• What does a CEO do all day?
• What do you do all day?
• Is it good or bad if the answers are not the same?

Most business of our size get started because a person can make something or sell something. As the market responds, they need to build a company to meet the market demand. In the early stages they can juggle it all. But at some point the company needs a CEO. What does that mean?

The two things about being a CEO are:
1. Produce Results
2. Choose the Right Results to produce

How to Produce Results. By definition, the CEO is an executive. That means you don’t produce results yourself. You did that before the company needed a CEO. As CEO you produce results by organizing others to be productive. That means you devise, implement, monitor, and adapt systems within the company to help the group produce more than any one of you could on your own. To see all the systems I’ve identified so far click here. But think about that last phrase for a minute. It’s your job to help the group produce more than any one of you could on your own. It can be a noble calling when you think about it.

How to Choose the Right Results. This is a dance between your vision of the company and external forces. The primary force is your customer’s desire – what they value. But there are others whose desires you must accommodate: investors if you have them, employee’s needs and skill sets (and the pool of potential employees if yours is a growing company) the technology “space”, regulatory agencies, etc. Your job in this capacity is to see the big picture of where the company can go, then fall back to #1 to devise a way to get there. In short, you’re monitoring trends outside the company, and interactions of the company with the outside world.

This leads to the following observations.

CEO Time.
A company of any size needs some CEO time. But most small companies don’t need a full-time CEO. That means you’ll be spending some of your time selling and doing the technical aspect of producing or managing. It’s important for your sanity and that of your employees that everyone – especially you – knows when you have the CEO hat on and when you’re functioning in some other capacity.

CEO Skills.
I think it was Peter Drucker who said the tools of an executive are meetings and reports. You need to develop skills in using these tools. You have to develop the right reports for your company and the stage it’s currently at. And you have to understand your business model or you won’t be able to see ramifications of the trends shown by the data in those reports. Meetings include every one-on-one conversation as well as when groups get together. There are different kinds of meetings for different purposes and they need to be run differently.

CEO Priorities.
A CEO must work on what’s important not just what’s urgent. That means you have to plan space in your calendar for CEO time. Time to work on the important stuff. Don’t let that time get crowded out by the emergency-du-jour. Your company will need more CEO time as it gets larger. And if you compare two companies the same size, the one which is growing faster or changing more needs more CEO time.

CEO Instinct.
You must know when to go with your gut and when to go with analysis. It generally works like this. You can analyze the past. That analysis only helps plot the future when the future is an extension of the past; when you’re doing “more of the same.” When you need to make a revolutionary jump you need to go with your gut. Apple computer did this when it launched the Macintosh – a product that analysis showed was going to put their cash cow (The Apple II) out of business. They did it again when they launched the iPod which didn’t bankrupt any existing products but did take them into a whole new business.

But as soon as you make a gutsy move and launch a revolution, the future is now past. So analyze the hell out of what you’re doing and change, adapt, revise as necessary. Two more examples from Apple. They launched the Mac thinking it would be used for spreadsheets, database and word processing. Instead desktop publishing became it’s killer app. They did enough analysis to recognize this early on and exploit it well. Likewise with the iPod. Launching it was a gut move, but the frequency and timing of improvement (different sizes) and enhancements (selling songs and now video) requires analysis.

Takeaways:

• Plan time in your calendar to function as a CEO.
• If you don’t love that job, if you’re better at production or sales, perhaps you should stay there and hire a CEO. You can be the owner but not the CEO.
• The better you are at CEO skills and priorities the better your CEO gut instincts will be.

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