People ask me the same question in different words. How do you run real estate and property management, a cleaning company, and a software company at once, and still show up for your family, your faith, and yourself? The assumption underneath the question is that the answer is more hours. It is not. There are only so many hours, and I gave up trying to win by adding more of them a long time ago.
The real answer is less romantic and more useful. I run an operating system. Not a productivity hack, not a color coded calendar, but a set of rhythms, boundaries, and decisions that let a portfolio run without me sitting in the middle of every choice. I have been building and refining this system for more than fifteen years, across companies in Utah and California, hundreds of units, and a team I trust. It is not perfect. It is repeatable. That is the point.
Here is what it actually looks like.
The mindset shift that changes everything
The first thing that has to change is not your schedule. It is your job description.
When you start a business, you work in it. You clean the unit, you answer the phone, you write the invoice, you fix the thing that broke at ten at night. That is honest work, and in the early days it is the only work that exists. The trap is that it feels productive, so you keep doing it long after you should have stopped.
Running a portfolio means working on it. My job is not to do the tasks inside each company. My job is to make sure each company is healthy, pointed in the right direction, and staffed by people who can do the tasks better than I can. That is a different skill entirely. It is closer to gardening than to firefighting. You tend conditions. You do not personally grow every leaf.
The hardest part of this shift is emotional, not tactical. You have to be willing to let go of the identity of being the person who does everything. For a long time, being needed felt like being valuable. I had to learn that a business that needs me for everything is not an asset. It is a job with extra stress and worse hours. The goal is to build something that runs well when I step away, because a thing that collapses without you is a thing you can never rest inside of.
The weekly operating rhythm
Everything in my system runs on a weekly cadence. Not daily, because daily is too noisy and you end up reacting to whatever screamed loudest that morning. Not monthly, because a month is long enough for a small problem to become a large one. Weekly is the heartbeat.
Here is the rhythm I hold to:
- One weekly planning block. I sit down at the same time every week, alone first, to look at each business from above. What moved, what stalled, what needs a decision from me this week and only me.
- A scorecard review for each company. Every business I run has a short list of numbers that tell me if it is healthy without me having to dig. For property management it is things like occupancy and collections and open maintenance. For the cleaning company it is jobs completed, revenue, and repeat clients. I do not need fifty metrics. I need the five that would keep me up at night if they went the wrong way.
- One clear priority per business. This is the discipline that saves me. For each company, I name the single most important thing for that week. Not a list. One. If everything is a priority, nothing is, and my team ends up guessing at what matters most.
That last point deserves weight. A leader who hands their team ten priorities has really handed them zero, because the team now has to decide which of the ten actually counts, and they will guess wrong half the time. One clear priority per business, communicated plainly, does more for momentum than any motivational speech I could give.
Building the leadership layer
You cannot run multiple companies by delegating tasks. You have to delegate ownership. There is a difference, and it took me years to feel it in my bones.
Delegating a task means you still own the outcome. You handed off the doing, but the thinking, the worrying, and the deciding still land on you. That does not scale. You have simply become a bottleneck with helpers.
Delegating ownership means someone else carries the outcome. They own the number, the decision, and the result. My job becomes hiring that person, giving them the picture of what winning looks like, handing them the authority to actually make calls, and then getting out of their way. This is the leadership layer, and it is the single highest leverage thing I have built. When I am gone for a week, the companies do not pause and wait for me. The people who own them keep steering.
Building that layer is slow and it is uncomfortable. You will watch someone do a thing differently than you would have, and sometimes worse, and you have to decide whether the gap is a coaching moment or a fire. Most of the time it is a coaching moment. The founders who never build a leadership layer are almost always the ones who could not stand to let anyone be imperfect on their behalf. I understand the instinct. I also know it is a cage.
Seeing everything from one place
For a long time, my visibility into my own companies lived in a dozen different tools, spreadsheets, inboxes, and my own head. To answer a simple question like how are we actually doing this month, I had to log into four systems and reconcile them by hand. That is not a strategy. That is a scavenger hunt, and it quietly eats hours you never get back.
This is the honest reason I built Akovex. I wanted one place to see the whole portfolio. One screen where the important numbers from every business live side by side, so I can tell in a glance whether things are healthy or whether something needs me. When your information is scattered, you cannot lead from above, because you are always down in the weeds reassembling the picture before you can even think.
The principle matters more than the software. If you run more than one thing, you need a single pane of glass. It can start as a plain spreadsheet that you update every Monday. The point is that when you sit down for your weekly review, the truth is already in front of you, and you spend your energy deciding instead of gathering.
Ruthless prioritization and the power of no
Here is something no one tells you when you start scaling. The more capable you become, the more opportunities show up, and most of them are good. Not bad. Good. That is exactly what makes them dangerous.
A bad opportunity is easy to decline. A good one that is simply not yours is the thing that quietly overloads you, because you have no obvious reason to say no except that your plate is full and your focus is finite. So you have to build the muscle of declining good things.
I have a filter I run everything through. Does this move one of my named priorities forward. Does it fit the direction I already committed to. Would the me of six months from now thank me for saying yes, or resent me for it. If the answer is not a clear yes, it is a no. A soft maybe is a no wearing a costume, and I have learned to treat it that way.
Every yes is a no to something else, usually something you cannot see yet. Say yes to a shiny new venture and you have said no to depth in the ones you already have, and no to the margin in your week that keeps you human. I protect that margin now the way I once protected revenue.
Protecting energy and calendar
You cannot out hustle exhaustion. I tried, for years, and the bill always came due, usually at the worst time. So now I manage my energy as deliberately as I manage my money.
A few things I hold firm:
- Deep work blocks. The real thinking, the strategy, the writing, the hard decisions, all of it happens in protected blocks where I am not reachable. My best work has never once happened in the cracks between meetings.
- A hard stop. My workday ends at a set time. Not when the work is done, because the work is never done. The hard stop is what forces me to prioritize during the day instead of assuming I can push everything into an endless evening.
- Sabbath rest. One day a week, I stop. Fully. No dashboards, no email, no strategizing. This is not a productivity tactic dressed up in spiritual language. It is the opposite. It is the practice of trusting that the work, and the God I answer to, do not depend on my endless striving. The strange gift of it is that I come back sharper. Rest is not the reward for the work. It is part of the machinery that makes good work possible.
If you never stop, you will make your worst decisions while convinced they are your best ones. Tiredness is a liar that feels like clarity.
Refusing to be the bottleneck
Every point above serves one goal. Do not be the thing your companies wait on.
The moment a business cannot move without your specific yes, you have capped its growth at the size of your own attention. And your attention, split across several companies, is the scarcest resource in the entire system. So I am constantly asking a simple question. Where am I the bottleneck, and how do I remove myself from that spot.
Sometimes the answer is a better hire. Sometimes it is a clearer process so a decision does not need me at all. Sometimes it is just writing down the thing that only lived in my head, so someone else can run with it. The test I use is honest and a little humbling. If I disappeared for two weeks with no notice, what would break. Whatever the answer is, that is my next project. A business built around one irreplaceable person is fragile, no matter how impressive that person looks in the moment.
The frame that keeps it sustainable
I could give you every system in this piece and it would still fall apart without the frame that holds it together. For me, that frame is faith and family.
My faith is what lets me hold the work with an open hand. I am responsible for the effort, not the outcome, and that distinction is what keeps ambition from turning into anxiety. It is why I can take a Sabbath and mean it, why I can say no without fear of missing out, why I can let my team be imperfect without spiraling. I am building things that matter, and I am also not the one holding the universe together. Both are true, and the second one is what makes the first one bearable.
My family is the reason for the boundaries, not the obstacle to the work. When my calendar and my energy are protected, the people I love get the best of me instead of what is left over. That was the whole point. The companies were always supposed to serve the life, not consume it.
Being recognized among Utah Business Women to Watch was meaningful, but it is not the scoreboard I actually keep. The real measure is quieter. Did the businesses run well without me needing to touch everything. Did I show up as a mother and not just a CEO. Did I end the week with something left in the tank. That is what sustainable looks like, and it is the only kind of success worth building toward.
If any of this resonates, I share more of the operator side of this work, the systems, the honest tradeoffs, the things that actually worked, in my newsletter, Operator’s Notes. And I go deeper on the real mechanics of running companies with the guests on my podcast, The Broker’s Table. Come sit down with us. There is always room at the table.
