Jesse (00:04.182)
You are now listening to Leverage for Growth. Hey everybody, this is Jesse P. Gilmore, founder of Niche in Control and creator of Leverage for Growth and the author of The Agency Owner’s Guide to Freedom, which you can find at nicheincontrol.com slash book. Welcome to the daily Leverage edition. Today’s topic is this, nine days till book launch. Sit back, relax, and welcome to today’s daily leverage. It’s been a while since I last did a Leverage for Growth podcast episode, and now I’m back. So where have I been?
I’ve been working with Pam Neely to get my book, The Agency Owner’s Guide to Freedom, ready for release. And there are only nine days left until our book launch event on October 14th. What I would like to do on this podcast episode is tell you more about this book and that has taken me over four years of research, informational interviews, testing and refinement on marketing agency owners to find out what works and what doesn’t work in creating freedom for agency owners.
What I am going to do is read the entire introduction of the book to you so that you can understand what this book is all about. Then if it resonates with you, you can either sign up for a book launch event on October 14th or order the book by going to nichecontrol.com slash book. So here it is. The introduction. This book is a manual for transformation. I believe entrepreneurship is a calling.
Entrepreneurs have been called to serve others through their products, services, and transformations they create. If you are reading this book, you have felt that call to serve. As entrepreneurs, our greatest gift to the world is to have a life and a business that works. To achieve this, we need to have agency over ourselves, our lives, and our businesses. Let’s understand the word agency.
Most of the time the word is used for ad agencies or government agencies, but there is another way to use that deserves more attention. Here’s how the Webster Dictionary defines agency in the sense that I am talking about. Agency, the capacity, condition, or act of, or state of acting, or of exerting power. Agency is our capacity to make decisions, take action.
Jesse (02:25.194)
and exert control over our lives. It’s about setting a trajectory and then taking the steps needed to follow it. Agency is the feeling that you are the driver of your life, not just a passenger. Exercising agency requires a commitment to personal growth and success. Over time, exercising agency can change you into the person you have always wanted to be. It can give you the life and the business that you want.
But everything starts with you. To get to where you want to be, you’ll need to grow past your current version of yourself. This is because your personal growth and your agency’s growth are entwined. To grow your agency, you have to grow as a person first. Revenue growth is great, but what really matters to me is watching business owners see the potential within themselves, to see them begin to exercise their agency, their power.
to transform themselves, their lives, and their businesses. Here’s what having agency in your life looks like. For your body, to take charge of your health, set goals, track your progress, and celebrate wins. For your being, to drive your personal growth, take autonomous actions, make conscious decisions, and acknowledge your progress. For balance, to exercise agency in your relationships.
to build and nurture connections that resonate with your values, and to allow others to have agency in their lives as well. For your business, to be the CEO of your business, not an employee, to set clear business goals, measure your progress, and adapt as necessary. When you exercise agency in these areas of your life, you achieve whatever success means to you. You aren’t just benefiting yourself.
Your success will affect your family’s life too. It will change the lives of the people who work for you and their families. Your ability to create a life and a business by design has the potential to create a ripple effect that affects thousands, possibly even millions of people. But this can only happen if you know how to evolve past your current self. Who you are now won’t get you to where you need to be.
Jesse (04:45.674)
You have to start actively growing into the person that you want to become. And this can be challenging. There are a lot of forces in the world trying to get us to operate in a certain way. Our culture, our education systems, and more are set up to create employees, not business owners. Even your friends and family members have an interest in keeping you as your current self. We hold ourselves back too, of course.
but changing our identities or even shifting them can create major disruptions in our lives. And I’m not talking about just taking on a few new habits or writing up a few worksheets on personal goals. I’m talking about altering your perception of the world and who you are in it. This is not a book for people who are looking for a get rich quick scheme, are not willing to put in the effort and do the work.
are not willing to embrace discomfort and change, insist on mapping everything out ahead of time instead of trying to take imperfect action, are not willing to take accountability and control of their life through consistent action, and expect the program or the book to solve everything for them without actually applying it. If you are looking for a magic solution without effort,
or you’re not ready to step outside of your comfort zone and put in consistent imperfect action, the Leverage for Growth program is probably not for you. It requires a willingness to learn, adjust, and work hard. It requires a willingness to grow. Not everyone is up for that. They talk a good game, sure, but when the change actually starts to happen or it gets hard or uncomfortable, they bail. Most people don’t even think about growing beyond their current selves.
Many of us are constantly participating in sedating activities like social media consumption, TV, or drinking alcohol. And that’s where we start. The first thing that needs to change if you want to scale your agency into the business of your dreams is to start evolving beyond your current self. You start by removing the distractions, the sedating behaviors, and your limiting beliefs. Just by doing that,
Jesse (07:01.43)
you will automatically shift from having an external locus of control being overly influenced by the world and other people to having an internal locus of control. That one small shift will give you much more agency in your life. Unfortunately, even after that significant achievement, many people still get stuck. They may know who they want to become or who their ideal self is,
but they get stuck in the gap between their current self and their ideal self. They are missing their middle step, which is their becoming self. By understanding and leaning into your becoming self, you focus on the progress you are making. Without a focus on your becoming self, you’re constantly in a state of lack, of falling short, because you haven’t yet become your ideal self. This focus on your progress is what makes the difference.
Instead of constantly coming up short, you’re living and leaning into who you are becoming. You are leveraging your forward momentum. And this empowers you to redesign your life and evolve beyond your current self simply by making new choices in your day-to-day life. These choices contribute to a mental feedback loop that enforces the belief that you are already becoming a new person. The more new choices you make,
and the more you see yourself and your life changing, the more you will be able to embrace the new version of yourself. Many of those new choices will be about how you spend your time. So in the Leverage for Growth program, we are very mindful about how we spend our time. We make choices about how we spend our time that are aligned with our future self we want to become. If you do the work in this book,
you will start freeing up your time so that you can work on your agency rather than in it. And this will reveal a lot about your current relationship with your business. It also gives you a clear incentive to reduce any time-wasting activities, delegate other activities, and simplify or reduce other tasks. Seeing how we really use our time as a powerful motivator
Jesse (09:18.894)
towards making changes that we might otherwise not be willing to make. There’s another benefit to seeing how we use our time. It helps us understand that the CEO version of our has to start delegating work. Otherwise, there won’t be time for the visionary work they need to do to become their future self and create our future business. When we are delegating work to others, we are no longer acting like an employee within our business.
We have become a CEO. Now this evolution does not stop with us. We aren’t the only people we help evolve from our current self to our future self. The next people we help are our clients. When we present the right offer to the right clients, our services become a catalyst for transformation from the client’s current self to their future self. Our goal in the business is to help them move towards their desired future.
through our services. We can offer a similar transformation for our employees too. We can help the people we hire become a better version of themselves, reaching towards their future self. We do this through training, career development plans, succession plannings, and other systems. And finally, our business too goes through a transformation from its current self to its future self. Our organization can grow into the vision that we have set for it.
whether that’s making seven or eight figures, getting acquired, or being able to take extended vacations or whatever our ideal end goal is. I’ll use this model of the three selves throughout this book. It applies to you, your clients, your employees, and your business. If you do the work outlined here, and not just think about it, you will experience a transformation. This book is a manual for how to create that transformation, The Agency Owner’s Guide to Freedom.
will give you the clarity and confidence to become the leader of your life and business, to have the agency to create the life and the business that you want. You’ll learn how to do all of this in a way that’s aligned with your vision and authentic to yourself. And you won’t need to overwork, risk burning out, or sacrifice the quality of the services that you deliver. By the end of this book, you will know how to manage your time so you can work on your business rather than in your business.
Jesse (11:45.518)
Create systems so you can duplicate yourself and start earning more and working less. Transition from being a hustler or subject expert into becoming the CEO of your agency. Develop a minimum viable solution so you are offering a service that is both profitable and scalable. Define your ideal client and test your messaging so that your marketing and sales efforts are more effective.
fill a sales pipeline with qualified appointments, and attract, recruit, train, and retain the right people so your agency grows into an organization. This book won’t just show you how to scale your agency. You’ll also learn how to become a leader. After reading and applying what is in the following pages, you’ll be able to align your mindset, systems, and people towards your vision of what your agency can be.
Your life and your business matter. I hope you use these methods in this book to leverage yourself, your services, and your team that you deserve to live your calling and to have a life and a business that you want. Let’s get started.
So that is the introduction to the Agency Owner’s Guide to Freedom. We have a book launch event on October 14th and exclusive bonuses to those that show up and register for the event. We also are now allowing pre-orders for the book. If you can’t make the event on the 14th, but you still want the book on launch day, we have a limited amount of copies. You can go to nicheandcontrol.com slash pre-order.
And I just want to thank you very much for listening to the introduction. And I hope this finds you well. And if anything resonated with you, I urge you to buy this book and to join us on our book launch event. I’ll see you and talk to you soon.
