Spend a year with me.

You've already done the systems work

Better meetings. A scorecard. Some kind of operating rhythm. That's all good stuff, and none of it touches the person you see in the mirror.

So that's where we work at the same time. How does that person develop a team? How does that person get past the discomfort, the habits, the anxiety and the outright fear that keep the work routed back through them?

I know because I was the bottleneck

I was running my wife's jewelry company. I'd made a promise years earlier that I'd take real time away, and one day the bill came due. So I put a month in Italy on the calendar, told everybody, and went sailing with my kids. No calls. No meetings.

Here's the part that doesn't fit on a slide. The first things I handed off got dropped. Work went out the door that I would have caught. I had good reasons to take it all back, and the reasons were even true.

That moment is the whole thing. Not the planning, not the org chart. That moment.

We tripled our distribution that year. Revenue, profit and cash all went up while I wasn't there. The old version of me never came back to the office.

What it actually is

It's called The Unbusy. Once a month we do Unbusy work together: a session with me and a room of CEOs pulling the same thread. A buddy between sessions so you've got somebody who notices when you go quiet. And one optional gathering in person.

Third Wednesday of every month, 9:00am Pacific, ninety minutes. Same date every month, so you can put it in the calendar once and forget about it. That's noon Eastern and early evening in Europe.

I'm on every call. Not a facilitator, not a video of me. That's the whole point of the name.

That's the whole apparatus. The work isn't complicated. Carrying it alone is what makes it hard.

What we do with the year

Month one you name your Italy and put a real date on it. Not a someday. A date, in the calendar, that other people know about.

Then we work backward from it. What has to stop being your job. Who has to be able to do it. What breaks first when you step back, and what you do when it does.

Then, every month, we do the Unbusy work. Along the way we go after these, in roughly this order, at whatever pace your business allows:

1. What are the personal and business costs that have been hidden from your view?
2. What are your strengths as a leader already?
3. What new practices and skills move you into the new reality?
4. What's missing from your execution stack?
5. Where are you limiting or sabotaging the execution and the team?
6. What other parts of your life have you been neglecting?
7. What would you build if you weren't afraid of your capacity?

Who this is for

What it's done for other CEOs

The Unbusy is the newest way to work with me. The work itself isn't new.

Who's asking

Forty-odd years as an entrepreneur and an executive. I've led four companies as CEO and helped grow two more from startup to past $550 million. Before all that I was a DJ and a radio executive, so I've always talked for a living. I just have better material now.

Since 2013 I've coached full time. These days that's leaders and teams in 39 cities across 18 countries. I host the Scaling Up podcast, 700-plus episodes, and Busy is Broken is out now with a foreword by Michael E. Gerber.

Lori and I have been in the Oakland Hills thirty years and raised two kids. When I'm not working I'm surfing, sailing, skiing, flying or diving. I mention that only because I just asked whether work is your only hobby, and you're entitled to ask me back.

I'm not teaching you something I read. I'm teaching you the thing it took me eleven years to notice I was doing.

The obvious questions