Ant Hodges 0:00
I want to talk to you about a book I've just finished, and I really want to be honest about it. I picked it up, not really being sure whether this was going to be something that I was going to get a lot from. Because, you know, when sometimes you pick up a book and you think this is a subject matter that's quite close to what I'm talking about, and I'm not sure that I'm going to get a lot of value in it, because, you know, I've lived this, I've taught it, I've seen it playing out. I've even written a similar book on this subject. But let me tell you what happened when I read this turned out to be the best kind of reading experience for me personally, and I'm going to talk about it here. 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. Okay, so this was a free book, and it's called actual intelligence. It's written by Kenny Rita and Jonathan kronsted, the CO CEOs of Kajabi. Now, to my best of my knowledge, Kajabi was founded in 2009 maybe 2010 I actually joined the platform and started using it in 2012 when I was early. 2012 when I was introduced to the platform by Brennan Burchard and Kenny actually started it from a point of view of wanting to sell a course on how to build a garden sprinkler that he'd built for his kids, like a toy kind of thing. And at the time, there wasn't really a platform that was simple enough to actually build this kind of thing. So he built one. It built the platform to do it. And since then, Kajabi has gone on to help literally hundreds of 1000s of experts turn their knowledge into income, and their customers have reportedly generated over $11 billion on the platform as well, 11 billion a, that's with a capital B. And I think for me, these two, they were involved in the day to day operations of the business. Then they stepped away from the business. For a while, were board members, and now they're back being co CEOs, and to be honest, they have seen from having a very front row seat how every kind of business could use the platform and succeed, but also how businesses have failed to succeed as well. So when they kind of put this book together, and I think it's kind of there as almost like a lead magnet, for want of a better phrase for the new platform, every expert.com that they're launching, I think you know this is absolute gold, because it's it's coming at a time when everybody is looking at complexity, AI automations, and they want, they're they're suggesting that we kind of take a slightly different tack. So I know, personally, that everything that I've built in my business is built on real expertise, and the way in which I've spent the last 20 odd years in the agency world, and I've been helping lots of clients and now writing my book simplify the funnel, and the work that I'm doing to help people to strip back and to simplify and bring the human back into The funnel is exactly what I'm building my business around. And I feel like everyone should be able to build a business around their experience too, not just because they know a subject, but because they've lived it, breathed it, and had the real life experience of the ups and downs like we've all experienced, so that they can teach out of those things. And the book, in and of itself, it didn't take me very long to read it was just like a one sitting book. The central idea of it is something that they call the expert equation. And I just need to kind of read this a little bit just to make sure I get this right, expertise multiplied by visibility multiplied by availability equals value. So that's expertise multiplied by visibility multiplied by availability equals value. And to be honest, this is quite simple on the surface. But the the thing is that this is very counter cultural. This kind of framing of how you build value is very counter cultural. If any one of those three
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things hits zero, the whole thing hits zero. And what I mean by that is, if you have zero expertise, but you have visibility and of. Availability, then you have no value. If you have expertise and availability, but no visibility, there's no value. You're not going to generate any income if you've got expertise and visibility, but you're just not available from a human perspective, then there is no value. It's got to be all three, and this is the, you know, I think this is the the stance that we are needing to take as true experts in the marketplace. Because everybody is saying that AI is replacing coaching. AI is replacing the need for knowledge. You know, entrepreneurs and things like this. That's why I think the sequence of this formula, this expert equation, is around expertise, visibility and availability, and you've got to have all three of those to really deliver amazing value for others and to be able to create a business that's going to pay you a lot of money as well. You know, most of the people that I work with who are quite honestly and genuinely, I'm not saying authentically, I'm saying genuinely here, brilliant at what they do. They do struggle, and they struggle because of one of the other areas, visibility or availability. You know, they've got more knowledge than they actually give themselves credit for sometimes, but because being more visible is actually hard work and making sure that you're available at the same time that's, you know, time for money. And everybody is saying, you know, move away from time for money and scale up your business in an automated way. That's where the gap lies for most people's businesses. I see it all the time with entrepreneurs who are joining my simplified community, but also with the fractional cmo clients that I'm working with. They literally are probably the world's greatest expert at what they do, but their time is precious, and they don't have the time to always be available, it would just burn them out. And, you know, just being visible online in terms of recording videos and posting socials and writing content and publishing books and, you know, recording videos, it all takes time, energy and effort. But I think far too many people who struggle with visibility and struggle with their availability, they put all their eggs in the basket of their expertise because they might have a certificate on the wall or some credentials or, you know, some kind of PhD or something like that. And the belief is that because they've got these credentials, then that's going to attract everybody to them. I remember training as a coach and certifying up to master coach level, and thinking couple of years after that, what a waste of my money. And it wasn't because the certification and the training was rubbish. It wasn't that at all. It was because the kind of lie that I'd told myself, that when I have this badge of honor, people will look at me and want to buy from me, because I'm going to be head and shoulders above everybody else. I'm going to be the master coach, and not just a coach. And it was a lie, because not one single person asked me for my credentials, and they they might reassure you, if you've got credentials, they might reassure you, from a perspective of making you feel like you know you're worthy of stepping in to do this, but I honestly, truly believe that when you step in and you serve someone and you help them get a result, it doesn't matter how many letters you've got after your name or what certificates you've got on the wall. This is something else that they talk about in the book, and I'm just, like, banging on about this for years, and this is like, one of those moments from reading the book. It was like validation for me and my thinking. I've been saying this kind of thing, and it's been ant a lot of other people, but I'm now reading it from two co CEOs who've helped people to generate $11 billion of revenue, and I'm feeling validated all of this, and the simplicity of owning your expertise, showing up and being visible and actually bringing the human back into it, in terms of that
Ant Hodges 9:35
availability, this is everything that I wrote in simplify the funnel, because A funnel does three things. It gets the person's attention so you show up in their world. It gives them a clear reason to trust you because of your expertise, and you make it as easy as possible to work with you, which is the availability, and that's the minimum viable funnel that I wrote in. Simplify the funnel. It. Isn't complicated. It doesn't need to be complicated, and so you don't need to make things complicated. Honestly, there's one exercise that I've walked some people through, clients and some of my community members, and it's it's an interesting little exercise. I want you to google your expertise when you can. So after you finish listening to this podcast, after you've finished your workout, if you're listening to me while you're working out, or if you're driving at the moment, you can't do this right now, but when you're able to, once you finish this episode, I want you to google your exact expertise, plus your city. And I don't want you to search for your name. I want you to search in a way that someone might type if they needed some things that you do, like business coach for consultants, or marketing strategies for coaches, or fitness coach for diabetics. And then I want you to put your town or your city or your region or your county or whatever it is in there, ask yourself, take a look, are you on the first page? And if the answer is no, then just straight up, you're invisible from a search engine perspective, and not many people are going to find you when they're searching. So also, you're not necessarily that's kind of just an indication, because the way in which Google looks at all of your content and kind of indexes what you do, it kind of gives an indication. Because if you're publishing content on YouTube as an example, you'd appear in that search. If you're producing podcasts around this you'd be on that search if you have your website and your content searchable by the AIS, you'll appear in that top section, which is the AI section of the search. Effectively, you're invisible, and most people are. And what you need to think about is not just relying on your expertise, but it's that visibility piece, but then adding in the availability as well. So yeah, this book, even though it was a small book, it was a freebie giveaway. You know, I think for me, they made also a couple of other clear arguments that I'd love to talk about. One of them was the before you build a course, Bill, before you build a membership, before you even build a funnel sell your time. And I'm like, when they wrote this, I'm just like, Finally, somebody actually saying this. You know, there are so many people who get caught in this trap of thinking they need to build something after they've sold it. Because how do I know that somebody wants to buy a course that I'm going to build? Okay, you can jump into this mentality of sell it before you make it. Can I call the BS on this? You know, if you sell something that doesn't exist. You're doing a few different things. Number one, I truly don't believe you're operating out of a full position of integrity, because you're pretending that it exists. You're saying, Okay, well, I've got this course and it's going to do this. And what you're doing is you're validating the message of the course by people buying it. You can get that validation in lots of other ways, whether the course is right for you to do, but why not actually serve someone in the best possible way by actually spending time with them and delivering some great results and learning from that? Because that's hugely important. What you end up doing is being able to refine frameworks and refine the delivery mechanism, and look at the results that people are going to get from what you do, and then from there, you build a course or a community or a framework, or you write a book, and you've got real case studies, and you've got real examples, and it's a lived experience, which is very different to what people can get access to through AI. And that's what's going to separate you at the end of the day. I think the thing about availability for people often, will stop them from thinking about doing kind of one to one stuff, and the whole notion of sell it before you make it and then automate it is the whole dream of multiple recurring
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revenue and making money while you sleep, and all of that kind of stuff that will come in time. Believe me, it will come. But I honestly think that if you could end up doing sort of 20 or more paid one to one sessions with real people that have real problems, not free sessions. I know there's a lot of coaching products and programs out there who say, Oh, you got to do like 40 hours worth of free coaching to get certified. Nah, nah, nah, nah. They're not free sessions. They're not. Just discovery calls, but real paid sessions, and you will learn an awful lot from that, you know, if you, even if you set the floor 150 bucks an hour or, you know, and you do those sessions, you make the whole process of building your business far easier, because what you end up doing is you spend more time with people on a human to human basis. You learn their real challenges, their real frustrations and fears. You learn their aspirations, and you learn how to deliver the right kind of advice and expertise to them to get the result of where they want to get to. I want you to think about, you know, the whole notion of when you charge for your time. In that sense, it's like people are making an investment. Free Free Advice, free knowledge, free stuff that we can pick up from Ai, sit on webinars and all that kind of stuff. It gets treated like free stuff. It doesn't get implemented. There's no value in it. Paid advice is valuable because people are putting a value on it by putting their credit card into your website and actually paying for you. But there is a deeper reason that all of this really matters. You know, until you can cross the kind of 2030, or 50 paying clients, you are truly guessing what you are wanting to build in your business. You may think you know what problems people have. You may think you know the language that will land around the messaging and the offer that you can put together, and you may think you know the price that they'll pay. But my friend, please hear this. You don't, not really until somebody has given you money and sat down with their actual situation in front of you, and you've done that multiple times, then you've got all the information to be able to build a course from there, what you've been able to do is capture a lot of information by working with those people in such a way that You're able to then put together frameworks and models and structures and offers, because it's real, lived experience. You have experienced it at a human level. And it's not a case of just going to AI and say, write me a course on this. We need people who are going to spend time with people in the age of AI who are really going to help them to solve the problems, to empathize with that situation, and to mentor and walk the path with them. I think we all need a little bit of a reset. And I think this book is doing that, you know, and will do that. And like I said, it's kind of validation for the whole simplify movement and what I'm trying to do, because when we stop getting bogged down with the idea and the notion of building complex funnels and building out all of our expertise into a big course, we're removing all of that complexity, all of the stress of doing all of that. And when we connect with a human at a human level, and we deliver amazing results. Something magical happens there, and you can get paid for it. You really can earn good money doing this kind of thing. And yes, it's going to take time out of your schedule. It's not a set it and let it go and make money while you sleep. Mentality, you've got to put the work in, but putting the work in you get real market feedback to be able to shape what you should then build, and you're no longer building in this vacuum of guesswork. They say the word assumption makes an ass of you and me, because that's how you spell it, I suppose. But the reality is, assumption is what so many people are building their online businesses around. They assume people will want to buy. They assume that the messaging is right, they assume that the pricing is right, they assume that the delivery mechanism is right. But when you get that feedback from working with people one to one, you can shape something that can be multiplied. That's the
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secret for building a long lasting business that's on rock solid foundations that will help you to thrive. I really want to implore you to stop thinking about the whole build it before you sell it, mentality and just go into chat GPT or Claude or whatever your favorite AI is to build out a course, live the experience and build from there. You can use AI tools to help you along that way, to extract your experience, but you've got to have that experience. First, I also want to leave you with one thing that really kind of hit home for me. The chapter I want to really kind of nail and hone in on is their last of the five truths, and it's the one I think matters the most right now. Kind of alluded to it in some of the conversation we've had up until now. But it's stay human. They make a case in the book to simplify and be very direct with this message that AI can do the what only you can do the who, and there's a story in the book about a fitness coach who nearly quit when AI fitness apps started getting good, because apps could generate a lot of personalized workout plans and track their progress and all this kind of stuff. And she asked the question, why would anyone pay her 150 bucks an hour when they could do it on an app for free? What she noticed was quite interesting. Her best clients hadn't been coming to her for the next workout plan for one of the I can't quite remember it from the I think it was that kind of thing. But they were coming because she could tell when they were stressed just by watching them warm up. And she knew that maybe the knee would play up with a particular exercise if they pushed too hard that week. And that's when she said, Do you know what? I'm fine in this place, because people aren't going to get that kind of input when they're doing an AI app, I can really speak into their situation when I'm connected with them as a human being. And yes, an app could generate a workout, but she could see their face, she could see their body, and she could then adjust on the fly, rather than just an app going just follow this program, which is just what the robots will do. So she raised her rates, and clients still stayed, which is amazing in the face of all of this kind of AI so many people fearful about their jobs and what's happening, but it's the human connection, and that's the argument that we all need to be listening to right now. AI gets better at delivering information every single day, but human judgment becomes far more valuable, not less in that age of AI, you have earned the experience to stand in that gap as the real expert, giving your judgment on certain situations with your knowledge, because you've lived it, you've failed at it, and we've all failed in more ways than one, and but we've Also all succeeded, and we've got it right, but often we'll have got it a lot of a lot of times wrong, or we would have got it wrong a lot of times before we actually got it right. And that's the thing that can't be replicated, and that's what people will pay premium for right now. So in reading this book, it felt like total validation, not because I needed it, but because two people who I've watched build a business around hundreds of 1000s of experts, and they've also looked at their businesses, have kind of written a book that validates the same kind of conclusions that simplicity beats complexity, that specificity breeds breadth, and human connection is the most valuable thing you can offer in a world that's drowning in AI and automation to the hill. It's the same philosophy. It's a different packaging. But I am so excited for this, because this is also kind of validation for me, in which sticking with someone like Kajabi over the years, where there's been a number of changes, and there's been some ups and downs with the company, and a rebrand and change of people and personnel, I think Kajabi have come back to their roots around what Kajabi was actually for in the first place, which is an exciting thing. It's an exciting
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thing to actually see them revert back to this notion that those with expertise can make money and can serve the world. But what this book has really taught us is that expertise alone isn't enough. We need to be found so therefore we need to be findable, if that's even a word. So people need to be able to see us. That visibility is important, but we also need to make ourselves available, because otherwise expertise counts for nothing. So. The premise of the book is to start with one to one sessions before you build anything, and their new platform that they're building enables you to build out a profile and put one to one sessions in there for certain things. And you can take money, and literally, it's a free platform, minus a percentage of the sale, and you can put in your offers for people to book in those one to one sessions with you, and it's just a really simplified way to position yourself and your expertise and to get calls booked in to your diary for paying customers. So again, the book's called actual intelligence. Kenny, Rita, Jonathan kronsted, co CEOs of Kajabi. It's short. You will finish it in just one sitting, and I recommend you get it, particularly if you're in the early stages of building your knowledge business. How do you go and get it? Head over to the website, every expert.com forward slash book. Every expert.com forward slash book. At the time I'm recording this, it's free. You can download the PDF. You can get the ebook. You can also get the audio book. It is clearly a way in which they're looking to market every expert as well and encourage people to get signed up on that which, again, at the time of recording this right now, it's on an invitation only basis before it goes kind of public. But I want to bring one more call to action here, if you want to truly simplify, and you want to look at all of the aspects that I talk about in terms of raising your visibility, looking at how to better sell, how to build a minimum viable funnel, then you check out my book over at simplify the funnel.com. You can grab your copy. It's also available on Amazon. Kenny actually wrote the introduction for my book, which is super exciting to see them come at this from this angle as well, because simplify is the way in which I'm moving everything forward. Less is the strategy. Is the name of this podcast, because that is got to be our mindset moving forward again. I kind of say this in the wrap up of most of the podcasts, I want you to be repeating that in your mind. When you look at an opportunity, when you look at a strategy, I want you to think less is the strategy. How can I simplify this? How can I strip this back? How can I make this easier when you look at the complexity of your business, how can you actually do less and subtract? That's the whole premise of what these guys are talking about in their book, what I talk about in mine, and the mission I believe that a number of people are on right now to help others to simplify. This is the journey we're going on. It's simplifying. It's bringing the human back into the funnel, human back into the business, and really capitalizing on how you can show up with your expertise, make yourself available and make bank. I've been ant Hodges, this episode has just been all about this one book, but it fundamentally reinforces the valid and validates everything that I'm standing for right now, everything that I wrote about in my book, everything that's coming in Book Two, and how I work right now is just to simplify, to strip back. If you'd like a conversation with me at any point, you can actually hit the chat button on my website, over at ant hodges.com or reach out to me on any of the social platforms. If you've liked this episode, then please do give it a review on whatever podcast platform you're listening to right now. Please do share it with somebody who also needs to hear this message. But my big plea, more than anything, is that you join us on this simplify journey. Less, really is the strategy to be able to succeed and to grow. So are you going to join us on that journey? Hit me up on socials and tell me that you listen to this episode and you're joining the simplify revolution. I've been ant Hodges, I will speak to you again soon. Bye for now. You