Dan Martell - September 21, 2015


How To Be A CEO： What Should the CEO's Day Look Like？

Topics
daily standup meetings talking with customers
Hosted by
Dan Martell
Mentioned
Sam Walton Spheric
How To Choose The Right Project or Business Idea How To Manage An Assistant

Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

235.97

Word count

1,400

Sentence count

62


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

What should the day of a CEO look like? I get asked this all the time, ever since starting my companies at 17 years old, where every day I woke up and just worked on the most pressing issues and then kept going and going. Over the years, really when I was about 24 and I started a company called Spheric Technologies, I had to change the way that I worked. I started asking myself, what should I be doing with my day? What are the things that are important to me that other people should work on? And other people can support me on and help me.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.480 What should the day of a CEO look like?
00:00:02.680 You know, I get asked this all the time
00:00:04.080 ever since starting my companies at 17 years old.
00:00:06.800 You know, when I was first starting,
00:00:07.920 it was kind of chaotic, you know,
00:00:09.360 where every day I woke up and I just kind of
00:00:11.680 worked on the most pressing issues
00:00:13.280 and then kept going and going and then,
00:00:15.120 you know, over the years, really when I was about 24
00:00:17.760 and I started a company called Spheric Technologies
00:00:19.440 and I had a big team, I had to change the way that I worked.
00:00:22.400 I had to start asking myself,
00:00:23.920 what should I be doing with my day?
00:00:25.440 What are the things that are important to me
00:00:27.640 that other people, that I need to work on,
00:00:30.140 but other people can support me on and help me,
00:00:31.920 and that's where I came up with this framework.
00:00:33.500 I've talked to many, many CEO coaches.
00:00:36.560 I've read hundreds of books over the years,
00:00:38.600 and what I want to share with you guys is my framework
00:00:40.380 for thinking about what should the day of a CEO look like.
00:00:43.500 The first thing is every CEO out there,
00:00:46.320 every management team should start with the daily standup.
00:00:48.460 You know, some people call them huddles,
00:00:50.160 but to me, I took the idea from agile development.
00:00:52.860 It's a development process.
00:00:54.080 Daily standups, no more than one to two minute per person,
00:00:57.320 and really it's just answering three questions.
00:00:59.200 One, what did you do yesterday?
00:01:01.160 Two, what are you doing today?
00:01:02.780 And then three, are you blocked or are you stuck?
00:01:05.600 Is there anything that you can't complete
00:01:08.100 that somebody else can help you with?
00:01:09.160 And that to me is the first, that should happen
00:01:11.680 first thing in the morning with your whole team,
00:01:13.480 real quick, 15 minutes max.
00:01:15.320 And the key is to not make it turn into a meeting
00:01:18.260 where you're discussing all the different aspects.
00:01:19.940 You're just letting people voice yesterday, today,
00:01:22.320 and block, and then as a CEO, after the fact,
00:01:24.840 if you'd like to, you can kind of unblock those challenges
00:01:27.160 or follow with people specifically.
00:01:28.840 So that is the number one thing,
00:01:30.560 a daily standup meeting with your whole team.
00:01:32.840 Two is making sure that 50% of your schedule is open.
00:01:37.400 Now a lot of you guys hear me and you're like,
00:01:39.720 there's no way, Dan, that I could possibly
00:01:42.300 get 50% of my schedule open.
00:01:43.960 Trust me, when I was building Spheric, I get it.
00:01:46.660 For two years, my calendar was 100 hours a week,
00:01:50.060 fully scheduled, working, talking to customers,
00:01:52.740 and I didn't see, there was no possible way
00:01:54.940 that I could make it work, but I'm gonna challenge you
00:01:56.860 because I really think that if you adopt that mindset
00:01:59.440 and you ask yourself 50% of my calendar not scheduled,
00:02:02.800 you will start looking at opportunities to outsource,
00:02:05.580 to out-task, to have people support you,
00:02:07.840 to delegate, to hire new employees,
00:02:09.480 but really you need to free up that time
00:02:11.220 so you can do the other aspects on this list.
00:02:13.660 So the third thing I'm gonna share with you guys
00:02:15.220 that a CEO does every day is any major project
00:02:19.040 that they have accountability to,
00:02:20.640 that they have to create, needs to be in their calendar.
00:02:23.620 And I can't tell you how important that is.
00:02:25.560 If you're working on a new marketing strategy
00:02:27.600 or sales process or maybe a new HR program
00:02:31.580 to help kind of create core values for your teams,
00:02:33.620 whatever the project may be, it has to be in your calendar.
00:02:36.440 If not, life will just take over.
00:02:38.520 You will be busy, you will never get it done
00:02:40.460 and the business won't grow.
00:02:41.820 I mean, to me, that is, those projects
00:02:44.420 that should be in your calendar are the ones
00:02:46.100 that are really gonna have a material impact
00:02:48.440 on your business and your growth.
00:02:49.760 So I'm gonna challenge you guys,
00:02:50.960 make sure that A, you keep first the number two,
00:02:53.540 50% of your calendar open
00:02:55.200 And then also with the rest of the time,
00:02:56.580 if you have major projects, schedule them in there.
00:02:59.100 And I do 90 minute chunks if that helps you
00:03:00.860 kind of figure out the block time, I call it,
00:03:02.820 to get those projects done.
00:03:04.480 The fourth thing that you should be doing
00:03:06.360 every day as a CEO, to me it's really simple.
00:03:08.880 It's aligning, talking to your employees
00:03:11.300 and aligning their work with the purpose of the business.
00:03:14.300 You know, many times I've suggested
00:03:15.620 to first time entrepreneurs that they should be
00:03:17.520 spending a lot of their time sharing their story,
00:03:19.840 their why, their purpose of their business,
00:03:22.160 most of the time.
00:03:23.440 You know, and they go, well why do I have to keep
00:03:24.680 repeating myself, trust me, you know.
00:03:27.260 People forget, they get in these funks,
00:03:29.800 they don't understand why what they're working on
00:03:32.780 is gonna be aligning to the bigger purpose
00:03:34.460 and that's what you should be doing.
00:03:35.420 You should be going around to your team and saying,
00:03:36.820 hey, you know that interface you're designing right now?
00:03:39.280 That's gonna allow us to do X, Y, and Z
00:03:40.940 and that's gonna allow us to achieve this big results
00:03:43.480 that we've all agreed upon.
00:03:44.760 So that to me is kind of the forced thing
00:03:47.260 that in a business every day the CEO should be working on
00:03:50.220 is meeting with their team and really trying to explain
00:03:52.620 to them how their work, their specific work
00:03:54.560 is gonna have an impact on the purpose and the mission
00:03:57.120 and the vision of the business.
00:03:58.240 So that's number four.
00:03:59.300 Number five, and I got this from
00:04:02.060 so many amazing books I've read.
00:04:04.040 You know, a great example is Sam Walton from Walmart.
00:04:07.500 He pretty much spent four days a week
00:04:09.900 inside of his competitors' shops
00:04:12.660 or talking with customers.
00:04:14.400 And then that one day, the Friday,
00:04:16.300 they would all come together
00:04:17.600 and they would share what they've learned
00:04:19.160 with the rest of the team, execute on those,
00:04:21.160 and then do the same thing the next week.
00:04:22.740 So number five is talking with your customers.
00:04:25.280 If you have not picked up the phone recently,
00:04:27.660 not to try to sell them, not to try to get feedback
00:04:30.740 on how well of a service you guys have been delivering,
00:04:32.880 but just talking to your customers,
00:04:34.420 asking them questions like,
00:04:35.680 what are some of the big trends going on
00:04:36.920 in your industry right now?
00:04:38.080 Where do you see some of your biggest challenges
00:04:39.680 and opportunities for growth?
00:04:41.380 You know, really just trying to understand
00:04:42.700 where their business is, because to me,
00:04:44.600 that is where innovation lies.
00:04:45.880 That's where growth opportunities lies,
00:04:47.540 and that's where building an excellent business for you,
00:04:50.240 by understanding their challenges
00:04:51.720 and bringing those into your business,
00:04:53.400 and maybe offering solutions
00:04:54.900 will really help you grow your business.
00:04:56.260 So to me, again, I want to recap the five.
00:04:58.300 The five are very simple.
00:04:59.620 One, you need to make sure that you're doing daily stand-ups.
00:05:02.460 Two, you need to ensure that 50% of your schedule is open
00:05:06.420 to allow you to do other strategic work.
00:05:08.600 Three, if you have major projects,
00:05:10.660 make sure they're scheduled in your calendar.
00:05:12.880 Four, talking to your customers to ensure that the work,
00:05:15.960 or to your team to make sure that the work
00:05:17.600 they're working on is aligned,
00:05:19.020 and you explain to them how these things are aligned
00:05:21.000 with the purpose of your business.
00:05:22.540 And then five, talking with your customers
00:05:24.880 and trying to understand not only how good of a job
00:05:27.060 you guys have been doing for them,
00:05:28.440 but the strategy and the purpose for their business.
00:05:30.500 Because to me, understanding where your customers are going
00:05:32.760 will give you some really clear indication
00:05:34.720 on what things you need to be working on.
00:05:36.120 So I wanna thank you guys for watching this video.
00:05:38.060 I wanna ask you guys to please like the video
00:05:40.480 and comment, leave a comment below.
00:05:42.060 And let me know what are you doing in your business today
00:05:44.220 or what kind of the five things that I talked about,
00:05:46.460 which one was the most aha that you're like,
00:05:48.420 man, I gotta work on that.
00:05:49.280 Leave a comment below, I'd love to hear from you.
00:05:50.800 I wanna challenge you guys all to live a bigger business
00:05:53.360 and a bigger life, and I'll see you next Monday.