CEO Time Optimization

In this episode, we break down how CEOs and founders can take back control of their time to become more effective leaders. If you're stuck doing everything yourself, it's likely costing you growth, creating bottlenecks, and leading to burnout. You'll learn how to delegate with confidence, empower your team, and focus on the highest-value activities that actually move the business forward. I also share a real-world success story that shows how leveraging your "genius hours" can dramatically improve performance and results. Episode Highlights & Time Stamps 0:07 Introduction to CEO Time Optimization 3:42 Shifting from Doer to Delegator 5:11 Understanding High vs. Low Value Work 8:57 Building Systems for Team Ownership 9:50 Transitioning to a Team-Driven Organization 🎯Key Takeaways CEOs who try to do everything themselves become the biggest bottleneck to growth Effective delegation is a leadership skill not a loss of control Your time should be focused on high-value, growth-driving activities "Genius hours" unlock your highest impact and best results Empowered teams create stronger performance and accountability Letting go of lower-value tasks is essential to scaling your business Leadership is about building capacity in others, not carrying the load alone Small shifts in time prioritization can lead to major business growth A collaborative culture accelerates execution and innovation Scaling success starts with trusting and developing your team Ideal For: Founders, CEOs, executives, managers, and anyone committed to elevating their leadership capacity. Resources & Next Steps Ready to take your leadership energy to the next level? Explore free training and resources at https://training.coreelevation.com/ to help you identify energy leaks, strengthen your leadership presence, and elevate your team's performance. 🌐 Explore More: https://training.coreelevation.com/ 🎧 Listen to the Full Episode: Growth Think Tank Podcast

• 0:00Speaker 00

  If you think you've got to do it yourself because you can do it better, you can do it faster, you'll always default to that. And so what I ask you to do is even though you could do it better and faster, who could you get to do part of it? Who could you get to do all of it? And start to bring them in on the process. Build them up, get their skills ready, get their confidence ready. Because when you learn to empower people around you, hopefully you hired smart people, people you can depend on, you will learn to do this at scale. And so that's the first step. It's the mental shift that's necessary for you to stop being the doer in your business. Letting go of control and empowering others.

• 0:45Speaker 00

  Welcome to Grow Think Tank. This is the one and only place where you will get insight from the founders and the CEOs of the fastest growing privately held companies. I am the host. My name is Gene Hemmott. I help leaders and their teams navigate the defining moments of their growth. Are you ready to grow? Today, we're going to talk about optimizing CEO time. When you have CEO time optimization, you feel like you're on top of the world. You feel like you've got things handled. You feel organized. You feel a lack of stress. I say that with a smile because we also know the truth. Most of the time, we CEOs and entrepreneurs and founders don't feel a lack of stress.

• 1:29Speaker 00

  So today, we're going to dive into what's really going on and what you can do about it. Hi, my name is Gene Hemmott. I am a founder coach. We work with companies that are growing fast to help them move from founder dependent to founder led and eventually a team driven organization. When you're team driven, everyone is working together. Accountability happens, ownership happens, empowerment, communication and performance. All those things happen because of what you've set up previously. Now, when you want to go a little bit deeper with that, I'm gonna go ahead and just throw this out there. If you want to get a training from us on how we work with clients, giving

• 2:11Speaker 00

  you the play by play, so that you could take it and run with it and steal it, or you could say, "Hey, I could use some help." I'll give you the play by play on helping companies go from founder dependent to founder-led, to team-driven. All you have to do is sign up at training.coreelevation.com, and you can do it for free. Inside it, you'll find the five steps that we take every client through that will help you not only get control of your CEO time, but it will help you create a team-driven organization. So, let's dive into this whole concept of CEO time optimization. I had a client once who described it really well. He said, "I could work the weekend, and I could show up on Monday, and I feel

• 2:55Speaker 00

  like I'm already behind." And I can relate to that. Maybe you can too. I also have had clients come to me and say, "What do other CEOs do with their time?" And as we dive into it, I realize how underperforming they are. And then I have the CEOs that come in and say, "You know what? I love to get to work early. So, you know, 6 o'clock is not really that early for me. I'm not getting enough done. Let me come in at 5:30." And then, for a few weeks, that works, but then they realize, "I could get up earlier." And they come in at 5:00, 4:30 even the next week. And I have to stop things and go, "How much earlier are you gonna get up? Are you gonna only get up early? Is that your only leverage point? What if we looked at this thing differently?" So today, hopefully, you're curious about

• 3:39Speaker 00

  CEO time optimization, and we can look at it differently. One of the things I know when I'm working with clients, founders, that they could, if they're willing to look at things differently, optimize their time better. Let me say that differently. I know that every client I've worked with, and this has just happened because of just so many reputations I've had over the last 14 years, being that founder coach, helping them figure out what's got a grip on them, where they're underutilizing their time, where they're focused on things that they shouldn't be focused on, where they're focused on low-value work, and how little time they spend on high-value. That being said, CEO time optimization is, starts in the mind first.

• 4:23Speaker 00

  So let's just look at that specifically. If you think you've got to do it yourself because you can do it better, you can do it faster, you'll always default to that. And so what I ask you to do is even though you could do it better and faster, who could you get to do part of it? Who could you get to do all of it? And start to bring them in on the process. Build them up, get their skills ready, get their confidence ready. Because when you learn to empower people around you, hopefully you hired smart people, people you can depend on, you will learn to do this at scale. And so that's the first step. It's the mental shift that's necessary for you to stop being the doer in your business,

• 5:07Speaker 00

  letting go of control and empowering others. Now, if you want to get a little bit more tactical, I've shared a lot of tips around this, but I'm going to just share with you kind of a little bit of a story that will help you understand what I mean by low value work and high value work. So a lot of people are majoring in the minors. That's not my phrase, but it's just, it's kind of a funny way to look at it. A lot of people love sports analogies, but if you're majoring in the minor details of your day, you're spending most of your time doing that, you're not what we call CEO time optimization. You are majoring in the little things. You are focused on those little things. So what do you do instead? Well, you get honest with yourself.

• 5:51Speaker 00

  You do an audit. You can look at it from a standpoint of value. We've run different things before. I've had Todd Herman on my podcast before. He's got a tool called Entrepreneurial Scorecard. It's pretty simple. Think about all of the tasks you have in four buckets. There's the $20 task, there's the $200 task, there's the $2,000 task, and there's $20,000 task. If you are focused on the 20 and $200 task, your business is going to be running at a very different level than those CEOs focused on the $2,000 and $20,000 per hour work.

• 6:28Speaker 00

  So I want to give you a story about a client of mine who recently shifted this. I didn't get their permission, so I'm not going to share either the name or their company, but I just want you to understand this. One of the first things he said to me is, "How do I get a control of my time?" And I said, "Well, what's going on?" We talked about it, different things, and I shared with them one of the concepts we have about letting go of some of these smaller things. And when do they do their best time? I call this genius hours. Some people call it maybe different things, but I just have called it this over the years. And it's when you do your best thinking, most creative, most disciplined thinking. For me, it's in the morning, between about eight and 10. It's usually about a two-hour span. It could be six to eight. It could be seven to nine.

• 7:13Speaker 00

  It could be, you know, 11 to one. It could be two in the afternoon. Rarely, people say two in the afternoon. It could be 11 at night. Whatever your zone of genius hours are, then it should be protected for the work that you do best, that you need that creative power. If we agree on that, then you can move forward with the story. So I asked the client, "When was their genius hours?" And he said, "In the morning, probably nine o'clock till 11." Great. I don't even ask for the full two hours. I said, "What is, what can you commit to?" He only committed to 30 minutes. And I said, "How many times per week?" He said, "Three." I'm not trying to push things. I want little, small changes.

• 7:56Speaker 00

  And so I didn't ask him what he's going to do with it, but I wanted to check in with him each week and week after week. And after two weeks, I said, "What do you, how is it going?" He said, "Going pretty good. I actually been get, got something on my list that I had avoided for a while." And I don't remember the name of it, but I remember the, the description of it was a document or a process to go from new client to the first 45 days. So client onboarding would be a good name for it. And I said, "Well, what did you do with it?" He goes, "In my genius hours, I was able to think about what we were doing, some of the gaps that we had, and I was able to build out a full process, put that in our tech stack, and then I introduced it to our team."

• 8:40Speaker 00

  I said, how'd it go? He goes, actually, they enjoyed it. They appreciated it. A few weeks later, I was checking in with him and I said, how's that going? He goes, fantastic. A few weeks after that, I said, how's it going with your client onboarding? And he goes, they love it so much that they've continued to refine it. They've continued to make it even better. So now they own it. So now the CEO maybe put a little bit of investment upfront, but now the team has these transferred ownership. Now that's CEO time optimization. When you take something, build a system as a starting point. If you've got a really experienced person, maybe you don't even have to build it. You just can enroll them into owning it and get them to build it.

• 9:23Speaker 00

  But for most employees, you want to start with something and then get them to take it in, use it, and then start to improve it and let them do that. Let them own it. When you do that, you'll have a much better chance to get the kind of team performance you want. Confidence starts to build and everything just kind of goes from there. You can start to use it for other projects. You can use that time any way you want to. Now, I'm only sharing with you a part of what I do. But if you want to know about CEO time optimization and you want to make sure you show up fully prepared for your team and get the most done out of your time, then you definitely want to come to the next training we have that will help you unlock a team-driven organization. So it's getting out of being the doer.

• 10:08Speaker 00

  Stop being founder-dependent. Move to founder-led and create a team-driven organization. All you have to do is go to training.coreelevation.com and you can sign up for free today. My name is Gene Hammett. If I can help you in any way, please reach out. And as always, when you think of leadership and you think of growth, think of Growth Think Tank. We'll talk to you soon.