The Blank Page Process: Just Do It — Starting From Scratch in Your Agency

There's a specific kind of discomfort that comes with a blank page. Not pain, not fear, something harder to name. A vague paralysis that makes you want to do anything except put something on the page. Check your email. Return that call. Organize the desk. Literally anything that feels like activity but doesn't require you to actually start the thing that's sitting empty in front of you.

If you've ever tried to build a process from scratch, write a hiring ad without a template, or map out your production goals for the new year without a framework to copy, you've lived in the blank page moment. This episode is about how to move through it.

Why the Blank Page Stops You

The blank page is not actually the problem. The blank page is just a surface. The problem is what your brain does when it encounters that surface: it immediately calculates everything that needs to happen before the page stops being blank, and it gets overwhelmed by the scale of that calculation.

Building a referral system from scratch means: figuring out the ask, building the tracking, scripting the language, training the team, creating the follow-up, and then running it consistently for long enough to see results. When your brain tries to process all of that at once, before you've written a single word, it shuts down. The task looks too big. You don't know where to start. So you don't start.

That's not a character flaw. That's how cognition works when it's confronting complexity without structure. The fix isn't motivation. The fix is a process for making the blank page smaller.

The Blank Page Process: Start Stupidly Small

Jason's framework for getting past the blank page isn't complicated, but it runs counter to how most agents try to build things. The instinct is to start with the full vision, the complete, finished version of the thing you want to create, and then work backward. That instinct fails almost every time because the gap between "nothing" and "complete vision" is enormous, and the brain interprets that gap as a reason not to start.

The alternative: start with the smallest, dumbest, most obvious version of the thing. Not the good version. The placeholder version. The version that's clearly incomplete but exists on the page.

Writing a script from scratch? Don't start with the perfect opening line. Start with: "Here's what I'm trying to accomplish with this script." One sentence. Now the page isn't blank. Now you're editing, not creating, and editing is dramatically easier than creating from nothing.

Building a hiring process? Don't start with the complete onboarding checklist. Start with three things you'd want every new hire to know in their first week. Write those down in whatever order they come to you. Now you have a starting point.

Mapping out your January production goals? Don't start with the spreadsheet. Start with the number you want to hit and write it in the middle of the page. Circle it. Now work outward: what has to be true for that number to happen? What are the three or four inputs that drive it? Write those around the number. Now you have a map, and a map is something you can work with.

The pattern is the same in every case: get something on the page, even if it's imperfect, incomplete, and obviously just a starting point. The act of creating something, anything, breaks the paralysis and shifts your brain from "this is overwhelming" to "this is something I can improve."

JUST DO IT Is Not Motivational Fluff

When Jason says "just do it," he's not being glib. He's making an operational point: the cost of starting badly is always lower than the cost of not starting.

An imperfect hiring process that you actually run will teach you more about what you need in a hire than the perfect hiring process you spent three weeks designing and never used. An imperfect referral script that goes out this week will generate actual referrals. A perfect referral script sitting in your notes folder generates nothing.

There's a quality of experience you only gain by doing the thing. No amount of planning, research, or preparation substitutes for the information you get back when you actually put something into the world and watch what happens. Every failed version teaches you what the next version needs to correct. You cannot shortcut that feedback loop by planning more carefully. You can only access it by starting.

This is especially important at year-end, when the temptation to wait for a clean slate in January is at its strongest. January 1st is not actually a clean slate. It's just December 32nd with a different number. The agencies that attack the final two weeks of December with the same energy as any other stretch are the ones who show up in January already in motion rather than trying to generate momentum from zero.

The three things to start on a blank page this week:

1. Your January production target and the three inputs that drive it. Write the number, identify the inputs, build backward from there. Ten minutes. Done.

2. The process you've been meaning to document for six months. Open a blank doc. Write three bullet points about how the thing currently works. Expand those bullets. You now have a draft process document that took twenty minutes and is 70% of what you actually need.

3. The conversation you've been avoiding. With a producer who isn't performing, a client who is unhappy, a partner you need to realign with. Write the three points you want to make before you make the call. The blank page clears. The call gets made.

What This Means for Your Agency Heading Into the New Year

The blank page is not your enemy. The blank page is the beginning of every system, every process, every record-breaking year your agency has ever had. The question is whether you treat it as an invitation or an obstacle.

Treat it as an invitation. Start stupidly small. Write the dumbest, most obvious version of the thing. Then improve it. Then improve it again. That's how everything worth building actually gets built, not in one genius stroke from a fully realized vision, but through iteration on something that started as almost nothing.

The agents who will be ahead in March 2021 are making decisions and starting things in December 2020. That's the window. Use it.

The Bottom Line

The blank page is the starting line, not the finish line. Your job is not to have the perfect answer before you touch the page, your job is to get something on the page and improve from there. The blank page process is simple: start stupidly small, ship the imperfect version, learn from what comes back, and build the next iteration. Do that enough times, and the blank page stops being paralyzing and starts being exactly what it should be: the beginning.

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About Jason Feltman: Jason Feltman is co-host of The Insurance Dudes podcast and co-author of The Million Dollar Agency. He runs a high-performance insurance agency and is obsessed with the systems and mindset that separate growing agencies from stagnant ones.

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