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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. Have you ever sat there and wondered, why the heck am I doing this? It's business at the end of the day, and entrepreneurship. It's one of the things that I can say in my life that I've questioned so much more than anything else in my life. The whole point of entrepreneurship, in terms of what I saw as a teenager and before I got into this in my early 20s, was really to have a sense of freedom, to do more with life, to do more in life, to serve God and my church and all of that kind of stuff in a bigger way, to spend more time with my family, because I was going to have more money to enable me to do that. I was going to be able to earn more money in less time than if I was in a job. Because in a job, you're governed around working hours, nine to five, Monday to Friday, if you're lucky, you know, you could end up with shift work and all that kind of stuff, which eats into doing life and this whole notion of entrepreneurship. It's that dream of having that sense of freedom and that sense of, you know, or that reality of more income and those things can be true, but most entrepreneurs, most business owners that I talk to, have over complicated everything, so that they end up trapped in this culture of hustle, the cult of hustle, as I call it. You know, some of the entrepreneurs who really preached this whole hustle culture mentality, they've started to mellow in their older years, and maybe that's because they just got to a point of burnout. But hustle culture and the complexity culture that's out there is leaving a lot of entrepreneurs struggling to know what to do with their business and how to move it forward. And in this episode, I want to really unpack for you a few of my learnings, a few of my lessons around this and how you can be strategic around building a simplified business that ultimately is sustainable and sustainable for you, for your family, for the dreams and visions that you have, for the calling that you have to serve in the space that you're called to serve with the people that you're called to serve. And I want to unpack some more tactical stuff towards the end of the episode that will help you actually implement some of this stuff. And so I think my biggest challenge with this journey of entrepreneurship is that I had this dream of leaving employment, thinking that freedom would arrive with my kind of resignation letter. The moment that I put my resignation letter in, there would be this enormous weight that would be lifted off my shoulders, and I would be free from the shackles of employment, and I'd be able to move forward, but the reality of self employment, it landed with a thud. You know, I still remember leaving and making that move forward, and then realizing, do you know what? Nobody's paying me at the end of this month, I've got to actually go out there and get this and over the years of building my first agency, which folded in 2009 the heights of the global recession. The company that I had, we were working with national companies, international charities, divisions of local government, Ministry of Defense Departments, all fairly larger companies who literally didn't have budget when it came to the new budget for that financial year, because of the recession and the downturn, we didn't have structures and processes in place. But do you know what? I'd worked like a dog in that business. I had left the nine to five, and I'd swapped it for a 24/7 I was in stupidly early. I was there late at night. I was talking and working, maybe some weekends as well, because everything was about the business. My life was the business. And when it became apparent that it wasn't going anywhere, we couldn't sustain it, and it got stripped out from under my feet, that was kind of a big wake up call for me. I. Because I had nothing else. I'd actually thought that owning my own business was kind of like the finishing line, you know, I was leaving a job, and now I was Master and Commander of my own ship, master of my own time. But there were those 6070, hour weeks, constant client demands and a calendar that was just rammed full. You know, the job that I'd left behind had much clearer boundaries than the one that I'd actually stepped into for myself. You know, the real win arrives actually, when you build something that doesn't need you bolted to it every hour of the week. Yes, I swapped a nine to five for a 24/7 and that wasn't the deal that I thought I was making with myself. I wanted freedom and I wanted something different, and it comes down to boundaries, and it comes down to how we were setting ourselves up as a business that I really needed to make sure that I what I learned from and when that business closed in 2009 And I went to work for somebody else, I enjoyed employment for a couple of years, only to realize that I wasn't made for employment. But I didn't want to set my next business up with the same challenges, so I tried to really set that business up in a way that would enable me to have the time freedom with them, with the income that was coming in. But in August 2023 and that was 12 years after exactly 12 years, it was August 2011 that I set myself up in business again. 12 years later, I was actually in Porto for a few days. I love Porto. Porto is an amazing city in Portugal. I've taken my mastermind group there for years. We go again this September. And if you're interested in my mastermind and maybe coming along, go to ant hodges.com forward slash mastermind. You can find all the information there. But I go to Porto also to decompress myself, to find it's a different it's a different pace of life. It's a it's a different location. The weather's normally great. It's always great, the food, the wine, the people, it's a place for me to just escape the day to day so that I can sit there and strategize. And this August, August 2023 that's where I ended up in Porto on my own for four days, and I was there to really take good stock of my business that year had included travel to the states a couple of times. I spoke at a conference in Sarasota in Florida that year in the February, and then I traveled in May to Austin for a conference. And it was actually in Austin that a good friend of mine actually just asked me the real question when I was explaining the challenges I was having in the agency that I'd built and the busyness that we'd had, and what was the prison that I felt like I'd built. And he asked me, Why are you still running that agency? And it really just stuck with me for a couple of months. And I said to my wife, I just need to disappear. Gonna go away for four days. I'm going to get my head straight. I'm going to work out what I'm going to do. So August 2023 that's where I was sat in Porto and I decided to close the agency. I actually was stepping back from the day to day work so that I could be very strategic. And it's a strategic act stepping back. You know, it's not just about taking a holiday or a vacation from work to find some time, but being able to be somewhere different, to be very strategic, was very different. You know, my family back home, on top of everything that I was doing in my agency, was just getting the leftover version of me, you know, the bit that was left after I'd been busy in the agency, and that deliberate pause in August 23 was the moment that I made the call to shut the agency, wind it down and rebuild something around simplicity. That was the clearest idea I had around what I needed to do from an entrepreneurship perspective, because as I started in 2011 I started with this idea of keeping things simple and not wanting to over complicate things. But success breeds complexity. Because as you generate more success and you you think, Okay, well, we can do that next thing, and we can take this opportunity you add. More team members, you add more systems. You Yes, you generate more income, and that pays for it. So you think that that justifies doing that, but actually, what if I'd kept it trim? What if I'd kept the income growing and I created a model that I didn't need to continue to employ people, get bigger offices, all of those kind of things, and have all the trappings of, you know, five to $10,000 a month tech stacks within the business to be doing things. You know, when I stepped away from the desk long enough to actually think and be strategic, that's when the kind of magic happened for me, taking time off is actually part of the work itself, and good thinking depends on taking time out. I know if you can't take a week off without the wheels coming off in your business, you don't actually own a business, you have a job with worse benefits, that's ultimately what you've got. So I think there's, I alluded to it a moment ago. I think there's ways in which you think you can grow your business. And you know, when revenue starts to creep up and you start seeing, you know, the business doing 100,000 200,000 of half a million, a million a year. You think, Okay, well, we're doing well. But you know what a business doing maybe half a million on 70% margins is in a far better place than one doing 2 million on maybe just a 5% margin. What I'm talking about there is, if you're doing half a million and you're making 70% profit, you're in a far better place than a business that's doing 2 million where you're only making 5% profit. The first business owner, he you know, he or she can sleep well at night, the second one is checking the bank balance at 3am now, believe me, I've been there, I've been checking the bank balance every five minutes, waiting to see if payments were coming in, because we know we've got payroll and we know we've got different things coming in. But do you know what? Right now, as I'm sat here, I'm getting to that point where there's retained income, there's simplicity around the contracts that I have with my cmo clients. My simplified business community is growing, and there is membership, and things are going in the right direction, because choosing in August 23 to simplify and to strip back, was a chance to strip back and subtract not just the systems and the processes, but also who do I serve and how do I serve? I think that there's ways in which we really need to measure our business success and revenue is the wrong scoreboard. I think freedom is the right one. There are kind of five kinds of freedom that I feel like we should measure in our business, as our business is growing and you feel like it's doing well. They are time, freedom, financial freedom, energy, freedom, choice, freedom and location, freedom, that's time, financial energy, choice and location, when all five are healthy. The business is working. When any of them are missing, something needs to change. You know, if you have time freedom, financial freedom, energy freedom, choice, freedom, but location, freedom, you're trapped in that location. It's not true. Freedom, if you've got location, freedom, choice, Freedom energy, freedom, time freedom, but you don't have financial freedom, then there's a different way of thinking about life and business. You're always watching the pennies. There's ways in which we can grow a business, and I find having that balance around time, financial, energy, choice and location freedoms are going to be the difference between having a successful business that is sustainable in the long run, rather than one that just keeps you trapped. You know, I think revenue is easy to measure. Freedom takes a bit more thought, but freedom is the number if we can measure it in a number, freedom is the number that actually matters. I think, as I say in my book, simplify the funnel, and you can go and grab your copy over at simplify the funnel.com. Simplicity scales. Complexity fails, and freedom is the only scoreboard worth watching. So how do we build this freedom in and how do we build a sustainable business that enables us to be able to walk forward, to be able to grow the business? Well, there's a couple of ways in which I just want to share a few more sort of tactical ideas around this. I think the first thing is to really look at the tools that you're using in your business. I think fewer tools beats more tools every time I'm talking about systems and software and things that you're using in your business. You know, I run two brands, and some people say, Well, you still got a complicated business, but I run two brands on purpose. I have several products, and I have a number of tools that help me to run this. So Kajabi is the number one platform that I recommend any entrepreneur jump onto to be able to think about growing their online business or growing their business, you can find out more over ant hodges.com forward slash Kajabi, and there's a few bonuses there to help you get started and have some time with me, even to talk about setting this up. I've been a Kajabi user since 2012 and I, you know, not looking back. It was, it was 12 years this year that actually, I started to think about it, and then I dived in, and I haven't looked back. It handles my online courses, my emails, my payments, my websites. It handles hosting this podcast. You know, it's the one business system that really runs most things. I then have monday.com as a task management system. Zoom handles all of my phone calls into the business. I have a business number on zoom as well as it hosting my online meetings, WhatsApp handles some of the other communication. And then I have a tool called many chat, which handles some messenger and WhatsApp conversations. But just like the first conversation, the first question, if somebody messages through either Instagram, Facebook or WhatsApp, they get an initial message. Say, Thanks. What is it that you want to talk about? There's some options. Then I get a notification on my phone, and then I humanly respond. And there's a whole notion and a whole strategy around this human interaction that I feel like I could talk about, and maybe we'll talk about on another call, on another podcast. Because many people will just say, literally, just implement, you know, funnels and messages, but I've had far more success when you inject the human back into the funnel. So I've got Kajabi, I've got Monday, I've got zoom, I've got WhatsApp, got many chat and then I've got a couple of other things, like Zapier that connects some things together, but that's pretty much it, you know, in terms of the tools that help me run my business, I have got other subscriptions for assets like sound and video and graphics and things like that. And we use, we actually use Canva as a business as well, but I think all of those things have just been stripped back from the many, many more systems that we had in the agency, and a simple audit for your business will usually show you that maybe half the stack that you've built could probably disappear. I've just come off the back of one of my Two Day events, and one of the guys who's been to a few of these events that they're called simplify Summit. You can actually find out more information at simplify summits.com there's a US event coming up soon. There is a UK event happening again later this year, and there's also online events. It's really where I teach all of my simplify methodology. You can find out more at simplify summits.com and you can even get on the event notification email list as well about upcoming events, but one of the guys who came along last week at my simplify Summit, he actually talked to me about how he'd taken this audit and looked at his business, and could say, hand on heart, that he had saved 5000 pounds in the year we're in the UK, so it's, you know, pound sterling, 5000 a year, saved by auditing his tech stack, including subscriptions and wiping out what he doesn't need. When you can track these things and when you look at these things, it could have an amazing impact on your business, but also it gives you back a lot of the headspace from not having to manage them all the time. More Tools rarely create more efficiency. It actually creates more places to lose things, in my opinion. So we need to think about using fewer tools in our business. The second tactical and strategic thing I want you to think about is around decisions. I use a phrase when I'm talking about funnels and helping people understand their customer journey, and it's called decision density. The higher the number of decisions that you're asking your customer to make, the higher the decision density, and this creates more friction and it creates more failure points, but decision rules will protect your energy from being drained every single time you have to make a decision. And when you make decisions in your business and in your life, you have to sit there and you have to think, and that can be exhausting. The biggest hidden cost in every small business is this decision fatigue. You know, you'll get the same questions that arrive on your desk or in your email or on your whatsapp or on your Slack every single week, customer requests from clients and customers. You know, you've got emails coming through all of the time trying to pitch you a new piece of software. You know, look for me. Number one. Number one thing to help you reduce your decision density and avoid decision fatigue. Unsubscribe from App Sumo. You know that for me was the worst website in the world. How many things could I add to my tool stack? Because it's cheap and it's a lifetime deal. There are partnership ideas that come through speaking opportunities outside of your core focus. That for me is one that I've just learned to say no to. I've got a core focus about what I want to speak at, when I'm asked to speak at business events, and if I'm asked to speak on something else, I'll just say no, not because I'm not wanting the opportunity. It could be a great opportunity, but it's not what I want to be heard for. It's not what I want to be found for, it's not what I want to be seen for. And I've now got standing rules for kind of all of these things, custom work outside of my model gets a no tools, you know, we get a quarterly check and a review of everything that's going on. Most decisions get made once documented and never revisited, because helping me to stay boring, for want of a better phrase, has enabled me to start to really grow the business. It's not that I'm saying no to every opportunity that comes under the comes my way. It's just that I'm trying to stay in my lane. And when you decide once, you actually stop deciding daily on these things, and that's where your energy starts to come back. The default should be no. You can always change your mind later, but I found that yes is a much harder undo than a no, and when we are focused on what we're supposed to be doing with who we're supposed to be doing, it, are you serving the right customer with the right kind of offers, the clarity over our audience, our message and our offers helps us to grow, and staying in that lane will help us. And we might think, Okay, well, opportunities are going to come, and if I don't take them, I'm going to miss them. But no, staying focused is probably your best strategic angle. The third thing that I want to talk to you about and give you kind of almost like a final sort of tactic. And it might sound really, really simple and really, really kind of like I do that already, but how well do you do this, I want you to block your life into the calendar before you block your work. The reason that a nine to five turns into a 24/7 is that nothing in life gets protected first. I put everything into my calendar first, things like family meals out and celebratory things and events, holidays or vacations, proper days off. You know, in the calendar, my weekends are protected. There's nothing, from a work perspective, that goes in on a weekend when I'm seeing friends, it goes into my calendar. But when I'm going to the gym, it goes into my calendar. The reason those things go into my calendar first is because I'm choosing life first. Business comes second, and meetings and events and other opportunities, they've got to fit around my life, my calendar tells me the truth about whether my business is actually serving or running my life, you know, and I want you to look at your calendar. Does your calendar serve your life or your business first? Most business owners build their week around their business, the free ones, they build their business around their week. I want to really just leave you with these thoughts that those practical takeaways that I talked through about really, you know, looking at your tools and auditing them, making better decisions and having rules around your decisions, and blocking your life into your calendar first. Those are really tactical things that I really want you to think through, but I also want you to revisit what I shared at the start of this episode, when actually thinking that, you know, swapping that nine to five for an entrepreneurial life, it's got to be about creating a sense of freedom and stepping back at times and taking time out of your business to work strategically so that you can measure the success of your business against the right scoreboard, not revenue, but freedom. And simplifying is a way of doing this. I teach all of my simplify strategies and methodologies over at simplify summits.com there are online events, there are in person events, and I'd love for you to join us, come and learn the simplify mindset. There's many other ways in which you can get involved as well. I have my simplified business community, and I'm live every week inside that community, answering questions, serving that community to build sustainable businesses around the principles of simplification. If you want to know any more, then head over to simplify summits.com. Have a look at those events in click to join the community. You can join the mailing list for future event updates if those events don't work for you right now, there are other dates that come up, but for me, simplicity scales complexity fails. That's why this podcast is called less. Is the strategy, because doing less it's not about not having as much success, but doing less breeds success. And thank you for listening to the podcast. Do encourage you to share this episode with anybody who may be thinking around their business that they're just working too hard. They're hustling, hustling, hustling. How do I simplify? Share this episode with them, but please consider giving it a five star rating wherever you're listening. Consider leaving a review or finding me on any of my social channels and sharing your thoughts around this episode and what you could do in your business to start to simplify. What are the one or two decisions that you're making to simplify today, I've been ant Hodges, I look forward to catching up with you again real soon. Take care. You.