Are You Stuck Working "In" Your Business?
Free Up Time & Scale Faster →I used to love telling people I was an entrepreneur. It felt like the ultimate badge — freedom, ambition, recognition. I figured there was no better role, and assumed I'd remain one for the rest of my life.
But today, I don't see myself as an entrepreneur. I'm a CEO.
For a long time, when I heard "CEO" I thought of big corporate types running huge companies with thousands of employees. The exact thing I never wanted to be part of.
Yet today I think of it completely differently. All successful business owners must evolve from entrepreneur to CEO. There's a specific series of stages you must go through if you're to leave the hustle behind and build a sustainable seven-figure business:
At 2X, we help clients take the leap from level two, three, or four — up to level five and beyond. We help them evolve from a "hustler" who works in their business into a CEO who works on it.
There are three phases as you transition from entrepreneur to CEO:
Once you reach 6-figures, you need to go through this process. Without it, you'll fail to identify your key income-producing activities — and you'll end up:
- Working harder and longer, never feeling like you have enough time
- Taking on too much yourself, afraid to delegate or outsource
- Focused on the day-to-day, never having time to strategize for the future
- Burning yourself out while self-sabotaging your business
- Being a slave to your business — a glorified employee
A few years ago, I had to call 911. It was just another normal night — I was 25 years old, running half-marathons and Spartans, seemingly healthy. I was with my buddies, having a few drinks and catching up. But then I began to have trouble breathing.
I felt like my heart was going to stop. I'd had this feeling building for a few weeks but thought it was just stress and lack of sleep. So I went to bed. I couldn't sleep. And when I did drift off… I would wake up gasping for air.
I went through this for an hour. I put my pride aside and had my buddy call 911. Thirty minutes later I sat with the paramedic. I told him about my business — how it was growing, how I worked 80+ hour weeks because "that's what I needed to do." When I usually told people this, they looked impressed. Not this medic. He looked at me with pity.
That pity forced me to ask whether there was a better way. Gasping for breath, feeling like I was going to die — I had hit my low point. But it was also here where I began to learn about real business.
I realized the hustle and grind that got me here wouldn't help me get to the next level. I realized my days of being an entrepreneur were over. I had to become a CEO.
Once I made that shift, the feast-or-famine months ended. I started to grow strategically and consistently month after month — while working less. I traveled more. I built better systems. I halved my working hours. And I started making more money, with more control and consistency than ever before.
"Hustling" gets you to 6-figures. It does not help you scale to 7-figures and beyond. The only way to do this is to become a CEO.
The role of a CEO in the 21st century is to be a leader who makes the right decisions — ones that positively impact both the present and the future. As CEO, you are not doing the work. You're observing, leading, and directing.
At 2X, we subscribe to a rule that no single member of your team should have more than five core responsibilities. That includes you as CEO. Any more than five and you'll remain an entrepreneur stuck in the business with no time to strategize, plan, or build for the future.
Think about Jeff Bezos. He has little idea of what's going on in Amazon on a day-to-day basis. He doesn't know every employee or every department's budget. Instead, he works on the business and leads its strategic direction. He hires people to DO the work, so he can focus on where the business is heading next. This is the role of a CEO.
As CEO, your job is to ensure tomorrow is bigger and better than today — and the only way to do this is to focus on the strategic vision and direction of the business. Let your team handle today's tasks. Your role is to create, maintain, and evolve the direction for the entire company — short, medium, and long term.
- What's your business vision and purpose?
- What's your direction for the next 2, 3, and 5 years?
- How can you set this quarter's goals to drive toward the bigger picture?
- What's the overall performance of the business — financial, operational, marketing?
- What is the 20% of activity that produces 80% of your bottom line?
- The 20% of people who produce 80% of productivity
- The 20% of products that produce 80% of revenue
- The 20% of tasks that produce 80% of outcome
- The 20% of your time that produces 80% of your best work
If you aren't thinking about all of this, you are not a CEO and not a business owner — you're a hustler. Creating and maintaining strategic vision is the foundation from which everything else in this list becomes possible.
I hate networking events where everyone exchanges business cards — but I love networking, and I make sure I do it every single day. Over the last twelve months I've hosted Mastermind Dinners weekly, committed to meeting 10 new people each week from my Dream 100 list, and attended events every time I visit a new city or country.
When I say network every day, I mean:
- Speaking at events and hosting masterminds
- Contacting peers and grabbing calls with new and old connections
- Hosting webinars and live streams for your audience
- Interacting on social media and replying to emails
- Asking your audience questions and gathering feedback
We're all in a "people business," no matter what your company does. As a CEO, you need to not only accept this — but embrace it. My focus on networking has contributed to most of my success over the last few years. Ever since I started dedicating time and resources to hosting masterminds and attending events, I've met people who've turned good ideas into great ones and set up partnerships that created mass sales opportunities I never could have reached alone.
It doesn't matter what industry you're in, whether you're introverted or extroverted, or what your strategic direction involves — as CEO you need to become an authority figure and thought-leader. You are the spokesperson of your business. You set the tone, live the values, and lead from the front.
- Speaking at industry events and conferences
- Writing for popular publications and building authority
- Interviews, PR, and media features
- Sharing your story on social media or a blog
- Writing a book and building your platform
Elon Musk is the ultimate example — he leads from the front no matter what industry he's in. He speaks, he leads, he lives and breathes his businesses. You may not have his reach, but your role is to use and grow your own platform to lead from the front.
As a hustling entrepreneur, you spend much of your time selling one-to-one. In the beginning, this is fine — it's how you validate the business. But you cannot do this as a CEO. You need to focus on mass sales. One-to-many opportunities that allow you to reach hundreds or thousands of people at once.
- Keynote speaking to large audiences
- Webinars and live streams
- Interviews, features, and media appearances
- Books and thought-leadership content
- Social media and video at scale
If you are your business' main salesperson, you are not the CEO. Every single time — without fail — when a new client tells us about several products and services they think are equally important, we show them that one or two parts of the business produce the vast majority of results. We help them hone in on the 80/20 of their sales opportunities. This ONE area has saved and made our clients millions.
1-1 sales is often not worth your time as a CEO. Focus on the 20% of sales opportunities that produce 80% of revenue. This shift alone — from one-to-one to one-to-many — is often what breaks the six-figure ceiling for our clients practically overnight.
As a CEO, your success comes down to one thing: Your Team. And before you can build a world-class team, you must first create a culture for them to thrive in. Culture doesn't come from ping-pong tables and free snacks. It comes from:
- Your values, your vision, your purpose
- Your people — from top to bottom
- Your message and your unique approach to the market
- How you observe your team for bottlenecks and bad fits
- Whether your audience and message still align with your values
It's easy to write a vision statement. What isn't easy is living it every single day. Your culture is what you do and how you do it. Your job as CEO is not only to create it — but to continuously manage and evolve it. Blackberry is the cautionary tale: they had an incredible culture, loyal customers, and massive brand equity. Then they took it for granted, stood still, and let it die. Don't be Blackberry.
In 'WHO', Geoff Smart and Randy Street interviewed 20+ billionaires and 300+ CEOs about what it takes to build a successful business. When asked the biggest single factor, 52% said Management Talent. Not tools. Not products. Not marketing or sales. People.
On your own, you will remain stuck in the six-figure hamster wheel. The only way to escape is by removing yourself from the business — and it's your team that makes that possible.
- Always hunt for your next perfect hire
- Search for bottlenecks and remove or optimize them
- Provide the right resources to the right people at the right time
- Look for opportunities to expand your team and save your time elsewhere
- Lead and motivate your team, keeping them aligned with culture
For my first three years in business, I was terrible at hiring. I wasted enormous time and energy settling for inferior talent — keeping only 20% of people I brought on after trial periods. I can't tell you how much time and money this cost me, which is why helping clients optimize their team is one of the first things we do at 2X. It's essential to your success, now and in the future.
Building a team isn't something you do once. It's a never-ending process that involves you at all times — whether you're at six, seven, eight, or nine figures. Your ceiling is always tied to the quality of the people around you.
As CEO, you lead from the front every single minute of every single day. This is a lot of pressure. And that's exactly why entrepreneurship isn't for everyone. You are the person who sets the tone for everyone else in the business — and if you're not owning that, everything else eventually breaks down.
It's easy to write great values and build an impressive "About Page." Visit any Fortune 500 website. But how many of them actually have a happy, motivated workforce? How many live and die by the values they talk about?
The cautionary tale here is Uber's former CEO, Travis Kalanick. He didn't lead from the front. He didn't practice the company's stated values. He set the wrong tone and bred a toxic environment — and although the company survived, the damage to culture, reputation, and momentum took years to repair. As a CEO, your job is to make sure this never happens on your watch.
Each day, ask yourself: "Will I succeed or fail as a leader today?" Your actions matter. Your decisions count. Your tone has consequences — someone is always watching.
This final activity brings everything full circle. The only way you can maintain a strategic vision, build a great team, lead from the front, and make consistently good decisions — is if you step back and remove yourself from the day-to-day process.
Warren Buffett reportedly reads up to 1,000 pages per day. He spends enormous amounts of time thinking, observing, and removing himself from the business so he's available for strategic direction. You cannot read 1,000 pages a day if you have a stacked to-do list of tasks someone else could do.
- Oversee performance and evaluate success and failure
- Highlight bottlenecks and surface new opportunities
- Observe your team, customers, and audience — ask for feedback
- Question your values, vision, and culture — are they still true?
- Search for the next opportunity, the next perfect hire, the next big thing
If you spend your day doing the work, you will never have time to do any of the eight things listed above. You'll continue to work in your business and go around and around the six-figure hamster wheel. So long as you do this, you don't own your business — your business owns you.
These eight activities will help you make the leap. But I also know it's hard to know where to start — which is exactly what we specialize in at 2X. We've coached hundreds of business owners through this exact transition, and there isn't a bottleneck our team of coaches can't help you overcome.
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Your 7-Figure Machine
If you're stuck on the six-figure hamster wheel and struggling to take the next step, it's time to transition into a CEO. We've helped hundreds of entrepreneurs make this leap. We'd love to help you too.
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