THE MAKING OF A CEO

Mark's Story

Meet Mark.

Mark is the CEO of a real estate development firm that brings in $75 million a year in revenue. He is a master at operations and processes, and the company runs in a very streamlined manner. Sales are up, deals are working, and business is booming.

Mark cares a lot about his executives and gets deeply involved in the issues that surface in the various departments. He constantly complains that his time is taken up with all the fires he must put out. Mark has brought in EOS implementers and other management consultants to solve this problem, but they have been unsuccessful.

Mark wants to continue building his company and create a positive company culture. He knows he cannot do this without first dealing with this challenge.

He reached out to see if I could help. 

After looking at Mark’s situation and his relationship with his executive team, I saw the problem.

Mark is a brilliant strategist and a highly skilled business operator.

But he was not looking at his company from the perspective of CEO, the 35,000-foot view of the business, that was critical to moving the company forward.

Each member of the executive team viewed Mark as the personal problem solver for their specific department.  They were not taking responsibility for their areas, relying instead on Mark to focus his energy on their specific problems.

And that’s exactly what Mark was doing.

He was seeing things from 350 feet up instead of 35,000 feet, and was being dragged into problems that should have been the responsibility of his executive team members in the first place.

Mark and I got to work developing his CEO mindset, learning to filter every challenge through that perspective. We worked on his big-picture focus for all his business decisions. Although every department had its own issues, his responsibility as CEO was to focus on the company as a whole. We worked on assigning greater responsibility and accountability to his executive team.

I helped Mark see himself as the captain of the ship.

He began to make business decisions that positively impacted the entire company overall, not just individual areas. His team started managing issues internally. There were fewer and fewer fires.

Revenue increased, the executive team worked more smoothly together, and Mark became a leader in every sense of the word.