How to Become a Hands-Off CEO with Mandi Ellefson – 032

Entrepreneurs – the key ingredient to your biz success is How You Think – and the Actions You Take.

Period. That’s it.

Get inside Your Mind. Check out this interview I did with Mandi Ellefson.

She is one of those quiet powerhouse strategic thinkers who flat out rocks.

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Our podcasts are interviews between Justin Krane, Krane Financial Solution’s President, and various professionals, one or more of which are or have been Krane Financial Solutions clients. However, nothing stated within the podcasts should be considered a testimonial or endorsement of Krane Financial Solutions or Justin Krane, and the professionals have not been directly or indirectly compensated for being interviewed.

Our podcasts are interviews between Justin Krane, Krane Financial Solution’s President and various third-party professionals. Noting stated within the podcasts should be considered a testimonial or endorsement of Krane Financial Solutions or Justin Krane, and the professionals have not been directly or indirectly compensated for being interviewed.

Mandi is the creator of the Scale to Freedom Scalable Service Growth™ model. She leads consulting agency owners to have lives with greater freedom and success. Mandi has consulted with over hundred consulting agency CEOs. She’s helped them immediately free up to 20-50% of their work week to focus on accelerating profits. Her clients have grown five figures of net profit every month, added millions of dollars in sales, and have exited the day-to-day to scale growth. Some owners now passively manage their business, or have sold it. Mandi is a published author and host of The Hands-Off CEO Podcast. As a committed Freedom Fighter, a percentage of business profits go to rescuing enslaved victims of child sex trafficking. Mandi is a mother of two, enjoys travel, mountain biking and exploring the outdoors with her husband.

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Scaling…it Doesn’t Mean What You Think it Means

Most people think scaling and growing are the same thing.
Growth is a linear path. Scaling means a business continues to grow without a lot more time, money, or staff being utilized.
Examine the business model and analyze – How are we able to add more value? How could we deliver this service with less and less of the CEO?
Concentrate on delivering the outcome instead of selling the charisma of the CEO.

A Hands-Off CEO

In order to be a hands-off CEO, a mindset shift needs to take place.
Expand the vision of what is possible. When this occurs, the CEO is ready to change their business model to increase results.
Another common mindset issue is the lack of confidence to raise your fees.
A simple way to justify a smallish fee increase (20%) is to develop a guarantee for your clients.
A guarantee causes clients to invest more upfront because there is less risk.
Increasing profit is critical for a hands-off CEO because the key reason a CEO does too much work is lack of profit to enable someone else to do it.

Evolving Business for Good

Mandi was a systems/processes expert but had customized consultations taking up a lot of time at the start.
By bringing on a mentor and studying a packaged way to deliver her expertise more generally (and by also being very clear on the target customer) her own business increased.
A big factor of evolving a business is not just smart marketing, but actually making the product or service irresistible.
It is important to document results because without having data it is difficult to improve a product or service.
The learning and growing process involves failures. However, don’t assign much weight to failure, determination will help you persist and the desired success can result.

Best Quotes:

“Scaling Is you being able to continue to grow without you, as the CEO, working more hours…without additional costs.” (2:22)

“That’s what we’re looking at doing is being able to remove the CEO from it [the business] so that you’re actually delivering out an outcome as opposed to the CEO selling their charisma.” (5:27)

“If you don’t have a very clear outcome and very clear problem that you’re solving, then every time you’re selling something it’s custom. And when it’s custom, they’re always going to want you as the CEO to be delivering it.” (8:27)

“It’s really about looking at what is possible and expanding your vision for what’s possible.” (11:51)

“A 20% increase in fees can actually double your profits. So I’ll give you an example of that. So let’s say you have a $10,000 service and you have a 20% profit margin on it. So it’s $2,000 profit you’re getting out of each service. So let’s say that you increase the fees 20%. Now it’s $12,000, right? So now you have $4,000 of profit. So you have doubled your profits with a 20% fee increase.” (16:12)

“We don’t grow by just growing. We grow by failing, or at least learning, and seeing what works and what doesn’t work, and then going off of that.” (25:21)