Timestamps:

00:00:00 Introduction to the Evolving CEO Role
The host introduces himself and the topic: how a CEO’s responsibilities must change as an e-commerce business grows.

00:02:00 The CEO’s Time Study
The host shares his personal experience conducting a four-week time study to identify and delegate non-CEO level work.

00:03:04 The “Subject Matter Expert” Phase
In the beginning, the CEO is the hands-on expert, handling everything from product research to PPC campaigns.

00:04:03 The First Million-Dollar Milestone
After hitting $1 million, the CEO’s role shifts to reinvesting for growth, often by expanding product offerings.

00:05:07 The Cycle of Growth and Delegation
The CEO identifies bottlenecks, hires specialists to solve them, and then doubles down on other sales-generating activities.

00:06:57 Leading Through People
Crossing the $20 million mark requires a transition from hands-on execution to leading managers and department heads.

00:08:00 Common Pitfalls for CEOs with Free Time
CEOs who delegate successfully must avoid wasting their newfound time or, most damagingly, starting another distracting business venture.

00:09:53 Investing in Your Team
The first priority for a CEO should be retaining talent by improving team experience, building culture, and supporting people.

00:11:21 Focusing on Brand Vision
The CEO must clarify and communicate the brand’s long-term vision to guide the company and retain key employees.

00:13:13 Developing Strategic Partnerships
CEOs should spend time building relationships with key industry players, potential hires, and co-branding partners for future growth.

00:14:11 Overseeing Financial Health
A key CEO role is allocating resources effectively, managing cash flow, and ensuring the business can support its growth.

00:15:11 Architecting the “Money Model”
CEOs must focus on engineering the business model to maximize customer lifetime value, not just front-end acquisition profits.

00:17:21 The CEO’s High-Level Focus
The CEO should work on the big picture—people, vision, brand, and money model—not tactical day-to-day tasks.

00:19:19 The Most Important CEO Skill: Selling
A CEO’s number one skill is selling the vision to recruit and retain top talent, which provides the most leverage.

00:20:20 Helping Others Become Millionaires
The ultimate mindset shift: a CEO’s goal should be to build a business that helps their key leaders succeed financially.

Links and Mentions:

Tools and Concepts
“AI”: “00:02:00”
“Time Study“: “00:02:00”
“PPC (Pay-Per-Click)“: “00:05:07”

Books
“$100 Million Money Models by Alex Hormozi“: “00:16:49”

Key Concepts
“Product Market Fit”: “00:04:03”
“Brand Vision”: “00:11:58”
“Customer Lifetime Value”: “00:15:41”

Recommendations
“Develop Partnerships”: “00:12:51”
“Financial Health of the Business”: “00:13:45”

Quotes
“If you want to become a billionaire, you’ve got to get really, really, really good at helping other people become millionaires.”: “00:20:42”

Transcript:

Josh Hadley 00:00:00  Today, I’m going to dive into how the role of a CEO entrepreneur has to evolve over the growth of that business and the tasks and the roles that that CEO is responsible for. Welcome to the Ecomm Breakthrough Podcast. I’m Josh Hadley. I’ve scaled my own ecommerce brand from 0 to 8 figures, and I’m actively building towards nine figures in sales. This podcast is where I document that journey and share the systems, the strategies, and the lessons learned in real time so that you can learn what actually matters and scale your own business. First of all, my name is Josh Hadley. I am a man of faith. I am a husband to a beautiful wife and a father of four children. I have been selling in the e-commerce space for over a decade, doing multi-million in revenue on channels such as Amazon, TikTok, Shop and Shopify. And I am also the host of the number one business strategy podcast for ecommerce entrepreneurs. And that is E-com breakthrough. Today, we’re going to talk about what it means to actually be a CEO, especially when you’re the entrepreneur who built the organization from scratch.

Josh Hadley 00:00:58  And here’s the challenge. There’s not a direct playbook that applies to every single business that you have to follow. And so the role of the CEO is, frankly speaking, quite nebulous. And it requires a massive amount of adaptability and extensive leadership skills in order to pull this off in a significant way. At the end of the day, if you look at any $100 million brand, it all goes back to how good the original leader or founder was or was not. Sometimes there is kind of like lightning strikes and it’s a really crappy leader and a really crappy founder, and they just hit a significant product market fit. That does happen. And honestly speaking, those are more often than not, a lot of the news stories that you hear about doesn’t mean they were actually that good of an operator or that great of a leader. And so with that being said, what do you do and how do. How does your role as a CEO have to evolve as your ecommerce brand is growing over time? And so let’s talk about it because this is something that has happened for me in my own business, and I’m speaking from experience.

Josh Hadley 00:02:00  And to be honest with you, right now, I’m going through another weird inflection point in my business, and that’s where this is coming from. I recently conducted a four week time study where I studied my time literally from sunup to sundown. I jotted down everything I did in 15 minute increments, and using AI and using my own human intelligence, I thought through and said, hey, what am I doing right? That is actually CEO level work, and what am I doing that like, is not CEO level work that needs to be delegated, deleted, or sometimes doubled down on. And so it’s from that mindset that I understood, wow, there’s a lot of things that I need to add, delete and delegate to other people. And that honestly leaves me in this like weird spot where, hey, if I’m delegating that to somebody else, what am I supposed to be doing? And so it’s in that question of me asking myself, well, crap, if I give this up, then what am I supposed to be doing? And I have to re-invent my role as a CEO and what I need to be doing on a day to day basis.

Josh Hadley 00:03:04  But let’s roll this all the way back to what I think ultimately happens when you’re just first starting your brand as the CEO, as the entrepreneur. This is what you’re doing. You are the subject matter expert. You are the guy working in guy or girl working inside the trenches. You are the person who again, if you started on Amazon, you are the person that found the opportunity on Amazon. You did the product research and development. You were the person that then negotiated payment terms and negotiated quotes with your manufacturer. You then figured out the supply chain to actually get it here into the US, into the warehouse. Then you had to be the person that figured out how to merchandise the product, how to actually sell it, PPC campaigns. You had to be really good at doing all of those things. And guess what? If you’ve made it past $1 million in revenue, that means obviously, like you’ve you’ve done it well enough. Like you’re good enough at being a jack of all trades, so to speak, that you’re then able to move on to the next level of being a CEO.

Josh Hadley 00:04:03  So the first step of a CEO is like, you’ve got to prove product market fit and you’ve got to do everything on your own unless you’re venture capital backed and you’re funded. And then that’s a whole separate topic in and of itself. But I’m talking to the bootstrapped entrepreneur that’s starting from scratch, starting from ground zero. They’re risking their own capital on the line and growing things with their own balance sheet. So now that you’ve crossed $1 million at this point, your role is going to become this. How do I reinvest into further growth? And honestly speaking, once you’ve hit kind of like initial product market fit, the best way to continue to grow is just continuing to expand your product offerings, serving that customer the next right product. And so if that’s the case, you’re going to say, hey, I need to go double down on creating more products. But here’s my challenge. I don’t have enough time to go and get all the quotes that I need to. And so maybe what becomes the bottleneck and constraint is I have more more than enough ideas, but I don’t have enough time to fly, maybe to China or wherever you’re going to go, meet with manufacturers to negotiate with them, etc..

Josh Hadley 00:05:07  And so your next hire, if your constraint and where most of your time is going, if, if it’s in supply chain, that’s your next hire. And so when you hire that and you get the majority of your time back, let’s say it was taking up 30 hours of your week. If you get that 30 hours back and your first hire is that supply chain manager is helping kind of coordinate everything, then guess what? Your role now shifts to say, great, I no longer have to wear the supply chain hat, but I still have to wear the product research and development hat. I’ve still got aware of the merchandising, the sales, the PPC hat, so I’ve got to own those. So you’re still very involved in the tactile execution of actually generating sales. And so what happens is this is going to become a virtuous cycle. This is why I do a two week time study at a minimum every six months. Because every six months I’m going to start taking on new tasks. And then as I take on those new tasks, guess what? In this example, let’s say the entrepreneur is now spending, let’s say more than 50% of their time on PPC.

Josh Hadley 00:06:06  So now they have more than enough products coming in, but I don’t have enough time to even manage all of those products. And PPC. There’s not enough hours in the day for me to truly optimize each campaign the way it needs to be optimized. So guess what you do? You go hire a PPC specialist or a manager. They oversee that now. Great. And now you get a double down on product research and development. So notice how this is like a progression. You fill up your plate filled with all the things you need to do to generate sales. And then you start allocating those things out to other responsibilities to other people. Give them those responsibilities you’re delegating. And so that allows you to go double down on your time on more sales generating activities. You then grow it to a point where it faces another constraint. You hire for that constraint, and then you go ahead and you rinse and repeat over and over and over again. Like that’s essentially what happens eventually. You are going to get to a point.

Josh Hadley 00:06:57  And I think it it’s once you begin crossing that 10 to $20 million frame, I would argue it’s probably closer to $20 million. When you cross $20 million, it now turns much more into you now have to lead through people because you’ve sat here for the past however long it took you to get to $20 million, and you’ve just had to be very good at like, tactile, like executing on certain things while hiring other experts to go do other things you’re maybe not great at, or things that you don’t like to do, but you’re still the one doing the darn thing inside of the business. Once you cross 20 million, you should at that point have, you know, figureheads over. Hey, here’s my supply chain manager, here’s my PPC manager, my Amazon optimization manager, my Shopify ad performance manager, you know, etc. like you then are leading through people. And here’s what happens. Some entrepreneurs don’t know how to make that transition of giving up the reins, and so they progressively try to keep and like manage PPC themselves because nobody can do it better than them.

Josh Hadley 00:08:00  And that’s a false statement. There’s always somebody out there that’s better than you. You’re just unwilling to go and find that talent. So let’s assume you have found that talent. This is what most entrepreneurs are scared of. And this is where the most damage can be done. And so forewarning, this is what you need to be on the lookout for. Here’s what happens. They hire these figureheads. They get massive time back onto their schedule, and then they don’t know what to really do with their time. So they either do one of two things. They either invest it correctly back into the business, into new growth initiatives, or they piss away their time doing a whole lot of nothing. And it’s they go out to lunches with people, and they end up staying at the gym for 4 or 5 hours and hanging out with their friends. All worthy endeavors. If that’s who you are, that’s fine. Or the most damaging thing. And I think the third thing that I often see is, wow, I got my time back.

Josh Hadley 00:08:51  I’m going to go start a new business. And so they start a new business. And then guess what? Your world becomes so much more complicated. And guess what? Your ability to get to $100 million shrinks immensely. As soon as like the you as the CEO or the entrepreneur, as soon as you divert your attention onto another business or another opportunity, like your shower time is no longer spent on your one opportunity that got you here and you’re. It’s going to be like fighting a massive uphill battle to get to 100 million. It’s not impossible, just extremely difficult compared to the entrepreneur. That just continues to double down on the one thing, on the one thing. You will grow a one thing business faster than you will trying to become a $100 million brand across 20 different businesses. And so that’s the constraint that you are going to face as the CEO. And so that’s the message that I want to be that I want to speak to you today as a CEO. Once you feel like you have the right people in place, and you’ve hired managers and leaders in your team, and you’re feeling like you’re getting a decent amount of time back onto your plate.

Josh Hadley 00:09:53  Here’s my advice and recommendation as to where you should be investing your time next. So number one, you need to understand that the most important leverage that you can have in the business is working through other subject matter experts. And so what that means is you, as the leader, need to get really, really good at number one attracting talent. But number two, retaining that talent. So if you’ve got really good people executing on your business, you’ve got lots of time back. Guess what? One of the where one of the first places I’m reinvesting my time. How do I make the experience of my team members better? Which means setting up calls with them, asking them, doing company surveys. This comes back to building the proper culture for your team and engagement for your team retention you should be focused on making sure that you’re not going to lose those people. So instead of you just going to the gym or going to the beach and just sipping Mai tais, whatever you’re doing, you need to reinvest that back into supporting your team members, letting them know that you have their back, letting them know how much, how, how much they are valued.

Josh Hadley 00:10:59  Because, like, you could be one, like one person away from like self-destruction in a way, right? What if your key PPC team member walks away from the business like, oh crap. Okay, so what needs to happen is you’re invested first and foremost into your people. So the culture, their retention, what’s their feedback and get their feedback and then begin architecting whatever structure you need to implement in your business to make sure that they want to stick around. And it’s an environment where they want to stick around. And you as the leader, you’re casting a good enough vision for their future growth and development that they do want to stay with you. So that’s number one. Number two, you should be focused on the brand vision. So if you want to talk about like what a brand is and I know it’s a very nebulous term, that’s why a couple weeks ago, I came out with my here’s the 16 step framework of how to actually build a brand. And guess what? This isn’t a hey, you do this one time exercise over one day and Bam! You’ve generated a brand.

Josh Hadley 00:11:58  Branding takes decades. And so for you as the CEO, you should be focused on what is my brand, how am I clarifying that message and finding the right person over and over and over again? How am I communicating that? How is that impacting the products I’m launching, the channels that I’m selling on what’s the money model that sits behind my business? Okay, so focused on the brand and the vision that you have for that company, which goes back to the whole retention issue. Most people don’t even know what the future looks like. And so if you’ve got a really exceptional PPC person, but you’re wishy washy about your own vision of the company and where it’s going, and if that team member, that PPC manager has no idea where you’re headed in the future, it’s less likely that they’re going to stick around. So the role of the CEO is to cast a massive vision. Say, guys, this is where we’re going and this is how we’re going to get there. And we’re either going to get there and succeed or we’re going to die trying.

Josh Hadley 00:12:51  And here’s the reason why. Your number one thing is the CEO is to like give the reason why they should stay in the battle. Keep fighting the good fight when times get tough, because they most certainly will. So casting a vision, documenting the brand, sharing that with the team becomes another vital thing that you should be spending your time on. Another thing that you should be spending your time on. If you’re in this limbo land of like, hey, I freed up time, what do I do? Okay. Develop partnerships. This goes into branding work, but developing partnerships and relationships with other key industry players so that maybe you have some backups and maybe we’ll call them benchwarmers, so that if somebody ever leaves your organization, you’re not left high and dry. You almost have kind of like backups or replacements in mind. To say, hey, you know, I’m going to call this person up, or here’s an expert or here’s an agency that if I ever really needed to, I would lean on them.

Josh Hadley 00:13:45  Like developing those partnerships and relationships becomes extremely valuable. We all know business is very relationship driven. And so again, that’s one of the most important things you could focus on is partnerships that your manufacturer, that your team members. That’s maybe a co-branding exercise or a new product that you’re coming out with, with an affiliate or an influencer or maybe co-branding with another brand, like those are all growth initiatives. The next thing that you should be focused on is the CEO is the financial health of the business. So if you’ve got the business operating and you’ve got a lot of new product ideas and a lot of opportunities, now your job turns into an allocator of resources. And so where are you going to invest your time and your money properly. So if you’ve got a good flywheel working you’ve got money coming back in. Now you need to be a little bit more deliberate with, hey, instead of chasing this 50 x return, we’re actually going to go after more 200 X returns on our capital. And here’s why.

Josh Hadley 00:14:43  And ensuring that you actually have the cash flow to be able to support the growth and the vision that you have for the business, that may require, again, maybe you have such a broad vision in an aggressive vision that like, maybe you need to go and attract capital into your business. Maybe you need to go raise capital. That’s fine. That is, again, one of the roles of the leader. Then the last thing that I would say is understanding what is the money model that sits behind your business, because maybe you started your business and it was all about front end customer acquisition. But as you’ve listened to this podcast and you’ve listened to my podcast on repeat, one of the things I talk about all the time is how do you build a compounding customer base into your business so that when you acquire a customer, not just getting the $5 or $10 or whatever you’re going to make on Amazon from that customer, but instead architecting the path and the money model so that you actually have a much larger and longer customer lifetime value.

Josh Hadley 00:15:41  So you’re not just chasing the $10 per customer and a bunch of front end customer acquisition, but you’re more focused on the lifecycle, the customer lifetime value. That’s where you should be re-engineering, architecting. How are we going to print money at the end of the day? Going back to Alex Hormozi lays this out quite well. One of the reasons why he was able to scale Jim launch so well is because he perfected the money model, where most gym owners were just offering free trials, and then they would get you onto our membership. And yeah, 50% of people won’t ever come to the gym, but they’re going to give us their money anyways. That was their like easy business model. Alex Hormozi flipped it on its head between his diet programs with the supplements that he was offering, personal training, etc. he turned somebody from a $50 a month gym membership customer to hey, I actually made $2,300 in month one from this one customer. And so guess what? It cost me the same amount of money to go acquire that one customer as the other gym owner did, but the other gym owner is just getting $50 a month.

Josh Hadley 00:16:49  I’m getting $50 a month plus $2,000 within the first 30 days out of that customer. That’s why Alex was able to scale his businesses so fast, because he worked on the money model behind it. Thus, the name of his latest book was $100 Million Money Models. So with that being said, what’s the money model that sits behind your business? I would argue that’s one of the most important things that you could work on in your business. In addition to that correlates with the cash conversion cycle that sits with inside of your business. So that’s what you should be focused on as the CEO. As you delegate more of the tactical responsibilities, you should not be the person who’s optimizing PPC campaigns. You should not be the person who’s thinking about how do we improve the click through rate or our conversion rate on our website or this main image test, or, you know, this negotiation tactic with the supplier or manufacturer? No. You need to be thinking at the ten zero zero zero foot view where if you make one significant change to your money model or one significant partnership with a manufacturer or a vendor, that then that solves a whole other host of issues that can potentially impact your team.

Josh Hadley 00:17:56  If you can flip the script in your business, makes money before you ever invest capital for that inventory, do you understand how life changing that is to your business? That’s what you should be adamantly focused on. And until you solve that constraint, you shouldn’t be working on anything else. But most entrepreneurs, they know how to do the tactics. That’s why they found success. They’re reluctant to hire the people at first because nobody can do it as well as they can. But once you bridge that gap and you actually hire capable people, then you’re freed up from the tactile things. And sometimes that’s where the entrepreneurs go away. But this is the chance for you to double down on the things that actually matter the most. And if you work on those things that matter the most, which are your people, the vision, the brand, and ultimately being able to sell other people on that, your cash conversion cycle or your return on invested capital, the money model that sits behind the business, that’s the foundation that you can architect as the CEO to be able to grow almost infinitely.

Josh Hadley 00:18:55  That is the role of the CEO. And so I hope this speaks to that entrepreneur who’s kind of like, man, I’ve followed a lot of these good practices, but like, I don’t know, what’s the next thing I should be focused on here are those next things that you should be working on. And as a leader and as a CEO, guess what? Your job is going to change when you go from a eight figure business to a $20 million to a $50 million brand, and then when you hit a nine figure brand again, your business is going to change and your role and responsibility. So as the CEO, don’t think that I become less important. You become more important. But what you work on on a day to day basis changes. So you need to be willing and able to adapt. And then the last thing that I want to say, the number one skill that you can develop as a leader is this. Number one, being able to recruit and hire talent, which comes back to being able to sell other people.

Josh Hadley 00:19:45  If you’re the CEO, you should be the number one sales guy in your organization, period. You might not be calling a customer and getting them to buy, but every time you try to hire a senior leader, which oftentimes they’re typically hired somewhere else, that means you’ve got to recruit them, poach them from somewhere else. You’ve got to sell them on your vision. Why work with you and not anybody else? That is your job as the CEO. So get better at selling. Get better at inspiring other people to take action because you get the most leverage when you work through other people and allow really, really talented people to do their best work rather than you, who’s a jack of all trades. That’s not where the best work is done. Your best work is done through scaling through other people and helping them. Here’s the best. I listen to this from Dan Martell recently. It was a great mindset shift. If you want to become a billionaire, you’ve got to get really, really, really good at helping other people become millionaires.

Josh Hadley 00:20:42  I’ll repeat that if you want to become a billionaire, you’ve got to get really good at helping people become millionaires. So guess what the number one responsibility should be for you? How do I create the money model to where? Yes, my business can scale, but do you know where it’s going to scale is if you incentivize your key leaders to say, hey, if you can get us here, like you’re going to be making $1 million, like you’re basically helping them create their own wealth, and instead of seeing that as just like pure overhead, see it as though one of the best. This is another framework that I learned from somebody else that I don’t even know the name of who shared it with me. But like, there’s different levels as an entrepreneur, it’s cool when you make your first million dollars in revenue. It’s cool when you make your own million dollars in actual net profit. And then do you know what’s even cooler than that? The first time you pay one of your team members $1 million, that means you’ve got a successful business.

Josh Hadley 00:21:38  That’s the framework that you should be operating from. If you are the CEO is how do I help my team members ultimately make $1 million in their own annual salary? That’s easier said than done, but that’s the mission that you should be on in architecting that, sharing it with your team members and inspiring them as to you’ve got their back and you’re going to help them succeed with the God given gifts that they’ve been given. So if you know somebody that needs to hear this message, please share this podcast with them. Drop it in your slack channel, your WhatsApp group for your mastermind, your Facebook group, whatever it is, and leaving a review on whatever podcast platform you prefer that helps others be able to see this content. Remember systems and focus scales while distraction kills. And until next time, good luck!