116 - The CEO Time Audit. Where Growth Really Begins
If you’re not spending at least 20% of your time on strategic growth, you’re capping your company’s potential. This episode reveals how to audit your time, eliminate low-value work, and reclaim scale capacity.
The CEO Time Audit. Where Growth Really Begins
Time is your most valuable asset. But most founders don’t know where theirs goes. They’re reactive. Caught in ops. Stuck in sales. Always firefighting. And that’s exactly why they’ve plateaued.
This episode gives you a simple lens to shift out of daily chaos and into deliberate, strategic use of time, the kind that drives systemic growth.
Key takeaways from the episode:
1. Classify time by function, not just task.
Track your time across four categories:
• Operations
• Client Delivery
• Sales
• Strategic Growth
This reveals how much of your week goes into running vs. growing.
2. Not all hours are equal in value.
Every task should be evaluated:
• Low-value (repetitive, administrative)
• High-value (strategic, compounding impact)
You need both, but you shouldn’t be doing both.
3. Firefighting feels productive, but keeps you stuck.
Constant urgency gives the illusion of momentum.
Real momentum comes from space to think, design, and lead at the next level.
4. Target: 20% growth time minimum.
Strategic founders carve out at least 20% of their time for the future, not the fires. That’s where scale lives.
5. Eliminate first, then delegate and automate
Stop doing what doesn’t need doing.
Then build systems or teams around what remains.
That’s how you free up time without slowing down results.
Conclusion:
Your calendar is a mirror. It reflects the business you’re building or the one you’re stuck maintaining.
This episode provides the structure to transition from operator to architect by leveraging your most valuable asset: your time.
Highlights:
00:00 Understanding Your Time Allocation
00:24 The Pitfall of Firefighting
00:37 The Importance of Strategic Time
Links:
Website: https://www.marcogrueter.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcogrueter/
Transcript:
You need to be clear on how much you spend on high value task, how much you spend on low value task. You need to know is it time spent in operations management, in client delivery, in sales, or strategic business growing activities. So these four things are super key to understand, and it's not if it's good or bad, it's more about being really present with where you spend your time.
We all like to work on the most pressing things. We like to work on firefights. this is just normal human because then we feel most alive. But being strategic is not about this. Being strategic is have enough time to grow your company and it's at least 20% of your time goes into growth time. So therefore, you need to eliminate if you work too much on operations, for instance, or too much in sales, which is nice for a lot of business owners.