Hi there, and welcome to Less Is the Strategy, the podcast that helps you to simplify, strip back and succeed, escaping the cult of hustle and complexity forever.
My name is Ant Hodges, I'm your host. I wrote the book Simplify the Funnel after 20 years in the marketing industry, running agencies and helping people to build marketing funnels and online businesses. I saw that there was one thing wrong. Complexity was holding people back. Complexity was the thing that was stopping them from actually achieving the success that they wanted in their business, if they were clear on what that success looked like for themselves.
In this episode, I want to unpack some thinking about how you define success. Do you mirror somebody else's success? Have you been told what success looks like? And I want to give you some key pointers and ways in which you can finally start to do business on your own terms, rather than always having to think about comparing yourselves to other people. So let's get into it.
President Roosevelt coined the phrase, comparison is the thief of joy. And he was not wrong. When we are sat in our businesses and we're busy... I don't talk to any business owner who says to me that they've got tons of time. Everybody is time poor. Everybody has got lots of things to do, lots of priorities, in order to be able to get invoices paid, to be able to serve customers, and to be able to say that their business is not failing. Everybody is hard pushed for time.
So in recent years, many people have then jumped into things like AI, because they can see how it can save time. And I believe AI can save us huge amounts of time. In my own business, I use AI in many different back office systems and processes, to help me organize my business, my diary, my calendars, um, my emails, transcripts from meetings that then give me notes that I can then review afterwards, so that I can make action lists and set priorities from those meetings, all kinds of different things.
What I don't do is I don't abdicate AI to the front end of my business. I don't abdicate AI to content creation. That's why you're seeing me sat in front of a video, if you're watching this podcast on YouTube, or you're hearing me talk straight to camera, straight into the microphone, if you're listening to the podcast, without script, without an autocue. Literally there's a few bullet points in front of me. I know roughly what I want to talk about, and I'm just talking to you as a human.
I want to make a connection with you on the front end of my business. Whatever aspect of my business you touch, whether it's a blog, an email, a social media piece, this podcast, any other video on YouTube, an advert, however you interact with me and my business, I want you to interact with me. That's why also one of the things that I did recently is that I removed an AI chatbot agent that I had installed on my website. And instead there's a green button over on anthodges.com that simply opens up a WhatsApp chat. You get one question asked of you from an automation perspective, I get a notification on my cell phone, and then I reply. I want you to feel like you're dealing with a human being, rather than a human robot, or a robot pretending to be a human. I don't know if you could actually get a human robot, um. I want you to deal with a human on the front end of my business. So I'm pro AI, but I'm also pro human.
And this way of working in my business has actually helped me to simplify and save even more time. Because what I found, when we all jumped into AI and we were using AI for things like content creation, is that not only would I spend time trying to prompt the AI and to get the AI speaking in my tone of voice, and I'd load up copies of other material that I'd written, transcripts of calls, transcripts of YouTube videos, the things that all of the people who are telling you to train your AI tell you to do... it still wasn't writing how I would write, or how I would talk to someone.
Even when I started this podcast, if you listen to the first few episodes of this podcast, I had AI help me to create the scripts for those podcasts, and they were pretty much scripts that I read verbatim. I've got a podcast coach, Cliff, and he listened to those podcasts, and he said to me, so why are you using AI to write your scripts? He didn't ask me if, he asked me why I was using them. And you know, it was encouraging me to step out of that, and I did. And I think it's probably like episode 3 onwards of this podcast, it's literally been me talking to you directly, no scripts, maybe a couple of bullet points, maybe a couple of things that I really want to unpack. But that's saved me hours of time every week.
Because what I wasn't doing is I wasn't going into the AI, feeding it a load of information, and pretty much giving it a brain dump, which was me just recording my voice saying all of the different things that I wanted to say, transcribing that, putting that into the AI and saying, now formulate this as a script for my podcast. And then I'd get that back, and then I'd spend an hour, hour and a half editing that podcast script, then I'd throw it back into the AI, and then I'd ask it to just tidy it up and edit it, make sure that I haven't missed anything. I'd get another version back, I'd spend time looking at that, and then I'd load it to the autocue. When I loaded it to the autocue, I then have to just make sure that the speed settings and everything were okay, or the voice control where it moves would work for me. And it would take me a day to do a podcast episode.
Now I write a few notes from my thinking in the week. I have a journal app on my phone where I just drop weekly thoughts or whatever, um, into there, so that I can then pull those out. And I can sit in front of a microphone, I can sit in front of a camera, and I can literally talk to you like we were almost at a business networking meeting, or we were at a barbecue or something like that. That's the kind of conversation I want to have with people. Stripping AI out of that content creation process has saved me on average around five or six hours a week. Five or six hours a week. Because all I now need to do is sit here, record, and I pass that over to my daughter, and she edits and publishes for me.
So I think for me, the human in the front office, the AI in the back office, is a way that we can simplify. And this is a trap that many people need to escape. They need to escape this thing that everybody is saying, that to be successful in business, you need to have ChatGPT or Claude open on your computer 24/7, everything you do should be done through AI. I truly believe that if you step away from AI from a content creation perspective, and actually start thinking, start expressing your feelings and your emotions, you'll really start to connect with people. You'll start to connect with people who want to connect with human beings.
There are patterns in the way that AI creates content, in terms of its language structure, its sentence structure, and its phraseology. There's phrases and sentence structures that I see all of the time. It's things like, um, business coaches. I'll go to the odd business coach website, and the same phrase will be there all over the time. I help frustrated entrepreneurs cut through the noise and be released from the overwhelm so that they can succeed on their own terms, or something along those kind of lines. Cut through the noise, be released from overwhelm, succeed on their own terms. There's even this word, fluff, that you'll probably see quite a lot. And I just don't understand how people can literally abdicate the responsibility and the importance of communication to an AI, when it comes to your brand needing to connect with your audience.
I want you to simplify, I want you to strip back your AI dependency. And maybe for the next seven days, 14 days, maybe longer, see what you could create yourself, by literally just turning on a camera, turning on a microphone, or opening your laptop, or grabbing a notepad and just writing from the heart. What is it that you can help your customers actually achieve? What is the transformation that you promise your customers? What are the steps that they can take? And therefore just take one of those steps, and talk about it in a piece of content. It could be a 20 second short video, it could be a 20 minute podcast, it could be a 20,000 word guide, whatever it might be. Just write, record, shoot the video and publish. Do it from your own heart, do it from your own mind, and connect with people at that level.
This whole thing about, you know, comparing what we're doing in our business to what everybody else is saying, is a thing that I've done for a long time in my own business. I've looked up to people, I've, um, wanted to model their success in some way. I've enlisted the services of coaches over the years who were ahead of me, who were earning a lot of money, and I wanted to earn that kind of money. So what I would do is I would try and model their business, they would coach me on how to construct a business like theirs, in order for me to succeed in the same way. And that included things like AI content generation, AI processes in the business.
And what I invariably do at times is take time out to just, again, high level look at my business, just take time to just think, am I on the right path, am I where I'm supposed to be, am I doing what I'm supposed to be doing? And this whole AI podcast creation, that leaked into things like emails and blogs and social media, was just one change that I made after somebody pointed it out and really encouraged me to step out of my lane and start talking from the heart.
I've just come back from, um, a week away with my family. We had some time in France. And, um, I drove there, so from my house to the Euro Tunnel it's about a three and a half hour drive, and we were half an hour on the Euro Tunnel and about three and a half hours the other side. So in total it was about seven and a half hours of driving. On that journey I listened to one and a half audio books. During the holiday I listened to a bunch more. And on the way back I listened to another one. And in reflecting on everything that I dug into in terms of what I read while I was away, there were some real key moments, um, for me, moments of enlightenment, moments that I, um, realized that I needed to do something different in my business.
But it wasn't about choosing to create something new. It wasn't about actually saying, okay, well, if I'm gonna do something different in my business, I need to orchestrate something, I need to do something. What I actually had this realization of when I was in France is that I needed to practice what I preached in everything that I do. Simplification and cutting back is the way to remove complexity and scale. The biggest thing that being able to simplify does is it gives you clarity of focus, it removes unnecessary elements from your business, so that you can focus on the things that you're supposed to be focused on, and maybe the things that are working.
Because all too often we focus a lot of our attention and time on the things that are not working in our business, because we're trying to get them fixed. We've got activities going on. So as an example, we might be running some Facebook ads, we might have a regular email that goes out to our list, um, we may run a regular webinar as an example. And these three channels, these three marketing tactics, are part of the mix. If, for instance, the webinar is going great and you're getting people signing up and you're getting people to buy at the end of the webinar, your email list does well because you get a high click through rate, you get people taking action from your email list, but Facebook ads in and of itself is tanking, you're not getting the return... where do you focus your attention? You focus your attention on the Facebook ads, trying to fix them. But the challenge for me is, what would you be able to get from the other two, webinars or emails, if you put a little bit more time, energy and effort? Could you turn the dial up on those far easier than trying to fix a problem like Facebook ads?
Now these are just three examples. Now you might turn around and say, all these things are working well in my business. There's gonna be elements in your business that are not working as well as they should be, including the services that you provide. Are all the services that you provide services that you should be providing in your business? Are the meetings that you go to, should you be going to all of those meetings? The courses that you've bought, the groups that you're part of, should you be part of all of these?
The thing for me in cutting back and simplifying, and the epiphany that I had while I was away, was number one, I'm part of too many groups. Number two, I offer too many different fragmented services. Number three, I do not have a clear focus on building a tribe and a community and serving them well. And number four, I'm chasing somebody else's dream.
The thing for me, I knew I just needed to reorientate my business back to what I wanted it to be when I made the decision in August 2023 to write the book Simplify the Funnel. You can go over to simplifythefunnel.com and grab your copy there, if you don't already have a copy. It's the playbook for online business owners, helping you to simplify, to strip back, to create what I call the minimum viable funnel, in order for you to truly succeed. I also teach the SEED marketing method, which is about you showing up as an authority in your niche and really building a solid audience. And in that book I've given you the framework for my Selling Without Selling strategy, which at its peak I was converting 90% of my sales calls, it's around 70% at the moment, to paying customers, and that was when I was selling agency services. Today I actually don't take that many sales calls, um, and everything seems to run well in and of itself. SEED marketing, minimum viable funnel and Selling Without Selling is all inside the book. Go to simplifythefunnel.com and grab your copy.
The reason I wanted to go back to August 2023, when I made that decision to close my agency and write my book, was because I made the decision in that moment that I wanted to serve more people than my agency could. My agency, we were gonna peak around 14 clients maximum, and then not be able to serve any more people without me taking more people on, without me outsourcing some stuff, without me adding in a whole bunch of systems and investing and growing the business from a physical perspective, to be able to serve more people. If I could write content, if I could spend time with groups of people, if I could create a community, if I could do what I had done for so many other businesses in helping them to create the same thing, if I could do it for my own business, I would be able to impact far more people.
But I got trapped. I got trapped in this idea that I'd made this shift from agency to something else, and that something else was actually something that somebody else defined for me. I started sort of working with a coach, um, and understanding this whole idea of utilizing 20 years of this knowledge that I have and selling high ticket products and programs, working again with just a few people. And so I chased that, and I pushed forward with it. And I am working with some private clients at that level, and I do enjoy it. But the one thing that I did is I then kind of just pushed my community to one side. I just did the bare minimum, the contractual elements of what my community was serving, showing up every Monday for a live Q&A, producing some training and releasing that on a regular basis, and answering questions.
But the thing was, the community is where I get a lot of energy and buzz. It's a group of people who are on a mission to simplify, and I can see the impact that I can have when I am in that community. Because whilst yes, my fractional CMO and my private client work, it does them well and they're moving forward and their businesses are succeeding, they're growing... the reality is, having stepped back into my community a little bit, put more energy into it, shown up more, been more available, taken the velvet rope down, therefore increasing my availability, I'm getting feedback from that community like I've never had. People who thought about quitting because they weren't getting on, finally actually doing something, succeeding, and going, I'm inspired to keep going, because of inspiration from content that I'd put there, and accountability to be able to get on and do things. And that's what the community was about. That's what the community was created for in the first place.
Not only do I want a safe place for people to be able to share their challenges and ask questions, I want people to learn from the 20 odd years of doing this, what didn't work for people and what does work, and simplification and stripping back does. So what I've decided to do in my business is to stop chasing the high ticket. You go to my website, you can find a page on fractional CMO work, and you can apply to work with me on a 1 to 1 basis. But my focus, my sole focus, is building my community moving forward. The more people I can have inside my community, the more lives I know I can impact, the more lives I know I can change, the more transformation I can truly bring to the world. And the more time I spend with that community, the more things that I learn about them, I learn about their challenges, so that I can create the next thing. I can create another piece of content, I can include some thinking in my writing time to put it into my new book. And these are the things that are gonna help me to grow.
So all I've done is I've stripped back and I've simplified my marketing and my business outreach, rather than trying to market all of these kind of different things that I had in my business. I want you to go and get a copy of my book, Simplify the Funnel, at simplifythefunnel.com. Then I'd love for you to join my community and be part of what we're doing. They're the two messages that I'm putting out to the world. Buy my book, join my community. I've got a QR code.
My question to you is, are all the products and services that you are trying to market and sell right now the right things that you should be focused on? Are all the meetings and groups that you're part of feeding you well, or should you be stripping back to save some of that time and do something else with it? That other mastermind group that you've been invited to join, should you be joining it?
I've been sort of coached by somebody very recently, and, um, he curates his own mastermind group by invitation only. He invites people in. And I've heard on the grapevine that it's an amazing group. That's part of the reason why I kind of reached out to him in the first place, is because of his reputation. I've been told by people that he was a genuine guy, he's there to help, and believe me, he's helped. But this mastermind group was kind of gonna be an aim at some point. I knew it existed. And then I get this email from him inviting me into it. Now, having the desire to be part of it before he even mentioned it, knowing that at some point there may be an offer or an invitation put on the table, I was kind of like, okay, well, maybe that'll happen. To then get the invitation, my first reaction was, yeah, let's do this.
But then I sat back, I went away, and I came back, and I sent him a voice note, and I graciously declined the invitation. I'm already committed to the things that I know I need to be focused on right now. My community, the mastermind that I run, and the other mastermind that I'm part of, as well as the client work that I'm doing, my family, other things in my life. And yeah, another 90 minute meeting every week that would help me to challenge my thinking in my business could help me to move on. But being part of a mastermind isn't just showing up to a meeting. It's the relationship stuff outside of it, it's the prep before it, it's the making sure that you're doing stuff and then being able to report back, all of this kind of stuff. It's not just a 90 minute meeting, it's a bigger commitment. And I thought, this is just gonna add complexity to my week, this is gonna add complexity to my business. And so in declining and sending the voice note back, I got nothing but praise as a message back, um, because I'm trying to do and practice what I preach.
Simplification is the art of stripping back. It's making decisions to say, is this the right next logical step for me, or is this a distraction? Will this take more of my time? Will this give me back more of my time? Simplicity is about finding more time to do the things that you should be doing. What is your calling? What is your purpose? Who should you be serving? How should you be helping them? Those are the questions I asked of myself last week. And those are the questions I ask my private clients. And I've come back with real clarity, that I'm defining business success on my own terms.
Now, I used to run a program called the 6 Figure Expert Business Program. And so I have been a culprit of helping people to define success. I even had people joining that program saying to me that whilst six figures is a thing that they want to strive for, actually they're comfortable with maybe $60,000 a year, because that pays all their bills, gives them a little bit extra, but it creates a business that they don't have to spend every single day in, and they've got time then to do other things. And so I was the culprit of putting the marker for success and the definition of success on other people. And when I changed that, because I was uncomfortable with that, that was part of the process for me, to help people to define what success looks like in their own life and in their own business.
But then I've been caught in this trap of being sort of, not pushed or cajoled or brainwashed into defining what success could look like for me, but I've been distracted. And that distraction has been realised. I've seen what that distraction is now, and I've removed it. My focus is clear. I'm not gonna try and live up to other people's expectation for success in my business. I'm not interested in what other people think about where my business is at and how successful it is. I'm interested in the impact that I can have in the world, and the lives that I can change, and the transformation that I can bring. So what I need to do is focus on the things that are gonna help me to do that. And simplifying, stripping back, cutting out all of the chaff that's in the business, all of the wasted time, energy, effort, that's enabling me to have the time to focus on the things that matter and the people that matter.
My plea to you as I finish this podcast is, I want you to just spend some time this week. Even if it's just an hour, or carve out half a day. Grab a notebook and disappear from your office, or the normal place that you work, whether it's the kitchen table or the home office. Grab a notebook and go somewhere different, turn off your phone, no distractions. And in that notebook, I want you to write three things. I want you to write down who you serve. Who is it that you serve? I want you to then write, what do you help them to transform in their life or their business? What is the transformation that they are looking for? And then I want you to write the third thing. What is the message to the world that you need to bring? The audience, who you serve, how you serve them in terms of what you deliver in terms of transformation, and the message that you need to bring to the world. Those three things are the starting point for the path that you can go on to be able to simplify, to strip back, and to really focus.
Because in reality, those that are succeeding today, they're doing less. They've removed complexity. And all the gurus, and all the entrepreneurs, and all the people that I'm listening to today, that were part of yesterday's world of build this complex funnel, systematize everything, automate everything, then they jumped on the AI bandwagon and said add this AI thing... they're now saying simplify. In August 2023, when I was start writing this book and made this decision, I was like, this is a message for here and now. And I'm sat almost in August 2026, three years later, and I find that I've hidden away for the last three years behind the exact things and the exact reason why I wrote that book in the first place. And so in being able to simplify and strip back myself, I want this message of simplification to get out there. Less is the strategy to be able to grow your business. Less is the strategy to be able to create the lifestyle that you want. Less is the strategy to remove complexity and hustle from your life forever.
Do that exercise. Your audience, your services and your message. Get real, insane level of clarity on those three things, and then you'll find that you only need one or maybe two offers out there in the marketplace to be able to succeed.
I've been Ant Hodges, this is Less Is the Strategy, the podcast that helps you to strip back and do more in order for you to succeed. Please do make sure that you're subscribed. If you're watching this video on YouTube, then hit that bell notification. If you're listening on any podcast platform, then please make sure that you're subscribed, so that you don't miss another episode. I look forward to chatting with you again next week, and I'll see you then. Bye for now.