vision and set goals. So, CEO-Mode needs to be a mode that you are in either monthly or bi-monthly. So, every 30 to 60 days, you want to sit down and plan out, “What am I doing? What are my big goals for the next 30 to 60 days?” Now, you may also plan quarterly or plan every six months or a year. But in terms of a 30- to 60-day plan, that’s usually short enough that you can keep an eye on everything and not so short that you get bogged down in the details. So, CEO-Mode… You may go into CEO mode just for a couple of hours, every 30 to 60 days to say, “What’s the plan. What’s the vision? Where do I want to get in the next 30 to 60 days?”

Pamela (04:33):
The second mode I want to talk about is what we might call ‘Manager-Mode.’ Managers take the vision and the goals, and they create the plan to accomplish those goals. So, you want to go into Manager-Mode at least every week. You’re going to evaluate the plan. You’re going to react. You’re going to take additional action or different action if you need to, but the manager sets the midterm focus. And so you might go into Manager-Mode for an hour at the beginning of a week or an hour at the end of a week, planning for the next week by saying, “What’s working? What’s not? What do I need to do?” And the manager is going to schedule things and set tasks.

Pamela (05:18):
The third mode that you want to look at is the ‘Employee-Mode.’ Yes, you are your own employee. And Employee-Mode is what you’re in when you implement daily. Now here’s where a lot of the hat-switching that may have frustrated you before is probably going to occur, because you may have admin tasks, and customer support tasks, and you have tasks as a coach or healer where you’re working with clients, and maybe you have marketing tasks where you’re writing copy or you’re reaching out. But those are all Employee-Mode tasks. They are doing the work. They are implementing daily the plan created by the Manager and the vision created by the CEO. One of the advantages of doing it this way and thinking in terms of these three different roles is, as an Employee, you wouldn’t in the middle of some task. You’re supposed to do all of a sudden say, “Maybe I should completely change my goal for the next 60 days.” It’s not your job. In that moment, you’re acting as an implementer, you’re acting in Employee-Mode. And so part of the relief that you get in this mode is, “I’m here to implement, not to question. I’m going to question at another time.”

Gene (06:33):
You know, I love this idea. Pamela, is it okay if I share with our listeners the way that I execute this month-to-month? Because what you’re talking about is exactly how I structure my time.

Pamela (06:44):
Of course!

Gene (06:44):
So, like you said, at the first of the month, on the first Monday of the month (whatever the first Monday of the month is), I spend one hour doing CEO-Mode stuff. This is where I am looking back over the course of the last month to see what my goals were, to see how I did, and to see what I need to improve. And I look forward to the next month. So like you said, the 60- to 90-range for me, it’s once a month, I do that particular thing.

Gene (07:08):
Every single Monday morning, I step into Manager-Mode. And if you were someone who was booking a call with me as one of my clients, you would see it’d be impossible to get on my calendar before 1:00pm on Monday afternoon, because I want to start my week in a position where I am controlling my time. I’m dictating what’s going on. And I make my plan throughout the week of everything I need to get done to implement the vision that the CEO came up with. I also spend five minutes every single morning in Manager-Mode, which is just basically me re-reviewing my day to make sure something unexpected hadn’t come up that’s gotten in the way of my plan.

Gene (07:48):
And then, the rest of the week I’m doing exactly what you said, I am in Employee-Mode. And for me, the most liberating thing about being in Employee-Mode is, I’m not having to hold any brain space for the vision. I’m not having to be thinking about and making value judgments about what to do next. I just get to do the task that is in front of me, be that fulfillment with a client, be it creating a piece of content, be it doing marketing activities. But because I know exactly what I’m doing at that time, I am able to be focused, but I’m saving energy because it’s not leaking all over the place thinking of all of those other things.

Pamela (08:27):
I love that phrase you just used, “leaking all over the place.” One of the things that causes the ‘energy leaks’ or ‘energy drains’ is switching modes too frequently, because it’s a different part of the brain. It’s a different way of thinking to be in CEO-Mode or to be in Manager-Mode. When you put yourself in one of those modes, you’re thinking big picture, you’re not thinking detail. One of the ways in which I noticed this is, I noticed that when I went into a meeting with my team and I tried to come from the vision and be the CEO, and then we got very granular about the details, it felt very confusing. And I realized that we actually needed to split that into two different meetings, where one was, “Team here is the vision. This is what we’re doing. Let’s talk about the broad goals. Let’s make sure that everybody’s clear on them.” And then another one where we say, “Okay, this is our one goal. How are we going to implement that?” And in that second meeting, I’m actually not operating as CEO, I’m operating as Marketing Manager, getting granular on the project plan. So, even with a team, these modes can be very useful.

Gene (09:31):
I think what’s really important there is you recognize the place where one is bleeding over into the other. And for me, part of the way that I manage this, because I am not in a circumstance where I have a team around me the way that you do, but there are times in which ideas come up that are not in the mode that I’m currently in. Like as the week unfolds, I bump into things that I need to think about as Manager or as CEO. And the way that I handle that is my external hard drive, which is a pile of notecards that is sitting immediately next to my keyboard. And any time an idea, a thought, a challenge, or a problem that is not about the mode that I am in in that particular moment, I just quickly take that idea, I jot it down on the notecard. I force myself to write slowly and clearly because there have been times where I’ve looked at my notes four hours later going, “What was I talking about? Why did I write ‘broccoli CPU database’ on there? That makes no sense to me,” because I couldn’t read what I’d written. But by getting it out of my head onto the piece of paper, it is no longer that mental, energetic leak of trying to hold on to this idea of, “Oh, when I’m back in CEO-Mode, I’m going to deal with this.” My brain knows it has been written down so when the CEO shows back up, when I go back into CEO-Mode that information is there. So then I’m not having the energetic, emotional, intellectual leak of having to try and think in different modes because I jotted it down quickly, and then I can return to the thing that is in front of me.

The Critical Mistake: How to Keep On-Track with Your Plans

Pamela (11:03):
Perfect. And that will take us into the critical mistake. I think we ought to talk about the critical mistake that can derail your plans and goals, and then lead from there into how to know you’re doing a good job in each role. So, the critical mistake that can derail your plans is all about making sure that you spend enough time in each mode. And here’s what I mean by that. If you set vision and goals, and then you go immediately into Employee-Mode without the Manager-Mode, without taking the plan and creating a project plan from it, that’s going to get you into trouble. I know I talked to a client who is doing a launch and she was feeling very overwhelmed. And I said, “Do you have everything in a list so you know what you’re implementing?” And she said, “You know what, when I started this project a weeks ago, I had a list. But as I’ve progressed in the project, I haven’t updated the list or the project plan. And now I’m trying to keep everything in my head.” And that was a recipe for overwhelm. So she was missing the Manager-Mode of this three-phase approach.

Pamela (12:08):
So, if you are setting the vision and the goals, and then you are taking the vision and the goals and creating a project plan in Manager-Mode to implement it, and you’re being a good and loyal Employee and implementing daily what was assigned in the project plan, it looks like it should all work beautifully. But, how do you know you’re doing a good job in each role?

Gene (08:29):
If you love what you’re listening to and would like to learn more about how you can elevate your business and wants to know how you can increase your impact in the world. I’d like to invite you to join our team on a free strategy session.

Want to know more about how to attract your ideal clients online?

We’d Love To Chat! Grab a Breakthrough Session with one of my coaches to learn how to create real impact and income online.

How to Set and Reach Your Goals (+ The Strategy to Know If You’re Doing Everything Right)

Pamela (12:55):
There are a few criteria that you can use to measure whether a role has been adequately discharged. So for example, in CEO-Mode, when you create the vision and set the goals: Are the goals clear, specific, and measurable? It can’t just be a goal to get more clients. Perhaps it’s a goal to get three more clients in the next 30 days. Or perhaps it’s a goal to increase the number of leads that come onto your calendar in the next 30 days. And then in Manager-Mode, as I gave the example of with my client, if you don’t create a plan to implement it, your vision and your goals don’t go anywhere. So, do you know how you would get those three clients? What actions are you taking to do that? Are you reaching out to 10 people or 20 people a week? But if there’s no plan to get to the goals, the goals are just empty words.

Gene (13:52):
And I think the thing that you’re mentioning there is super, super critical about having this idea of something that is measurable. I regularly see with my clients a sense of dissatisfaction that comes when their goal is better. Because I can always do better. And it makes it really difficult to measure whether or not we’re moving forward in a thoughtful, deliberate way if we don’t have something to measure up against. And so, as you are figuring out that visioning piece, it is so critical that you know what success looks like. 1. So that you know when you’ve gotten there, but 2. So if you’re falling short, it gives you the opportunity (like we’re talking about) to figure out if I’m doing a particular goal or task or role effectively. Part of it’s, “the proof’s in the pudding,” and if I’m not getting the outcome that I want, then it gives me the opportunity to reevaluate the way that I move forward.

Pamela (14:41):
And I love that idea about your goals, not just being better. For a lot of people in the transformational world, the phrase “this or something better” is a very common affirmation. And so, sometimes there’s a feeling of, “Oh, I shouldn’t set a goal because what if I’m holding myself back,” or “What if I put too much pressure on myself to achieve that goal?” Well, both of those are mindset challenges that I believe are worthy of being worked on. In terms of holding yourself back, I don’t think a goal necessarily holds you back. In fact, Gene, on another episode you were talking about, “I looked at my numbers and I realized I was at 164% of my goal.” Yay, you’ve exceeded your goal. So it’s certainly possible to do that, but it gives you something to shoot for.

Pamela (15:26):
In terms of goals creating undue pressure, there are two ways to look at this. One is that, not all the time, but sometimes you will fail at your goals. That’s why we set goals: to move us in a direction. And more importantly, to become a better business owner so that we’re constantly achieving better and better levels and creating more value in the world and making more of a difference.

Pamela (15:52):
The other thing to take into consideration is that goals don’t live in a vacuum. When I teach goals, I’ll often teach about ‘Results Goals’ and ‘Process Goals.’ A Results Goal is something like, “I want three clients in the next month.” That’s a goal that has elements in it that depend on other people. You have to get other people to say, “Yes.” A Process Goal is a goal that you can do independent of anyone else. For example, you might set a Process Goal of reaching out to 10 people a week. Now, there’s nothing in that goal that says that they will respond, that they will answer the phone, that they will return your email, but you are in the process of reaching out to 10 people a week. So when you set a Process Goal in motion, it makes it far, far more likely that you’re going to achieve your Results Goals. The Results Goal would be set by the CEO. The Process Goal might be set by the Manager, and then implemented by the Employee.

Gene (16:45):
So one of the things that I really appreciate about all of this, Pamela, is what you’ve just walked through here. It gives us the ability much like these three modes to be able to look at our business, our outcome, our goals from multiple different levels, the 70,000 foot view of the CEO and the 500 foot view of the Employee who’s implementing stuff. As a business owner, it’s important that we’re be able to telescope in and out of those things. To be able to do the work moment-to-moment, but be able to hold the vision so we’re growing in the right way. And I think as we go back to the title about wearing all of these hats and going crazy, I think the reason why people go crazy as we’re navigating all of this is because we’re trying to do all of these things at once and we’re bouncing back and forth. And I think in the way that you’ve laid it out, it makes it really, really clear and easy for us to be able to be in a situation where we’re understanding where we’re supposed to be sitting and what hat we’re supposed to be wearing at any given moment.

Pamela (17:43):
Exactly. And one of the things that that does for people, and one of the reasons I love this three-mode system is that, as you scale your business, as you bring on team, as you get more help in the world, this mode, this system doesn’t change. I spend very little time in Employee-Mode now, but I still spend some because I’m the person who makes the videos (that’s an implementation project). I spend some time in Manager-Mode guiding the marketing team. I spend some time in CEO-Mode. So, I can use these modes and help keep myself clear even as I scale, and so can you.

Conclusion

Gene (18:22):
If you’re in a situation where, as you hear us talking about these different modes, but you’re still really struggling with how to figure out exactly how to implement that in your own business, we’d encourage you to reach out. Have a conversation with one of our coaches, absolutely free, to help you get a better grip on how you can spend your time, day-to-day and moment-to-, so that you are more successful in your business. All you need to do is go to BookMyBreakthroughCall.com, that is BookMyBreakthroughCall.com, and you can sign up for a conversation with one of our coaches to have them help you figure out the way to implement these three modes in your business.

Gene (18:59):
If the conversation we had today is something that you’re excited about and you know, another healer or coach or transformational entrepreneur in your life who could use this framework, please pass the episode along. It’ll take you 30 seconds to send an email, and you might actually be giving one of your friends and one of your colleagues the exact right piece of information they need today to be able to make a bigger impact in the world.

Gene (19:23):
If you haven’t done so already, we’d also encourage you to subscribe to the podcast. Subscribe and podcasting terms is always free. You can Subscribe at Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, anywhere you get audio. If you just search for ‘A Profitable Impact,’ you’ll be able to find the show. Click ‘Subscribe’ or click ‘Follow’ so that every single time a new episode comes out, you get a notification so that you’re in a situation where you continue to be better as a business owner to make more impact with the work that you’re doing. Until next time, I hope you have an impactful week.

ABOUT THE PODCAST

Building a business as a coach or expert is challenging, especially if you’re trying to find your clients online.

Join business coach and online marketing expert Pamela Bruner as she uncovers the secrets of successful transformational businesses. If you want to make a difference in people’s lives, expand your reach, and attract high-paying clients, you’ll love this show!