Do, Do, or Die: The Action-Oriented Mindset That Separates Growing Agencies from Stalled Ones
Hosts of The Insurance Dudes Podcast — 1,000+ episodes helping insurance agents build elite agencies
Agency ownership has a natural sorting mechanism that most people don't recognize until it's already done its work. It separates the people who move from the people who mean to move. It doesn't care about your intentions, your credentials, your market knowledge, or how smart your plan looks on paper. It only cares about one variable: do you do the thing, or don't you? The agencies that grow are run by people who do. The agencies that plateau, drift, or fold are almost always run by people who plan to do, intend to do, almost did, or are about to do. Almost never by people who actually did.
The Distinction That Changes Everything
Jason is coffee in hand, and this one is direct. The concept is simple on the surface: do the work. But the operational complexity underneath that simple instruction is where most agency owners get lost.
Action-orientation is not about being busy. Some of the least effective agency owners in the business are intensely busy. They're in constant motion, meetings, calls, emails, admin, firefighting. Their calendar is full, their days are long, and their agency is standing still. Busyness is not action-orientation. Busyness is often its opposite, because it consumes all the energy and time that real action-orientation requires.
Real action-orientation is about doing the specific things that move the needle, and doing them even when you don't feel like it, even when conditions aren't ideal, and even when you haven't fully figured out the perfect approach. It's the combination of knowing what matters, which requires clarity, and actually executing on it regularly, which requires discipline and tolerance for discomfort.
The "do, do, or die" framework is not grim. It's clarifying. For any given task or goal, you have exactly two options: do it, or accept that you're not doing it and own that choice. There is no middle state that has any integrity. Saying "I'll do it later" indefinitely is choosing not to do it, just without the honesty of admitting it. The framework forces the binary: either this is a yes, in which case it goes on today's list and gets done, or it's a no, and you free up the mental space you've been wasting on its presence in your consciousness.
Why Doing Is the Only Path to Getting Good
Here is the operational truth that underlies the whole conversation: you cannot get good at anything without doing it at scale. No amount of preparation, study, or observation substitutes for repetition. The insurance agents who are the best on the phone are the best because they have made more calls than everyone else. The commercial producers who can walk into any industry and hold a credible coverage conversation got there by having hundreds of those conversations, most of which were imperfect.
The implication is uncomfortable for agency owners who prefer to have things figured out before they start: you are going to be bad at the new thing for a while, and the only way through that is repetition. Waiting until you're ready is waiting to be bad privately instead of publicly. But private badness never generates the feedback loop that produces improvement. Public badness, calls that don't convert, pitches that miss, marketing that underperforms, gives you the data you need to get better.
Jason's framework for action-orientation has a few specific operational elements.
The first is decision speed. Action-oriented people make decisions faster than their more deliberate counterparts. Not recklessly, but with the understanding that a good decision made today with available information is almost always more valuable than a perfect decision made next month with complete information. In a competitive market like insurance, decision speed is a direct competitive advantage.
The second is tolerating discomfort at the execution point. The moment when most agency owners lose the action-orientation battle is not in the planning phase. It's at the specific moment of execution, picking up the phone, sending the first email, having the uncomfortable performance conversation, launching the campaign before it feels ready. The feeling at that moment is resistance, and the only thing that moves through resistance is motion. Jason's prescription is to shorten the gap between decision and action to the point where resistance doesn't have time to build.
The third is measuring outputs, not intentions. Track what you did, not what you planned to do. A daily list of intentions is a wish list. A daily list of completed actions is a performance record. When you keep a performance record honestly, you get accurate information about whether you are actually action-oriented or whether you are action-oriented in your mind while being planning-oriented in your calendar.
What This Means for Your Agency
Pick the three most important activities for your agency growth right now. Not the three most important projects, the three most important recurring activities. Prospecting calls, referral outreach, team coaching conversations, whatever they are for your specific situation. Now look at your calendar for last week and count how many times you actually did each of those activities. The gap between your answer and the ideal number is your action gap.
Then remove friction from those activities. If the prospecting calls aren't happening, why not? Is it that the list isn't ready? Build the list once and reuse it. Is it that the script isn't finalized? Use an imperfect script and refine as you go. Is it that you haven't blocked the time? Block it now and treat it as a commitment identical to a client appointment.
If you manage a team, understand that action-orientation is partly cultural and you set the culture. If the owner is slow to execute, the team will match that pace. If the owner moves fast, makes decisions clearly, and does what they say they're going to do, the team builds around that standard.
The Bottom Line
Do, do, or die is not a threat. It's a clarity tool. Every day your agency is either moving toward what you built it to be or it isn't. The difference is almost entirely in whether you and your team are doing the specific things that generate growth, or spending time on everything else. Action-orientation is learnable. Build it deliberately. Start today.
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About Jason Feltman: Jason Feltman is co-host of The Insurance Dudes podcast and a P&C agency owner. He specializes in the operational and mindset side of building an insurance agency that produces results without burning out the owner.
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