445: The 10 Year Plan To Achieve Financial Freedom With Jodie Cook

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You’re listening to the My Wife, Quater Job podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and dig deep into what strategies they use to grow their businesses. Today, I have a very special guest on the show, Jody Cook. Now, had never met Jody prior to this interview, but as you’ll soon see in the podcast, we hit it off instantly. Jody is an international power lifter for Great Britain that happens to be an entrepreneur as well, and she’s going to teach us how to formulate a plan to retire in just 10 years. But before we begin, I want to let you know that tickets for the 2023 Seller Summit

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are on sale over at SellersSummit.com. It is the conference that I hold every year that specifically targets e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online. And you all know me well enough by now to know that my event has zero fluff. Every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches of their e-commerce business and not high-level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet. Every year we cut off ticket sales at around 200 people and it’s a very intimate event. Everyone eats together, everyone parties together every night.

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and I personally love smaller events and tickets always sell out far in advance. Now, if you’re an e-commerce entrepreneur making over 250K or $1 million per year, we also offer a special mastermind experience where we break up into small groups, lock ourselves in a room and help each other with our businesses. The Seller Summit is going to be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 23rd to May 25th. Go to SellersSummit.com. That’s S-E-L-L-E-R-S-S-U-M-M-I-T.com. I also want to thank Postscript for sponsoring this episode.

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Now if you run an e-commerce business of any kind, you know how important it to own your own customer contact list. And this is why I’m focusing a significant amount of my efforts on SMS marketing. SMS, or text message marketing, is already a top five brand new source for my e-commerce store, and I couldn’t have done that without Postscript, which is my text message provider. Now why did I choose Postscript? It’s basically specialized in e-commerce stores, and e-commerce is their primary focus. Not only is it easy to use, but you can quickly segment your audience based on your exact sales data,

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and implement automated flows like an abandoned cart at the push of a button. Not only that, but it’s price well too and SMS is the perfect way to engage with your customers. So head on over to postscript.io slash Steve and try it for free. That’s P O S T S C I P T dot I O slash Steve. And then finally, I wanted to mention my other podcast that I released with my partner, Tony. And unlike this podcast where I interview successful entrepreneurs in e-commerce, the profitable audience podcast covers all things related to content creation and building an audience.

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No topic is off the table and we tell it like how it is in a raw and entertaining way. So be sure to check out the profitable audience podcast on your favorite podcast app. Now onto the show.

02:38
Welcome to the My Wife Could Her Job podcast. Today I’m thrilled to have Jodie Cook on the show. Now Jodie and I have never met, but my friend Joe Valley highly recommended her for the podcast and I always listen to Joe. Jodie is an entrepreneur and author from Birmingham, UK. She was featured in Forbes Europe’s 30 under 30 list of social entrepreneurs in 2017. And she is also an international power lifter for Great Britain. Now she’s written many books, which include the 10 year career and Stop Acting Like You’ll Live Forever.

03:06
And she started a social media agency back in 2011, which she sold in 2021. Anyway, in this episode, Jodie is going to teach us how we can all retire within 10 years. And with that, welcome to show Jodie, how you doing today? I’m great. That was the best podcast intro in the whole world. Thank you so much. Well, you know, what’s funny is the first question that came to mind when I was kind of reading up on your bio is how does powerlifting and entrepreneurship go together?

03:33
Yeah, good question. I get asked that a lot because it seems kind of confusing and also because I’m quite small and I don’t really look like what you think a power lift is going to look like so often people get very confused. In the photos I saw though, I mean you’re pretty muscular so… Yeah, I’m jacked.

03:56
But I’m also quite cute as well, so you just can’t really tell. But I quite like that. I guess on that theme, I quite like that if someone underestimates you, you’ve got all this stuff under your belt that you’re actually like, no, I can do this and I can do that. And it gives you this quiet sense of confidence where you don’t really have anything to prove, but you know that you could probably knock someone out. And that’s cool. Yeah. So did the powerlifting start first or did the agency start first? The agency started first.

04:25
I was a runner. I used to do half marathons, 10Ks and 5Ks. And then I picked up a book called How to Run. And in that book, it was by Paula Radcliffe, who used to hold the world record for the marathon, the women’s marathon. And she said that you should start lifting weights because that will improve your running. So that’s what I did. And then very similar to how entrepreneurs see almost anything in their lives. I couldn’t just have lifting weights as a hobby.

04:52
it had to have goals and progress and metrics. So what began with just learning how to squat and just going to the gym and just doing it came, oh, I want to improve. And then, oh, I wonder what people are doing competitions. And then I entered my first competition and then I loved it so much. I loved being on stage. I love lifting in front of an audience. And I loved that whole, everyone’s supporting you and it’s a really cool environment. And then I just got the bug from there. So I’ve been competing about six years. I do two competitions a year, all being well. And the first,

05:21
Half of the year it’s a national and the second half of the year it’s an international. Amazing, amazing. And I know you sold your agency in 2021. Can you just kind of tell me what you did for that agency and actually ultimately why you decided to sell it? Yeah, definitely. So I started it in 2011 when I was 22. I was fresh out of university, fresh out of a graduate scheme. And I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. I just knew that I vaguely wanted to start a business and I knew that I wanted to…

05:50
travel while having that business. So it was a social media agency. It was super easy to start because there were no startup costs required. It was just me and my laptop going and meeting people. And looking back then, I was so naive. I was so green. I didn’t know what I was doing at all, but I just went along to networking events and I stood up and I said, hello, I’m Jodie. I’m a social media manager. Come and talk to me. And then people did. And so I started picking up clients based on just

06:17
the pure enthusiasm that I had for their companies. And then I found that once I had one client, it was easy to get two and then three and then four. And then I had a real agency and it wasn’t just me. So it got to about three years in and I realized that I’d set up the agency in order to travel and I hadn’t taken a holiday in three years. And I was completely trapped in my hometown and it was completely the opposite of what I wanted to do. So that’s when I set about

06:47
turning this agency into a lifestyle business. And so that’s when I started traveling for about four months in every year, started competing properly in powerlifting, started writing all the books and tried to do this whole, can you run and grow a business while you’re also really enjoying your life? Because I just refuse to believe that you have to choose one or the other. And I’m never going to accept that that’s the case. I’m always going to be trying to do both. Yeah. And then social media, are you talking about like Instagram and Facebook or?

07:18
Yeah, so back in 2011, it was the kind of social media landscape was so different to how it is now because rather than representing a client in a specific industry on a specific platform, we were just representing them on social media. So for many of our clients that we had, we were setting up their Twitter account and we were convincing them why they should use it, which is crazy. Like that would never happen now. Right. Yeah.

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And then just curious before we get into the guts, how do you feel about the social media landscape today? Yeah, it’s big. It’s big. It’s a confusing place. just so much opportunity. And I think if I was starting from scratch, I would definitely really, really niche down. I would look after dentists on Instagram or dentists of a certain size in a certain location. I would niche down so hard because I feel like that’s what you have to do now. It’s not just OK to be a generalist. You have to…

08:12
Like a social media manager used to be one job that did everything and now it’s like, you good at creating good Twitter threads? Are you good at making LinkedIn posts? Are you good at creating reels? It’s just so many different roles. So yeah, it would be a very different agency had we started today. And then what platform are you the most bullish on?

08:33
Which platform am I the most bullish on? I think I like running experiments and that’s the phase I’m in at the moment. Kind of in that glorious post-exit life, figuring out what I’m going to do next, promoting a book and running experiments on different platforms and seeing if I like it and not carrying on if I don’t and carrying on if I do. Cool. All right, so let’s get into the meat of it because you make this bold

09:03
claim that you can retire in 10 years. How does that work?

09:10
So for me, it was running my business through a series of different stages that at the time I didn’t realise I was doing in a certain order until I looked back and I asked other people who had not needed to work within 10 years and I found that their journeys all followed a very similar pattern and it’s in the book, it’s the 10 year career framework. So it’s four stages, it’s execute, systemise, scrutinise, exit.

09:38
And I know it sounds super, super oversimplified when it’s just those four different words, but what many business owners do is they get into the execute phase, they start their business, they do all the pushing, all the delivering, all the being everywhere, all the kind of being really busy, and then they stay there forever. And I know that when I was starting out, especially, I met so many people who were having just the same year again and again and again and not letting go of stuff and not getting to the second and third and fourth phases.

10:08
So getting from execute to systemize pretty much involves writing down every single thing that happens in your business and then creating a SOP, a process, and giving it to someone else to do, or outsourcing it, or not doing it, or making sure that you are not the one that’s the bottleneck to it. And it’s really, really tough. How do you, okay, so let’s start over. So what were the four steps again? Execute, systemize. Execute, systemize, okay.

10:35
And so I agree with you. Actually, I’m in a mastermind group with many entrepreneurs. And on the surface, when you see their numbers and everything, they’re doing fantastic. But in the close circles of my mastermind, there is a good number of them that are miserable, or not actually making that much profit, or just kind of working themselves to death and doing well at the same time. I guess the question for you is, how do you know whether you’re stuck in that?

11:05
loop. Like you mentioned, you were not able to take any vacations. how did you how did it even occur to you that that was a problem? I think the main thing I realized I was doing was I was answering the same questions more than once. Okay. And I was being used as Google. And I was being relied on and everything had to go by me. And on one hand, if you’re if you want this feeling of being needed, and if your ego is kind of running the show,

11:34
you can mistake that as being a really, really good thing. But I realized that that was just going to keep us playing so small forever unless I just did something about it. OK. And so I imagine you were doing a lot of client work and you probably will get a lot of the same questions from different clients, right? So how did you fix that problem with your business? So the client side of things was kind of

12:01
simple compared to the sales side of things. So the client side of things pretty much involved making sure I was upskilling the account manager to look after all client stuff. And if at any point it was like, oh, we need Jodie to be in this meeting or we need to speak to Jodie first, I wouldn’t just go in the meeting. was very, very difficult to get me into one because I’d keep asking questions and saying, well, hang on, you’re the account manager, what’s going on? Why do they need me? And then we’d get to the problem and it would be a training problem or it be a confidence problem or it just be a…

12:29
an easy problem and they didn’t want to do the meeting on their own or something like that. that was a process of getting me out of the client side of things. I feel like the hardest thing was getting me out of the sales side of things. Because I think if a business owner is doing sales calls, depending on what kind of business it is, but for an agency especially, I found that clients that I signed up would kind of cling on to me and then they’d expect me to be doing all the work at the same time.

12:57
So my solution was to take myself out of sales entirely and make it that I didn’t have any direct contact with them at all. But that was tough, that was super tough because getting someone else to take on your leads and to go and chat to them involves so much trust. You’re not there, you can’t be there, so you have to be able to train them properly beforehand and then figure out what’s going wrong when maybe they don’t even know. What was the name of your agency actually?

13:25
It was called JC Social Media. it was even named after me. Right. Yeah. Exactly. And I named it at a networking event while they were going around the room and everyone had to stand up and say 60 seconds about their business. And it was getting to be my turn. And I realized I didn’t have a business name. And I thought that’s really stupid because everyone else has got a business name. I’m going to look like I’m super green and new. And so I realized that in the room,

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the business names were following a pattern. So we had ML accountancy, had JS technical services, we had JP entertainment and I oh, there’s a pattern here. And I just thought, JC social media. it took two minutes to think of that. And then I stood up and said it and that was the inception of the company name. That’s hilarious. The thing is with agencies and I’ve never run one before, but I’ve used agencies before is that like the person I’m talking to in the sales, especially if it’s the owner, like usually I’m

14:22
depending on their expertise. And there is this assumption that they’re going to be overseeing everything, maybe not necessarily doing the work, but they’re overseeing everything. When in fact, like I think, and you can correct me if I’m wrong, the agency model only works if you find workers that you pay less than yourself. Is that accurate? Okay. Yeah, definitely. And I guess simple analogy is just farming and hunting. Right. And the salespeople are the hunters, but they’re not the farmers at all. And they’re maybe very small agencies are, but not until…

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not once they get to any size. Yeah, so in that aspect, by taking yourself out of it, did that hurt sales then? Yeah, in the short term, it definitely would have done because it had to. I think probably every decision hurts something in the start and then you grow past it. But especially with going from execute to systemize, if you outsource something first or you get someone in your team to do it, at first, they probably do it differently.

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and it’s really easy to mistake different for wrong. And then as soon as you mistake it for wrong, you just get like involved, do start doing the thing again, and then they never have the trust and they never have the autonomy to do it themselves. And then you’re screwed. But the ego is just like, yay, I’m needed. I need to be here. Everyone needs me. I’m the best at doing everything. And it’s just not true. Okay, so we’ve had this problem in the past. And so I’m curious how you overcame that.

15:51
Because I guess my wife and I have big egos, I guess. But you know, especially if you see someone doing things not quite like the way you would do it, it’s really hard to just let them go, even if you know it’s wrong. Yeah. way they’re doing it. I guess I tried to be a coach rather than a manager as much as possible. So it was trying to get them to come to the solution by asking them what they think it was, even though…

16:15
I knew the solution and they weren’t coming up with it, but keep asking them, so what do you think? And what would happen if we did that? And what would happen next? And then keep going with that until they get there. And then you know that they’re owning the solution rather than you’ve just given it to them. And then at that point as well, we were creating this whole manual, big SOPs thing. So as far as possible, I’d get other people to create their SOPs. Walk me through that because creating SOPs is boring.

16:44
So boring, yeah, no one loves doing it. I found it just a really necessary evil. when I decided that I wanted to go travel and I booked a trip to Australia for five weeks, it was three months in the future, because I was like, I need to just give myself some deadline where I absolutely have to systemize my agency, otherwise I’m never going to do this. And then I just took a spreadsheet and then…

17:09
column A wrote a list of every single process that happened in my business. Every single, it was like so granular and there was like 60 different lines. And then I just wrote a who does it now and that was mainly me. And then I wrote who’s gonna do it next and that was the person or the software or the role that I was gonna hire. And then I put a date when I wanted to do it by and that just became my plan. And it’s like, it’s probably a very oversimplified version of what.

17:34
what went on, but it started from that spreadsheet. I just, every day I went to the spreadsheet, okay, who do I need to train now? Who do I need to trust now? Who do I need to outsource and then work through it and then got on the plane. And that was it. I mean, for sales, I would imagine it was the hardest thing, right? Probably. Sales was the hardest thing. That was the thing I did first because I thought it would make the most difference. And I spoke to so many different people. I tried to think about

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each call as if I was the client and I tried to have a conversation with them purely in the shoes of a client of ours and thought what would they think, what would they think of this person and that was the main decision that I based it on. Okay and then what was your role after all that, after systematizing everything, what were you doing in the business? Yeah that’s well that’s interesting because I was very, I was very keen on traveling, I was very keen on doing stuff that was life but then within the business

18:34
I still like working, I really like working on fun projects, that’s why, you don’t suddenly stop doing it once your business is systemised. But I like to think of it as I would get in and do projects rather than do something that was ongoing. So in my head I never wanted to do something that required my upkeep of it all the time or anything with like a daily task or a weekly task. It was all about, this is a project that I’ve just dreamt up or it seems like the right thing to do within the company. So I’d go in, do that, get other people to help me out and then leave them to…

19:03
manage it and then get on to the next one because it was all about those yeah it was project based rather than ongoing based. We’re alike because the first like 75 % is like the most fun but the maintenance part isn’t Yes, yes, yeah I think exactly like that I’m just the idea of having to log in and do the same thing every single day I just I can’t think of anything worse but creating it bringing it into the world that’s amazing that’s the best part of of just running a business in general and what I found for me is that

19:31
When I sold my business, I didn’t have to do an earn out, which is like it doesn’t really happen within agencies. But it was because of that. It was because I didn’t have any ongoing stuff that relied on me. So there was just nothing for me to do there going forward. I would imagine that played a huge role when you decided to sell, right? Because obviously you can’t really sell if you’re the face of the business. Was that something that you planned for ahead of time or did that systematizing all that stuff happen way before you were planning on selling? Yeah, the systemizing happened a long time before. It happened before I went traveling. And then there was about five years of

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traveling for four months in every year. And then COVID hit, we shrunk 25%, we grew back to normal and then grew another 20 % in four months. And it was after those four months that I was like, now’s the time to sell. But I hadn’t even considered the outside of things because I didn’t know too much about how to sell a company. But

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The first few offers we got all had earnouts. One had a 18-month earnout, one had a three-year earnout, and I was like, what? This is crazy. It doesn’t make any sense. So then I spoke to the buyer and explained why it didn’t make any sense. Or actually, no, I didn’t explain it. I asked them why they wanted me to do that and what they wanted me to do. And when they told me what they wanted me to do, I was like, well, someone else does that. So with sales, for example, I said, so why do you need me for 18 months? And they said,

20:52
Well, we want you to get sales and go prospecting and do this kind of stuff. And I was like, oh, so do you want me to take this over from my sales team? I don’t get it. I’ve got people looking after this. And then they’re like, oh, yeah, it doesn’t make sense. OK, well, do you want to manage the team? And I was like, oh, so do you want me to take over from my manager to manage the team? Or how do you see this working? I think what we both realized together is that if I did that earn out, it would screw everyone over because they’d just have to

21:22
exit me in another 18 months, whereas they could buy the company, I could exit and then they could take over and they could have everything exactly the way they wanted it anyway. So it made a lot of sense from both sides. My first book, The Family First Entrepreneur is now available for pre-order at your favorite online retailer. Now this is a book about entrepreneurship, but not the kind that they tell you about in business school or that you often hear about online. Now if you can relate to my wife and I story,

21:50
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22:19
and your freedom for the promise of riches, work yourself to the bone and lose what precious time you had to spend with your loved ones. Now on this podcast, which I’ve run since 2014, I’ve interviewed over 450 successful entrepreneurs who are absolutely killing it with their multi-million dollar businesses. But what you don’t hear about publicly is that they don’t see their family much or that they’re totally burned out or stressed out. You don’t hear about the huge sacrifices that they had to make in order to get there. So in this book,

22:46
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23:14
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23:35
Actually, one question that just came to mind now is like, how do you keep your workers motivated? Because you mentioned before, right, there’s a lot of repetitive work. What were some of the things that you put in place to keep, you know, your agency workers motivated? So, whenever I was hiring someone, I always thought I don’t want to hire someone who I have to babysit in any way. I want to hire people who I would have as a business partner or people who I just know that they’re self-sufficient and they like resourcefulness and they like independence.

24:05
So lots of the questions in interview process all revolved around that. Like whenever you started something on your own, tell me about a project that you ran, tell me about something that you did and you owned and you were really, really proud of it. And I would look for people saying, I did this, I did that. And not people who said, oh, we did that or I had to do that, that was the worst. In an interview, if someone says, oh, I had to do that, it’s like, no, no way. Because you just know that they’re gonna need constant kind of babysitting and handholding. So I was looking for people who…

24:35
were really proud of owning their work and people who weren’t going to look to me to just spoon feed them the whole time. Just curious, were you hiring people within the UK or did you have workers all over the world? Mainly in the UK and then we went fully remote when COVID happened and then that opened up our geography and then we had people from all over after that. Interesting, because I would imagine the pay scale in the UK is higher, right?

25:04
in other places. Yeah, potentially. Yeah, just curious how like all the numbers worked out. because if you’re trying to hire a highly motivated person, like someone that you described, they tend to be more expensive, I guess, unless you unless you hire like, you know, new college grads. Yeah. Or someone younger. Yeah. Sometimes they were new college grads. It depends. It depended. So I think I would say much rather hire someone based on attitude and then train them and all this stuff than the other way around.

25:34
Yeah. And I imagine the SOPs that you put in place kind of train them so you didn’t actually have to personally train them. Yes. Yeah. We were big on… Joanna was my head of client services and she was really funny with the SOP thing because she kind of got to the same stage as me where she wanted people to solve the problems they could on their own and come to her with the ones that they couldn’t because otherwise she’s just…

26:00
she’s wasting everyone’s time and she’s not progressing either or the business isn’t progressing. So if someone came to her with some kind of question that she knew full well was in a manual, it would be, huh, isn’t this, I’m sure this is in a manual, I’m sure it is, did I not put it in there? And then they would go check and then over time what we’d train is this culture of you would just check first, you wouldn’t ask someone a question that you could ask Google or you could ask the manual, you would only ask people the stuff that you couldn’t get from there.

26:28
What was the manual in? Was it like a web page or what? It was an Excel spreadsheet. It was an Excel spreadsheet. Okay. Things were exported into PDFs. Yeah, was like junky. It was basic, but it was there and it was used. I think there were so many different fancy things you could use. mean, Notion would be a good option right now. Yeah. But I don’t think it even matters what it’s made in. I think what matters is that it’s used. Correct. And made, actually. The creation part is the hardest, I think. Yeah.

26:57
But you’re right, just letting them, pointing them to the manual or whatnot is the best way to train someone and just not ask you every little thing. Yeah. All right, so that was okay. So we have execute, we have systematize, what is number three? Scrutinize. Scrutinize, okay, what does that involve? Scrutinize is when you feel like you have this well-oiled machine. You probably have a lot of time on your hands. You don’t yet know whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but overall it’s probably a good thing if your business is also growing.

27:27
And this is where you just have a bunch of options. So you could go and exit, you could move to the fourth stage, which is exit. You could get back into execute and you could go again on a different level. So the guy who bought my agency, like agencies were his jam, he just loved them, he wanted to do it, but he wanted a new challenge. So he bought a bunch of agencies and went back into execute, but just on the level above with a bigger, with a bigger thing. Or that’s when you can sit back, play golf, travel the world.

27:57
do nothing, kind of just enjoy life, which is one option as well. Or you might realize that you want a new challenge, but you want it in a different field, in which case you might head down the side project route. I feel really funny about side projects because sometimes I think that starting one while you’re in the execute phase of your business is like the wrong thing to do because your energy is just going all over the place. But if you’ve reached this scrutinized phase and you don’t really feel that passionate about your business, then yeah, by all means start all the side projects then, but don’t…

28:26
have all these different, I don’t know, two grand a month side projects and be kind of kidding yourself that it’s a multiple income stream strategy because it’s probably not because everything’s quite small. I found with myself that if I coast a little too long, things tend to go off the rails. So I can never just completely let go. Were you traveling and powerlifting? I mean, how much time were you going to the business during this phase? So one thing that I put in place was just office hours.

28:55
when I was available to the team and then when I wasn’t in those office hours, I would be working on projects or lifting or traveling or doing something else. it was about, it was like four hours, two days a week or four hours, two, like three days a week in the mornings. Okay. So not, yeah. Not much at all. No, but enough to, enough to kind of stay involved, keep the, keep putting little fires out if I needed to. But I try, so.

29:24
using the fire analogy, I tried to get it so that I would only be needed for bigger fires. Because you’ve always got fires in agencies because it’s like, need stuff, teams need stuff. There’s just, you put them out everywhere. And I think the most frazzled agency owners are those that like, they’re not ready for the fires. They think, oh, once I do this, there’ll be no more. And it’s like, no, there’s always more. There’s always more fires. But I want it to be that the level that I am deployed at is just higher.

29:53
because I want to deal with like, when we’re getting broken into or when something is really, really, when something really bad is happening, not when it’s just something small. guess presumably if you’re not on the sales team anymore, people will not ask to talk to you, they would probably ask to talk to the person that sold to them. Is that accurate? Okay. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So that was probably a key piece in your freedom. Someone you can trust, people you can trust. Because it’s interesting that you use the word freedom as well because

30:23
Whenever I hear the word freedom, I always think freedom from what to do what? Because I feel like that’s how you define it. And for me, the freedom from what was being tapped on the shoulder, being needed, having to book my diary with different meetings, and just doing work that I’ve kind of had outgrown. And then to do what was to do fun projects and look after the team of partners and powerlifting and travel and everything else.

30:52
So those most trusted people that were running your agency, were they people who you kind of had for a long time that you developed from the ground up or were they people that you brought in who were experienced? A mix. One was my second ever team member. joined, was kind of with us for the last four years until the end. And then, yeah, it was a mix. It was a mix. Okay. So you don’t have any recommendations one way or the other? No, I just think…

31:21
Oh no, I don’t. I think recruitment is the hardest thing to get right ever. And we rely so much on our gut feel. But the main thing that helped me was just having a consistent process for everyone. And also making people really, really jump through hoops. So we didn’t make it easy for someone to get a role with us. on the recruiting side, mean,

31:44
When I was a director, I found that that actually occupied a lot of my time. So were you not involved in the recruiting process as much or? So we built this little inbound recruitment kind of system. So we set up a bunch of different pages, blogs all around how to become a social media manager. And we educated people if they wanted to be a social media manager. And then we collected email addresses. So when we wanted to hire someone, we emailed our list and we got people through that. So it helped it take less time. It still takes time because you still have to…

32:14
filter and do all that kind of stuff. we had people within the team who looked after that. But building an inbound recruitment system was like must have saved us hours and hours. Interesting. So the leads were coming to you. Yeah, because we wanted. Okay. Yeah, we wanted the people who were like, I want to work with you rather than I want to work at any company because then we found people who were very motivated, driven and just were excited for our brand.

32:39
Walk me through that process. Were you ranking in search? Was this on social media or YouTube? How were you putting up the content? Yeah, ranking and search. So I think for a bunch of different companies, they could start creating content around how to make it as an insert job title here and put loads of stuff into it because you know it, you know what makes a good, whatever the job title is, and then be really helpful with it.

33:06
monitor all the search terms, geek out on all the numbers. We had a whole team of geeks, so we really enjoyed that. And then have a way of them hearing about jobs. We had such a, I don’t remember the exact size of our list, but we had such a big list that we almost thought about becoming a recruitment, kind of like having a recruitment service for other people who wanted to hire social media managers. But really we used it for our own benefit. And it was, yeah, it was great. So it was mainly through search then? Yeah, Google search. Oh, okay. So that means you were writing articles, you had writers on staff then, is that?

33:36
Yes, yeah, we had writers on staff and then there was other stuff. So talks at universities, having conversations with universities, they’d send people our way. So we just kind of collected people up. And then when we needed someone, we were saying, when we were saying there was a vacancy available, we knew that we’d have so many applications for it. And we could tell people that it would be a very oversubscribed role without it being not true, which is easy to say. yeah, I felt like we were in a good position with that.

34:06
I’m just curious, the economics of running an agency, how much do you have to bill out compared to how much you pay for your worker? Like, mean, very so wildly. Agencies can be anything from like 0 % to 0%. Okay. I mean, there are probably some, there are probably very, very many running that are only just making their.

34:34
everyone’s salaries and that’s it. There will be loads like that, but that’s possibly their goal. The owner just wants to make a certain salary each year and they’re kind of happy doing that up to about, I mean, 50, 60, at the high end, depending on how much technology you have involved. There were some really cool stories of agencies who’ve created products because they’ve created something that their clients wanted to use. They use their clients as like a testing ground to create the products and then they shut their agency and went to product.

35:03
that’s actually happened to a bunch of my friends. They developed some software in-house that they use to manage all the clients and they’re like, hey, why don’t we just productize this? And they ended up selling, they ended up keeping their favorite clients and then they fired all the rest and then started selling the software. Yeah. Because for me, know that I don’t think an agency would be what I’d start now, but I think as a example of how you can learn how to play businesses, I think, yeah, it’s pretty solid.

35:30
And then, okay, so scrutinize, we kind of got off track a little bit. So scrutinize really, like my definition of scrutinize is to like analyze the expenses and like increase my margins. For you, it seemed like more of like reflecting on what you want to do, whether you want to go all in again, versus take on other projects. Yeah, it could have margins and it could have monthly income and it could have the cash side in it, because that might be a big part of your decision as to what you want to do.

35:56
But in your case, you wanted to sell, did COVID have anything to do with that? Yes. So because when COVID hit, because we lost a quarter of our client base in one week, and that was kind of scary. And it made me realize that you can write an SOP for absolutely everything, probably except a global pandemic. It’s kind of hard to preempt that. And it’s kind of hard to say like, oh, if all our clients leave, here’s what you do. Like, I just, didn’t have one for that.

36:24
So I was very, very back involved at that point. And it was rallying the team, it was saying, okay, what do we do? It was coming up with a plan. It was pretty much working out how we just meet, continue to meet people, even though we’re not physically in front of everyone, because we’ve been very based on physical networking up until that point. And then when we managed to grow and then grow again, my scrutinized thinking was like…

36:50
Am I the person to take this company through to the next level given that I feel like the people in it are capable of this new level? And I realized that I didn’t actually want to do that at all. But I felt like going back to my lifestyle business would be would be not giving them the potential. I felt like I was their ceiling now. And I wanted to remove myself as their ceiling. And I also maybe selfishly didn’t want to get tapped on the shoulder in that way again. Yeah. What’s funny is though you sold without a

37:18
a plan for what you want to do in the future? Or did you just want to become an author, right? Oh, yeah, I thought I wanted to become an author. I thought that was my thing. And then I realized that when I sold and I started writing more stuff, because I’d already that’s when I finished writing 10 year career, which is the book that’s out now, I thought I’d want to just write and write and carry on. But then I realized that without the material without the being in the trenches, the running of business, you kind of run out and

37:46
I know that I really love running a business. It just wasn’t that business. I’m definitely in the, it’s definitely my plan to start a new one and not be a writer all the time. But I like writing as a kind of outlet for all the mess in my head from running a business. Yeah. So I, I’m just curious now. So the agency model you didn’t like for, for me personally, I don’t like the agency model because it’s, it’s all people based, right? And you have to do a lot of talking and I’m an engineer at heart.

38:15
that I prefer just to kind of like stare at screen or whatnot. What were your cons, I guess, for the agency model for you personally? You’re more extroverted, I feel. Yeah, yeah. So cons for the agency model. Yeah, the fact that it’s all people, the fact that your clients are building relationships with the people so therefore they hold a lot of power. feel like, yeah, that’s probably a con. But also it’s kind of a pro if you keep people for a long time. If you can…

38:44
If you can do great work and keep your relationship with a client, then you will keep them longer and then you will grow. What are the cons? I think sometimes clients don’t know what you want, what they want, therefore, clients don’t know what they want, so therefore, you’re trying to work it out and you’re trying to tell them what you think they want, but then if someone else can in a more compelling way tell them what they want and sell them that instead, you’re in the competing business all the time and you don’t really want to be doing that. Right.

39:13
When I had my first ever job, my boss there, it was a print and promotion company. So we would sell branded mugs and plates and corporate clothing to various different companies. And he was always just convinced that there was an easier way to make money. He was like, this cannot be how I’m destined to make money. And he was always looking for it. And sometimes I felt like a bit like that with

39:40
my agency because you’ve got everyone around looking for this sexy way to make money and this way of like digitizing, productizing and I was there in the slow lane doing all right. So sometimes it’s like those unsexy boring kind of businesses that are flying under the radar that no one’s really thinking about that are doing pretty well and the owner’s pretty happy. I have many friends who’ve run successful agencies that sold but I think one thing that would kill me

40:08
is the fact that you’re doing all this work for a client and you can do a great job, but then they get to reap the benefits of your work, right? In the long term. Yeah. If you have an ego, don’t run an agency because you don’t get credit for all the stuff, but then you do it. But you know, you know that you contributed, you know that you made their business what it was. And maybe that can be enough, but if it’s not enough, it’s, yeah, you need to be a brand that has an agency. Yeah.

40:36
Okay, so tell me this, Jodie, what’s next? Who knows? I mean, I love running experiments. I like just testing stuff out to see what I you experimenting with right now? So at the moment, there’s a giant spreadsheet called ideas. Everything’s a spreadsheet, but it’s all the different business ideas that me and my husband come up with that we talk about, we kind of make little business plans about, we put them all in separate lines.

41:02
We don’t buy any domain names. That’s a massive rule. just don’t because it’s so easy to get really excited by the domain name. You can create the brand on Looker. You can create the page on Shopify. You could set the brand up within like half an hour, but we don’t want to do that. We want to go ahead with the one that we cannot stop thinking about. So at the moment there’s 28 different ideas on there, but yeah, you’ll be the first to know when we go forward with one. Have you always been a husband, wife team or in business?

41:31
So we’ve been together since we were 18, but we didn’t start working together until we were 24 or so. And then we just joined forces and that coincided with when we wanted to go traveling. So yeah, we work together now. Nice. I’m a husband and wife team. It hasn’t always been smooth, I’ll tell you. You know, when you have two cooks in the kitchen, but now the way we’ve managed to, we separate out the duties. So like my wife’s in control of this domain. I have no say over it and I’m in control of my domain. Is that how you guys?

42:00
Yeah, well, mean, both our last names is Cook, so we actually are two cooks in the kitchen. Yeah, I mean, we’re very good at different things. So it’s helped quite a lot. Analyzing both of our personalities, both of our strengths, both of our weaknesses and being okay to not try and do stuff that you’re just not good at, give it to them instead and then vice versa. I feel like the self-awareness has just helped us loads when we work together. I’m going to ask you some selfish questions now.

42:30
I noticed you had a book on how to raise entrepreneurial kids. Teach me. Oh, okay, cool. So yeah, that book came about because I sent out a journal request asking for people to tell me how they were raised to be entrepreneurial or how they were raised to how they were raising entrepreneurial kids. And I thought I would get two responses. I got 500. Wow. Okay. So then I was like, oh, this needs to be a book. And I don’t have kids. I kind of was raised.

42:59
with entrepreneurial parents. So I was kind of a kid in the story, but I hooked up with Daniel Priestley, who has three kids under the age of six, and we wrote the book together. So it’s split into like 46 different ways, but kind of the best few. One of them is practice what you preach, be the entrepreneur real excited, doing what they say they’re gonna do, having high integrity, being an amazing person, just as a role model. That’s like by far the most powerful.

43:23
all the others pale into insignificance compared to you just being amazing and being someone that they want to be like. One of the others I love is called doubling down. So some parent in the book that we interviewed described it as if his kid is interested in dinosaurs, they are going to double down on dinosaurs. They’re going to go to dinosaur museums. They’re going to have pencil cases. They’re going to have, you know, bedspreads. It’s going to be like dinosaur everything and they’re going to geek out. They’re going to learn everything because that is how that kid will learn mastery.

43:53
And once they learn mastery and once they learn how to be obsessed with something, they can apply that to any different field and it won’t matter. They just know how to have deep interest.

44:03
So how do you foster that? So, okay, so my kids, my daughter has started, she’s on her second business now. The problem is, is like, there’s all this stuff that I want her to do to market it, but I don’t wanna push her to do it. But I wanna kind of have her discover it on her own. But then there’s school and then there’s sports, there’s so many things going on, it’s tough. Yeah, well, how my parents used to do it was if we ever signed up for something or if we ever committed.

44:30
doing something. We were in, we were committed, there was no getting out. You can’t mispractice, you’ve said you’re to do it. If you want to quit, you can quit at any time, but you have to either in or out. So we didn’t really have any grey areas with what we were committed to. And I feel like that maybe helped us from flitting around all over the place. And you sound like a very self motivated person that just goes all in, like the whole powerlifting thing. You know, it’s one thing to lift weights so you can run a little better. It’s another thing to start entering competitions on behalf of your country.

45:00
Right? Yeah. Yeah. It got a bit too far. And then one of the other ones that I’ve just thought about from the book is about labels, because labels are so powerful. And one of the examples is that if you call a kid clumsy or if you call them shy or if you call them any of these words that just get banded around, they’ll wear it like a badge and they’ll act like it even more so. So a child that you call clumsy will be more clumsy. They will fall over more because they identify with it.

45:28
And it’s the same with shy. So when you think about the labels that you administer, like when I was little, it was always like, you’re strong, you’re confident, you’re all these different things. And I thought, yeah, I am. And then I acted like that. So it’s about being mindful of which labels that you give to other people, which I think is true of grownups as well as kids. I mean, grownups are just kids is what I discovered. Because I teach this class and I have one-on-ones occasionally. And yeah.

45:54
Like it’s almost like talking to my kids sometimes when I’m helping them on their path and that sort of thing. So you’re absolutely right. I mean, I behave like a kid all the time too. Yeah, me too. Yeah, so I’m like, okay, that’s good. I like that labels comment because I noticed that she’s already had some internal labels that she’s given to herself that aren’t true that we’ve been trying to kind of dispel. Like shyness is one of those ones as well. thanks for the tips.

46:23
I’ll use them. Jodie, it was a pleasure talking to you. Where can people find your book, which is coming out in the US? Oh, my book is at 10yearcareer.com or it’s available on Amazon and everywhere that sells books. And why 10 years? I forgot to ask. So I think 10 years is such a good timeframe because it stops you trying to get short term wins, which I don’t feel ever really work in business.

46:51
But it’s a long enough time frame. It’s a short enough time frame that you don’t waste time and you’re not gonna just have the same year again and again. You’re gonna be going towards progress and trying to evolve in some way. And then my journey was 10 years and then lots of the entrepreneurs I’ve spoken to who managed to do this in 10 years. That’s the time frame. It works. Oh yeah, okay. Wait, you started in 2011. Oh yeah, you’re right. It has just been around 10 years.

47:18
Okay. Yeah, there’s also a companion course as well that comes with the book. And we’ve got a bunch of different case studies as well from entrepreneurs who’ve exited and they followed that four-step structure and that’s exactly how they did it. And yeah, 10 years, magic. You don’t consider yourself retired though, do you? No, but more because the label sounds really old and it doesn’t really fit. But I don’t really know that. I think that’s one of the things that I found when exiting. I didn’t really know what…

47:46
my label was because was I powerlifter, was I writer, was I retired? I don’t know. I’m still figuring out. People always ask me that question and I say, I’m never going to retire. Yeah, I’m like, I’m going to be doing this stuff forever. Or something. Yeah, I think that’s the massive paradox of all of it. It’s like you want to not have to do it, but you’re to do it anyway because you absolutely love it. And my personal view is like if you retire, like I think of retire as like

48:13
playing golf and like sitting on the beach, I think your brain is going to atrophy. It’s like a muscle, right, that you constantly have to use. So. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. And also when you sell, don’t just stop being, you don’t stop being you, you don’t stop having all the energy. It’s just that you haven’t got a business to apply it to anymore. So yeah, there’s a, there’s probably a better outlet for that than golf. Or a better word for that than retirement. should say. Yeah. Let’s make it. If anyone’s got any ideas of the, of the better word for retirement.

48:42
then yeah, by all means. So Jenny, I love your energy and yeah, I’ll link up the book and the show notes in case you guys are curious, but I highly recommend it. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. Thanks, Steve.

48:58
Hope you enjoyed that episode. I love Jody’s drive and personality and you should definitely check out her book, The 10-Year Career, which is available right now. For more information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 443. And once again, I want to thank Postscript, which is my SMS marketing platform of choice for e-commerce. With a few clicks of a button, you can easily segment and send targeted text messages to your client base. SMS is Nick’s big own marketing platform and you can sign up for free over at postscript.io slash Steve.

49:26
That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. I also want to hang out with you in person this year in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. So grab a ticket to Seller Summit and let’s meet up. Go to SellersSummit.com. That’s S-E-L-L-E-R-S-S-U-M-M-I-T dot com. Now I talk about how I these tools on my blog and if you are interested in starting your own eCommerce store, head on over to MyWifeQuarterJob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.