Advisors are often brilliant at helping their business owner clients build real enterprise value and create companies that can run well without them being involved in all the day-to-day activities.

It’s strange, then, that so many advisors don’t take their own advice when it comes to their advisory practices.

The fact is, a lot of you don’t truly own a business; you own a job. Instead of leading your practice and designing how the work gets done, you do all the work—acting like a producer whose presence is constantly needed instead of a CEO who can step away without the business suffering (even as you help clients avoid the same fate!).

The good news: You can make the shift from business operator to business architect and, in doing so, create both a better business and a better life for yourself. Yes, it takes work—but perhaps not as much as you assume.

With that in mind, check out these insights and action steps from Jessica Lee, who coaches elite advisors on growth strategy, leadership and building businesses that scale.

Are you a producer or a CEO?

Where you are in your development rests with what you’re seeking to optimize and your focus.

A producer optimizes for their own output. Producers are always asking how they can see more clients, close more deals and do more work. This isn’t bad. In fact, it’s how every great firm gets off the ground.
A CEO optimizes for the enterprise’s output. CEOs focus on how the company as a whole can deliver great results whether or not they’re in the office at any given time.

Both of these types of advisors have ambitious goals. But one seeks to do more and the other wants to get more done without all of it running directly through them. So while producers spend their most valuable hours of each week doing work, CEOs spend their most valuable hours architecting the people, processes and systems that will generate the best work.

Discover if you’re stuck in producer mode by looking for these a few key telltale signs: such as

You are the bottleneck. Nothing important moves forward without your input and sign-off. Your day looks like a traffic jam with your name on it.
Revenue is tied to your personal hours. The only way that growth happens is if you work more. The business’s growth ceiling is the number of hours you’re in the office.
You can't truly step away. Do vacations turn into answering emails from the beach? If the business can't breathe without you for a week, that's a tell.

Act like a CEO

What do you do if you want to transition away from being a producer and become a CEO—someone who architects the business instead of grinds it out each day? There are four key CEO behaviors to adopt and implement:

Protect your time to think and design. Carve out recurring time each week to work on the business, and defend it on the calendar as blocked, non-negotiable. Treat this time as seriously as your very top client meeting. You would never no-show your biggest client to answer an email, but we often cancel our own strategy time the second anything urgent pops up. A CEO architect won’t do that
Hire ahead of the need. Producers wait until they're completely drowning to bring in new talent—which means they hire and train the new person in a panic. CEOs intentionally build capacity before that wave hits, adding people just ahead of the growth.
Communicate your vision relentlessly. Your team can only execute without you if they actually know where “there” is. If the picture of the company’s future lives only in your head, then every decision has to route back through you and you’re right back to being the bottleneck. CEO architects repeat the vision until every single person can act on it independently without asking.
Develop clear standards and accountability. Delegating outcomes doesn't mean walking away and hoping. It means coaching people up to a bar, being clear about what great looks like, and then following up consistently. Producers worry that if hand stuff off, the quality of the output will drop. And it will if you hand it off and disappear. But accountability is exactly what enables you to let go without lowering the quality. You're not lowering the standard—you're transferring it.

Bottom line: That’s how a business keeps its quality and outgrows its founder at the same time.

3 action steps to take this week

Ready to get started? Make these three moves right now:

Name what depends on you. Write down three to five things that only you can do right now. Those are the exact duties that you're going to design out of your job, one by one. But first you have to identify them.
Block your “CEO time.” Before you close your laptop this week, put reoccurring time on the calendar to work on the business—and then defend it like it is your very biggest client meeting. If it's not on the calendar, it will not happen. It will get swallowed by the urgent every single time. So that block is what makes all the rest of this real instead of aspirational.
Design one thing to remove from your plate in the next 90 days. Pick a single task or decision or process that currently runs through you, and build the person or the system to fully own it—not to help you with it, but to own it. One clean handoff like that proves the entire model to you and your team. The first time something important goes well without you touching it, something clicks and you start to feel that ceiling life. That's the moment you stop being the practice and start leading the business.