CEO Stories 099: Balancing Your Creative Work and Your Business Growth

Growing a business is hard work, and building the right team and processes to become the CEO you were meant to be is no easy task. Laura Brandenburg learned that in corporate and found new challenges in trying to keep the corporate world out of her business and rebuilding balance back into her life and the lives of her team members. Coming from a corporate background and owning her own company she did not see herself as CEO.  She felt like CEO’s were just very distant. After 10 years she realized that holding the vision and what impact they are making was her job as CEO in her company.  She thinks about what she wants the company culture to look like. To start defining this CEO role, she took on much more marketing and vision while handing off a lot of the day to day aspects of the business.   How to market and grow the team together is a big question she asks herself.   The reality is that she has been the writer, the author, and in front of every video.  They have to think about who does what best to be able to properly delegate the other things.   She got to a point where every month she delegated or eliminated something in her business. Laura is really good at protecting her creative time in the morning. You have to carve out specific planning times.  She does not succeed if she does not have her morning creative time.   Laura has a virtual assistant that is stretched to thin.  They are trying to bring in multiple people to help relieve her.   They are moving into doing more corporate and team clients.  This means more managing of customer relationships. Do you build the team to support the sale and trust that or build the team once the sale has been made? You can plan and plan and plan but until people actually want it, it does not matter. Some of the negative experiences in corporate leads us to have to unpackage those things.   She has organized the business as times to not stress people out like corporate did. It has been a detriment, and she has had to grow from that. Laura has had to do work on herself to grow into the leader that she should be.   Many organizations still do not value business analysis.  Inside the company when people get into the role, thing are very different then what they were explained in school.  There is an undervalue of the true skillset. Her vision is to show why it is important and how valuable a business analyst can be in a business.   On a project, they eliminate waste and make sure they are solving the correct problem.   Investing and training for your business analyst team shows that you value this.  The product on your projects will show their value. It is a very fulfilling cycle. In 5 years, she still sees online training and a very similar structure, just expanded mentoring programs for more on the job work that are largely supported by the instructors.  It starts with a class, but every project is a little different so additional support is very important. Laura would like to travel and keynote to people about mindset. People are held back by their self-belief.  She would like to continue to help other business entrepreneurs.