It’s humbling to start a business from the bottom, to take your creative idea, bring it to life, and watch it grow. At every stage of your business you’ve played a key role, and as entrepreneurs the fire burns within us to continue creating.
But what happens when we have grown so much that we don’t have the space to create anymore? When instead of being driven by excitement to build new ideas you are buried in responsibilities that come with being an industry leader?
Women everywhere are running million-dollar businesses while being completely detached from their work, simply showing up because they have a responsibility to lead the business. Most days feel like auto-pilot and instead of being excited to bring new ideas to life they are stuck in the throughs of problem-solving, decision-making and leading their teams.
Some days you might wonder if it would be easier to just go back to where you started, when things felt fun and you spent the majority of your time doing the work you love. Do you remember where you started? You were fueled with the idea of possibility and opportunity, and now you’ve built everything you dreamed of and you wish it could just… feel easier.
What if you could find that excitement for your work again and lead your team well instead of checking the boxes because you feel like you have to?
Normalizing The Detachment
As businesses grow there is a natural progression of bringing on a team to delegate parts of your work, it is impossible to grow and impact more people without support. Knowing that your expertise is in a singular area, you bring on a team that can help you in the areas that are holding you back from expanding further.
And as the company continues to grow you find more specialized roles, bring on additional leaders and have a full org chart to serve your clients in the best way possible. You hand off more and more of the work and play the game of increasing expenses as you increase revenue. You are following things in the order that every successful business owner has done them to scale bigger.
You pull back further and further from the work you were doing, and step deeper and deeper into your new role as a CEO.
And then one day you wake up and realize that this job isn’t the one you signed up for when you started, You didn’t know that you would have this level of growth and serve this many people, you just knew you wanted to make an impact. So you jumped in.
This trajectory is normalized and as I often speak about, CEO’s shouldn’t be buried in the day-to-day operations. But they also shouldn’t be completely cut off from the company either.
The detachment from the work itself has been normalized putting the creatives that we are as entrepreneurs in positions where we feel we can’t create.
This trajectory doesn’t have to be the norm, stepping out of the day to day operations to build time freedom isn’t about disconnecting from the purpose of your work.
In fact, accepting this as the norm leaves these creators turned leaders resentful, unexcited and operating like they are on a hamster wheel.
Taking Back Control
If you feel disconnected from your work because there aren’t any parts of your work that you love doing, change it.
You are in charge, you have a choice.
Here’s what I want you to do: Rewrite your role as Founder & CEO to reflect doing what you do well, doing what you love and doing what makes the most sense for the longevity of the business.
Instead of subscribing to the idea that because you are the CEO you only do the things leaders do, think outside the box.
Make creative time part of your responsibilities, take a day each week where you aren’t leading or answering to anyone, you aren’t making decisions or problem solving, you are just going back to your roots - putting the excitement of possibility and opportunity, on paper.
At any point, you can make a different choice that gives you a different outcome.
And when you do this, you will feel reconnected, invigorated, and maybe even excited to lead your business again.
I’ll leave you with this, your business is yours. You can burn it down and start again, you can pivot and try something new, you can make your own schedule and you can most definitely do whatever the heck makes you truly happy.
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