Value in Transformation with Ant Hodges

Dr. Sheri Fluellen: What does coaching mean in your life? Because you're a marketer, you've got an agency, but you also do private one-on-one coaching. What does that look like? And then we'll kind of go from there.

Ant Hodges: It's been a journey to get to where I am today. And it kind of, that the meaning of coaching for me has evolved over the years. And what I believe coaching to be ultimately is a process of helping somebody get to a point of realization change needs to happen. That's the true nature of what I believe coaching is.

Yeah. And as I've had experience in business, as I trained as a business coach and all of that kind of stuff as well, and things I would sometimes very easily trip into consultancy and advice. And I think for me there's a real distinction that I draw between coaching, training, and mentoring. Coaching is about asking questions to help people get to that point of realization that change needs to happen.

The training gives them the skills, tools, and strategies to be able to make that change a reality. And then the mentoring is about walking the path with them saying, okay, well I've been there before. I know what you're going through. I've used the same tools and strategies that you've got because maybe you've done my training and I'm gonna help you get there faster.

And I think that distinction is now where I sit firmly within what I'm operating now, but it hasn't always been that way. So does that help to give clarity on where I'm at right now? 

Dr. Sheri Fluellen: Yeah, so I think it's fascinating that you do both coaching and consulting. Yeah. A lot of the coaches that we have interviewed are just solidly in the coaching space.

and can definitely be the challenge trying to have a foot in both worlds of when do I tell them what to do? When do I let them discover the process themselves? How do you navigate those two roles? Does one flow into the other? Do you keep them separate? How does that work? 

Ant Hodges: I guess again, it's been an evolution, I think plotted history.

I was a freelance graphic designer as a teenager. Had a few different jobs doing that kind of thing. In 2007, at the age of 26, I decided to start my own agency went bust within two years, but we were a seven-figure agency and just before my 28th birthday, we had to put the company into liquidation.

Lay off all the staff and it put me about good six figures into personal debt. At that point, I hid away in a job, and at the age of 28 started my personal development journey. I'd never picked up a personal development book. I'd never read any sort of coaching materials or anything like that, and it just started to open up to me and I thought, you know what?

I'm in a job. I'm paying back this debt from my previous business. can't afford a coach, but what I could do is maybe do some coaching training so that I could maybe self-diagnose and then self-coach, and that's where I started in the coaching world and I got the bug. In 2011, I went back to being self-employed and at that point went back to doing marketing delivery.

So graphic design, web design, and advertising management. And at that point, I was thinking, what's the next level in my training from a coaching perspective? And the coaching world has only got one man to blame for me being in it. In 2012 Brenna Bouchard had a conference in Southern California that I put on a credit card to book into his program join.

And I've, I even dug out the workbook from Experts Academy in 2012. Okay. And that was the start really for me, just opening up to not just being a service provider of doing the marketing piece, but wanting to step into this role as a coach. Came back to the UK and spent even more money on a credit card going further into debt, and I purchased a franchise of something called the Business Wealth Club and became a business wealth club coach.

And business wealth advisor, and it was a great start for me in terms of how that was really gonna move forward. But I needed to uplevel again. So in 2014, I joined the International Association of Professional Coaches and Mentors and started my life coaching training. To dovetail with the business coaching experience.

Two years later, I'm accredited as a master coach. A year later in 2017, I'm a fellow of the I A P C N M, and even in 2017, At that point where I'd done all of my accreditation, I'd spent thousands on my training. I was still at a point where every time I walked into a business networking meeting or I had a conversation with somebody about coaching, it was a race to the bottom in terms of pricing.

It was always, oh, I'll do you a free coaching session, see if we get on. And then, okay, so what's your rate? Oh, it's 97 an hour. Okay, well we can do four sessions a month. It's 400 for the month. And I realized if I wanted to start earning money like earning 5,000 a month, I needed to do 50 coaching sessions.

And I was just like, I'm trading my time for money here. I need a new model. It's gotta be a better way cuz I see coaches succeeding. And the biggest shift for me was the shift between selling my coaching based on time to selling it based on value. and that value is the transformation people get out of that coaching.

So nicheing within the small business market, which was my experience over the years of succeeding, going bust, starting again, having a franchise, all of that kind of thing, that's where I stuck my neck out and just said, I'm gonna be a coach for small business and small business owners self-employed people, and very quickly was attracting people and I leveraged group coaching really to start with which enabled me to leverage time because then it's one too many rather than one-to-one, and started pricing my one-to-one coaching much higher than just $97 an hour. Yeah. The one-to-one coaching started at $2000 a month for four sessions because it was based on value and transformation.

Not just on my hours and today to flip between the consultant and the coach and the service provider because my agency delivers digital marketing solutions and services. It became easier when I got a team because I'm not doing it all. Is the, is the short answer to how I can flip. And with the knowledge, the wisdom, the experience that I've got, obviously over the last 20 odd years of doing all of this.

And I think for me the secret source is to have a suite of products that people can slot into and firmly stick to this. Okay, well, Training is training. The mentoring is the one-to-one stuff, but also there's their level of implementation because not only as a coach can I help someone get to that point of realization, change needs to happen.

Give them the tools to do it themselves. Most people won't. Yeah. Particularly in my niche anyway, the small business owners that I would meet, the struggles and challenges that they had in growing their businesses were predominantly based around marketing and advertising. Then when I started to say, well, I've got a team that can do that for you as well.

Everything started to come together and it's a great little four-piece puzzle that just sits well and it enables clients to transition from one to the other well. The focus is predominantly on selling the agency side of things in terms of marketing. But there is a focus on selling my coaching.

So it starts at both ends, the training and the one-to-one stuff come in after other conversations. And so therefore, the group coaching element the live group events, you know, a membership that I've got where there's a group call every week, and also the agency side brings people in at those angles.

And I think if there is a struggle from people switching from one to the other, it's because like I had, I was wearing all the hats and it was difficult for me to take one off and put the other on. And being able to engineer the business, have specific products, specific ways that they're delivered, and team to be able to do that now has enabled the business to grow, to grow up, as we talked about earlier, and be able to deliver those individual services so that I'm not having to wear all the hats, but what I can still do is be master and commander of the overall brand, enabling my team to deliver.

Dr. Sheri Fluellen: Yeah. So as you were building out the agency and then you kind of added the coaching onto it. Did they kind of develop at the same time or was it 

Ant Hodges: It was, it was the coaching first. Coaching first, and it was the coaching first. Then it was the training aspect with some online courses and live workshops and things like that.

But the coaching really developed first and it was out of my frustration of not seeing people taking action. Yeah. That I started the agency because they had all the tools, they had the realization that change needed to happen. They had the tools and strategies to do it, but only a handful of people were succeeding.

So when I open the door by asking questions such as, would you like me to just do that for you? 

Dr. Sheri Fluellen: You literally said that to me and I'm like, please, please will you. 

Ant Hodges: And that was the reaction all the time. And so as an agency, we had to do very little of our own marketing to start the agency and start growing because it came from the coaching angle and simply just asking another great question, would you like me to do that for you?

Would you like us to handle that for you? That was because people are so busy. And for instance, you know, one of my early clients was a personal trainer, and he's a personal trainer. He's not a marketer. He went into business because he wanted to do personal training. He didn't go into business to learn how to do social media and Facebook ads and YouTube videos and all of this kind of stuff.

So he was the first client that I turned around and should we just build your website and do your marketing for you? Yeah. That was the answer. And that's where the agency started.

Dr. Sheri Fluellen: that's awesome. And I think the lesson for myself and those listening is as we're progressing in our coaching, it is a journey.

It's a coaching journey, and we're shifting a little bit what we're doing, and we're seeing new opportunities. How can I be of more value to my clients? If we can find an opportunity like you did where you're like, aha. Here's a gap in what my clients are experiencing.

Can I fill that gap? And you said, absolutely. I mean, you have a background in that you knew how to do it. You had some perception around that, and so you're like, okay, here we go. That seems like it would have to be pretty scary given what had already happened with the previous business. 

Ant Hodges: It was. And the business went bust in 2009. Getting that job for a few years gave me, I was, I became a business development director of an e-commerce agency, so, I was earning good money enough to be able to pay that debt and live. And then I think it was the May of 2011, we were on one of the cheapest holidays that we could ever book and or vacation that we could ever book.

We were in northern France in one of these campsites, and my wife turned around to me three days before we were due to come home. And she said, you're not happy, are you? And I said, no. And she said what's going on? I said, I just don't wanna go back to work. I feel like I need to be the master commander of my own ship again.

Yeah. We got this hangup of this debt and I need the salary, I need the income. And it was her saying to me, you know, well, if it's right, it'll work out. And our faith as Christians helped us to step into that and to have faith that God would provide in those instances where we needed it. And that step in 2011 was the scariest step in the world.

But it all worked out because I was due to speak at a conference a couple of weeks after I handed my resignation in. Based on representing the company I was working for and they said, you need to pull out. And I said I'm a keynote speaker. I'm delivering the keynote on social media, so will you send someone else in instead of me so I can communicate that rather than let the event company down and the MD said, just do it. Just don't mention our company name. 

So I then stood on a stage two weeks after handing my resignation in. I was having to work a three-month notice period, and people were coming up to me afterward going, when can we work? How can we work with you? So then I had a roster of clients literally queuing up to work with me once my notice period had ended.

And so I literally left one job straight in and had six clients straight off the bat, which enabled me to get everything started. But it was a scary step because I was going out into that unknown again. And I would say to people that I'm scared because I have this fear of success. Because the first business was so successful so quickly, and we took on clients, and then it flopped really quickly.

It was the March of 2009 when the global recession hit. We lost 10 of our 12 retained clients in a week because marketing budgets got pulled. And it wasn't the fear of success, really, it was the fear of failure. It was fear of failing, and what I had to do was work on reframing what I thought failure was, and failure instead of being a catastrophic failure, which it could have been.

I saw failure as a lesson. I started seeing failures and mistakes as gifts to learn from, and it was in that transition period of going back to being self-employed and starting to see failure and mistakes as those gifts to learn from that enabled me to grow. It enabled me to do something different from what had been done before so that I didn't make the same mistakes again.

And I remember it was an experts academy where you, where he gets you to write down your sort of statements and all this kind of stuff. I wanted to serve people and small business owners to not make the same mistakes that I did. That's what I wrote, and that's what I still live with by today. Ultimately, from the experience that I have of being in this world, I see so many people making the same mistakes over and over and over and over again.

That it's all about helping them to do what's right and do what's right now to help them with their marketing and their digital strategies and things like that. But it's more about then all of the other aspects of business that come into it with the coaching, where we talk about people and money and as I said, the power team of having the support mechanisms customer service systems, all of these things are mixed in.

But fundamentally, it's all about helping small business owners get the right foundations in place so that they can grow or take an existing fairly successful business and help it scale.