Why Founders & CEO's Should Only Do Three Things
With Trey Taylor
When everything is your responsibility, these three things matter most.
The How to Sell More Podcast
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January 28, 2025
How did James Madison become the Father of the Constitution without writing a word of it? By setting the agenda of the Constitutional Convention. As a CEO, you can take a pointer from Madison’s book and set the agenda of your company.
In this episode of How to Sell More, Mark Drager explores the real responsibilities of a CEO with Trey Taylor, the guy who wrote the book on the topic. He's the author of A CEO Only Does Three Things, which he wrote fifteen years after taking over his family's insurance business following his father's unexpected passing in 2005. The book documents everything he’s learned and wishes he knew then.
Trey outlines how the CEO can set the agenda in three crucial areas of the company: culture, people, and agenda. Culture represents the company’s “how” while the people represent the “who.” Finally, numbers indicate if the company is on track with its goals.
“Culture is about how we work. People is about who we will work with. And numbers is about how we know we're on track.” - Trey Taylor
Listen in as Trey outlines how CEOs should–and shouldn’t–spend their time. He zeroes in on the “non-delegatable” tasks that only CEOs can take charge of to spearhead their company’s culture and success.
Trey believes that most CEOs wear too many hats, while at the same time, 95% of CEOs under-engineer their company’s infrastructure, leaving them unprepared to face avoidable problems.
You’ll learn how to escape the trap of “doing things as they’ve always been done” so you can build a competitive, defendable business. Trey advocates for doing less, well instead of doing more with mediocre outcomes.
Trey is the CEO of Taylor Insurance Services and Managing Partner of Threadneedle, where he leads strategic investments in financial services, real estate, and technology. With over two decades in the industry and more than 200 angel investments, Trey brings deep expertise in both running and scaling businesses.
Ready to learn what it really takes to lead a successful company? This episode offers a compelling case for simplifying your job description to set your company’s agenda and hone in on your unique genius.
Connect with Trey Taylor
More About Today's Guest, Trey Taylor
Trey Taylor is a recognized business leader, investor, and author who has established himself as an authority on executive leadership through his book A CEO Only Does Three Things: Finding Your Focus in the C-Suite.
As Managing Director of Trinity Blue Consulting and CEO of Taylor Insurance Services, Taylor brings extensive operational expertise to his portfolio of business ventures. His investment acumen is demonstrated through his role as an angel investor and advisor, where he has contributed to the financing of more than 100 companies. Additionally, Taylor serves as a Commissioner of the Georgians First Commission, further expanding his influence in the business community.
In his acclaimed book, Taylor presents a focused framework for executive leadership, emphasizing three fundamental pillars: culture, people, and numbers. This strategic approach provides C-Suite executives with clear guidance for organizational decision-making and leadership effectiveness.
Building on his family's entrepreneurial foundation, Taylor has successfully launched and scaled multiple ventures across different sectors, including insurance, consulting, and venture capital. His business achievements have garnered recognition, including his selection as one of Georgia Trend Magazine's 40 Under 40.
Taylor continues to share his expertise through speaking engagements, contributing to the broader business community's development and success.
A Transcription of The Talk
Mark Drager: So Trey, you are the author of A CEO Only Does Three Things. And I was talking to you a bit before we started recording about the fact that you admit in the opening of this book that there's nothing, maybe, new. You know, you didn't invent the stuff in this book, and yet it has been so informative in my own learning. I've taken so many things away from this book, and I know that others who have also read it speak so highly of it.
Before we get into what those three things are—if we're only responsible for three things and nothing more than that—we're going to get into what those three things are. But before we do, why did you write this book?
Trey Taylor: Yeah, Mark, thanks for having me, and thanks for asking the good question. Right off the bat, I wrote that book because that's the book that I needed when I didn't have that book. There's a famous quote that goes around, you know, sort of like "be the guy you needed when you were the guy that needed somebody," or something like that, you know.
When I took over as the CEO of my family business—one week after the unexpected death of my father—he passed at 52 from COVID. Back in 2005, we didn't even have a name for it. Then, I came into a place that was very disjointed. It was an industry I wasn't supposed to be in. My dad had always told me, "Don't do what I do for a living." And the very first thing I did after announcing that I was sort of taking over chose the CEO title because my dad was called the President, and I didn't want to take his job.
I closed the door and Googled, "What does a CEO do?" because I didn't know what the job was. And I'm fond of saying now that in every organization, you have job descriptions for every job except for the CEO. At the bare minimum, this book is a job description for the CEO. That's why I wrote it—because I needed it at that age. My thought was that I was going to hand over that business to someone else and be able to sort of give them this chicken-scratch version of a book that I had back then.
When COVID hit, and we were all in lockdown, I knew I would go crazy if I didn't have a project. So, I took those legal pads out and started typing them together, thinking through them, refining the models, and that sort of thing. And again, like you said, there's no novelty here. The novelty is that it's all in one sort of referenceable volume, but it's also got a mental model attached to it. So, even if you can't put your hands on the book, at least you can access the principles.
Mark Drager: Interesting. Because to me, your story reflects so many others who eventually became authors. I'm thinking maybe Gino Wickman, you know, who took over a family business and then ultimately realized, "Hey, there's no operating system here," and created EOS and Traction and many others.
I'm part of a business owners group where I was having lunch with someone who, it turns out, is quite wealthy—quite independently wealthy at this point, hasn't worked in many years. I was kind of inquiring about their backstory, and they had to step in to take over a family textile business in the '90s where the father unexpectedly passed. It was a mess and on the verge of bankruptcy. To save the family business, they spent three or four years figuring out how to operate, ultimately replaced themselves, and then exited 10 years later, running a family office since then.
As an outsider, that's not my story. I started my agency in 2006. I was 23 years old. I'm very much kind of a startup guy. I do not have the schooling you have; I do not have the corporate background you have. I didn't grow up in a family business. And so, with your background in tax law, if I'm correct—is that right?
Trey Taylor: Yeah, that's correct. I took a JD from Tulane and focused on big corporate transactions and how tax impacts the choices you would make in those transactions. Fascinating dinner table conversation.
Mark Drager: Well, so where I was going with this is, understanding your background and then stepping into this role, I would think that it should be fairly simple, right? You're used to a certain type of training, a certain type of experience—big, complex corporate M&A and restructuring. With this kind of background, coming into what is a family business that helps with financial planning and insurance seems like it should be an easier transition, almost like stepping down into it. But that wasn't the case, was it?
Trey Taylor: Well, I don't want to diminish or embellish it. They say, "Choose your pain." The pain for me was that I parachuted into a business that was a working business, but it was highly dependent on my dad and his way of doing things, which, by nature, are different than the way I would do things.
I think I could have done very little and let that business sort of continue on, but I don't believe it would still be in business. The market changed, and those kinds of things. I contrast that with the difference of someone in the startup mindset, which I respect very much. I'm a prolific angel investor—I have over 200 angel positions in companies. Mark, you and I have a lot of friends I've invested in and that sort of thing.
If I had to choose my pain, I would choose to take the business that was already a going concern and make it a lot better versus founding a company. I’ve founded very few companies, so it's a very different mindset for me.
So, was it hard? Yeah, it was hard, but mostly because of the psychology, the mentality, and the emotionality of what we were going through at that time versus standing on the abyss and saying, "Are we going to make it or not?" We never really had existential concerns when I took over the business. So, it wasn't about how to run a business and keep it alive so much as it was about how to expand the business, how to be better for the people that are here so that they do better for the business, themselves, and their families. Very different concept there.
Mark Drager: Well, and I think it's important that we highlight that because there is a difference between the startup founder or the owner-operator, who is still very much in the day-to-day, versus the CEO. And the CEO—often brought in as President or CEO—is there when we're ready to move past growth and into the scale-up phase, expansion phase, or simply professionalize the business.
Part of why I wanted to lay the groundwork for that is to help us understand: if the CEO only does three things, I would love for you to share what those three things are, but then also right-size it. Because if you focus on these things too early, it’s all an exercise in what might be one day. So I’d really love for you to share these three things and then help us right-size who this is most practical for.
Trey Taylor: Yeah, so I’ll take aim at the question itself because the question assumes that if I’m a startup CEO, then I don’t only do three things—I do 3 million things on the to-do list. And it would be a great thing if I only did three things, but I can’t, and all of that.
I have a section in the book called Objection Overruled because the point of the book is exactly this: the CEO only does three things because the CEO is the only one who has the responsibility and authority to do three specific things. That isn’t an opportunity argument. The opportunity argument is, "I’m the only guy in the company, and therefore I have to do everything in the company." Yes, that is true, but there’s a section of your mind that you must section off—this is the CEO part of the job.
Yeah, you might be the product developer, you might be the ultimate coder, you might be the marketer. You might do all of those things and wear all of those hats. But one of the hats is the CEO hat, and when you put that hat on, I want you to think in terms of culture, people, and numbers. Those are the places where the CEO, the guy who’s in charge—or the gal who’s in charge—sets the agenda.
So, culture is a conversation about how we will work. People are in a conversation about who we will work with to accomplish those things in culture. And numbers, very simply, are about how we know when we’ve made it or when we’re off track. It’s just a measurement of effectiveness. But she’s the one who gets to set the agenda on how we think, talk, and act about these three things.
Mark Drager: Thank you for addressing that. And I did set up that question with a bit of a bias. The reason for that is that I think oftentimes, I always use the framework or the visualization that Jocko Willink mentions in Extreme Ownership. He shares a story in one chapter about the fact that the best types of leaders—when you’re storming, and if you guys don’t know the book, it’s all about Navy SEALs and using war metaphors for business—the best leader may not be right at the front line because they almost get pulled into the action of clearing rooms, fighting battles, or putting out fires.
If you’re too far back, you’re not close enough to the action to even understand what’s taking place day-to-day. But the best leaders are somewhere in the middle, and I’ve always tried to visualize that with any given challenge, any given team member, or any given product or service we might be building out. When things aren’t going right, I ask myself, "Where is this staff member in relation to: are they too close to see the forest from the trees? Are they too far back to really understand what’s happening up front? And where are they in the mix?"
The reason I mention all of this in relation to your “put on your CEO hat—these are the three things you need to do” is because sometimes I find myself—and I’m sure our listeners find themselves—sucked into frontline things that they should not be dealing with. Or we’re so far back that, frankly, it’s not our skill set. Maybe we don’t take things as seriously as we need to. Maybe we just don’t realize what’s happening. And reality always reminds me, it seems, when things are going wrong, that no one is going to do this for me.
There are certain things that I cannot outsource. There are certain things that I cannot just hope will somehow work themselves out. And there are certain things that, frankly, even with the best COO, even with the best recruitment team, even with the best sales or marketing team—even with CFOs helping to manage our money to ensure cash flow and runway—there are still core elements that no one is going to step into my role and do for me.
Trey Taylor: Yeah, and my argument on that is that those things are not what we think they are. There are two levels of abstraction above those, and it comes down to setting the agenda.
There’s a great story I read just a couple of weeks ago in my weekly reading; James Madison was called the Father of the Constitution.
Mark Drager: You just piqued my curiosity here—biographies of all the Founding Fathers, pretty much.
Trey Taylor: Okay, well, Madison was the Father of the Constitution. He wrote none of it. Governor Morris wrote the Constitution at the Constitutional Convention. He was the head of the secretariat that wrote it, and they called him "the rake that wrote the Constitution." Governor Morris is a fascinating person to dive into, by the way—really interesting. But James Madison was called the Father of the Constitution.
Why was that? James Madison showed up at the Constitutional Convention a week ahead of time. He got the best rooms in the city so that he could host people after the convention to chat, have maybe an after-dinner drink, or something like that. He created a sort of salon where they could debate ideas. But more importantly, he got himself appointed to—forget the name of the committee—but it was the agenda-setting committee, which decided, "We're going to debate these things and by definition, not these things." Because of that, the framework of the Constitution that came out of the work made him the Father of the Constitution.
He didn’t apply that name to himself. He didn’t put a bumper sticker on the carriage as he went back to Virginia saying that. His friends, colleagues, and even enemies who didn’t support the Constitution—like Thomas Jefferson, initially—said, “He’s the Father of it. He has to own it, for the good or the bad.”
My point in telling that story is that as CEOs, it is our job to set the agenda. Now, can other people do cultural work? Absolutely. Your culture will not work if other people aren’t doing the work of building it, making it more intense, more practical, and more addressable to the people themselves. But as the CEO, you must have an agenda around people. You must have an agenda, hopefully, for the growth of the people who work with you—selecting the right people to be in the organization and kindly deselecting those who shouldn’t be there for any number of reasons.
Then there’s the agenda around numbers: Are we running a company to be the most profitable thing we could do? Does that mean we have a smaller size focus? Or do we want to be big and make less money? Do we want to grow revenue for the benefit of a single family, or for the benefit of the larger community? Those kinds of questions are set by the CEO and only the CEO. I’m fond of saying this: The CEO has the responsibility of doing that and the authority to make it happen. These are non-delegables. If you delegate them—and usually, it’s by abdication—really bad things happen.
I like a highly articulated culture. I like value statements. I like rituals around those things. I like talking about them with the team all the time. I like complimenting team members when they leave them out and scolding them when they don’t. I like being the sort of gardener, the cultivator—who shares the same Latin root as "culture." It’s that which we cultivate. I like that idea. If, however—and I have clients who don’t—if they don’t want to be in touch with that at all, it doesn’t mean that culture goes away. It just means it becomes a one-on-one, individually benefiting culture instead of a community-benefiting culture. We have all probably lived in organizations like that, and we wouldn’t choose to live in one of those. But there is work to do to make that happen, and that’s the CEO’s work.
Mark Drager: And so, if we get practical about some of the advice that you’ve listed here—around culture, people, and numbers—it’s adding a lot of work on the shoulders of the CEO. And it’s work that most CEOs, I don’t think, will do naturally. Let me explain.
For example, to be able to control culture, as you mentioned, we have to gate who’s in and who’s out, right? We go back to Good to Great—who’s on the bus, who’s in the right seat, are they on or off the bus? This all sounds good when you’re reading Good to Great, and you think, “Yeah, that makes sense. Do I have the right people on the bus or not?” But the amount of time and work this means—you recommend that the CEO is a part of the hiring of every single staff member, I imagine, up to a certain size. If you have 20,000 people, of course not. But we’re talking about small and medium-sized businesses.
Trey Taylor: Larry Page at Google reviewed every single application for anyone in a management position or higher for 10 solid years. It can be done.
Mark Drager: I’m not saying it can’t be done. I’m saying that I think... I had a client this morning I was speaking to, and there’s another party involved that affects our work. My assessment of that other party was they like to do as many things as possible, as quickly and easily as possible, as opposed to doing a few things really, really well. Maybe it’s a different operating style, different outcomes, different goals, whatever it might be. But most of what you suggest in this book is to do fewer things really, really well. Effort, does it not?
Trey Taylor: It absolutely does. My argument is that it takes 2% of the time and effort to do it in advance versus doing the cleanup of the fallout from not doing it in the first place.
To your point earlier, all I’m trying to do is make it conscious. For everyone I coach, we have a little notepad that says, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday—I give them Sunday off. It says: Culture, People, Numbers. Every day for 90 days while we’re in coaching, all I want them to do is go in and ask, “What am I doing today to affect the culture of the organization?”
Sometimes, that is notice that everyone leaves the office at 2:00 PM on Fridays, and I want them to leave at 4:00 PM. I had a CEO pull his chair out to the security desk and sit with the security guard at 2:00 PM, and miraculously, everyone stayed until 4:00 PM. He felt like that was an important commitment to the client or something of that nature.
For people, I recommend writing handwritten thank-you cards. That’s a hallmark of what I get people to do because it gets us into a place where we’re paying attention to the people around us. For numbers: What did we learn on the sales call this week? Did we have enough marketing leads coming in to feed the sales team, and vice versa? How do we adjust that? What’s the exercise you’re going to do on that today?
It becomes the master to-do list. Most people are finished with that list 20 minutes after they start in the morning. They’ve done the CEO’s job that day. There may be follow-ups that come from those taskings, but the CEO’s job pretty much can be done in 20 to 30 minutes every single morning before you get on the phone before you open the inbox—any of that sort of thing.
That means the rest of the time is free, either for creative work or for the CEO to climb down the ladder. One of the things you and I love about the people we admire in the workplace and the career space is their ability to go up and down the ladder of focus.
For example, Dave Thomas at Wendy’s was famous for walking into a Wendy’s, seeing the drive-thru backed up, and jumping on the line to start frying fries or flipping burgers. While doing that, he wasn’t worried about the per-share price or the CPC budget for next month. He was fully present in the task at hand. Why? Because he had checked off all the other things requiring his attention.
It’s a real master skill. David Allen, with Getting Things Done, teaches exactly that: if you’re going to fight the bear, you really should be focused on the bear—not the argument you had with your spouse a week and a half ago. Keeping those things in balance is what makes a CEO great.
So, for me, I work from the one-to-three-year time frame really effectively. I don't need someone zooming in and telling me, you know, it's time to change the tape on the phone or, you know, I don't need those kinds of things. What I do need is someone to clear the decks for me so that I can be super effective three years from now, with the plans being activated.
My receptionist is very good at a day-to-weekly time frame. That does not mean she's less intelligent than I am or less valuable to the organization than I am, because I'll tell you where it goes off the rails. If you put me in her job for a week, I will blow everything up trying to optimize things that should not be engineered in the first place, right? Instead of just doing the job. Same thing—if you put her in my job, her ability to work unsupervised for one week will be a dramatic change for the organization.
Now, I say all of that to say, as the CEO, you have to go and, really with a magnifying glass, look at everybody in the organization and figure out: Are they in the role that most matches their time frame? Their ability to work at their highest and best calling? And 78% of people are not. And you have big choices to make.
My COO today—we hired a level-one enroller, a salesperson, and a face-to-face salesperson in our insurance business. At the end of his first year, his numbers were not good. They were not sustainable. We were going to let him go. He's smart, and he figured that out. And he came and said, "Hey, at the end of the year, I'm not going to come back for the new year."
And it dawned on me immediately, because of the way that he phrased that, that we had him in the wrong job. So, we promoted him instead of firing him—into a customer service management position where he built out a new customer service focus that we had. He has since been promoted to the COO role because, unbeknownst to us, he wasn't a level-one person; he was a level-four person.
And now he runs everything in the span of a year that I don't have to touch or think about because, remember, I'm one to three years, and I'm just going to mess stuff up if I'm messing around in the one-year time frame. And he's excellent at that. And then he starts from zero every year, and he loves it. That's exactly where he wants to be.
So, that's the kind of thing that you have to be able to dial in. And the exercise to do it is exactly that: Do I need this person? Now, if you want to really complicate it and put an exponent on it, you've got AI coming in. So, when I do prompts with GPT and Claude and all of that, I tell them, "Look up Elliott Jaques and adopt the personality of a level-two person." And then they come in and answer me in ways that someone in that time frame would answer me—very helpful.
But that's what I think most businesses struggle with. More businesses struggle with that than anything else that I see.
Mark Drager: So, if we thought of business—and maybe this is an oversimplification—if we thought of business as the work we have to do to deliver outcomes, the work we have to do to be able to sell and market our services so we have outcomes to deliver, and then the work we have to do actually inside the business—managing, optimizing, growing, structuring, all of the stuff that we have to do inside the business itself. Do you believe that most CEOs you're working with—do you believe the average CEO—overengineers the inside of their company and all that work? Or under engineers and just hopes things will work out? Does it once, and then kind of sets it and forgets it for a few years and circles around it later? Like, what is your take on whether we're spending the right amount of time, too much time, or not enough on it?
Trey Taylor: I think, I think I could universally say that every CEO under engineers. And I have a couple of notable exceptions—Mark, friends of ours that I could mention, and you would know—who are probably not in that boat. But I would say 95% of people are under engineer. We don’t do a lot of thinking and building of infrastructure to support problems.
When a problem comes up, we simply rush to the problem, we call the team together, and we fix that problem. But at no point do we say, “Okay, now, your job is to change the processes, systems, and the machine so that the next time that problem arises, it solves itself.” We don’t do that. And I think you have to go pretty high up in the size of an organization to get to a place where people are hired to be able to do that kind of activity.
Mark Drager: So, if we're looking for competitive businesses, defendable businesses, long-lasting businesses—I mean, my greatest frustration, I suppose, because it's not even a fear—but I am not interested in building anything with an 18- to 24-month lifecycle. That, to me, seems like a total waste of time and energy, even though I know that there are many businesses that make tremendous amounts of money by cracking the code of what's currently working. Ride the trend, and then find the next trend. Find the next trend, find the next trend.
To me, that feels like a hamster wheel that I'm just not interested in. But there's so much work and so much time that has to go into building these competitive, defendable businesses. As you mentioned, most of us are underengineering. We need to spend more time on this. I would think that most people would look at this as a luxury. Why isn't this a luxury? Why is this something that we should 100% prioritize?
Trey Taylor: Well, you hit on it earlier. I think that it is amazing to me how many of our decisions were never made. Things just show up, and we just do things in the way that they have been done. Because one time, we did them in this way, and it's now a thing. We have product lines that we still represent for sale, despite the fact that we do probably less than 100k a year in revenue on them, or something of that nature.
What was the Gordon Ramsay show, where he would show up at the local restaurant, right? Yeah, and he would eat the food, and it was always everything was crap. There was never anything good on the menu. The very first thing he did was to taste the food and verify the problem. But the second thing—the real solution that he did—was do less and do it better.
So, he would take a menu, and I've got a favorite restaurant in my own hometown that I always have this fantasy he’s going to walk in because they've got, like, a Cheesecake Factory phone-book-looking menu, and everything's aggressively mediocre. I would rather they throw that away and do eight things, and have all eight of those things be delicious.
And in our businesses, I think we get in the rut of building, building, building, building, building, and never subtracting. And so much of your strength comes from being able to subtract and focus. That's the thing. Even if you have eight things, you subtract one, and you're at seven. I'm not even saying you have to focus on those seven, but that one-eighth of the time—that 13% of the time—you just picked up by deleting one thing is going to inure to your benefit. Because you're going to have creative thinking time, relaxation time. You're going to have time to invest in people and customers, in research and learning—whatever it happens to be. I think we do a lot more by doing a lot less.
Mark Drager: Such great advice. I’m speaking with Trey Taylor, who's the author of the book, A CEO Only Does Three Things, and he is also the managing partner of Threadneedle and the CEO of the family firm that you were talking about, Taylor Insurance Services. I have a closing question that I always end each episode with, and so I want to hit you with it. If you gave us one tip or one strategy to help us sell more, what would that be?
Trey Taylor: I think you sell more when you fundamentally make the effort to find out why those who buy from you buy from you. Do they buy from you for a culturally relevant reason? Are your values aligned, and do your products and services help them answer those questions? Or do they buy from you because they have to? Do they want to or have to?
And it is an eye-opening experience when you meet with your sales team and go through an entire account balance sheet and say, “Oh my God, 85% of people do business with me because they have to.” That’s something that has to change.
And so, we do that exercise every 24 months. We actually have it keyed up in February of next year, as our next iteration of that. And my team will be surprised yet again that we have grown a customer base where a lot of people do business with us because they have to—because it’s legacy, because it’s the choice they don’t have to make.
And we will invest quite a bit in paring away those that we don’t want to be in business with and investing that free time, energy, and resources into those that we do want to be in business with. And that will then blossom and make a lot more profitable business choices for us. That’s an exercise I think everyone should do.
