Ant Hodges 0:00
What do you do in your business when you've hit a rough patch, things aren't going so great, and you need to fix it. You need to get out of the funk that you find yourself in. You need to fix the problem that's occurred in your business. You know, you may have had clients leave. You may have revenue down. You may have team decide that they don't want to be part of your world anymore. So when these things happen, how we respond and how we look to address these challenges will make or break us. And I want to talk about some of my personal journey over the last few years with this and how I've been able to use a lot of adversity as real ways to learn and to be able to move forward. I feel like we need to have a very different perspective when we have problems that occur in our business that we might not necessarily think in the way that we should when it comes to solving them. 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. Now, granted, we need to fix problems when they occur. I get that. We need to find a solution. We need to be able to have it, you know, sorted, and we need to be able to move forward. But what I found, particularly in more recent years, as I've pivoted away from delivering services as a full service agency to being an author, a business speaker and being able to consult, is that sometimes a focus on the problem like a sold out, hard nosed, dedicated focus on the problem isn't necessarily what you need to be able to say, well, we need to fix this. The reality is focusing on a problem is just focusing on the negative. It's all your energy and focus being put on something that's gone wrong means that your focus isn't elsewhere, and that negativity can absorb a lot of our time, a lot of our energy, and we know we need to do something different to fix that problem. But sometimes we can't see what we need to do, and we can't see what we need to do, because we're clouded with the issue at hand. I know all too well when, like for instance, revenue as a challenge in the business, I would focus on what the problem was, and more often than not, maybe it was when a client had left the business, and we didn't expect that to happen. For whatever reason, they've chosen a different supplier, or they've on very few, on quite a few occasions, they've brought family members into the business, and they wanted to train up their son or their daughter, because my daughter's worked with me, and they like the idea of that, and so they are taking over the work instead of us delivering. So that has been something that's really challenged me over the years. Maybe clients are slow or late in paying so that you have to put a pause on the service, but putting a pause on the service stops, obviously the service for the client, but you're not addressing the actual root issue of getting the money in because they're late paying. But underneath all of that, no matter how many times we looked at all of these things, there was actually a bigger problem that actually needed fixing, but I was focused on the problem as it was on the surface, rather than looking at the root cause of the lead gen wasn't necessarily working for us as an agency. I wasn't having enough sales conversations with people to be able to mitigate a client dropping so that we could fill it straight away. And so the focus for me was on the wrong thing. And all too often, I've also found that when a financial difficulty occurs in the business, that I look to try and build something new
Ant Hodges 4:39
as an entrepreneur, if you're this way inclined as well, my friend, I'm sure you may resonate with this. There's always a new opportunity. There's always something else that we could try to do. There's a new sales tactic, there's a new tool, there's a new thing that I could build, and sometimes I know in. My whole ADHD brain, I can sometimes dive in and hyper focus on something that is far more of a distraction than actually an answer. I know that I've, I would say, in the last six months, I've spent like days working on platforms like lovable and replit, building out apps and using AI to just play with stuff, but that could have been a couple of days of productive work. That could have been a couple of days where I was reaching out and having conversations with people. But actually, some of that, well, most of it came to nothing because I realized it was more of a distraction than it was actually helping me in my business. So the thought is that, if we're having a rough patch in our business, revenues down, we don't have as many clients. Oh, we could just build something new. Building something new isn't the answer, and it may be at times, but coming from a place of challenge in the business, to then build something new is actually an even bigger distraction than the other things that we were talking about a moment ago. And the reason I say this is because when you think about building something new, you think, well, I could quickly spin this up, and we've got all the tools at our disposal to be able to quickly spin stuff up, and it's really easy, but once it's built, they won't come. That Field of Dreams mentality is not true in business. If they build it, they won't come. You need to brand it. You need to market it. You need to launch it. You need to build an audience, or build a list. Get people around it, supporting it, get people testing it, actually start selling it. You've effectively just created yourself a whole new business that you've started from scratch when you've thought about building something rather than looking at your current business and actually going well, hold on. How could I just make these things that are working well in my business? How can I make those work better? And that's where our focus should be when times get tough in our business, rather than adding a ton more stuff to the your plate, to your business and all of the complexity that comes with it, the whole reason that this podcast exists is to bring you the truth that less is the strategy when you can sit down and you start To look at the challenges or the problems, and you start to unpack what are the root causes? What caused this? You can often find that there's some really simple little tweaks that you can make to your marketing, to your message, to the activity that you're doing, and start to scale from there, and you can control that scalability. I know people who do not want a huge, scalable business, but the compound effect of diligently doing the right things enables their business to thrive, and it doesn't necessarily have these drop offs. There's a whole conversation going on in the business world right now, particularly the online business world, that there's not many people buying that there's this whole fear over the war in Iran that could cause all kinds of stuff to happen. We could go into another global recession. Energy prices are going up, so everybody's looking after every penny that they've got. The reality is, my friend, there are still people out there who have the problem that you have that you can solve. They just need you to put an offer in front of them. And that's the secret, that's the thing that we need to be focused on. How can we have more conversations with people, with the things that we know that are working, so that we can ride the storm. And it's a hard thing to focus on those things, because you think that shiny object, that opportunity, it looks great, it sounds amazing. Or I could spin this app up and it will work really well for me, because I could get that launched super quick.
Ant Hodges 9:26
It's not always the same. It doesn't always work that way. And more often than not, it's not the answer. The answer is subtracting. The answer is simplifying. The answer is saying to yourself, What things are working and how can I double down on them? When things get tough in your business, when revenue has dropped, when you've lost clients, it's a case of actually saying to yourself, how can I double down. On the things that are working to be able to do that, you need to do three things. First, you need to block out time on your calendar, in your schedule. You need time to be able to sit somewhere away from computers, away from your phone, away from distractions, a notepad, your brain and your heart, because your business runs because you feel or you're in business because you felt like you could serve the world with something. You could make a difference. You could have an impact in the world. And that's a heart thing that comes from the heart, because you want to stand in that place of service. I hope, I hope that's why you went into business in the first place. I know that's why I went into business in the first place. I'm sold out and passionate to help my clients get the result they're looking for, to grow their business and to simplify. That's where I'm at. And from a heart perspective, everything that you then do needs to come from that position. So the first thing is to block the time and sit and go. What am I called to do? What's my calling? Understanding your calling, which is your reason for being in business, the kind of direction that you want to move in and who you want to serve once you've got an insane level of clarity over something that completely aligns with you. That's where we step into the second part of this journey. The second part is to get really clear on your message. The message needs to align with the values that you have and the reasons for that calling. And once you've got that, it's it's easy to create a message. Once you understand your calling, it's super easy to create a message, because all you're doing is you're effectively just telling people what your calling is. Once you've got your message, that's when we move on to the third thing, which is creating your offers. So it's calling, it's message, and then it's offers. Now offers, they have a huge part to play in generating new income for your business, because an offer that's hidden somewhere else and that you're not putting out there is going to generate no sales. I'll say that again. If you hide an offer away from the world and you're not confident of sharing it, nobody's ever going to buy it in the first place. I will often talk to people when they're thinking about wanting to create, maybe, like a high ticket offer. You know, there's a fear around creating a high ticket offer. There's a fear about putting it out there. So they might spend ages writing up this document about what this offer is, but then they'll never put it out there. Nobody's going to buy it if you don't put it out there, you've just got to be able to maybe just put up on a website and tell people that it's there, refer to it, then people know it's there, because you never know who you're going to cross online or in person, in real life, who's going to be in a position to be able to buy for that buy that offer, because they want what you're promising from that offer as well. Offers help position you and your expertise when you've got high ticket offers, and you've got this way in which you can really get somebody a result, whether it's a financial, a health, a relationship, a business, any any kind of goal you there's, there's a structure to how you create that high ticket offer. But there's a word of warning for low ticket offers. Low ticket offers are often a place that people will go to when they think, I need to generate revenue. And the thought process here is, well, if it's priced cheap, but it's high value, lots of people will buy it.
Ant Hodges 13:50
It's not necessarily true. It's actually a falsehood. The reality is that pricing psychology works on the basis of price and value. If something is priced very low. The typical response to a consumer is, there mustn't be too much value in this. So what people do is they then try to expand the value and add a huge amount of stuff and try and explain how valuable it is, even though it's such a low price. But nobody's going to buy that. If you have a particular audience or target audience, ideal client in mind, and they have a challenge and they have a problem, it's our job to be able to craft a message and position an offer that forward paces and future paces they're thinking to the result that they could get that we lead with payoff, and we price it accordingly. We've got to price it in such a way that there's enough value attributed to what we do. One of my friends, Graham Cochran, he will often. He's talked to me about this quite often, and I hear Him say quite a lot. I. What's the value that you can bring to someone and price it as a starting point as a 10th of that? So if you're a business coach and you believe you could add a million dollars to somebody's business in the next year, price your work at $100,000 because it's a 10th of what you're promising to add. If you're in a particular space where it's not necessarily money and revenue isn't something that you can measure. Think about what it would cost somebody to get that result, if it's maybe you're you work with elite athletes or something like that. What would it cost somebody to win their next race in terms of time, energy, effort, all of the coaches, all of the all of that, and price your service to them in a way that is seen as around 10% of the effort, 10% of the cost, 10% of the energy that they need to spend to get that result, because you're going to be there as their coach, their elite coach. Example, I've just made up on the fly, but that's the reality. We need to price in such a way that the value and the payoff is greatly exceeding the cost that they're going to invest and we don't. When we hit a rough patch in our business, when revenues are done, we lost clients, whatever it might be, we shouldn't automatically go to those low priced, stack them high kind of offers. They work in some industries, and they will work for your business, but in that moment where things are tough, personally, I think one of the best things that you can do is position a high ticket offer and have some conversations around that, because one sale of a high ticket offer will equal multiples of a low ticket offer. And when you are justifying what offers to put out there one conversation to get a high ticket offer is the same amount of energy that you might spend trying to sell a low ticket offer, but you've got to sell a lot more of those to create your high ticket offer income. So doesn't it make sense just to create a compelling high ticket offer that enables you to position yourself as a true expert and maybe win one or two clients to fix the challenge that you've got in your business right now, rather than trying to create a low ticket offer, build something brand new, put it out there, have to spend all the time branding an audience, building and ultimately end up with more work to do.
Ant Hodges 17:36
The reality is, we can change things in our businesses if we focus on the right things, if we focus on simplifying less, is the strategy, is the title of this podcast, and I want that to be ingrained in you. The things that you can do to try and fix the challenge or the problem you're experiencing in your business or in your life right now is not about adding more. It's not about building new stuff. It's about taking stock, simplifying and doing far less, but doing the things that work well. I know you can do it. I've done it time and time and time again, and that default position now of going and building something or hustling to try and do something else, or get another project in, or building something out that's gone. I'm just going to do the things that I do well, it's the having the conversations, it's the positioning myself as an expert. It's having a slightly higher ticket offer so that I can actually enjoy working with clients, because I'm not run ragged between lots of different projects. I can position one thing and we're just going to go for it. That's what less is. The strategy is about. It's the science of subtraction. Is the science of simplification. If you want to read more about simplification, you can go to simplify the funnel.com and you can grab a copy of my book, it is effectively the playbook on how to simplify marketing funnels so that you can build an audience. You build a list of buyers rather than freebie hunters. You have a minimum viable funnel, and you focus on what I call seed marketing that helps to shape you as an expert in your niche, where you engage with your audience, you echo your core values and you deliver amazing results. That's what seed stands for. Shape, engage, echo and deliver. All of this is covered inside simplify the funnel, which is my new book, and you can grab it at simplify the funnel.com, the final thing that I want to leave you with is just this one thought, if your business is struggling right now, not only can you take the less is the strategy, methodology and mindset and simplify, but you need to talk to someone. You need to. A vent. In some senses, you need to get a little bit of perspective from somebody else at times, and I want to do that for you. If there's a way in which I can help, I want you just to go over to ant hodges.com there's a let's chat button at the top of my website. It'll open up a whatsapp conversation. There's one automated message that asks you what you want to talk about, and then I'll get a notification on my phone. I'd love for you to be able to reach out if there's something you want to chat through. If you want an answer, I send voice notes to people who who message me through there, but the whole point is that I'm here to serve you, to help you to simplify, to help you to get through those challenges, and to help you to scale up. So despite this episode really being all about focusing on the problems, my friend, I want you to focus on what's possible by simplifying less, really is the strategy. So why don't we do that? Why don't we implement that into our lives? Use that as a mantra in our minds. Less is the strategy. Less is the strategy. And let's do this. Let's simplify and scale you. You.