INTRO
TONY: Welcome back to the podcast. Now, most entrepreneurs begin their business with a simple goal—freedom. Freedom to build something meaningful. Freedom to control our time. Freedom to create a life on our own terms. But somewhere along the way, many founders discovered the opposite is really happening. The business grows, the revenue increases, the team expands, and yet somehow the founder becomes more trapped than ever. Every decision runs through them. Every problem lands on their desk and the very company that they built for freedom becomes a machine that can't function without them.
You know me. I've been in the corporate world for three decades. I've seen this happen where it's micromanaged on such a level you probably wouldn't believe it unless you were in it. Well, today's conversation looks directly at that challenge. My guest, Jesse P. Gilmore. He works with agency owners who reach that stage where the founder becomes the single point of failure in the business.
Now, after experiencing several business failures himself, he began studying the patterns that keep entrepreneurs—that keep us stuck in operations instead of leading our companies. I've been there even on podcasting. I've worked in my business instead of on my business, and it's just something that you just keep getting thrown into it, you know what I mean?
Well, what emerged from that work with Jesse is a framework for shifting from operator to architect. I love that word—building systems, structure and leadership so the business can actually scale without consuming the founder's life. If you're an entrepreneur who feels like the business depends on you more than it should, this conversation may help you more than you think. It might help you rethink how growth in your business is really supposed to work.
Let's dive in. Let's go. Bring him on. Hi, Jesse. Welcome to The Tony DUrso Show.
JESSE: Tony, thank you so much for having me on the show. Super excited for our conversation.
TONY: Oh, great. The honor is mine. We're all looking forward to learning about how and why the founders become the bottleneck in their own businesses and how to fix it. And what I like to do, Jesse, is let's kind of step back for a moment. Can you tell us what led you into entrepreneurship in the first place, to eventually helping agency founders really build their business and have it so that it runs without them? So I'm really curious what leadership, guidance and help that you've learned from this along the way?
INTERVIEW – PART 1 (JESSE'S BACKGROUND: THREE FAILURES & LESSONS)

JESSE: Absolutely. We could probably have the whole episode on this one question, but I'll try to keep it pretty short. So first off, none of my family members were entrepreneurs. And so the whole idea of owning a business was kind of like a new concept for the family. And when I was about eighteen, I started to kind of tap into lucid dreaming and getting to understand a bit more about psychology, and I had this dream that I wanted to start a business with my brother Jeremy.
And shortly after the dream, I got a job as a B2B door-to-door salesman. And I started going door to door selling office supplies—a very humbling experience, but taught me a lot about business, where I was asking every business owner that I talked to, "What's the ticket to a successful business?" And I'm a really good note-taker. So I took seventeen eighty-page notes of the answers, and I thought that that was enough to get started.
So in two thousand and six, I came back from Florida to Minnesota and started this business with my brother. But the problem with the business is we fell in love with the idea before a proof of concept. And we were kind of innovative at the time. Like Facebook and Myspace were brand new kind of things. And we were promoting the arts and culture in Minnesota, and we fell in love with the idea so much that our proof of concept—actually getting it out to the market—took three years. I would never recommend that anybody ever do that.
But what it did was it started leading towards, you know, sixty, eighty-hour weeks. And at the time that we were becoming more successful on the outside, on the inside, we were dying. We had just kind of burnt out. And one of the worst things you can ever experience as a founder is losing that vision, losing that passion, that inspiration for the thing that you literally just created.
So that one got dissolved. And I just—I was like, "Maybe it was just that business." So then I started another one, right? And then the same thing happened. And what I found was in each one of these businesses—and I created three before I went into corporate—I was finding that if I didn't work, work didn't get done, and I couldn't effectively give that work to somebody else and have them do that at the same level of quality that I wanted.
And so I sucked up my ego, traveled to Oregon with my wife, and we started working for a four-billion-dollar global corporation. And I worked under the VP of HR. And it was funny. Judy, she was like, "Jesse, here's three months worth of projects." I was like, "Oh, okay." And then I finished it in three weeks and she's like, "Okay, you're like a different breed here. Let me give you a project that you can't complete."
And she sent me on a corporate mission that ended up being my main focus, which was to remove single points of failure from the business of a ten-thousand-person company. And over those five years, I started learning the things that I was missing in my previous businesses.
And it wasn't until the corporate business unit that I was working in got acquired that I started realizing, "Man, this is actually what I was missing in my previous businesses."

INTERVIEW – PART 2 (FOUNDING MISSION CONTROL & THE FIRST AGENCY CLIENT)

JESSE: So Mission Control was founded under the mission and the vision of helping people that were probably in the same spot as I was to kind of remove the single point of failure so they can scale.
And one of the first clients that I had was a digital marketing agency. I was like, "I didn't know anything about agencies before working with them," but I was like, "Oh, this is the framework that I'm using." And what happened was we took Warren from fifteen thousand per month to one hundred thousand per month in nine months, and all of a sudden I was like, "Whoa, I stumbled upon something."
And over the last six years, going from Warren and one case study all the way up to five hundred agencies that I've worked with and writing a book about it, it's all geared towards what's called the Leverage for Growth method, and it removes that founder dependence. So that's as short of an answer to my background as I can give.
TONY: Wow, you packed a punch, I love it. I'm still stuck on the "here's a job task that you'll never be able to finish, you'll never be able to complete," I love that. But while you're saying this, I'm thinking to myself, put a pin in it. I gotta tell Jesse you're going to help me. You make companies grow that fast. We're going to talk after this because you're going to definitely help me scale. But meanwhile, I have to get the interview.
I want to go into the pattern behind the failures that you had and kind of get a better understanding of it. You had said to me before that you had three businesses that failed and that you were the bottleneck. So I kind of want to go into this, tear it apart. How did you recognize that pattern and what was going on that this all happened?

INTERVIEW – PART 3 (RECOGNIZING THE PATTERN: SINGLE POINT OF FAILURE)

JESSE: Unfortunately, in my first three businesses, I wasn't as self-aware as I am these days. And during that time, I was very unconscious about what was not working and what the root cause was. And it wasn't until that acquisition in twenty nineteen that I started to kind of do a big reflection looking back on previous journals and what actually led to it. And I had been taught root cause analysis in corporate. And so I was starting to use it on my own story because I felt as though corporate was kind of like a stage or a chapter in my life that taught me a certain thing.
But I never was a good employee. I was always an entrepreneur, like someone who's working with it and trying to grow something within it. So in the process of twenty twenty, we had moved from Corvallis area to Portland right before twenty twenty hit, and when I was in quarantine, it was a perfect time to kind of start imagining something new.
And that reflection process got me to start realizing that as demand increased within the business, I didn't have the foundation. I didn't have the architecture that allowed scale to be not based around me. And I didn't really understand how standards and continuous improvement and systems—and what do they actually mean, those types of things. And what makes a system actually effective? It's all of those kind of pieces that led towards everything funneling through me.
And what I found was the easiest way to describe what was happening is the difference between a centralized business model and a decentralized business model. When you think about a centralized business model, everything kind of funnels through a single person. It can be a founder. It could be an employee, it could be a contractor, even could be a vendor. But when something is constantly funneling through a single person, if that person is removed from the business or they get sick, or they go on vacation or whatever, the business can no longer function as it has. And that's what's called a single point of failure.
All my businesses prior to Mission Control, I was a single point of failure.
TONY: That's a very hard lesson for a founder, a CEO, to realize because they spent their lives at whatever point building the company, starting from scratch or taking a family business and improving it and really, really working that. And what does that term—I'm trying to think of that term—a self-assessment. It's something that I've never seen. They just don't have it yet. You had it because the last thing a CEO or founder is going to ever say or think is that they're stopping their own business from growing. It's these other people.
Yet you were able to recognize that. It's a very humble quality. It's a great quality. I have not seen that in the corporate world that I've been around, and I've spoken to and dealt with a lot of CEOs and founders in my corporate days as well. I just—I don't know why. Perhaps maybe you better understand it, but I'm just very curious about that.
And probably before you go into answering that question, let me just for the audience here, this is Jesse P. Gilmore. We're talking about why founders become the bottleneck in their own business and how to fix it. You can find him at NicheInControl.com—niche or niche, however you want to pronounce it. It's N-I-C-H-E-I-N-C-O-N-T-R-O-L dot com. NicheInControl.com.
And that idea where everything starts funneling through one person, that's where things begin to break down.

SPONSOR BREAK – MONARCH

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And now back to my conversation with Jesse Gilmore, talking about how everything in a business can end up funneling through one person.

INTERVIEW – PART 4 (SELF-AWARENESS & FINDING YOUR UNIQUE ABILITY)

TONY: All right. So yes, please, this self-assessment review. I just don't see that. I've never seen that before.
JESSE: Yeah. One of the things that I went through—I've joined a lot of, I've had a lot of mentors in my life. And it all started from my corporate mentor. But from there, one of the masterminds that I was a part of, we went through a very intensive called "Sole Purpose" and finding out your sole purpose of being in existence. And a lot of it was based around just taking a lot of self-awareness, self-assessments like the Kolbe, StrengthsFinder, Color Code, and Astrology. Like there's a bunch of different things. And then looking at the commonality between all of those to find what your sole purpose or what Dan Sullivan would call your unique ability.
And I've always been a person that studies psychology. I was studying psychology back when I was a teenager, and I wanted to go study psychology in college. And even with what I do for clients, a lot of it has to do with psychology because the mindset is actually more important and more influential. That inner game, which Gino is talking about, is very true. If you fix the inner game, the outer game kind of works.
But that type of awareness was just kind of built into me. And once I started to realize that the best thing that any founder can really do is figure out what their unique ability is, and then building a business around that unique ability—not necessarily meaning that you are the single point of failure, but to position you according to your strengths. So as the business grows, you're actually feeling more fulfilled as opposed to less fulfilled.
Those are all things that I kind of geek out about. And when we do it correctly, it's like this beautiful concoction. So I guess anybody that's on that kind of same journey where you're listening and you're like, "I'm not really sure what my unique ability is," I would just take all those assessments that I just talked about and then look at the commonality and you'll start to understand how you need to position yourself.
TONY: Interesting. While you're saying this, I was thinking about this, and I must not be thinking about what you're saying, because I'm thinking on a different tangent here, a little juxtaposition. Because these founders, these executives, these people that started the business—I mean, one for one, they always thought marketing or sales was their problem. It's all marketing. It's all sales.
One of the last companies I worked for, Jesse—sales, I was in charge of sales. I did pretty well. Marketing was an issue for real, but delivery was atrocious. Yet the founder never focused on it. It was always marketing or sales, always marketing or sales. And I think some of us fall into that trap. Yet delivery and building up your infrastructure and being known for something good. That to me is really, really key.
So I just wanted to mention that. It probably has not a whole lot to do with what you're saying, but I think that, again, is part of that myopic looking of the founder and being so convinced. Well, you know, you got to give it to them. They helped start the company. They put it together, they built it on their own back. So I get that. But they have to stop. There's a point where you have to realize it’s not marketing and sales anymore, like it was when you were first starting knocking on doors. You know what I mean?
JESSE: Absolutely. Yeah. I think what you're talking about is that revenue trap where you're just focused solely on marketing and sales, and you feel as though delivery will figure it out. And you're describing about ninety percent of any growth program that's out there. They don't have what we consider the Leverage First scaling program where you focus on leverage first and what's called asymmetric returns. The things that you do in a business, that one unit of input creates ten units of output. And if you keep on doing that over a period of time, you don't need as many people. Number one, your profit margins are a lot better. And if you get client results, you can use that in marketing and you stop saying how great you are and you just literally use client results to do it for you.
That's actually what has kept us in business is literally just case studies—tons and tons and tons of case studies about it. Because we don't own an agency. And the biggest skepticism that ever comes up is, "If you don't own an agency, you don't know our world." And it's like, "Well, have you ever worked with five hundred agencies before?" You know, and then here's the case studies like, "Don't listen to me. Listen to them."
And I think that anybody that's kind of in that ninety percent of people where you're just focused on marketing and sales and your delivery sucks—fix churn and keep clients longer. And it just makes life a million times easier than trying to flood it with marketing and sales, but having a leaky back end.
TONY: Totally true. Totally, completely. It's a habit. It becomes a habit. Because again, I know I've said this multiple times, but when you love something, when you eat, drink, sleep, and breathe getting this business going day after day, week after week, month after month, and year after year. And you bring in some people, you don't even realize that you're so dead set into that mindset. And yet that becomes, as you mentioned, the revenue trap these founders have.
You know, that I've seen have not moved on or realized that they should move on and they may dabble a little bit. "Oh, yeah, let's get delivery going or whatever." But it's never been strong enough. And so it becomes the trap. But I also think it's the revenue habit. It's just the way they think and they're not going to change. You know, you drive the same car every day. You probably eat some of the similar foods. You just get into these habits. And it's that same way with CEOs.
And I'm really hoping that this conversation we're having here helps companies, helps them get out of that, rethink their drink, so to speak.




INTERVIEW – PART 5 (THE IDENTITY SHIFT: FROM OPERATOR TO ARCHITECT)

TONY: And one of the things, and I think this leads into one of the things that I've seen in your material, you call it the identity shift. You talk about that to switch from operating the business, being in the company. We talked, we mentioned being on the company. You said a great word. You have a great word here—an architect. To switch from being an operator to an architect. So I'd love to take a look, Jesse, at let's talk about that. What does that shift look like? You know, we've got CEOs listening to this show. How do we get their attention to look at this phenomenon, this phrase, whatever you want to call it?
JESSE: Yeah, totally. And "architect" can also be synonymous with "visionary." So if "architect" is something that people don't latch on to, "visionary" is the other one.
And when you think about the identity shift, when you first start off a business, you are naturally building the business around your skills, especially service-based businesses. Now, I only work with service-based businesses as opposed to products. So there might be a little bit of a different identity there. But when you think about the starting point, we'll take a marketing agency owner for an example. At the very beginning, they start off as a freelancer. They start getting some work maybe on Upwork or something like that, and then they develop enough demand to get to a place where they go from a freelancer to "now we're an agency," right?
And everything still funnels through them. So their initial hiring is based around anything that I don't want to do, just give it to somebody else, right? And then eventually you get to a certain place where you're going to need a second version of you, at least with some of the specialist type of work, and you go from being the doer or the operator, and you start realizing, "Oh my gosh, with these new people, I'm going to have to train them effectively. Otherwise, what's going to happen is I'm just going to keep on doing, they're going to keep on doing, and then the work product is going to suck."
And so ultimately, the first identity shift that people start to have that they need to is become a really, really good trainer. Can I train somebody effectively to a place where they take on the role, own the role, not just tasks, right? And then they become independent within that. And if you can do that effectively, you can start training people to do well. But that's one step.
Once you kind of shift the identity to where the greatest value that you can give to your business is not doing the work, it's training the people, then it starts shifting. Eventually you have to manage the people, right? So you go, "Okay, well, management's a little different. The performance is not good. Now I have to make another identity shift where I have to focus on management, right?" They're trained up now. Are they performing? And if they're not performing, how do I get them back on track? Right.
And with management, you get to a place where people talk about running a business. "I'm just running a business. I'm running a business." That's just like the same thing over and over again. And if you stay in the management role and don't keep on moving, your business will stay flat. The culture will be complacent. There's a lot of issues that happen with the founder staying in management.
And eventually you'll start realizing, "Man, I need to direct this. I have to have something bigger than I'm working towards that's not just running a business, but something that is pulling us forward as an organization." And that's when you start shifting into leadership.
Difference between management and leadership is pretty simple. Management focuses on the how and the when, and then leadership focuses on the what and the why. Okay. And when you step into leadership, you are pulling something out of people, right? Great leaders, the greatest leaders of all time, focus on the why. And then they just communicate the vision to a place where people feel the inspiration and the motivation to continue to move forward towards something.
The difference between management and leadership makes a big difference in the culture of the group that you're creating, right? And when you start to focus on leadership, eventually you're not focused on what's happening today and this week, you're starting to focus on month and quarter and then maybe year, right?
And eventually you'll get to a place where you start developing other leaders and you move into visionary. This is where you're focused on what is the way to impact the most amount of people. And all those different shifts between the operator to the trainer, to the manager, to the leader, to the visionary or architect—those five main roles require you to view the way that you create the most value to the company is different and keeps on switching. That's why it's called an identity shift.
Does that make sense?
TONY: And that shift from doing the work to designing how the work gets done, that's where things really begin to change.
SPONSOR BREAK – SHOPIFY

TONY: And let me pause here for a moment, because that idea of stepping into something bigger, that's something every entrepreneur faces. There's always a moment when you decide to build something of your own, and if you're honest, it doesn't feel certain. It feels like risk. You start asking yourself, "What if this doesn't work? What if no one buys? What if I'm not ready?"
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And now back to my conversation with Jesse Gilmore breaking down the shift from operator to true leadership inside your business.





INTERVIEW – PART 6 (THE FRAMEWORK: ELIMINATE, AUTOMATE, DELEGATE, TIME BLOCK)

TONY: Yeah, it does. I'm thinking with this, and I think this leads into the next point that I was enjoying about your material that actually leads into more serious leadership. If I could put it in those terms, the what and the why. You talk about the framework of eliminate, automate, delegate to basically as the founder, the CEO, to remove yourselves from the daily operations, again, working in the company as opposed to working on the company.
JESSE: It's so beautiful. I love this framework because it's unbelievably simple and effective. I just—it always works. So one of the first things I do with every single client that I work with, whether it's in our mastermind or working with me one on one, or even doing one of our ninety-day sprints where it's like a done-with-you, I always have the founder do a seven-day weekly time log every half an hour for seven days, both personal and professional. They log it and it is the fastest slap in the face of how they are using their time.
And we'll probably do a time study at some point in more of an anonymous and a larger amount to see where time use is. Because ultimately, if you are not achieving what you truly want or what that vision is, how you use your time is that habit that you're talking about—the revenue habit. But now it's like the time habit and the habits that you have accepted as normal have kept you where you're at, right?
And if we were to try to create a new normal for you, you have to switch the habits. So the first thing I always do is just get them to be very raw about their time. And the more detail that they are in there, the more the benefit that they get actually out of the activity. And I've seen a wide range of answers with this thing, from addictions to social media, from distractions to not wanting to do something that they need to do in the business. And so they're distracted by other things, right?
And then you remove distractions and all of a sudden they're crystal clear on exactly what they need to do. And that is the input that leads towards the model we're going to talk about. So once you look at your time use for those seven days, even if it's not like a normal week—everybody always says that it's not a normal week that I captured. Okay. But regardless, you're going to look at patterns and there's always going to be something that you are doing right now that you can get rid of, and there's no issue with it, right?
Could be just even like phone screens right before bed that lead towards bad sleep patterns, right? It could be checking the email the moment that you wake up. If you just stop doing these little tiny things, it starts adding up. So first step is to eliminate.
And then if you can't eliminate certain things, can you automate it? One of the most beautiful things about the time that we're in right now is twenty twenty-six, right? There's like a million automation opportunities. And the best thing that I can tell everybody that's here is just focus on the thing that's most important about automation, because it can be a black hole and actually lead towards more things that you just don't want. But what you want to do is you want to look at that time log and you want to look at could anything that I'm doing, is there a better, easier way of actually automating it? Right.
If you're manually typing things in, can they fill out a form? If the form gets filled out, can it create a proposal? A lot of different things that can make it easier. So eliminate, automate and then anything that you can't eliminate or automate. Can you delegate it? Okay.
Dan Martell talks about how eighty percent done by somebody else is one hundred percent awesome. And there's a lot of cool things that he talks about with delegation. And it's true because if you can get people to at least get you to a six-inch putt, when you're editing something as opposed to starting it from scratch that is a huge time saver. And most things that people are doing right now could go into that category of delegation.
The last piece to this model that I like to add to it is time blocking. Everybody always talks about time blocking. So if you can't eliminate, automate, delegate, and then you have to do it, how do you do that? And time blocking really works with certain types of tasks being grouped together to minimize what's called task switching.
So for an example, if you are working on a website and you're doing something very technical, and then you're going into a sales call and then you're going into a team meeting, right? That's a lot of context switching that happens. And by the end, you're just dead. You know. If you can group those things together—client meetings together, team leadership meetings together, the technical stuff together—that is the other way of kind of still feeling like you're not dying by the end of the day, even if you have a long day.
Does that make sense on the model?
TONY: It does. So I'm just thinking that this is something that some of us, maybe a lot of us, can get something out of by applying right away for ourselves. For one week, we're to list every hour the key things that we do, whether it's looking on the phone, answering an email, having a lunch, whatever you're doing in that—for one week, just start marking everything down. When you get up, when you go to bed, and all those things you do, including time off stuff or things just related from work, is that correct?
JESSE: Yes, absolutely. And the more honest that you are about it—binge-watching Netflix, looking at the phone in bed trying to go to sleep, looking at social media and doomscrolling—the more open that you are about it and you just start to remove it, it's amazing what happens. And I could go way deeper into it, but you got the point there.
TONY: So we'll wind up slapping ourselves in the face after we review it for a week. But it's an eye opener. Just right here. That introspection in a way, can lead to control of what we're doing. And how else do you know what you're doing that can be improved without having a log or journal or whatever, and writing down and recording what you're doing so that you can see it. I think that's very, very good point because we always think we can get better. And I think most of us probably can continue to get better by doing that.

INTERVIEW – PART 7 (THE 5 PILLARS OF LEVERAGE FOR GROWTH)
TONY: And as we're going through this and going through all these conversations, the one thing that comes to mind, I think I mentioned at the very beginning, is we created our business because we want freedom, we want to grow. Growing the business, having more revenue in our minds equates to more freedom. Even though we may be focused or more myopic focused on sales more than we should be, as opposed to delivery and other things we talked about. But again, the founders, they chase the marketing, they chase growth. And you talk about building this infrastructure that's very important. And we have to realize that we need that to grow. So what's this infrastructure that we need? And let's kind of drill down into what is it that we should build to help us get to that freedom a lot faster?
JESSE: Absolutely. I think it has an inside-out approach. And so I think the easiest way to look at it is from a macro view. And then I can always kind of dive deeper into it. But if you think about freedom from the founder, typically people will focus on the leads and sales side. We suggest focusing on the Leverage for Growth method which goes through five different kind of pillars. And we actually talked about the first one or two. So the first one is based around regaining control of your time.
And the first way to do it is do the time log, and then do that model and keep on doing it to a place where the work that you're doing is more focused around what you can only do, number one, and that's highly valuable. And once you start to dive into that, you're going to find that there are certain things that are just in your head that you need to get out of your head and have somebody else be able to do right—that automate or delegate side. And actually, when you're time blocking, if you create your own standards, then you follow your standards, you should be able to actually save more time as well. You create an SOP that you follow. The next time you do the thing, it's going to make it a lot easier.
And so step number one is to regain control of the time. The goal is to have eight to ten hours per week to work on the business. Okay. That's the first kind of infrastructure piece that you need is just founder working on the business time.
And then once you start to carve out that time, the next thing is based around systems and you need to create a delegation system and be able to deliver the same amount of work or the same quality of work to clients, with the person being able to switch. There's a lot of strategies that I outline in my book, The Agency Owner's Guide to Freedom, which actually outlines what do you start with and how do you go from that?
A really quick overview is just client onboarding first. If you can—what's called front loading or you just get all the stuff as early in the process as possible—it makes things a lot easier downstream. I'm about to go down a rabbit hole, so I'll hold off for a second. So the client onboarding is first, most frequent service, core services. And then the ones that only you can do, those are probably the first ones that you want to build systems for.
As you continue to build systems, naturally, you're going to start to understand because you're so close to the build of a system, what is valuable to the client and what is not valuable to the client. What you're the worlds greatest at. And what things are kind of iffy, right?
And so that kind of leads towards the third step in Leverage for Growth, which is developing a minimum viable solution. Least amount of effort on your end, greatest results for the client and you price it according to value. Okay. There's hourly models and cost-plus models and they suck and they're going away. And it's a lot better to focus on the value to the client.
And when you create a minimum viable—an example of that just for time savings would just literally be doing a weekly time log and using that model. That's an example of a minimum viable solution even within our own method.
And once you start to understand the offer and who it's for and pricing, it makes it a lot easier for you to go to the market, which is number four, which is where you fill the pipeline and you do it by connecting referral programs, inbound and outbound programs together.
An example is Susan was a case study of ours. She gave a really in-depth case study. She actually wrote the foreword in my book, and she talks a lot about spinning your wheels prior to working together. And so I use that testimonial, put it onto YouTube, right. And then I also included, "Are you spinning your wheels in your creative agency?" as a subject line in a cold email. And I found more Susans.
So this is an example of filling up your pipeline where you're using each one of these kind of assets and then being able to develop a client extraction system. Once you do that, filling up the pipeline is no longer the issue.
The last issue is based on the people. So step number five is empowering your people to run whole parts of the company so you can focus on growth. And that's really the difference between building a business that depends on you or one that actually grows beyond you.
TONY: And before we continue, I just want to take a moment to thank you for being here. If you've been listening to this conversation, you've probably noticed something. This isn't just about business systems. It's about how you choose to build your life, because at some point every entrepreneur faces that decision. Do I build something that depends on me or something that works beyond me? And that's not always an easy shift. It requires thinking differently, letting go of control, and stepping into a different kind of leadership.
So if today's episode is giving you something to think about, I'm glad you're here. And if you want more conversations like this, you can follow the show wherever you're listening so you don't miss what's coming next. Also, if someone came to mind while you were listening, someone building a business or feeling stuck in it, feel free to share this episode with them.
And if you're not already receiving my Elite Entrepreneurs newsletter, you're always welcome to join us. A couple of times a month, I share insights like this along with practical ideas you can apply right away. You can find it at TonyDUrso.com. That's Tony D-U-R-S-O dot com. I appreciate you being here. And now back to my conversation with Jesse Gilmore laying out the framework for building a business.


INTERVIEW – PART 8 (RECAPPING THE 5 PILLARS)
TONY: I want to make sure I've got these a little bit in my head, because I'm going to go back and listen. But you went over your five pillars. Can I get them in a summary one more time? Because I'm really trying to track with this.
JESSE: Yeah, totally. Step number one, regain control of your time. Carve out eight to ten hours per week to work on the business.
Step number two is create your delegation system. Get everything out of your head and your team's head into systems or procedures so you can switch the person doing the work and the customer is not impacted.
Step number three is the minimum viable solution. Creating a minimum viable solution—least amount of effort on your end, greatest results for the client. Price it according to value.
Step number four is to fill up your pipeline. Create a referral, inbound and outbound system that works together to fill up your pipeline.
And then step number five is empowering your people. This is where you hire the right people, you train them effectively and you manage a growing team so that way you can step into growth and not have to worry about it. You got the team running the day-to-day for you.
TONY: Okay. And with that, a lot of analysis based on your experience, there's probably a pillar here—one of these pillars is the most often neglected. And if we were just to focus on one pillar, what do you think would give us the most bang for the buck and help the company the most, just without even doing a major analysis? Just like it's sometimes it's a lot easier to just start on one.
JESSE: Yeah. Time. And if you focus on time, it's like in operations they use a thing called the bullwhip effect. It's like a little tiny thing makes a big difference downstream. That's exactly the way it is. If I can fix the time use of a founder, it has a ripple effect in the other areas. So I would say step number one and it just naturally, literally leads into the other ones.
TONY: So we should do that time analysis and really get our control on time. That will help us to what we want to accomplish. Really, really interesting.


INTERVIEW – PART 9 (OVERCOMING PERFECTIONISM & TRUST)
TONY: Now we talked about different things here. And again, I think I've made the point probably maybe too much of seeing companies, the owner, they don't want to let go of stuff that I've seen. Now they've built a company. I've talked about that. But the thing is, you know, you're bringing in some people to help you with the company that are experts in their field and you're paying them good money. But because you've built your company on your back, out of your garage or wherever it came from, you still think you know best.
And I think that's a hard thing for founders to let go. "Okay, I'll hire these people, but they're still going to come in." I knew—I said founders and CEOs, they'll have meetings and never let anyone else talk because they think they know it all still, even though they're hiring high-priced people. So I think it's one of the things that is very difficult for them to let go. Maybe there's some ego, but it's also, again, that habit, that blood, sweat and tears. It's that mindset.
So I like to kind of focus or go back to this and revisit this. The hardest mindset shift that founders struggle with in order to get on the business instead of in the business.
JESSE: Perfectionism is what you're talking about. Is that what it is? Yeah. No one can do it like me, right? And that kind of thing. And one of the things I'd have somebody consider—if you're listening to me and Tony right now, you're like, "Maybe I am that person that talks in all the meetings. Maybe I am the person that actually is the bottleneck."
I just want you to try one thing. And if you're listening to this and you're not driving, close your eyes for a second and just imagine that the business is in a constant expansion mode, right? And just constantly trying to expand, right? And your job as a founder is actually just to understand what is holding it back from expanding. And then just remove that. Okay.
The only way that you're going to find the things that need to be removed is by listening to your team. It's literally—that's how you figure it out. And I could go in a whole different route with it. There's a book called The Idea-Driven Organization. One of the things I read in corporate and they talk about Coca-Cola and assembly line, and they brought in all these black belts, like Six Sigma guys and paid millions of dollars. And then finally the assembly worker that was working on this one thing was like, "The reason why all the bottles two and three times per day just stop up and break and cause a lot of things, it's just because they need this little nut right here and it'll fix it." And all of a sudden it fixed everything.
And that's a good example of listening to your organization and being able to do that. And the identity shift from being the person who has to know it all to more of a servant leader, where you're more focused around the ideas of other people and sifting through that and listening more than talking. That switch is how you make the business expand.
That's what I did with Warren. It's like one of my first things right after the weekly time log. I was like, "Your business wants to expand as fast as you're able to allow it, and your job is now to remove it." And we just went through it. That's a little exercise that might help somebody.
TONY: You know, as you're saying this, I'm thinking of applying it myself. And I'm thinking the biggest factor to me is trust, Jesse. Again, I know my business and I'll bring on someone that does very good, but it's that trust factor. Let's just take it down to simplicity. I write, I do the interview and I send—I have someone post it, post about it. Well, it's that trust factor. It's like they didn't do the interview. They don't know the interview. They didn't get this rapport with you. They don't understand it. They just say, "Hey, great interview, but a good interview with Jesse and Tony, you know, listen to it." It's like it doesn't do anything.
You know, it requires, "Tony, go. Wait. We talked about this and the pillars and blah." And, you know, really kind of get into it. So I think it's a matter of getting your employee, you want to delegate to them. And that's one of your pillars, I believe. But there's that trust factor that you believe or, you know, you now understand that person can take it to the level even if they have to give it to you at the very end.
I've worked with owners that to some degree gave enough trust. That may not be the right word. You put all the work together and if they liked it, then it was their work in a way. But if they didn't like it, or if it didn't do well, then it was your fault. You know, that sort of thing. We—I think we've all seen that. But there's a trust factor. You've brought these people in and you're paying a million dollars, millions a year in salaries and so forth. But you've got to trust these people. And is that covered in your pillars on how to get someone to that point where you could just let them go?




INTERVIEW – PART 10 (THE CONSCIOUS COMPETENCE MODEL)
JESSE: Yeah. And I think that the best thing that anybody can do, and I'm just a model guy—in my head, there's constant models that I can talk about. One of the greatest things that people can learn if you're in that trainer-to-manager kind of role, literally right after this or right after this, type in "Conscious Competence Model for Training." And it is the easiest way for you to understand how people learn.
The reason why people get burned so many times with hiring somebody and then trying to have them do a role is they're just not set up correctly. And if people feel as though they can go from new hire to independence in less than a month or something for something that's high risk, right? And there's got to be a handoff that starts happening.
A real quick snapshot of what that model is—you have four different stages. If it was on a quad, you have consciousness on one side, competence on the other, and stage one is unconscious incompetence. People don't know what they don't know. And their role in the very beginning is just awareness and job shadowing and kind of understanding what the heck's going on.
Once they move from stage one to stage two, stage two is conscious incompetence. So they start to know what they don't know, right? And the way to get through stage two is through practicing, right? They do work on low-risk things or high-frequency, and then give it to somebody else to kind of check it, right?
And once they get enough practice, eventually there are certain things that they can do in stage number three, which is conscious competence. They're becoming independent within the work and they don't need as much oversight, right.
And then the fourth one is unconscious competence. So they don't have to think about what they're doing.
If you understand that every part of a position can be mapped out to what are they in stage one with awareness? What are they doing for practicing? When are they supposed to be at independence? And you map out a development plan specifically for them, it's a game changer. Sets up expectations for both the leader, the manager and the employee. Give it to them and you're literally following it. You can catch people that are not good fits right from the get-go. You make sure that you're setting them up for success. So it has nothing to do with a process and setup problem and has more to do with the person and their performance.
These types of things are needed in order for you to build that trust that you're talking about.
TONY: Very interesting, I like that.

OUTRO
TONY: All right. Now this is going to be kind of ad lib here. Last question, kind of like a commercial, but it's not a commercial. But if you're in the audience and you're feeling trapped, here's a couple things from Jesse that you could start doing this month to move yourself toward operational independence. Take it away, Jesse.
JESSE: Oh, I love it. Here's the commercial answer. So first up, do the time log? Be raw with yourself. Even if it's just you looking at it and then analyzing it and you don't share it with anybody. If you would be a part of my mastermind, I would literally do an audit with you. But from there, you get to understand what can you eliminate, automate, and delegate, time block, right? Same exact stuff that me and Tony have been talking about.
And because most of us know AI note takers and transcripts and stuff like that, one of the things you could do is just block off a Friday. So if you're listening to this on a Wednesday, literally block off the whole entire day on Friday and set yourself up for a Zoom meeting with an AI note taker and literally just go through your entire business, just go through, "What do we do in client onboarding from step one, step two, step three, step four, step five." What was the last time that I did that? Where is that coming from?
And if you just speak it all out, you'll get a transcript of you literally mapping out what's called a value stream. Okay. A transcript can be used for SOPs, can be used for a bunch of different things. If you're looking for a nitty-gritty build-systems-in-a-day kind of thing, the fastest way of being able to do that. And you can use that transcript in Claude. You can ask for an SOP creator.
We're in a place where the knowledge is there and the tools are there to pretty much do anything that you want. And so if you're at a place where you're just trying to figure out, "What the heck am I going to do to get everything out of my head?" Block off a day, listen to some good music, have some coffee, and then just start talking through it and just walk all the way through it.
There's a lot more to it, but if you just get everything out of your head, you will have a way clearer understanding of what are you best at? What do you need to delegate? What do you need to automate? What can you do? And that transcript you could throw into Claude and literally just go, "What can I eliminate, automate, and delegate, time block?" And you're starting to get very personalized answers.
So I don't normally say to use AI in this whole thing, but it is one of the fastest ways of getting everything out of your head. And then what to do with it is obviously following the Leverage for Growth method.
TONY: It has its uses, it has what it's good for. So that is very good. Thank you, thank you, and thank you. I think that was brilliant.
Once again, this is Jesse P. Gilmore talking about why founders become the bottleneck in their own business and how to fix it. Go find him at NicheInControl.com. Jesse, I want to thank you so much. I truly enjoyed this. Having worked in the corporate world for so long and having been an entrepreneur for so long, I mean, I see a lot of points that are very helpful, very good, very wise. You're sage. Your sage is very, very good. I want to thank you so much, sir.
JESSE: Yeah. Thank you so much, Tony. I really appreciate our conversation.
TONY: Great, great, great to have you on. Thank you once again.
All right. Well, there you go, guys. If you like this, tell your friends, tell them about Jesse, tell them about all these points and the pillars and some quick steps to grow your business. This was absolutely amazing. Tell them about what Jesse's been through. He failed plenty of times so that he can give you this information to really, really help you. I mean, this is really hard-won experience, so please check it out. Listen to this again. Check out the transcript which is on this site. And please, wherever you're following this, please follow the show. It helps to bring in more amazing guests to you. I thank you guys all so much.
All right, let's use this and let's help you move on your journey to success. Thanks. Remember, just take action. Success awaits those who persevere and remain steadfast despite the odds. Sow good seeds, do good deeds. And I'll see you on the next episode.