471: Unlocking Success through Strategic Goal-Planning, Partnerships, and Providing Services with Matthew Gartland

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Hey there, this is Anne from the Food Blogger Pro team and you are listening to the Food Blogger Pro Podcast. This week on the podcast, Bjork is interviewing Matthew Garland, the CEO of SPI Media. The spi, AKA Smart Passive Income Media community, is full of online entrepreneurs who have come together to build their online businesses through SPI's wealth of educational content, community building opportunities and training experiences. In this interview, Mat Matthew shares a story behind his own entrepreneurial journey which led him to start SPI Media along with Pat Flynn. They also talk about the benefits of offering services and leaning into the skills that you already have and how you can solve real life problems by doing so. They round out the interview by discussing the importance of strategic goal planning, the power of community, and how building partnerships earlier in your career can help to not only build an audience, but to sell to them, whether you're just starting out or years into your business venture. We think this will be a really insightful episode and hope you enjoy it. If you do, please share the episode with your community. It helps our podcast so much and it means a lot to us. And now, without further ado, I'll let Bjork take it away.

Matthew welcome to the podcast Bjork.

Thrilled to be here. Thanks buddy for having me.

Yeah, this is one of those conversations where we get on. We have an hour to record this podcast. We have to be accountable to ourselves to not spend the entire hour like catching up talking about what's going on within our businesses, personal lives, whatever it might be. We have a lot of different connections, one of which is we're in a fantasy football league with some other really great entrepreneurs and creators. So there's so much for us to talk about. But today we're going to stay focused. We're going to be talking about online business, business building, we're going to be talking about kind of some systems and processes related to that. But what I want to do, like I do with every interview, is just to hear a little bit about your backstory. I know that you started growing an agency. That agency eventually got acquired or kind of merged into Smart Passive Income. We've had Pat Flynn on the podcast before, but fill that story out a little bit. What was the agency and when did you start it?

I started it as my very first startup right after I left my corporate career, I'm pleased to say, and grateful for a career in corporate America. I was in a leadership development program right out of school, sort of like an in house executive MBA sort of a thing. And it's where I started to really kind of give sharper definition to what I've been able to play forward into any variety of the startups I've been a part of now for over 13 years. So I had a six year corporate career and got out and that was the very first one. And it was timely and sort of like serendipitously like I got lucky in that. Like my background is it data, data science, building of information systems, strategically working with sales and marketing business partners to solve really complex sort of questions and challenges to grow, you know, enterprise companies. Right. That was my, my, my corporate career. So I, I loved, you know, emerging technologies. I also just personally love storytelling. So even in college I was like electively studying the Arthurian legend, you know, Greek and Roman history, Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, you know, Joseph Campbell and the Monomyth, which we know now today as like the hero's journey.

So how, the question for you is how often do you think of the Roman Empire less? Do you remember that? Do you remember that? Where, where it was like there's that trend where people would ask their. I think it was like I'm not on social as much. Maybe, maybe you.

I'm not on social as that much either, but do you.

Okay, so there's this trend where like people would, I think it was like a spouse, like a wife would ask their husband how often do you think of the Roman Empire? And they're like, oh, like maybe once a day and it was like this, this idea of like suddenly all these people realizing their significant other thinks about the Roman Empire all the time anyways. But you like, literally thought about the Roman Empire?

I literally thought about it, yeah.

Every day.

I. I should have. In retrospect, I got within an inch and then I didn't do it. Choose to take an entire semester and study abroad in Greece. So not Romans, but I wanted to actually go there and I almost did it. I should have, yeah. But the interesting and again, like unplanned sort of synergy that happened was my enjoyment and professional career, right. With technology and especially like emerging technologies of different forms of SaaS and different solution building with my personal enjoyment of stories and storytelling, essentially content, right. Converged right at the moment with the blogger sphere popped off. So, like, I saw opportunities that were already starting to percolate online with blogs, you know, in particular of, you know, essentially something I could do with my entrepreneurial spirit that I hadn't yet done. So I wanted to build something, wasn't entirely sure. So I just started what I think a lot of us sometimes do that are kind of first time entrepreneurs, which I started a service business right before I had like a product. And I was already like really decently invested in what it takes to write. Well, because I was doing a lot of writing and even then editing my friends, you know, sort of papers in school, you know, I was an honors kid. So that was another layer to all of this in terms of reading and writing and helping people with like their honors thesis. I wrote an undergraduate honors thesis, so I kind of had this weird notion of like, I can help with manuscripts, I can help like edit people's written stuff into. Into a better shape. Right? So that was the genesis of the very first agency. We'd think of it today as like a creator studio because it evolved rather rapidly into not just working on books, but also doing podcasts and newsletters. And again, what we would think of today is like all of the kind of content types, right. For a creator business, the only thing that we didn't end up doing was video. We never got into video, sure.

Which at the time would have been people who are doing video, but it would have been early. It's not like video super early. It's almost like table stakes for writers.

Even podcasting was. Was relatively early. So this got, this got started in 2012, 2013. I did quickly meet Pat within the first year, but our core focus was working with nonfiction authors, folks that had traditionally published books or were working on their first One this was also sort of again just sort of like magical timing of the Internet. Amazon KDP arrived on the scene and became.

Explain what that is for people who don't know kdp.

Oh absolutely. Kindle Direct publishing, which is now ubiquitous in terms of our understanding of like hey, if you want to write and publish, self publishing is an option. It wasn't always an option, or at least it was really really hard. And then Amazon developed an entire ecosystem of tools.

Like you could have a tool that you'd write a book and it would be formatted in a way where you could just have it show up in the Kindle store. So suddenly it's like you're able to get a book in front of millions of people in a digital format with the ability for them to purchase it with one click versus 20 years ago you'd have to get a book published and you'd print it and you don't know how many have to print. And so a massive change in the world of publishing for authors.

Oh yeah, it, I mean it brought down the walls right. In terms of barriers to entry for people that wanted to be authors that had some version of a manuscript they could now, yeah, format it in different types, you know, ePub, mobi files, get really kind of nerdy about it and then I forget the exact chronology. I'm pretty certain that the, the digital KDP side came first but then eventually Print on demand came as a fast follow through Amazon. So then you could even have like a physical version of yourself published book. So that created so much demand. Right. So for the bloggers, the writers that were really emulating inspired by Seth Godin who was still hyper relevant but he was going through like you know, a mega moment. This was the immediate wake of like Tim Ferriss first book that kind of really, you know, cracked open a lot of people getting interested in entrepreneurship and working for themselves in different ways.

It was four Hour Work week.

Is that the four Hour Work Week book? Yep. Check me on this stuff. Thank you, that's great. LastPass important details. Yeah, but yeah, it was again like I had a good idea and I got really lucky, right?

Yeah. And I think that's often how it goes. Like it's the luck of timing. It's a good idea and it's hard work and it can't just be any one of those. Like it kind of has to be all three of those. And sometimes what it seems like happens is you work hard but it's not the right time. And it eventually is the right time and Then you catch it, or, you know, maybe you're not working very hard and it is the right time of which you're lucky. And then eventually you're like, wait, I'm going to start trying on at this. I'm going to start working hard. And then it unlocks. But I think that's the hard part is like, sometimes people feel like I'm working really hard on this thing and it's not happening. It's maybe because it's not the right time or the timing isn't exactly as it should be. Not that it's always exactly as it should be, but there is definitely like market pull conditions for a thing.

And sometimes there's also like luck involved.

But we talk about this idea of like, luck wears overalls. Like, hard work and luck often go hand in hand. So I like, yeah, totally get what you're saying with it. So you've built this agency. It kind of coincides with the rise of kind of early creator economy. You're helping creators in lots of different kind of mediums. Maybe not video, but like writing, publishing, blogging, maybe creating content on social. You build that up and then eventually you cross paths. Let me know if I'm fast forwarding too much with Pat Flynn. Smart, passive income. Some people are familiar with that. We interviewed Pat many years ago, but he kind of was somebody who did and still does speak to creators who are interested in building an online business. What was that moment like? How did that come about?

Another sort of serendipitous thing you mentioned our fantasy football league. On the front end of this, Pat is included in that league. And that is the very first interaction I had with Pat through a mutual friend as I was building that league for the first time. Someone recommended Pat to be in the league. He said yes. That's sort of just a weird sort of like writing reference. But then the first project together was in 2012. I want to say no, I'm sorry, 2015, which was his first manuscript, self publishing that we worked on together. But we just kind of hit it off. So I continued to be invited by Pat into like the next project idea he had that was in some way creative. Me and my team, as my team continued to grow, we sort of shared a something of a symbiotic storyline in terms of Pat's building of the first generation of spi than like, as I was building my, my creative team at that time. So, yeah, we just, we became fast friends. We, you know, were invited very deeply into the strategic process of what Pat was trying to do, or at least me personally. And rather quickly I kind of became sort of like just a, you know, business partner on the side. Like not formally, but like, was just really privileged and grateful that Pat trusted me, you know, with like bringing really big questions and ideas and like, we'd kind of just talk about it, right. And then we had an opportunity. Not all the time, but most of that work lent itself to like, we. What we could do. So we did, you know, and that included online courses. So fast forwarding to around, you know, 2016 era, when online courses then became sort of like one of the next big things for what of course we'd now call creators to codify, you know, their expertise and create now a new asset to sell. We cut our teeth on that. Real fast learning of all of the technology systems to be able to do that, hook them up to different payment gateways and just the whole kind of marketing apparatus to get people in. So we cut our teeth on that. Did a lot of course development for other clients as well, not just Pat. So yeah, that was a whole other kind of moment. The broader ecosystem and the economy of online entrepreneurship was the advent and the, the, the introduction of online courses. So yeah, it was just, it was, it wasn't planned in terms of what, you know, we ultimately did. But I think in, in many respects that's a good thing. Like, it was never forced that we grew organically, the friendship intensified, the trust was, you know, immense. So by the, by 2018, by that point, I'd actually sold another agency, which is a bit of a side quest on the story. So during this whole time, another good friend of mine started an E commerce agency. And there was also sort of a great moment in time with what was occurring with specifically Shopify and a lot of DTC merchants getting there and starting their own small businesses on Shopify. He was starting to grow that he needed a business partner that was really on the ops and finance and systemization and data and contracts and all of these things because he was very much the big idea, big energy sales guy. So there was even a point in time where I had two agencies operating at once. My other partner, John and I became. Got within an inch of even merging those two agencies together to create a content and commerce like agency. We ended up not doing that, in retrospect, a good thing. And then we sold eventually the E commerce agency to a much larger directed consumer ecom agency. But we grew that rather significantly and had a really close strategic partnership with specifically Shopify plus which is their real kind of like up market version of their tech stack servicing 20, 30, 40 million dollar a year direct to consumer brands like chubby shorts, Bombas socks. Some of those kind of darling companies.

Of which I'm wearing right now.

Are you really? Yeah, I mean they're amazing. It was a wonderful experience. It was a really hard experience. We kind of grew too quickly at different phases and that's another kind of teachable thing. Just which is, you know, for folks listening like the business that you're building and you know what, what is success? How do you define that in numbers? Is it always about revenue? Are you always just trying to scale and grow that? And to the extent that you're building a team, how fast do you build a team in concert with just revenue and demand and all of these kind of other factors that at least someone like me and I think Bjork, someone like you, you're always just trying to balance these things in your head and then ultimately also spreadsheets and data and plot, plot these things out so you have stable profit flowing businesses. Right. And that's, that's been a commonality in my career across my creative agency, which was just me, I didn't have partners on that one, the E. Comm Agency. That was chiefly my job. I was the CEO of, of that company. And then you know, I guess bringing it back to Pat's story, you know, after I sold or we sold the direct to consumer econ company that was in late 2017, then in 2018 maybe like also a lot of us, I kind of felt like that chapter of my entrepreneurial career was complete or near incomplete. Writing an agency, a service business is hard. It's really enjoyable. I still wildly promote service work. I think too many people these days maybe poo poo service work and they just want to be creators and then just have online courses that sell themselves. And I don't actually think that that's terribly good advice. We could maybe come back around to that.

Yeah. But basically, yeah, I think as long as we're talking about it, interesting to double, double click on it.

Yeah, go for it.

We talk about a lot like what are you after? And if people are after creating their own job to replace their current job where they work somewhere else, maybe they don't enjoy it or it's not a good fit or they just have a vision of a, you know, future that they want to build, one of the best ways to do that is to figure out how to trade time for money and to create some type of service that you do for Others is going, that's going to most often you're going to be able to compress that into a shorter period of time to a certain revenue number or profit number than you would to scale some type of creator business. And then I think often would be interested in your thoughts about this. You can work backwards from that and start to backfill some of the, some of your time. Whether it's you have a gap where maybe you're not as busy or you just intentionally start to pare down the clients you're working with in order to build on the side. I mean so many businesses have done this. I think of Basecamp as the ultimate example where they originally were a services business doing web design, web development and then built these products kind of on the side. And then obviously now one of the most well known in a bootstrapped software businesses. I think the same thing can be true for the creator world. We've had many different interviews with people who like they start like a video business and they shoot video for other creators and that helps them transition into being an entrepreneur. And then 10% of the time they're working on their own site or their own social and then it's 20% and 30% over time they start to scale it up. Is that kind of what you're getting at is like the value of a service business is pretty immense in that it allows you to relatively quickly if you're focusing on an area you're interested in and you have unique skills and abilities in scale up.

Yeah, exactly. Especially folks that aren't raising money. Right. Like, like they're bootstrapping. So why not kind of be revenue generating from the jump if you can.

Yeah, right.

And I'm not saying that that is like for everyone, you know, snap easy, you know, to do. I don't want to create maybe the wrong impression. There's. But I find that if you, you're trying to work for yourself, if you're trying to replace a traditional like source of income with just your own sort of income, that at least as a first, perhaps not always, but perhaps definition of success is just to like match that. Right. It's a very common story and I think it's a good one as a starting point. Not that you end there always, it's like, yeah, then do services, you know, lean into the skills, you know that you already have. You can go to market faster. You know, velocity is always a really key thing in any kind of small business or entrepreneurial venture. And I think something else that is really under Celebrated under discussed is that it keeps you sharp. Right. Like because things change, like so much has changed in the creator economy by itself over the last five, 10 years. So if you are doing services, I find through my lived experience anyway that you're closer to the flame of like what the market wants, like what your customers ultimately want and their pains, the language that they're using to talk about those pains, the needs that they have. Yeah, things are, things change and evolve. When you do services, you're, you're that.

Much closer, which is kind of customer development, product development.

It's like R and D. It's like.

Paid R and D. If you were creating a product, one of the first things you should do is have those same conversations, but you just wouldn't be getting paid to do them. You would be trying to convince people, please get on a call with me so I can ask you questions about your pain points as opposed to if you're doing a services based business, you're helping people solve those problems, getting paid to do it, and also then getting informed as to a potential product, whether information or software or physical product that you could be creating to solve that problem that people are coming to you to kind of help get help with.

And at least per the thesis, you're de risking your chance of being wrong. Like if you, if you didn't do that, if you just kind of sat in your office, right, or anywhere and you just created a product because you thought it was a good idea, right. Without talking to a lot of people or talking to very few people and without trying to get some feedback loops going right. Then, then like you could be building the wrong product or you could be positioning it the wrong way using the wrong language. So if you can test some of those methods and the services through a services offer first, you can at least again. And I've seen this prove true. It's not like a totally unproven thesis then like your margin for error reduces, which I think is a valuable thing to consider again for almost like an operational mindset about how I think about product development. Right. For small business.

Yeah, it was. I had an email conversation with somebody who's a food creator and she was talking about just kind of the painstaking process of trying to build traffic to her site and she wanted to eventually monetize it. And the in the back and forth that we had was around, she was doing these in person kind of meal planning classes and people found them to be like immensely valuable. And my feedback to her was like, oh, like continue to explore that like there's something there and it could potentially be made digital. But just because it's in person doesn't mean it's bad. Like you could have something that is a in person class that you do once a week and maybe there's like a digital version of it and then the online component of it is gener lead generation for that class versus I think a lot of people start with the idea of like hey, I'm gonna try and just grind away at creating content for two to three years in order to get enough traffic to you know, work with an advertising company or do sponsor content.

Which works.

You can do it. But to your point, sometimes you might think I'm creating a type of content that people really want and you don't actually know if they do want it or not. And doing some of that service based work allows you to see is this something that people actually want? Like in the purest form are people willing to pay to get this problem solved? And if they are, that's probably an indicator that there is something more there, right?

You're on to something. Exactly. And then just keep listening. It's what, what we did through both services companies. So my, my creative company Creative Studio and then the Direct to consumer Ecom business which a quick maybe story back there that perhaps kind of illustrates. The point is we solved through software through this is almost a Basecamp esque story. So through our services business, the, the E Comm one we collaborated and co created software with one of our biggest clients which was the Chubby Shorts crazy brand. If you go check that out, return to an exchanges software. Because in Direct to consumer E Com and some of us are consumers of that, like we buy socks online, right? Or shoes or whatever. The traditional experience, a lot of it's been solved these days is like returning that stuff is a pain in the butt, right? The traditional process was very manual. You had to download a PDF return slip, you had to print it, you know, fill it out, you know, go, go get your own box, right? Take it to, you know, UPS or somewhere. It was just, it was, it's a bad process. So we invented software that moved a lot of that experience into the browser as people were interacting through, you know, a particular brand consumer website. You know, on Shopify it was a separate piece of software that integrated with Shopify, right? And it was like crap, this is a product, right? But we solved our own problem. We kind of did that and incubate it and then we eventually spun that out into a new company that went on to raise gobs of money and it's on a rocket. So. But, but we would never been able to like, figure that out on our own. Like, we did it because of services and we were solving real problems through a service lens.

That's great.

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So coming back out, like we double clicked, now we press the back button to hear kind of the completion of that story around. You and Pat are working close together. You eventually decide to merge or the agency that you're working on, like that becomes SPI media, Smart passive income media, where you work directly with essentially the type of people that are listening to this podcast. Online business builders, creators, content creators. When did that happen? And then talk a little bit about the SBI community, what that looks like.

Yeah, I'd love to. And there's a really strong, you know, kind of tether between the two. So after the E Comm Agency was sold at the end of, or towards the end of 2017, like it, it kind of galvanized within me, okay, what is my longer term future envision for then? The creative studio, you know, that I had. And what just kept coming up as we were solving of new problems for folks like Pat, though not exclusively Pat, you know, our other clients, it was that, you know, the forms of content in 2017, you know, online courses were still doing quite well, but you know, the zone was getting flooded, if you will, with then online courses, right. You know, barriers of entry come down, zones get flooded. Same happened with books even. And saw this happen up close, you know, all this publishing capability as we've already hit on, you know, from Amazon, you know, democratized the whole notion of anyone can be an author, right? And there's a famous Seth Godin quote that says, like, when anyone can be an author, anyone can. Or when anyone can publish a book, anyone can. And most are going to be crap, right? So like there's a quality factor there, right? So to keep, you know, at least in my mind, and also Pat's like to keep quality high, to stay differentiated, right. With courses we were starting to see. And by that point, even though I wasn't like a formal partner again, he was trusting me enough. So like I knew financial numbers, I knew what was kind of happening in the business, right. It was like, I don't know if this is the model, right. You know, for the next five years, right. Like, how, how do we think about where the industry is going to be? What are, what are we seeing and hearing from the students, right. That we are serving by way of selling online courses. What are they really, you know, craving? And not just more like topical, you know, feedback, but like interaction feedback, you know, with our, with our curriculums. Right. Also, what are our friends seeing and feeling, you know, are the close relationships we had in the market and kind of tied all together. It was like, okay, I think for me because I'd had at that point close to seven years or six years, you know, doing, doing agency work. It's like, okay. I kind of want to be focused on like one brand, right, and be a real vested partner in that brand. Pat and I were the closest and he was looking to do things differently and wanted more help. So again, it was a very natural thing. We. We'd almost been like dating for years, to use a dating reference. And then I was like, hey, like here's something we could go do and differently. I don't have all the answers, but here's the beginning of a pretty different vision for like what could be possible. Pat enriched that as well. I kind of bent the knee proverbially, but like, hey, what if we just made a baby, right? Like made a company together, right? So I merge in my creative team and certain assets and SOPs and you know, kind of the business apparatus, you know, if you will. You take your SPI assets, the brand and other things which he had in just sort of like a. A big global sort of like single LLC company. And he had other personal projects that would then be carved out. Then we like put those together, draw a circle around that. Right? And then bamboo know we co founded a new company that's SPI Media. And a big part of that thesis that, that through line was that learning and development was already beginning to change. You know, one of the most important things or the most valuable things that we were seeing and hearing was not so much like just the curriculum, you know, that we were selling on teachable our courses, but the interactions that we were fostering through at that time. Facebook groups. Yeah, so we were using Facebook groups with. And there we had a. A lot of them, right. And there was one specific per course we are trying to cultivate effectively. Community. Right. But Facebook groups, not the best. It was never designed to necessarily be community, at least not the way that we think about it and talk about it today. And we have very strong opinions, at least I do, about like what is and is not good community. So, you know, it was again, sort of another accidental good lucky timing because we had a really close and still do close personal relationships with the founder of Teachable, who went on to sell Teachable. And that was in the industry. So what when I was talking to Encore, who was the founder around, like, hey, this is I think the direction that I want to go. We want to build MRR into our business monthly recurring revenue. We didn't have any of that. At least not what I call native. Like we had some affiliate revenue that is inherently recurring, but we didn't have our own. Right. So started to even test the waters with Encore around. Hey, are you at all thinking about building this sort of capability to the future of the teachable product? And he was unsure and there were some things you could kind of stitch together but he's like, hey, but three of my top guys are leaving the company to basically go start a new startup that I think is going to solve what you're talking about and that is now circle. So it was just again happy accident timing. You invest in people, invest in a relationship. Sometimes you get lucky and I think that's always something you should do. So that's like again, fortuitous timing. So this was 2019 at that, at this point. Right. We'd already tied the knot. We had co founded the company in 2018 or at the end of 2018 we decided to do that. So 2019 was kind of the start. And then I guess the rest is history to kind of fast forward a little bit, but happy to come back and double click on anything. Which is. We started to pivot the business model. That's a really hard thing to do is to transform one's business model, especially when you have a full time team. You know, which we did, you know, our high watermark with online course revenue. We were doing somewhere between 2 to 3 million a year in one time purchase online courses. And then very intentionally it was already starting. We were seeing attrition for again market reasons and, and, and others. So we intentionally cannibalize that to zero. Today we make $0 from our primary revenue source, you know, in 2018 and now. So do that while you're building a whole new essentially business model. Right. Which is recurring revenue.

Yep. And the benefit of that is you're, the selling looks different. It's like you're building a community, you're selling into the community. People stick around. You know that same idea we have with Food Blogger Pro, which is this kind of recurring business model. It's, it's not like software but it's membership. And membership can be a really wonderful thing but incredibly hard to rebuild that. But now you're at this point where you have members who are part of this community and the focus of it is really, you know the name smart passive income. We all know. And you talk openly about like passive in the, in the sense that like you could not work a day and still earn the money, not passive in the Sense of like, you're not going to work an entire year. But the allure is what a lot of us feel, which is like autonomy. You're able to work where you want. It's digital, so you're not having to necessarily go into an office. All of these people who are building these types of businesses, and you get to see in a really interesting cross section of global digital creators who are building businesses. One of the things that I'd be interested to hear you reflect on a little bit is like, what's working right now, like with the people you see within your community or that you come across on the podcast as you guys are doing interviews with people. What are some of the things that feel like are working right now and are effective? You know, we talked about these different stages throughout the last decade. Things that did work, maybe didn't work, but what's working right now? At least when you look at the entrepreneurs you're working with or even within.

Your own businesses, a few things. It's a great question, might be a slightly counterintuitive answer, is at least in our community we have the great pleasure to serve over 1200 members. So a decent data set is that many of them don't identify as creators. Yes, that's. This is, you know, an important industry term. My opinion on the record, a hundred times over, I'm sure with on podcasts and whatnot, is that I'm not actually the biggest fan of the term at least, at least at this point in its definition, because it's kind of been hijacked to be now like a meta term that is now kind of everything. And when something means everything, it kind of means nothing in my book. So. So any. Anyway, like what I'm seeing in hearing that I think is actually quite fantastic, that is beginning to work for people. One are partnerships like, like. Like being more deliberate with like the relationship building activity that like early stage entrepreneurs, you know, online entrepreneurs are doing to help them not just build audience, though, that as well. Right. But honestly, just like sell and sell relatively quickly. Right. Or sell faster than maybe traditional advice might suggest. Right. Of like, oh, just go build an audience and eventually sell to that audience. Right. That could take a while. Right. Especially because audience building is increasingly, quite frankly, a hard thing to do. The more that the Internet gets fragmented, the more that AI is coming and affecting SEO, which I know a lot of friends, including ourselves, have, you know, you know, struggled with in terms of like retaining certain, you know, keyword positions.

Yeah.

And the whole, you know, social media sort of you know, dumpster fire. At least I'm not the biggest fan of all things social media. Just, it's. It's much, much harder these days, you know, as compared to 2010, 2012 era of social media.

Yeah.

So, like, the more that you can just to go back to it, number one, you know, partnership building, like, can. Can we do co promotion? Can we think about economic, you know, relationships? I think that's a wonderful thing for entrepreneurs to be thinking earlier than maybe they used to around, you know, finances, essentially. Right. Like pricing, you know, rev share sort of models. Not that these are complicated things. They don't have to be.

Yeah.

And then. And then relationship building as a pathway to getting a business to really work. Right. To actually getting the inputs into a business that are going to be necessary as the basic needs of a business. You know, a little bit of revenue. Right. To get it going. A little bit of access to an addressable market vis a vis someone else's audience. Right.

Yeah.

Partnerships is, I think, a great thing that people are thinking about more critically earlier in the process.

I think that's great. It's one of the. So Lindsey and our friend Nate have started a kind of side channel. They have 6,000 followers. It's called Snackdive, and it's like a snack review show. But one of the things that we've started to do on it is like, try and sell. Like, it's, it's. I hear what you're saying in partnerships and that sometimes it's you and another business and you're thinking creatively around how, how do you create like a net win situation. And it's a little bit like that because we're reaching out to these companies and being like, here's where we're at. Like, we would love to figure out how to partner. And it's a little bit of that early stage, you know, filtering around, like, is this a viable business? And we're in the early stages of potentially getting the first deal that we've gotten. It's like the business is operating at a loss, but as soon as possible, we're trying to get it to be revenue positive. Even though we have these other businesses that could support it, we wouldn't really need to necessarily get it to a point where it's, you know, profitable. But if it's not that, then it's like, then it's a hobby. And we don't want it to be a hobby. Like, we want it to pay for itself. And so to prioritize, you know, early on, selling, trying to land deals, trying to figure out partnerships. Thinking of it as a business early on and thinking about it from the perspective of like building revenue and being strategic about that. It reminds me of the conversations we've had around your. It's kind of a framework that you've created to track business metrics, revenue, expenses. Can you talk a little bit about what profit flow is and how entrepreneurs are using that within their businesses? And we have our friend Daryl Besterfeld who talked about it being life changing for him. And that's just, you know, for somebody like yourself who loves spreadsheets, I'm sure for somebody to say like a spreadsheet is life changing is. Is really great.

Yeah.

Great to hear.

Tickles my heart.

Yeah.

Thanks for teeing it up. Let me back into that super quick. So I. You were prophetic in that I was going to say to my number one, my number two was going to be direct sellings and. And they are overlapping circles with like partnerships. But yeah folks moving more into you know, first and foremost like a mindset, a headspace again of being more comfortable and more willing to try to make an offer right on the front end of something and sometimes to go back to already another conversation point and offer that as a service based offer in, in some capacity.

Right.

You know, it doesn't always have to be consulting per se. You know, there's a lot of different ways you can kind of design out like, like a service offer would be number two and then number three is the tie back to profit flow which is. And I, I hope I'm not wrong with my read on this from my friends, my community, etc, you know, is that the. This day and age definitely post pandemic when you know that has affected a lot of different, you know, small businesses in a lot of different ways. There's been a lot of adversity there. People do seem genuinely. I'd say this is like, you know, a grinchy but. But healthy byproduct of some of that adversity in the markets over the last couple years is a greater literacy with business finance. Like they care about business finance more or at least that's what I've seen. Or they care in such that they, they want to learn it sooner and sooner than maybe they used to. Whereas like before talking about budgets was like oh, that seems boring that I don't want to put my time into thinking about or designing a budget. What is cash flow like? I kind of think I maybe understand the notion of cash flow but I'd rather just, you know, Record podcasts, you know, versus like try to think about cash flow. So yeah, I think it's, it's a good thing ultimately in terms of like what I kind of see, especially as businesses begin to get traction and grow is that like a certain, like interest level is increased is my radar on business, financial literacy, if that kind of makes sense. And it ties back to, yeah again sort of as a through line to some of these conversation points, me solving my own problem, right over over a decade. So going all, all the way back. Not to retell the whole story, but from the very beginning of my first startup, right, that creative studio, as we were starting to gain traction, you know, my costs were increasing because I had to keep bringing in initially contractors and then eventually I made the choice to go, you know, with a full time workforce, right as our revenues were growing. It's like I need to keep these things in balance because at least I had chosen, you know, this is not everyone's choice. But I always wanted just to at least be cash flow neutral, right. Which is to simply say I want to be bringing in as much revenue as I'm spending out the back, right. And try to be at least cash flow neutral as I'm trying to systematically grow this business. I don't want to take on debt. Some of my companies I've been a part of have taken on like working debt, lines of credit, things like that to try to grow the creative studio never did at least my personal preference is to try to avoid those things as much as possible. It just, that's a me decision. So like I started to slowly but surely build out, yes, in a spreadsheet at the start, a very simple, just kind of cash flow calculator. And it was designed very literally in almost a calendar format. So like day by day, you know, Monday through Friday, you know, where business activity was happening, transactions to map out. Okay, here are the inflows that I'm expecting from certain client receivables, et cetera. Then here's when I need to make payments on credit cards and invoices to contractors and then eventually payroll. And then I started to stitch together kind of what this looked like with data. This is certainly drawing on my data science and information system background. Like I know how to build systems. It was very basic in the beginning and then is not basic anymore. So over 10 plus years, kept adding different dimensionality to essentially the database, right. The data structure to it started to build more dynamic elements into it so I could categorize the inflows in different ways. I could also categorize the outflows so the expenses, you know, in different ways. I eventually built an entire visualization layer through charting, just charts. That still all lives within a Google spreadsheet ultimately. So that's why it gets a little bit like a joke. It's like, oh, this is just a spreadsheet. And it's like, yes. And, you know, it's kind of software with a database layer a lot, a logic layer that's doing all the computations automatically and then a visualization UI layer and at this point in time to kind of, I guess, wrap up the story. Like, it's basically a cash accounting based, you know, business system. Right. Where you can run almost any small business, whether you have a creator business, a services business, whether you're working just for yourself or if you have a team, those things don't really matter because it's, it's designed to work with basically any form of, you know, cash accounting, input output, you know, sort of a system.

Yeah, cash accounting mean cash accounting, meaning like the cash that comes in and the cash that comes out and into your bank account on any given day or any given month. And one of the things that I think is so great about that and that we as business owners, you know, when anybody who listens to this podcast will hear me talk about like creators, publishers, but the term I often use is business owners because we are building businesses, is like understanding. It's kind of like the heartbeat of a business is the product. So it's like, what is the content you're creating in many cases, what is the actual product you're creating in other cases, what is the service that. It's almost like there's two hearts that plus the, you know, the, the almost like maybe it's like the, the heart is the product and then the oxygen is the revenue. Like, it's the ability for the business to stay alive. It needs to have money coming in and money coming out. And the understanding of those numbers, I feel like, is what's really critical. And a tool like what you've built helps people get a good understanding of like how much each day is coming in and coming out and keeping an eye on those things. It's one of the most, you know, I know that Pat had a season where you do the income reports on smart passive income. On Pinch of Yum, we did a similar thing for a season. And one of the most beneficial things for us in doing that was me taking a day and going in and understanding like, here's what it looks like from an inflow and outflow perspective. And even better to do that on a, on a, like day by day basis. So if somebody's interested in. I know that you do kind of like licensing for that system. If somebody would be interested in connecting with you with that. There's not like a landing page or, you know, official tool, but I know that there's a handful of established entrepreneurs who are building businesses and using it. If somebody wanted to hear more about it, could they just like shoot you an email or something like that?

Oh yeah, that's very kind, thank you. Yeah, no fancy landing page or anything I do. I'll just say like, I don't know, as most entrepreneurs do, they have crazy dreams. Like I have a dream of someday. Like, I'm not, I'm a good data scientist sort of a guy, but I'm not like a software engineer. So maybe one day partnering up with, you know, like a CTO sort of a person actually building software like the base camp guys actually did. But yeah, for right now it's just. Yeah, a little licensing thing. Anyway, my email. Yeah, that'd be great if people are interested. It's just MatthewArtland co. So my first name in full at my last name.co.

Well, that's great. Thanks.

Yeah, thank you.

To close out would be interested to hear. You know, we talk about those numbers and we talk about this idea of tracking those numbers and getting an idea of what those look like. We talked about this idea of autonomy, the ideal schedule, business building. But let's. If you, if you don't actually know what game you're playing, then it's hard to know what success looks like as you're tracking those. And one of the things that we've talked about before and I think is really important to shine a light on kind of as we close out, is this idea of using all of those tools, using all of that information, using all of that data to inform whether you are playing the game that you want to be playing or not. And I think sometimes we can get caught up in other people's gameplay. We can see what somebody else is doing and then we start to do it without really defining what we're trying to do. Can you talk a little bit about maybe how you do that, how you approach it, and how you guide the entrepreneurs and business builders that you work with on doing that?

Well, yeah, I don't think this could be probably a, an understated question. Like it's, it's so important. Three minutes probably isn't enough, but it's definitely a good thing to land on. Yeah, yeah. Like, I again, have spicy opinions. I think there's obviously a lot of hubris online. I think there's a lot of grandstanding and, and in such a fashion where I think that there's an inceptingness, right. Of other people's success and trying to then mimic or mirror or say, like, oh, I'm not successful until I hit that level.

Right.

Of either, you know, revenue in terms of people sharing all of their revenue, or all the vanity metrics that usually come associated with social media followings. Right. Stuff like that. Yeah, I, I think that is a really dangerous game to play because it's, to your point, like, it's not probably the game you want to play or that you should be playing. You know, how do you, how do you solve for that? I think one of the classic ideas that stuck with me through my entire career, and it even dates back to my corporate career, I forget where I, I first heard it, but it's that classic notion of like, you are the average of the five people you surround yourself with the most. So I guess you could call that community, but in a very intimate way. So, like just kind of look around you and not necessarily like physically next to you, but like, who are the five people you trust the most that you're trying to get feedback from? Who are you following? Right, in a social media following sense? And maybe that's a first kind of tactical lens of like some form of honest self assessment. Like, are you following people that are honestly healthy in your own sort of understanding and mental journey of like, what success means, you know, who, if you actually are a part of a community, right. That is trying to promote accountability and foster collaboration and nurturing of forward progress right on your small business. Like, are you in a good community? Is there a better community that you can maybe consider differently if you're not really finding that the community that you're in is really kind of helping you in this way? So I'd sort of assess. I guess that's kind of a long way to say, number one, kind of like, yeah, who are you following? Who are you really mimicking and looking to and maybe doing an honest assessment on that? Number two, with no time to be able to unpack, it is just like goal planning, like, like getting into, you know, into actual business methodologies that are maybe unnatural at first because usually they are for entrepreneurs. But you know, strategic planning, you know, goal planning, you know, over the next six months. How are you defining goals? How do you, how do you assess those go to be the right goals for you? Right. And then how are you aligning the work that you're doing day in and day out, week in and week out to the pursuit and hopefully the attainment of those goals? Right. And then how are you socializing your definition of those goals? Maybe flipping back to number one with the people that hopefully you're choosing to be your most trusted. Sort of like advisory board. Right. Like the people that are. Right. So there, there's a lot there and I'm sorry we can't unpack it today.

No, that's great. Well, just for another podcast.

Yeah, just around goal planning. I could talk for hours on strategic, strategic planning, frameworks, methodologies, tactics and all of that. But.

Well, we'll do that on another podcast. People have your email address. Smart Passive Income. If they want to join the community and be a part of that, there's also the Smart Passive Income podcast. Matthew, super great to connect. Thanks for your time today.

Thank you, buddy.

Really appreciate it. And we'll have to have you on again.

Thank you. Yeah, this was a blast.

Hello there, Emily. Here from the Food Blogger Pro team. We hope you enjoyed listening to this week's episode of the podcast. Before we sign off today, I wanted to mention one of the most valuable parts of the Food Blogger Pro membership, and that's our courses. In case you don't already know, as soon as you become a Food Blogger Pro member, you immediately get access to all of our courses. Here on Food Blogger Pro, we have hours and hours of courses available, including SEO for food, blogs, food photography, Google Analytics, social media, and sponsored content. All of these courses have been recorded by the Food Blogger Pro team or some of our industry experts and they're truly a wealth of knowledge. We're always updating our courses so you can rest assured that you're getting the most up to date information.

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As you're working to grow your blog and your business, you can get access to all of our courses by joining Food Blogger Pro. Just head to foodbloggerpro.com join to learn more about the membership and join our community. Thanks again for tuning in and listening to the podcast. Make it a great week.

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