In this practical episode, Scott Ritzheimer, shares a simple exercise to reclaim control of your CEO schedule. If you struggle with endless pulls on your time and unclear priorities, you won't want to miss it.

You will discover:

- How to rate current time use across key categories like planning and mentoring.

- Why envisioning your ideal schedule six months out reveals big shifts

- What setting goals for top movers turns insights into actionable change

This episode is ideal for for Founders, Owners, and CEOs in stage 5 of The Founder's Evolution. Not sure which stage you're in? Find out for free in less than 10 minutes at https://www.scalearchitects.com/founders/quiz

Scott helped start nearly 20,000 new businesses and nonprofits and with his business partner started led their multimillion-dollar business through an exceptional and extended growth phase (over 10 years of double-digit growth) all before he turned 35.He founded Scale Architects to help founders and CEOs identify and implement the one essential strategy they need right now to get them on the fast track to Predictable Success.

Want to learn more about Scott Ritzheimer's work at Scale Architects? Check out his website at https://www.scalearchitects.com/

Mentioned in this episode:

Take the Founder's Evolution Quiz Today

If you’re a Founder, business owner, or CEO who feels overworked by the business you lead and underwhelmed by the results, you’re doing it wrong. Succeeding as a founder all comes down to doing the right one or two things right now. Take the quiz today at foundersquiz.com, and in just ten questions, you can figure out what stage you are in, so you can focus on what is going to work and say goodbye to everything else.

Founder's Quiz

Hello, hello and welcome. Welcome once again

to the start, scale and succeed. Podcast, the only podcast that

grows with you through all seven stages of your journey as a

founder. And today, we're going to talk about an exercise that I

use about this time of year, toward the end of the year, the

beginning of the new year, with just about every one of my stage

five CEOs that I work with. It's a ridiculously simple exercise,

but one that I have found is remarkably powerful. What does

it do? It helps you to control your schedule. Now, don't worry,

we're not going to look at timesheets or calendars or sit

you in a bunch of meetings, but there's this question of like,

what as CEO, do I need to spend my time on? Because you're

you're being pulled in 1000 different directions. And I

remember a CEO coming to me, and he's like, we have all of these

opportunities. We have all of these ideas. The problem is

knowing which one to work on. And that's the same thing with

your time. And so I want to walk you through this exercise. It's

gonna be a nice, short, sweet episode. And this is something

that you can do by yourself. You can do it with your coach. You

can do it with any of our scale architects. If you wanted

someone to do it with you, they'd be happy to do so. And so

here's how it works. I'm going to list off a handful of

different, what I'll call categories, things, buckets,

that you can put your time into. And what I want you to do is,

I'm thinking through each one. You can jot the category down if

you'd like, and you'll need a pen and paper for this. So pause

it if you're doing it. If you're driving, don't, don't use a pen

and paper. Just check this episode out later. But you're

going to take this in. You're just going to jot down each of

these categories. We're going to work through them one at a time,

so you don't have to list them all off. And then what I want

you to do is I want you to think about how much time you spend in

that category. It might be some of my clients like to do it in

terms of hours. So they spend four hours in team meetings a

week. Or they might like to do it in terms of a percentage, and

so they might say they spend 20% of their time planning or

working on the business. Either one doesn't matter. Whichever

one works best for you, it's a lot easier if you use the same

thing the whole way through. So don't switch back and forth.

That's really the only rule. Now, as we're going through

these, what I want you to do is rate each one as I share the

category with you. So I don't want you to think of the whole

thing and try and, like, put it all together. All I want you to

do is just think of the gut instinct, what your very first

response is, and then write that down. So here's, here's, we're

gonna do it. We're gonna go through I'm gonna go through

these quickly. You might have to pause between each one, but for

folks who are just listening, we're not going to pause for

like five minutes on every one of these would be crazy. All

right, here we go. So first category, this is kind of the

obvious one. This really is where you want to move towards

spending the lion's share of your time, and this is planning

or working on the business. So I want you to think right now

about how much time do you spend on an average week, thinking

about planning for working on your business or nonprofit, jot

down either the number of hours or the percentage of your time,

and then we'll move on to the next category. All right, next.

This next category is networking, or relationship

building. This is high level networking, high level

relationship building, very future oriented where you're

meeting with your top clients or your most impactful members.

This is time spent intentionally getting out of the office and

meeting with other folks in your industry or that can help your

business or nonprofit So networking slash relationship

building, go ahead and jot down about how much time you spend on

average. Now with something like this, you might not do it every

single week, and that's why we want to average it out. And I

found it's usually helpful to think back over the last month

or so. Doesn't have to be rocket science, but just take that,

average number of hours or percentage of your time that you

spend, all right? That's number two. So we have planning working

on the business that was number one. Networking, relationship

building. That was number two. The next one is actively

marketing, or actively doing biz dev, where, like you're writing

the marketing copy or setting up the ads, or you're out there

doing business dev in some active capacity, maybe at trade

shows or smiling and dialing, as some of you might. If you are in

stage five, this is where we really want to be conscientious.

Is one of the categories that you might still be hanging on to

some of but if you're doing it, it might be a great part of part

two of this exercise. We'll get to that in just a moment. So

think about that might be good for part two, but for right now,

all we want you to do is say, How much time do you spend in

that area, actively marketing or doing business development. All

right, next one. This is category four, and this is

selling or closing deals. So where you are an act. Part of

the sales process. Maybe you've still got a full book of

business that you're maintaining. Maybe you're still

the one who closes the big deals for the organization. Maybe

you've just got one or two clients that you still work with

closely. What percentage of your time or hours of an average week

do you spend actively selling or closing deals. That's category

number four. Category number five is fulfillment or client

delivery. So what do you want to think about here is, what are

the parts of whatever it is that you do or sell or offer that

you're still responsible for? That might be the act of doing

of it, it might be decision making of it, and more likely,

it's the active management of the people who are doing it. And

so if you're regularly reviewing processes or following up with

team members handling issues when they come up, that might

fit in another category we'll talk about here in just a

moment. But if you are either in or actively managing the

fulfillment or client delivery that's going to fall in this

bucket. All right. Next category here is administration, and this

is, you know, to be fair, it's kind of the junk drawer of what

executives work on. Sorry to all you really wonderful people who

work in these areas, but there's a whole lot of stuff that

doesn't actually fit together, but all really falls under this

category of administration, things like finances and the

bookkeeping and reviewing financial reports, things like

HR and hiring and pay bands and all the crazy stuff that we have

to pay attention to these days, things like it. If you're still

one of those kind of tech forward founders who's like the

main IT person for your company. That's another high quality

candidate for part two of this process. But again, how much

time do you spend in these areas combined? So all the

administrative stuff, like finances, HR, IT other systems

and processes that you guys might have to keep up with. All

right, that's the next bucket. We've got a few more. We're

almost there. Next one, mentoring and coaching, and this

is in particular one on one. So how much time are you

intentionally spending with your direct team of executives, with

your up and coming managers, and maybe one or two or five or 10

other people throughout your organization that you're

actively mentoring? This could be anything from one on one,

same page meetings. It could be taking folks out to lunch just

to hear how they're doing. Might be spending time with a new hire

when they come in. But any environment in which you are

actively mentoring and coaching in a one on one circumstance.

That's the next bucket here. Three more. We're almost there.

Third to last is team meetings. And I'll be honest, this one

makes folks cry every once in a while when they really look at

how much time they're spending in meetings at this stage. And

team meetings is really if it doesn't fit into any of the

previous categories. That's why we've got it pretty late in the

process here. So it's not necessarily time that's a

meeting that's specifically dedicated to working on the

business, for example, that would go in the working on the

business category at the beginning. But this is all the

other team meetings that happen. So if you do some kind of a

weekly leadership team meeting or monthly leadership team

meeting that would go in here if you're part of the Client

Onboarding team, or there's 1000s of meetings that we're all

in, all those meetings that you find yourself in all the time,

whether they're pre scheduled or not, those are team meetings.

They're going to go in this category. All right, two more.

This one's often overlooked, and it's real hard for a lot of

folks to think of on a weekly basis how much time they spend

here. And to some extent, that's okay, but it's a really

important category for CEOs, and that is training. You have an

enormous amount of institutional knowledge in you singular. And

if your training program exists without your active involvement,

you might be missing out in a really big way. And so while you

might not do it every single week, almost certainly won't.

You might want to allocate a little bit of time on average to

your training if you aren't already so for right now, all

we're doing is saying how much time you do spend there on

average. We'll talk about step two here in a moment before we

get there the very last one, the dreaded one, and it is

firefighting. Hopefully, if you're in stage four, it's

nowhere near what it was back in stage I'm sorry. Hopefully if

you're in Stage Five, it's nowhere near what it was in

stage four, but it can sneak up on you, especially during busy

seasons. And so if you are spending any material amount of

time firefighting, you're going to want to write that down here.

If it's an hour a week, 10% of your time, whatever that number

is, that's what you're going to do. So if you missed any of

those, go back and record them. I'm not going to say all of

them. Again here just yet, because we're going to listen

one more time, you'll see why. But what I want you to think

about here, just as you're looking at that, is one where

are you spending your time? Did anything surprise you? Is

anything strike you as no longer appropriate? Is anything too

high or too small, anything that you'd like to change. Does any

of that represent something that you really don't like doing and

you're probably doing too much of it. Take some time to reflect

on each and every one of these. And as you do, we're going to

start building out list number two here, or score number two.

And so if you think of all those categories, all those buckets

for your time. What I want you now to think about is on July 1,

or whenever you're listening to this, six months from now, six

months is seems to be the right time. Three months some changes

can happen, but not a whole lot. A year you'll have forgotten

that you did this exercise. But six months is about the right

timeframe for a CEO to make meaningful changes to some of

these numbers. So take a date six months from now and write it

down. We'll use July 1 for this recording. And now what I want

you to think about is if you were to really give it a

concerted effort, if you were to solve for some of the issues

that are currently pushing you to spend more time doing stuff

that you don't want to do. If you were to think about what a

CEO for a company or a nonprofit like yours should be doing and

how they should be spending your time, what I want you to do is

take all of that and think through for each of these how

much time you'd like to be spending realistically on each

of these categories in July or six months from now. So a couple

of recommendations. Some of the things that I've seen as common

patterns is that for the vast majority of my clients, they're

spending too little time in those first two categories,

they're not planning or working on the business. They're not

networking or building relationships, especially for

the future. And that's a big problem, because for CEOs, I

would go so far as to say the majority of your time, at least

51% really should go into those two buckets, if you're doing it

right, if you're stepping especially into that CVO role,

that chief visionary officer role, which really is a great

fit for founders, then you'll be spending more and more of your

time doing that. Now you can't just add this exercise is real

easy if you just create more hours out of nowhere. But the

reality of it is, is you shouldn't be solving problems by

working more hours anymore. You should have learned that lesson,

hopefully a long time ago. Sometimes it sneaks back up,

doesn't it? Instead, what we've got to think through is, well,

if we're really going to spend more time in those areas, where

can we buy back our time in some other areas? And so for most

folks that I'm working with in the stage five, CEO, chief

visionary officer, stage they should not be spending a

material amount of time selling or closing deals. They should

not be spending a material amount of time doing

fulfillment, client delivery or directly managing the people who

do. They shouldn't be spending a ton of time in finance. HR or

it. You should have an executive team that handles that, or at

least managers that can handle that as well. Where you should

be investing your time is namely in planning, working on the

business, like we said at the top, networking and relationship

building, depending on your industry, that might be a bigger

or smaller chunk, and then also in mentoring and coaching. Now

there's going to be a couple things that you know,

realistically can't get to zero, and so most of the time, we'd

love to see firefighting go low, but realistically it's probably

going to sit somewhere around 5% of your time. We'd love to see

team meetings disappear entirely. Sorry, that's just not

the nature of how you win as an executive. So we're not going to

see those disappear altogether. However, they don't have to be

40 and 50% they don't have to be a huge chunk of your time. So

just to be clear, what is part two, the exercise? The Part Two

the exercise to go through these same categories and list off how

many hours or what percentage of your time you'd like to be

spending in these areas by July 1. Now, there's going to be a

lot of them that are basically the same or the same, right, you

might be spending, you might already be spending 5% of your

time on firefighting, and you're like, hey, that's great. I just

need to keep that there. That's fine. Most of these will

probably be pretty similar between now and July. In fact,

you can't really change all of them in that time timeframe, but

what I found is you can make a really big change in two or

three of them. And so as you're looking through that, I want you

to pick the two or three. Uh, different categories that were

the biggest movers, maybe you're spending way less time in team

meetings, or maybe you're spending way more time mentoring

and coaching your team for the future. Take the two or three

biggest movers, either up or down, and set a goal for each

one. What is one thing that you can do to dramatically improve

it. Now, for some of my clients, the goal is the move itself. I

want to go from 15% of my time spent firefighting to 5% of my

time spent firefighting. For others, it's a little bit more

result oriented. I want to develop great relationships with

five new real estate agents, because we're going to be moving

in a few years, and I want to make sure we've got the right

location. So either way is fine, but what you want to do is say

what is a goal that's going to help move you to that ideal

schedule that you laid out for six months from now, July 1, and

you'll find, at least for most of my clients, they find a ton

of clarity in that they're actually doing a lot of things

well. There's a lot of things that are working great. They're

spending their time on a lot of the right things, but there's

also some room for improvement, and this is a great time to do

it. This is a much more practical take on an episode.

This is an actual exercise I use with my clients, and I wanted to

share it with you because I've found that it's super, super

helpful, and it's one that I hope translated over the

podcast. So if this was helpful for you, fantastic. Again, I'm

going to give you those categories one more time. These

are categories that are especially helpful for those of

you in stage five. If you're in other stages, you will have to

change these categories a little bit for that to be more

relevant. But here they are. Category number one, planning,

working on the business. Number two, networking, relationship

building. Number three, marketing and biz dev. Number

four, selling and closing deals. Number five, fulfillment and

client delivery. Number six, administration, like financials,

HR it. Number seven, mentoring and coaching. Number eight, team

meetings. Number nine, training and number 10, firefighting.

Hope that's a helpful exercise for you. Let me know what you

choose, what you find. If you want to send us your goals, let

us know what they are. We'll be rooting for you, and would love

to see your progress as well. I hope this episode was helpful

for you. I hope this exercise gave you some new insight into

how you can better spend your time as a CEO, and I cannot wait

to see you on our next episode. You know your time and attention

mean the world to us. I hope this was as fun for you, as it

was for me, I can't wait to see you next time. Take care.