Learn from event mentorship program expert May Silvers as she gives you tips on how to create a CEO schedule that keeps you on track in both your business and personal life.
Do you have a CEO schedule for you and your business? Do you even know what a CEO schedule is?
Having a CEO schedule is a crucial part of starting and growing your event planning business, or any business while keeping your sanity at the same time.
You can have the best laid plans and strategies, but if you don’t make time to implement them, what’s the point of having all these grandiose plans for your event planning business and for your personal life?
Here are a few tips to help you create your CEO schedule so you have time blocked to work on your business AND for yourself, your family and loved ones.
Tip #1: Flip your schedule
Instead of fitting your business schedule into your existing schedule, you need to fit your existing schedule INTO your business schedule
An effective CEO schedule is one that focuses on a success list, not a To-Do list.
The CEO schedule should ONLY contain tasks that are NON-NEGOTIABLE for both your personal life and your business. These tasks must be tasks that will move the success needle for your business, and fulfill you emotionally, mentally and physically for your personal life.
Items that are non-negotiable for your business are any activities that generate leads and sales, such as potential clients and clients outreach. Activities that create visibility for you and your business such as engaging on your social media and other people’s social media platform, networking events, etc.
Items that are non-negotiable for your personal life include self-enrichment activities like listening to podcasts that expands your mind and calm your soul, spending time with your loved ones and exercising.
When you look at your success list for your personal life and for your business. What tasks can you automate, delegate or delete?
Automate:
Can some of the tasks be automated? If yes, they need to be automated so you can gain back some time to work on sales generating activities for your business.
I run two successful businesses. If I were to do everything manually, I would never be the multiple 6 figure eventrepreneur and event coach because there is simply NOT ENOUGH TIME to do everything on my success list!
I try to automate any tasks that don’t need to have any human contact, such as scheduling discovery calls, sending out questionnaires and marketing kits, onboarding emails, sending invoices and processing payments. All these tasks can be handled using CRM (client relationship management) softwares like the these two below:
HoneyBook: HoneyBook is great for event professionals who just started implementing automation and also for event profs who like to keep things simple and use the platform to do call scheduling, handle inquiries, create proposals, contracts and collect payments. Here is my affiliate link that will help you save 50% on your first year of subscription: http://share.honeybook.com/events4anyone
Aisle Planner: Aisle Planner is great for event professionals who are experienced in using automation and wants to level up. Aisle Planner has a lot of fancy tools like creating mood boards, floor plans, seating chart and timeline. Here is my affiliate link that will help you save 25% on your first 3 months of your subscription: https://www.aisleplanner.com/affiliate/E4A
If you need an all in one platform to automate the scheduling of your social media post, try out Tailwind. The platform allows you to schedule your Pinterest, Facebook Business Page and Instagram Business account all at one place. Use our affiliate link to get discounted member subscription prices:
https://tailwind.sjv.io/b37DRP
Note: You need to be a first time user for these platforms. If you had previously created an account, you can take advantage of these savings by creating a new account.
Delegate:
You DON’T have to do everything yourself. In fact, you should NOT be doing everything yourself. You need to focus on your zone of genius and let people who are more talented and skilled in the other tasks on the success list take over those tasks. That’s how you can move the success needle the fastest.
Delete:
Don’t listen to people when they tell you that you have to do EVERYTHING NOW for your business. Whatever you are doing, ask yourself “By doing this now, how is it going to make the rest of the tasks easier or even unnecessary? By doing this task, will it move me closer to my goal?”
Focus on your current bandwidth and skills. Ask yourself what are the items that you can do NOW to grow your business? Then, evaluate your skills AND your resistance to doing those tasks.
Let’s take social media for example. When I was starting Events4Anyone, my company that provides a mentorship program to event planners, I knew that I must use social media to promote my services and my brand. But I was afraid of social media. I have very little experience with Facebook as I only use it for my personal page and I have ZERO idea how to use Instagram.
I decided NOT to do anything with Instagram at that time and because of my unfamiliarity of that platform, it then created a lot of resistance for me to want to tackle instagram.
Hence, I focus all my energy on growing my visibility inside my facebook group and facebook page. I temporarily “deleted” instagram from my marketing strategy. That move paid off! It helped move my company from zero revenue to over $30k in 2 months!
After mastering facebook, I now had the bandwidth to conquer instagram. Within a year, we grew from zero followers to close to 900 followers who are all my ideal clients.
You don’t have to do EVERYTHING for your business and neither do you need to do EVERYTHING NOW. Always evaluate what is going to move the success needle the fastest, and delete the rest, at least temporarily, until you have the resources and time to get there.
Tip #2: Make the schedule with the mindset that you already are running a business.
This is one of the most common mistakes I see when I speak to other event planners. They plan their CEO schedule based on where they are NOW, not what they are doing NOW.
Even though you may not have your social media set up or have any clients currently, you need to slot in times in your schedule NOW so when you do have your social media set up or get a client, you are NOT scrambling to find a time slot to work on these tasks.
If you don’t block time NOW on your CEO schedule for these “future” tasks, you will run into the “I don’t have time to do all these tasks!” situation when your business is actually up and running. And that will create a snowball effect of not being able to complete tasks on your success lists, and things start to fall through the cracks.
You want to be a CEO of your business? Start thinking AND behaving like one, starting with your CEO schedule.
Tip #3: Respect your schedule and set boundaries!
The CEO schedule is garbage if you don’t respect the times you blocked on your schedule to do certain tasks because you were distracted and pulled into every direction. At the end of the day, you accomplished none of the things on your CEO schedule and you get frustrated.
If YOU don’t respect your schedule and set boundaries, then NO ONE will respect your schedule and your boundaries.
When I blocked time to do work for my business, I made sure that everyone in my inner circle was aware of my schedule, AND the boundaries I set.
For instance, if I blocked 3-4pm to work on client outreach and my 5 year old comes to me and wants to play, I will tell her mommy will play with you from 4-5pm. My team, my husband, and my daughter know not to disturb me when the time is not focused on them.
That is why it is so important that you need to indicate your NON-NEGOTIABLE items for business AND for personal life into your CEO schedule so everyone and anything that is important to the success of your business and the fulfillment of your personal life gets an allotted block of time. No one and nothing is competing against each other and one another.
But the trick is in order to be efficient, you need to stay hyper focused when you are doing the task you blocked on your schedule. If you are trying to multitask, or your mind wanders to the next thing you need to do while you are supposed to be focusing on the task at hand, you will feel like you are neither here nor there. So if you are supposed to be spending time with your family, put your phone away. If you are supposed to be working on your social media, put a “do not disturb” sign on the handle of your office door, and stay present to your current task allotted for that blocked time, DO NOT LET YOUR MIND WANDER!
All of the above takes practice and a lot of fine tuning to get to a realistic schedule that works for you, your business and your inner circle of people. The thing is you need to start cultivating that awareness and habit now so it becomes second nature for you to respect your time and boundaries and also make sure the people around you understand the boundaries too.
If you are struggling with finding the time to start and grow your event planning business, Mindset & Productivity is one of the pillars we focus on inside our Unstoppable Eventrepreneurs mentorship program. Click here if you like to have a quick chat on how we can help you get the CEO schedule part down!
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