AI Is Replacing Your Business and You Don’t Even Know It: Jodie Cook

0:00So we recently spoke with Jodie Cook and Zach, it was an absolute banger of a conversation. If someone's listening to this today, what are they going to get out of it? It's a masterclass in all things mindset, how to apply being an athlete to business and the benefits of that, but also how to really think about optimizing AI in the ever-evolving business landscape. Did you like the way I said that? I really liked it. Jodie is doing some brilliant things at the moment. Not only has she built a business up from scratch, she scaled it, she sold it. She's done everything that every entrepreneur dreams about.

0:34If you are somebody that's working in business or you want to conquer your mindset, this episode with Jodie Cook is a banger. Also, get your head around how much traveling she does. I'm jealous. Jodie, welcome to the podcast.

0:47Jodie Cook:Thank you so much for having me, Jack and Zach. We got you. We got you here in the UK. Thank you so, so much for joining us. It's great to have you. I'm going to hit you with a big open question, Jodie. who are you and what problem do you solve who am i i'm jodie cook i'm a entrepreneur i'm a athlete i'm a digital nomad i'm a writer i'm an author they're all my nouns and then the problem i solve right now is i help top coaches generate more leads nice so if i'm a top coach and i'm struggling when it comes to generating leads on somebody that might be reading your books or consuming your content what what kind of symptoms might I be facing in my life the main thing you're probably feeling is it shouldn't be this difficult you probably you'll say you're a top coach so you've got these methods that you know work you've got things that you've done before that you know help people you've got all these transformation stories all these testimonials you've probably written books, you might have your own podcast, you've got all the stuff, but you struggle translating that into clients and you feel like you have to do things that mean selling out in order to get them because you see other people doing that and you don't want to do that.

2:06Jodie Cook:You feel like you don't have to do that. So we help those people use AI, use the work that they have previously done to make the AI version of them that then they talk about, people sign up to as the lead magnet and then it coaches them in their style in that exact coach's style and methodology and then those people get followed up through their system which we help them create and then they turn into clients nice so if we were reading Jodie's entrepreneurial life what is chapter one of that where did it start chapter one started I was 22 I just finished a graduate scheme where I'd been working two full-time jobs so I've been working well it was meant to be nine to five but I negotiated eight till four in an office.

2:51Jodie Cook:And then in the evenings, I was working in a restaurant. I was doing six till 12, five or six days a week. And then I was also running half marathons. I don't really know how I was doing that in that year. But that was the craziest year where I just thought, I'm just going to work all the time. I'm going to earn as much as I can so that I can start a business when I finish. And so that I don't have to get a part-time job while I'm starting my business. And so that I don't have to move back in with mom and dad also while I'm starting my business. so I started my first business when I was yeah about about 22 and it was a social media agency although that would have sounded like a big fancy word at the time so I think I just said I'm a social media manager and then I went to networking events and I just chatted to people about the kind of stuff I was doing and then started getting clients from there.

3:39Wow okay and then how does that grow to you know at the start we were talking about you sold an agency so that's that's the start

3:46Jodie Cook:how does then the scaling of that happen yeah so that's a so it was a 10-year period started the agency at 22 sold it at 32 when we sold it was a seven-figure exit we had a team of 20 and I wasn't running the business so it meant that I could sell and the handover then took two weeks wow because it was just handing over the keys, I guess, the logins, and then kind of sailing off into the sunset. But the work that went into that started, it started so small. It started just by doing a good job for one client, getting the confidence that I could then do that for more clients. And then probably the biggest crossroads I faced early on was when I had 40 hours a week of client work.

4:32Jodie Cook:And then I thought, so what do I want to do now? Shall I be a freelancer and just do this forever? And maybe I charge more in the future, or maybe I niche down with which client type I want in the future, or do I start hiring? And so the 23-year-old me at that time thought, no, I want to go big on this. I want to start hiring. And so that's when I started. I actually hired very recent graduates, taught them my methods, and then every 30 hours of client work I sold, I just got another one and then another one and then another one there'll be so many business owners now that are probably facing that dilemma of do i become a freelancer do i outsource it somewhere else do i bring in ai do i hire how in in today's economy how would you approach that decision i would do it so different now it would almost be crazily different and i've got a bit of a taster of that because at my agency, we would get 30 new hours of client work and then we'd hire another person and keep going.

5:32Jodie Cook:But now at CoachVox, we're a software company, but we're still creating social media assets for our customers. But it just takes a very advanced prompting system, lots of different AI models and a kind of community manager to run it. So we can generate in probably a tenth of the time what would have taken a team member like a long time and a lot of a lot of effort to do and we can just do it so much easier and it's actually good and there's actually a method to it and it's proven and it works so it's almost ridiculous how different that would be right now I think if I was starting an agency from scratch I would think of it as being me plus an army of robots and then I would only hire people when I knew exactly what I wanted them to get the robots to do.

6:24You and an army of robots, that sounds like a sci-fi movie that's going to take out of the world.

6:28Jodie Cook:Well, we say, we kind of say this, so our coaches right now at CoachVox, we say all you need to run the coaching business of your dreams is you, your VA and your AI. And it's, it's true. Our books are now open. If you need help getting in front of the right people, finding your dream customers or winning new business, we might be able to help. Why not outsource your sales to We Have A Meeting? Just go to wehaveameeting.com. So you were saying that you had the agency for 10 years. We speak with so many entrepreneurs and we speak to so many coaches and business owners. And there's a lot of like shiny object syndrome of like, I want to do this in two years.

7:09I want to get out, blah, blah, blah. What can you tell us about your journey with delaying gratification?

7:15Jodie Cook:I would say the middle five years of having the agency, I ran it completely as a lifestyle business. So the goal of the agency was to fund my lifestyle of traveling, of training, of writing books, of doing whatever the hell I wanted and setting it up so that we didn't do anything that didn't scale. It was processes. It was a general manager. It was everything was like, just go, go, go. But the thing that changed that was when COVID hit, we lost all our clients like 25 of our clients in one week and then I got back involved to then grow the business back to normal size and then bigger which is when it was the right time to sell but I would say the thing that helped me not get shiny object syndrome was just having always knowing what the goal was and in the lifestyle stage it was like why would I get distracted I've got this thing that is funding my lifestyle while I'm doing all this other other cool stuff there's nothing that could distract me from that and then while I was building it back the goal was just build it back and then while I wanted to sell the goal was just sell so I feel like if you really know the end you you can't get distracted by anything you don't get FOMO because well I don't want your journey I've got my journey and my journey is great but that becomes but that only comes from really I guess it's visualizing it's almost like living in the end so when I decided that I wanted to sell my agency I wrote myself a pretend check and I prepared it for sale even though we didn't have a buyer on the table I didn't really know how to do it or anything but it was like well if this is true if I assume that this is true if I assume that this check is cashed that's really old school webding it we didn't it wasn't really a check it was a bank transfer but it just looks pretty when it's a check but if I assume that this is true this money is in my account who do I need to be in order to make that happen and so I acted as that person and it was well I need an agency that runs without me that has a second tier management system where every client doesn't need me in a meeting it's like what needs to happen for that to be true and then it doesn't feel like effort putting that into place it feels like just well this is what I do this is who I am this is what's expected of me and you don't need resilience you don't need willpower you don't need anything it just feels like you're taking aligned action wow that's beautiful you wrote that i've got it i was right in my life um so there's there's athlete and entrepreneur imagine on a venn diagram yeah and there's an area probably where they kind of cross over you borrow bits from the other one yeah what are those what are those kind of crossover points i've deadlifted every wednesday afternoon for the last like 10 years maybe longer than that and I feel like that's the hardest part of my week no matter what there is nothing that comes into my inbox or that anyone could say to me or that could happen in any work scenario that is harder than that so I've already set the bar every single week by that top set of deadlifts so I feel like this gives me some kind of superhuman feeling about business in that ultimately it doesn't really matter like I used to work in a pizza restaurant and if someone got angry I'd be like, it's pizza.

10:23Jodie Cook:It's pizza. And then it was the same social media management. Yeah, it's a social media post. And so it somehow gives me this sense of perspective. And then once you have that, you can diffuse other people. So if you've got someone saying something's urgent, it's my biggest beef. If someone else tells me something's urgent, there's something about me that's like, you know, you are not putting that word on me. But you can kind of diffuse other people by your crazy sense of perspective and calm and I think I get a lot of that from sport and a lot of that from lifting heavy and then I also think that lifting heavy looking like you are athletic gives you some kind of magnetic quality that means people want to know more about it and I will find that at events that I go to if I see someone who's clearly in great shape I want to talk to them I want to find out what's your sport how often do you train like what do you what do you do because they've clearly got something more and I think in business you can you can you can do the shortcuts you can you can find the little hacks and you can find the ways through like we know plenty of idiots who've made millions but I don't think it's exactly like that in training I think in order to be hitting those big numbers or be in insane shape you have to have somehow taken the long way to doing it how important then again talking about this kind of crossover point how how have you been able to build habits that are kind of sticky and last?

11:51Jodie Cook:It's very similar to the social media agency sale. It's living in the end. It's why am I doing this? What do I want to do? And it's because I really, really like the title of athlete. That's something I identify very, very strongly with. And then also because I'm going to be a world champion one day. So now I just do what a world champion does. And it takes it away from that trying hard effort. I'm really grafting. I have to get up in the morning and do this thing I don't think anyone who ever made it really big in sport ever really didn't want to do it they had that goal in mind and then they worked back from there and they just did the stuff that greatness required so that's kind of how I think about it your thought process around perspective is that is incredible so when it comes to like worrying was there a time where that wasn't the case have you always been this version of Jodie who's like it's pizza come on I think so so the word worry I don't think entered my vocabulary I don't use that word like I don't think I even really knew that word until someone else used it maybe I was in high school or something like that it's just not really how I think about things so I grew up with a dad who worked in car sales and so he's kind of cheeky chappy Essex boy who's just always joking about things and then a mom who was corporate power woman working in London wearing power suits boardrooms of men consistently trying to prove that she was there on merit and not just because she was a woman and then she started her own business when I was about 15 so between the two of those I feel like I've always had this sense of you can just do what you want and why wouldn't you be the boss and why wouldn't you just do the the stuff that you want to do at any given time so maybe I got that from it and maybe that gives you a big sense of perspective and and not worrying and also because if someone was worrying about something I think the question I would have from for them is is that useful like is that is that serving you because I think someone said it to me once like aren't you worried and it's like oh do you should I be worried like what what benefit would that have and I'm like oh yeah I guess no benefit okay well I won't then that's it so we we were i think it's beautiful we were having this conversation this morning on the walk here and we were talking about like negativity and people in in the world and you think about 10 years ago me and zach went to high school together so we can think of so many people where you go oh you're a vampire and now in this day and day and age i wouldn't i wouldn't even let you near me so i think when you're in business and relationships and traveling sadly you can't necessarily pick who comes into your life like there's all this like you're working with different people how do you manage those relationships with people that might try and bring a drain on your energy I think I do manage the people who come into my life I think if you're the boss you can do whatever you want if you're the talent you can you can do whatever you want so I think be the talent that's the goal because if I was working with someone who was draining my energy I would figure out how to not work with them.

15:01Jodie Cook:I don't think I'd work on my resilience to dealing with them. I think I'd just go, nah, don't want to do that. Do something else. And this has changed fairly recently because when I was running my agency, especially in those early days, we used to have one client who was about 20 % of our entire revenue, big car brand. And if they click their fingers, we would be there. And I wouldn't do any of that anymore because I just think, no, all that time that we spent jumping through hoops for them we could have found 10 other clients who we were aligned with who we really liked working with who the team liked working with as well and then if there's if there's someone in a friendship group that you don't vibe with you don't have to spend time with them if there's someone who you believe that you should really like because you've got all this stuff in common but something's not clicking then it's okay but I think that's a recent thing I don't think I was always like that but I kind of joke that my new way of being is called the vibe method where it's like just whatever you vibe with do it and if you don't vibe with it don't.

16:03That's a good way of living. Yeah. So agency owners coaches one of the there's probably two kind of core things that are always on their mind getting more clients and then keeping more clients if we start the other way around so we start on the retention of the client what have you learned that really works to make those clients stay with you?

16:23Jodie Cook:I think that getting clients to stay with you comes from having a fundamental understanding of what they really want and then not being afraid to ask the questions. Because I think if, you know, when you've got a client and you think they're on the way out because you think that something is going wrong. And so you're acting like something's going wrong to you and your team, but with them, it's like, oh, how are you doing? But you're kind of skirting around the issue. You're not addressing it. I would say, address it. what's going on here oh that um result that wasn't as good how can we make that better like i would say just own everything about it so you're never kind of trying to detect what they really mean or trying to find the layers and the unsaid stuff you know shrek and how he yes i do which one just the person the ogre so you know how he says he has layers like an onion I don't have layers and I don't I don't work in layers I would much rather it was like what's going on here let's all talk about it let's all address it like real human beings rather than skirt around it and and and having to read between the lines and read the undertones so retaining clients is all about that I feel like if you think you're on rocky footing then not addressing it is just going to make them leave faster have you got maybe an example of where that really worked for you yeah for sure so in the agency we would have had so many campaigns that just didn't work as we planned and it could have always been create the report that's like oh it's doing really well and this is down but look this is up and and you could you could fudge numbers but I feel like such a better way of doing it is be like we messed up this didn't go to plan here's what we're going to do differently and just get on that level with the client and we would have done that so many times and it would have been better when we'd have just been real it's that admission of getting there first i think is so so powerful so then if we if we flip it and we look at the getting clients so you you spoke about networking earlier when you're thinking about business today and the best way to generate warm leads people that have the problem maybe even their solution aware they know what they need we just need to sit down with them and and sell how do you approach that today so I was looking at some of your stuff and you guys love outbound right love out I freaking hate out I just love inbound I'm just like attract it in how do I get people to come to me and I think about this with everything because in networking I think the more you build your personal brand the more you focus on just being out in the world the more everything's easy because you don't have to work the room the room comes to you and you don't have to worry about getting stuck with anyone because you've just got this fresh flow of people all the time that you can talk to so I think I love that as an extrovert but I think even as an introvert that makes a lot of sense because you never have to go oh who shall I say hi to or like anything like that it's just people come to you and that's how I handled everything at my agency as well so we did SEO at one point we ranked number one for social media expert and social media agency so we just got things through there and that was just by playing the seo game but then apart from that the coaches that we work with especially it's all around creating content so specifically to that one dream client so that they believe you are in their heads so you know inside out their fears you know their their the dreams you know their beliefs you know their knowledge gaps and then every single thing you do either champions their beliefs mirrors their dreams alleviates their fears or fills their knowledge gap and so if we when we say to coaches this is how you create content this is how you show up online we just get them to produce content that does those four things over and over again until they are bored of themselves because the more they do that the more their dream client is going oh my god they get me oh my god they get me and then the more they feel that they get them the more that no one else can fill that gap so then you're not competing you're not one of three people who could get the work you're the only person they could possibly think of and that's the place that I always want to be I think it'd be it'd be so powerful would you be able to like break that that down but give us like a real life example to bring a coach to the room and how would that sound because I think the frameworks are beautiful but so many people sit there and listen and the feedback we've had is like yeah but I'm super niche it would never work for me so it's like how do we like make that tangible and sticky for them so if I think of the audience that we specifically serve and it might be the coach that I described at the start so some of their fears are other people are getting overtaken all my hard work has gone to waste I have to spend ages online to get anywhere clients are never going to find me because they're all watching homo's videos I don't know like there's there's all these fears that they've specifically got so then if you come up with like 10 sentences that your dream client would say and have them written down and you can use chat tpt for this you could say you could say this is this is me this is who i am and can you describe the dream client i've got in terms of their fears dreams strong beliefs and knowledge gaps in sentences that they would say as if they were saying them and then once you have those they are like hooks they're like put that at the top of your linkedin post so that your linkedin post at the top is i'm really scared that people won't do x whatever whatever it is and and have it as their exact sentence because then it's like they they see it on their news feed and they think this person gets me so you're kind of naming their fears back to them and then showing how you would solve it with your coaching methodology because you know how to get over that fear you know how to help them through the other side and over that transformation and then I think this is gonna be a hard question to answer people will always want to know if they adopt a strategy like that so that's totally different from what they're doing already how long or how consistently they have to think about that and push that until they start seeing something happen I mean it's always until it works isn't it it's always until it works but But it's looking out for the clues along the way that show you that you're on the right lines.

22:58Jodie Cook:I think that the wrong way to do content or the wrong way to do any kind of marketing is to go in one direction and then not to learn along the way. And just to keep kind of bulldozing along, wishing things were different, wishing things didn't change. And also the wrong way is to completely jump ship and go for a different strategy because then you're just starting from zero. I think the right thing is adopt what you're going to do and then learn, learn, learn, like become a student of the game. I think that all the best creators, they're just so hungry for the data. And then when they get the data, they go, OK, so that didn't work, but this is going to work instead.

23:35Jodie Cook:And then they change stuff up. And then by the time they do that consistently, eventually it becomes intuition. You just know what's going to work. Like you guys probably find this in in sales meetings. it's like oh I know how to handle objections oh I know how to do this I know how to do that because you've done it so many times that it looks magical to other people but it feels so normal to you it's probably actually quite hard to teach it because how can you possibly put all of that years of experience into like a step-by-step guide for someone else but you just know and I feel like that's where it gets really fun because that's when there's no effort you're just showing up and being you so ai is where you find yourself now um there's kind of two schools of thought with ai at the moment and this happens with innovation you kind of end up with super pro super scared and terrified it feels like there's two opinions so there's the kind of mo gorda we're going towards the end of the world and there's nothing we can do about it and there's the jimmy car ai is kind of a covers band you're still the person that's the beatles so where where do you stand on the discussion we probably are we're all gonna die anyway just want to make that clear for everyone so that doesn't scare me so much because if it happens faster it happens faster i think that for me just ai is a really fun playground it's i think of it in terms of if you could spend the exact amount of time and achieve more impact make more money why wouldn't you do that?

25:08Jodie Cook:And why wouldn't you play around with that? So how I think about it as well is it means that if we can successfully get robots to do all the work we don't want to do, we can spend all our time being more interesting, being more human and doing the work that we do want to do. So nothing's really fundamentally changed. We would have got team members to do this for us anyway. We would have got a VA, we would have hired team members, but now we can just hire robots so on a fundamental level it's not that different it's just that it requires a new set of skills to be able to like train the robots have you thought have you implemented it into your personal life in any way like could you think of any examples of this is how it helps me when it's developing purpose or discipline or goal setting so a really good friend was in ai before it was cool.

26:04Jodie Cook:He did a degree in AI in 2006. And he got a.AI domain name when they were like two pounds, something like that. So right now he's realizing that people who are working, junior developers who he's working with are being way more productive after using AI. So they are coming up to work, they're using different AIs to help with their coding and they're thinking, yep, I'm done, signing off, everyone's happy. but when they hand that work to the senior developer the senior developers looking at it and going oh because the ai programs that they're using are introducing bugs so they're making it actually worse code even though the junior developer thinks it's way better and faster and everything else so so now the junior developers are sailing and happy but the senior developers have a conundrum because they look at the work and they go yeah i could i could go back to the junior developer and tell them how to do it I could rework this all myself but actually it's probably just faster to just redo it from scratch on my own so it's creating this kind of problem where if you use it if you use it and don't fundamentally understand it it can make you do bad things really fast but if you do understand it then you can do good things really fast and then ultimately overtake overtake everyone else out produce whatever you want to do with it but how I think about that in practice is that I am mainly getting my team members to use stuff I'm equipping my team members with the knowledge and the skills to use different AI programs and then they're using that but then they're also learning how to mark the homework of the robot at the same time so what I don't want to do is do all the stuff myself to the point where I'm like oh it's easy I don't need a VA I've just got AIs because I feel like that would actually create me a load more work so I see it as I'm here my team are here but my team are out producing using AI instead of just me going oh I don't need people and then actually creating myself a trap where it's taking me longer I was walking through Manchester High Street the other day and a guy stopped me and do you know what he said to me Zach what did he say he said I'm about to start cold calling and I need to know where you get your data.

28:21So you know what I told him, Zach Thompson? You know what I told him. Tell me. I told him that I use a little place called Prospeo. Spell that out for me. P-R-O-S-P-E-O. And the rumors are that it's 98 % better than every other data provider. Don't know if those stats are true, but I like them. Prospeo. Little link in the bio if you want it. so you say understand ai my mum started using chat gpt and she sent me a poem the other day about why my 18 month old son won't eat his peas and she said this was all generated so that's my mum's understanding of ai yeah shout out mum um what do you think i guess business owners entrepreneurs are fundamentally getting wrong when it comes to using ai i think that i think

29:14Jodie Cook:thinking in terms of prompting is very limited because that can only take you so far so i feel like the entry level is go on to chat gpt try some prompts out see what it can do but then after that it's like you have to think beyond prompts you have to think in the systems so imagine if you previously would have got a team member to follow an sop and it's an sop for writing a blog post say and it's like this is what you do to come up with the title this is what you do to come up with the copy, meta description, et cetera. So now you're getting that team member to use AI to create that copy. And because you're giving them a ban list, you're teaching them how to use the tone of voice, you're putting in the psychological profile of the dream customer, but then don't stop there.

29:58Jodie Cook:It's like that SOP is now not for the team member to follow. That SOP is for the robot to follow. So the next stage after that is to get the robot to follow it automatically. rather than it having to be going through the team member. So I'd almost be like, think in the systems, like think in AI. It's almost like take the human out of it and think, how would I get this delivered to me in its complete and final form and then work backwards from there. And then you learn the systems and the software programs that you need to put in place to make that happen. This is gonna be a hard question to answer, I think.

30:38But I think it's important to ask it. So a problem with human beings is sometimes we will arrive at a subjective truth thinking it's kind of absolute. And that is also a problem with AI. It will arrive at a subjective truth and go, this is definitely 100 % factual. So how do we decide if we're in these kind of hybrid teams now of AI and human whose subjective truth is better?

31:01Jodie Cook:I think it all comes down to being beliefs based and being principle based. And then if you're working with like LLMs that you're talking about, give it your fundamental belief system before it does anything. So ChatGPT, for example, was trained on something like 300 billion words. So it means that all the strong opinions of all the stuff it's trained on have basically just cancelled each other out. And you're left with this murky middle that somewhat resembles when you sit an exam at school and you don't know the answer. So you just completely blag it. That's just what will come out. So it needs to have a framework and it needs to be your framework.

31:39Jodie Cook:So if I said to you, what are your 10 strongest beliefs on outbound sales? Or what are your 10 strongest beliefs on how you want your kids to eat healthily? Or something like that. Then have that as your set of rules. And every time you generate anything, include that in it. So that everything's all based on those beliefs. Because otherwise you will get the murky middle. and you will get the stuff that's generic and the stuff that is just AI is lying to you because it's not following your rules. So we were talking before about kind of content from an inbound perspective. I'm sure you're seeing it.

32:19We see it a lot of you kind of scroll on LinkedIn now and you're like, wow, it's hard to find anything that was written originally now and hard to find anything that's not being commented on by AI. Do you think the future of LinkedIn as a vehicle for inbound because of that is going to change.

32:39Jodie Cook:I went to see LinkedIn last month to mainly grill them about the algorithm because it's just quite interesting. And they told me that what they prioritize is value adding content, fine, but also authoritative content. And then also the quality of comments that you get and the kind of quality of the engagement. So it's, are people who make up your dream customer commenting on your posts or are they just randoms because they're weighted differently but if you go back to the second point whatever's shared on LinkedIn it doesn't really matter what it says what matters is the person who said it and their credibility to say it so I feel like the messengers matter more than ever because there's all these like everyone said any given business rule in a million different ways but if someone said it and they've also got a 300 kilo deadlift and they've also got a they've sold five businesses and they've also raised money and they've also done this and they've also done that it's like that's the person I want to hear that rule from so I feel like what matters more is being interesting aspirational qualified yourself and then building the content out from that and always having that that sentence or two at the top of every post or that you lead with that's like here's why i am the person to share this message so that's why i think that personal brand matters so much because otherwise we're just we might as well literally just be listening to chat gpt and using that to guide our life it's probably worth asking you jody so like personal brand i think the last five years has been a buzzword and we've had so many different people on the podcast who create a living from creating personal brands or they they drive it in in terms like their marketing team when when you think about that what what are the first things that come to mind in terms of personal brand I used to think that personal brand was content pillars deciding what you wanted to say and who you wanted to be and then putting that impression of you out there and now I think so different about this and partly it's because I started co-hosting a podcast called the future with a guy called Chris Doe, who's like the OG personal brand guy.

34:52Jodie Cook:And he was in personal branding before it was cool. And what he taught me is it's less about deciding the version of you that you're putting out there and more about stripping back every single layer. So the only version of you that's out there is the most raw, real, unfiltered version that exists, which is just who you are. And it's like connecting up different sides of you as well. Not because you're trying to say oh this is how deadlift applies to business but more because you're like this is who I am I do all these things and you connect them together you talk about them and then you create this persona of yourself that is real you're not faking it but also that people gravitate towards because they can have lots in common with you and then I feel like you meet more of your people you meet more people that you do vibe with because they do gravitate towards you and then you don't have to have those sales meetings where you're like oh like I remember um there was a sales meeting actually no no I can't tell you that yeah it was I'll just tell you and then we probably won't use it but um I remember at my agency once and this was before we'd really cracked this whole inbound thing and I'd gone to see some people and it was the day after the Brexit vote and I was in the meeting and I found out that they'd all vote Brexit and I was like oh my god I do not want to be here right now i just like i hated it and i was like i just need to not do that i need to just find people that i vibe with i want to work with and not like try and fake stuff to get clients but yeah maybe don't put that in because that kind of divides we didn't name anyone okay so then when we think about personal branding and it's a case of like stripping back a lot of people i'm not saying that this is the advice you're giving them but a lot of people would say okay well I need to share everything and by sharing everything I'm probably going to showcase some vulnerability which can be a positive but we definitely see on LinkedIn now too much maybe vulnerability in terms of if there's a guy that's having a breakdown every week I'm looking at it thinking well that's maybe not the best person to come and manage my social media so when you think about posting content and personal branding how would you approach authenticity and vulnerability oh my god that's a great question

37:14Jodie Cook:i think it comes back to who are you and what do you ultimately want to achieve because if you want to or if you're if your big goal that you absolutely know is going to happen is you want to you be this big shop business owner and you want to sell your business and you work back from there, the question becomes, what does that person do? How does that person act? And if you're imagining that you are this person, it probably doesn't actually align with sharing about that thing that gives way too much away about something that actually isn't really true because everyone has bad days. It doesn't mean you have to share about every single bad day.

37:52Jodie Cook:But if you've got the whole everyone has bad days angle then fine because that might then help other people but if you've got the whole I'm having a bad day therefore I'm terrible therefore I'm a failure then that's not it's not really who you are so mostly I think in every single story there's lessons but I don't think always sharing the lessons at the rock bottom is the right thing to do I think you want to get the lesson out of it first you want to get the meaning and then share the meaning and then you become the messenger who has been through that thing and found their way out the other side rather than the person who's just sharing from the bounce it's like we want the bounce back story and maybe that means that you still get help and you still get support and you get everything you need but it's from like your closest friends and then when you're ready to share and you've got the you've got the narrative and it makes sense it's not just some kind of muddled mess in your head that's when you share it out there and I think imagine that you've got the rock bottom, the I'm going through hell right now.

38:51Jodie Cook:And then you've got out the other side, which is I'm going to share about this story on LinkedIn or online or in my newsletter. I think the bit in the middle of that is communities, like private communities. I feel like the private communities that I'm in for founders, entrepreneurs, that's where you'll share that lesson that you've just learned or that thing that you've just come up with. And you might say, I haven't got the exact route through here. And I don't know all the answers right now, but this is something I'm trying right now. This is where I kind of build in public slash private. And then when it's fully fledged, ready to share, that's when you share it wider.

39:25Jodie Cook:That's how I think about that in my head. So when you think about entrepreneurship, what was the last thing that you changed your mind about? The last thing I changed my mind about to do with entrepreneurship is that it has to be a struggle. I feel like my first few years, it was just always, yeah, well, it's a struggle. That's what we do. And now I think, no, that is wrong. It's not, it shouldn't be a struggle I almost think this is like it's almost kind of resilience porn all those people who've struggled really hard and they've done this thing and they've done that it's like we there's something that we get taught when we're younger that tells us if something's too good to be true it probably is or tells us if you haven't worked for it doesn't mean anything or tells you that like the struggle is real and you have to do this and all the credit goes to that person who's like really really fought for it but I just don't think that's how it works I think how it works is the most fun you can have in business is when you feel like I'm taking aligned action towards an inevitable outcome.

40:23Jodie Cook:So I think if anyone is in the stage where they're like, oh, this is really a struggle, I think something's wrong. Something's not grooving. And it's so easy to fix because all you need to do is close your eyes and visualize the best life you could possibly imagine, the best business you could possibly imagine. And no one can stop you thinking about that. Like if you wanted to shut your eyes and imagine that you're a multi-millionaire with a hundred person robot business and you've got you're working with these types of clients and you live in these countries all that stuff like no one can stop you doing that but then when you imagine it you get to experience the feeling of having it and then you can go huh is this what I want and then keep going through scenarios until you get to the situation that really does make you think like yes this is it and I feel like that will hit you like a lightning bolt I feel like you'll probably get goosebumps you'll probably think like yes this is it and then as soon as you know that the next question is imagine this was true imagine this was my exact reality what's the next thing I do and then that makes everything feel easy and that makes everything obvious and there's no struggle there's no struggle with us so so on that we've had a lot of people sat in that chair and their vision was I want to build this business that I've got and exit and they achieve the exit money hits the bank account and I'm like oh where's the where's the fit I was expecting something to happen yeah what's been you sound like someone who's been very grounded in here's what I want and I've kind of almost got there before I've got there yeah so what was your experience once you did sell money hits the bank what was the reality of oh man I for sure had that post-exit entrepreneur crisis for sure it's the least relatable problem in the whole world because oh you poor rich person with all this time like oh no what do you want what do you want to do but I think for me it came back to just really being real with myself it was it was the March of 2021 I'd sold I'd handed over the main weird feeling was this sense of just not being needed a feeling irrelevant and I went to someone's wedding and I sat next to some guy and he was he was quite funny and he was quite drunk and he said something like what's your business and I said oh I just sold my business and he said you're completely irrelevant he's like come back and talk to me when you've got a business because you're just no one right now and I like he was he was joking but he was also kind of we'd reached quite a good level of the conversation where he felt like it was a safe space to say to make that joke and it kind of was but at the same time that was actually how I felt until until I just did get real with myself and every time I felt like oh no one needs me it's like this is literally what you wanted you visualize this like you visualize this whole day that you would have to be free to go to the gym to not have to check your email to not have to do anything so like this is what you wanted like you made your bed lie in it and so um it just it took just lots of journaling lots of thinking about it and then lots of figuring out okay I'm here this is the feeling of this what am I missing what does feel really good what am I gonna allow myself to enjoy because I feel like I've earned it and what am I just gonna decide that I want to change so I might be wrong with maybe the next path that I go down but it It feels like throughout the conversation, you've alluded to manifestation.

43:37There's probably like a few trains of thought of the secret. I think about a green Lambo, I'm going to get one or actually reverse engineering. I'm seeing the end and then I'm kind of getting there. When you're thinking about that spectrum of manifestation and thinking it and writing the check, how do you actually approach that?

43:59Jodie Cook:I'm totally not an expert on manifestation. I think I learned about it fairly recently and then when I look back at everything I've ever achieved it's because I had a very clear picture in mind of what I wanted to happen to make happen and then I lived like it was already happening and it's so strange but I think that's just how stuff works so in reality it was deciding I wanted to sell my agency writing that check and acting like I had an agency that someone was ready to buy stuff that was smaller that I did was whenever I was in a situation where I imagine you've got your pipeline there, you know you need to hire someone at some point, but you don't know exactly, well, these clients are coming in, is that going to make sense?

44:44Jodie Cook:Like, can I balance numbers? We would just always hire and then the clients would arrive. We would always just plan as if we were going to grow. We never stopped interviewing people. We would always welcome really amazing people through the door. We'd have a chat with them. And then I feel like it's that excitement of that person starting that then means that you've got more energy to go into the proposals and to the sales meetings and then those clients start and then everything makes sense and then we grew so there's a lot of acting like that thing that you want to make happen has already happened and then being that person oh god i'm so tired i've just been talking to qualified prospects all day without any wait time how have you been doing it because i've been cold calling people on my mobile and i reckon i've spoke to one person no no no stop that right now and use Nooks.ai.

45:29Wow, what does Nooks do? It finds me the right people to call and it calls them and it connects with them over and over and over again. So you're saying it's Nooks.ai and I can just be speaking to qualified decision makers all the time. No other better connection, right? Wow, Nooks.ai. Nice, I like it. So I'm aware that you're a digital nomad. I want to maybe understand that in reality because a lot of people see that on LinkedIn and think okay you're in Bali you've got a coconut and you're just on zoom calls from nine o 'clock till nine o 'clock for Jodie what what is the reality of being a digital nomad