To build a business that runs without you, spend your early energy bringing cash through the door, then slowly dilute yourself out of the day-to-day with systems, good people and a real management structure. Jack Delosa’s rule is blunt: early on, about 80% of the founder’s time should go on sales and marketing. Once the money is flowing, your job is to make yourself unnecessary to daily operations, so the business becomes an asset with a value of its own.
Jack is the founder of The Entourage, which he described to me as Australia’s largest educator of entrepreneurs. When we spoke, he was about to appear on BRW’s Young Rich list, the 100 wealthiest self-made Australians under 40. I told him straight up: I must commend you on your success. I know finances aren’t always a good way to measure success, but he was out there helping so many young and hungry entrepreneurs do the same thing.
His answer set the tone for everything else. Business for him was never about the stuff. Money, he said, is “kind of an afterthought.” The rich list was a ticket into a new world and a bigger platform to do more cool things. That’s the attitude of someone who built something that doesn’t need him in the building every day. You can also find the original audio episode on our podcast page.
Freedom is a choice, but it costs years
I said something to Jack that I still believe. Guys our age are sitting at a computer desk or commuting to and from work in peak hour traffic, and it’s like you’re living small and not really living big.
Jack agreed, then added the part most people skip. Anybody can make the same choice, he said, but it took him 10 years to get to a profitable business with an exceptional management and leadership team, a great board and a business that runs without him. “It takes years and years and years of dedication and hard work,” he told me. “But it ultimately is a choice. Is that what you want? And are you then prepared to do the hard work in order to get there?”
I like that he didn’t sell it as a shortcut. A business that runs without you is the result of a decade of building, not a hack you install in a weekend.
Step one: spend 80% of your time bringing cash through the door
When I asked what he’d tell founders who have something good but can’t get it to the next level, Jack said the biggest thing is also the simplest: the time spent on sales and marketing.
“I reckon that early stage businesses should be spending 80% of their time on sales and marketing,” he said. He meant you, the entrepreneur, personally. He cited studies suggesting the average small business owner spends around 11% of their time on sales and marketing. That’s his figure, not one I’ve verified, but the gap is the point. If you’re spending most of your week on admin, tweaking the logo and answering emails, you’re not doing the one job that keeps the doors open.
Here’s the thing. You can’t systemize a business that doesn’t have revenue yet. There’s nothing to hand over. Cash comes first, because cash is what pays the people you’ll eventually hand things to.
Step two: dilute yourself out of the day-to-day
Once income starts coming in, Jack said, the game changes. “It then becomes about how do you start to slowly dilute yourself out of the day-to-day operations.”
He gave me an example from one of The Entourage’s programs. A woman ran a cupcake store. Exceptional store, relatively profitable, but she needed to be there 12 to 14 hours a day. She started implementing systems, slowly brought on great people and built management and leadership structures into the business. Six months later, Jack said, she told him she was spending most of her time on research and development. In a cupcake business, that meant eating cupcakes and drinking coffee at different cafes.
That’s a funny line, but look at what actually happened. She didn’t sell the store or hire a CEO overnight. She took small steps: one system, one good hire, one layer of management at a time.
If you want a structured way to do that, an operating system helps. We broke down EOS vs Scaling Up for founders who need accountability and a meeting rhythm that doesn’t depend on them chasing everyone.
Why you step back (it isn’t for holidays)
Jack was quick to qualify this. Diluting yourself out isn’t so you can take holidays in the Bahamas. He told me he doesn’t often take holidays. There are two reasons to do it.
First, it lets people do their jobs better than you could. Second, it frees you up for more meaningful work. When we spoke, Jack was working on an investment in a completely separate business, an acquisition relevant to his core education business, and the process of becoming accredited so The Entourage could offer diplomas. “I couldn’t do that if I hadn’t afforded myself that sort of freedom,” he said.
That’s the real reason to build a business that runs without you. You stop being the bottleneck, and you get your head back for the big moves only you can make.
Play the game of value, not just cash flow
I’d been speaking with Grant Cardone, and he told me the difference between people who make a million and people who make 10, 20 or 100 million was getting out of the self-employment bracket and moving into business and investment. So I asked Jack how someone with no investment experience gets to that next level.
His answer was the best part of the conversation. Most people start a coffee shop thinking the business is about selling a $3 coffee and making a couple hundred grand a year. The best entrepreneurs, he said, know they have to turn a profit and keep healthy cash flow, because “that’s the lifeblood of the business. Without that, you’re gone.” But they’re playing a different game. “They’re more interested in playing a game of value, which is understanding that my business is an asset separate to me.”
That value, Jack said, is shaped by your growth rate, customer relationships, brand, risk profile, systems, people, distribution and financials. And it only really shows up when the business runs without you.
“If you’re always the person in the shop making the coffee, then your return is always limited to how much coffee you sell on that particular day,” he said. Step out, and other moves open up. He mentioned selling an international license for your business into another country, a deal that might take a month but be highly lucrative, or acquiring other businesses using shares and part cash.
Those are real strategies, but they’re not DIY moves. Licensing deals, share swaps and acquisitions carry legal, tax and dilution consequences, so bring in a business lawyer and an accountant before you sign anything. The principle still holds, though. A business that needs you every day is a job. A business that doesn’t is an asset.
I summed it up back to him: go into your business with a goal bigger than making a bit of money. Build it until it’s independent of you, then use that as leverage. “That’s right,” he said. “Totally.”
Branson’s micro strategy and the customer feeling
Jack helped a friend, Creel Price, design the curriculum for the Branson Centre of Entrepreneurship in Johannesburg, South Africa. They spent 10 days with the mentors, the students and Richard, then about six months building the curriculum back in Australia.
The lesson Jack took from Branson wasn’t something Richard said to him. It was something he said to a student. She ran a magazine and handed him a copy. He told her it’s sometimes good to give a really big brand a free page of advertising, so you can sell pages to other brands on the back of that big name appearing in your magazine.
“Such a simple thing, right?” Jack said. What impressed him was that, at Branson’s level, he’d still kept in touch with the micro strategies and the basics that make a business start and become profitable. I said it’s kind of like hunting for elephants instead of hunting for rabbits, going after the big thing that pulls everything else in behind it.
Jack also passed on something a longtime Branson colleague told him. Most billionaires starting an airline think about the balance sheet, the capital and the exit. Richard, the colleague said, starts by asking what the customer is going to feel when they walk onto the plane. At the end of the day, the customers are who are going to be paying and referring. Build around them and the business has a reason to keep running when you’re not there.
The years it takes, and why he didn’t quit
I asked Jack if he’d ever felt like saying stuff this, I’m going back to a 9 to 5. He smiled.
He said he didn’t stop losing money for about three years and didn’t make any decent money for five or six. Three days before he started his first business at 18, his older brother died as a result of drug use. “That whole period was just not a happy one for me,” he said. He got into debt. Every day he asked himself if it was worth it, if he was good enough, if he was smart enough.
What kept him going was simple. Every time he thought about quitting, he thought about having to go and get a job, and that was never an option for him. “I’ve just got to make it work,” he said. So he stuck with it for five years, failing forward.
He was honest about the rest of the path too. You’re acting on a vision only you can see. Family and friends may not get it. You expect to be wildly successful in month one, and it doesn’t happen. Clients say no, people you hire leave. His advice: get comfortable being outside your comfort zone, and understand the path is going to be challenging, so don’t get down on yourself when it’s slower and harder than you hoped.
The voice saying you’re not ready never goes away
I asked Jack what he’d learned from coaching so many entrepreneurs. He went to something he remembered Oprah saying on her last ever episode: after sitting down with everyone from presidents to prisoners, the one thing they all had in common was the voice inside their head telling them they’re not good enough and not ready.
For Jack, that was the most empowering lesson he’d picked up. Every person on the planet has that voice, no matter how successful. Whether you’re Richard Branson, Oprah Winfrey, Jack Delosa or Joel Brown, it’s the same for everyone. “You recognize that that voice is never going to go away and you just got to act in spite of it,” he said.
At Addicted2Success we have a name for that. We call them ANTs, annoying negative thoughts, and you’ve got to get good at squashing them, or at least turning that noise down in the back of your head. I’d also heard a coach say to give the voice a name and tell it to go away. Jack pointed to Steven Pressfield’s short book Do the Work, where it’s called resistance: “Give it a name, familiarize yourself with it, shine a light on it, and it becomes a lot less scary.”
This matters for stepping back. Handing over control is scary, and that voice will tell you nobody else can do it like you. Act anyway.
Simplicity on the other side of complexity
Jack’s book is called Unprofessional, and what I love about it is that he’s not afraid to say he didn’t finish university and figured it out by doing. A lot of people think they need a degree or some sort of credibility before they can start. I told him it reads like the dummies guide, except it’s elegant and has a lot more swagger.
He said simplicity is something he fights for. Sometimes simple is just crap, and sometimes simple is profound. The profound kind comes from someone who’s gone through the layers of complexity and come out the other side. “Finding simplicity on the other side of complexity,” he called it. That’s what a good system in your business should be too: simple enough that someone else can follow it, because you did the hard thinking first.
Don’t copy anyone’s path, including his
My last question was what he’d tell his kids if they wanted to become entrepreneurs. “I’d say don’t try and do it the way I did it,” he said. The biggest mistake, in his view, is trying to replicate somebody else’s path.
“If there’s one thing I found that all successful people do the same is that they’ve all done it different,” he said. Draw inspiration and insight from people who’ve been there and done that, put it through your own filters and apply it your own way. So, basically, strive to be fascinating and different.
A checklist to build a business that runs without you
- Track your week and see what share of your time actually goes on sales and marketing.
- Push that share toward the top until cash comes through the door reliably.
- List every task only you can do today, starting with the one that eats the most hours.
- Write a simple system for it, then hand it to one good person.
- Build a layer of management so decisions don’t all route back to you.
- Use the time you free up for growth work: partnerships, acquisitions, new products.
- Think about value: brand, systems, people, customers and clean financials.
- Get a lawyer and accountant involved before any licensing, share or acquisition deal.
FAQ
How do you build a business that runs without you?
Get revenue flowing first, then document your key processes, hire good people and build a management layer so daily decisions don’t depend on you. Jack Delosa calls it slowly diluting yourself out of the day-to-day.
How much time should a founder spend on sales and marketing?
Jack Delosa suggests early-stage founders spend about 80% of their own time on revenue-generating work. He cited studies putting the average small business owner at around 11%.
How long does it take to make a business run without the owner?
It varies. Jack said it took him about 10 years to build a profitable business with a strong leadership team and board. One cupcake store owner in his program stepped back from 12 to 14 hour days within six months.
Why does a business that runs without you matter?
Because it becomes an asset with its own value instead of a job. It also frees you for higher-value work like partnerships, licensing and acquisitions, which is where Jack says bigger net worths get built.
How do you deal with self-doubt when building a business?
Accept that the voice saying you’re not ready never fully goes away and act in spite of it. Give it a name, shine a light on it, and it gets a lot less scary.
Disclaimer: Addicted2Success content is for general informational purposes only and is not a substitute for personalized advice from a qualified, licensed professional. Always seek professional counsel for your specific situation before making decisions.
