Lessons from the Front Line: Being More Effective

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Developer Nord podcast, where we work on getting better step by step, professionally and personally. Let's get started. Well hello and welcome back. We are continuing our season of going back and forth between a couple of things, between special topics and interviews. In this episode, we are going to look at a new interview. We're going to speak with Donna Dube. She is the creator of the voice of the CEO Amplify podcast. We are going to talk about being more effective. Now, particularly in her case, it is she works with CEOs and executives and that that really need to, maybe for lack of a better term, buckle down to focus, to find ways to get time back into their day and how to really effectively lead an organization. Now, if you don't lead an organization, this may not feel like initially that it's as applicable to you, but there are a lot of steps and keys that she's going to talk about that are the kinds of things we can apply no matter what our role is. But I'm going to let her share those with you. Go ahead and get ready to take a few notes because this is going to be a good one as we speak with Donna Dube. OK, today we're starting a new conversation. We're speaking with Donna Dube and we're going to talk about something that everybody has value in and that is time. We're going to talk a little bit about time management, how to do it better. There's always everybody's got their little tips and tricks, but this is somebody that's like sort of a specialist in that for lack of a better term. She has the CEO Amplify podcast and that's a great place for you to find some of that kind of information. But before I steal your thunder, welcome to the show, Donna, and if you go ahead and introduce yourself. Great. Thanks, Rob. I'm so happy to be here. So, yes, I'm Donna Dube. I'm from Canada up in Ontario and my business journey started a while back. Of course, we all have a very narrow, not narrow, but wavy path to get to entrepreneurship. But I've always been a planner. I've always been one to map out all the steps, see a big problem or picture and be able to break that down into smaller. So I focus on helping entrepreneurs leverage three things, their time, their talent and their tactics so that they can grow their business to the next level, whatever that looks like for them without sacrificing their life. So without sacrificing their family, their health and their relationships. Wow. That is actually a fairly big ask right there because that's I think that's where and maybe that's how you got into that. It seems like CEO is the last person that in a company, if you really think of some people have different views of it, CEO, but typically the CEO is the last person that actually has time for anything outside of the business. You look at it, especially as you get into bigger businesses, you see some of these CEOs that they're traveling around the world every week. They've got 15, 20 hour days. A famous quote was back when Bill Gates got, I think it was when he first got married. He said, yeah, it was it changed his life. He was cutting it down to 14 hour days, seven days a week. It's like, yes. So how do you even how do you even start having that conversation with somebody who's like, OK, where are you going to find the time? Yes, right. So I think a lot of it comes down to what we're focusing our time on. Right. So we all only have 24 hours in the day. We know that we can't change that. But the real myth is where are we spending our time? Where are we directing our time and energy? And so many times I feel there's a lot of things happening in our business that we as the leader can let go of. Doesn't mean it falls by the wayside and we're not looking at it, but we're either delegating it, we're automating it, we're putting in systems and processes to make it run smoother. And so it doesn't then have to be our responsibility. I remember speaking with a CEO recently and he's got this going on and this going on. But when we actually got into his time audit, he was the one ordering pizza for the for the office on Friday afternoons. Now, nothing wrong with ordering pizza, but he doesn't need to do that. Right. And so just really honing in on what am I actually doing with the time that I am spending on my business and am I doing those high level CEO tasks that really bring that me that return on investment? That's actually an interesting. The ordering pizza is an interesting thing because there's that. That desire for like the personal touch that I think people have, and especially when it's a company that I've come across, it's sort of like grown up and sort of like a family environment is that I've run across a lot of those where the CEO or the president or the higher ups will do things like that and they will do it personally because they feel that that that gives that personal touch, even though it's ordering pizza. But how do you how do you walk them through? Like what is really I guess this is like how do you figure out if you're sort of what really is the valuable use of my time versus what is it that I should that I should let go of and move to somebody else? Yeah. So I like to think of two major big buckets if you think about it that way, of all the things that happen in your business, all the tasks that need to be done. They can fit into two large areas. One is maintenance and the other one is growth. And so maintenance, obviously, are things like your admin, your invoicing, your bookkeeping, customer service, sending emails, your social media, all of that type of thing, marketing. But then in those growth tasks, those are really your higher level tasks. That's your networking, your JV partnerships, your sales. If you're still doing sales as CEO, you know, those areas that really need you, you can't delegate or or pass that off to anyone else within your business or your company. And so I challenge CEOs to sort of come up with a CEO score so that we can look during your week, how much time are you spending in growth level tasks? And so you have sort of a score that you're trying to reach each week so that you can make sure you're balancing what you're doing and you're making sure some of those growth level tasks are in your calendar and they're getting done each and every week. Now, I've heard of it, and I think this is the same thing, a slightly different terms, is the idea of working in your business versus on your business and sort of that growth versus maintenance. Is there a... Because you've talked with, you know, worked with a lot of different CEOs, different lines of business and stuff like that. Is there something that you found that is a sort of like a across the board, a good breakdown of one versus the other? Does it vary by the business or the age of the business or anything like that? Yeah. So what I find is that the CEO score is really dependent on the amount of revenue that you want to make in the year. So the higher your annual revenue is, so we take your annual revenue and divide it by the number of weeks that you want to work in the year. And that's your CEO score. It's not money that you're making. It's not money that you're paying anyone. It's just a dollar score to think about it. And so the higher amount of revenue you want to make, the higher your CEO score is. And therefore, the more growth level tasks you need to do in a week. So if someone wanted, you know, a revenue of 500,000, that would look very different from someone who wanted a revenue of 2 million. Now, is there a limit to that? Is there something where it's within a range, if you go too far, you've actually overdone your growth versus your maintenance tasks? Or is it really, it's just, is it more about how much you can delegate? It's really about how much you can delegate with keeping that personal touch, as you're saying, right? Because there are so many tools available to us now to automate things, but we don't want our business to feel like there's no human behind it. Right? People are buying from us. They're not just buying from a robot. And so we want to keep that human touch there, but there are certainly things we can delegate, things we can automate to make it run smoother and take time off of our plate. So how do you convince a CEO to do that? Because I'm assuming it's not a like, boom, all in one and we're done and now you're off and running with the perfect CEO scores. Talk a little bit about that journey and how you get, and particularly thinking about it, if I'm somebody that's sitting in the audience going, okay, I know I do too much. I know I'm like, my days are too long and I'm too focused on things that aren't growth. What are maybe some ways to guide myself into a better balance? Yes. So really a lot of it starts with a mindset shift to begin with, to be honest with you, because like you said, we have to come to terms with ourselves and reflect and say, yep, I'm at this point, I'm putting in too many hours. I'm not present for my family. I don't have time for this. And we want to make the change, right? Because if we're just saying it, but we don't really have any oomph behind it and we don't want to put any discipline into it, let's face it, it's not going to happen because these are changing habits, just like losing weight, just like exercising. We have to be motivated and disciplined to want to succeed at doing that. So really it's a mindset shift that I can be the CEO without being the chief everything officer. I can reduce the amount of time I'm working in my business and still have time for my family and my friends, my vacation, whatever that looks like, that's important to you. So really once they've got that mindset shift, then good. Now we can take each step. We work week by week on these habits. So one that really helps is setting up a CEO date or what I like to call a power hour, which is really one hour with yourself reviewing and reflecting and setting what your priorities are going to be for the next week. And we do this recurring every single week. So if you think about big businesses like Apple and Microsoft and the rest of them, they obviously have board of directors, they have VPs, sales, marketing, and the CEO is in touch with each of those. They're reporting, they're sharing what's happening in their departments. And so as CEO of a smaller mid-size company, we want to do the same thing. So we want to have that one hour where we're concentrating. We're looking at some of our top level metrics. Where am I in terms of revenue for the month? Am I on target? If I'm not, what can I do to tweak or change or improve? How am I getting new people into my pipeline? Whether that's coming in through email or requesting for consults or calls, whatever that looks like for your business, but making sure that we're filling that funnel at the top so that we do have enough sales at the bottom of our funnel. And then really looking at what are my priorities for this week? So what were my 12 months goals? Break it down into 90 month goals and then into monthly goals. So that's really a process to really break things down. But once we have those monthly goals, what do I need to do this week to get me closer to that goal? So it really allows us to put the blinders on and really focus on that's my goal. What do I need to take a step forward to get there? Especially in this online world, there's so much noise about what we should be doing, what we could add, what we could. And so I think as CEOs, we really have to do focus and say, okay, what is my goal and what steps do I need to take to get there? And then hone in and do it. Now you mentioned weekly goals, monthly goals, quarterly type goals. Do you do that CEO date, that power hour? Is that something that you, somewhere along the way, you're also building out? You take some of yourself and you do your annual, your quarterly goals or however you want to break those down? Or is there a separate, some people will do like retreats or something. There's something that's a little separate that you do for that bigger planning piece. Yes, a hundred percent. So yes, I do like to have a strategic planning session, whether you go off and do it outside of your business, take time away, whatever that is. But yes, it's important to have that strategic planning session. What are my yearly goals? And then I like to break it down into 90. And then I like to think about those 90 days as a sprint almost. So I've got 90 days, I've got these three months. What do I want to accomplish in these three months? And then now I'm in this month, what do I need to do each week? So it's much easier to think about 90 day sections than the big whole year at a time. Many of us will set yearly goals in January, December, January time for the year. But by March, some of us have even, forgotten we're off on a different track. And so just breaking those down into those 90 days really helps us focus and stay on track in an alignment with where we want to go. It also really helps our team. Because now if I know what my focus and my priorities are for 90 days, I can now go to our team and say, okay, this is what we're focusing on. And now everybody's rowing the boat in the same direction. Now, do you, because one of the things I've seen with some of these planning things and might personally have that same thing, I might admit that, is that you sit down and you do even an annual, and probably even more so on an annual type of a goal setting session, is that when it finally trickles down, it's too much. It's basically, because you're a CEO, you set sort of almost by nature, you set very big goals, you're pushing yourself, you're pushing your team. How do you work with them on that? Is that something that they have to learn for themselves? Or are there some things that they can look at, that can help them right size or at least bring their goals into something that's reality, even if aggressive is always fine, but it's got to be aggressive and real and not have everybody working 25 hour days all year long. Right, right. Exactly. And so I think that's part of that planning process when I work with clients on it. And that is, okay, this is my goal. Now, what is my capacity? What is my team's capacity? Do I have the right people on my team to actually fulfill this goal? Right. And if I don't, do I have the budget to hire the right people to make this happen? And so we have to really put into play, you know, our own capacity as well as our team's capacity. And do we have the right people in the right seats to make that happen? So that should be part of that planning process, not just here's my lofty goal. I want to push for it. But, you know, do I have behind the scenes? Do I have the right systems and processes in place or even the right tools to make this happen? Okay, good. Because yeah, there's, it's always that nice thing of like, you've got it, you've set a destination, but then, okay, how do I get there? That's sometimes, particularly when, I think if you're an established industry or actually really established organization, to some extent, you've got a feel for that kind of stuff. But particularly when you're starting out, if you've got something that's newer or you're in a, especially if you're in an industry that changes a lot, or you have like, I don't know, you just went through a pandemic or something like that, those things that can happen sometimes can really make it challenging to just, to even start with a plan. It's like, what can I get done? I don't know. It may be very big or it may be very small and I don't know where reality exists within us. Yes, yes, 100%. And then with having, breaking that into your 90 day chunks. So let's say you set your 12 month goals and they are too lofty, let's say. After your first 90 days, you're now going back when you make your next 90 day goals, you're going back and saying, okay, where am I? Well, I said that I was going to do X, Y, Z. I'm nowhere near there. I need to adjust, right? Or the other way around, which is a good thing. We're done that. We've moved on. We need more goals because we're just climbing ahead. So, but I think having that sort of reflection and review every 90 days helps to break that up. Particularly from a leadership, like a CEO kind of position is, how do you have that? How did they have that conversation and how do you help them have that conversation of, okay, we set this and we got through 90 days and things have changed. And so the next 270 days that we had planned is now going to adjust because that, I know it happens and it's how do you work with them to do it in a way that builds trust, I guess, versus loses trust. So it's not like, oh, the CEO has changed their mind again. It's all right, let's go run in a different direction versus no, this makes sense. This is, we're still following them even though yes, we're altering course. Yes. Good question, Rob. And for me, I feel that any of these important decisions that need to be made in our business need to be based on the metrics on the data because the numbers don't lie. And so if we bring that to our team and we say, okay, we're pivoting because the numbers are showing this, this, and this, and we're making an informed decision based on what the numbers are showing us, whether that's marketing, whether that's finances, whatever those numbers are, but we're really bringing the objective evidence. We're not just subjectively feeling like this is a good way to run. So stick your finger in there and figure out which way the air is blowing is not necessarily the recommended approach. Exactly. Yes. Now, one of the things you mentioned in your material and content, and we'll get website and links, we'll be in the show notes, but is kind of about like six ways, which is your standard sort of like X ways to do this, is you have six ways to really make the most of that hour. And I think that's a key because it's one thing to say, all right, I'm going to set aside an hour a week, and I'm going to plan, but what does that look like? How do I make the most of that time so that I actually come out with the plan and with one that gives me a good reason to march for the next week until I have my next little hour session? Yes. Yes. So I have a PDF document, which I'll link, which will help walk you through it, but the bottom line is we want to start with review and reflection. So again, looking at those top level methods, we're going to be looking at those top level metrics. Don't need to go crazy looking at 50 numbers, but three, four of the things that you're really monitoring, look at those first. Am I on track? Is my business on track for where I want it to be this time of the year? If it's not, how do I adjust and tweak? So that's number one. And then number two, where am I in terms of my goals and what do I need to do this week that are my top three priorities? Once I know what my top three priorities are, I need them on my calendar because if you're anything like me, if it's not on the calendar, it's probably not going to happen. So blocking, actually blocking out time to do those top three priorities. If that for you means you need to eat the frog first and it needs to be first thing in your morning, then that's when it is. If it needs to be after dinner when the family settles down, that's when it is, but find that time where you can really have your peak performance and hone in and focus and get those priorities done. Notifications are off, your email's off, your team is off. All of those things are aside and you're just really focusing on the task at hand. So once those are in your calendar, then you want to look ahead and say, okay, what does my team need this week from me? Maybe there's something in your business that they're waiting for. It's a bottleneck. So you want to make sure that you have time to give that to them. And then if you have anything you need to communicate to your team, that's the time. So maybe there's something extra you need them to do or something you forgot to mention, something coming up, that type of thing. So having that open line of communication with your team is very important. So just reviewing that. And then last but not least, going through what I like to call self-care and support. So what do I need for myself as CEO this week? Maybe I'm traveling and so I need to make sure that someone's got all my travel plans in place. And maybe I need a little bit of downtime when I get back from traveling, just to refocus and rejuvenate. And so building that time into your week. Maybe you've been trying to get to the doctor for the last two months and you need to make that appointment. Or maybe you, you know, that week you're going to take your wife out for dinner, whatever it is for you. But what do I need for self-care and building that in? And then what do I need for support, both from your team and from home? So once you've got all those pieces figured out, now you've kind of got a guideline for where you're going for this week. Now you, it's an interesting thing that you mentioned early on there that's always been, it's thought through it and had a lot of discussions about this over the years. When you think about a CEO, typically there are multiple plates that they're dealing with. They've got a lot of different balls in the air, plates in the air, whatever knowledge you want to use. How do you work with them to figure out how to keep those things spinning? Because there's sort of, sometimes you'll find people are like, okay, I'm going to focus on this one thing this week, but then the other thing starts spinning out of control. And what if, you know, how do you work with them to figure out how often you have to touch something like that, to, you know, how present it needs to be in your schedule to make sure that things don't go off the rails, that they don't get lost in the cracks or something like that, where you're like, oh shoot, this, like, you know, a doctor's appointment, oh, my health is falling apart because I haven't gotten this thing done that I should have gotten done weeks or months ago. Yeah, good. So what I like to use is our calendars and I like to call it our scheduling ninja. And we can have this ninja working for us or against us. Obviously we want it for us. And so I encourage my clients to actually take a blank calendar, whether it's paper on the computer, it doesn't matter, but take a blank calendar and put in first your life things. Meaning that if you have a morning routine that you like to do, or that's the time you do your exercise, block that time off. If you have something in the evening that you do on a regular basis, block that time off. So your life things that are important to you are getting in your calendar first. And then from there, we're going to have our open hours of business, meaning that's the time when your clients, your customers and your team is expected to find you. You obviously may work outside of that time and that's your choice, but you want to have set hours when your customers and your team know you're available and they can find you. And then from there, you're going to take those work hours and you're going to block them out for those important things in your business. So we all need, in my opinion, three systems. We need marketing system, we need a sales system and a delivery system. And so depending on the type of business you have, you want to make sure that whatever activities you need to do for marketing, sales and delivery, those are in your calendar each week. So you're not dropping the ball on any of those three things. You've got your life in there, you've got your marketing, your sales and your delivery. New things that you want to do, new projects that you want to do, that now comes afterwards. So you want to write a book, you want to make a new offer, you want to do lots of different ideas that you have, but you've got those basics, those foundations that keep your business running there in there first. And that is where we will pause this episode, wrap this one up. We will come back next episode. We will complete our conversation with Donna and continue trekking along this season we call Lessons from the Front Line, which is essentially some really good interviews and many of the things as we've seen that we've learned through these interviews, including more than a few things I think you may have picked up this time around. We're not done yet. We're going to continue working on how to get more effective, get more out of your day, how to really focus on the things that matter. And we will do that next episode around. We talk with Donna. Until then, go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week, because we will talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Nor podcast. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, anywhere that you can find podcasts. We are there. And remember, just a little bit of effort every day ends up adding into great momentum and great success. Please check out school.develop-a-nor.com. 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