Why Your Right Hand Person Belongs in the Planning Room with Elise Arsenault and Priscilla Leonard
You come home from a planning day lit up. Six hours of clarity, a wall of Post-its, a quarter that finally makes sense. Then you sit down with your team, and somewhere between your head and their inbox the whole thing flattens into a to-do list nobody has the context for.
Elise Arsenault knows that exact moment. She built The Global Actor into a training program the audiobook industry has come to trust, with ten of her graduates nominated at this year's Audies and several of them winning. And for years she came back from the CEO Retreat® alone, carrying a quarter's worth of decisions she then had to translate, explain, and hope landed. She called it instant overwhelm. She was not wrong.
This episode is the before and after of what changes when the operator is in the room. Priscilla Leonard runs operations for The Global Actor, and she and Elise have built that business together for years without ever meeting in person. When Elise started bringing Priscilla to the retreats, the handoff stopped being a handoff. It became a real conversation about why, not just what.
We get into how the 90 Day CEO Operating System® becomes the bridge between a visionary who sees the whole horizon and the right hand who makes it actually happen, what shifts when your team owns their goals instead of receiving them, and why Elise no longer believes the whole thing could fall apart if she stopped working for a week.
If you have a right hand and you have been carrying the plan alone, this one shows you what the other version looks like.
About Elise Arsenault and Priscilla Leonard
Elise Arsenault is an actor, coach, and the founder of The Global Actor, the training program behind the Great Audiobook Adventure. She has spent the last decade building a body of work the audiobook narration industry has come to trust, with casting directors who recognize her course by name and ten of her graduates earning Audie nominations this year.
Priscilla Leonard is her right hand and runs operations for the business, a role she grew into after coordinating The Global Actor's first thousand-attendee summit and eventually coming on full time.
Elise has been part of The CEO Collective® for years and plans each quarter at the CEO Retreat®. When the membership added its team tier, she started bringing Priscilla into the retreats with her, and the two of them now run their quarterly planning through the 90 Day CEO Operating System® as a team. They have built The Global Actor together across a virtual team for years, and they have still never met in person.
What You'll Learn in This Episode
- Why coming home from a planning day fired up can quietly create more overwhelm, not less
- What actually changes when your operator sits in the planning room instead of getting the recap afterward
- How the 90 Day CEO Operating System® becomes a translator between a visionary and her right hand
- The shift that lets a CEO stop believing the whole business could collapse if she stepped away for a week
- What it looks like when every person on the team owns their own quarterly goals instead of inheriting a list
- How Elise reclaimed time for her own craft once operations had a clear owner
- Why you do not have to fix everything at once, including the email address that has been wrong for ten years
Key Concepts from the Episode
The Bridge Between Vision and Logistics. The 90 Day CEO Operating System® gives a big-picture CEO and a detail-driven operator a shared language, so the plan stops getting lost in translation between the two of them. A visionary who sees the whole horizon still needs the person who knows where every step actually lands.
The Right Hand Belongs in the Room. When Priscilla started attending retreats instead of receiving the six-hour download afterward, she sto
