183: Are You Behaving Like an Employee, the Business Owner, or the CEO of Your Business?

Welcome to the Time to Level Up Podcast. I'm your host, Andrea Liebross. Each week, I focus on the systems, strategy, and big thinking you need to CEO your business and life to the next level. Are you ready? Let's go.

Hello, my friends and welcome back to the Time to Level Up Podcast. I am here to give you some more wisdom. I actually work out with—this is like a tangent here—but I work out with a woman named Sherry, she's a personal trainer. Shout out to Sherry.

She wants to have a gathering of all the women that she trains. So we were kind of goofing around and saying, “What should we call it?” I said, “Well, sometimes I do events that I call it wine, women, and wisdom.” And she's like, “Oh, we should call this wine, women who work out. Or wine, workout, and women. Or women, work out, and wine.” I don't know. We were joking around.

But anyway, here I am sharing some more wisdom. And today, what I want to share with you is how you think about exchanging time, money, and energy, the mindset you might be in when you are really feeling like you are trading time for money or money for time or time and money for energy, like where are you in your business when you're in each of those places, and what you might be calling yourself or thinking about when you are in each of those places.

Here's what inspired this. I got on a consult call and the woman said, "I don't know if really you're the person for me, because you say on your website that you coach female CEOs, and I'm really not a CEO.” I said, "Oh, well, you own your own business, don't you?" She said, "Yeah." I said, "Well, who's running the business?" "Well, me." I said, "Okay, so you are the CEO." She said, "Well, I don't really think of myself as a CEO. I mean, I don’t know."

So, when I dug a little deeper, she is really in the place where she is trading time for money. Let's just start our discussion at that place. When you're trading time for money, you're probably feeling like you are just an employ-ee of this business.

Because when you're an employee, it typically involves working under a certain contract or as part of an organization where you're compensated for your time and your skills.

If you're at this skill level, you get this rate of pay, and if you work this many hours, that rate of pay times that many hours equals what you take home, or what your paycheck is.

If you're self-employed or on your business and you're directly exchanging your time for your client payments, you're like a freelancer in a sense. What happens though is when you're in that place, what you're really focusing on, your mindset is often focusing on a couple of things, like the way you're thinking about things, the way you're approaching your business.

You're approaching it with a desire to increase efficiency. You want to maximize efficiency. You want to ensure that the time spent working is translating into the highest possible earnings. You want to be getting the biggest bang for your buck, the biggest bang for your time, the biggest buck for your time. You want to be cranking things out.

If you're someone that's like, "I have to be more efficient, I have to be more efficient, I have to be more efficient," you may be thinking about trading time for money. You also may be thinking that you need to increase your skills.

If you improve your skills, then you can charge more. Like, “I'm just a baby interior designer. I'm not really an advanced interior designer. I don't deserve that pay rate at this point.”

You're trying then always to improve your skills. Now I'm all about improving skills, but think about that. If you own your own business, whatever skill level you're at, you're at. Your business, I mean, do you really want to keep thinking about it as a trading time for money?

If you're in the trading time for money, if you're thinking of yourself as the business being just a job, you're probably also trying to do that work-life balance thing. You're managing your work hours to prevent your burnout while you're still achieving your financial goals.

The balance or the work-life integration is probably high on your priorities list in your mind. You spend a lot of brainpower trying to figure that out. Also, you probably then eventually get to the place, you may be nearing the place where you're recognizing the time is limited and you're evaluating whether the financial return justifies the time invested.

I mean, you might get to the place where you're thinking, "Okay, if I worked 40 hours a week, if I put 40 hours of time into this, am I getting the financial return I want?” You're recognizing that time is limited and you're evaluating whether the financial return is justifying the time you're putting in.

Okay, so that's trading time for money. That's when you think of your business more as a job and you as the employee or the freelancer in the job or at the job.

All right, so if we give ourselves a little bit of an upgrade, then we get to the place where we're trading money for time. In this scenario, you start to realize that you can spend money to save time.

You can hire services, you can use technology and software to handle things for you that you otherwise you'd have to have to do yourself. When you're at this place, you do start to think of yourself as an entrepreneur. Because you're strategically using your financial resources to free up time, which then could be directed towards sort of higher value tasks or things you want to do in your personal life.

Entrepreneur really suits those who reinvest their saved time into their business or into their personal lives and quality of life. When you're trading money for time, you're also probably constantly thinking about weighing the opportunity cost, and understanding what additional value could be created with the time saved. What could I do with all of that time saved that I got from investing in hiring out or using technology?

You're thinking about quality of life. You've kind of moved on from the balance thing and you're thinking about quality of life, enhancing your life satisfaction by reducing the amount of time you spend on the things that are not in your zone of extraordinary achievement.

If you have not downloaded the Zone of Extraordinary Achievement Matrix, go to andrealiebross.com/toolkit, it's part of the book toolkit and you can do that there. But if you're in this trading money for time, you're working on quality of life, enhancing your life satisfaction by reducing the time spent on those less enjoyable tasks.

You're also viewing the money spent as an investment and freeing up time for higher value or more fulfilling activities. You don't see this as an expense, you see it more as an investment. Like you're an investor in your business.

And you're really into leveraging resources, you really want to effectively use your financial resources to maximize your personal and professional growth. Effectively using financial resources to maximize personal or professional growth.

Trading money for time, you now see yourself as the entrepreneur. You see spending money to save time is worth it, and spending money on hiring out things and using technology to handle things you might have done yourself or could do yourself, and you're really focused on opportunity, like what opportunity could be created or what additional value could be created now with this time saved. How can you enhance your quality of life or your life satisfaction by not spending time on things you don't love?

You view the money you spend as an investment, and you're really into effectively using your financial resources to maximize your growth. Then let's give yourself one more upgrade. When you start to get into the business of trading time and money for energy, you're really into the CEO type of thinking. You're into improving yourself and optimizing your life.

This gets to the place where you're committing to your personal development and well-being, and it's really less about that formal business title of CEO and more about lifestyle choices, focused on getting you to be the person you want to be, to be vibrant, to perform better in all aspects of your life.

Like you want to spend time exercising. That is a number one priority for you. You want to be spending time maybe on a hobby. That is a number one priority for you. Your title is kind of like a CEO or maybe a life optimizer. Here is what you're thinking about.

When you're investing both time and money into activities that boost your physical, emotional, or mental energy, your brain is focused on long-term benefits. You're focused on the long-term gains in well-being, in productivity in your business, rather than the immediate returns.

You see this as a long game. You're also probably focused on holistic health. You know that you need to put your own oxygen mask on first in order to create the life and business that you want and in order to elevate your performance. Your brain is focused on your own personal growth. You see the benefit in all of this self-improvement stuff. You recognize the role that energy plays in achieving success.

You know that you need that energy. It is worth it to you. You see both time and money as investments in a more energized and capable self in business. You want to sustain things, again, long-term, it's like a sustainable investment.

You see both time and money as investments and a more energized and capable you. So each of these scenarios that I just talked about—the trading time for money, the trading money for time, the trading time and money for energy—each of these scenarios really involves a strategic approach to how you allocate your most valuable resources, to get to the place you want to get to, to get the results, have whatever you want in that result line.

If you're able to think about things in this way, it's going to lead you to a more fulfilling personal life and a more fulfilling business life. I want you to ask yourself, what title would you give yourself right now? Are you an employee? Are you an entrepreneur or business owner? Or are you a CEO or a life optimizer?

This is important, my friends, to think about this stuff. Depending on where you are, that might be a little bit of an indication of which coaching program that you belong in. Are you an I’ve Got This person? Are you an I’ve really got this person? Are you a Runway to Freedom person?

I think this is important super duper valuable info. I want you to take the time to think about it. I am happy to think it through with you too. Let's get ourselves on a call together. Why not? What's the worst thing that can happen? You walk away with some knowledge and maybe I've helped you see a little bit inside what's going on in your brain or in your business?

What's so bad about that? Let's do it. Let's hop on a call. Head over to andreaslinks.com and book a call, it's free. There's not much that's free in life, but this is free. I sometimes feel like they're worth $1,000 even though they're free.

Or if that's too much for you, just direct message me on Instagram and say, "Andrea, I want to talk more about this. Help me figure out where I'm at because I feel like I'm still in the place where I'm trading time for money and I don't like it. I want to get to that CEO level. I want to be trading time and money for energy or more brain power."

All right, my friends, if you haven't gotten yourself a copy of She Thinks Big, the book, what are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? You can access, actually, how to purchase that through andreaslinks.com or you can just go to your favorite bookseller or Amazon and type in She Thinks Big, Andrea probably, and you're going to find it, and the workbook, get them both.

Until next time, this is your time to level up. This is your time to think big. This is what happens when you think big, you start to up-level your life in business and get to believing and being that CEO, that life optimizer that you want to be. All right, my friends, see you next time.

Hey, listening to podcasts is great. But you also have to do something to kick your business up a notch. You need to take some action, right? So go to andreaslinks.com and take the quiz. I guarantee you'll walk away knowing exactly what your next best step is to level up.