Matt Reiner: Leveraging AI for Finance Based SaaS through a New Category Tech fo Fin Advisors

This episode is sponsored by Contentfy, a premium video editing and content repurposing service for busy content creators, influencers, brands, podcasters, YouTubers, and marketers. Contentfy provides unlimited end-to-end editing and repurposing services to help you get your video and audio content edited and repurposed quickly, easily, and reliably. Join other busy content creators, founders, brands, and marketers who now spend even more time creating while they take care of the rest. You no longer need to worry about spending hours editing anymore. Just create content, build your audience, and grow your business. If you're a content creator looking to save time and money, or looking to outsource your content marketing team, get your first free video edited now at contentfy.co. If you'd like to sponsor the SaaS District podcast or recommend any guests that you think would be valuable to be on the show, visit horizoncapital.com/saas-podcast today. Thanks again, folks. Thanks. Hello, hello everyone. This is your host, Akhil Jabbar, and welcome back to another episode of SaaS District. In today's episode, we'll be talking about leveraging AI for a finance-based SaaS through a new category of technology for financial advisors. Today we have our guest, Matt Reiner, joining us. Matt is the co-founder and CEO of Benjamin, a technology company focused on delivering SaaS-based solutions to other financial service companies, enabling them to streamline internal communication and processes while enabling a digital client experience that extends beyond traditional client portals. Matt has also written a book, Ready to Be Rich: Smart Financial Advice for People on the Way Up, which looks to change the conversation around money management and budgeting. It also talks about how individuals can leverage technology behavioral economic theories, and simple down-to-earth philosophies to position themselves to enjoy today while saving for the future. So welcome, welcome, Matt. Super excited to have you on the SaaS District show today.

Thanks so much for having me. Excited to be here and looking forward to the conversation.

So Matt, we always like to start off just to give us a quick background, nothing too detailed, but just, you know, what's your personal background and past positions from, I think, your portfolio manager up until launching your startup Get Benjamin back in 2013.

Yeah. So, I mean, I grew up in the business of wealth management. My father started a registered investment advisory firm about 25 years ago. I joined that after I graduated, serving families, helping them kind of position their financial future. I helped to run our investment committee on that side, got a few designations to help with money management. And then, we started another RIA or registered investment advisor that was focused on the mass affluent. Um, about 12 years ago, and then I helped to run that. And then we started our technology company, like you said, uh, now about 7 or 8 years ago, really to help our 2 firms. And I then now run the day-to-day of our, of our technology company, Benjamin.

So you were actually entrenched in the business. You were working as a registered advisor. You were part of that kind of environment, that business. So you understand kind of what were the pains and struggles as a financial advisor. Can you just talk to us a little bit more of what was the process from idea up until launching GetBenjamin? What was the opportunity you encountered? What was the problem you're looking to solve that you saw so clearly and many others were struggling with?

Yeah, that's such a great question. And, you know, I was fortunate to be in the business, right? This is a business that I grew up knowing and understanding and truly loving. Just the ability to serve others and the the impact that we can make in this industry of helping people find happiness in retirement and reach their financial goals is just an amazing feeling. And so I saw an opportunity within our 2 firms. We were growing really rapidly and we had a lot of opportunity and we couldn't find technology to help us continue to scale our business while also enhancing the client experience. And this was at the height of the trend of the robo-advisors when there was all this idea that the robos are going to take over the entire industry. And I thought it was really interesting. And so I started studying it and I saw some opportunity for us to try a few things. I'm fortunate to have partners in the business that, you know, put some effort and money behind it. And we went out and learned and we— it evolved over time, but we ultimately saw some opportunities within our own business where we weren't scalable, we weren't efficient, we weren't integrated with our technologies and our processes. And so we committed capital and time to trying to solve that for our own 2 firms. And so before we even became an enterprise SaaS solution, we were solving the problem for ourselves. And we learned a lot, we failed a lot, but we ultimately got a few of those aha moments, as everybody says, and we saw some really big ROI to our firm. And that's what led us to kind of scale it out to be an enterprise solution. But it took time and we basically, the process was, Let's try it on ourselves. Let's look at our business in depth and let's see if we can create something different that we couldn't find on the marketplace to serve our people and our business and our clients.

And did you, did you guys just go out and say, look, we know how we want to solve this, we have an idea of how we want to build it internally, you just go and hire some developers to do it and kind of build an MVP, run it, and then before actually selling it to market?

Yeah, so we didn't know what we were doing, to be honest. I mean, we spent a lot of money and a lot of time sledging along, right, without a clear vision. We started as a B2C company, actually trying to build kind of an account aggregation budgeting type solution. That's when I wrote my book, Ready to Be Rich. And then we ultimately saw that the technology, you know, we didn't have the capital to scale on the B2C side that you needed, but we saw that the technology was valuable. And so we found a place for it within our business and we were like, we noticed that it actually had value. And so, we continued to dive deeper into that. And, it was mainly regarding back-office operations in the onboarding aspect of our business. We started to streamline that, make that more efficient, less time-consuming. And, that's when we said, well, we may have something. And then, that allowed us to kind of broaden the opportunity of what we were building. And, it kind of was like a gradual iteration to ultimately come to what we have as Benjamin now, which is a business support system, the first-ever business support system for wealth managers that's integrating technologies together to streamline processes and eliminate menial mundane tasks. And so it was a natural evolution of failing, learning, iterating, and also consistency, right? We were fortunate to have, you know, some capital to be able to continue to push forward. And without it, we would have failed and, you know, let this idea kind of, you know, go off in the sunset years ago. But we were fortunate to be able to continue to push forward.

So speaking about the capital, have you guys raised, you know, outside capital, or was this kind of completely bootstrapped internally? And then where are you guys in terms of size today, you know, 7, 8 years later?

Yeah, so I mean, we've had multiple iterations. So I think we're just now— I would still consider us an early stage, you know, just a startup, because we finally found who we are and what we want to be when we grow up. Um, and, you know, we took some outside capital, just a, you know, family and friends round. A few years ago, but we kind of went through a— we were part of one of our RIA companies in the past, and so it was a technology company within there. And we actually went through a whole kind of recapitalization process last year where we spun Benjamin out into its own company, took a small round of capital, again, family and friends. We've really funded it from cash flow from some of our other businesses, but we now have our own entity, a new capital structure, some fresh capital infused, and we're going to continue to do some raising to continue to push the R&D now that we, again, we've learned what we needed to do. We scaled to, you know, 50 clients. We learned a lot. We rebuilt our product based on the lessons we learned there, and we've gone back out to market with a relaunched and re-architected product over the past couple of years. And so, you know, right now we have about 38 clients because we kind of restructured our whole deal and we kind of We cut some of the people that weren't using the product in the way that we wanted to, we envisioned moving forward. And now we're kind of hitting our stride. We've created a category, like I mentioned. We have the right sales strategy, the right pricing methodology, but it took us a lot of time. And being first-time tech entrepreneurs, at least we've been entrepreneurs, there's a lot to learn. And we spent a lot of time and money on that, but now I think we finally figured out who it is we wanna be.

Yeah, it's, uh, people underestimate, you know, finding product-market fit is, is a challenge, right? You know, it took you guys years to find it. People think it's an easy problem to solve, but once you finally hit that, hit that kind of, or find that product-market fit, that's when you can actually hit your stride and you can actually just focus on building and growing versus, you know, keep iterating and making those changes. But I'm glad you guys finally found it, or at least, you know, getting close to it and can, can start moving forward.

Yeah, I think that, and to that point, right, product-market fit, you know, you, you always think you have it. Right. And again, I think that one of the lessons that we learned was, you know, who, you know, identifying who you're wanting to serve, right? And like when you start out, you want to serve everybody and you think your product can do everything. And you think you have a clear focus on who you want to be and who you want to serve, but you really don't until you really get into it. And you don't know what problem you're really needing to solve until you start, but that until you start having people use your product. I think that the lesson I learned was, you know, once we got the product into other firms' hands outside of our initial 2 companies, that's when we learned who it is that we wanted to be because we started to get real feedback from there. And you can do it through testing, but until people actually use the product and they want to get involved in their business, you're not going to get as good and powerful feedback. And that's when we really learned, you know, what we needed to do to our architecture to scale it to be an enterprise solution, and then how we needed to present it to make it utilized in a valuable way. It took us a long time.

Yeah. And the biggest thing of that is, you know, the process of elimination of knowing who you don't want to work with, right? You said, you know, B2C, you guys went out there, you know, this is not who we want to work with. Then you went probably other, you know, B2B, and now you guys know enterprise is where we really need to focus.

Yep.

Yeah. So just to kind of help understand a little bit about the product a bit better for myself, how is Benjamin helping other of these advisors and their team working with their clients. Can you speak more about how the AI piece is integrated into that?

Yeah, so Benjamin, as I said, is a business support system, and the business support system is meant to utilize APIs within the, you know, the advanced technologies that we now have, open APIs, to connect all the technologies that financial advisor uses to bring all the data into one standard location. We cleanse it, we unify it, we structure it, and then we allow the advisor to utilize simplistic RPA, robotic process automation, to train Benjamin Based on their processes and their data that's specific to them to go execute on tasks that fall within 5 different buckets, right? Anything from prospecting to meetings. So something as simple as, you know, scheduling an annual review meeting or doing meeting preparation prior to a meeting, to onboarding, helping getting paperwork set up and finalized, to ultimately proactive maintenance, anything that happens post the meeting, right? Following through on different tasks. To also know your client. How do you keep data up to date and clean? and then keep it within all the systems structured in that way. Benjamin is meant to live in the background, right? It's a connective tissue of all the technologies. That's the challenge we face in our industry is that we live in disparate systems and every person on the team has a different goal and objective from each system and they utilize the system in a different way. And so it's really hard to scale a company or a firm, right?

Yeah.

We always have capacity issues of how many clients we have and then we have to go hire more people. And in an industry where we have margins that are being compressed, Because we're charging the same fee and delivering more services and more value, we have to figure out how to help that middle part of the P&L so that we can keep margins higher and deliver more services and more value, and we can serve more people. And so our technology brings all the data together to act on different tasks, and then we utilize natural language processing to be able to have conversations with the client and with internal team members to be able to execute on those menial mundane tasks that are repetitive. There's actually 40% of the day of an advisor and their team is spent doing menial, mundane, repeatable, and automatable tasks. And our goal as a firm is that we want to automate all of those to be able to— if we can give 40% of time back to teams, they can do what is most important. Our belief and one of our core values is that this is a human business. Our core value is be human-centric.

Mm-hmm.

What that means is that we're looking to build technology to allow teams to be able to spend more human-to-human time with their clients, because that's ultimately a differentiator in this industry, is the relationship that you're able to build. And when it comes to behavioral finance and behavioral economics and psychology of managing money, there's slickness and seamlessness of a robo, but there's a need of a human, right? And we're trying to combine the two where the human can have that EQ and that emotional intelligence to keep people from making those silly decisions. And we believe that if we can build technology to take off a lot of that menial stuff, every person on the team now can play a part in that. And so, you know, whether it's a task that's part of a workflow in your CRM, as opposed to assigning it to a human— let's just use something simple as scheduling, right? Even if the human has to send the Calendly link out, um, now, as opposed to the human having to do that 400 times because you have 100 clients and you meet with them 4 times a year, Benjamin's able to actually go and execute that task. complete it, schedule the meeting, and then start doing meeting preparation and bringing documents and data from all the systems to the advisor prior to the meeting. So we are able to scale and leverage teams drastically, and we're able to now put a nominal dollar value on the ROI that Ventrion's able to provide. So we are— we're not trying to replace any of the technologies in the tech stack of an advisor. We're trying to get better utilization out of those technologies, and that's also what's won us over inside the community, right? Because the technology partners look at us as a true partner, As opposed to a threat. That's a great position to be in.

It makes sense. As somebody who's charging those high hourly rates or even the kind of wages these people are being charged to the firm, one hour saved, if they can be focused on high-value tasks of what they're being paid for versus the mundane tasks that, A, maybe an assistant could do, or if you can automate it, there's this huge ROI on that so they can keep doing the high-value tasks. This is kind of a personal, maybe a little bit more interesting, you know, maybe question from our audience. You know, it's a bit tricky of a conversation with clients who are selling or when selling, you know, advice solution as a registered advisor, right? You're selling this solution, but now, you know, computers are being more involved in kind of the decision of where the investments are made. AI is doing a lot of the backend work of deciding how to optimize your portfolio. What do you see kind of an expected increase of ROI when leveraging these type of tools, like as an investment advisor or team versus the old way? And, you know, where do you see that balance?

Yeah, I think that our industry is going through some drastic and major evolution, right? The thing is, is that the robo, you can see it in different evolutions, right? You had Charles Schwab and Vanguard come in the '70s, and they brought in discount brokers. What they did is they enlarged— they expanded the pie of people who could get services. And then you had E-Trade doing online in the '90s, and then you had Betterment and Wealthfront and Personal Capital in the late— before 2010 or so, 2008, 2009, with the robo-solutions. And it just continued to expand the pie. But what it's done is that it's slicked up and streamlined a lot of the— some of the inefficiencies with onboarding. And what it's mainly done, though, is commoditize investment management. Right? Investment management with the evolution of the ETFs, exchange-traded funds, with robo-advisors, knowing that passive investing tends to perform better than active investing, or at least it's like a reversion to a mean, and outperforming the market consistently is a really difficult thing, even with an algorithm, just because of the kind of the metrics of reversion to the mean. You know, this business is evolving. And what I mean by that is that we're becoming, instead of just being investment managers, we're becoming wealth managers, and we're helping people with all of the wealth advising, Right? And it's everything from investment management, still is a part of it, but you have to be better at building a relationship and serving them from estate planning, tax planning, all around financial planning. And so what I think that AI has done and what the robo-advisors have done is that they should be used in combination with advisors as opposed to thinking of them as threats. We should look at them as tools. And if we can look at them as tools, again, we are a service-based business that people trust us because they build a strong bond with us and a relationship with us that we can help them keep their emotions in check, both in the good and the bad time, keep them from being too greedy and keep them from being too fearful, and help them see— because we see it time and time again because we manage so many of those clients— help to navigate them. And the moment that we can shift our mind and accept that investment management has become commoditized, then I think that our industry can provide more value, more services beyond what we've ever done before, which is an enhancement to the ROI of what we do as an advisor, to where our value isn't hinged on what we do and how we perform in the market, but actually how we actually help clients reach milestones and goals that they have within their whole life, which is so much more powerful, uh, than what the market did, because the market's out of our control. But what we can do is we can help them budget, help them estate planning, helping them, you know, build, you know, generational wealth, uh, and protect that. That's the value of an advisor is that psychology of it. We look back, the pandemic has been a rough time. There's a lot of people that sold March and April at the beginning of the pandemic, and they never got back in. And we saw it in 2008 and 2009, but then we saw a lot of people that had an advisor and they talked to their advisor and some of them stayed in. And the ones that got out versus the ones that stayed in, the gap of where their assets are right now is drastic. Right? Just because cash earned nothing and the markets actually, they recovered in all aspects. And, you know, I think that that's a value of an advisor, right? It's not that we made better investment decisions, it's that we helped them see and understand how to not emotionally react to what's going on in the headlines in the world and stay true to their financial plan. Now, not every advisor did that, not everybody did that, but that's an example of where I think advisors can add value. And it's the relationship and emotional emotional side of it. We need to be better at that, and that's what AI is allowing us to do now, is to get better and more focused in that way.

Yeah, that makes complete sense. Um, in terms— you mentioned, you know, using the tool, Benjamin, uh, has actually— you guys actually measure the ROI of how it's improving, you know, the, the company's kind of return on their time, their portfolio. Uh, can you share a little bit, you know, what are the, the percent increase you see for, for clients, um, you know, from investors, you know, from the overall Uh, kind of portfolio? And then is it only, uh, like on the client fee side? Is it the number of transactions you're seeing more of? Is it just kind of overall productivity on time?

Yeah, it's really productivity on time is how we measure it, right? It's, it's how do you keep— how do you— how can we allow you as the firm, as a financial advisory firm or wealth management firm, to grow your business, the number of households you serve, without having to grow the number of people that are, are employed by your business? And, uh, what we found is, you know, we have a white paper. If you head over to getbenjamin.com, there's an ROI white paper that we put And we did 2 different types of calculations of ROI on a business support system, Benjamin specifically. And we showed that we're able to save on a nominal value, we're able to create, you know, at least $65,000 per year because we're able to delay some hires. But then we're also able to scale teams based on a leverage ratio that we created of how many people we can actually scale. And based on the size of your firm and the number of families you serve, it can be anywhere from half a person to over 10 people that Benjamin can help to scale. That's real, that's real value. And, and it's all in a, in a mindset of not ever taking away the white glove service that is so important in this business. It's a how do you continue to deliver more services with the same number of people. And that's what we're so focused on. And I think that that's really a unique way that we think about it because we come from being in that service-based mentality. We bring it into a technology company Which there's not many technology companies that have that mentality, right? It's like you build technology, you sell it, you serve it, you get out. There's a service-based aspect that is on the foundation of this firm because of our background. And so it's all about how do we build technology, allow you to serve your clients deeper with the same number of people. And so the leverage of the number of people that we can, you know, help you grow by is pretty incredible.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, and that's another thing in the service-based business, people really think of headcount. I mean, that's the way they scale, they think to scale, but If you can slow it down and say, look, you don't actually need to increase headcount to increase revenues and profits, that's huge.

100%. I think that that's been the old school way of growing our firms. When you're just in investment management, you didn't have to provide anything else, it worked. Now that there's this battle between fee compression and margin compression, should I lower my fees? Should I increase my services and keep my fees the same? It's a challenge that many firms are going through. What we're trying to do is say, Don't lower your fee because there's been plenty of studies that show that you shouldn't, that we are a valuable asset. We are a valuable service provider to the, to our clients, and the price that clients pay for us, they're willing to pay, and the value is there. What you should do though is figure out how can you do more with your time and where can you create efficiencies. And where we can create efficiencies in our day is in the menial mundane stuff that we can't stop doing that is so necessary that we have to do. that we always do, but that we don't need to do anymore because technology has become advanced so much. And it's just going to get more advanced. And, you know, some of the cool things that we're looking to do, you know, we're not stopping where we are. We've got a lot of focus on how we're going to continue to grow and our vision. We're not even— we haven't even scratched the surface on what we're going to be able to do with Benjamin for our advisory clients. Nice.

So speaking about growth, I mean, uh, you know, for our listeners, say SaaS founders, who are maybe also focused in your space, they want to focus on enterprise-level clients. You built a product in a very, very competitive market industry, finance, fintech, as you can imagine, it's very competitive. Can you share kind of specific growth strategies that you say have worked best for you guys, your product, to be able to drive those users? I think you're about 40, 50 enterprise clients right now using it.

Yeah. I mean, It's the relationship, right? You know, I'm fortunate that I grew up in this industry. I know a lot of people in the space. Um, you know, me and my, my business partners, we all know a lot of people and, um, we're fortunate for that. Um, and, and this business is a— this is a, you know, especially in the wealth management business, it's a really— it's a, it's a tight-knit group, right? We all, we all know each other, right? You, you do one thing wrong, everybody hears about it. You do one thing great, Everybody hears about it. And, you know, we're protective of our own, I think, in this industry. And, you know, so it's— you've got to really focus on the relationship. And it's somewhat, you know, just hitting the ground and just deepening relationships. How can you serve them? And being service-focused. You know, we've done everything, right? We've done social marketing. We've done, you know, we've done digital marketing. And it all works, right? You have to have an omnichannel approach to it all. But what it ultimately comes back to is deepening relationships with strategic partners in the space and just deepening relationships with some influencers in the space and showing them the value of the product. And sometimes you just have to give your product away at the beginning. If you believe in your product, you know they're going to buy it. And if you can make it irreplaceable for their business to grow, you got something. And you know what? To be honest, I didn't know that early on in our business. Now, I am 100% confident that that is the case. I've seen it work time and time again. And so, I think that you have to be creative. And this business is hard to talk to the decision-makers because we have great gatekeepers in this business because we're used to it from the mutual fund sales side. But I would say that you work really hard on creating kind of your initial raving fans. And they will, they will speak about you. And it's just kind of good old-fashioned, you know, grit and hard work and pounding the pavement. There's no really like secret sauce in this. I think it's an omnichannel approach. You got to have digital. I think that doing, you know, white papers and case studies and, you know, we're big proponents of video and podcasting and you got to be an early adopter, but it's consistency, right? This industry will finally If you're consistent with your message, you're consistent with your value prop, you're consistent with your strategy, you will be noticed. And this industry is an industry that awards consistency and value. So I think it's service, consistency, and having an omnichannel approach. Cool.

So you guys have obviously tried many different kinds of channels, And you've seen what's worked, what hasn't. Is there any that you can share that you would say have maybe tried and failed and you wouldn't recommend or do again?

Um, most of the ones that we tried and failed were in the B2C space. Um, you know, I think that, um, you know, I, I don't think that we've, um— I think that where we failed, and I think that what I would stress to the listeners on this show is If you go in with the expectation that you're going to go and get this, like, you know, it's kind of like that old saying of like you turn up your website and you're like, well, why aren't the phones ringing? It's like, well, you gotta, you gotta promote it. You gotta go. And it takes time. Uh, when we failed, it was because we thought we were going to get this big bump right away doing something short-term. And it just doesn't happen in this space, right? Where we've had such success is that it's just a consistent slogging along process. And so if you find this thing that you think is going to just be like this big bump right out the gate, I would stay away from it unless you want to commit to it long term. And I think that you're not going to find that easy pop in this space. You have to— so that's why I think where we failed at times, we took that road and it just didn't work.

That's good advice. Speaking about financial advice, you've been in the game for a year. As you know, finance is kind of the back of your like the back of your hand. Uh, you know, a lot of SaaS companies maybe not have an internal CFO to kind of manage their, their capital. Can you share any, you know, simple tips or advice to help them, whether, you know, strengthen their balance sheet, maybe help them increase the returns on the capital? They're just kind of, uh, tips that maybe they don't, they don't usually think about.

Yeah, I mean, I, you know, for me, since day one, I still am, uh, you know, uh, really kind of, uh, an eagle on it, right, with an eagle eye on it is, you know, I'm big on cash flow analysis, right? I think that for you to run your business, having just, even if it's like a simplistic cash flow analysis of your expenses and your revenues and projecting that out and living and dying by that every day in terms of the buying decisions and spending decisions and revenue decisions and how to go spend your money, I think that too often we as founders, we just want to go spend and we hope that the money will follow. But cash is king, right?

Right.

In building a business. And if you don't have it, your idea, it doesn't matter how good it is, it's going to die on the vine. And, and so, you know, for me, I've really just focused on— I don't care about, you know, any of the accrual type stuff in terms of accounting. It's just how much money do I have in the bank? How much am I bringing in every month and how much am I having go out? And I'm going to be conservative and always have a line item for miscellaneous because I always tend to overspend in some ways. But I want to know where I need to be, right? Because it allows me now to set goals on revenue and allows me to adjust very quickly if I need to, as opposed to having $0 in my bank and having to adjust. And it helps me understand when do I need to go get more capital, and I can start planning for that earlier on. When I didn't do that, I was always reactive of raising capital and reactive to my decisions as opposed to being proactive. And a cash flow analysis spreadsheet, you don't need a CFO. You can do it very easily. You can update it very quickly, even if it's just what income and what total expenses are. That's all. You can have 3 line items: income, total expenses, and, you know, cash from operations, whatever your net cash is. And what is your starting balance, and when are you going to run out of money? If you're going to run out of money in 10 months, you probably either need to figure out how to cut your expenses drastically to prolong that cash, figure out if you're going to be able to increase your revenues in the next 2 months, and if not, You better get on the trail trying to raise some capital if you believe in your idea, because if you don't, it takes a little time to get the raising of capital and everything of that nature. Um, it just gives you such clear insight. It worked for us in the pandemic. It's been really helpful for us as we've grown. And that's what I would say, just simplify everything and just focus on cash until you become profitable or until you get enough in the bank to where you can invest, um, and have a CFO run it day to day.

Love it. I mean, that's probably very similar advice that people should be doing for their own personal finances. too, and kind of figure out how much money you have every single month. But most people, most people surprisingly don't even do so. I mean, that's simple, but it's so powerful.

It's, uh, you know, it's funny, the simplest advice is always somewhat the, uh, the best. And so you try to overcomplicate it, things just become more difficult than they intend to be. Yeah.

Matt, I want to switch gears a little bit, moving towards kind of like a little bit more personal questions, uh, a little bit more rapid fire. Um, starting off What's one advice you wish you had known and would tell your 25-year-old self, knowing what you know today?

Yeah, um, I think it's— I, I, I kind of broke it down into a few different mindsets when I think about this, right? It's, uh, I think it's structure, consistency, execution, and level-minded. I, I think that, um, early on, you know, the cool— the, the coolness of starting a company keeps your emotions into a roller coaster, right? Building a company is challenging in and of itself, and I wish I would have been told to be level-minded in the past and really invest in being mentally sound and mentally focused and also understanding deeply where you wanted to go. I was a shiny object person, founder early on. I like this. Oh, let's go do that. I like this. Let's go do that. And I wish someone would've told me, stay structured, stay disciplined, and focus on execution. And when you have a big win of a big client, celebrate it, but don't let that kind of tell you that you've made it through because there's more tough times ahead. And when you have a tough time, you're going to get through it and you'll have good times. And so, you know, you got to keep that clear mind because I was making irrational decisions on both the extremes that didn't help my business. And I think we could have saved off a lot. Saved a lot of money and time if I would have known that.

Makes sense. Focus. So simple again, so powerful. Um, what, what are some of the biggest challenges you're face— you're currently facing in order to continue to grow Benjamin? Meaning, you know, what keeps you up at night these days?

Yeah, I think there's really 2 things. Um, right. I think that as a— I think it's one, execution, right? I talked about it earlier. I think that, you know, we have, we have a great vision. We know where we want to go. It's a matter of everybody executing it in the best potential way to move forward. And I think that everybody says that, right? I always say strategic planning is like an IOU, right? It's worth nothing if you don't execute. And we have the strategic vision and execution, and making sure we have the right butts in the right seats to get the best execution is really a challenge that I'm always focused on. And the second thing is, I think any founder believes this, right? Our business is going to be successful. But even in the early days, right, a lot of people, employees, partners have invested in me and the idea. And I think what keeps me up at night is that if we run out of capital, right, or we run out of sales, the way they invested in us, that they put their livelihoods on the line and trusted me. And so, I take that really seriously. Not that I worry about it, but I take it really seriously. And if there's ever an issue with the business, it's not that I worry about my personal, you know, image. It's that I worry that, is this going to impact my employees and my team and my partners that have, you know, really trusted us? So I think that's those 2 things that really keep me up. And we're doing well on both of those right now. Cool.

Glad to hear that. Matt, who or what would you say are the best 3 resources? These can be books or people, mentors, people you follow in the space who you'd say have been the most instrumental to your success over these last few years.

Yeah, I think that over the last couple of years, I mean, my one mentor that nobody can follow is my pops, right? My dad. I mean, he He keeps me— he's an entrepreneur at heart and keeps me kind of stable-minded and pushes me along. But I mean, I'll take 3 books that have really changed my perception of building a business.

Sure.

The first one is Hard Things About Hard Things, right? That is probably the best book about building a business because it just gets to the root of how hard it is, right? I think everybody looks at all these companies that are successful and it's like, oh, wow, that's so easy. But the things that you don't See between the beginning and the whatever the public deems a success is is a lot. The other book is called Reboot by Jerry Colonna. Mentally changed me. That's what kind of helped me get through the level mindset, helped me put failure on the table, and really reshaped my ability to handle difficult situations mentally, which has made me a better leader. Right? Failure is always on the table, and it's always an option. I think I used to run from failure as opposed to accepting that it's a It's a potential option. It's not an option I desire, but it's there. And when you do that, then you can make more clear decisions. And then, a more recent book is Shoe Dog by Phil Knight. Again, Phil Knight building Nike. What I learned from that is I resonated with the person he is. He's an introvert like me at times. And I suppose people may not know that, but when you're building a business, you got to put your extrovert hat on and go out there. And you do it. And I related to Phil a lot in that way. I mean, he's now— he's worth a lot more than I am and built a really successful business. But what he also showed is that they struggled for 15 years, but he just kept pushing because he knew he had a great idea, he had a great product, and he was doing whatever he had to, to get that done. And I think that that determination, that again, nobody realizes how much and how long and how hard of a path it was for Phil and Nike. to get to where they are. And I just really respect that. And it's really changed my mentality around being positive, being optimistic, and never stopping. Right. From that standpoint, which I think we all know, but it really kind of brought to light.

Cool. Well, add those links in our show notes for people to check out. I haven't read those last 2, but I'll definitely check them out. Matt, you've had some, obviously, some different levels of success from before starting your startup up until now. What does success mean to you today, whether that's personally, financially, business? life? There's no right answer.

Yeah, so I'm also a big Simon Sinek fan, um, and, you know, understanding what your why is, uh, is really important. And, you know, for me, my why is to have a positive impact that lasts beyond my lifetime, um, and I believe that starting businesses, I can do that. Um, I can impact our clients, I can impact our employees, um, and, you know, I ultimately, you know, when, when, you know, I'm 6 feet under, you know, my— I hope my legacy is that I inspired my family and and my peers to develop self-awareness, to develop discipline and a work ethic that allows collaborative impact within challenging verticals, right? I've never shied away from a difficult challenge, and I don't think we ever should. And success for me is that I've inspired people to do that. And hopefully people that have worked with me and worked on our teams go out and do great things. And I hope that everything that we start has a great impact. And that's success to me, right? Again, that goes to my service foundation from, from my days as an advisor. So that's, that's how I judge it and that's what I'm striving for day in and day out. And I believe that building businesses, in my opinion, in my mind, is how I think I can do that. And so that's why I'm so adamant on building more and more businesses to impact more and more people.

Love it. Love it. Thank you. Thank you. This has been, this has been a great conversation, Matt. Really appreciated you jumping on and sharing all your wisdom. What are your kind of future plans for Benjamin, and where can our audience get in touch with you to learn more about you or your program?

Yeah, please go follow our journey at Benjamin. We love to have people kind of on board to see what we're doing. We, we're just getting started. We've got a lot of fun AI R&D projects that we're in works of doing, and we're going to reshape the way that financial advice is delivered to individuals, hopefully opening it up for more individuals to get financial advice from financial advisors. because of the solution that we built. So, go follow us at getbenjamin.com. You can follow us on Twitter @GetBenjamin. Myself, I do a lot of thought leadership on both leadership and also on wealth management, RIAs. You can find me at mattreiner.com or @MattReiner on Twitter and on LinkedIn, across all the social platforms and on YouTube. So, go check me out and follow us at Benjamin. We It's going to be a fun ride, and I think you're going to hear a lot more about us in the days, months, and years to come.

I look forward to seeing what you guys build out here in the next couple of years. Thank you so much, Matt. I appreciate you jumping on SaaS District.

Great. Thanks for having me.

Thank you all for watching this episode and joining SaaS District today. Don't forget to like, subscribe, and hit the bell for future episodes where we interview top leaders in the the SaaS industry. If you're a SaaS company looking to grow and unlock the true value of your business, get in touch with us at Horizon Capital, and myself or one of our consultants will provide a free assessment to help you get there and hit your goals. If you have any feedback or suggestions for this podcast, please comment down below and help us improve our content for you all. Thanks again, and see you on the next one.