4 Systems of a CEO

I’m not talking sales funnels…

…or webinars…

…or marketing automation…

…or landing pages…

…or any of the systems you hear me commonly talk about. 

Today, I’m breaking down the 4 systems I’ve continued to master as a CEO. 

You can have all of the sales, marketing and acquisition systems you want — but without dialing in these 4 CEO systems, you’re likely still going to struggle. 

The reality is, as the CEO and owner of your business you need to become a PRODUCER. 

Your job is PRODUCTION. 

Aka creates stuff. 

For most agency owners, their business ebbs and flows just like their emotions and their own personal energy. 

In a bad mood? 

Business doesn’t go well. 

In a great mood? 

Business is ok. 

And back and forth and back and forth.

Our success as the CEO of our business really comes down to 4 areas. 

Each of these areas has become a game-changer in my life. 

Installing the right CEO systems have allowed me to show up in areas of my life that I think a lot of entrepreneurs (myself included) have neglected. 

Dive into today’s episode and leave a comment below with the one you’re going to focus on next. 

​Transcript / MP3

What’s good, everybody.In this video, I’m gonna break down the four systems of being an effective CEO. Let’s get it going. For three years, my agency built funnels and automation systems for the biggest names in marketing today since then have transformed that agency into a hyper profitable training and consulting business. While everyone is out there talking about scale like it’s some sort of destination, we’ll be asking the real question, how do you transform your business into a more scalable model using the knowledge, skills, and expertise that you already have? This podcast is here to give you the answer. Join me in, follow along as I learned, apply and share the strategies I’m using to build my multimillion-dollar business. My name is Greg Hickman and welcome to scaleSo this episode, as I said, I want to talk about for systems that you need to have to be an effective CEO and leader in your organization. Now, in other videos and upcoming videos and podcasts, we will and have already talked about business systems, right? The how do you systems and automation around lead generation, lead, nurture, um, fulfillment and retention. All of those other things. The systems that a lot of the courses and you know, the marketers are talking about online, those are very much important. But what I really want to dive in today is the systems that you need to have and or adopt if you don’t have them and or create, if you don’t have them as the CEO in your business. And uh, I want to give a shout out to one of my former coaches, Russ Perry from design pickle. He kind of introduced me to the systems that I’ve been living now for, you know, the last 180 plus days and it’s really changed all the time of listening to this.It’ll, it’ll have been way longer than that. Um, cause you know, we batch record y’all. These four systems have really given me the room to kind of really start making that transition from an entrepreneur. The business is me too. I’m the CEO. I have business systems. But yeah, in order to have those systems and create the things that I need to create to be successful in building a profitable and scalable business, I need to be doing some other things that start with me, the leader. So if you’re not doing some of these things, I’m going to be breaking down these four systems for you and kind of giving you some high-level examples of how you can start incorporating these systems into your own life. All right, so let’s, uh, jump over here and now if you’re listening on iTunes, I am drawing on my iPad at the moment.Don’t worry, have no fear. You are not missing anything. I will talk you through what I am talking about. Um, so you can, you can very much succeed by listening, uh, just on the audio here. But really what we’re talking about here is the four CEO systems, right? And I really believe that these are the systems that will make you really effective. So imagine like a ladder if you’re just listening to the audio and that the ladder. Um, you know, we have a ladder of, of four. And so at the bottom, we have the foundation. Uh, all the way at the top we have the fourth step, which is, uh, you know, the forest system. So at the foundation of all of this being a CEO, you need to develop what is called habit systems, right? Habits systems are things like your morning routine, your evening routine, which I think is often neglected and not discussed, but very much your morning is predicated on how you handle your evening, right?So your habit systems are things like how do you show up each and every day with the energy to create. Now, for myself, um, I have been living and adopted a system called core four, which was created by a guy by the name of Garrett j, White from wake up warrior. And Russ Perry is one of the certified trainers of that. So I learned the core four methodologies, right? It’s a habit system. It allows me to focus on being a four-dimensional person, not just a CEO, which allows me to focus on my body, my being, my balance, and my business, right? Oftentimes I see a lot of entrepreneurs, myself included at times, get so dialed into ours, our just our business that we lose focus on how we’re showing up with our body, with our mind, with our families, right? And that actually leads to a kind of decay in those areas.And that’s because we’ve been operating as a one-dimensional person, only focused on business. But what you’ll find is when you treat your body like a Ferrari or a million-dollar machine, and you treat your mind that way, and you treat your relationships that way, your business will actually benefit and be the byproduct of all of the amazingness that you have because you’ll have all of the power and energy to create, which is going to allow you to show up in your business like a boss, like a CEO, right? So at the very core, um, or at the foundation, we have our habits systems. So if you don’t have any sort of am or pm rituals, you might want to consider focusing on those. You literally cannot read a book about a successful entrepreneur and not hear about their morning routine, right? Um, think about when and why people that create New Year’s resolutions fail, you know, 60 days into it, if not earlier than that.It’s because they’ve never really created habits, systems in their life to maintain and sustain these new habits that they’re trying to create, right? Or that they’re trying to adopt, right? If you’ve never been a runner before and all of a sudden you’re trying to run every day, seven days a week, you’re probably going to burn out and fail, right? You haven’t created a habit system that allows you to be successful in those areas. And so for me, that’s core four. I have a little morning ritual that I do every single day before I jump into work that allows me to kind of cover all four spectrums, body being, balance and balance and business. So the first system of a CEO is your habit systems, right? And you’re going to see how these all stack on top of each other. Now, above habit systems, we have planning systems, right?Planning systems very much are things like a time blocking. If you’ve ever read the book, the one thing, um, you know, [inaudible] or deep work by Cal Newport, these, this is the ability to manage your time so that you have room for creation, right? So how do you plan to create, right? So we have our habits systems, then we have our planning systems is how do we make the time to actually do the work that is needed within our lives and our business to be successful, right? So planning systems, things like time model, time blocking, um, financial planning, right? This is, uh, oftentimes we take a lot of our clients through this process where, um, we look at, Hey, what are you, what’s this new model you’re going to create? What are you going to be charging? What does that look like in 60 days from now?If you’re growing at a certain percentage? And then what happens when you need to bring people on or make investments in, in your business? Will you still be profitable, right? Having some quick systems to plan and look at, will you be profitable? Do you have the bandwidth to capitalize on these opportunities? Those all fall into your planning system. Now, one level up, we have creation systems. So creation systems are now stacked on top of planning because we’ve made the room for creation in our plan, right through our calendar. Um, we have a video, uh, I’ve done a video, a podcast episode before all about, um, you know, if it’s not on the calendar, it doesn’t exist in the power of time blocking. So you should go check that out. I’ll link that in the show notes. But the next system is your creation systems. And for us, we operate in 90-day game plans.And really what that allows us to do is look at where we are now, look at all those facts and determine a target 90 days from now. And that aligns with our objectives. So where do we want to be in 12 months? Well, let’s reverse engineer that into 90 days. Now we know what we need to work on, right? We, that’s what, that’s what we’re creating. The things that we need to create. Maybe we need to create those business systems. Maybe we need to go get a certain number of clients, right? That’s the creation system. How do we, when I think of creation systems, think about how do you take the important things that you need to do to grow your business that is not currently urgent and make them urgent. That’s what we’re doing in our creation systems, right? But if we don’t have room to create, how are we going to get things done?That’s why they come after our planning systems. So you need to have your calendar and your weeks and your, and your day’s designed to give you the room for the work that needs to be done. So that when you know what you need to work on, there is time to do it right? So that’s the creation systems. And then lastly, accountability systems, account to ability systems. All right? And now there are two types of accountability systems. There are internal accountability systems and external accountability systems, right? You might be someone that is really good at holding yourself accountable. Great. I applaud you in some areas of my life. I am an other areas of my life. I am not. And so we need both those internal and external accountability systems. So internal accountability systems are things, um, kind of like your habit systems, right? Like you might actually be good at showing up and honoring your own word, but some of you might actually kind of hide behind that.So that’s where you might need an external accountability system. So an external accountability system could be something like a coach, right? We’re getting a consultant, um, putting yourself in a mastermind in a group of peers that are going to hold you accountable, right? Um, and or adding a constraint, right? Giving yourself deadlines. Those are external things that you can be doing that will compliment your own internal accountability systems, right? Um, going to my wife and saying, I’m going to achieve x, y, z. Can you hold me accountable for getting this done? Be in a mastermind, pain, pain, a coach, or a consultant, a certain amount of money to achieve a specific result. Those are external accountability systems. Right now I don’t need necessarily accountability if I don’t know what I’m working towards, right? Which is why accountability is the fourth CEO system that’s sitting here on, on top of the four, right?So if you need accountability, you need accountability to something, right? To create something. Well, that’s why it comes after your creation systems, right? You need, you need to have a system to help you determine what it is that you need to create so that you can hit the goals that you want. Now, if you don’t have room for creation, thus your planning system. So if you haven’t given yourself room to create, then how are you ever going to hit any of these goals that are important but not urgent right now? And if you have no system to show up to be at your best every Single Day, Aka your habits systems, how are you ever going to plan, create, and have the need for anyone to hold you accountable to anything? Right? So these four systems are things that if you don’t have them now, you really need to start adopting and finding the combination that works for you.Your habit systems are what are going, what’s going to give you the energy and the power to create. But you need to plan for creation and plan for the management of Your Business. And then you need to actually go create and know what to create those of your creation systems. And then you’re going to need both internal and external accountability. AK, your accountability systems to make sure that you actually do the things that you said you were going to create. When you have those things in place as the CEO, the leader of Your Business, you’ll actually start to feel the momentum, right? You’ll actually start to see the progress in all of those business systems that you might be starting with, right? So if you’re starting with only business systems and you’re feeling like it’s kind of, you know, this, you know, you’re trying to drag up a boulder or push a boulder up a hill, you’re probably feeling a lot of resistance and friction.A lot of that is probably coming from the fact that you don’t have these four CEO systems. So, uh, if you’re listening, I’d love to know which of these systems, if or maybe all of them that you’re lacking and you’re going to focus on developing first a comment below in a [inaudible] here in the comments in if you’re watching on youtube and if you’re listening right now, driving, working out or whatever it be sure to hop into our free private Facebook community called the scalable service provider. Um, and jump in on the conversation as it relates to the four systems of a CEO. And we’ll catch you next timeif you’ve been looking to grow and scale your agency, but you’re tired of trading time for money, custom projects, and relying on referrals alone, it can be hard. That’s probably why if I gave you five, 10 or 20 new clients right now, you or your business would break. I struggle with the same thing for a while until I figured out a better way. So I created a special experience called foundations to help them package up your knowledge and experience into a profitable online program, launch your automated sales system and systemize your fulfillment. You’ll work directly with me, my team, and a group of entrepreneurs just like you to implement the systems and get the help you need. We’ll learn more and see if it’s a fit. Just hop on over to my scalable business.com and schedule a call with us today.

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Greg Hickman

Greg Hickman

CEO & Lead Mentor

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