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How to plan a monthly CEO day for your business.
Get out of the weeds of working in the business & spend a day working on your business! It’s the best way to make sure you are moving in the right direction. Use my download template for the day as direction for your time as a small business CEO.
This is something I started doing in my blog business monthly. Every month I have a CEO day, it’s helped our growth and planning so much.
Once a month, I get out of the weeds of running my business and I focus on actually owning my business.
As digital entrepreneurs, we are often the CEO of our business.
We’re also often:
- the marketing manager
- the content creator
- the social media expert
- the technical department
- the admin support
We wear a thousand hats any, any given day. So we spend a lot of our time in the weeds, making things happen. We’re the ones who are responding to emails, who are showing up on social media, who are doing all the things.
And sometimes you can do all these things and end up in a place in your business where you might not even want to be. That’s the worst!
A way to prevent this drift is to take a day off of the doing, to focus on the owning of your business.
How to Have a CEO Day
Pull out your calendars right now and plan for when you can do your next CEO day for your business.
Along with this week’s show, I’m sharing my full template along with the checklist and everything you need to plan your own digital entrepreneur CEO day. Just input your email below and I’ll send it right over to you.
But first, if you have time for nothing else, here are three important things that you should focus on for your CEO day every single month.
1. Goals
Number one is to look over your quarterly goals.
Go back to what you set aside at the beginning of the quarter as your goals. Look over what you wrote and take stock of where you are with those goals. Have you accomplished them all? Are you cloe? Maybe some feel far away right now.
- Did anything significantly change this month?
- Maybe something new happened.
- Maybe there was a Google update.
- Possibly a product that you were excited about didn’t sell.
A lot can change in a month and so being able to sit down and look back at your quarterly goals and be able to judge where you are in relation to where you wanted to be.
Are there things that you need to tweak right now to be able to accomplish what you set forth to do this quarter?
I do this every month before setting things like events and meetings on my calendar, because these big ticket goal items we are talking about are what’s actually moving our blog businesses forward.
These are the things that you want to be able to focus on first.
2. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
The second thing I look at are my analytics and KPIs for the month.
I use an analytic tracking sheet that you can find right here if you’d like to copy it.
My list is based on my blog business… I run a content based business that also sells products.
Depending on what your business and revenue models are, your KPIs might look similar or really different than mine, but whatever they are, it’s important that you have them written down and that you’re tracking them every month.
A long, long, long, long time ago when I first started blogging, I didn’t do this.
I ran my business based on…
How I felt that day when I woke up.
And let me just tell you, it was not great.
Since I’ve been tracking my KPIs on a monthly basis and looking at trends, seeing what works, and clarifying what isn’t working, my business strategies and effort has flowed so much better.
I’d really encourage you to do this.
Sometimes it can be hard. I’m not going to lie.
It’s easy to look at your KPIs when things are great and growing, right?
This last spring after helpful content update hit, it was a little bit hard to do my KPIs the next month because a couple of our sites got hit and that was hard.
But I’ve learned over the years as a business owner that facing the music… whether it’s amazing and wonderful and causes you to celebrate or causes you to step back and take stock of what’s going on is equally important.
Either way, there is value in knowing the numbers.
Really try to be honest with yourself about where you are when it comes to important things like your traffic numbers, your conversion rates, your profit margins, things like that. Not sticking your head in the sand about them, but instead actually noting them, dealing with them, and not letting it become an emotional thing.
For a lot of us, our businesses are like in a strange sense, like our babies, so we can get really emotional when things don’t seem like they’re going the way they should.
But let me encourage you, as someone who used to hate this. If you look at your numbers and look at them logically, it will help you to grow as a business owner and to run a better business.
3. Audience Connection
The third area to think through is how you’re engaging with your audience. Map out what’s working and how you hope to change them moving forward.
This might be looking at:
- How you’re showing up in social media
- What blog posts are going up
- How you’re responding to reviews
- What your engagement is with customers
Whatever kind of business you run, you have an audience and engaging with that audience is a really, really important part of running an effective blog business.
Think through where that is right now and how you would like to grow, how you’d like to change that and try to map that out for the next month or so.
For my business, this looks like content planning.
So we sit down on a monthly basis and think through the content that’s going to be coming out next month.
- What blog posts are going to go live and when?
- Where am I going to be showing up on social media?
- Are we launching a new podcast by chance;) that needs some focus and attention.
Wherever it is that you’re showing up, whatever it is that you’re doing, focusing on that and mapping it out will give you a really good working plan for the future.
Those are my top three that no matter what your business is, you should be doing that at least once a month sitting down and going over those three things.
CEO Day Template To Follow
However, I actually have a whole template of how I spend my CEO day. So I’m going to share just a little bit of that here. Maybe it’ll inspire you and how you can arrange your day as well.
Morning Numbers
I like to start the morning at my computer, looking back at my numbers.
So this is when I do my KPIs. And thinking about where my business is both in a quantitative place, which just means what the numbers are telling me it is, and in a qualitative place, which means how I feel about my business.
- Am I feeling like this was a successful month?
- Was I encouraged by it?
- Am I burnt out at the end of this month?
- How am I feeling about my business?
As female digital entrepreneurs, both of those sides are really important, because none of our businesses are just about the numbers at the end of the day.
And so taking into account both the quantitative and the qualitative side is really, really helpful.
Movement
The second chunk of my time is set aside to working through any big issues or important things that have come up in my analysis.
So this often means movement for me!
If I have something come up and I’m trying to figure out how to overcome this issue or how to tackle something new then taking a walk for me is the best way to process.
Resources
Some of this time is spent trying to find resources for the future growth of my blog and business.
Perhaps there’s some new tools I need.
A new hire I need to make.
Or some other part of my business that I need to figure out a new strategy for.
This is a great time to set aside to really figure out what some of the issues are that you’re having, some of the big hurdles, or some of the big next steps that you want to do, and give yourself the time and space to process the best way to move forward with it.
Mapping the Month
Next, I start to map out the next season in the next month.
I take where I am in my business note some of the issues or the goals and the priorities that have come up. Look at my solutions that I’ve now worked through and really work hard to use those things as a map for how I’m going to run my business moving forward.
For me, it looks like mapping out where I am with my goals, breaking them down into small enough steps that I can actually accomplish steps towards them.
This also includes planning for my functional life plan for the next month.
Life questions that will affect my business:
- Do I have a trip coming up?
- Do I need a plan for time off?
- Is there something going on in my life that I need to adjust for?
This can often start on paper as big picture planning as brainstorming and then move to a more actual digital planning system to actually walk through planning your business.
Goal Planning
The last step I do…. is to write it down!
So we have a monthly goal chart that we do every month.
There’s a printout for every month so you can use this or you can really easily track these things in your own way.
Writing down what the goals are, you want to accomplish that month, and then what the small steps you plan to take to accomplish those goals are.
Writing things down this way into small steps gives you not only just accountability, but a really easy way to know exactly what to do when you sit down next.
Planning & Celebrating
Make sure you plan out your next CEO day, before you end your day!
Know what day you’re going to be doing this next.
The last thing to do before you end your CEO day is do something to celebrate.
Write down a couple of the wins you had this month.
It’s always great to focus on what is going well. The things we can control. Even if a lot of things maybe didn’t turn out as you wanted this last month, I’m sure that you can think of at least a couple wins you have had.
Write down a couple wins and then do something for yourself to celebrate!
Maybe stop and buy yourself coffee, or lunch. Whatever will leave you feeling happy and encouraged about the month you just did.
You’re doing awesome and running a business at home is hard work, not just the actions, but the mental load of it all.
I’m hoping that taking a CEO day and processing through the reality of where your business is, the things you can do to change and grow, mapping out what that looks like, and celebrating that you’ve done will serve you well.
Use this CEO day system to be an effective business owner in the months ahead. Tell me below how your next CEO day goes.