Welcome to this week's training. The frameworks, tactics, and know-how you need to kick arse and take names in the trenches. Today: 4 min read.

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I talked to a multimillion-dollar producer last week.

He is an elite, top-tier producer at a top 5 shop, so he asked to remain anonymous. For the sake of this letter, we’ll call him Eli, since that happens to be the first three letters of the word elite.

A year ago, Eli hired an executive coach. It wasn’t for sales or leadership, but for something far more interesting:

How he spends his energy.

To understand why he went looking for that type of coach, you have to understand where he’d been. Eli’s book of business had grown substantially, but it came at an ever increasing cost. He was completely run thin, on his way to burnout, and living with a constant, low-grade anxiety.

He’d tried all the time management and productivity hacks with no luck, unable to figure out how to manage it all, much less keep growing. That is what forced him to realize that the problem wasn't his hours, it was how he was spending his energy.

Once he wrapped his head around “energy mangement”, everything changed. His calendar, his team, and his production all transformed. Now, I’m no expert at this so I can only tell you what he told me.

Here are the cliff notes.

Most of us try to fix a stalled business with tighter calendars and more discipline.

Eli did that for years. But as he explained to me, time management is just table stakes. In our industry, you generally get about three years to validate your nut and keep your head above water. Time management gets you through those first three years.

Your career, though, is a 30-plus-year build.

You can’t out-discipline a bad energy budget for two decades. Working hard at the wrong thing isn’t discipline, it’s just expensive suffering. Time management keeps you alive on that first clock, but energy management is how you win the second one.

Eli learned that "energy" isn't just whether you had enough coffee this morning. You’re actually running on four distinct fuel tanks:

If your mental, emotional, or spiritual tanks are empty, throwing more physical hours at the problem won't fix anything.

Here’s the exact process Eli’s coach put him through to turn things around:

Audit the Friction: For one full week, write down everything you do. Mark each item as either (+) Energizing or (-) Draining.

Eli told me the results will embarrass you. His did. The leaks aren't the big, obvious disasters. They’re the subtle friction tasks you’ve done for so long you don't even realize they’re draining you anymore.

Find Your "One Thing": Look at your energizing items and ask yourself: What is the one thing I do that is genuinely excellent, that others notice, and that I never get tired of doing?

For Eli, it wasn't technical underwriting or compliance detail. It was knocking on doors, building relationships, and closing deals. Detail work zapped his energy. Sucking at detail work didn't mean he was lazy, it just wasn't his gift.

Run the Real Math on Your Time: Once you find your one thing, delegate the rest. Cross-reference your draining list with your team. Something that drains you might actually give a teammate energy.

If you don't have a team, this is the case for team selling. Ask yourself: would you rather have 100% of $100,000, or 50% of $300,000? Most producers instinctively cling to the first number. But the second number wins every time. You move faster, close more, and stop burning energy limping through stuff you hate.

Protect the Margin: This isn't a one-time project; it’s a weekly practice. Every Friday, look at your plate for the upcoming week. If administrative clutter has started creeping back onto your schedule, push it off. Stay the course.

Machines run at a constant speed until they run out of gas. People don't work like that. We’re built to rev up with high output, then recover.

Eli had to learn to protect two distinct modes:

Tactical Mode: Emails, quoting, firefighting. Necessary, but it won't scale your book of business.

Strategic Mode: Thinking time. Driving, walking, staring at a wall. Working on his business, not in his business.

The big moves that actually grow a book come from strategic mode. If you don't protect space for it, it never happens.

The following excerpt is from the man himself.

“This not theory... this is my actual week.

I staffed my weaknesses: The detail work that drains me… organizing, filing, tracking, cleaning up the mess.. I handed to AI. Real example: my work desktop was a disaster zone I'd avoided for months. AI organized the whole thing in about 7 minutes. My "team of people doing what they love" now includes a teammate that isn't a person... and it happens to love the exact work I hate.

Nothing slips anymore: The second an idea, commitment, or follow-up hits my brain, it goes straight into my AI second brain. Mid-drive, mid-meeting, whenever. And it comes back when I need it. For a guy whose filing system used to be "hope I remember"... that's not a productivity gain, that's a whole category of background anxiety, retired. The energy I used to spend worrying about what was slipping now goes to clients.

I workshop before I ship: Big idea, hard email, a talk I'm giving... before it goes out, I pressure-test it with AI. Argue against me. Find the holes. Tighten it. The eye-opener is that AI isn't writing for me... it's the sparring partner between the idea and the send button. And case in point... everything in this email went through that exact workflow. For months.. since Claude CoWork came on the scenes.. So I'm practicing what I'm preaching in real time.

None of this is about working less just to be lazy. It’s about making sure the energy you do spend goes toward the few things that actually compound for you, your team, and your clients.

And the time it does free up isn't meant to give us more room to shove eighty pounds of you-know-what into a forty-pound sack. As our buddy Luke Berry said on a previous podcast, the ultimate idea isn't to use tools like AI just so we can keep doing more and running ourselves into the ground. It’s to achieve more while doing less, so we can actually spend our lives being human, spending quality time with the ones we love.

That was the shift Eli made. And it’s why one conversation about energy turned into the best decision of his year.

-MS