Why “Letting Go” Could Be Your Best Growth Strategy | Cary Prejean

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How Visionary Leaders Scale Without Burning Out

This episode explores how entrepreneurs can stop being the bottleneck in their own business by shifting from operator to visionary leader. We discuss why great entrepreneurs don’t need to be great managers, how to build scalable processes that run without you, and the importance of empowering teams through clear vision, strong communication, and trust.

Are you the bottleneck in your own business?

Many entrepreneurs wear every hat—CEO, sales, R&D, even accounts receivable—yet still feel stuck. Cary Prejean, founder of Strategic Business Advisors and author of three books, has spent 40 years helping business owners shift from operator to visionary leader. In this episode, we explore why entrepreneurs don’t need to become great managers—and why trying to do so can hold them back. Instead, Cary shows how to build processes that keep the business running without you, freeing you to focus on vision, growth, and impact.

We break down the opposite skill sets of entrepreneurs and managers—why one thrives on vision, speed, and risk, while the other thrives on stability, patience, and process. Cary explains how to use the language of leadership to engage your team, enroll them in your mission, and empower them to take ownership. It’s about letting go without losing control, and creating repeatable, scalable systems that make you irrelevant to daily operations—in the best possible way.

Cary shares practical ways to get the attention of distracted, fast-moving entrepreneurs, starting with the right questions. He reveals how to uncover hidden bottlenecks, fix chronic operational headaches, and stop training your team to rely on you for every decision. We also discuss the parallels between leading people and prompting AI—clear direction, desired outcomes, and the freedom to innovate.

From his roots in accounting to his evolution as a leadership advisor, Cary’s journey offers a blueprint for sustainable growth. We talk about his upcoming books—one on common business-killing mistakes, and another on the lost art of relating—and how improving communication can transform not only your business but your relationships. If your business can’t run without you for more than a day, this conversation could be your turning point.

Three Key Takeaways

Entrepreneurs shouldn’t try to become great managers — The skill sets are fundamentally different. Instead of forcing yourself into a management mold, focus on evolving into a visionary leader who sets direction, inspires others, and empowers the team to execute.

Build processes that run the business without you — Repeatable, scalable systems free you from daily firefighting. When your team owns the process and delivers consistent results, you can step away from the weeds and focus on growth and innovation.

Empower and engage your team through clear vision and communication — Enroll employees in your mission, give them ownership of solutions, and resist micromanaging. Leadership is about prompting for outcomes, not dictating every step—just like using AI effectively.

If Cary’s episode got you thinking about how to stop being the bottleneck in your own business, Jonathan Raveh’s conversation is your perfect next step.

Both episodes tackle the same core challenge—how to move from doing it all yourself to building systems and empowering others. Cary shows you how to evolve from operator to visionary leader, while Jonathan dives deep into scaling thought leadership so your ideas can live and grow beyond you.

Listen to Jonathan’s episode to see how you can turn your vision into a shared organizational capability, equip your team to contribute their voices, and create thought leadership that scales—without burning you out. Pair these two episodes and you’ll have a roadmap for scaling both your business and your ideas.

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Transcript

Bill Sherman How do you help entrepreneurs stop being the bottleneck in their own business? In the world of entrepreneurship, people talk about working on the business rather than in the business. But the field of thought leadership makes this challenge far more complicated. Your book that you put out in the market might be available for 20 or $30, but your fee for an in-person workshop, a keynote, or an onsite could be a thousand times more expensive than your book. Many thought leaders on the run are their own product. They sell their presence and their time. Worse yet, they serve as their own research and development team, sales team, and accounts receivable. They do a bit of everything. So how do you work on the business as your own CEO when you’re wearing so many hats in the business? Cary Prejean. The founder of Strategic Business Advisors and author of three books has spent 40 years helping business owners evolve from operator to visionary leader. In this episode, we explore why great entrepreneurs don’t need to become great managers. We look at how to build processes that run the business without you and why leadership not micromanagement, is the key to scaling. I’m Bill Sherman and you’re listening to Leveraging Thought Leadership. Ready? Let’s begin. Welcome to the show, Cary. Hey, thanks for having me Bill. Glad to be here. I have an interest in origin stories, specifically how people get into thought leadership. Cary, how did you get into this?

Cary Prejean Actually became like a necessity in terms of working with business owners in terms of, I don’t want to go on too long here, but most entrepreneurs are not good managers because skill sets are opposite. I mean, good manager, the skill set to be a really good manager is the opposite of the skill sets it takes to be good entrepreneur. So entrepreneurs, I didn’t want them to try and become good managers because they’re never going to be really that good at it, but what they can be, what they’re good at is becoming leaders that lead their company to the next level. So this whole thing about what is it to be a leader that asking the question, what is the leader? What are some of the things you see when somebody’s a leader, you know, they have followers, they have a vision that’s bigger than them. So it was all about having to work with business owners and showing them you need to become the leader that leads your company into the future. It’s that’s the next level, rather than you’re going to try and manage it to the next, which you’re probably not going to do. So it became a necessary thing that I learned more about so that I could speak about it so I could have some distinctions to show business owners like this is these are things you need to do take you into the next level.

Bill Sherman So if I hear correctly, some of that’s making the invisible visible. You might’ve had a bunch of entrepreneurs who say, Hey, I’m an entrepreneur, that’s their identity. They want to grow the business. They want a scale it. Maybe they want to exit. And they know things are getting harder, but they don’t know. And it’s like, well, maybe I need management processes, but I was really a lousy employee for someone else. And that’s why I am an entrepreneur. And you’re like, no, no no no, don’t try to become the manager, right?

Cary Prejean Yeah, I mean, you know, think about what entrepreneurs want. They like, they’re very dominant, they want their way, because they see things as like, I don’t get that. They take action, they kick ass, they make things happen. Whereas a good manager wants, you know, I want to maintain the status quo, want to produce consistent results. Yes, it’s going to be boring, boring is going to with the articles, just pumping it out, pumping it up. Entrepreneurs like, where’s the next shiny object? Oh yeah, and that’s possible, and it’s possible. You got to chain them down sometimes, and channel the energy into like two, maybe three. Possibilities at one time, rather than them chasing 15 or 20. Uh, entrepreneurs are impatient. I mean, they’re extraordinarily impatient with good managers are very patient. Again, entrepreneurs of a more independent, whereas good managers are more on the team player type. Uh, I’m sure it’s like fast pace. It could managers want a nice steady pace. Entrepreneurs are very, I’ll make it up as I go. Don’t give me a lot of rules where managers, they want a lot of strict guidelines, rules, processes. This is how we do things. So the… are like opposites.

Bill Sherman Yeah. Yeah. And I want to sort of dig deeper. You said you’ve gone into thought leadership out of necessity, right? And I wanna ask, how do you get the attention of someone who fits that entrepreneur profile, right. Because to get them to think of they have to shift from entrepreneur to leader, they first got to be paying attention to you long enough, rather than chasing the next shiny object. But how could he try to do that?

Cary Prejean Again, you can’t get you can get all of them to pay attention. You know, the ones that, the one’s that want to pay attention to the future. They’ve hit some, they hit some ceiling. They can’t take any further. Enjoy those ones who’ve grown their business to the extent that they can handle it personally. Right. They’re involved in it every day. They’re in the weeds. They’re having to save everything every day and they, they’re so bogged down with it, they can’t do the things that make them great, which is like discovering possibilities and running possibilities. Turning into revenue, building strong relationships, they’re enmeshed in the day-to-day minutiae of the business. And they’re stuck with, okay, so how do I go to the business? We’re stymied here, we’ve been stuck here for so long, we were plateaued. Okay, so the way out is still be a great entrepreneur, but go one level better than entrepreneur, become the entrepreneur leader. In other words, leader is not different than entrepreneur. Leader is the next step, I guess, in being an entrepreneur. Listen, leaders are great visionaries. What entrepreneurs, they’re great visionaries, right? So there’s a lot of swalties in being an entrepreneur that translates into being a good leader, except good leaders are more patient, also more, they are more willing to share the credit and let everybody do that thing rather than insist on my way. So that’s the big transition from entrepreneur to leader is you need some of those qualities.

Bill Sherman That makes a lot of sense. So you’ve probably had to polish how you get an entrepreneur’s attention because you’ve got a short window of attention before they’ll go chase the next thing. How do you get them to go, wait a minute, tell me more. I need to know about that. I haven’t thought about it that way. How do we shave the math?

Cary Prejean That gets back into thinking versus just having thoughts, right? So we’re always have all these thoughts. We have all of these thoughts going on and on. We have the scenario that tells us what’s going on every second of the day. So the way to interrupt just having thought is to ask a question because asking a question generally makes you think, okay, what don’t I see here? What is the answer to that? There’s not talking about like wrote like what’s 10 plus 10. What is it about your business that has you? What do you think is why you stopped there? What preventing you from moving forward? What preventing from growing your business? And a lot of times the answer is I don’t know.

Bill Sherman I don’t know. Okay. And how do you respond to, I don’t know, because you’ve asked an open-ended question and I don know is almost as much of a wall as you guys know, right?

Cary Prejean Yes, so you go through a series of things that are missing, like you’re missing a marketing plan. How’s your marketing plan? Our marketing plan is great. Are you salespeople? Are you trained up? Yeah. How’s you’re product? And then you start to find out what happens in going through these questions, you start to find, well, we don’t really have processes and yeah, we have a lot of breakdowns and yeah we’ve had some problems with customer service and getting things shipped Have a great, fun time. And yeah, we have some contentious bits of the business that are always fighting with each other. And yeah I’ve had people quit because I blow up and they leave, and things like that. And yeah and working age, $100 a week, I can’t take any time off. I have to rescue everything. So getting them to start to see all that is like, okay, then you start to explain, okay so you’re an entrepreneur, and you start identifying the traits of an entrepreneur. Yeah, that’s me, yeah that’s made of me. Here’s a trace of a good manager. Oh yeah, don’t really do that well, do I? Yeah, oh, okay, I have to be patient. I have want repeatable results, how boring. So it’s getting them and asking questions to begin to think and see what’s there, not that they couldn’t see it before, but they didn’t have the distinctions to see it. Does that make sense?

Bill Sherman It does. And so some of it is giving a language and a framework and some of it is also giving them space to give an answer that’s deeper than the quick answer of, of course we got a marketing plan.

Cary Prejean Yeah, it’s like, okay, so you start asking questions and they start getting there to be honest. It’s like okay, not every business is perfect. You set up that contact. Not every business perfect. Tell me what’s not working. What are the chronic headaches that you deal with on a day-to-day basis? What are problems that you’ve tried to address that don’t seem to go away? All of a sudden they start, yeah, we got this, this part of the business is a real pain in my ass. And I’ve tried and I’ve try to fix it. I’ve trying to fix this. Okay, how’d you try to to fix? Well, I had a meeting. I said this is the problem, So I’m going to solve it. And six months later, we have the same meeting again, rather than. Did you ask any of your employees, their input was what they see, what solutions? Well, no, I mean, it’s my company. I owned it. I started it. I’m, I’m the best person to manage it. Right. Are you based on results, based on what you’re saying, would you say you’re the best manager for the business? Would you hire you to operate the company? Would you like you based, on the results you’re producing right now, would you hire to come in and manage the company.

Bill Sherman Well, and I think there’s a very really interesting crossover, which is one of the areas I want to get into is that the spirit and you use the word visionary of someone who sees something different and possibility of what could be either in their geography or a new business idea or something, the entrepreneur is willing to take a risk to get there. The same is true with someone who practices thought leadership. Very see the world as it might be, as it could be. They can say there’s an easier way in negotiations or for innovation or for whatever their insight is, but they’re also visionaries and what makes a good visionary isn’t necessarily what makes. A good CEO, whether in thought leadership or as an entrepreneur.

Cary Prejean Well, it depends on what level of business you’re talking about and really, really big businesses, the CEO, the C suite, the whole management structure is really there to just maintain things. Right. And yeah, you want some growth, but it’s in the small to medium sized companies where the entrepreneurs still in charge. They very much want growth. So being a visionary is much more critical then as opposed to something that’s well, you know, you have these global mega corps now for them to achieve even say 10% growth. You talk in billions of dollars, but they want to maintain say a nice five to 8% growth rate, I don’t know, somewhere in there. And so there’s some things to do, but it’s like, we have things too good, we’re too established, let’s not rock the boat. Let’s not take any crazy risks. Whereas when you’re a small to medium size business owner, yeah, you wouldn’t take no risks.

Bill Sherman And you’re willing to rock the boat you want to make change your work, and I think that’s true across thought leadership and entrepreneurship.

Cary Prejean Right, you’re willing to disrupt the status quo.

Bill Sherman And with that, you may or may not have corporate background. You may or, may not, have a business school education. You may, or may, not really have all of the leadership skills that you need to lead, to take it past that point of, like you said, that personal arms reach capacity and that you feel like you’ve got to be touching. Every email, every document, every proposal that goes out and you become the choke point.

Cary Prejean That that’s one of the things I say if if your business can’t operate without you for more than a day You’re the you’re the bottleneck.

Bill Sherman And I’ve said something similar on the fall leadership side of, okay, if you’re the speaker, the author, the talent, the consultant, whatever you’ve decided to take six months sabbatical, what happens to the business to lead still come in. Do clients get served or does everything come crashing down? And if it’s the latter, you got a problem.

Cary Prejean Yeah, for most probably, I would say 98, 99% of businesses that would crash, crash and burn.

Bill Sherman Because you haven’t built the repeatable scalable systems and you’re at the center of it all. Everyone relies on you. So this is where it’s not.

Cary Prejean Much everybody relies on you, you’ve trained them to rely on you. In fact, you sprained that to you. You won’t take it so far and after that the boss is gonna have to step in because you’re not authorized and don’t get don’t any crazy ideas out of the box and do anything because you not gonna do it the way the boss likes it or the way to boss would do it. He’s gonna come in slap your hand not because you didn’t do it you didn’t t solve the problem because you did’ t do it his way or her way.

Bill Sherman And it could have been a little bit different this way, and you should have asked me.

Cary Prejean That’s one of the things I hear constantly is like, yeah, did something happen? I solved it. And instead of thanking me, what I got was, yeah okay, that’s not the way I do it.

Bill Sherman So… If you’re enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. If you’d like to help spread the word about our podcast, please leave a five-star review at ratethispodcast.com/LTL and share it with your friends. We’re available on Apple podcasts and on all major listening apps, as well as thoughtleadershipleverage.com/podcasts. Let’s talk about your background and your expertise. You’re advising entrepreneurs and you’re working with them on leadership. Why is that a lane that you care about? What about it is exciting to you?

Cary Prejean My background, my training is in accounting, right? So when I first started, it was mostly about ratios, financial analysis, making recommendations for your, your business is profitable, but it’s financially not that strong. So we need to do some things to strengthen the power.

Bill Sherman The cost of sales and your cogs what’s going on here and explain to me this lease that you have on the building.

Cary Prejean Yeah, right. Things like that about financial. And what I got was that most business owners don’t know how to read their financial statements. They don’t want to do with actionable financial data. They know how find possibilities in trying to revenue and they don’t have training to things like accounting, logistics, inventory management, HR, whatever, all the other stuff is they’ve never been trained in that. They don’t have any experience in that, so they fumble through. The whole thing about over time, I evolved that I had to be something more than just a numbers guy for these guys to really take their business off. I had that. I had. One of the distinctions of what it was to be more than just a business operator. That’s what most business owners are. They’re really not, they own the thing, but they’re really more operators and owners. They can’t step away and be a… owner. So it had to, be some education I undertook. That allowed me to make some distinctions about leadership, about next level, about having a bigger game, having a vision that allowed to talk with them. I have conversations that got them to see possibilities that they didn’t see before.

Bill Sherman So your initial conversations, let alone the follow-up conversations change those first questions that you would ask at the beginning went probably from things that would appear on a P and L in or a balance sheet too. Then how’s it going?

Cary Prejean Well, what I get is like, here’s all your financial stuff and here’s some recommendations for it. You go, yeah, but you know what, that’s going to be hard to do because we got this issue over here that’s preventing that. So you know, it wasn’t an accounting thing, it’s an operational thing. So I was like, okay, well, what you gonna do to solve that? Well, I don’t know. We’ve been trying. I’m a financial guy. I don’t know how to solve. That. So one of the things I got really clear about is one of the things that makes the business operate well, is to have real well-defined processes that everybody follows, everybody’s aware of. They know their job, other people’s job, and have the process run the business rather than the owner always getting there mucking it up.

Bill Sherman So let’s stay on that question of the owner getting in there and mucking it up, to quote you. How do you help them let go?

Cary Prejean Again, it’s about building processes that work. And what you want from the owner is not, I don’t want you to, I don’t really have anything to do with the process, other than what I’m looking for from the owners is what are the consistent results you wanna see this process produce? And again, the process has to be about a critical function of the business. Sales, accounting, cash flow, will that bill? All that, so there are processes in place to handle these functions. But first, tell me what results you wanna produce and then it’s up to the employees that actually do that. Thing, all participating there, they come up with a process because they see things at a more granular level. The owner is going to miss some of the really finite, minute things about it that make the process actually work well. I mean, that’s why they have the thing, you know, here’s a problem, here is a solution. And six months later, you’re having the same meeting about here’s the problem, here’s solution.

Bill Sherman Right, right.

Cary Prejean So when the owner, the employees put a process together, they own it, especially when they get it to where it works. It’s producing consistent results. Now they own that because now this is an easy way to get work done. There’s knowledge conflict, there’s knowledge breakdowns and you’re delaying me and no, you’re doing me and you did wrong. Now the process is this is how that flows and the owner steps back. So now that’s one part of the business that can start to let go. So the more processes you build, the more they can let go, the more they let go of the more things go because now they trust that the processes around the business produce results that they want rather than I gotta run around and make sure save the day all the time. And again, even with that, they don’t always get the results that they want.

Bill Sherman So let me ask this question. I want to turn the question to you in terms of thought leadership. You’ve written books, you’re doing thought leadership, where do you see that work going? Do you see it increasing decreasing? How are you getting value from the books that you’ve written?

Cary Prejean And they keep doing what I’ve been doing. And I also, one of the, one of the things I’ve been doing is continuing with my education. Like what else is out there that I can help business owners with what else is, what else, is entering the, the business dynamics that business owners need to be aware of. And one of the, one of the things that’s really crucial right now is AI. Need to integrate as much AI as possible into your business, into your processes because it, it increases productivity like crazy. So I’ve been building AI into my practice and tons of helping clients as well as processes that I use in my business. And again, it saves me tons of hours. I can’t tell you how many, but that’s something that a lot of business owners, it’s kind of foreign to them. I mean, it kind of alluring, it is kind of sexy in that it’s something new with new shiny object, but at the same time it’s not something you just look at, oh yeah, yeah, I got that. It’s not that simple. You have to learn how, instead of coding, you have to know how to prompt well. And that takes some thought. So how do I talk to this artificial intelligence in a way that it’s gonna give me the answers that I want? And how do, and again, that takes practice, that takes refinement, and most business owners don’t have the patience for it. So who in your organization, or several in your, who can we put in charge of or get trained in AI and prompting and how to use it for your business? Because the owner is not gonna do it.

Bill Sherman Well, and it’s an interesting question if I circle back to the conversation of moving from entrepreneur to leader, who’s going to talk to the employees like a leader, how are you going to prompt them for the outputs that you want? There’s a parallel there, right? In terms of what are you asking for and are you willing to let them figure out how they’re going to do that? With AI, it’s a black box. I don’t know if anybody can tell you exactly, based on the prompt, all the steps that are involved. But here, on the human side, you also have to be able to say, this is what I’m looking for. This is what success looks like. You figure out how you’re gonna get there, I’ll hold you accountable to the success.

Cary Prejean Yeah, I mean, again, it’s about, these are the results I say I want to see, okay? And if you have any parameters with that, like those certain budgetary constraints or time constraints, whatever, I want see these results in this amount of time and I want you to spend less than X amount of dollars. And again, there may be that we can’t do it within those constraints, you know, but you need to try, you need try really hard. We can do it in this time space or in this for these dollars, you still want to produce those results. But that hat you have to give him play gave you better faster.

Bill Sherman And cheaper, which two do you want?

Cary Prejean And I see that there’s a mechanic I go to and he has that in his garage. You can have, you can have fast and cheap, you could have good and fast. You can, you have the combination, but you can’t have good, fast and cheap, doesn’t it? So yeah. So you have to give, you had to give employees not only permission, but the support to do things on their own and to make mistakes and not see mistakes so much as a mistake. Like he screwed up, you’re endangering my business, my income, my wealth, cause that’s how most businesses. Business on the speak about my wealth, my revenue, my sales, my this, my everything. And so what’s in it for the employees paycheck. Okay. Well, what I have to do, what’s the minimum I have to do that just get my paycheck and not get fired. So you have to actually support them, encourage them, elevate them in what I call empower them to do what it is you want them to, and again, you have to enroll them in your mission. You have to roll them in. Your vision, like, okay, this is where we’re headed. Here’s what here’s your part of it that I see you contributing. What can you do? These results want to produce. What can do as a group? How can y’all put together a process that’s gonna produce that? Cause that’s really gonna help the business. It’s gonna help you as employees. It’s going to make your job easier. And as we’re more profitable, you’ll be able to get paid better.

Bill Sherman Right. It’s really hard to put up a sign in the break room that says, maximize shareholder value or the owner needs a third yacht, you know, and expects morale to improve.

Cary Prejean Yeah, exactly.

Bill Sherman So as we begin to wrap up, Carrie, I want to ask you about books. You’ve written several books. You are an accountant in practicing accounting. Did you ever see yourself writing a book or was this a surprise?

Cary Prejean Early on, no, I know. And listen, the other thing, the books that I write are for business owners. I’ve had a few business owners, non-business owners read them and was like, okay, and then, yeah, I’m not John Grisham. I’m trying to write….

Bill Sherman Yeah, this is not a novel. I are speaking to a specific audience.

Cary Prejean You’re not it. I’m not looking for Pulitzer Prizes or New York Times bestseller or anything. This is business owners, it’s a way for them to see themselves in the way the world sees them, as well as a way to see how they, sometimes the way they act in their business is not empowering for them. It’s not effective. It’s ineffective. It’s destructive acting sometimes. And how can you be different? How can you a better entrepreneur leader That’s going to have your people really want to rally around you and support you and join you in your mission. As well as some practical, these some things you can do to increase your revenue, increase profitability, what do you call it, empower, engage your employees, build a better business. And again, I’m not expecting them to do it on their own. They don’t have the, they don’t had the follow through that have the attention to detail. But it, maybe you can find somebody in your organization. If you’re willing to trust them enough, they can do it or call me or call somebody to come help.

Bill Sherman Do you see yourself writing more books or have you said what you need to say and they work for business development? You know, some people tell me they’ve got 12 books still inside of them. What is true for

Cary Prejean Actually, I’m in the middle of writing two more, you know, guessing there’ll be more beyond that at the same time. That’s a challenge. Yeah. Well, one is about things not to do in business. And I’ve seen some in the last few years, I’ve seen some really, uh, I don’t want to say it horrendous. Endings to businesses that were like institutions, just incredible the way they fell apart. And the other thing that’s really missing a lot that I say is in business. Is the art of relating, we’ve gotten so sloppy at actually being able to relate one another and be effective in our communications, you know, where we’re all usually kind of half ass sloppy with it and then we make sloppy requests, sloppy offers, sloppy promises. I sent you a one sentence email. Wasn’t I clear? Well, you know, the thing I get from customer, especially the entrepreneurs, they’ll forward an email to me with nothing of their own, just like You’re like, I’m supposed to read this, interpret it, and then take some action. So I usually respond.

Bill Sherman Be clear what that action is.

Cary Prejean So I usually respond to that with, is there a quest in this?

Bill Sherman Exactly.

Cary Prejean You’re going to have to talk to me. I don’t reach through the ether and know what you’re thinking.

Bill Sherman Mm-hmm. See, You’ve got two books coming. Ok. What’s the strategy for them? How are you gonna use them and are you doing anything, will you do anything different with them than what you’ve done with your earlier books?

Cary Prejean Not really, I mean, the one on how to ruin your business is really just like a warning sign. If you see any of this going on in your business, be careful, I’ve seen some really strong businesses go up in smoke because they were headed down these paths and the owner or owners, they couldn’t see the warning signs and they just went off a cliff. And the auto-relating is hopefully something that owners can take or whoever can take. Having more effective relationships, not only at work, but maybe in a personal life, husbands and wives, parents and kids, you know, it’s just, how do you relate to another person in a way that they’re gonna get it, that you care, that since that you wanna take care of them, that you’re clearing your communications, that you coordinate action better, that you more effective. You know, cause if you look at any organization or business, it can be boiled down into a network of conversations. That make sense? The work, the production level people, they’re more concerned with fulfilling promises, right? They come to work and do this work. The manager supervisor level, they are more concerned with requests, offers and promises. They’re trying to coordinate resources to produce consistent outcomes or maybe even better incomes. Whereas the C-suite people are more concern with making assessments and declarations about the future where the company’s headed. They’re not so concerned with fulfilling promises, they aren’t so concerned. I mean, they do make requests, offers, and promises, but their main function, the main thing they do is make declaration about where the company’s headed. But they need to make good assessments in order to do that.

Bill Sherman Well, and I like how you’re splitting out the language in a very approachable way, and you can start saying, okay, am I making a declaration? Am I making up promise? Am I’m making an evaluation. It gives a framework of what role am I playing currently? And am I flying in formation, right? Am I doing what I need to be doing, or am I the CEO who’s checking every promise.

Cary Prejean Yeah, if you if you’re the CEO and you’re going through what everybody does and you micromanaging everybody, there’s a reason you might be starving as a reason you might have, you know, you’ve gotten stagnant.

Bill Sherman We found the reason for the ceiling and it is you.

Cary Prejean Yeah, the old Pogo cartoon, right? Yeah, exactly.

Bill Sherman Exactly.

Cary Prejean If we have met the enemy, it’s us. I forget exactly the line, but that’s basically it.

Bill Sherman I think that’s it. I think it’s it from the cartoon. So I want to thank you, Cary, for joining us today for a conversation around entrepreneurship, thought leadership, the evolution to leadership itself, and then realizing what role are you playing, how do you empower others, and get out of your own way.

Cary Prejean Yeah, Bill, thanks for having me, man. It’s been a great, great conversation.

Bill Sherman Thank you, Cary.

Cary Prejean Absolutely.

Bill Sherman Okay. You’ve made it to the end of the episode, and that means you’re probably someone deeply interested in thought leadership. Want to learn even more? Here are three recommendations. First, check out the back catalog of our podcast episodes. There are a lot of great conversations with people at the top of their game, and thought leadership, as well as just starting out. Second, subscribe to our newsletter that talks about the business of thought leadership. And finally, feel free to reach out to me. My day job is helping people with big insights. Take them to scale through the practice of thought leadership. Maybe you’re looking for strategy, or maybe you want to polish up your ideas or even create new products and offerings. I’d love to chat with you. Thanks for listening.