How 10 Hours a Week Can Transform Your Agency

In this episode of The Fractional CFO Show, we explore a question many agency founders quietly wrestle with:

What would actually change in your business if you freed up just 10 hours a week?

I’m joined by Jesse P. Gilmore, Founder of Niche in Control and host of the Leverage for Growth podcast. Jesse works closely with agency owners who have built successful businesses, but find themselves trapped in delivery, decisions, and day-to-day firefighting.

This is a practical, grounded conversation about escaping founder-dependence without losing control.

We unpack how agency owners can:

• Diagnose where their time is really going using Jesse’s Time Audit framework
• Move away from trading hours for revenue and towards value-led pricing and profitability
• Build systems and delegation that support scale, not complexity
• Use AI deliberately as a leverage tool, not a distraction
• Reframe metrics like utilisation, average client value, and earned standard hours to support better decisions

From a CFO perspective, this episode sits right at the intersection of time, money, and leadership capacity. Because reclaiming time isn’t about working less, it’s about building a business that no longer relies on the founder to function.

If you’re an agency founder or service-based business owner feeling stretched, stuck in the weeds, or unsure how to create headroom without risking performance, this episode will help you think more clearly about what needs to change, and in what order.

A thoughtful, practical listen for anyone serious about building a scalable agency with stronger margins, better systems, and more intentional leadership.

Transcript

Adam Cooper (00:02.041)

Okay, so today I'm joined by Jesse P. Gilmore, system strategist, agency advisor, and host of the Leverage for Growth podcast. And Jesse's also wears many hats, he's also the author of the Agency Owner's Guide to Freedom, founder of Niche in Control, where he helps agency founders scale profitably. So Jesse, welcome to the Fractional CFO Show. How are you doing today?

Jesse P. Gilmore (00:26.562)

I'm doing awesome. Thank you so much for having me on the show, Adam. Excited for our conversation.

Adam Cooper (00:29.641)

Absolutely, very, very happy to have you and thanks for being here. And I guess to kick things off, it'd be great to understand a little bit about how you got to wear so many hats. I see you started off in operations back in sort of early 2000s and you've had a number of roles. So perhaps you could just talk the audience through in a couple of minutes how you got to where you got to.

Jesse P. Gilmore (00:55.576)

Yeah, sure. So, niche and control is my fourth business. My first three businesses were really based around my skills. So, if I didn't work, work didn't get done. They were really good businesses, kind of like more based around the passion as opposed to like a profitable idea. And the first business where I was a COO of the North Coast Collective, it was really based around taking our passion for events and kind of condensing.

all the different venue calendars in Minnesota into a single calendar and it was an information services business. And it took us about three years to get a proof of concept out, which is definitely something I would not recommend for anybody to do, because it led towards a business where we fell in love with the idea, but it wasn't really producing as much as we had wanted. And so we got to a place where in that business, I was working 60, 80 hour weeks for years.

led towards burnout and actually as the business was becoming successful, I felt like I was dying on the inside and so I dissolved that business even as it was becoming successful and I was trying to figure out, know, what was the ticket to freedom because I think every single entrepreneur really wants to go after freedom and the freedom of time, freedom of money, freedom of purpose and relationships and what I realized was that first business was not really giving me that freedom that I was after.

So I set up a second business which was a fine art photography business. Basically I was traveling around the world taking really cool shots of photography and then selling that on a website and I realized that that again was all based around my skills. If I didn't work, work didn't get done. Didn't really understand a lot more about systems or processes. So then I started a third business which is actually a non-profit organization and the non-profit was also based around kind of my skills and I couldn't really figure that out.

Those three businesses, when I met my wife at the end of 2013, I started realizing that I wanted to make a change and maybe start a new life. And so we moved from Minnesota to Oregon and went back to school and I started in a $4 billion global corporation as a project manager. And I started learning about systems and processes and that led towards understanding that what I was learning in corporate was what I was missing in my first businesses and...

Jesse P. Gilmore (03:16.374)

It wasn't until 2019 where I started Niche and Control and that started to kind of blend all the lessons that I had learned in my first three businesses, what I learned in corporate about systems and removing what's called single points of failure. And that led towards Niche and Control. And my third client was a digital marketing agency. I started working with them, took them from 15,000 per month to 100,000 per month in nine months. And that started this idea of what's called leverage for growth, which is our method.

And since then, I've coached over 500 agencies and refined the leverage for growth method every year for about six or seven years. that is a snapshot. In a nutshell.

Adam Cooper (03:56.966)

In a nutshell, that's brilliant. That's brilliant. What a great story you've got there, I tell you, Jesse. And I'm really interested in the agency world. It's a world that we inhabit equally like yourself. And I know how much they need help with moving from being that overworked founder to becoming a scalable CEO. Obviously with your background within the $4 billion.

Jesse P. Gilmore (04:11.534)

Mm-hmm.

Adam Cooper (04:25.565)

corporate environment and learning all those processes and skills and then bringing them into that marketing world and agency world. What are for the list for the founders listening, what are some of those those signs? What are some of those telltale signs that they're stuck in the business rather than working on the business?

Jesse P. Gilmore (04:45.39)

Probably the easiest one is if you were to take on new clients right now, does it increase your hours? That's the first kind of like sign that you are stuck to delivery or stuck to fulfillment where you, if that is the case and you're focused on leads and new clients right now, you're eventually just leading towards burnout. So that's the first kind of sign. The second one is if you can't turn off.

Adam Cooper (04:53.651)

Mm-hmm.

Jesse P. Gilmore (05:12.714)

If you don't have the weekends free or you can't take the weekends free or you can't take a week off for a vacation, know, at the time of the recording it's really close to holidays. So you can't take off and you're still checking your email or your laptop, you know, even on vacation, that's another kind of issue. And the third thing is the identification of what's called a single point of failure. So single point of failure is where one person in the

agency, it might be you as a founder, could be an employee, could be a contractor, it could be a vendor, is so intricately built into the business that if that person is gone, the business can't operate. And a lot of times in the way beginning, it is the founder, and that's just a stage or a phase of the business. And so I think that once you identify that you are the single point of failure, you can start making changes to that because that is the...

Adam Cooper (05:56.883)

Mm-hmm.

Jesse P. Gilmore (06:09.314)

founder dependence that makes all the other issues happen.

Adam Cooper (06:13.799)

Hmm, yeah, interesting and very common, all three of those. And I wonder what, what is it, what's the first thing that you do through your, methods and processes to help founders, you know, to identify them and then start to solve them. What's kind of like the first steps that you help them take.

Jesse P. Gilmore (06:30.956)

Yeah, so I think that everything that is happening when you come to a change, you want to understand kind of where you are and then where you want to go. The easiest way to understand that is your use of time. Now, I tell all clients to do what's called a weekly time log, and it's not like something you have to do forever. But logging your time every half an hour for seven days straight gives you awareness of how you're using time. Now,

for a lot of people, like about 90 % of my clients, it's like pulling teeth to actually like, you know, do it. But it is radically transformative in just giving a snapshot of how you're using your time right now. Now, the use of time tells you a lot about habits. It tells you a lot about kind of like your current use of your unique ability. And once you get to understand kind of

where you are today, it gives you enough awareness to start making a change. Now there's a model called Oktar in change management, which is A-K-D-A-R, awareness, knowledge, desire, action, results. And I think that all change requires awareness first, and then from there you can kind of move on it. So the weekly time log is the first step.

And let's just say right now you might be just like I was in the previous businesses working 60, 80 hour weeks. Very simply, once you get a snapshot of the use, you can go through the next model which is based around eliminate, automate, delegate, time block. So first off, you look at your list of all the things that you're doing right now and the first question that you wanna ask yourself before trying to figure out who to give all this work to is what can you eliminate? So.

There's no reason to automate, delegate, or time block anything if you can literally just get rid of it. So I find that naturally people spend a lot of time on things that don't really matter. And marketing, because marketing is so close to things like social media, people get stuck in checking apps all the time, or their email, or whatever it is. So eliminate is the first step. The second step is anything that you're doing that could be automated.

Jesse P. Gilmore (08:49.47)

The great thing about technology at this very specific moment is that most things can be actually automated. But what I always said in a previous podcast was, right now data transfers should never be done by a human from here on out, because that is one thing that moving data from place to place is just something you can automate. If you can eliminate and automate what's left over, the next question is, can you delegate it to somebody else?

And Dan Martell in his book, Buy Back Your Time, has a really great model which is based around the taking whatever you have as a salary on an hourly basis divided by four and find somebody that can do that work at that amount. And that's a good amount to be able to leverage your own time. So that gives you kind of a frame. And the last piece is if you can't eliminate, automate, delegate, then can you time block? And now time blocking, a lot of people just think that I'm gonna put an hour towards

a certain thing and then I move on to the other thing. Time blocking really works really well when you minimize what's called task switching. So for agencies that might be working on websites and then jumping into a sales call and then all of a sudden into a leadership meeting, that's using different parts of your brain that make it very hard for you to just have a sustainable thought process. And so what you wanna do is you wanna start organizing things that have like.

like-minded tasks. So if you're working on a website, that's very technical. So anything that's very technical, you kind of group into a deep work session of two or three hours. And then if you're going into like sales calls or podcasts with Adam, then that's more of like on the sales side or like, you know, a different type of thing. So once you do that, you naturally start to carve out time. I've had clients go from 80 hour weeks to 40 hour weeks in less than six weeks, just by doing this over and over and over again.

It sucks in the way beginning but you kind of get used to the fact that you start getting the freedom that you're after and that sets up for all the rest of the stuff that we can probably talk about but

Adam Cooper (10:51.419)

Nice, okay, very comprehensive. And you mentioned that it's like pulling teeth a little bit at the beginning, trying to get the founders to actually do this time logging. And I know working with businesses, time tracking is like the bane of every agency's life. So trying to get the founder to do that religiously is a challenge. How do you typically get them to do that? I mean, what's the sort of magic solution to sort of incentivize to make sure that they are actually doing?

Jesse P. Gilmore (10:57.71)

Mm-hmm.

Jesse P. Gilmore (11:06.573)

Yes.

Jesse P. Gilmore (11:18.932)

Yeah, totally. So anytime you change somebody's use of time or habits or ways of looking at things, it actually comes down to mindset. The way that they look at their use of time and what we do within our Mastermind program and also working with me one-on-one, is I figure out very quickly what your unique ability is. So if I can understand, Adam, if you were a client of mine, I would be asking you questions about what are your top strengths.

have you go through quite a few different assessments to understand what's your unique ability. If I was to place Adam, if I was to place you in the perfect environment where you just are at your best, then what we wanna do is we wanna paint a picture of what life would be like for Adam on the other side of time logs and system building and all the other stuff that's in Leverage for Growth because ultimately, in order for a change to happen, some, or.

in order for you to have different results than where you are currently, something has to change. And habits are some of the most ingrained things that we have. And the only way to actually change your habits is actually to change where you're going. And I find that the people that don't have some big, strong why or vision or something that's pulling them through whatever hardship they're experiencing, they're never gonna do it. And so a lot of what we do in the way beginning, has to do with like,

Let's paint a picture of what life would be like on the other side of all the stuff that we're gonna ask you to do. yeah.

Adam Cooper (12:48.913)

Makes sense, makes sense. So like you said at beginning, where you are to where you want to go, right? So it's understanding that destination. Okay, cool. Just changing tack slightly. You mentioned when we spoke before about redesigning the offer and yeah, I'd be interested to get your take on, know, a lot of people are talking about the traditional hourly pricing model or cost plus pricing model and how that's evolving. Could you give me your take on that?

Jesse P. Gilmore (12:53.251)

Mm-hmm.

Jesse P. Gilmore (13:02.894)

Mm-hmm.

Jesse P. Gilmore (13:15.178)

Yeah, I think let's give a little bit of background to it. So if you think about agencies in the way beginning, a lot of what they did was charged by the hour, right? And they charged a very high amount because they were doing things that helped other people grow their business, right? And then there was another model, which was based around a cost plus model. So if people bring in for a project, they bring in all these different types of contractors, they would look at how much

the contractor is estimating for the type of work, along with their kind of in-house, you know, prices or costs, expenses that are there. And then they would go, I wanna make sure I'm making 30 % margin on that. So then they bundle it all together and they sell it, okay? Those are the two different models that we were talking about from an hourly and a cost plus model. Those two models don't really incentivize you to deliver the greatest value to the client. If you think about an hours, if Adam I was working with you and

I was delivering SEO for you. If I'm on the hourly model, the longer that I take to create SEO, the more money you have to give me based on our agreement, And then, so in actuality, you're incentivized to take longer to do the thing, right? Then if you think of the cost plus model, if I had SEO contractors doing the work for you, and then those contractors...

whatever the cost is, like 30 % extra. But then from there, that's another thing that if I just increase the bundle, then I make more money based around that percentage. So those two models right now are not incentivizing for a great customer experience or actually like good monetization, right? And what's decimating this model is AI because the same

Like if I could originally do 10 hours worth of work under an hourly model to get to a certain outcome that you're going after, I can now do that same exact amount of work in about two hours. Right? And if I'm still on the hourly model, I just lost eight hours worth of you paying me by the hour. Right? So there's a lot of like contextual environment things that are telling agencies to get out of this model. And those that stay in that model will just be commoditized and then eventually lose it.

Jesse P. Gilmore (15:38.126)

the benefit of looking more at the value that you're giving to somebody. So if I was still doing that SEO for you, for an example, and I realized that monthly visitors getting into a certain amount generates this certain amount of revenue for you, then all of a sudden I start pricing towards that value. And instead of me focusing on the effort that it takes to try to like, put in certain amount of hours to get your results to where they are. Instead, I focus on your results.

there's like a huge difference in the relationship that happens and you can make a lot more money, right? And that is ultimately what a scalable offer is. It's aligning, what is your goal? What are you trying to accomplish aside from me taking over SEO? I want organic monthly visitors to a certain amount. Cool, if I am able to hit that amount within a certain timeframe, you know, this is how much I would be charging for it. And then from there, you are able to see the ROI based around it.

I wanted to give a really strong foundation between the different models because I think that there is a lot of people that hold on to certain models that they may have done for 20-some years because it's like how we always did it. But I think that there's a massive disruption with that one model that if we just, if all agencies listening to this right now, just switch over to focusing on value for the client and then you're able to manage all of the time and the estimated hours and all that kind of stuff internally, but it's not what you're.

giving to the clients and you're just focusing on results, it's better for both parties.

Adam Cooper (17:11.465)

No, absolutely. You're preaching to the converted here as a finance director, CFO. One question that I often get with clients, particularly as they move up the value chain. So when I say clients, I'm talking agencies as well. So apologies. One thing I get from agencies as they move up the value chain is they're dealing with larger clients on their side. Those customers procurement departments who often will benchmark different agencies based on hourly rates. How do you...

manage that when you're dealing with your agencies and that kind of pushback.

Jesse P. Gilmore (17:45.004)

Sure, I think there is a sweet spot. think that agencies that I typically work with are under 20 employees. And so just the stage of business that our clients are on, typically they're not working with enterprise types of clients, but that might be one of the reasons why we kind of bypass a lot of the procurement type of work. When we're looking at the agency's ideal clients,

we're looking for ease of working together, like a good relationship, a couple other things based around profitability and then understanding the value and so forth. If, based around the positioning, it points us towards more of a mid-sized type of business as opposed to a larger business that's more scalable, that's easier to close deals in shorter amount of time and so forth, that's usually where I'm pushing them. So I don't actually have this issue as much as what you're...

I'm talking about. But what I would say is that the speed at which you're able to close a deal and it becomes easy on both parties to move forward is where I would suggest that you go. A lot of the things that I'm talking about with value, you might not know the true value when you're working in an enterprise type of organization just based around there's too many things in

Adam Cooper (19:06.727)

Yeah, okay, understood. So I guess it's very much about defining your market, your ideal client first, and then ensuring that you're aiming for that sweet spot where you can change that perception in terms of the offer and pricing for value. Makes sense, makes sense. Yeah.

Jesse P. Gilmore (19:22.114)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I was gonna add one thing. So what I just said two seconds ago is about 98 % of our clients, the 2 % of clients that have taken this price for value to the nth degree in the last two weeks. One of them closed a 50,000 a month client and another one closed a 25,000 a month client. And so what I just said, somehow they figured it out, just not within my own training. I'm not teaching them how to get around procurement.

Adam Cooper (19:46.024)

Nice.

Jesse P. Gilmore (19:53.197)

But whatever they did, it seemed to work really well by implementing our accelerator programs. Yeah. Yeah.

Adam Cooper (19:56.938)

Nice, always good to hear a success story, that's great, that's great. Just changing tack slightly, you talk about systemizing for growth, so obviously using the time that you've got back from carving out through your activity that you mentioned up front. When they get that time back, however many hours it might be, what do you recommend that they focus on first?

Jesse P. Gilmore (20:14.382)

Mm-hmm.

Jesse P. Gilmore (20:25.108)

Yeah, totally. So let's just say you did the time log, you went through that activity, and I highly recommend if everybody does it, regardless of how many hours you have. But once you start carving out time, you just become a lot more intentional about the time. If you carve out about 8 to 10 hours per week, it can kind of be a game changer for your business. Because at 8 10 hours, what I would suggest that you do, especially if right now when I talked about the single point of failure, you're identifying yourself as one,

is actually to start to document everything that you are doing, very similar to the time log, but more based around, you know, like how I'm answering this type of email, right? Capture it. Maybe there's a message template that you could be using for that type of response, right? You start to look at different ways of capturing a process that's happening more like unconsciously and just capture it.

One of the greatest things that I tell all clients to do, especially if they're working the 80 hour weeks, or they're like, I can't make an SOP for this, is literally just take a loom, record it, and just start talking your way through whatever the task is that you're doing. And just even that video itself can be its own delegation, right? And the goal with systems is really just to get everything out of your head and your team's head into systems and procedures.

So the person that does the work can change whether the customer being impacted. So my suggestion is you document everything. And if that gets too overwhelming for you, which most of our clients are like, where do I start, right? My suggestion is you start with client onboarding, because it's a small enough process to get started and you kind of learn through client onboarding what you can do. A couple different tips, front loading all asset collection is one of the greatest things you can do as an agency.

and just bringing that as early into the process as possible makes it to where you don't have random waiting times within other processes. But you nail client onboarding and then you look at the most frequent service and you start from the beginning. So setups and then launching and then management, that kind of thing. And you start working through the process. So client onboarding, most frequent, highest at risk for doing it wrong. So if you do something wrong with it.

Jesse P. Gilmore (22:42.982)

Capturing that type of system is really helpful, and then maybe the fourth one is things that only you can do. That gets you on a of like a framework to keep on moving with systems. What naturally happens when you start building systems is that you're gonna find some parts of your service are either like your core competence, it's the things that give the best value to clients, and then there's other parts of your service where you're like, I don't even know why we're still doing this, right?

And naturally, by building the systems and being that close to it, it gives you an opportunity to actually understand what the value is and then starting to switch into the offer. That's the reason why the Leverage for Growth program moves in this way is because you solve one problem and then it creates another one and then you have enough awareness as you're moving through this process that it really is like the long-term growth strategy of agencies if they want to go from an operator to a CEO.

Adam Cooper (23:37.38)

Mm Okay. Very good. Very good. And I guess client onboarding is such a good one because as you say, it's early on and everyone does it, right? So everyone's got client onboarding. Everyone's got those challenges. No, it makes a lot of sense. And obviously it wouldn't be 2025 if we didn't talk about AI and how that is leveraged in your system within this systemizing approach. So do you use AI as, recommend using AI for your founders that you work with to help with this process or what's your take and position on that?

Jesse P. Gilmore (24:07.886)

Yeah, so I think AI needs to stay as a tool as opposed to an autonomous thing. This AI agent deal like everybody's raving about, I think is bullshit and it's just gonna randomly fail. We can probably talk about that at some point, but I think what's most important is people that understand. So I'm gonna answer your question by giving more context, then I'll talk about AI, then I'll talk about the future. So in the...

If we think about what AI is meant to do, people always talk about it's going to free me up so much time, so much time. But I find that people are still working just as much, if not more, and they're trying to catch up with it and so forth. If you're right now trying to build systems, AI is a variable and an equation that you don't really need to add until much later. So most important when you're talking about systems is, is the process documented? Is it effective? And once it is,

what automation can be brought into it just to speed up the process and make it easier, then you can start thinking about AI, then you can start thinking about AI agents. If you don't have those first three parts, is the process effective and is there automation already built in? You're gonna have too many variables in the equation and you're gonna spend more time talking with JatchiBT than actually getting the work done, okay? So that's like the system component and where does AI fit, it's more after certain things are built in.

The way that we use AIs, we analyze every single year what's working with leverage for growth and what's getting clients results and what's not. And we get rid of what's not. The thing that was taking up a lot of time for clients was the SOP creation, for an example. So people would get in there and they're like, I don't have 12 hours to build SOPs and I wanted this done yesterday. And so,

What we did was we created custom GPTs that basically take all of our trainings on how an SOP should be created and how to make that work. And from a Loom video transcript, can just literally without a prompt take the transcript, put it into the SOP GPT, and it spits out the SOP at about 95 % of accuracy. That's an example of how we used it. We just started looking through the entire value stream. And we were early adopters even before G.

Jesse P. Gilmore (26:24.302)

ChatGBT4 came out, we were already in three and playing around with it, you know. And we use it very specifically for taking things that are non-value added time wasters and we just, we flipped it. We have a job description creator, we have a hiring guide for questions, we have all those kinds of things where the input is so simple and there's no need for understanding a prompt and it literally produces a result that's pretty good. That's how we've started using it.

And then in the future, I know your question is going to be how does AI impact agencies? Because every single podcast guest is, our host is always asking me the same question. and well, I've found through a lot of conversations, I mean, I've coached over 500 agencies. We have like embedded ourselves into AI to figure out what what's actually happening with the future. And so that way we can stay with our clients long-term.

Adam Cooper (27:00.114)

Hahaha

Jesse P. Gilmore (27:19.054)

and everything that we teach is more innate and more focused around not trends but the innate stuff. What I've realized is that the marketing agency kind of like realm or situation has been on a time where there's a split between these two different agencies. You have the execution type of agency which is more of a low cost commodity type of agency and then you have these more strategic types of agencies, okay.

And I think that a middle ground, which is super funny, it's like the high, upper class, middle class, lower class, and everybody's talked about the middle class going away. It's the same exact thing with marketing agencies where that middle spot where either you're charging 3,000 a month and you're serving a small business, that type of agency, I believe, is going away. And I think that the actual positioning of an agency has more to do with strategy, especially US and UK.

and Canada type of agencies that are like really, really good at what they do, they need to go up market. And I'm finding that more and more, the 50,000 a month client, you know, the client that got the 50,000 a month client, and then the 25,000, they're all going up market. I had another client that was at a 4,000 a month, and he was like, I have to differentiate myself. And I was like, go up market.

Adam Cooper (28:32.755)

Mm-hmm.

Jesse P. Gilmore (28:40.192)

and now he's closing 12K a month retainers, you know, and the whole thing is just based around going up. Now, how you do that is based around the offer. And that's the reason why we just recently, about a week and a half ago, we launched the scalable agency accelerator, which is where these clients are getting good results from. It's just literally how do you reposition the agency, really understand the specialty and the core competence of the agency to deliver the greatest value based around your unique ability as an agency.

So that way you're positioned accordingly and that way when you close good clients that are paying a lot, they're actually like more fulfilling to you because you can lean into your core competency as opposed to being everything to everyone. I know that was the longest answer for your one question, but.

Adam Cooper (29:21.511)

Hmm. But very valuable. So no, that was good. That was good. And you covered a hell of a lot of ground there. I'm interested. obviously and this is a financial podcast. I'll just sort of going to go down a financial route because obviously you're you're looking at AI as a way of saving time. You're looking at it as a tool or variable, as you say, within the equation. You're also looking at this time blocking approach.

and encouraging owners to track their time. But do you then equate that to financial metrics? And if so, which metrics do you tend to look at and has that changed as a result of AI and the technology and the changes that we've seen over the last few years?

Jesse P. Gilmore (30:08.16)

Yeah, I think that the metrics have actually stayed the same. Maybe the importance of which ones you're focused on may have changed. Utilizations are the amount of billable hours or hours that your team is putting towards clients divided by the total hours that you pay for them to be a thing. That is always going to be needed, the utilization number and how your capacity works.

Things that we also look at outside of operations, but more on new business is the average client worth on a monthly basis. And then we take like a monthly recurring, the split between monthly recurring that's coming in and then project work, which is like one time. And getting to understand that it's all of like the fundamentals of like how much fixed revenue is coming into the business versus fixed expenses and variable revenue and variable expenses. But when it comes to like AI, I wouldn't

change very much with that. The thing that's actually changing, if you really get into it, but we don't do that as much with our smaller clients, but it would be earned standard hours, which is the amount of time that it takes to typically do a certain task. And typically what happens when we build the systems and build the processes and then eventually start bringing AI into it, the earned standard hours that used to be 10 hours now goes down to two, which eventually goes down to like almost completely automated.

That kind of thing is more important because what I find is that the capacity to handle more clients continues to increase. So if you're able to do the same amount of work in less time, eventually you can take on more clients and have a leaner team. So we actually try as much as possible to eliminate the need for hiring, as much as possible and hire slow, fire fast, that kind of thing. But when it comes to metrics, nothing has really changed that much. It's more so just the emphasis on

Adam Cooper (31:56.979)

Mm-hmm.

Jesse P. Gilmore (32:02.218)

Average client monthly increasing. I'm not as focused on active clients increasing at the same time. I'm more focused around making sure you're actually getting what you're worth. And then the utilization and earned standard hours. But that's only for if they're doing really intense time tracking to make sure it's accurate.

Adam Cooper (32:22.683)

Nice. Okay. That's great. And I'm interested to know, cause you mentioned that most of your work is done with agencies of 20 staff or that there and thereabouts. And we work with a similar kind of cohort and we find that often the type of financial information that they have is lacking, frankly. And so when you're going in and you're trying to equate value to time and you're trying to look at ways of improving profitability, do you find that...

the agencies you work with struggle because of a lack of quality data, quality information, trustworthy financial information, and if so, how do you get around that?

Jesse P. Gilmore (33:03.406)

Yeah, totally. So we do have a strategic partner called Clever Profits. I've worked with them since 2021. They have a financial model for agencies that kind of break down certain percentages of labor and client acquisition costs and overhead to give a percentage. from that percentage, can, I don't get as much into the finances with individual clients part of where.

my line ends in the beginning of financial people is like the PNLs and stuff like that. But I do find when we run quarterly goal setting workshops for clients to give them an understanding of what they need to do for the next 90 days and it gets crystal clear on the business what they need to do. And we have a lot of different ways of getting to understand how many appointments do they need to book in order for them to hit wherever their goal is? How many clients at a certain dollar amount do they need to hit in order for them to hit a certain amount?

And then we ask him questions about what's called CEO cash. How much are you taking home, both from a W2 as an employee and then also like owner's draws. But that model itself helps. We have like a document that kind of gives them an understanding of what to do there. But we do still have times where people need a lot more of the optics. And that is one of the things that we start.

at least shining a light on, but it's not necessarily part of our leverage for growth.

Adam Cooper (34:28.073)

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Okay, very helpful, very helpful, great. So just moving on to our final section, which we call our business book bonus section. And so this is a section where the guest usually recommends a book or a podcast or other resource that's really helped you in your business career. So Jesse, is there anything that you would like to recommend to the audience that's had a big impact on you, your work, your mindset?

Jesse P. Gilmore (34:52.014)

Mmm.

That's a good question. Originally I was like, scalable agency accelerator. But then I was like, oh, that's my thing. I can talk about that a little bit later. think Dan Martel's Bye, Back Your Time is a really good book that got me to start, actually it helped me get an executive assistant that helps me with my inbox and my calendar and actually scheduling podcast interviews very similar to this one.

Adam Cooper (34:57.073)

Hahaha

Jesse P. Gilmore (35:20.466)

And just the amount of stress that has been taken off of my plate or my shoulders because I have somebody to be able to help me with that. Leah, if you're listening, thank you so much. But I think that made a big difference in the way that I approached it. And it was funny because I went through that book right after I had redone the time management side of.

our program and I was like, man, this guy must have gone through our program. And I was like, no, I'm just kidding. Because we're very aligned in a lot of things, but it was cool having a different perspective on that. But Dan Martell's, bye, back your time.

Adam Cooper (35:48.883)

Hehehe. Hehehe.

Adam Cooper (35:59.056)

Excellent. I've heard that mentioned quite often actually, so we'll put a link to that into the show notes. So thank you very much, Jesse. And just before we wrap up, is there anything else that you want to add before we wrap up or where can people find you and find out more about what you're doing?

Jesse P. Gilmore (36:14.286)

Yeah, totally. So I'm extremely active on LinkedIn. You can go to Jesse P. Gilmore. Like that's, you'll find me. It's like my SEO. We were just talking about that. But anyway, I'm very active on LinkedIn. And if you are an agency owner and you resonated with what me and Adam are talking about with the offer very specifically, after working with over 500 agencies, I found that the root cause of pretty much everything time.

systems, go-to-market strategies, and actually even training people came down to the offer. And that's the reason why we created the Scalable Agency Accelerator. It was launched in the middle of November, 2025. And for anybody that's listening and is like, I don't really know, was just a guy, let me just test him out in some form. I can give you a $1 trial of the accelerator. It covers the offer and positioning.

And the messaging kind of figure out who are you serving? What problem are you solving and what is the solution for that just? Some of the clients that have just gone through that one module I've doubled their monthly recurring within four months like Daisy or tripled their revenue within five months Which is Tanisha just from that one training so if that resonates with you you can go to niche in control comm slash triangle it's the offer triangle that will be the lesson there and

I'd love to give value before you trust me even further.

Adam Cooper (37:40.627)

Well, sounds like a good return on investment. we'll definitely, I'm sure people will take you up on that offer. Thank you so much, Jesse. Really appreciate your insights, your perspective and your time. Thank you for joining me today on the Fractional CFO Show.

Jesse P. Gilmore (37:53.098)

Adam, thank you so much for having me on the podcast. I really appreciate it.

Adam Cooper (37:56.842)

Great.