#019 - Break the ceiling: transform from solopreneur to scalable CEO

In Episode 19 of The CEO's Seat, host Samantha Noelle breaks down the “ceiling” many women hit between roughly $250K and $1M—when revenue grows but the business model stays solopreneur and everything still runs through the founder. 

She explains how the habits that built early success—control, perfectionism, owning every client relationship, making every decision, and pricing around personal capacity—become the bottleneck that caps growth. The solution isn’t more mindset work or more tactics; it’s a structural shift to a customer-centered company built on systems, standards, people, and decision frameworks that work without the CEO’s constant involvement. 

Samantha shares a simple scalability test (can the business run 3–4 months without you?), the grief and identity shift that comes with letting go, and a practical weekly audit to identify what truly requires you versus what needs a process or an owner.

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Transcript

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You build something real and you have the revenue to prove it. You have the clients, the reputation, and the years of hard work behind you to prove that you are now an expert for the services and the products that you provide. You know that you have something that people want and the evidence is there in the data. That's not the question. But here you are still hitting the same wall. And it's not because that you're not capable, not competent, and it's not because the market isn't there. You've already proved that. But because the business you build to get here cannot take you where you're trying to go. And the hardest part, the very habits, decisions, and instincts that built your success are the exact things that are now capping it. There is a certain inflection point that happens somewhere between earning a quarter million and a million dollars when a woman stops being a solopreneur and is supposed to become the CEO of a scalable company. Most women cross that revenue threshold without ever making the actual transition. The money changes, the model doesn't. And that gap, the one between the business she built and the one she's trying to build is the ceiling. Hey everyone, you are listening to the CEO C with me, your host, Samantha Noel. And you're listening to episode number 19, where we're going to discuss breaking past the ceiling. Today we talk about what that ceiling is actually made of, why it's so hard to see it from the inside, and what it structurally takes to break through it. Not more mindset work and not more strategy, a fundamental shift in how the business is built going forward and who it is built around. So let's get right into it. So when you started your business, let me guess, you started from a place of passion. You found something that you're good at doing. Maybe you realize that you don't make a very good employee. You want the freedom and the flexibility to run your own business and design your own time and your own schedule. And you really enjoyed the aspect of building something. And you did that on your own. You hustled, you did what it took to get where you are today. And the business became built around you. You became the brand. Every customer, every client knew you. You became the delivery, the quality control, and you became the decision maker and the primary client relationship. So everything that happened in the business when you first started went through your judgment, your taste, everything about you, your availability and your output. And that is exactly what works in the solopreneur model. Clients loved you. You learned the ability to close sales because you were speaking language and your customers felt that. This is your baby. And now here you are in a company that is no longer at the place of being a soulpreneur, but you're still operating out of those habits. And that is a ceiling. And that ceiling is now capped because of one person's time, energy, and capacity. Take, for example, a company that is built to scale, it operates completely different than a solopreneur model. The scalable company is built around the customer, not around the CEO, not around the shareholders, not around the owners. Now, a publicly traded company sometimes ends up being built around what the shareholders want or what the board thinks that the shareholders really want. But I'm talking about a business that's really healthy and can scale and isn't suffocated by having to build around one group or one person, but building around the customer. That company is built so that everything in place can service the customer in terms of experience, outcome, and delivery. All of it has to be systematized so that it can constantly be replicated consistently. Think about when you go to McDonald's in any state or any city or any country, it's relatively the same wherever you go. That's because there's such a system and a process for everything that's baked into the company itself. And the model for that is all based around the customer experience. It's not anything to do with what the CEO wants, who the CEO is, who the owner is. In fact, most everybody that goes to McDonald's has never even met and probably never even heard of who the exact CEO or the owner of the company is. The founder's role shifts when you are building a scalable company from doing the work to building and leading that infrastructure that does do the work. And growth is no longer capped by her capacity. It's supported by systems, people, and processes designed around the customer's result. And I've talked about this in a previous episode where oftentimes owners want to make sure that they're injecting themselves into the business. And they think that the way to do this is to be steeped in the business so much that the business completely depends on them. And that's not how you build a business that can be scaled. You build a business that can be scaled around the owner's mission, vision, values, and their personal identity and brand by making sure that all of the systems and the processes that help the business to be successful in the beginning, the really core things, the things that people really value, that gets baked into the processes and the systems. So you no longer require the owner to actually be there and doing everything and overseeing everything because all of the important things that made the business successful get steeped into building the scalable systems that will support it and still deliver the same level of quality and service, again, value and vision that was there when it was smaller and more boutique. The problem ends up being the female owner who's right in this gap that I'm talking about has the revenue of someone crossing into the second model, but she's still running it based on the habits, the instincts, and the control patterns of the first. She's trying to scale a solopreneur operation without rebuilding it into a company. And that contradiction is the ceiling that I'm talking about. Here is a test of whether you have a business that's scalable or whether something that is a hobby and operates around a business owner. If the business cannot function for three to four months without her direct involvement, it's still a soulpreneur operation. And it doesn't matter how high the revenue number is, the structure is the giveaway, not the income level. And when I talk about steeping into the processes and the systems, the things that helped the company be successful in the soulpreneur phase, what I'm talking about is, like I mentioned in a previous episode, the body shop, when they started to scale, they got rid of some of the things that were really important to their customer base, which was environmental awareness. That's no longer a huge part of the body shop. So they lost a lot of their original customer base and the things that were important to their original customer base that helped them to be successful in the first place. So you want to make sure that the vision, the values, and the mission that were there in the beginning, those are the things that are going to get steeped into the processes and the systems as you build something that's scalable and that's a way for you, the owner, to stay in the business without you having to be in the business. Next, I want to get into habits centered around control. If I had to read you, you're probably a bit of a perfectionist. You like things done in a certain way, you like to have control, and over time, you might have started to equate control and perfectionism with excellence. Now, these helped you be successful in your soulpreneur operation because everything was done in a meticulous way. And that's what helped you get to that quarter million, half a million plus that you're now finding yourself at. And that's part of what customers have loved is that they know that the value is there. They know that when they're giving you their money, they can expect a certain level of quality and care. However, that same level of control that helped you be so successful in the beginning will be the thing that hinders you from growing and scaling your business to a million, to a million plus, to something that you can step away from and take a vacation with your family for three months without having to worry, without having to destroy the relationships around you because you actually never stop working. Changing the way that you operate will be the thing that will help you to scale. And it's not a character flaw that you were controlling or perfectionistic or that you wanted to have your hands in everything. That's not a character flaw at all. Again, it helped you to be successful. We always have traits about ourselves that help us to be successful to a certain degree, and then eventually they stop serving us, they hinder our growth. The soulpreneur habits have outlived their usefulness at the point of where you are at in your company. And now I just want to get into the habits that I find in women who are at this threshold, who are at the tension between the soulpreneur and the scalable company that's building for profit. And I want to talk about what those habits are so that they can be called out and identified. The first habit is everything still has to go through her. And I'm going to be honest, I have worked with companies upwards of $30 million a year in annual sales where the owner still has to have her final approval on everything. And this was a huge tension point for her. This was a huge stress for her. She hated that she could never step away from her business. She was so worried that she was never going to be able to actually retire. But the problem was her. It wasn't anything else because she had good people in place, but she wasn't letting go of the reins enough. And everything still had to be filtered through her. And what's happening when women are operating in this level in their business, it's the belief and the idea that if it doesn't pass through her, it won't be good enough. And there's fear around letting go of that. Every piece of work that leaves the business passes through her review, every client communication, every deliverable, every decision of importance. And she'll tell herself that it's about quality. And in the Soulpreneur years, it absolutely was. It had to pass through her. But at this stage of business, it means that the business can only move as fast as she can personally review and approve things. So she becomes the bottleneck. And she's not built a quality standard within her company. She's built a dependency on herself and she's called it a standard. The second habit is that she owns every client relationship personally. And I understand this because the clients trust her. They hired her. Their loyalty is to this person, not the business. And she's allowed that because she's trained that. Because in the beginning, she was the product. She was the face of the company. But now it means client retention is going to be fragile in a way that it evaporates the moment that she is unavailable, overwhelmed, or trying to serve more people than she can personally hold. She's not built a client relationship. She's built a personal relationship that the business is dependent on. Because when you are building a business that you know you want to scale, you always think about making sure your customers and clients know that you are going to have other people that will have touch points with them. And you empower your people to have that touch point. The third habit, you're still making decisions that should not require you. In a business on day-to-day, there are a myriad of things that can go wrong. You could have a leaking roof, you could have a pest control issue, you could have technology issues, you could have a frustrated client. And if you don't have the people in place and you have not empowered them to deal with those situations without having to run to you or run it through you in order to make a decision, you're still operating from a place of being a soulpreneur as opposed to that scalable business. Decisions that should be owned by a team member or governed by a process or handled by a system are still ending up on your desk. And not because your team can't handle those things. It's just because you haven't yet built the decision-making framework that would empower your employees to do those things. And you think it's just faster to handle it yourself. And maybe it seems like it's faster today, but long term it becomes more expensive. And also you run the risk of losing good employees when you don't give them the tools and the empowerment so that they can make decisions in the company knowing that you trust them. People feel when we don't trust them. And people quit when they feel like there's a lack of responsibility, a lack of growth, or a lack of trust and recognition. Most people want to do well. And when we hold back by controlling everything ourselves and making everything run through us, and the decision-making processes all run through us, especially the really simple decision-making things like a roof is broken and leaking, or there's a pest problem, or you have an unhappy or dissatisfied customer. Those are all things that you can empower your employees to handle. The fourth habit is your offers and your delivery are built around what you can personally handle and execute. So your offer structure, your pricing, and your scope of work is all designed around what you can do yourself and not around what the customer actually needs and what a team and system can deliver. Again, I've said this many times. Building a successful business is almost like having a child where you're raising it so that you can eventually leave it and let it go and it will be successful without you. And you always want to think about what that child needs? What does the business need over what do I need? And so, as the business owner, if you're not thinking about what the customer actually needs, you might be missing out on very profitable additions to your business. For example, you could go start a pressure washing company and never once actually operate a pressure washer yourself. And yet you could still have an incredibly successful business because you hire the people that can do the things that you can't do or that you're not good at doing or that you don't want to do. So when you build a business in a way that's capped to your own personal limitations as the business owner, it means that you build a business model that has a built-in capacity ceiling, meaning you cannot raise prices beyond what your personal time can justify. And you can't take on more clients than what your personal bandwidth allows. You haven't built an offer, you've built a very well-paying job for yourself. The fifth habit is you measure success by how busy you are and not by how well the business performs without you. I talk about this a fair amount. Busyness doesn't mean success. Busy meant you were working, and working meant the business was alive. But at this stage in business, busy is not a growth metric. It's a warning sign that the processes and the systems that you have in place are not scalable. The measure of a scalable business is not how much the founder's doing, it's how much the business produces when the founder steps back. And when you're at this stage, when you're still in the tension place, you haven't made that shift in how you measure yourself as the business owner. And none of these habits are failures. Every single one of them was the right move at an earlier stage. The problem is not that you've developed them, the problem is that you kept them past their expiration date. And now they've become the ceiling to your company's growth. And here is the thing: you're an incredibly intelligent, successful woman. So if you're wondering why didn't I see this, it seems so simple and so obvious. It has nothing to do about the fact that you're not smart, that you're not successful, or that you don't have what it takes. It's simply that you've been self-built. So you have such a level of confidence in what you do, how you do, how you deliver it. You know that you've been able to build success for yourself. So you know that something works, and that's a good thing, but it can also be a massively blinding thing because we can become arrogant sometimes about that growth. Again, none of these are bad things. They're just simply information about what often does happen. And I always say that being a business owner of a successful business will be the greatest personal development course that you will ever take because it's going to force you to grow. And in order to be incredibly successful, you will have to let go of pieces of yourself that you once were so incredibly attached to and comfortable with, and that did serve you for a period of time. So it's not that we need to feel shame or guilt or be angry at the fact that this is how we have operated until this time because it served you up until now. But now you're ready to go into the next phase. Now you want to grow your business, you want to hit that million dollar mark, you want to hit 2 million, 3 million. And in order to get there, you have to change your mindset that now you might not be the person who knows what's best for your company anymore to the degree of what you did when you were operating as a solepreneur. And you will know what's best for your company as long as you continue to move forward and follow some of the advice that people who've done it before you or who can see what you don't see, if you can take on that information in order to help your company grow, that will help you because you're genuinely good at what you do. And your competence and confidence in that is real and warranted. It's also exactly what makes that ceiling invisible. It's also what makes it hard for you to see that that's the thing that you need to break past. Because everything that you do, you do it well. The client relationships that you hold personally, you maintain them well. The estimates, the conversations, the sales engagements that you have, you do those all well because you are now the expert at what you do in your business. And the decisions that you make instead of delegating, you make good decisions. So from the inside, it looks like the business is running well because of your involvement. But what you can't see is what the business could become if it weren't dependent on your involvement because you've never gone there before. You haven't seen what it looks like and how it's different to go from a solopreneur to a quarter of a million, to a half a million, to a million and beyond. You haven't seen the different stages yet. You haven't been there yet. And so you need somebody outside of you to point out some of the things that you're not able to see because it's kind of like when we're by ourselves, we can think that we are the shiz. We can think that we are the. Best person ever. But then as soon as you get into a relationship with somebody, you realize really quickly oh, I actually have some flaws. I might not be as patient as I thought I was. I might not be as organized as I thought I was. I might not be as warm and bubbly as I thought I was. Now that I'm in a relationship with somebody else and I'm forced into different situations and different circumstances that are forcing me to experience things that I wouldn't experience by myself. So it's almost the same thing where sometimes by ourselves, we can be limited in our perception of what is until we're actually forced to look at what is. And I have seen these problems in companies up to $30 million a year in sales. The one thing I've noticed is if you're not actively having your own perception challenged, that the problems and the habits that start as a solopreneur will continue on up to a certain degree. So every time that ceiling appears, it arrives with a convincing operational explanation. You think that the hire didn't work out. And I have worked in a company where the owners literally thought it was everybody that they were hiring that was the problem. And then I worked directly within that company and I found out that the common denominator was always the owners, not the people that they were hiring, because that's a lot of people. It's the owners. We might blame it on the system not being ready, or that the client situation was just so unique, or the timing was just off. And some of those explanations might contain some partial truth. Sure, maybe you hired 10 people and you let them all go, and maybe one of them actually really was bad, but maybe the other nine were teachable, were coachable, but there was something still within you that didn't want to train in order for the company to not necessarily need you in it to the degree of which you are, which prevents the growth and the scaling that you actually do want. And the fact that some of those explanations can be partly true makes it even harder to dismiss. But when the same growth ceiling generates a new operational story every single time it appears, the story isn't the issue, the structure is. The default moves of somebody who is self-built is often to fix something on the outside, just add, add or cut off. So new systems, a new hire, a new restructured offer, or a different marketing approach. But none of those things will hold because adding new elements to a fundamentally solepreneur structure won't change anything. It's changing the wrong thing. So hiring somebody in a business that still runs through the founder's personal approval on everything is not a hire, it's an assistant. And a new system in a business where the founder still overrides the system with her own judgment is not a system. It's a suggestion. And the structure has to change first, and then the tactics will work. The mindset, the process, and the habits. You have to move from the soul printer thinking into the scalable multimillion dollar business owner thinking in order to close that gap and move into treating your business like something that is scalable. In Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill tells the story of R.U. Darby, who ends up quitting his gold mine during the Colorado gold rush. He ended up selling his equipment to a junk dealer. And that junk dealer ended up bringing in an engineer who discovered that the vein was literally three feet from where Darby had stopped digging and ended up making a fortune. And then that line stayed three feet from gold. The female entrepreneur sitting at a quarter million plus is often three feet from a breakthrough. The vein is right there. And the demand is there, the capability is there, but what's missing is the structural shift that would let her reach it. And yet she keeps stopping just before making it because stopping feels safer than rebuilding the thing that already works. So, how do you successfully move from being that soulpreneur to that scalable business? You have to completely change the way that you operate your business, starting today. Not starting tomorrow, starting today. You have to stop thinking about it as a business around yourself and what you need. You have to think about it from I'm building a business that is meant to serve customers, a specific type of customers, solving a specific type of problem and doing it so well. And it takes you out of the equation completely because it's no longer about what you want and need, it is literally about what does the business need and what does the customer need in order to continue being successful and scaling. And if you were to step away and step back from it completely and you weren't involved and you were to look at it from that perspective, what would the company need if I was no longer an active part of this company? And that's going to help you to start seeing what are the pieces that need to be injected in. You might also start to notice that, oh, I've actually been denying my customers this because I don't have this skill set. And maybe I could hire somebody who has the skill set that I don't have, and that's going to give my customers a better outcome, a better experience, more value for what they're getting from the company. And here is what it looks like when your company is still centered around you. The customer experience depends on your personal involvement, meaning how positive the experience is, the value that they end up receiving, the quantity of what they end up receiving in terms of their experience. It's all centered around what you're capable of giving and what you can duplicate yourself. And maybe if you have one other employee, maybe you've trained them to do what you can do. So it's still limited to your involvement. The quality is defined by your judgment in real time to each situation. And growing the company requires you, the owner, to work even more. And the business's reputation is the owner's personal reputation. And that's a really good indicator of whether you're operating still in that solepreneur model or if you've moved into a growing scaling business model. The customer-centered model ends up looking like your customer service, your customer experience is defined, documented, and deliverable by a team and a system that can be repeated over and over and over again. And quality is defined by a standard that exists independent of the owner's real-time oversight. Meaning you've empowered your staff and your employees to take things into their own hands when it's not a CEO level decision. If it's not a CEO level decision, the CEO doesn't need to be involved. The offer is scoped around what the customer needs and what infrastructure can consistently deliver. So if you don't have the skill set yourself in order to provide an experience to the customer, you hire the people who can. So not more hours from the owner, it just requires better systems that all work well together, was limited to no bottlenecks and the right people in place to continue operating those systems. And the business itself has a reputation that exists independently of any one person. The question isn't how to work harder, the question is how to work smarter. How do I make sure that my customers get the results that I want them to have without it being completely dependent on me? And oftentimes I've worked with female entrepreneurs who get really frustrated and they think that making a hire means that their problems are solved. It means that they should just be able to hire somebody, slot them into the position, and then that person should just be able to figure it out. But you have to have the right systems and processes in place, which is also why I talk about in other episodes and part of my method, the reverse blueprint method, which is about working backwards in order to determine exactly what you need to get to where you want to go. So if this has the wheels in your brain turning and you're starting to think about your own business and you're thinking, okay, I can see that I've been operating like a solopreneur, even though my revenues are high, I don't have the scalable business that I can walk away from for three to four months without the business declining. And I now want to do something about that. I want to change things. I'm ready. So let's just talk about a place for you to start. The first thing you need to do is define what is the customer experience. That has to be really clear because if you don't know what it is that you want the customer to experience, it's going to be really hard to figure out the rest of the pieces. Once you've been able to define the customer experience and you know what it is that you want them to have, the value and the vision for the customer and what they want and what they need and the problem that you're solving for them. And once you're really clear on that, and then you start to think, what does this business look like if it is set to serve the customer? And just so that I can break this down a little bit, imagine that you're having company over for dinner. And that dinner that you're going to create completely revolves around the people that you have coming over. It's really important people, VIP, maybe it's your in-laws or some other person. Very important people. And everything about the dinner is going to be centered around the people that you're having over and the experience that they have. So think about the house needs to look a certain way. My spouse, my children, they all need to present a certain way. We all need to be on a unified front of who it is that we have coming over for dinner. We need to make sure that we lay out certain silverware and certain plates and certain chargers and napkins and glassware. And we're going to make the menu in such a way that is all set based on the experience that we want this very important person to have. And we're going to think about all these steps beforehand and we'll think about what do we need to get? What do we need to buy? Who needs to help with what? And maybe you want that person coming over to have such a type of an experience that maybe you actually have to hire a private chef because maybe you are a terrible chef. So this is what you're going to do with your business. And then focus on delivery. How is the customer going to receive the result if you're not there to do it? Take you out of the equation, like I said earlier. Completely take you out of it. How do they have the experience that you want them to have if you're not there? What's the process? Who's going to be trained to deliver each stage of the process? You can't have one person doing everything because you have your finance, you have your HR, you have your sales, you have the customer portion. And how are you going to measure what is being delivered? How are you going to quantify what's being delivered? How are you going to systematize it? And then you focus on the client relationships. How do the client relationships continue to get maintained? How do you make sure that that client and that customer is going to continue to receive the kind of care that you would expect and that you would hope that they would have if you were the one delivering it? And this is where I talk about you bake yourself into the business. And it's not by you being in the business physically, it's by you taking, here's what my morals and my values are, here's my mission, here's what I want the customer to experience, here's what I've been delivering to date and has worked really well for me. And then you train your people on that. The brand of the company becomes those things. That's how the client relationships get maintained without you. And that's how your customers start to feel like even though you've stepped away and you're not the person that they're dealing with anymore, they know that they're in such good care because you've trained your people through processes and systems on the core values of the company and the vision that you want the customer to experience. And that's what ends up giving you those loyal customer bases. The next thing that you want to do is you want to figure out what decisions happen in my business on a daily basis, weekly basis, monthly basis, and quarterly basis. What decisions need to have me involved and what decisions do not need to have me involved. Who needs to own these decisions and be responsible for the decisions? And this is where empowerment of your employees really comes in. This is making sure that you're also hiring the right people and you're hiring the right people because you've taken the time to do this process that we're going through right now so that you know who is going to be the person that gets that role. What personality do they need to have? What values do they need to have? What experience do they need to have? What is trainable? Because some things you need them to come in the door with, and other things they need to just be trained on, trained on company culture. That's something that you'll usually have to train, but also you want to make sure some of those basic values are aligned, and then you're going to empower them to make decisions that they are going to be responsible for, and you pay them for the decisions and the value that they are adding to and making for your business. And you empower them to do it. Now, here's the thing that we're going to talk about that probably a lot of people don't talk about. And that is the grief. And this is why I think so many women hang on in their business and end up controlling in a way that make it hard for their business to truly scale because it ends up causing a lot of internal and external problems. It doesn't just cause them to have growth problems, but it often causes restrictive problems internally because they frustrate their own staff because they don't let go of control because they haven't done the steps that I just finished discussing. And this is the grief. You will experience grief because think about where you came from. You probably at one point worked for another company and realized this is not my path. And then you started your own business and it was a labor of love. You didn't do it out of wanting to become some greedy multi-billionaire. You did it because you wanted to deliver a product or a service to people that you knew you could deliver, and you saw the gap in the marketplace, and you decided to fill that gap with the product or service that you deliver. It came from a place of passion and love. You put in the sweat equity, you put in those long nights, you worked on public and statutory holidays, you worked until four in the morning, you lost money. Maybe you put equity from your own home into it. Maybe you borrowed from a friend or a family member, or maybe you started with five dollars in the bank account and built this business from literally nothing. So there is a grief that's going to come when you graduate from being the soulpreneur into the woman who is owning that scalable business that can be built into a million, two million, five million, ten million, and beyond that doesn't require you to be in it every single day. There is a loss, there is an identity confusion that starts to happen. Who am I if I'm not doing this? Who am I if I let go? And then you get to the point one day, hopefully, where you can sell your business because you've done such a great job at building it in such a way that you end up being able to sell it. Who are you then? And that's why it's really important for us to not build our identity around any one point in our life because we're ever changing and we're ever growing. And I've said it before, and I will always say it building a successful business will be the greatest personal development course that you will ever take in your entire life because it will force you to become the best version of yourself. And so that grief of shedding the old pieces of yourself in order to grow into this successful, scalable business, it's real and it's totally okay to have that experience, but recognize it and don't clench your fists on it. All right. So now in this next section, let's just give you a walkthrough of what you can do in your business in the next week because you realize, yep, this is me. I'm feeling called out. I recognize that I've been operating like a solopreneur and I'm ready to grow that business that doesn't need me in it. And I can walk away and I can take three to four months off because hey, guess what? One of the perks of all the sweat equity, all the late nights, all the missed fun that you've missed just to build this beautiful business that you have is that one day you build it to a place where you need to take time off. Maybe it's a health emergency or a family emergency, or maybe it's a sabbatical, maybe it is a trip that you've been wanting to take your entire life. That's the perk of all of the hard work that you've put in. But we have to get your business to that place. So let's give you some steps that you can take away after this episode. And you can do this in your business over the next week, two weeks, and you can really start to think about things so that you can start planning and mapping out how do you move out of the tension of being the soulpreneur and moving into that massively wealthy, successful, scalable female business owner who has a business that's running and operating mostly without her. First thing you're going to do is you're going to review what actually requires you. So for the next couple of weeks, every time that there is a task, a decision, any kind of communication or some kind of deliverable that crosses your desk, you're going to ask, does this actually require me? And ask yourself that question twice. And then ask, or have I just never built the system or developed the person who could own this? And then keep a list. And that list is your ceiling blueprint. Second step is define the standard before you delegate out. So define what it is that you want people to live up to, what it is that you want the deliverable to actually be before you start to delegate it out to other people. Otherwise, you're not giving people their own map that they need to be able to continue delivering the service to your customer base. The expectation isn't clear. And expectations always need to be clear and outlined. And just because it lives in your head doesn't mean that the expectation has been clearly delivered to the people that need to understand it. And the reason that delegation fails for most self-built founders is that they delegate the task without documenting what the standard of that task is. So you have it in your head. It's never been written down. You've never properly communicated it. And even if you've written it down, read it as if you're not you reading it. In fact, I would even say give it to somebody else to read and ask them, do you understand this? Without saying one word, do you understand this? And if they don't understand it, if they have to ask you clarifying questions, it means that that standard isn't clearly communicated and not properly documented. And if that's not done, you're Team will never meet it and you'll constantly be disappointed and you'll constantly think that it's the other people. And I am big on saying process before people, meaning if you have problems and issues with somebody not delivering the way that you're wanting them to, then that usually means something in the process is unclear or is broken. So go to the process before you blame the person. And oftentimes I see business owners, especially people that are self-built, blame people before they blame the process because they're so emotionally invested. They just assume that everyone else is in their head and can understand what it is that they want them to know that you've been doing in your business for so long. The third step is to rebuild one thing at a time. Don't try rebuilding everything at once. Pick the number one thing that is most constrained by you personally being involved. Where is that one bottleneck that is costing the most in terms of your time and required input into the business and rebuild that first? Document the standard and develop or hire one person, create the process, step back and measure against that standard, and then you can move to the next thing. Step four is measure business performance without you, not with you. So stop measuring by how busy you are and start measuring how the business is actually performing when you're not in it. Can the business operate without you in it for three to four months? And the fifth step is track the financial impact. Moving from an owner-centered model to a customer-based and centered model should reflect in your numbers. Because in owner-centered models, the owner is often doing work that somebody else could be paid far less to do. Her time is freed up to go do and go after the things that have a higher cost to them. But she's doing them because less of her time is focused on the lower cost items. You should also recognize that there should be a higher level of gross margin, that the revenue should also grow because there's more capacity within the business because now you've hired people to do things. You should have client retention metrics that should also reflect how well your processes are and whether the standard has been clearly communicated and is being consistently delivered by the people that you have in place. Do they need more training? Do they need retraining? Do they need clearer instructions of outcome? Do they need clearer measurement and documentation? Are you having quarterly reviews with your staff? Varying things that you can have in place to make sure that the company is now continuing to grow financially. You should see your margins improve. If gross margins start going down, that's where you need to go back, revisit everything that's being done, and look at why the gross margins would be shrinking and go back to some of the basic things that I've discussed. Okay, so I have several questions here for you guys to think about and answer honestly. If you were completely unavailable for two weeks, so no calls, no approvals, no decisions, what would break in your business? That list is a guide to figuring out what is that tension point? Where are you still operating as a soul printer? Second question, what is one function in your business that still runs through you personally that has nothing to do with your actual genius, the thing that you're good at, and everything to do with the fact you just haven't built the system or developed the right person to own it? Third question is Are your clients loyal to you or to your business? And do you understand the difference? And do your systems reflect that loyalty? The fourth question is, what would your offer look like if you designed it around what the customer needed and what a team can deliver consistently instead of around what you can personally execute? So how would it differentiate? And I bet that you would find things that you could actually offer to your customer base that you've been leaving off of the table as consideration because you didn't think that you could deliver it. Maybe you didn't consider hiring somebody who actually had a skill set above you that might be able to deliver that. And the fifth question is what is the version of your business that you're holding on to? The one where you are indispensable that is keeping you from building the one where you are not. All right, we're just gonna get into my closing challenge for you guys. Okay. So this week, do that audit that I discussed. The five steps to determine what your ceiling is. So it was reviewing what actually requires you, define what the standard for the outcome is before you delegate it to somebody else, rebuild one thing at a time, measure your business performance without you, not with you in it, and then track what the financial impact is. So go through every task, every decision and communication that requires you, write it down and at the end of the week, go through that list and mark everything that genuinely requires your specific expertise versus everything that you have just simply never built a system for or hired the right person to handle it. That second list is your starting point. You're not trying to remove you from the business, you're trying to build a business that doesn't collapse without you because a business that depends entirely on you is not a scalable company. It's just a very expensive job. The habits that got you here today in your business are not bad. They're not wrong. They were very, very right for a long time and they were not mistakes. They're right for the stage that you were in, but now you're at that tension point. You're in between the soulpreneur and the scalable company that can go on to be incredibly financially successful that won't require you every day. And you're wanting to now move out of that stage, out of that tension stage. You're literally standing at the threshold of something that requires a new version of you and the business, a business that's built around the customer, not around you. Three feet from gold is still three feet from gold. And the only question is whether you're willing to rebuild the shovel. All right, that's it for today's episode. I hope you guys got a lot of value out of this one. And I hope that you guys will leave the comment below about what it is that you have found in your business that you are still doing that maybe you don't actually need to be doing. And I want to hear where you're going to hire somebody to do some of those processes so that you can continue to grow and scale your business into that million-dollar, multi-million dollar company that you say that you want. I am your host, Samantha Noel. And you've been listening to the CEO C. This was episode number 19, breaking past that ceiling and moving out of the tension from being the solepreneur to this scalable business that's built for profit. And you can join me over on my Facebook group for female entrepreneurs built for profit. You can also follow me over at Instagram at SamanthaNoelOfficial. And you can also send me your suggestions for the show to the CEO's seat at gmail.com. Again, it's the CEO's seat at gmail.com. And there are two S's in that. So it's the CEO's seat at gmail.com. And share this episode with a woman that you know who has built something real and is also standing at that tension point where she's at in her business between the soul owner and the scalable, successful, multimillion dollar business that she dreams of having that doesn't require her in it every single day. Well, Ray, it's been so great being here with you guys, and I can't wait to see you guys next time on the next episode. Have an amazing day and continued success in your business. See you guys soon. You've got this, you've built this, you made it. The time is now. Don't back down. You're the boss. You wear the crap. So pull up the C, the C E O C and let's go. Drop this beat.