S2E32 – Mat Boyle – How to find stocks with a strong sales team

Key Timecodes

• (01:10) –  Mat Boyle’s background story

• (01:32) – His business model

• (02:28) – What challenges he faced

• (09:49) – What he delivers to his costumers

• (11:09) – How he improved the processes, his team, and clients

• (12:19) – What type of business does he serve

• (14:12) – How he manages his team

• (19:22) – His Hiring Criteria

• (22:50) – How he scales his business

• (30:06) – How to keep expanding the revenue

• (32:46) – How he personally engages with the operational front

• (40:56) – The worst investment advice he ever received

• (41:17) – The best investment advice he ever received

• (42:24) – Mat Boyle contacts

Transcription

[00:00:03.430] – Intro

Payback Time is a podcast about building businesses wealth and financial freedom. We try to uncover the challenges our guests faced, the mistakes they made, and the steps they took to achieve their goals. The overall objective is to provide you with a roadmap that leads to your own success. Sean Tepper is your host. Are you ready? It’s payback time.

[00:00:33.090] – Sean

Sales processes are more important than we think. As investors, most of us will pay attention to the numbers, but it’s also important to pay attention to the people and processes. My next guest owns a business development.

[00:00:45.600] – Sean

Firm, and he shares the story of.

[00:00:46.780] – Sean

Building a poorly run business that nearly went bankrupt.

[00:00:49.850] – Sean

He then goes on to share how he transformed the business and the specific changes he made.

[00:00:55.300] – Sean

There are a lot of great takeaways in this episode that will help investors pay closer attention to not only the sales numbers, but the people and processes behind the scenes. Please welcome Matt Oil. Matt, welcome to the show.

[00:01:09.050] – Mat

Thanks for having me.

[00:01:10.390] – Sean

Good to have you here. So why don’t you kick us off? Tell us about your background.

[00:01:13.690] – Mat

Look, there’s a huge element there. So I’ve got a father of six, and we run a business based out of the Philippines that works with creating jobs for women in developing countries, and it helps businesses grow their sales and stuff. So, yeah, there’s a lot there in the background.

[00:01:32.580] – Sean

So with your business, I know I’m on your site here a little bit. It’s an outsourced business development company, is that correct?

[00:01:40.000] – Mat

Yes. So what we do is we work with outsource business development. So we do lead generation settings, sales strategies, growth strategies, even manage sales from front to wind for certain clients. So we do that mainly B to B businesses and a lot of startups, a lot of scale ups and SAS providers.

[00:01:58.270] – Sean

Got you. Okay, so what caught my attention is when you reached out, is you had lost everything and you were able to bring it back and multiply it by a significant amount. And as investors, we like to learn about businesses and how do they scale so quickly. Because when we look at the businesses we invest in, we not only look at the numbers, and we want to look at the type of business model, type of processes in place. The CEO, how are they making these decisions? So I’d love to hear your journey on kind of what are the challenges you faced? Why did you lose the money? And then, more importantly, how did you get yourself out of this? Why don’t you take us down that journey?

[00:02:37.650] – Mat

I made the shift. So for a fleeting moment, I had one of Australia’s biggest automotive sales training company. So we had offices all the way around Australia. We’re training dealerships how to sell cars over the Internet and do all that kind of stuff, which was massively profitable, horribly unfulfilling. I was able to go to thailand a few years ago and spent three weeks rescuing women out of brothels and kids off the streets and looking at the depravity, which is sexual slavery and human exploitation, and got back and just went, I’ve got to make a difference. And as I was kind of doing that, I was really driven by heart first, head second. I’m also that visionary type of bullet, a gate. Let’s just go and make stuff happen. And at that point in time, I didn’t really have the support team around me to make sure that I was doing the proper due diligence as I was decided to in a heartbeat change direction and say all about automotive clients, hey, we’re not doing that anymore. We’re now building a center in the Philippines, and we’re going to automate and outsource all of the processes that we’re training you on.

[00:03:42.370] – Mat

I haven’t quite calculated how long it’s going to take me to figure all that stuff out and how to actually turn that into a viable business. So that sort of journey there took us three times as long as what it should have or what I thought it would have, and took us four times the amount of money, and through that process lost everything. We ran out of money. We had to sell our house and sell our cars. We got wiped out where we were down to literally has $50 to our name. And I said that was at the kind of low at the low point of when I was kind of there and everything had kind of fallen down and around. I really kind of just took stocks at where we’re at and what I could do to get out of it. And I kind of came to the decision fairly quickly that I couldn’t give up, because if I gave up and if I quit and went back to job or we started something else, it would take me twice as long. I had no money to start something else again when I was already invested into this project.

[00:04:38.210] – Mat

And we nearly kind of figured it out, and so went and shifted direction. I had any money to start something else. If I went back and just really threw in the town, went back and got a job, there’s no way I could feed my family on jobs, and the sacrifice of the lifestyle would be astronomical. So the only choice I had was to figure this out and make this work. So I kind of just went, well, my bridges are burnt, I’m at the bottom. Whatever you want to kind of call it on down here, I’ve got two options. Death will figure it out. And death wasn’t a choice. So I just went and figured it out. And then I looked at I took stock of what I had as far as assets and the things that I had, as I’m a damn good salesman, I’m a damn good marketer, and I’ve got 24 hours in a day. So I literally to rebuild, I literally started open up the US market, said well I can get up at 400 in the morning and I can go in and hustle and grind and go sell into the US.

[00:05:34.720] – Mat

And then when the US stops I can go selling to Australia and then when Australia stops I can go sell them to the UK. And literally for the first year that’s what I did. I just worked, hustled and did what I did best, but did that 18 hours a day to go and bring clients on board and figure it out. And we were churning clients because the systems weren’t where they needed to be. So we were churning the clients but at least cash was coming in the door, we were keeping the lights on, we were starting to get ahead and that higher volume of clients meant that we were able to figure out the systems that needed to have to be able to have a sustainable and a good product from there on the business point of view. So that’s probably another probably twelve months to figure out how can we actually deliver and execute campaigns outsourced at a high enough standard that we target capital firms, so a lot of businesses doing startups, so our marketing campaign by these outsourced agents in the Philippines are going in and targeting sophisticated investors that are getting $2 million investments into their business.

[00:06:41.390] – Mat

So that’s the level of sophistication we got, we’ve got now the systems but it just started off with hard work and from a personal point of view, we had to rebuild personally while at the same time as rebuilding the company. So we had to look at how can we do that effectively. We’re in a rented house, we’re paying ridiculous amounts of rent because we’re a big family and two dogs and all that kind of stuff. So we’re looking at the personal stuff and went well, we’ve really got three choices. We can either take our kids at a private school, which we didn’t want to do because it’s a great school and it’s a great commitment. The kids have got so settled there and we went well. We don’t want them to suffer from that. Or we can just keep renting and just kind of hope that over time we can afford to live where we are or we can go and move an hour away from where a lot was because the property market was a bit cheaper than and we can do a rent. So how we got back personally was just doing property flips.

[00:07:43.230] – Mat

We bought a cheap house, we lived in it, it was falling apart termites. We renovated it, we sold it for a profit, then we bought another one and we got fortunate with the property market here that we timed it and it was rather planning but we timed it perfect. And buying back a property right at the time the property market took off. So the second property we bought doubled in value in two years. So that was the personal side, was going through the property flips. And at the same time, we just were able to double the business three years in a row.

[00:08:19.270] – Sean

Wow. Let’s take a step back and break this down because we want to make this a similar journey. To what investors can pay attention to with the businesses they invest in. So first off, the model that failed, was it the call center model? Was it the same business model?

[00:08:35.440] – Mat

It was the same business model, but where it failed was I did the product wasn’t enough and it took me a lot longer. My vision of what I wanted was I wanted to take everything that I was training businesses how to do with regard to prospecting and follow up and the lead generation and all that stuff and the stuff that I was training. And I wanted to be able to automate it and outsource it. And I want to be able to build systems that they could follow that no one other than the company would know that it wasn’t actually the salesperson following up. So that was the model that we were building. And that building those systems took a lot more sophistication than what I thought. May be a bit naive and heartstring. When I can figure this out, I can do this. There was also the other complexities in the fact of building a business in the Philippines. Yes, there’s some human capital there, but there’s some massive cultural differences between Australia, the United States and the Philippines of how they run business. And there’s also that element. There’s a lot of people out there that will tell you how we can do this, but don’t actually have the ability to be able to execute.

[00:09:42.290] – Mat

So the combination of those factors, it just took a lot longer to figure it out than what I had planned and what I budgeted for.

[00:09:49.540] – Sean

Yeah, I’m trying to understand to figure what out. Are you talking about the whole business plan that you work businesses through? Or is this sales scripts or what is it exactly you were delivering to the customer?

[00:10:02.950] – Mat

So it was actually a system. So we take all of the tasks that people do for business development, and we’ve been able to automate and outsource them. And do it in a way that you don’t know it’s someone else. So we’ll use a voicemail drop technology, for example, that will prospect someone, and we can read them from your cell number, leave a voicemail that’s your voicemail and have them call you back directly. Being able to put all of these different components of about twelve or 13 different sort of technologies together into a streamlined process that actually works and actually delivers client results and actually goes well. Here you spend $1,000 on marketing. And we’re going to give you 20 qualified appointments and having those qualified appointments. The appointments that the business wants that just took longer to be able to build. Deliver that product to the standard that customers were prepared to pay for it and keep paying for it. There were so many variables that I hadn’t considered that would constantly disrupt the ability to be able to execute on that.

[00:11:08.680] – Sean

Got it. Now here’s the learning point is what changes did you specifically make? Is it to the processes? Is it maybe being a little more rigorous with hiring the right people? Is it maybe find better clients?

[00:11:21.510] – Mat

It was all of the above. It was like everything was a few degrees off and the combination was that. So we had to get better at our processes, we had to get better at our management of those processes. We had to get better at the recruitment of staff and the training of staff. We also had to get better of the setting the expectations of the client when they are coming on board and client communication and ended up having to build a whole training platform just for our clients so they understood what was expected of them to deliver the results because it was just that combination of everything and it’s still that process we take today. We look at every kind of element of the business almost on a daily basis and go how can we do that a little bit better because the market is changing and that we need to continually improve so we can deliver better results for the clients more efficiently, more efficiently than what we are at the moment.

[00:12:19.260] – Sean

Right. You mentioned that one of your customer segments is venture capitalists. Correct. What other type of industries do you serve or businesses?

[00:12:29.290] – Mat

I should say so really in the B to B space is the main space. We work with quite a lot of SaaS providers of various degrees. We work with a lot of recruiters and recruitment agencies. We work with a lot of management consultants and coaches and that and then we’ve also got a few kind of clients but they’re all kind of in that enterprise type of sales, that enterprise sales where they’re selling a whole sort of companywide solution, something in Fortune 500 or Fortune 1000. But the main ones we are really focus on is in that kind of sass and in that sort of startup phase.

[00:13:10.260] – Sean

Got you now you’re just generating leads. You’re not actually working a lead into a closed sale, is that correct?

[00:13:17.550] – Mat

In some cases, yes. So we have obviously a sales team in the Philippines. We have certain scenarios where we can recruit and manage US based or Australia based or EU based sales teams to do that full end to end outsource providers. I also go into a lot of cases on a temporary basis as a fractional sales director because a lot of the clients when we start with have zero processes in place that zero people that just either just got a Series A or they’re just trying to get in a position to get Series A. I can come in on that sort of temporary basis. Build the systems. Build the team. Get those kind of revenues increasing month to month and then be able to sort of fill that gap so I can step back out of that role. Have someone else running it and have our team continue to grow with them over time.

[00:14:10.950] – Sean

And your business, with the amount of people that work in the business, are these contractors or these actual employees of your business?

[00:14:18.930] – Mat

They’re employees. Everyone we employ is full time. They work in their office, in our center. And that which in local culture is very important. Family is really strong. So we build our center. We treat our team a lot like family through from that which really builds that strong bond that has them prepared to do a lot more for the company than what most people would.

[00:14:43.960] – Sean

And how many employees.

[00:14:45.400] – Mat

So we’re at the moment we’re 20 and we’re growing over the next probably six months with just the clients we’ve got on board. We’ll probably double that again before the end of this year.

[00:14:55.020] – Sean

Got you. And I’m guessing because you’ve got a higher quality process and service offering this time around, you’re probably charging a little more than your first round, is that correct?

[00:15:07.110] – Mat

Probably not.

[00:15:08.340] – Sean

Really.

[00:15:09.000] – Mat

Okay. We’re about the same. The numbers, that’s what it needs to be to be sustainable. So we’ve got more efficient at what we do. So our profit margins have increased as a result of it. So we’re delivering a better result. Clients are happy at that price point and then we’re looking at the efficiency of how we can actually deliver that. So we just keep growing the bottom line as well as growing the top line.

[00:15:35.710] – Sean

Got you. And do you charge I’m going to get into the numbers a little bit. If you’re willing to go there with your service, what do you charge? Like a monthly rate?

[00:15:45.400] – Mat

Yeah, so we usually charge a monthly rate and then have a little performance bonus based on it. So we’re always kind of want to have some skin in the game with our clients so we can share on the upside that we do. And our monthly retainers, rather than sort of putting people into a here’s a seven dollar an hour employee like common model is we tend to take a full team approach and when we’re working with someone, we go, here’s all the outcomes you need as a business. This is ultimately what you’re paying for because no one really cares whether I spend 100 hours or five minutes doing the work. You want the results. If I spend 100 hours to get nothing, there’s no value to you. If I spend five minutes and get the results, you’re happy. So we start with the outcomes of these outcomes that we’re going to achieve for you. We then take it back to the activities and how we’re going to manage that and say this is what we’re going to do and then we sort of charge for that and we will still have a dedicated agent doing a lot of that work.

[00:16:48.590] – Mat

But from a business point of view that’s enabled us to kind of increase the margin that instead of charging an hourly rate we can build the efficiency that we can go well, we charge $1,500 a month but it’s taking 20 hours to do to achieve the outcome. So we’ve actually got the margin margin in there from that work we’ll charge. And part of the things where we started, we’ll charge an hourly rate. People were a wanting to monitor hours so they were micromanaging, clients were micromanaging the hours that we were doing. Then they’re micromanaging the results. And it’s like you kind of both way. What’s more important to you, whether you track the 40 hours a week or whether you track the outcomes and the overwhelming feedback was if you’re charging for 40 hours, we want 40 hours work but we want the outcome as well. So we just started to charge them for 40 hours work. We’re just going to charge you for the outcomes.

[00:17:41.430] – Sean

That’s it. And I like businesses like yours, that structure, it like a SAS. You want to go a monthly plan and they can pick their package if you will. And whether it takes 2 hours or 200 hours, they don’t care. They want the results. Can you give us a low end? High end? What are you charging?

[00:18:01.890] – Mat

You said 1500 is about the low end. High end. We’ve got clients that are up to 15 grand above at the moment that have got a substantial team behind them. But all of them kind of started at that low end and then as we just started delivering results, they just keep reinvesting and we just keep growing, just keep growing with them.

[00:18:24.240] – Sean

Got you. So for the listeners out there, when you’re looking for stocks, the type of businesses that come to mind that are publicly traded would be your professional services businesses. So like management consulting firms like Accenture is a stock people can show interest in and there’s plenty of infosys. Out of India is another one. There’s plenty of that. And you want to think about businesses that can charge that reoccurring monthly fee but become a little more efficient over time with their operations so that profit margin continues to increase. Kind of what you’re doing is what you want to look at. It’s not like I’m a big fan of tech, I love SaaS businesses myself, I love the Scalability, but I don’t typically invest in professional services businesses. But there are some if they do it right, they can continuously grow year over year. You just got the same type of business model but on a smaller scale.

[00:19:20.470] – Mat

Exactly right.

[00:19:21.540] – Sean

Yeah. Nice knowing that you’re heavily dependent upon employees, can you tell us, what do you look for in the people you hire, and how long does it take to get them up to speed?

[00:19:35.010] – Mat

It takes an average of three days. So once we’ve got someone on board, because of the systems we built, and we’ve taken the human element and the skill out of the equation that they don’t need to be a good salesperson to deliver results. They don’t need to hold a great conversation. All they need to be able to do is follow the bouncy ball, cut and paste messages, and be able to understand the feedback that they’ve given. So we can take someone off the street that has never sold a thing in their life, never had any experience in marketing, and we can train them, and we have a process that we follow that we have them within three days working on a client’s account, going live. True answering the first part of the question, the difference in, say, the Philippines at the moment is there’s a lot higher unemployment employment. So the United States and Australia is suffering from great star shortages and power shortages over there. There’s an absolute abundance of quality people out of the Philippines at the moment. So we often have people that are coming into the office working for free, and they’ll sit there and watch some of our agents and do some of the training for free on the hope that they’ll get a job.

[00:20:47.750] – Mat

So we had this total different paradigm shifts, which is why, at the moment, we’re in such a great growth curve is because on one side, there’s massive employee shortages, on the other side, there’s an abundance here, and in the middle is us with the systems to be able to translate the two and connect the two together. So when we’re hiring people, culture is critical for us. You have to be able to fit in with the team. You have to be able to fit in with the culture. You have to get it. The Philippines is a very strong sense of family. So we’ve built processes, and we build our culture like a sense of family. We go out and celebrate everyone’s birthday. We had some deaths and families of some of our agents recently. Our whole team chose to go and warm with them, so they had this really strong sense of family. So you have to fit in with that first. The second kind of criteria is attitude. Are you prepared to learn? Are you prepared to take on feedback? Are you prepared to grow? Do you want to invest in yourself to become more than what you are now?

[00:21:58.420] – Mat

And if you meet those three criteria and you’re an honest person, you’re on a team, skills come secondary. Our systems are so good that we can start you off on an account, and we can get you within three days, be able to deliver the value to clients, go, we can do that. We can kind of back ourselves from that, and then we can work with you to grow over the time so you can improve your skills. You can become more than what you are. You can grow into more roles. We’re starting to train some of the agents and more graphic design and video production and content writing, social media management so we can add more strings to our service offerings and start to do more for our clients. And they’re all loving that. They sort of all want to do it, so they’re all training up and practicing and all that kind of stuff, which is amazing.

[00:22:49.490] – Sean

Got you. Now it sounds like you’ve got great systems in place to serve your customers and retain your customers. How do you scale the company? Are you the only person who’s seeking and looking for new clients or you have another business dev person that’s helping.

[00:23:03.930] – Mat

You at the moment? It’s me. And that’s the kind of roadblock we’re working through at the moment. So where we’re sort of transitioning towards is to actually get me more out of the day to day operations. We’re looking at kind of a double edged sword to do that. It’s firstly bringing on a bit of person, and we want to pay someone out of the Philippines to be able to do that. So that’s a higher skill role than what we normally hire. So that takes a little bit more time to find the right person that meets all the criteria. The second thing we’re doing is just how we’re sort of shifting our offerings to working more with the startups that precede an after series A and working at that kind of higher level, because that builds a scale into that. As they grow, we grow. So partnering with more of those companies and looking at some of the venture capital firms that we target from a marketing point of view and actually start aligning with them so we can help them get a better return on their investment builds that will enable us to discover because the kind of next version of what we’re doing.

[00:24:15.770] – Mat

We want to open a second center in Thailand next year. But we also want to start to buy property over there and be running retreats so we can actually take businesses over to Philippines or to the Thailand and run these kind of Immersive tours over there and start to diversify what we do beyond just the call center and just the outreach center and into more of that kind of business life cycle that we can help them really grow and scale and have that resource base over in the Philippines and over in Thailand that they can leverage on to keep sort of growing and leveraging the assets that are sort of offshore offshore teams to sort of help them grow. So there’s a few things in the work to be able to kind of make that happen over the next four months.

[00:25:06.030] – Sean

Great.

[00:25:06.580] – Sean

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[00:26:16.170] – Sean

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[00:26:50.750] – Sean

When you bring on a customer, do you have some kind of like trial period? Something that is a pretty low barrier to entry? What I’m trying to do is connect the dots to sometimes B to B Sass. A lot of B. Two C SAS like mine does. This is very much trial. You can try us out if you like us, then we commit to something long term.

[00:27:11.090] – Mat

Yes and no. So we don’t have this try before you buy mentality. Just because the amount of time that goes in and setting it up correctly. And the amount of investment that both parties need to make. Not just us. But for this to work for you. We need to put your brain. We need to understand enough about your business and how it operates so we can marry in what we do with what you do so it delivers a result so we don’t have that credit card before you buy. We are very slow in our sales process that we want to be diligent and we don’t want to rush people in. And I’ve got a part of that kind of proposal. I think it’s effectively conditions for working with right away where we set out the criteria of this is what it takes to be successful. And if you’re not happy. With any of these terms. Please don’t work with us. We’re very intentional, we’re very deliberate. Our sales process, and it takes longer now to allow that journey to go through. And a lot of people drop off through that because they realize, hey, I don’t want to do that, or that doesn’t work for me.

[00:28:17.390] – Mat

We have that. But when we do take clients on board, we typically take them on a 90 day contract initially and go, if we can’t figure this stuff out in 90 days and we can’t get this working for you in 90 days, sack us from there. And the last couple of years since we’ve got the systems to where they are now, it’s been pretty good. We haven’t had too many clients get to the end of 90 days and go, hey, we don’t want to keep working with you.

[00:28:47.500] – Sean

Right? No, that’s good to know. And I get it because there’s a lot of companies out there, they’ll do a contract, something that’s maybe a little lighter. It’s not free, of course, but I think of the management consulting firms out there that I’ve worked with, including Accenture and Deloitte, and then one company in my portfolio is Talent here. They’re a big data analytics company and they will do a lower cost entry, like professional service. Use the tool, use the platform a little bit, and then if you like it I don’t know what their term is. It could be 90 days for all I know. But after that, then that’s when we do the commitment. It’s years. In that case, multiple years.

[00:29:29.990] – Mat

Totally. Most clients, after the 90 days we’ll sign them, go on six month renewals through from there, most of our clients will grow, that their scope will change outside of that 90 days and it will actually continue to grow, exporters through from there. It is that kind of land and expand type of type of strategy that we work. And we just need to make sure that we’re aligned with their goals. And us expanding means us growing. Doubling their retainer means we’re tripling the value that we’ve been able to triple the value that we offer.

[00:30:06.650] – Sean

That’s the key takeaway too for the listeners, is you want to look for businesses, especially enterprise SaaS. Your business model is structured the same way as expansion. Revenue is really important because if you just come into a client, let’s say after 90 days, you charge them X amount and then next year you’re charging the same amount, you’re failing. You need to be providing more value, right? You’re going backwards, you need to be providing more value. And right, in return you’re getting paid a lot more. So you keep expanding that revenue. Expansion revenue, yes, exactly.

[00:30:37.750] – Mat

And that’s key for us. And that’s why targeting more of those sort of startups for us is a faster growth because, yes, as they grow, we grow. But there’s also the fact from a retention point of view, they become sticky clients because if we start to build their team for them and their team is working for us, we’re critical for that. We integrate our teaming with them. As they grow, the payment separation becomes a lot harder. So they want to stay with us longer, they want to work with us, they kind of over time view us as their partner and that rather than just as a vendor. So that’s a real big focus for us and kind of being part of the underlying shift to target more of these stats and startups and kind of go below revenue in the beginning because one of the things when we’re looking at a churn before of going well. As long as looked at us as just an absolute contractor and I had this happen so many times. Everyone goes hey. I love your mission. I love it. What you want to do. I want to support it.

[00:31:42.700] – Mat

And that was great. So they come on board supply but then six months later they’re going well, we’re not delivering the return on investment, we’re not doing this, we’re not doing that, this isn’t working for us. So see you later. Where now by going through these starts and all that kind of stuff, putting their key people in place and their team and having the team that’s responsible for their growth and we integrate our team with them so they become part of their company as well as our. So it’s not a separate entity, it sticks in. They become sticky all of a sudden. They don’t want to let their people go. They need a place for their people to work in. They want someone like me coming in every now and again and just overseeing the whole thing and the perspective that I can bring to the table. So they start with a heck of a lot longer. They grow with us from that. So that stickiness and clients has been something that’s been really a big focus of ours over the last twelve months and more so because the fruits of that labor will continue to sort of.

[00:32:45.490] – Sean

Pay off, I’m guessing because you’re on the front line, you’re the ones talking to actual paying customer, right? You’re engaged and you’re probably doing touch bases every week, every two weeks, every month.

[00:32:57.730] – Mat

Exactly right? Yeah, all of that stuff. So they get it. But it’s also a lot of SAS companies are great developers, they’re not great marketers, are not great sales people. And I’ve seen a lot of those companies that have got funded, that have gone and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on marketing consultants and this and that have delivered them nothing. And it’s like most companies don’t need a $40,000 branding solution. We just need to know who’s your customer, what’s the problem, she sold, where can we find them, how can we contact them? And it’s that very streamlined. So I am a marketer, but I’m a salesman first. So when I’m building systems is going, point A, point B, this is the product, this is the market, this is the sale. Go, let’s just go find them. Let’s start conversations. And that type of approach and just that sort of straight line makes it a lot easier to get the returns quickly, to get the growth that’s BC purpose. What they want, that kind of month by month revenues growing consistently. So if we can deliver that for a lot of the clients that we work with, and we can do that for a short amount of time, that they can shorten that learning curve for them, they stay with us forever and they keep growing.

[00:34:16.470] – Mat

As we help them grow, we help ourselves grow, and everyone’s out of it.

[00:34:21.410] – Sean

Let’s say you had a firm like yours. They provide the same value, you get the same results. But the one that’s going to win is a company that really cares about the customer is engaged. They make them feel like they’re being taken care of. Because you’re right. If you position yourself as just the vendor, you sell them, you get locked in, you get your contracts taken care of, and now you’re off and running. And you don’t do those touch points. You don’t tell them how things are going. You don’t learn about them. You don’t ask the questions. You’re not going to keep that client. This is good advice for the entrepreneurs out there. It’s like you need to have great customer service and you got to really care about the customer. Because if you have a great product and you don’t have that right, that great customer service, that great touch point, you’re going to fail that’s in my opinion. You can go blue in the face working on your software, but it’s really easy if you just, hey, I’m a regular person. I’m here to serve. We’re going to set up a cadence of every week or every two weeks just to learn about how you’re doing and make you feel good about our service.

[00:35:23.810] – Mat

And you can see that kind of jersey behind me by me there. We can’t see that sign by the whole plane squad that was given to me from a client of mine. And that was just a thank you. He found out I was a massive Carlton fan, which is in the Ozzy Rules football, which is not rugby, it’s Ozzy Rules football. And a massive fan of that. And he happened to know someone that was on the playing list. So we had that relationship that he goes, I just want to do this with. So he went and got it signed by that said, thanks for everything, I appreciate it. But that doesn’t happen by accident. No, that happens by intention, by doing it. And our systems now support that. Because at the end of the day, you can have a great relationship. But if you’re not delivering results, you’re still there. So it always has to come down results first. Sure, I found that that has to be the driver, the relationship has to be very close second and the connections are on that. So we make sure we set up a reporting system that not a lot of people use.

[00:36:31.810] – Mat

I did a lot of research into Edward stemming and what he did with continuous improvement back in post World War II and taken a lot of that into sales management also sort of Sean Cody’s 40 X took a lot of that and lead indicators and lab indicators and we build a whole kind of management platform around activity based and then results of that. So we have that transparency with clients that they see what’s going on and the results and it’s just a green light, red light, traffic lights, type of scenario, green light we’re ahead of the KPI, red light we’re below and we just as a team we review that for every client. Twice a week we send that to our clients, twice a week we send that to them with the action plan of going this is what we’re doing and it can be just simple things which it often is, but they just know that hey, we’re onto it. We’ve got no force correction through from that. So the relationship comes from the consistency around the results and then the communication that we put through the agents that we become more than just an outsource provider, they become part of their team, so they’ll often get involved in team meetings and so on and so forth.

[00:37:38.890] – Mat

So there’s that really kind of tight bonds through there on multiple levels and it’s not just me, it’s not just our leadership team with the agents and that just keeps it going well. And said they don’t look at us as external vendor, they look at it as an internal partner and part of the business.

[00:37:57.200] – Sean

Nice. So before we jump to the rapid fire on, I want to summarize a few high points that I at least extracted. There’s a lot of great value here you provided but a few key takeaways when people are looking for stocks out there is number one, even if it’s service business, you can still scale it but make sure they are really focused on process and they are verbal about it. You can look in the transcripts, the quarterly earnings reports to hear about how they’re improving processes, making themselves run more efficient. Number two is have a great product or service but couple it with great support because there’s a lot of great products out there that lack the support and that’s what can turn us off as consumers. And the third thing is what you just mentioned, I think this is great. It’s almost an accountability program that lets the customer know what are you doing? Here are the metrics we’re able to drill down to and track. This is good for entrepreneurs out there, you don’t just provide the service. Like, show them every week we’re doing this, this, and this. We’re showing green lights here, red lights here.

[00:39:02.380] – Sean

Get their feedback, get their input. That’s brilliant, because that makes them engaged and almost makes them see the reoccurring value they’re getting from you.

[00:39:11.270] – Mat

Exactly. And that just enables that’s really what underpins results. Because, like, a plane from New York to Australia is going to be off course 90% of the time. But as long as it knows where it’s supposed to be going and is measuring, it can make the course correction still land where it needs to go. And our campaigns are off course most of the time, but because we constantly call square, saying, well, let’s change the targeting, or let’s look at some of the messaging, or let’s look at this. Well, let’s go back to these people and all of these simple things that none of them require any real thought or effort, but it’s just that focus that the fact that we’re doing them more condensed thing, we’re looking at that twice a week and making those voice corrections twice a week deliver the results.

[00:39:55.380] – Sean

Sure. No. Makes sense. Well, great. Matt. This is really helpful. What I’d like to do next to dive into the rapid fire round, this is where we get to find out who Matt really is.

[00:40:04.880] – Mat

Perfect.

[00:40:05.880] – Sean

All right, if you can try to answer each question in 15 seconds or less. Are you ready?

[00:40:10.710] – Mat

Yeah.

[00:40:11.400] – Sean

All right. What’s your favorite podcast?

[00:40:13.550] – Mat

Born Swimming podcast.

[00:40:15.470] – Sean

Got it. Never heard of it. Check it out.

[00:40:17.650] – Mat

Yeah. Joe Marion. I love him.

[00:40:20.570] – Sean

What is the recent book you read and would recommend?

[00:40:25.250] – Mat

The paragraph was just reread.

[00:40:29.160] – Sean

I just was talking to somebody about that book. Sometimes when you hear it from multiple people, it’s almost a sign. You should just order it on Amazon.

[00:40:37.550] – Mat

Absolutely. I’ve read it about five times, and I just finished rereading it again. Sure. Every time I learn something new out of it.

[00:40:44.860] – Sean

Nice. All right, here’s a fun one. What is your favorite movie?

[00:40:49.790] – Mat

Matrix. Nice.

[00:40:51.760] – Sean

Back in 1999. Classic.

[00:40:53.890] – Mat

That’s old school.

[00:40:55.470] – Sean

All right. On.

[00:40:56.930] – Mat

All right.

[00:40:57.500] – Sean

What is the worst business or investment advice you ever received?

[00:41:03.410] – Mat

The worst business advice that I’ve ever received? Should I receive? A lot. The worst one would be don’t do it.

[00:41:12.560] – Sean

Of course it’s too risky. Don’t do it. All right, flip the equation. What is the best business advice you ever received?

[00:41:21.910] – Mat

Don’t do it.

[00:41:25.710] – Sean

Goes both ways.

[00:41:29.350] – Mat

From a business decision, building a support team that I’m the accelerator. I’ve had to build a support team with brakes. Someone to slow me down has been the best thing that I’ve ever done to enable our growth.

[00:41:43.390] – Sean

Nice. And last question. Here’s the time machine question. If you could go back in time to give your younger self advice, what age would you visit and what would you say?

[00:41:52.930] – Mat

I’d probably go back to 21 when I was married and bought my first business. And just say it’s going to work out okay, because we had a lot of dark times and a lot of self doubt, a lot of self loathing going through that kind of period that now I’m through it. I know, I know it was meant to be, but I probably reassure myself that it’s all going to work out okay. It’s all meant to happen.

[00:42:18.690] – Sean

There you go. Little peace of mind.

[00:42:20.140] – Mat

Doesn’t hurt, so it saves me a lot of energy. Yeah.

[00:42:24.490] – Sean

All right. And where can the audience reach you?

[00:42:27.030] – Mat

Look two places. We’ve got our website, which is www.onlinetofffline.com. Au, or you can look me up on LinkedIn, which is you look up Matthew fourville Matthew, spelled with one T on. There are the two places that you can find us easily.

[00:42:43.230] – Sean

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for your time, Matt.

[00:42:45.490] – Mat

Likewise. I appreciate being here.

[00:42:53.570] – Sean

Hey, I just want to say thanks for checking out this podcast. I know your time is valuable and there’s a lot of other podcasts out there you could be listening to. So thanks for taking the time to listen to my guest story. If you did enjoy this podcast episode, could you head over to itunes and leave a five star review? That would be much appreciated. Thank you. And last but not least on this podcast, some episodes we do talk about stocks. And please keep in mind, this podcast is for entertainment purposes only. So if you did hear any buy or sell recommendations, please don’t make those decisions based solely on what you hear. All right? Thanks a lot.

[00:43:29.720] – Mat

See ya.