In this episode, we break down how CEOs and founders can take back control of their time to become more effective leaders. If you’re stuck doing everything yourself, it’s likely costing you growth, creating bottlenecks, and leading to burnout. You’ll learn how to delegate with confidence, empower your team, and focus on the highest-value activities that actually move the business forward. I also share a real-world success story that shows how leveraging your “genius hours” can dramatically improve performance and results.

Episode Highlights & Time Stamps

0:07 Introduction to CEO Time Optimization
3:42 Shifting from Doer to Delegator
5:11 Understanding High vs. Low Value Work
8:57 Building Systems for Team Ownership
9:50 Transitioning to a Team-Driven Organization

Transcript: Introduction to CEO Time Optimization

[0:03] If you think you’ve got to do it yourself because you can do it better, you can do it faster, you’ll always default to that. And so what I ask you to do is even though you could do it better and faster, who could you get better? To do part of it who could you get to do all of it and start to bring them in on the process, build them up get their skills ready get their confidence ready because when you learn to empower people around you hopefully you hired smart people people you can depend on you will learn to do this at scale and so that’s the first step is the mental shift that’s necessary for you to stop being the doer in your business, letting go of control and empowering others.

[0:45] Welcome to Grow Think Tank. This is the one and only place where you will get insight from the founders and the CEOs of the fastest growing privately held companies. I am the host. My name is Gene Hammett. I help leaders and their teams navigate the defining moments of their growth. Are you ready to grow? Today we want to talk about optimizing CEO time. When you have CEO time optimization, you feel like you’re on top of the world. You feel like you’ve got things handled. You feel organized. You feel a lack of stress. I say that with a smile because we also know the truth. Most of the time, we CEOs and entrepreneurs and founders don’t feel a lack of stress. So today we’re going to dive into what’s really going on and what you can do about it. Hi, my name is Gene Hammett. I am a founder coach. We work with companies that are growing fast to help them move from founder-dependent to founder-led and eventually a team-driven organization. When you’re team-driven, everyone is working together. Accountability happens, ownership happens, empowerment, communication, and performance. All those things happen because of what you’ve set up previously.

[2:02] Now, when you want to go a little bit deeper with that, I’m going to go ahead and just throw this out there. If you want to get a training from us on how we work with clients, giving you the play-by-play so that you could take it and run with it and steal it, or you could say, hey, I could use some help. I’ll give you the play-by-play on helping companies go from founder-dependent to founder-led to team-driven. All you have to do is sign up at training.corelevation.com, and you can do it for free. Inside it, you’ll find the five steps that we take every client through that will help you not only get control of your CEO time, but it will help you create a team-driven organization. So let’s dive into this whole concept of CEO time optimization. I had a client once who described it really well. He said, I could work the weekend and I could show up on Monday and I feel like I’m already behind and I can relate to that. Maybe you can too. I also had clients come to me and say, what do other CEOs do with their time? And as we dive into it, I realized how underperforming they are. And then I have the CEOs that come in and say, you know what? I love to get to work early.

[3:14] So, you know, 6 o’clock is not really that early for me. I’m not getting enough done. Let me come in at 5.30. And then for a few weeks, that works. But then they realize I can get up earlier. And they come in at 5, 4.30 even the next week. And I have to stop things and go, how much earlier are you going to get up? Are you going to only get up earlier? Is that your only leverage point? What if we looked at this thing differently? So today, hopefully you’re curious about CEO time optimization and we can look at it differently.

Shifting from Doer to Delegator

[3:42] One of the things I know when I’m working with clients, founders, that they could, if they’re willing to look at things differently.

[3:52] Optimize their time better. Let me say that differently. I know that every client I’ve worked with, and this has just happened because of just so many repetitions I’ve had over the last 14 years, being that founder coach, helping them figure out what’s got a grip on them, where they’re underutilizing their time, where they’re focused on things that they shouldn’t be focused on, where they’re focused on low-value work, and how little time they spend on high-value work.

[4:18] That being said, CEO time optimization starts in the mind first. So let’s just look at that specifically. If you think you’ve got to do it yourself because you can do it better, you can do it faster, you’ll always default to that. And so what I ask you to do is even though you could do it better and faster, who could you get to do part of it? Who could you get to do all of it? and start to bring them in on the process, build them up, get their skills ready, get their confidence ready. Because when you learn to empower people around you, hopefully you hired smart people, people you can depend on, you will learn to do this at scale. And so that’s the first step is the mental shift that’s necessary for you to stop being the doer in your business, letting go of control and empowering others.

Understanding High vs. Low Value Work

[5:11] Now, if you want to get a little bit more tactical, I’ve shared a lot of tips around this, but I’m going to just share with you kind of a little bit of a story that will help you understand what I mean by low value work and high value work. So a lot of people are majoring in the minors. That’s not my phrase, but it’s just it’s kind of a funny way to look at it. A lot of people love sports analogies, but if you’re majoring in the minor details of your day, you’re spending most of your time doing that. You’re not majoring.

[5:41] What we call CEO time optimization. You are majoring in the little things. You are focused on those little things. So what do you do instead? Well, you get honest with yourself. You do an audit. You can look at it from a standpoint of value.

[5:56] We’ve run different things before. I’ve had Todd Herman on my podcast before. He’s got a tool called Entrepreneurial Scorecard. It’s pretty simple. Think about all of the tasks you have in four buckets. There’s the $20 task. There’s the $200 task. There’s the $2,000 task. And there’s $20,000 task. If you are focused on the $20 and $200 task, your business is going to be running at a very different level than those CEOs focused on the $2,000 and $20,000 per hour work.

[6:27] So I want to give you a story about a client of mine who recently shifted this. I didn’t get their permission, so I’m not going to share either the name or their company, but I just want you to understand this. One of the first things he said to me is how do I get a control of my time and I said well what’s going on we talked about it different things and I shared with them one of the concepts we have about letting go of some of these smaller things and when do they do their best time I call this genius hours some people call it maybe different things but I just have called it this over the years and it’s when you do your best thinking most creative most disciplined thinking for me is in the morning between about 8 and 10. It’s usually about a two-hour span. It could be 6 to 8. It could be 7 to 9. It could be 11 to 1. It could be 2 in the afternoon. Rarely people say 2 in the afternoon. It could be 11 at night. Whatever your zone of genius hours are, then it should be protected for the work that you do best, that you need that creative power. If we agree on that.

[7:32] Then you can move forward with the story. So I asked the client, when was their genius hours? And he said, in the morning, probably 9 o’clock till 11. Great. I don’t even ask for the full two hours. I said, what can you commit to? He only committed to 30 minutes. And I said, how many times per week? He said, three. I’m not trying to push things. I want little small changes. And so I didn’t ask him what he’s going to do with it, but I wanted to check in with him each week and week after week. And after two weeks, I said, how is it going? He said, going pretty good. I actually got something on my list that I had avoided for a while. And I don’t remember the name of it, but I remember the description of it was a document or a process to go from new client to the first 45 days. So client onboarding would be a good name for it. And I said, well, what did you do with it? He goes, in my genius hours, I was able to think about what we were doing, some of the gaps that we had. And I was able to build out a full process, put that in our tech stack. And then I introduced it to our team.

[8:39] I said, how’d it go? He goes, actually, they enjoyed it. They appreciated it. A few weeks later, I was checking in with him and I said, how’s that going? He goes, fantastic. A few weeks after that, I said, how’s it going with your client onboarding?

Building Systems for Team Ownership

[8:52] And he goes, they love it so much that they’ve continued to refine it. They’ve continued to make it even better so now they own it so now the CEO maybe put a little bit investment upfront but now the team is these transferred ownership that’s CEO time optimization when you take something build a system as a starting point.

[9:16] If you’ve got a really experienced person, maybe you don’t even have to build it. You just can enroll them into owning it and get them to build it. But for most employees, you want to start with something and then get them to take it in, use it, and then start to improve it. And let them do that. Let them own it. When you do that, you’ll have a much better chance to get the kind of team performance you want. Confidence starts to build, and everything just kind of goes from there. You can start to use it for other projects. You can use that time any way you want to.

If you think you’ve got to do it yourself because you can do it better,

[9:47] Now, I’m only sharing with you a part of what I do. But if you want to know about CEO time optimization and you want to make sure you show up fully prepared for your team and get the most done out of your time, then you definitely want to come to the next training we have that will help you unlock a team-driven organization. So it’s getting out of being the doer. Stop being founder-dependent. Move to founder-led and create a team-driven organization. All you have to do is go to training.corelevation.com and you can sign up for free today. My name is Gene Hammett. I can help you anyway. Please reach out. And as always, when you think of leadership and you think of growth, think of Growth Think Tank. We’ll talk to you soon.

🎯Key Takeaways

• CEOs who try to do everything themselves become the biggest bottleneck to growth
• Effective delegation is a leadership skill—not a loss of control
• Your time should be focused on high-value, growth-driving activities
• “Genius hours” unlock your highest impact and best results
• Empowered teams create stronger performance and accountability
• Letting go of lower-value tasks is essential to scaling your business
• Leadership is about building capacity in others, not carrying the load alone
• Small shifts in time prioritization can lead to major business growth
• A collaborative culture accelerates execution and innovation
• Scaling success starts with trusting and developing your team

Ideal For:
Founders, CEOs, executives, managers, and anyone committed to elevating their leadership capacity.

Resources & Next Steps

Ready to take your leadership energy to the next level?
Explore free training and resources at training.coreelevation.com
to help you identify energy leaks, strengthen your leadership presence, and elevate your team’s performance.

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