How Much of Your Week Should Go to Leading Your Business?

Pull up last week's calendar and do some rough math.

How many hours went to delivering the work? How many to selling it? How many to admin? And how many went to leading: setting expectations, developing people, making decisions about where the business goes next?

Most founders I ask this can't answer it without looking. When they look, the leadership number is smaller than they thought. Sometimes it's zero.

That number tells you more about where your business is stuck than your revenue does.

Your time should change as the business changes

Every expertise business moves through the same five stages on the way from a job the founder owns to a company that runs without them. I map them in The 5 Stages of the Business Owner's Journey™. Each stage asks the founder to spend their time differently than the stage before.

That's the part that gets missed. Founders will change their pricing, their offer, their team, their software. Their calendar stays the same.

Here's roughly how the week should split at each stage. The numbers are guides, not rules. The direction is what matters.

Look at the Leadership column and how the allocation there grows: 0-> 5 -> 15 -> 35

And Delivery dwindles: 30, 25, 25, 10, 0

In Stage 1, the job is doing the work. But that has to change to move to each stage after that.

The jump that breaks most founders

Look at the move from Stage 3 to Stage 4. Leadership more than doubles, from 15% to 35%. Delivery gets cut by more than half, from 25% to 10%.

No other transition asks for a swing that big. And founders of expertise businesses resist it hardest, because delivery is what they're best at.

Their reputation has been built on it. Handing it off can feel like you're giving away the part of the business that works.

When Dr. Benjamin Hardy joined me on The Business Owner's Journey Podcast, he made the point that scaling should make the founder's job smaller, and most founders do the opposite:

The part founders don't hear is "even the things you're a master of." That's usually the delivery column.

So then you've got a founder keeping a Stage 3 calendar, for example, while trying to get Stage 4 results. They hire people, then keep doing the work those people were hired to do. The team learns to wait. The founder stays the bottleneck. Revenue plateaus right around the ceiling of what one person can personally produce.

What the shift looks like on a real calendar

When I started working with Daniel Wakefield, founder of Top-Tier Headshots, he was a one-man show. His week looked like the top of that table: selling, shooting, a little admin, no focus on leadership. Stage 2.

His best month from that period came entirely from his own production. It took everything he had, so marketing stopped. Then sales dropped more than 50% over the next three months.

Then compare a second month in Daniel's business where he had nearly identical revenue and had made some significant changes to how he spent his time. Photographers he'd hired did the shooting. Marketing and sales support kept the pipeline full. An admin ran operations. Daniel's hours went to leading the team and building relationships.

Delivery went from most of his week to a fraction of it. Leadership went from zero to one of the biggest blocks on his calendar. The value of his time went up 3x. In his words:

Here's the full story of how Daniel Wakefield redesigned Top-Tier Headshots.

Use the table as a diagnostic

If you have a team and your leadership hours are near zero, your team can only grow as far as you hand things off. And if you're waiting to step back until the next hire is trained, look at who's doing the training.

Pick one area to give more time to this month, and one thing to stop doing to make room for it.

Your calendar already shows which stage you're running. Find out which stage your business is in and compare to where your time goes. (You can also get an individualized 90-day roadmap built for it.)

Your CPA Isn't Your Finance Team

Most founders have a bookkeeper and a CPA and figure the finance seat is covered. It may be, if the goal is compliance: books closed, taxes filed, nobody in trouble. But that setup only tells you what already happened. It doesn't help you decide what to do next.

A growth-minded finance team has three seats: bookkeeper, CPA, and eventually a fractional CFO, working as one system instead of three vendors. My guide, with contributions from Ryan Page, CPA and founder of Back Pocket CPAs, covers the five signals that it's time for the CFO seat and the mistakes that come from filling it too early. Get the guide to building your finance strategy team.

👉 Please forward this newsletter to someone! And if you received it, here's how to subscribe.

Build the business you envision,

​
​

#golden-0926