You’re not too busy. You doing too many things that don’t matter.
If you’re in charge—if you’re the CEO—every hour you spend on client deliverables, project management, scope creep conversations, and tools decisions is an hour not spent on the three things only you can move. The scrappy hustle that got you here—the “I’ll just handle it” reflex—is exactly what’s keeping you from the next level.
Trey Taylor’s premise in A CEO Only Does Three Things is deceptively simple:
Culture
People
Numbers
That’s it.
CEO’s shape the values and behaviors that define how work gets done. CEO’s hire and retain the right people. CEO’s set the key metrics, watch them, and share them openly. Everything else gets delegated.
I ran my agency SuperFriendly for over a decade and there were years where I was the best designer on the team, the closer on every big pitch, and the one reviewing invoices at midnight. I thought that was just what ownership looked like.
It wasn’t. Staying in the tasks I was good at was excellent procrastination from doing the harder, lonelier work of building a company that didn’t need me for any of it.
Audit your calendar for the last two weeks and mark every task that falls outside culture, people, or numbers.
That’s your delegation list and your growth plan.
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