In this strategic episode, Jesse Gilmore, Founder of Niche in Control, shares how to escape the founder-as-bottleneck trap by shifting your identity from doer to leader and building real systems so you stop owning a job and start owning a business. If you’re still the single point of failure and every client or fire runs through you, you won’t want to miss it.

You will discover:

- Why succeeding as the best doer in stage two can make you the bottleneck that prevents scaling into higher stages

- What signs reveal you've built yourself a job instead of a business, such as inability to take a week off without everything stalling

- How to complete a 7-day time log to identify tasks for eliminate, automate, delegate, and time-block so you can shift from doer to trainer to manager to visionary

This episode is ideal for for Founders, Owners, and CEOs in stage 2 of The Founder's Evolution. Not sure which stage you're in? Find out for free in less than 10 minutes at https://www.scalearchitects.com/founders/quiz

Jesse P. Gilmore is a transformational business coach and the founder of Niche in Control, where he helps agency owners scale their businesses while reclaiming their time and peace of mind. Creator of the Leverage for Growth® method, host of the Leverage for Growth Podcast, and author of The Agency Owner’s Guide to Freedom, Jesse has helped over 100 marketing agencies break through plateaus and systematize sustainable growth. His mission: to help business owners scale not just their profits—but their freedom.

Want to learn more about Jesse Gilmore 's work at Niche in Control? Check out his website at https://www.nicheincontrol.com/

Connect with Jesse through his LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessepgilmore/

Get a FREE copy of his book The Agency Owner's Guide to Freedom at https://go.nicheincontrol.com/resources/get-the-book

Mentioned in this episode:

Take the Founder's Evolution Quiz Today

If you’re a Founder, business owner, or CEO who feels overworked by the business you lead and underwhelmed by the results, you’re doing it wrong. Succeeding as a founder all comes down to doing the right one or two things right now. Take the quiz today at foundersquiz.com, and in just ten questions, you can figure out what stage you are in, so you can focus on what is going to work and say goodbye to everything else.

Founder's Quiz

Hello, hello and welcome. Welcome once again

to the start, scale and succeed podcast, the only podcast that

grows with you through all seven stages of your journey. As a

founder, I'm your host, Scott Ritzheimer, and there's a trap

that nobody warns you about. The very skill set that made you

good enough to go out on your own can actually become the very

thing that keeps you from ever building a business. And when

you're the best at whatever it is that you do, and you're the

best at the work that you've started, you can also become the

bottleneck very quickly, because every deliverable, every client,

every fire runs through you. It makes the work harder and

harder, and the better it gets, the bigger you get, the deeper

you fall into this trap. And fortunately, it doesn't have to

stay that way, because my guest today, Mr. Jesse P Gilmore, is

going to help us figure out the exact way to get out of it and

what you can do next. And he's well qualified to do so, because

Jesse is a transformational business coach and the founder

of niche in control, where he helps agency owners to scale

their businesses while reclaiming their time and peace

of mind. He's a creator of the leverage for growth method. He's

host of the leverage for growth podcast. He's also author of the

agency owner's guide to freedom. And there it is. Jesse has

helped over 100 marketing agencies to break through

plateaus and systematize sustainable growth. Keyword

there his mission to help business owners to scale, not

just their profits but their freedom. And he's here with us

today. Jesse, welcome to the show. Glad to have you here. One

of the things that just jumped off the pages of the book as I

was reading through it was this idea of a distinction between

owning a job and owning a business. And I think a lot of

founders, especially in this stage two that we're talking

about, have a job, you know, it might have a little bit more

freedom, but probably, if they're honest, it has a lot

more responsibility than it does freedom. And so what's going on

here? Maybe, what are some of the signs that somebody has

built themselves a job instead of a business?

Yeah, that's a great way of starting off our

conversation. And in my first businesses, everything kind of

funneled through me. If I had worked didn't work, work didn't

get done. That is very similar to that people are kind of

feeling trapped. So if you took off a week, would the business

even sustain or grow without you? That is a big kind of like

indicator or self assessment type of question. Also, as you

take on more clients, does it increase your personal hours?

These are very simple ways of being able to determine whether

or not you are actually the bottleneck, or what I would

consider to be what's called a single point of failure, where

everything relies upon a single person, and it's a certain

stage, like you talked about how this is stage two in your model,

where there is kind of, like a reason why it's there, but

doesn't necessarily mean that you have to stay there and

leverage for growth methods all based around freeing them up and

kind of moving through the different stages. But I would

say, anybody that's listening to this, those two questions, if

you can answer them, they'll determine if you're in this

stage right now.

Yeah, I love that you brought that point

there at the end, because it, to some extent, succeeding in stage

two is about being the answer to all those questions, because

somebody has to do it, and there's nobody else around. So

if you don't answer it, it doesn't move. That's That's by

design, not just by default. However, if we get stuck in

that, I think that's where it becomes really problematic. How

do you help folks to recognize when it's time to start

addressing that? Like, how does someone know if, if building the

business is to the degree that they have is just a necessary

part of the game, or that they are stuck in a pattern that's

not serving them well anymore.

Yeah, what I've found is that there's certain

kind of growth plateaus that happen right right around the

20,000 a month, where you're about to hire the first person

that's like one of the kind of plateaus. And a lot of times

those types of people that are like solopreneurs, that's like

the first stage of being like, okay, something's wrong.

Something is happening within the business, and I need to make

a decision if I'm going to stay small or start to grow a team.

Okay? And I think that that is one of the biggest kind of

steps. Another step is where you start to realize that what

you're doing in the business might necessarily be the thing

that you had signed up for. You know, as you start to take on

more team members, and maybe you don't find the right talent,

you're positioning yourself based around kind of more of a

default type of role, as opposed to being very specific about

this is my unique ability in the business. This is where I need

to focus, or stay as a visionary, and start building a

business around them. And I think one of the biggest kind of

unlocks, and I might be jumping into a further question you're

going to ask, but is you have to make a decision on whether or

not you want a business to kind of stay all about you kind. Like

a centralized business model, right? And there's benefits to

that. Some people are like fractional coos or different

types of fractional types of roles. Can make a lot of money

doing that solo. But if you're starting to think about what me

and Scott focus on, which is scale, you have to kind of

switch your identity, and you have to start looking at, maybe

I was the doer for a period of time, and now I need to start

thinking about, let's just be the world's greatest trainer.

Can I train people better than what I am currently? And if I

can train them, can I move into management, kind of be the

world's greatest manager, and then start moving through these

different identity shifts. But I think that one of the biggest

things is, is if you get to a place where you can start to

understand that you could hire somebody and that could take,

you know, things off of your plate, what is that kind of the

first step I always tell people to do, like a seven day time

log, and to get to understand that your use of time within the

business, and immediately that gives you the raw inputs to

figure out, should I be Doing this, or should I not be doing

this? If I hired somebody, what would they do? You know, that's

kind of a foundational step.

Yeah, yeah. There's so much to unpack in

there. I want to start with a statement you made earlier about

the choice that we're really having to make, and that is, do

I stay small or grow a team? And I think for a lot of folks, the

there's, like, a right answer to that and a wrong option, right?

Is it one of those is good and one is bad? Is that true? Is it

bad to stay small, or is it better to grow a team? What have

you found to be true?

It really depends on what your vision is. So a lot

of times, when I ask agency owners that I work with, or even

before starting to work together, I'm like, What's your

end game? Like, what are you trying to accomplish within this

business? And what I find that the ones that are wanting to

grow and are wanting to grow a team and build systems and kind

of switch those roles, like we're talking about, usually

have three End Games. One of them is, is that they either

scale it to the moon as much as they possibly can, eventually

sell it, or work in the business whenever they want to. If any

one of those three End Games are kind of like, you're listening

to me and Scott, and you're like, Hey, I'm one of those

three, then you do actually need to make the switch from small to

larger. And it doesn't necessarily mean that you have

to go, like, to the nth degree when it comes to growth. You can

actually achieve your goals a lot faster than a lot of people

think. A lot of times people have that kind of like, have do

be model where it's like, once I have this, then I do this, and I

become this. It's actually the reverse. And so I would say,

anybody that's listening that has one of those end games, you

do have to make a choice to be bigger and start growing a team.

For those that are kind of like, maybe that's not one of my End

Games. And maybe my end game is just to have complete control

over what I'm doing, and I only grow to a certain amount and My

impact is smaller. Totally fine, but that's that's it's dependent

upon what their definition of success really is.

Yeah, that's so true. Really making that

decision based on the vision you have for the organization is

wise. One of the things that you said, so let's say someone's

deciding to move forward, and they do want to grow a team. You

use the phrase, becoming the world's greatest trainer and

then moving on to becoming a manager. And you talked about

this identity shift that has to happen. And one of the things

that I've found, and this is, I would say, very true in the

agency space in particular, is their identity, is marketer,

right, or agency owner, or some, you know, SEO expert, or

something, whatever their their thing is. And there aren't a

whole lot of entrepreneurs that start out saying, hey, I want to

be the best trainer in the world. How do folks make that

identity shift? And can anyone do it? Or is it like for an

elite few?

I would like to say, with the right method, you

can that anybody can do it. But I think that when you when you

come out as a marketing agency owner, typically, you're like a

freelancer in the way beginning, you start working on by the

hour, you generate enough demand, then you leave your job

and you start making the choices. And a lot of the

business in the way beginning is based around your skills, but

they get to a certain point where there's only so many hours

you're going to be able to work. There's only so much of an

impact you can do if it's just based around you. And I think

that one of the biggest things that I can get clients to do is

a lot of mindset work, getting understand where you are and

what do you want to be remembered for when you die,

like really intense types of questions, and then based around

where you are right now, what habits are actually holding you

back from achieving that end game that you're trying to

accomplish. And I think that once people start to make that

mental shift, that right now, the best value that I can give

to the business is not by doing the SEO type of work, but

actually finding people that can do it better than I can, or at

least, as Dan Martell would say, 80% by somebody else is 100%

awesome, like that same kind of idea where you have other people

starting to do a lot of that quote, unquote, grunt work. So

you. Can actually focus on what you are the world's greatest at,

and the trainer is not necessarily the end game. In our

model, we think of a lot about these identity shifts, going

from the doer to the trainer to the manager to the leader, and

then eventually to the visionary, very similar to your

stages, where you talk about the chief executive at stage five.

And I think that the best thing that we can do is build

businesses to support the founder in that transition. And

it kind of gives a path out of just constantly grinding.

Yeah, I love the stage approach. I'm somewhat

partial to it. There is you mentioned this before, and I

want to come back to it, because I have found it to be

exceptionally helpful and also exceptionally repulsive to a lot

of people. But this idea of sitting down is actually

tracking what you do. Tell us a little bit about how that I

think you use a one week log, if I remember correctly. How do you

do that? Does it take? Like, hours a day? What does it look

like, and why is it helpful?

Yeah, totally. So the weekly time log is one of

the first things I do with every single client, specifically one

on one, clients will do a deep dive into their time log and

give them actionable things from it. But it's very simple. For

seven days, just log your time every half an hour. For seven

days, you can sleep and then cover it all so you don't have

to do it while sleeping. But what it does is it captures the

both personal and professional, and you get a snapshot of kind

of raw data if you're a marketer right now, and you understand

that if you're going to take over somebody's ad campaign, you

look at past campaigns before you do anything else, right?

Same exact idea when it comes to time use and those identity

shifts, right? Your use of time is going to shift when you start

to move from Doer to trainer to manager and so forth. So what we

do is, for seven days, every half an hour, as much detail as

you possibly can. So you can't just say client work, right? You

got to kind of dive in. And this is what I'm doing. Okay? Now I

started binge watching Netflix. I'm kind of bored, or I'm not

going to sleep because I'm checking my phone like anything

that gets you to be so raw and aware of what, where your time

is going, it gives you so much data, and we run them through

the eliminate, automate, delegate, time block

methodology, which, If there's something that you're doing that

you can eliminate, just do it. There's no reason to automate or

delegate or time block something that's not even worth it.

Automation right now, especially in the land of AI and and where

we're at right now, it can take over large amounts of the things

that you're doing right now to free you up to delegate

effectively. And delegation does not necessarily mean that you

just immediately, just give them everything you can focus on low

risk tasks or things that are totally not worth your pay

grade, and be able to focus mostly on time block. Now time

blocking, a lot of people always just think about allotting a

certain amount of time towards a certain activity, which is part

of it. It's actually the minimization of task switching.

So if you're working on something technical, keep all

technical stuff together. If you are working working with

clients, group them together, right? If you're working with a

team, group them together, and what happens is, is that you

have make better decisions, you have less fatigue, and you can

get more done. So that's what we do. And it starts up the whole

process.

It's so it's such a great first step for

someone looking for a practical way out of this job that they

created for themselves. It really is step one. I love that

you do it that way. Jesse, there is a question that I have for

you before we make sure folks know how they can get in touch

with you, and that is, what is the biggest secret that you wish

wasn't a secret at all. What's that one thing you wish

everybody watching or listening today knew?

And it might be because we just talked about the

time log, but what I want to say is, is that for if you are

starting to realize that the things that you want in your

life and business, you, quote, unquote, don't have time for,

I'm just going to say that's BS, keep it as that, because you

have a lot more control over your life and business than you

think. And I think that if you go through a seven day, even if

it's like a seven day time log that feels like it's like nails

on a chalkboard, to get through those seven days, it's gonna set

you up so much for success if you just go through the seven

days of roughness to get to a place where you can realize that

it's all based around prioritization and mindset. I

think that's that's my takeaway.

I love it. I love it. For those of you, for

those who are listening, who are saying, Hey, I'd love to know

more. Where's this book? Where can I get a copy of it? How can

they reach out to you directly, especially those who are in that

agency owner space, where can folks find you and reach out for

more?

Sure, so we're going through a rebrand right

now, but you'll find my website niche in control. So niche, N,

I, C, H, E, in control.com. If you want a copy of my book that

Scott was reading right. Before this to prepare I can go to

niche in control.com/book, and then I'm very active on

LinkedIn. So you can go to LinkedIn, and it's just my my

name, Jesse P Gilmore, and just let me know that you listen to

me and Scott, so that way I can understand a bit more of the

context. And I'd love to chat with you.

Fantastic, highly recommend it. For those

of you who listen to the show, you probably like stage based

advice, and Jesse does a great job at that. This is an

excellent resource. Jesse, thanks for being on the show. It

was just a privilege, awesome conversation. I really enjoyed

it, and I appreciate your time. And for those of you watching

and listening, you know that your time and attention mean the

world to us. I hope you got as much out of this conversation as

I know I did, and I cannot wait to see you next time. Take care.