Jesse Gilmore 12:26
And I think I didn’t. If I think about who I was back, then even if I would have started Niche in Control or some other business during that time, I don’t think I was the person that I was meant to be. Right. And this is one of the things that taps into the mindset. Because I think that a lot of people can do the tactical things they can do the strategies they can they can understand all of the know how right? Now they can even do the right things and still not achieve what they’re going after. And it’s really based around mindset. Where if you understand what mindset actually is, it’s the understanding that we are not our static self.
So the answer of like, who am I right, the identity piece that usually holds people back from what they truly want. We’re more of that. We’re like a becoming self where we’re constantly evolving and changing. And back then I think I was a very static self. And towards the end of my time in corporate America as becoming someone different, because of the business systems that we were building for the last five years. And granted, I went from intern to like I got promoted four different times. And we ran strategic initiatives in corporate America impacting over 1200 employees with the things that we were doing. And then eventually it became like the business unit that I was working in, got acquired, all during that period of time.
But as I was doing that, I think I was becoming someone different. And even in the beginning of Niche in Control, I was somebody different, even like yesterday, somebody different. I think we’re constantly in a state of becoming and I think that entrepreneurs if you’re if you’re going after that stability, I think that stability actually comes from being adaptable. And I don’t think I was adaptable back then. I’m definitely adaptable now.
John Corcoran 14:12
Yeah, well, you must have been about adaptable to go from running three or so businesses into being an intern and working in corporate America. It reminds me personally, I had tried to start a business. After I graduated from law school, I wanted to have my own business, but didn’t really succeed. I had trouble getting clients for all the things that you’re talking about. You know, I really had a couple of clients, so it wasn’t making a lot of money. And my wife was really pushing me to go and work for someone else and learn systems and processes, which I did for a couple years.
And then eventually, like you went out on my own and started a business that was more successful. And it started a couple of years ago. But yeah, definitely seems like there was a an openness to learning and well evolving as a human, I want to ask you about your relationship with your wife, because my wife is similar doesn’t come from an entrepreneurial background, very different kind of approach much more, you know, focus on security with a job that you work for a bunch of years get a pension, stuff like that. How do you and your wife balance those different tendencies and personalities? Talk?
Jesse Gilmore 15:20
I think that the times in our relationship where we have not talked about something, if it’s like a crucial conversation that needs to happen, but then it’s swept under the rug, that’s where we may go. But I think that the fact that she went all in with the business, you just stay at home mom, we have three kids. I think that was one of the biggest leaps of faith that she’s ever made.
John Corcoran 15:45
Are you referring to your current business? Or are you referring to which one you are referring to?
Jesse Gilmore 15:49
Oh, niching control? Okay. Yeah, she was actually in different business units at the same company. While we were there, I left in September 2020. And then she left in July of 2021.
John Corcoran 16:05
And it’s funny. So she and she joined your company, and she joined a Niche in Control? A No, no, stay at home. Okay.
Jesse Gilmore 16:11
Yeah. She stayed at home. Yeah, she manages the household. Focus on this, you know, but, um, but yeah, going back to your question, based on the communication, I think that communicating about it and talking about strategies, getting to hear different things. I mean, she’s got to always look at, like, how do you manage the downside, which is an amazing, awesome asset to have in a business is being able to understand the managing of the downside, I’m gonna always be the type of person that goes, okay. What’s the risk here? And what’s the possible return on investment, which one we move on? Right? I think that understanding and aligning towards a common goal of, you know, time freedom, we got location independence, which is one of the things that we wanted, when we made the switch from corporate America to niching.
Control, and, and then also financial freedom. But I think one of the things that I realized the most, and maybe this is a good lesson for anybody that’s either just starting off in entrepreneurship, or they’re in that hustling mode, is just time freedom happens before financial freedom. And that one switch, if you can think about that, where people keep on thinking that they have to have a seven figure agency in order for them to free up time, or they have to have X, Y, and Z in order for them to fill in the blank. I think that when you can create a business and a life by design, and it is conscious, like a conscious choice, that I’m going to set boundaries on the business.
And you know, one of the things once you start doing that you start realizing that you have boundaries, there’s a work and there’s a personal and when you do that, you automatically have to prioritize, which naturally gets you into a mode of okay, what is the most important thing? And is it the most urgent or is the most important? And when people don’t have that boundary? Prioritization goes all over the place, and then they get burnt out and they close businesses.
John Corcoran 18:19
And one thing that you’ve been doing, which we were talking about before it is this 12 week, quarter or 12 a year. Okay, and tell us a little bit about that. Because I think that relates to what you’re talking about with time freedom.
Jesse Gilmore 18:31
Yeah, so I’m rolling it out this year. And what 12 week year is in maybe I even got the terminology wrong, I’m pretty sure it’s far weaker. But what it is, is basically you sprint as you’re looking at your business and quarters, and then you sprint for the first 12 weeks. And then you take the 13th week off on a sprint, and then you take it. And one of the things that I realized doing it, and first half now I’m addicted. And so it’s my family, but one of the things I realized is when you take a conscious break from your business, there’s a lot of things that happen that are beneficial. One of them, you empower your people, if you have a team, you get to check on the system.
So if you’re gone and something breaks, you go all of a sudden, no, okay, well, that’s something that needs to be fixed right? At the same exact time when you get into a cadence and you start to realize that entrepreneurship is one big marathon. And if you can understand that you’re doing these Sprint’s it gives you enough time to rethink things, rethink strategies, rethink, move, you know, because a lot of times we’re so close to the trees, we can’t see the forest. And so when we start to separate that gives us a fresh perspective, or a moment I got back in it just happened like a couple of weeks ago. I really understood one part of my business, it’s not scalable.
One part of my business has taken over A lot of time, and I immediately just thought of this one concept of simplicity. Simplicity. Simplicity is like the only thing it’s like in my podcast, a guy named Joey Gilkey talked about a singularity of focus. He’s like, it’s like the lens by which you look at everything. And if it matches the singularity of focus, you do it. If it doesn’t meet, and you say no. And my singularity of focus has become simple. So I’m constantly looking at different ways of making things simpler, like, but anyway, that fresh books if you
John Corcoran 20:33
read the gear, the most recent Elon Musk’s biography, I think they talk he talks about the best rule is no rule or the best program is no program, just eliminating things first, you know, or no, it’s mostly in the context of rocketry, right, but like the best, the best system is to just eliminate pieces and parts. Because if you have more pieces and parts, there’s more pieces and parts that can break.
Jesse Gilmore 21:00
And that’s, that’s actually, that is the first step aside from doing a timelog that we do with agency owners based on time. So the majority of people that come to us are six or seven figure agency owners, and they get to a point where they’re like, Hey, I’m, the whole business is either centralized around me and taking on more clients and increasing my hours, or I’m unclear of what I need to do. And I’m just working 80 plus hour weeks, people resonate with my story. And so a lot of times, what I’ll do is I’ll go, okay, just run through a weekly time log, basically, every half an hour for a week, you just log your time, personal and professional.
And then once you have that, it’s like raw data. It’s like, if you were to pull like marketing campaign KPIs, you can’t really run away from it. It’s just, it’s logic, right? And what we do as we tell them, the first thing to do to carve out time to work on the business, and you know, have that, that time away to direct it is elimination. And if you get to a point where even if you’re not sure whether or not you can eliminate it, just eliminate it and see what the issue is, right? And then if you can’t eliminate it, can you automate it, because there’s some other system or software, Zapier is amazing at this kind of stuff.
Where you know, the task that’s predictable, repeatable happens all the time can be automated, if it can’t be eliminated, automated, and can you delegate it to somebody else that is at a lower pay grade than you. And then last but not least, to get into a place where you can’t do those three things, anytime.
John Corcoran 22:35
I want to ask you if you have a client. So this is after you’ve formed a Niche In Control, you’ve gone through your experience in the corporate world, and then you decide to go back to working for yourself, you form Mission Control, and you’re working with different types of companies. And you had one client that came to you there was an agency business, and you took them for 15k, a month to $100,000. In about nine months. Can you take us through that?
Jesse Gilmore 22:59
Yeah, totally. Yeah. So in that way, beginning, I want to take one step behind because understanding the work with Warren really is best to understand the environment at that time. So what I was doing was starting consulting on the side, while the business of the corporation was being acquired, and it was kind of like my fallback option. At the Sands of Time, I’ve always wanted to be a consultant. And what I had done in corporate America was process flow diagrams, and business process management and project management, a lot of different kinds of pieces based around execution. So one of my first clients was a SASS company, another one was a copywriter. And the third one was Warren, who is a digital marketing agency.
And what I have done in the beginning was to create a framework where if I was to teach somebody that might have been in my previous, like, very similar to where I was, in my previous businesses, what was a systematic way to walk them through a process to get them to free themselves up. So I was literally creating a program for myself, but I had a framework of what I was doing, and I did it with a SASS company. The copywriter took on a 33 week project, and then all of a sudden, they were able to do it in less than a week. They’re like, whoa, that’s cool. And then with Warren, when I was talking with him, he’s like, the problem is not based on client acquisition, we’re just running our own systems that we do for clients, and we do it for ourselves, that’s fine. The problem is that I can’t remove myself as a bottleneck. And I can’t figure out how to train account managers that don’t take nine months to get independent. Right.
And so what we did was we freed up some time to start working on systems. And once we started working on systems we started understanding okay, what are some of those? What are some of those main kinds of processes that happen all the time: Client Onboarding, being one of them, and other one being based around the setup of different ads that he was doing? And as we continue to get everything out of him in his partner’s head. And his team said, into systems and procedures, what happened was that they could do the same amount of work and less time. And when this started happening more and more time, more time freed up. And we started understanding that the next kind of bottleneck in the business was based around the offer. If you’re doing too many things to too many people, or with too many people, that becomes very complex as you scale, right? And so we started looking at the offer and making it very client goal oriented.
And then and once we figured out that offer that made it to our clients that came in, it was a little bit more streamlined based on the systems that we had built, then the next piece was based around marketing, and then hiring and training people. And that is basically the leverage or growth method, where you start off with time freedom, then going into systems, then the offer, then the client attraction systems. And then lastly, the people systems. And all we’re doing, as we’re figuring out where that bottleneck is that’s holding the business back from growth. And one image that I want to put into everybody’s head, is just think. And if you can embrace this one concept of mindset, and how you view your business, it pretty much changes a lot of different decisions that you make, where the business is wanting to expand as fast as humanly possible.
And your role in the business is to remove whatever is holding it back from growth. And if you can keep that in mind that everything is trying to expand, then naturally, you’ll find where the bottlenecks are. And through processes and systems, you can remove the bottleneck in the switches, because there’s always problems if you solve one problem, another problem begins.
John Corcoran 26:38
So, I’m going to be trying to be the devil’s advocate here. So what if you feel like your business doesn’t have an area that is naturally trying to expand? Or how do you figure out what area is naturally trying to expand?
Jesse Gilmore 26:51
Depends on the size or the stage of business. So in the beginning, if you’re just starting off, you just started a business, proof of concept is going to be your main thing. So the bottleneck is based around gaining a demand in the market. If you have a demand in the market, then and then it’s all centralized, where a certain person is hitting capacity, you know that if they’re working later hours or project deadlines start to get messed up, or different ways of looking at the actual execution. If it’s centralized around a certain person than they need, they are the bottleneck.
If it’s based around, you’ve built systems and still centralized around a certain person. And then you might look at hiring. But ultimately, that bottleneck is just always there. So one of the questions that I ask clients, especially when the discovery call, or I’m like, if you just got flooded with business, you took on two to five times as many clients do you have right now? What would be the first thing to break? What they’ll do is go Ah, fine onboarding. Okay. What about Client Onboarding? It’s the asset gathering, okay, well, then that’s where we need to focus. If they say, oh, it’s account management. If I took on that many, I’d just be communicating with clients all the time. Like, oh, okay, client communication. How are you communicating?
Oh, it’s like Slack and email and like, oh, okay, centralize that. So it’s just a series of questions. And that kind of determines where that bottleneck is. But everybody has one, the organization of which bottleneck to focus on just comes from a lot of experience, working with agency owners, one on one for five years, and I’ve worked with about 80 of them or so I can understand patterns within a very short period of time, then like a 15 minute call, I can tell pretty much their whole strategy for the next year.
John Corcoran 28:41
Yeah, and I thought it was illustrative. You, after working with Warren, realize that agencies, even though your businesses have not been a classic agency model, were the right niche for you to focus on. And I thought that that was helpful for others who haven’t figured out what their niches so can you take us through that how you kind of determined that, after working with Warren, obviously getting some great results, you know, whatever it is a eight 8x increase in nine months that that was the right niche for you to focus on.
Jesse Gilmore 29:16
Yeah, so that comes down to an assessment of core competencies. So what I did when I was creating leverage for growth and getting to understand a bit more about my ideal client profile, I didn’t base it around previous businesses that I run or even types of businesses that I run, it was more based around my competencies. So what are my competencies? Mindset systems people, right? I know all about HR even, like talent management systems and a $4 billion global corporation. So I know hiring, training, analytics, a bunch of different things that a lot of agencies may not have competency in right now.
A lot of times people don’t go from HR into a dish A marketing agency, but maybe they do. But what I found was that my, my competencies, or we’re kind of augmenting theirs. And if we kind of think that we’re kind of like a yin and yang, or we’re partners in this, this game is called growth. That’s where I started realizing that it was kind of like a puzzle piece that was missing. And even though we do client attraction systems and help with some of that a lot of it’s more based around strategies. It’s not our strong suit, we only learned it from other marketing agencies, or real strong students based around understanding just really that that, like, we’re not going to teach them to be like a better SME, like a subject matter expert in their agency, we’re going to teach them how to be a better entrepreneur systems people mindset.
John Corcoran 30:47
Yeah, and then tell us about I know we’re a little getting a little short on time, but the Ag owner, agency owners guide to freedom what motivated that and tell us a little about the book. Yeah, totally.
Jesse Gilmore 30:58
Yeah, by the way, I’ll send you a free copy, just go to niching control.com/book. And then we have an audio book digital and in paperback that we can send to you guys for free. Yeah, but the book itself is basically, I felt the need, let me take one step back. Before I even started the book, I realized that I wanted to impact more people. And one of the greatest ways to help people is through knowledge. I read business books all the time. And what I realized was I had gotten to a point where I needed to take all the information, the case studies, the things that I had learned and just compile it all into a single asset. And, again, a lot of times that I’m building these assets, I’ve been building it for me. So this is like a reminder of all the things that I’ve learned about the same exact time, it’s an asset for others.
And so it walks through a step by step process that walks through the leverage growth method. So everything we’ve been talking about from freeing up time to the system, building to the offer to the client attraction systems and people systems is all in the book, you could literally follow it page by page and work through each one of the worksheets. It’s like a manual, it’s thick, it’s 256 pages. You can literally get a transformation from the book itself. A majority of people will go through the book, and they’ll realize it’s really hard to implement without some type of coaching. And that’s where we come in.
John Corcoran 32:26
Yeah, great. And Jesse, this has been great. I want to wrap up with my gratitude question. So I’m a big fan of gratitude, especially expressing gratitude to those who’ve helped you along the way. So she peers and contemporaries. I know, Judy, you mentioned who would you want to shout at?
Jesse Gilmore 32:45
Yeah, I would, I would like to thank Judy, rest in peace. But she has helped me really refine who I am. My vision was that she was my corporate mentor and told me all about HR and corporate politics. And getting to learn a lot more about the people’s systems if I did not learn that there would be a big part of my own kind of journey they’d be missing. My second kind of kudos is based on Sam Ovens. I had purchased his consulting accelerator program, right at the time where I was starting a consulting business, and getting to understand how he thinks taught me a lot about mindset. I took the systems piece and then the HR piece and so a shout out to Sam Oven and Judy Carson.
John Corcoran 33:35
Great and where can people go to learn more about you, Jesse and leverage for growth podcasts and your book and everything? Absolutely.
Jesse Gilmore 33:42
So you can go to nicheincontrol.com. We have all the links up in the top right of the menu. And if anybody is wanting to get a little snapshot of what it’s like within our programs, we are taking on a weekly basis tips, tools, strategies that we help our clients implement, and giving it out in a newsletter so you can go to nicheincontrol.com/newsletter for the agency SEO newsletter. But nicheincontrol.com has everything that you just think so much about. Thank you.
Chad Franzen 34:15
Thanks for listening to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast. We’ll see you again next time and be sure to click Subscribe to get future episodes.