How to Overcome the ‘Employee Mindset’ and Start Thinking Like a CEO

If you’ve come from a corporate career like I did, you’ll have a lot of learned perspectives that aren’t doing you any good as a business owner. 

Now you’re in the drivers seat, you’re leading a business and you need to be thinking like a business owner, not an employee. 

Here’s three mindset shifts you need to make to stop thinking like an employee and start acting like a CEO of your own company.

Mindset shift 1: Time does not equal money

Now that you’re the CEO of your own company, it’s all about leverage. How do you maximize your revenue and your profits for the effort that you put in?

Your old employee mindset of more work = more money is no longer relevant! You’ve got the power to make much more……

Lightbulb moment: You’re not being paid by the hour, even if that’s the way that you charge out to your clients. 

There’s a lot more, as you know, that goes into running your business than the actual work that you are doing for the client side of it.

So you really need to stop thinking in terms of an hourly rate. Stop pricing your services based on what you think your hours are worth as an employee! 

You need to look at the company as a whole, what you’re doing as a company, the value that you’re providing, and look at how you can best leverage what you have available to maximize your profit and and bring in the highest amount of revenue possible.

What I do, and help my clients with, is creating packages for their services. With packages you can build the value into them that means you move away from an hourly rate pricing model. 

Mindset shift 2: Investments, not expenses

The second switch that I want you to take is to think about your costs as investments, as opposed to expenses.

When you do your accounting, yes, costs are recorded as an expense line item, but that’s an accounting term. Most of what you are doing when you’re spending on your business are investments.

You’re investing in technology, systems or resources that’s saving you time. 

You’re investing in developments in your business that are creating new revenue streams or new ways that you can service your customers to increase your earning potential.

Or you’re investing in other improvements to increase your customer lifetime value, for example, online portals, customer relationship systems, automated services, communication…

… all of those great things that create an outstanding experience for your customers, which builds your reputation and gets them coming back for more plus new people coming to you as well.

And there’s another investment, when you commit time and money to marketing activities – you’re actually investing in growing and building your brand reputation. Which in turn drives more prospects into the marketing funnel to convert to revenue-generating clients.

An expense is money that goes out the door, a cost which can’t be recovered. An investment, is an outlay of money that you make in order to make even more than that in revenue. 

This is a MASSIVE block I see many people having, and I used to be exactly the same!

However once I made this shift, I could see how making some investments were going to get me even bigger returns, and this was a huge game changer in how I approached my business that resulted in bigger growth.

So what you need to be looking at is your return on investment from the amount you’re spending, instead of the face value of the spend as a cost. 

Mindset shift 3: You’re the boss – you decide!

Now, the third switch that I’d like you to make is to realise that this is your company. You can decide how you do things and you don’t need qualifications or training to be ‘suitably skilled’ to run your business. 

You do it your way. 

Yes, it’s really that simple but so many people look to others to be told how to do everything. They need ‘permission’ by either being told what to do, or by doing training so they’re taught what to do. 

Guess what? This business of yours…. it hasn’t existed before. 

You’re creating something new, and it’s unique, because of you. 

One thing I know so well from my career in marketing – there’s no ‘one’ way to do business, or to do marketing. 

Different things work for different people, you need to find your own groove and what works for you.

Have confidence to take the advice from experts and adjust it to suit your own business, situation, ability and – the most important one – your ideal customer!

You don’t need to do five posts on Facebook every day if that’s not what’s going to work for your particular business. 

You don’t need to have a five series of emails for your freebie opt-in. Maybe you don’t even need a freebie!

You don’t need to wait until the end of projects and then invoice – if you like you can charge upfront. Sure, some people may be surprised at first if it’s not ‘normal’, but most will just accept it. (And if you’re thinking ‘that won’t work for me’ I challenge you to try it!)  

So many things to do with your business that you get told by people “this is how you do it”. And yes, that’s how they’ve done it. 

But that doesn’t mean that YOU have to do it that way!

The lesson here is that you can decide how you reach your goal. There’s always more than one way of doing everything, and you can decide what’s right for you without feeling pressure to follow the crowd.

You can stop feeling restrained by rules, stop asking for permission to do things your way.

Start thinking of how you can do it that works for you!

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Those are my growth mindset shifts that I’d like you to take – so you stop thinking like an employee and to start thinking like the CEO of your business. 

Take a moment to consider your own actions and beliefs, do you need to make any of these three mindset shifts? 

It won’t happen overnight, but if you’re conscious of your current way of thinking, you can recognise it and make an effort to re-frame those thoughts.  

Time to step into your role as CEO, and let’s get your business moving this year!

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Now you’re thinking like a CEO, get your business moving towards your next goal.

Apply to join my group coaching program for my help to create that killer strategy! Applications open now >>