A small rant about plates
Andrea M. Tarrell
CEO of Sercante | 17X Certified Salesforce + Marketing Cloud MVP | Marketing Champion
My least favorite phrase lately: “take it off my plate”.?
I’ve used that phrase often.
We all hear it all the time.
But those words have become like nails on a chalkboard to me.
Maybe I'm just getting too grumpy over here, but here's an example of why:
I was recently chatting with a new entrepreneur who was 8 months into a fresh venture.
“I need to figure out how to get sales and customer work off my plate so I can work on the business,” he lamented.?
That didn’t sit right with me, and I struggled with how to respond in the moment.
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My POV: as an entrepreneur in a services business... selling and delivering for customers IS the business! And when the business is a smaller scale, managing that is at least 80% of the whole mandate of a services CEO.?
This guy was around a couple hundred thousand in revenue. Just one employee. Trying to offload growth and customer success at that stage is rarely the right move.?
And really — even if you hire someone amazing to lead those functions as you get bigger, it doesn’t come “off your plate.” Your plate just expands to include other humans on it, who are each holding their own plates. And you get to be accountable for all those people, and all those plates.?
The best leaders I’ve worked with seek ways to meet their goals — either through direct action or empowering others — and maintain ownership for attaining those goals as they grow.
They don’t want someone else to grab the rope… they seek A-players who are ready to grab the rope alongside them and win together.
They dance with time constraints and realize that there is never “enough” time. Ever.?
Bring out the bigger plates.?
Founder and CEO at ImagineCRM
3 周For me, it's about passing off the small plates, leaving room for the larger plates! It is super important to pass things off, but you start with the tasks you should not be doing. It could be administrative tasks, operations, or things that you aren't good at or don't have expertise in. There is so much to running a business, and you have to find ways to keep elevating yourself, which means you elevate the people around you, and as a result, it elevates the business.
Reply Intelligence (E-mail Reply Management Service) & Cypress Learning Solutions | Salesforce/Hubspot Consulting & ISV Partner | Salesforce Marketing Champion | Certified Hubspot, Salesforce & Marketing Cloud Consultant
3 周In my experience, if you want to eat you’ve got to be HUNGRY!
Helping Clients become Pardot (MCAE) & Salesforce Rockstars | ex-Pardashian @Salesforce | Texas Dreamin' Speaker | Salesforce Marketing Champion '24 | Marketing & Sales OPS-essed
3 周"Bring out the bigger plates" Brilliant!
I find myself overthinking tasks that shouldn't require me to think at all for them. There's two main buckets of decisions. 1. Reversible - Think, getting a trial of software, testing new messaging etc... things you can change later if it falls flat. 2. Permeant - Building a new office and signing a 5 year lease... I think we often spend far too much time treating the reversible decisions like permeant ones making it feel like everything is on YOUR plate. Really, trust, delegation, and being okay with failing a little is the part I keep trying to remind myself... ??♂?
Chief Operations Officer at MUD\WTR ◆ Delivering Omni-Channel Growth with Transformative Products | CPG Marketing | R&D | Quality Control | Supply Chain and Operational Optimization
3 周Adapting to what the business needs to reach its goals is a critical CEO competency in my opinion.