Why Less is The Strategy - Episode 1 - Ant Hodges
Most people trying to grow their business are doing too much, not too little, too much, and the advice telling them to do more is the reason they are stuck in this episode. I want to make a case for something that runs completely against what you've probably been told, but less genuinely, deliberately, strategically, less is the most powerful decision you can make right now.
I'm Ant Hodges, this is less is the strategy. The podcast that proves doing less is the most powerful business decision you will ever make. Are you ready to find out what becomes possible when you simplify then let's dive in.
I want to ask you something. How many things are on your marketing to do list right now, not your whole business, just your marketing. The content you said you'd create, the email sequence you keep meaning to finish the platform you signed up to three months ago, and the trial is just about to expire, and you've barely touched it, the funnel that someone told you would change everything if you just added a few more steps into it.
If you're anything like the people that I've worked with over the last 20 years or so, that has a list of between 30 to 50 items on it, maybe more. And I asked you, honestly, hand on heart, how many of those things are actually moving your business forward right now, the answer would probably be three, maybe four. The rest is noise.
But it doesn't feel like noise. It feels like work. I get it. It feels like progress. It feels like if you just get through the list that and you finished it all, then things would finally start to click, and so you keep adding, because that's what you've been taught to do.
Every expert, every course, every conference, tells you the same thing, but in a different tone. Do more. Be everywhere. The algorithm rewards consistency. Post daily, go live, build the funnel, grow the list, test the ad. Show up on video. And if it's not working yet, it's because you haven't done enough yet.
You know, I've spent 20 years watching that advice play out in real business. I want to tell you what I actually saw from the coalface of running an agency implementing these things for clients. What not only that, they brought to us and said, would you take this blueprint and implement it, but also that trap that I got caught in as the agency owner, thinking that's what I needed to do.
The businesses that struggled the most were almost never the ones doing too little. They were the ones always doing too much, spread too thin, and chasing too many things at once. They were led by brilliant, capable people, but they were exhausting themselves on a strategy that was never going to work, not because they lacked talent or effort, but because complexity itself doesn't scale. It compounds. It gets heavier every time you add something new, and at some point, the weight of it will start to crush everything that you've built beneath it.
The businesses that broke through, almost every single one of them had done something that felt counter intuitive at the time they stopped. They looked at everything they were doing, and they'd taken most of it away.
As I've said, my name is Ant Hodges. I've been in the digital marketing game for nearly two decades. I've helped clients generate over $76 million in results across that time in agency life and consultancy, work with them, and for most of those 20 years, I was the person behind the success, the strategist, the architect, the one building, the systems and the funnels, and had a team to run campaigns. It effectively made other people's businesses grow. I was never really the face. I was always the engine.
In May 2023 at a conference in Austin, Texas, I walked off stage holding two awards, a million dollar Hero Award and a community superstar award. People I genuinely respected were shaking my hand from the outside. Everything was working. This was the Kajabi hero conference in Austin, where I'd been part of this community for over 11 years, and I'd been working to help people to build online courses and platforms on this system, and it all looked really good.
But do you know what inside there was something missing. Could I could I say I felt completely hollow, not completely but there was an emptiness. I wasn't ungrateful, I wasn't dismissive of what I'd built. That hollow feeling was just there, like the version of success I was standing in the middle of wasn't actually the thing that I'd been working towards.
Three months later, I was sat alone in a cafe in Porto, Portugal. This is where I take my clients for annual masterminds, and we head out every September, but this was in the August, just before running another mastermind event. And a question that a friend asked me at that conference, kept coming back to me. It was only six words. The question was, why are you still running your agency?
Do you know what? I had no answer, and that silence told me everything I needed to know. The business I'd built to give me freedom had become the thing that consumed my life, every tool I added, every service I launched, every hire, every process, each one made complete sense at the time. Together, they built something I no longer recognized as mine.
So I made a decision. I wound the agency down carefully and deliberately, not overnight, and I started asking a different question. It wasn't, how do I grow this? But what would this look like if it was simple, that question would be the question that changed everything.
You know, what would it look like if this was simple? Is the question this show is built on. It's the question that my business is now built on. It's the question I just want to pose to you, because here's what I believe, after working for all of those years watching businesses succeed and fail and succeed and fail myself, I've seen that simplicity scales and complexity fails, not some of the time, not in certain niches and at certain revenue levels, most of the time.
In most businesses, the single business obstacle to growth is not a lack of ideas or a lack of effort, it's a lack of clarity, too many things competing for too little attention, too many strategies running simultaneously for any of them to get the focus they need to actually work.
You see, I blame something I call the hustle culture, the do more be everywhere, outwork everyone narrative. It's not just unhelpful. It's actually become harmful, because it takes real people who are capable, motivated, people who want to have an impact in the world, and it points them in 20 directions all at once, and then when nothing works as well as it should, it tells them that the problem is that they haven't worked hard enough, that they haven't done enough yet, and that is the lie. And I think somewhere in you right now you already know that.
Listen, my friend, I've watched people build businesses they actually wanted the ones where the results matched the life that they were creating. They were the ones who didn't do the most. They were the ones who got the clearest, who decided what mattered, committed to it completely and said no to the rest, not forever, just long enough to find out what would happen if they gave one thing everything instead of giving everything a little.
That is less as a strategy, not laziness, not giving up a deliberate, intentional decision to subtract so that what remains can actually grow.
I want to tell you about someone I worked with, Aileen, came to one of my Portugal mastermind retreats. She had a real business, real clients, real revenue, real results. And from the outside, she was doing well. She'd built it how most of us would build things by serving, by showing up, by being diligent. And what she was talking to us about was there was a challenge with, you know, growing her funnel, and that's what she was talking about. And you know, ultimately, she wanted to improve her sales. She wanted to grow her revenue in her business. So she thought that she had a sales problem.
When we sat down and we looked at everything that she was doing, the picture was quite familiar. There were one or two things in her business that were genuinely working and generating the most results, creating the impact she wanted, but she was surrounded by all of these other strategies that she felt like she needed to get right to make the sales engine work better.
So over the course of the mastermind, we talked about it. We pulled things apart, we looked at the numbers, because it's really important to look at the numbers in your business. Well, we actually discovered that she didn't have a sales problem. The conversion rate when she was actually speaking with people, once she actually got onto a sales call or a sales presentation, was off the charts. The problem was that she wasn't filling her funnel with enough of the right people, because the people at the top end of the funnel were not transitioning all the way through to a sales conversation in the right way.
So we worked on what was needed to be done to bring a clarity of message to help her to show up in the right way, and to get that funnel fixed coming with I have a sales problem, and realizing that she didn't have a sales problem was actually the work that we did. And by stripping away some of the complexity and some of the things building her funnel, she was then able to start attracting the right people and see sales grow with a lot less effort.
This is what simplification actually does. It's not just a revenue strategy. It's a recalibration. It's what becomes possible when you stop spreading yourselves across things that are not pulling their weight, and you give your best to the things that are. I've seen this happen so many times to think that it's an accident. It's not a personality thing. It's not a niche thing. It's not luck. It's what happens when someone is willing to do the harder thing, which is not to add more, but instead to choose less.
That's what this show is about, not tactics, not the next tool or the next platform or the next framework, not someone telling you that you just have to add one more thing, not some kind of interview with some person who's over complicated things and wants to sell you their system. Hopefully then everything will finally click when you install it. It's the opposite of all of that.
Every week, one episode, one idea that actually matters. No lists of 20 things to do and overwhelm you, just the right thing, I hope, explained clearly with something that you can actually do with it. I want to share real stories from real people who choose simplicity. It's not an interview podcast, so it will be me sharing those stories of those who found everything they had been chasing started to come towards them when they simplified.
I want it to be the honest version of what it looks like to build a business and build a business on your own terms, including the parts that are still being worked out right now, because that's the thing about simplicity. It's not a destination you arrive at. It's a practice, a decision you make every day, and then you make it again the next day, to resist the pull of more, to trust that the right things, given the right attention, are enough.
I believe that with everything I have not because it's a comforting idea, because I've watched it in my own business and in the businesses of people I've had the privilege of sitting with looking at what they've built and helping them to find what was already there, waiting to be given the space to grow.
If you've listened this far and you haven't already switched off, I think you already know, my friend, that some of this version is true for you. You may have even felt some of what I've talked about, the exhaustion of the treadmill, the quiet suspicion that more is not the answer, the moments where something simple worked better than everything complicated.
This show is for you. Subscribe wherever you're listening to come back next week. To bring the questions that you've been afraid to ask, the one that starts with, what if I just stop doing most of this? And let's find out together what that answer looks like. Less is the strategy, and I genuinely believe it's the best one you will ever use.
Thank you for being here on episode one. Make sure that you dive over to less is the strategy.com. You can submit your ideas for questions, for topics, for thoughts. Over on that page, you can also find social media connections to reach out to me and send me a DM. But please do subscribe here on this podcast platform, wherever you're listening, to make sure that you don't miss another episode. Less is the strategy. We can do this together.