By Rolf Versluis · Published September 8, 2026 on Uncommon Knowledge in Business and Life

I sat with a farm owner last spring. He described his Tuesday. Up since five, answering messages from three different vendors, chasing a late delivery, trying to figure out why the bookkeeper's numbers didn't match the bank account.

He'd considered hiring someone. Couldn't afford the payroll. Just kept showing up every day and doing everything himself. I watched him do it last time we met. Phone in one hand, coffee in the other, three different problems he couldn't put down.

I asked him what part of the day he wanted to hand off.

Everything that wasn't the actual work.

Employees, suppliers, customers, a property that needs constant attention. Managing people, talking to suppliers, showing up for customers. That takes most of his day. Everything else piles up by noon.

He tried a consultant first. Part-time. Other clients. Rate went up every year. He didn't really understand the system once the consultant moved on. I built something like that once for someone else. A year later they were gone. The system kept running. Nobody knew how it worked.

Hiring a person was option two. Payroll's the most expensive line item. Training takes time out of the owner's day. The person's good at some things, weaker at others. I've seen this pattern too. You hire someone, invest weeks of training, and then they take a better offer somewhere else. The training investment disappears when the person walks out the door.

Option three: doing it all yourself. Works until it doesn't. The day stays a mix of every kind of work at once. He becomes the catch-all.

He came to me because he'd heard about agents.

I run a fleet of these myself, spread across Alpharetta, the farm in Chatsworth, a cloud server I rent by the month, and a Mac Studio in my office. The count changes every month. They run through the night, pick up work where I left off in the morning. The farm camera on this site is one of them.

I built it so the owner keeps control. Runs on hardware he picks out, a Mac Studio, a Linux box, a small VPS (virtual private server) rented by the month. The agent reads what it gets, decides what to do, uses tools to do it, reports back. It talks to him through Telegram, email, or a chat window. Whichever one he already uses.

The agent doesn't replace anyone on the team. It picks up the loops nobody else has time to touch. The report the owner keeps meaning to build, the follow-up email that gets forgotten, the vendor that needs chasing. Open-source software. Needs configuring.

We picked one loop first. The Monday report. Ran the same way every time. Took an hour. Always got pushed to Thursday. I built an agent around it, handed it off with skills and runbooks, trained the team to run it.

The first skill the agent learned was how to format that report. Six months later, it had hundreds of skills. Broader than what any single consultant could keep in their head.

The owner owns it. The capability accumulates with the owner, not with someone else.

The other three options all disappear when the person or the consultant walks away. This one stays. The owner walks away with the system, the skills, the whole thing. That doesn't leave with anyone.

Email me at [email protected]. Thirty minutes. Tell me what keeps you busy and what an agent could take off your plate.