Welcome back, visionaries! Today, I want to talk about some of the hidden things that stop visionary CEOs from being able to scale their businesses into seven-figure years and six-figure months. There are two “camps” where visionary CEOs often end up trapped, and I’m really curious to find out what camp you may fall into…

Spaciousness for Visionary CEOs

Firstly, if you’ve been hanging out here for a little bit, you know that I am a big proponent of spaciousness. I deeply believe we need spaciousness to truly be the visionary CEO we were meant to be, and to allow the day-to-day of your business to start humming along without you.

When our clients gain spaciousness, they get to go on adventures like gallivanting around the sacred sites of Egypt, leading a medicine journey in the rainforest of Peru, or being invited to an immersive retreat to guide people through powerful initiations. These are all examples of what some of our clients are up to right at this moment.

Having the spaciousness to do your work AND live your life feels so luxurious and yummy. When we have that spaciousness, it fills our tanks instead of emptying them. It allows us to lean into our vision and see very clearly where we want to take our business. 

But when we get stuck in the hustle of the day-to-day operations in our business, we often lose sight of our vision. We get lost in hustle mode and can’t reach that level of spaciousness we long for.

I won’t lie…for a long time, it seemed like I would never get to enjoy the spaciousness that my visionary heart really craved. I was stuck working away in my office, putting out fires, doing a bunch of mundane tasks, and just trying to keep the train on the rails.

 After working with hundreds of visionary CEOs over the years, I can tell you that it’s not uncommon for business owners to tread water trying to capture the spaciousness that they desire. It’s really hard to get over the hump and get to their side of the hustle, and most of them fall into one of two camps…

Camp Coping

Camp one is high-performing, but they’re only coping, not thriving. 

In this camp, you’ve likely got a handpicked team of experts, people you’ve worked with for years; a team that knows just what to do to keep the wheels turning. They’re flexible, they’re active, and they get the job done, but they are overworked and on the brink of burnout.

Some of them are doing the jobs of two or three people, or they’re responsible for two or three or more departments, and they’re constantly switching gears and jumping around the new business and trying to keep up with everything just to survive. 

They create new policies and processes on the fly that pretty much only they can understand, and they implement new systems and tech that only they know how to use, because they’re the ones doing all the work. They’re not taking the time to document them and turn them into SOPs because it seems like there’s no need…and even if they thought there was, they have no time to do it.

These people are probably vastly over-qualified and overpaid for a lot of the tasks that they do in your business.

The jobs need doing; no one is arguing that. But odds are you just keep assigning them to the people you already have, because you’ve paid these experts top dollar and have no funds left over to actually hire the hands to do some of the more mundane tasks.

 When you have it set up like this, there’s no capacity for growth in your business. Your team is overwhelmed. Nobody is necessarily thinking straight. Everybody is on the grindstone, and nobody really has a big-picture perspective or a big vision for where your business is heading.

You end up trying to solve big problems while you are all on the brink of burnout. You’re feeling overwhelmed by trying to keep up with day-to-day tasks, which is a very hard position to be in while still trying to make strategic, smart decisions for your business. 

You may be overpaying your team, and it may be sapping your ability to hire more efficiently, but you end up in a catch-22; the thought of them leaving with all of their knowledge is unthinkable, so you’ll do and pay whatever it takes to keep them, even if it costs you spaciousness and scaling potential. 

You may have a really high-performing team, but how much longer can they all keep on going? How much longer can you really keep paying them the premium cost?  

It’s not uncommon for me to step into Camp Coping businesses and find that the visionary CEO is literally paying themselves half of what they’re paying one of their key team members, and they haven’t given themselves a raise for years. 

This is just not sustainable. It often comes from a place of the visionary CEO feeling overwhelmed with all the decisions and all the things that are happening in the business, and they started off hiring hands to help out, to step in and and support them in their business. But then they realized that those people just didn’t understand their vision and weren’t capable of making strategic decisions, so they were creating more problems than they were solving.

So instead, they ended up investing in core team members who were real experts in their field, and at first it was amazing, because they could speak to those team members and they understood where the visionary CEO was coming from. They understood the CEO’s heart and vision for their business, and they could take those ideas and implement them directly into the business.

But over time, as the business grew and more and more things got added on top, the visionary CEO started to lose control of what was going on in their business. They no longer had sovereignty and autonomy about key decisions or even understanding how best to grow their business, because they were no longer aware of all the moving pieces. Instead, those key team members were holding so much of the intellectual property of the visionary CEO’s business that they didn’t know how to function without those team members.

That becomes really cumbersome and overwhelming for you as the visionary CEO, because you end up constantly working to make sure that you can pay those key team members and keep them, because without them, you believe that your business will go under. 

Camp Bottleneck

Camp two is all about the self-induced bottleneck.

This camp is where you hire sporadically and reactively to plug the gaps that you have in your team; it’s a constant putting-out-fires approach to solve the latest crisis or fill the newest need in your business. 

What this looks like is you contacting your peers and telling them that you need somebody skilled in a particular software or other area, and you hire people off the cuff from random recommendations from people in your peer group and just hope that it’s all going to work out.

In this camp, your team members are good at what they do, but they can’t really see the bigger picture and what is needed to drive the business forward. You can’t afford to hire that expert core team (though that’s not a solution either, as we discussed previously!) and at the same time, you don’t have time to slow down and really vet people and go through the whole recruiting and hiring process. You don’t have time to go through the tedium of reviewing hundreds of applicants and seeing if you can find that golden nugget, the one person who’s going to fit perfectly into your team and be able to do all the things that you need them to do.

So instead, you have team members that are great at doing the task that you give them, as long as you give them incredible detailed instructions. 

Maybe they’ve been able to do a couple of things really well for you, but there are lots of things that you’re trying to hand off to them that they can’t really handle.

They’re skilled, yes, but every decision, every question, every crisis still comes back to you to be solved, and nothing can really happen without your sign-off still. 

So in Camp Bottleneck, hiring to expand capacity has somehow resulted in overloading your own plate.

You hired this team to free you up. You wanted to delegate some of the tasks that you were doing so you could have more capacity and really step into that spaciousness the visionary CEO needs, but the exact opposite has happened. 

You, the visionary CEO, have become a bottleneck of your own making. You have traded the act of doing the task to now acting as the manager. You’ve transitioned from a visionary CEO to a task and project and team manager, and you have no idea how to make it back to the role that you desperately wish to embody.

How to Scale Out of Your Camp

Want to know how to successfully scale out of these camps? Then you’re going to want to check out our brand-new on-demand training video. I know you guys are busy, so it’s on demand. You can jump on it anytime you want, and it takes you behind the scenes of three different clients’ business transformations as we move them through the 7-Figure Freedom business scaling methodology. It’s going to show you how to scale your business to seven-figure years and six-figure months.

This is the shortcut to scaling your business without having to do more of what you’ve already been doing. It doesn’t offer any cookie-cutter solutions or “bro” marketing tactics or big launches to gamble your business income on. It’s just made up of simple frameworks that make scaling your impact and income not only possible, but frankly inevitable.

This video is for visionary CEOs who are ready to scale on their terms and make their business easy to run. They want to take month-long vacations whenever their heart desires and be able to step away from their business without things falling apart. Watch now!

If you want to make sure you never miss an episode, come follow the 7 Figure Freedom Podcast on Spotify, subscribe on Google, or head over to Apple Podcasts. In the meantime, I’d love to connect with you over on Instagram or in the 7 Figure Freedom Club Facebook group so we can chat about what you got out of this episode!

Are you wondering if you’re ready to take the next step in your business? Curious about whether you’re a good fit for our services? Take the free business assessment quiz to find out! And if you want to learn more, you can visit my website or schedule a call with me today. I can’t wait to hear from you!