Most Agency Owners Are Doing 47 Things a Week. A Visionary Should Only Do Three.
Here's a question that changed how I spend my time: “What are three things you do every week that move everything forward – the stuff only you can do?”
Yesenia asked me that on a recent episode of the Scaling Together podcast, and it forced me to get honest. Because the truth is, most agency owners – myself included at certain points – spend the majority of their week doing work that someone else on the team could handle. We convince ourselves it's faster to just do it, or that nobody will do it as well, or that “it only takes five minutes.” But those five-minute tasks stack up into 20 hours a week of work that isn't moving the needle.
Running Plumbing & HVAC SEO at $7 million per year and Seven Figure Agency serving 350+ agencies, I've had to get ruthless about what lands on my plate versus what gets delegated. And the filter is simple: if it doesn't fall into one of three categories, it goes to someone else.
The Three Things a Visionary Should Spend Their Time On
Yesenia broke this down clearly, and it's become the framework we use to evaluate every commitment, every task, and every request for our time.
1. Building Relationships
This is number one for a reason. The agency business is a relationship business – and the relationships only the owner can build are the ones that matter most.
That means three types of relationship building:
- Team relationships. Your leadership team needs face time with you. Not micromanagement – real connection. Understanding what they're working on, what's blocking them, and making sure they feel supported. This happens in level 10 meetings and one-on-ones, which is why we consolidate all of those to Monday.
- Client and member relationships. In our world, that's the 350+ agency owners inside Seven Figure Agency. They need to know Josh and Yesenia are accessible, present, and invested. That's not scalable if you're buried in operations all week.
- Strategic relationships. Vendors, partners, people in your space who can open doors. The kind of relationships that don't show up on a task list but end up being the reason your next big growth lever appears. You can't build those in the 15 minutes between two back-to-back meetings.
If a task on your calendar has nothing to do with building relationships in one of these three areas, it's probably something you should delegate.
2. Coming Up with Big Ideas
This is the creativity piece – and it's the one most agency owners sacrifice first when the calendar gets full.
Content creation. New program design. Strategic planning for the next year. Whiteboarding the five-year vision. Figuring out the next hire that will change the trajectory of the business. These are visionary activities, and they require something most agency owners don't have: white space.
Yesenia put it this way: “It's amazing when you look at that day. You wake up in the morning, you have almost nothing else to work on that day. It gives you a freeing feeling that allows you to open up a space in your brain that wouldn't normally open up to you.”
That's not a luxury. That's a strategic advantage. The agencies that grow from seven figures to multiple seven figures aren't doing it by grinding harder. They're doing it because the owner has time to think about where the business is going – not just where it is right now.
In our week, this looks like whiteboarding sessions with Yesenia where we look at our five-year goal, our one-year goal, and map the trail to get there. Who are the team members we need to fill gaps? What systems need to be built? What's the next phase of growth look like? None of that thinking happens in a meeting. It happens in the white space.
3. Focusing on Team Culture and Hiring
Here's the third one, and it's the one that compounds the hardest over time.
Your business runs on two things: systems and people. If you have the right systems and procedures, that gets you ahead. But systems don't run themselves – people do. And making sure the people executing your systems are the right people in the right seats? That's a visionary job.
This means:
- Being intentional about every hire you make
- Evaluating whether current team members are in their zone of genius
- Setting the tone for how your team operates – the energy, the standards, the accountability
- Protecting the culture as you scale so the thing that made you great at $500K doesn't get diluted at $2 million
We use the EOS framework across both businesses, and one of its core principles is “right people, right seats.” That's not a one-time exercise. It's an ongoing responsibility that only the visionary can own. Your head of sales can run sales. Your operations director can run operations. But the cultural DNA of the company – that comes from the top.
The Delegation Filter
Once you know the three things, the filter becomes automatic. Every task, every request, every “can you just…” gets run through one question: Does this fall into relationships, big ideas, or culture?
If yes, it stays on your plate.
If no, it gets delegated. And this is where having the right people in leadership positions matters. Your head of sales handles sales meetings. Your head of fulfillment handles delivery check-ins. Your operations director handles the operational syncs. You don't need to be in those rooms – and your presence in those rooms actually slows your team down because they start deferring to you instead of leading.
Travis Weathers at Rotate Digital grew from $3 million to $5 million in the moving industry by doing exactly this – building a leadership team he could trust and then getting out of the operational weeds so he could focus on the visionary work that drives growth.
What This Looks Like in Practice
Here's a snapshot of how this plays out in our actual week:
- Monday: Relationship building. All team meetings, level 10s, and leadership connections happen on this day. This is where I pour into our leaders, make sure everyone's aligned, and handle any hot issues.
- Content days: Big ideas. Yesenia blocks Tuesdays and Thursdays for content creation and recording. I protect white space days for long-form content, webinars, and strategic thinking.
- Whiteboard sessions: Big ideas plus culture. Throughout the week, Yesenia and I whiteboard together – mapping the five-year vision, planning hires, evaluating whether we have the right team structure.
- Friday: Yesenia runs a women's mastermind (relationships). We record the Scaling Together podcast at the studio (big ideas plus relationships).
Everything else? Delegated to the leaders we've built up across both organizations.
Why This Gets Harder Before It Gets Easier
I'm not going to BS you – letting go of tasks is uncomfortable at first. When you've been the person who handles everything for years, stepping back feels irresponsible. You worry that things will slip. You worry that nobody cares as much as you do.
But here's what actually happens: your team steps up. When you stop being the bottleneck, they start leading. And when they start leading, you get the one thing every agency owner says they want but few actually build – freedom.
That's the whole model. We didn't build Plumbing & HVAC SEO to $7 million a year so I could sit in operations meetings all day. We built it so the leadership team runs the day-to-day while I focus on the three things that only the visionary can do.
If you're running an agency and you feel stuck doing work that isn't in your zone of genius, let's talk about building the systems and team that give you your time back. That's what we help agency owners do every day inside Seven Figure Agency.
Frequently Asked Questions
What if I don't have a team big enough to delegate to yet?
Start with the filter anyway. Identify which of your tasks fall into the three visionary categories and which don't. The tasks that don't are your first hire targets. Even if you can only afford a part-time VA or a junior team member, get the non-visionary work off your plate first. That frees you to focus on the revenue-generating activities – relationships and big ideas – that fund your next hire.
How do I know if I have the “right people in the right seats”?
The EOS framework uses two filters: do they share your core values (right person) and do they have the capacity and skillset for their role (right seat)? If someone's a great culture fit but struggling with the work, they might be in the wrong seat. If they're crushing the work but creating drama, they might be the wrong person. Both have to line up.
Isn't “big ideas” time just an excuse to avoid real work?
The opposite. Big ideas time is where your highest-value work happens – the strategic thinking that determines whether your agency grows 20% next year or 100%. Content creation, partnership strategy, product development, five-year planning – these are the activities that compound. Answering emails and sitting in status meetings doesn't compound.
How do you balance visionary time with the fact that you still run two businesses?
Structure. Monday is meeting day for SFA, Wednesday morning is the Plumbing & HVAC SEO level 10. Those are non-negotiable. Everything else gets evaluated through the three-things filter. The key is that both businesses have leadership teams that handle the day-to-day, so my involvement is strategic – not operational.
What's the first thing I should delegate if I'm doing everything right now?
Operational meetings. If you're sitting in weekly syncs for fulfillment, support, or internal processes – those are the first to go. Hire or promote a department leader, hand them the meeting, and use that reclaimed time for relationship building or creative work. The impact is immediate.
