You don't scale. Your systems do.

I'm managing 24 accounts at work. Twenty-four distinct businesses, each with their own executive relationships, their own meetings to push forward, their own initiatives to track. It doesn't work. One person can't successfully multiply across that many moving pieces. You either prioritize the top few and let the rest lag, or you flounder across all of them.

But here's the thing—we can build tools now that make this manageable.

the grunt work trap

One of my recurring tasks was creating slide decks for executive business reviews. Each account needed one. Each one took 1-3 hours: find the data source, pull it, turn it into a chart, wait for downloads, wrestle it into Figma, figure out content and placement. Copy some template, paste, adjust, repeat.

The data retrieval. The decision fatigue. The context-switching between internal and external meetings. It's not tenable. I don't have an executive assistant to offload this to—but I do have AI.

Over the weekend, I built a tool that pulls all the data I need and exports it into a ready-to-use file. Boom. One click. What used to take hours now takes seconds.

the patience to front-load

Most people tolerate grunt work because they don't know a better way. They do the same tedious task over and over, never stopping to ask: could I build something that does this for me?

The answer is almost always yes. But it requires patience.

Building a system that automates repeated work isn't easy. It takes grit to invest the effort upfront instead of just doing the thing manually one more time. But if you actually go for it—if you have the patience to front-load the work—you never have to worry about it again.

Think of it like music. Imagine writing a new piece for every gig you play, even though the piece is basically the same each time. Why would you do that? Write it once. Rehearse it. Play it. Done.

Instead of writing it every single time, rediscovering it, multiplying your effort—you just have the one that you've already built.

That's the mindset shift. Stop tolerating the repeated work. Front-load the effort. Build once, run forever.