This month I’m going to talk about the CEO’s role as that of the Visionary.
I had a client a couple of years ago who wanted to grow his business. As we talked about how he envisioned his company growing and what size he was thinking about we started talking about how that was going to happen and who was going to grow the business.
Similar to many startup companies this client started his business doing what he knew how to do; in addition having come from a consulting background, the way he was expected to grow his contract was by doing a good job, a practice I didn’t disagree with. The challenge was it was a limiting view on how to grow a business.
At the time he had one client and he was also billable 40 hours a week. This is the typical way that businesses start. A person starts a business based on a skill they have, they do a good job and they continue to get more work. The challenge is that at some point a question needs to be asked and a decision needs to be made.
The question is, how big do you want to grow your company? And who is going to take you there? This is not about who is going to do sales, this is about who holds the vision of what the company will accomplish and if you are that person, it’s time to switch roles from Chief Doer to Chief Visionary.