From Agency Owner to AI Entrepreneur: Jodie Cook's Journey

I'm Rob Da Costa and this is the Agency Accelerator Podcast. As someone who has stood in your shoes, having started, grown and sold my own agency, I know just how it feels in the ups and downs of agency life. So this podcast aims to ease your journey just a little by sharing mine and my guests experiences and advice as you navigate your way to growing a profitable, sustainable and enjoyable business. Hey everybody and welcome to this week's Agency Accelerator Podcast. I'm excited to have someone with me today that I really admire. Someone who is living the digital nomad dream and living her best life, and that is Jodi Cook. Jodi is an entrepreneur and an author known for her insightful perspectives on entrepreneurship and on AI. She's the founder of CoachVox AI, a platform where people such as myself can create their own AI Coach. Jodie's also a regular contributor to Forbes and has penned several books including the 10 year career. And prior to starting CoachVox AI, Jodi successfully built and sold a social media agency. So we are going to dig into all of that and welcome to the show, Jody.

Hey, thank you. We have so much to talk about.

Yeah, we were just saying off air that Jody, although I'm a lot older than Jody, Jody's career and my career have followed very similar paths. So why don't we start at the beginning and tell us a bit about your journey in the agency world. Like what got you started? Why did you start your own agency? And you know, tell us how it grew and why you decided to sell it. Now let me just put a pause on here and jump in quickly to introduce you to our free bi monthly 45 minute agency workshops. These sessions are packed with value, focusing on the critical challenges you as an agency owner might face. From defining a clear niche to setting the right pricing, from preventing feast or famine to team building. We've got you covered. Each workshop includes an in depth exploration of the week's topic along with a Q and A session to address your pressing concerns. And remember, these are providing you value with no sales pitches. So head over to dacostacoaching.co.uk agency-acceler-live events. That's agency, accelerator, live events and save your seat. Okay, back to today's topic.

Sure. So in 2011, I was 22, fresh out of university, fresh out of a graduate scheme, and I decided to start an agency. But I didn't know it was an agency. I probably hadn't even heard the word agency at the time. I was just rocking up to networking events, standing up on standing up and introducing myself as a social media manager. And then anyone who wanted to talk to me about this new age, what the hell is this thing that was social media in 2011, anyone that said they wanted to talk to me about it, I would get their business card and I would call them and then I would carry on calling them until they agreed to meet with me and then work with me. So I very much. I'd say I started an agency by accident because I started out as a freelancer, kept getting clients, and then found myself about eight months in with 40 hours a week of client work. So I'd essentially created myself a job. And that's where I was at a crossroads where I thought I could just keep doing this forever and that would be fine, or I could start hiring people. And I took the route of hiring people, so hired my first employee and pretty much tried to replace myself on the client work side and then kept hiring people, kept giving them my clients, and then focused more on the sales side of things, which is what I really enjoyed doing. So I don't know at what point I considered it an agency, but it was not straight away for sure.

Yeah, you know what, I think almost everybody would relate to that story. I mean, as you said, it's exactly the same story that I had that I started out on my own, got too busy and then kind of. I don't know whether it was true for you, but I think my naive youth was on my side in a way because I didn't know what I didn't know. So I did all these things. Whether I do them now, I don't know. But I did all of these things, took the risk of hiring people and then before you know it, you're responsible for feeding lots of people every month and the stress has changed from one thing to another. Now I've got to keep bringing the business in to feed these people. So I think a lot of people would absolutely relate to that journey. And I think a lot of people start out just as a freelancer and then get too busy and, you know, decide that actually I need to move it into, into a full blown agency. What would you say some of the biggest challenges that you faced while you were scaling the agency and what did you do about overcoming them?

So I would say at first it was very simple because I had one client type that I was going after and that was marketing managers and one offer which was I'll run all your social media for you and one channel which was networking. It was just going to events, chatting to everyone and then putting people onto my spreadsheet and following them up. So that was the very simple early days where it was just. It all kind of beautifully worked and built it from there. I think when I started hiring people, it definitely brought more challenges. And one of the challenges, the biggest challenge probably was about three years in where I realized that I created this business so that I could travel and I could work from my laptop anywhere in the world. And actually I hadn't left the United Kingdom in all of those three years because I'd created this like prison. I kind of called it, I affectionately refer to it as the Jody show because I was doing the sales, I was doing the accounts, marketing, admin. And even though I had this team of really amazing people, clients would still expect me in the calls and they would expect that I was just there all the time and even kind of getting me to send tweets and stuff like that. And it was a real challenge being the person who sold the work and then didn't deliver the work. And so that was probably the first time that I figured out I needed to make a change. And so the way I solved that was I threw myself massively in at the deep end. And I booked a five week trip to Australia that was three months in the future. And I gave myself a deadline to like really sort this out because I was like, it's not going to happen otherwise. I'm not just going to fall into this self sufficient agency. I have to do something to make this happen. So. But yeah, we booked the trip and then I set about creating a manual, like a company manual, and, and trying to turn everything into a process. So I think I was inspired. Firstly I was inspired by the four hour work week. Then I was inspired by the E myth and just this idea that my agency wasn't this complicated thing, it was just a series of processes. And there was a table with four columns. That was the name of the process. Who did it now that was pretty much me. There was another column that said who should do it in the future. So I created this dream scenario of who would look after every single thing. And then column D was the plan. So it was either train someone or hire someone or outsource someone. Outsource, like find a supplier or it was just stop doing it because it was a process that just didn't need to happen at all. And so that column D was then sorted into most important thing first. And I just spent three months working through that list, turning every single process into an SOP training People hiring people doing what I needed to do to mean that I could get on the plane and be on an 11 hour time difference from our UK based agency and so that that could work. So I got on the plane, had the trip, nothing burned down, everything was fine. There were probably some fires that other people had to put out, but then they learned how to put out their fires, so that was fine. And then that actually started. Five years of being away for one month in every three. So me and my husband pretty much did that on repeat. We'd go set up in a new city and then we'd come back for two months and then repeat, repeat, repeat up until Covid.

Wow. Love it. And isn't it interesting that if you hadn't have had that hard deadline, you probably wouldn't have done what you said. I think again, a lot of people will relate to your story because, you know, we all start our agency because we want control, we want freedom, but we don't end up getting freedom because we desperately want control. We all, we as entrepreneurs are control freaks, aren't we, really? We will. We believe that we can do it better, faster, quicker than anybody else. And in the end that gets in our way. And we have to learn that actually, well, no other people can do it. I always say to people, they're asking the wrong question instead of will someone do it as well as me, they just need to say, will they do it well enough to keep the client happy, to deliver the project, whatever it is. So I think having that absolute, absolute hard deadline and that thing that you really wanted to do was probably such a great catalyst that everybody needs to create for themselves. Not necessarily traveling, but just something that says, I want to change the way I run my agency and something's got to give, otherwise it won't just naturally happen on its own.

I've definitely done the thing before where I've put something vague in my calendar and it's been like, oh, maybe I'll do this trip then, or maybe I'll do that amazing thing I really want to do then. And then if it's not booked, you know, you just don't do it. You find another thing to do, other stuff takes over, and then you could go your whole career never really doing the stuff you want to do. But I find that once you book it, things just magically fall into place or you just, you have no choice but to make them happen.

Yeah, it's interesting. I did an interview with somebody who talked about the, I can't remember what the 30 minute hour, I think he calls it. And he said to me, when is the time that you are most ever productive? And I just guessed this right. I said, the day before you go on holiday. Oh yeah, absolutely right. And if you can run your business like it's the day you're gonna, before you can go on holiday, then you can achieve the 30 minute hour, which is a really like you're talking it in a kind of a big level, but in a micro level. That's sort of true, isn't it? As well? Otherwise we just pontificate and let things just slide.

Yeah, I like that. The 30 minute hour, the day before you go on holiday, replicate that all the time. Yeah. Because you kind of need to. Because I think to get right where you really want to go, you have to run every day with that sense of urgency. It's like this beautiful balance between ambition and contentment where you're, you're grateful for what you have, you're happy, you're enjoying the journey, but you're also like, okay, go, go, go. How can we do more?

Yeah, absolutely. And some point, some point, we need to stop and smell the roses, don't you? And realize, I mean, so many people start their own businesses and they're focused on growth and then they wake up one day and they realize they're working for a much tougher boss than they ever used to have before and they're person in the queue to get paid, the last person in the queue to go on holiday and all those other things and then they fall out of love with their business. And you know, oftentimes that's when people contact me because, you know, they need to take control of the journey, but they don't really know what that journey is besides kind of existing day to day and getting 20% bigger year on year and all those other crazy things that we tell ourselves that is a definition of success. And I say, no, that isn't a definition of success at all, is it?

Exactly.

Tell me. So the agency grew. You managed to take a month off every three months, I think you said. Did you say that or.

Yeah.

What led you to the point of deciding to sell the agency? Was that a deliberate plan or did it just kind of come along as an opportunity?

So about, I think it was about seven years in, we got approached by a company that wanted to buy us. They, they flew over to the UK actually from India to talk to us about buying us. And I hadn't really considered it before and that's when I was like, maybe, maybe I could sell, I don't know. And that didn't happen for whatever reason, but I think the seed was planted in my head. But I just kind of put it to one side because I was quite enjoying running it. It was. Had a really great team, really great clients, didn't like it, didn't need me for a lot of the time. So it was, I would say, a true lifestyle business. And I very much set it up to become a lifestyle business, even though we had like 20 people. And then in March 2020, Covid hit. So in. I just come back from a really amazing trip to Miami and Hawaii. I was feeling really, like, really quite like smug about the year because I was like, we know what we're doing, we're going to grow. We've got all these travel plans, all this amazing stuff's going to happen. And then at the start of March, well, The middle of March 2020, we lost 20% of our client base in one week. And it was like, what? And so it doesn't matter how many processes you've got written up, it doesn't matter how many SOPs you've got, you can't like, SOP Covid. It was just. There was no, there was no. Like, this. Is that the way we deal with this? So what I did was got so back involved to the point where I was just, I was, I was there all the time. I was present. We got all the, got all the team kind of rounded the troops and almost like presented them with the problem and just listened to all their solutions and then we implemented every single one of their solutions. So we did things like, because we couldn't go networking and that was our main, like the main way we met people and got new clients. We were just like, how do we just meet people? How do we get clients back? And the main thing was to save jobs, it was to keep people employed because I think at the time that we'd lost those clients, they hadn't announced the furlough scheme. We didn't know what was going to happen. So it was all like, we want to, we want to keep everyone. And so we went from emailing our mailing list like maybe once a year when we had like a year birthday party, but to email them every single day, running webinars every single day, teaching people all aspects of all the social media stuff that we were doing. And between the whole team, over the next five months, we managed to basically outwork Covid. We grew the agency back to normal size and we grew another 20% and so, and we also had all those clients that had dropped off that were still, we were still in touch with, we were still talking to, and they were about to come back on board as well. So it was like such a period of growth. And in August 2020, it felt like another crossroads, similar to the one at the start where I was like, do I hire or do I be a freelancer? And this time the crossroads was, do I want to go back to having a lifestyle business and just do what we were doing before, or is this now a performance business and I'm going to take what we've done and what we've proven we can do and take it to the next level or do I want to like do something else? And I think what I realized then was my ambition for the company was lower than where I felt the people in the company could take it. Like, I felt like my ambition was below their potential. And so that was the, that made the decision to sell really easy. And I followed a process that I pretty much follow for everything, which is set the intention, like, okay, we're going to sell. I actually wrote a little pretend check from the perfect buyer with the amount I wanted to sell for with like the day and signed it the perfect buyer. And so that was the intention. Okay, this is going to happen. And then I spoke to as many people as I could who had done this. So there was a friend who'd sold her agency, there's a guy I knew who, friend of a friend who had. And I just got them on the phone or went to see them and said, how do I do this? And then one of those people put me in touch with a consultant who prepares agencies for sale. And I had a chat with him and he told me all this stuff they did. He was like, right, you need processes, you need a, you need a management team in place, you need it to be self sufficient, running without you. And I was like, hang on, I've done all this. And he's like, oh well, you can speak straight to the broker. And so then I got put in touch with a broker who outlined the whole process for me. And he just said, okay, it's going to take six months. We're going to do a one pager, you're going to meet buyers and have chemistry meetings, you're going to have second meetings, you're going to negotiate, and then we're going to complete. And he said it would take six months. It actually took six months and two days. And the furs that we sold for the exact amount that I wrote on my pretend check. And we met the buyer within two weeks of the date that I put on the check as well. So it happened pretty beautifully. And I think. But I think it was because there was kind of a higher purpose and like a mission there because I was super excited about our team going to join a bigger team and, and being able to use their powers as some for something bigger than my lifestyle business. And then I guess I'd started to think a little bit about the next steps and what I could possibly do without having an agency. Because even though it didn't take loads of my time, it's still that you could get tapped on the shoulder at any point, like another Covid could happen or anything could happen where there's a bigger fire that no one knows how to put out. So I think I was excited about the freedom. Although while the sale's going through, you just never want to, you never want to think that it's done. You always want to think, no, no, it's okay, it could fall through. But I think it was that energy of I don't need to sell, I really like enjoying it. That meant that the buyer pushed it through faster because they were keener to, they were keener to get it. So, yeah, it all worked out in its own way.

I mean, they always. Sorry to interrupt you. They always say, you know, never sell a business when you're feeling down about the business because the buyer will sense that. So, and you know, you've got to, you've got to think that there's something in laws of attraction as well, haven't you? If you, you visualize that check now, were you tied into an earn out period? Like I, when I sold my agency, I had a two year, I call it my two year prison sentence, but by two year earn out period.

So we got three offers. One of them, I can't remember what earn out, that was. One of them was an 18 month earn out. One of them was a three year earn out. We ended up going with the ones that said 18 month earn out. And I got them on the phone and said to this earn out, what do you want me to do? And they said, oh, well, we want you to do sales and stuff. And I was like, right, so I don't do sales right now, so you want me to take over the sales? You want me to manage the sales team? Like this feels a little bit of a step back. And then also I overcame this problem at the start where if I did the sales, clients would just hold on to me. So I don't think you'll ever get rid of me if you get me to do sales. So they're like, okay, well maybe we get you to manage clients. And I was like, okay, so I've got someone who manages clients, so do you want me to manage her? Do you want me to like, how do you want this to work? And I just talked through it and it didn't really make sense and there wasn't really a role for me. And so we ended up having the same offer but without an earn out. I just did a handover and it took two weeks.

Wow. Yeah, you're, you're very fortunate. Just goes to show for anybody that's listening to this that, that hopes one day to sell their agency that you've got to put all the components in place to make yourself redundant before you get to the sale like Jody did. And that means that you can, you know, the value of the agency isn't totally based on you and your brand and you being there and because everything will fall apart if you're not there. So that's amazing. So tell me this next question. Did you already know what you were going to do next? Did you know that you wanted to create Coachvox or what happened after you left the agency?

So actually just on the earnout thing, because it's almost like a big horrible, scary word I think in the agency acquisition world. And so when I, one of the things I did when I set the intention to sell is I also had in my head start your earn out now. So I kind of, I almost felt like I'd done my earn out by the time we sold because I'd started it as soon as I set the intention that we were going to sell, which potentially helped that. But no, I didn't, I didn't know what I was going to do at the end at all. And maybe on purpose because I really didn't want to set all my stall on this, on this deal going through and then it falling through because that could have easily happened. So when it completed I went to the gym a lot and also did. Ran a lot of experiments, like loads of experiments. I, I was just seeing what I wanted to do next because I, I knew I didn't want to just jump into a new business without really thinking about it. So I probably spent about, about a year running experiments of doing some teaching, doing some coaching. I wrote a book, I wrote 10 year career that you, that you mentioned at the start and that was to try and that was almost to Close a chapter. Because, like, I was 22 when I started the agency. I was 32 when I sold it. And you're such a different person in that time. So I wanted to write up the manual that I wish I'd had at the start so that someone else could use it. But also so it kind of closed the chapter so that whatever happened next could like, start from scratch. And then I did some powerlifting competitions because I had way more time to, to train. And what else did I do? I did a whole, like, podcasting, like, series where I went on podcasts every day. I just, I just experimented with lots of different stuff. I did a lot of writing, thinking I can test this out as like a career. But then what I realized after all of this time is that I only really like writing because it's an outlet for running a business. And I only really like, like mentoring because, like, I'm in the arena helping other people in the arena. But when I wasn't in the arena, I found I found it all kind of boring. So that's when it was like, okay, I really think I want to start another business. And then set about figuring out what business that would be. And that became the Summer of Ideation that Ben, my husband and I did together. And this is where we would go to different places and like different coffee shops, different restaurants, different cities, and just talk about business ideas. But we had this set of six parameters that they had to fit within. And that was things like it has to be location dependent, has to be good for the planet, has to be an audience of entrepreneurs, has to have a potential to be $100 million business. Like there was, there were six of them. And we thought of ideas that fit within these parameters, wrote them all down. But, and this is really important, didn't let ourselves buy any domain names and didn't let ourselves go forward with anything at all. And we came up with 30 and coach box was idea 22. So we kept going even after we found the one because we were so careful to not get into stuff too fast. And I don't know if anyone listening can relate to this, but it's like as entrepreneurs, we're so capable of just getting this thing, this idea and then rolling with it and just putting everything into taking action. And that is dangerous. Like to do that at the wrong thing. That is the worst thing ever. So both Ben and I were just very aware that we didn't want to do that and we didn't want to get ourselves in another 10 year journey where we were just. That would happen without thinking about it. So, yeah, CoachVox was number 22. It started life as a slightly different company and now it's the one that you know and love now.

Yeah, absolutely. And so when you hit on CoachVox at number 22, did. Even though you carried on to 30, did you know that was the one? How did you narrow it down to pick that as the one?

Yeah, that's the one. So the narrowing it down process is very unscientific. It's simply the one you can't stop thinking about.

Yeah. Love it. You're really fortunate, I think, because one of the things that I, if I'm working with an agency who wants to sell, one piece of advice I always give them is they need to have a succession plan. And the reason I say that is because personally for me, once I'd sold my agency, the next kind of 18 months until I figured out I wanted to become a coach were the worst 18 months of my life. Because I'd lost a sense of. Of who I was because I reluctantly admitted that my self esteem and self worth was based on my business, this baby I'd created. And I no longer had that baby. So I was like, hey, I'm Rob and I don't know who I am. So I was searching around, I was searching around in a negative way to try. And I ended up doing a bunch of things I really, really hated. But it taught me a good lesson, which is don't be driven by money, because if you're driven by money, you'll never really love what you do.

Yeah. And I definitely had that existential crisis that's very specific and very unrelatable because no one cares that you've got loads of money and time. It's like, it's not a problem that anyone thinks is a problem, but you're there. Like, who am I? I remember someone asked me, I met someone at the gym and they said, oh, what do you do? And I was like, I can't answer that question. I think I actually said, I can't answer that question right now and just ran away. And then there was someone at a wedding who told me he was joking. But when. When he asked what I did and I said I just sold my business, he said, oh, well, you're. You're totally irrelevant right now. Like, come back to me when you start your next one. And it was kind of a joke, but it was like I felt, I felt like that at the same time. And then also doing the coaching because I did A couple of, well, maybe about six months of kind of what you're doing now, Rob, like speaking to agency owners and helping them. But I think that I had a, like, debilitating level of empathy because I could feel all their pain of being stuck in their agency and not knowing what to do. And then because I'm such a doer, I was like, this is what you need to do. And then if they didn't do it, I'd get. I like, I would just think about it for days and days. So that just wasn't. I couldn't hack it. I couldn't hack it. So, yeah, it was. It was about finding a new. A new business to start and to really own and to just double down on running that.

Well, let's dive into CoachVox because obviously it's a platform that I absolutely love. I'm investing quite a lot of my future based on sort of an AI coach. So just because obviously a lot of the listeners won't know what CoachVox is, can you give us the sort of elevator pitch of what the product is and oh my goodness, yes, go for it. That's probably an unfair question.

So coachfox AI is a way that subject matter experts or coaches or thought leaders can essentially scale themselves to infinity because they can upload all their content, beliefs, frameworks, methods and have an AI model coach and mentor their clients in their style 247 when they are asleep, or doing higher leverage things or just doing other human things. And within our platform, they. They do all the uploading their content and training the model as well. But they also collect leads so they see what they're. They see the names and email addresses of all the people who chat to their AI, but then they also see all the summaries and transcripts. And this allows them to really understand their ideal customer, know their challenges, know their hopes and dreams, and use that to either get better at their actual role, which might be coaching, or to create more content. Because these people are creators, they've got content. So it feels like it makes a lot of sense for their audience's challenges to combine with their existing content to then create new content. And the goal is to be the ultimate AI marketing tool for coaches with content.

Yeah, so true. And I love the fact that in the back end you can see what people are asking because we all assume we know the kind of things that our audience is asking, but it's not until we actually go and look and then check the answer and think, actually this answer could be better. I always look at it now with the lens of, is this the same advice I would give if I was sitting one to one with the person? And if it's not, then I go back and train the model to answer in the way that I would. I think it's super exciting. I feel like we are at the cusp of this AI coaching world and a lot of people don't quite get it yet. They see it as a glorified search engine or they're not seeing it as a coaching session. And that's something I'm really trying to educate my audience on. But how do you see these type of tools kind of transforming the way that agencies or businesses generally operate?

So I think right now feels like the time of the personal brand. Especially this year. It's like it's the buzzword, isn't it? Personal brand, everyone wants one. And I think that coachwalks being involved in this sector of the agency and marketing world is super interesting and super different to how it was in, like 2011 when we were running our agencies, because right back then we were representing brands, not people. But now it's all about the person. And people are buying into these people and their methods and their frameworks and their worldviews and that's what they want to take on board and that's how they want to build their brand and run their life. Really. Like a lot of people run their life based on the frameworks of some guru on the Internet, but everyone wants to be that guru on the Internet.

So.

So I can see the AI coaching side fitting in with this way of the world, because people who have spent all this time creating content, they could keep creating books, they could keep creating courses, but how are they going to add true one to one value to people at scale? Like it's with AI coaching, there's no other way of doing it. There's no other way of scaling yourself one to one in that way. So I think that it's super exciting because it means that people can make more impact, more money without burning out. And the underlying premise of AI is that if we've got artificial intelligence doing all the boring, monotonous stuff, we can do all the stuff that only we can do. And that's what we want to. We want to help that. We want to help creators do the stuff that involves their superpowers and not the stuff that they don't need to be doing.

Yeah, exactly. I think that's so true. And I actually see, because I'm old and wanting to retire soon, I see Creating my coach Fox, which is called Ask Rob Anything, as a way of creating a legacy that can live on after I retire. So that's something, you know, I'm kind of mindful of. Like you say we could write books and so on, but actually having this coach that can still operate. And you know, I joke to say that One of the five ways that I found to use my CoachVox tool is the fact that it can remember better than I can and so I can ask myself questions, in effect. And it can. Oh yeah, I remember that. And I found that super useful as well. So tell us about, like, what, what you see coming down the road in like the near term and then the long term. Because obviously, I mean, I know I'm asking you to look in a crystal ball because the AI world is moving so quickly. I just reminded someone yesterday, actually, I was on my group call and we were talking about a AI and I just said, just think. What? 18 months ago, no one really knew what AI was. They had a rough idea and then this ChatGPT thing came along and it changed everything. That was only 18 months ago. So what's your crystal ball gaze tell us?

Oh, so much. I mean, I think about this a lot. I think so. A big misconception, I think about, about AI, especially in coaching, is that it's replacing coaches, because I don't think that's true at all. I think it's supplementing it. I think the creators that we have on board, they're extending the time that someone spends with them. They're creating. I love this phrase, tight. My friend Taylor always mentions this phrase. He's like a marketer, marketer, ghostwriter guy. And it's time under attention, like the how much time someone's spending with you, how much of your attention of their attention you're getting. And that's what I feel like they're doing. Which humans can't do one to one at scale. And this idea that we. There are so many generic tools popping up and if you wanted to, you could train ChatGPT to be your coach, you could say, hey, start a coaching session. But people don't want generic advice. They want advice from individuals. They want to believe that they are aligned with the ethos of whatever person that they've got in mind that they look up to. Like, I think the personal brand fits in with this so much. So for where I see CoachVox, it's getting our dream thought leaders on board, but having them take the credit of their work, not just the large language Models that are trained on their content that they don't see the benefit of, and then that their clients love the AI version of them so much that they think of it first when they have a question or a challenge. So it's not, oh, I've got this challenge, I'm gonna sit here and think about it myself, or it's not, I've got a challenge. I'm gonna go read a book that may or may not give me the answer wherever I'm looking for it. It's like I'm going to go and get an A session, and it will just be so unbelievably normal. And we want to be a really big part in helping people do that because it's. I'd say it's the closest to journaling that you can get with the ethos and mindset of the person who you really admire.

Yeah.

That'S our kind of thing.

That's great. And, you know, even since I've been using CoachRock, I can see how much the platform has changed and evolved and improved and new functionalities come along. So it's exciting to see where it goes. I think personally hope that at some point there'll be an avatar version of an animated avatar version of me that can talk to my clients and they can talk to the platform and then get verbal and written responses so that it really does look like a coaching session. I think one of the challenges I have at the moment is just getting people into that mindset of seeing it as a place that they go, first of all to have a coaching session rather than a place to go when I've got ask a question or even. I mean, I had someone the other week say to me, not Coach Fox, but in another program that I sell to say, Rob, you know, unfortunately, I need to pause my membership. You know, can I do that? And my first response is, I've trained my Coach Fox on how to do that. So go ask the. Go ask the coach. But we've just got to train people more. But I love the fact that we're sort of at the cutting edge with this stuff and that the bigger world has got to. Has got to catch up. So I think it's super exciting and I could talk to you for hours, but I'm conscious that we are just over the half an hour. So let me just ask you now, you're still very young, but let me just ask you, if you go back in time and give your younger 20 something old self a piece of advice, what would it be?

It would be, it would be. Think bigger. It would be set bigger goals, make bigger requests and go to great lengths to broaden your thinking. I think in. Until 2020, about 2017, I was so UK focused and I remember I won, in 2014, I won this business award called Birmingham Young Professional of the Year. And I just thought I peaked. I thought, like, I can't get any higher than this. This is like, this is my city where I live and this is the thing I've. And. But the world is so big. It's. It's so bigger than your town, your city, the place you grew up, even your country. And I think I would definitely give that advice to my former self. It's like the, the places you go and the books you read and the people you meet. Every single one of those has ideas and opportunity and new rabbit holes to go down. And I feel like I'd want my former self to be hungrier for more knowledge so that they could make bigger plans sooner.

Yeah. Do you know what? We've had maybe, I don't know, 70, 80 guests on this podcast over the years and I always ask my guests that same question and we almost never get the same response. So actually for our hundredth episode, we put like a freebie together of all of the bits of advice that everybody has said. And so no one's ever said that before. So that's just really, really interesting and great advice to hear now. Right. Let alone your younger self. So I'll share, obviously the links to CoachVox and I'll also share a link to your book. But if people wanted to find out more about you, where else would they go? Or is that. Well, it would go.

Yeah. CoachBox, the coach box is the main place. The main social media platform I'm active on is LinkedIn. But I mean, go. I'm. I'm on jodycook.com so j o d I e c o o k dot com and if you want to drop me a message, drop me an email. I would love to know if anything resonates or just say hi and tell me about you.

Great stuff. I will make sure we share all of those links in the the show notes. I just want to say huge thank you for joining us today. Jody's actually in San Diego at the moment and it's super early in the morning, so I really appreciate you getting up and being bright and bushy tailed early in the morning. And thank you so much for joining us today.

Absolute pleasure. Thank you, Rob.