How we plan to grow MarketBeat in 2019

Hey guys, Matt Folson here. Some of the content I've been recording in the last kind of year. What I'm finding out is the stuff that you guys really like is kind of when I kind of share what's going on with my personal business journey. So last week I kind of recorded a video about marketbeats growth and why that's happened this year. And this year I want or this week I'm recording a video to talk about some changes that we're going to be making in our business to sustain that growth in 2019. MarketBeat has grown a lot this year. We've grown from 3.5 million in revenue to about 6 million in revenue. And that's fantastic. But a lot of that has been on my shoulder. And then Rebecca McKeever, who's kind of my right hand woman, it's been on her shoulder too. We've both been working a lot. We've both been at our capacity, have been for a while. And honestly it's just time to grow the team. This really came to a head about a month ago. I went to the Emerging Prairie Founders Retreat. So this is up in Northern Minnesota. Group of, I think 19 entrepreneurs went up there, spent a couple days away to try to create a break from our businesses. Think kind of strategy, big picture stuff, you know, how can we do what we do better? And this is a Wednesday, Thursday, Friday kind of thing. So it was weekdays. A lot of the people that we normally do business with were working and my phone just wouldn't stop ringing. I got a lot of emails, stuff that I had to take care of. And ultimately what I realized was that my business right now, it's just too dependent on me to do stuff. If I'm here in my office downtown Sioux Falls, things go pretty well. I can always take care of stuff that comes up, the emails that come in. Usually I have enough time to do all that stuff and do some strategy stuff as well. But if I try to take a day off, I'm playing with my kids, I'm going on vacation, I'm going to a work conference, anything like that, it usually doesn't always go super well in terms of like the work stuff. And that's because I'm not there to respond to everything. So my business, you know, today, it's too dependent on me and I want to make it less dependent. So at this conference I was at the Emerging Prairie Founders retreat, Greg Tveen, who is the guy running the show, he had us make a commitment to our businesses. At the end Normally you go to a church camp and there's commitment at the end. Greg did the same thing. My commitment was to make myself not the kind of hero at the center of my business. Ultimately, for the sake of the business, it can't be dependent on me. This is for really the benefit of my employees and my spouse. So if I fall over, dead Korean is probably not going to run MarketBeat. But if I have a good team in place, that business could continue on without me and could continue to run for her benefit and the benefit of our employees. So really kind of my goal for 2019 is to build my team and make it so that the company can run without me for maybe one to two weeks at a time so I can go somewhere with my wife and kids and not think about work. Go on vacation, go to a work conference, just get away for a little bit and. And then kind of me being away for a week is a good stress test to see if the company can survive without me. There is a good book by the guy that wrote Profit First. Can't remember his name. I'm going to type it in quick. His name is Michael Michalowicz. I might not have pronounced that right, but he just wrote a new book and I just finished it. Hold on a second. And that book is called Clockwork. And the kind of message of that book is to kind of identify the key strengths of your business and what has to happen for the business to go well and then get that out of your hands. And ultimately he says if you do what he says, you can take four weeks off without having to worry about your business. So that would be fantastic. So I've been kind of inspired by that book as well. So I'm going to make some pretty significant changes at MarketBeat in 2019 and how we operate and kind of the team behind a company. I'm really reminded of the concept of what got you here won't get you there. So like the type of work that you need to do to go from $0 in revenue to $100,000 in revenue and then from 100,000 to a million million to 10 million. Like those are all different types of work. Early on in your business, you do all the work yourself. You're really in the kind of day to day sludge of getting work done so that you can kind of figure out how to make the business. But as you scale, you kind of need to move higher level, you need to build a team. You need to be thinking more about strategy, marketing, long term business stuff. And I'M kind of at that place where I need to change the type of work that I do to get to that next level of success. I honestly don't see us getting from the 6 million mark to the 10 million mark with me doing this type of stuff that I do now. I really need to build that team to get to that next level of success. So this is kind of where some fun news comes in for the company. I'm hiring two people and they're going to start next week. So there's a company called Bright Planet run by two guys, Will Bushy, who was kind of the de facto president and then he had a high quality software engineer that worked for him. His name is Ryan Kwam. Bright Planet, as a company they're gonna, it's kind of reached its natural end of life. You know, every business has a life cycle. They're just kind of near the end. They're going to shut down the company, it sounds like. And Will and Ryan are going to come work for me. So Will Bushy, he is going to be kind of the vice president of business development operations. So he will kind of field the, a lot of kind of the external partnership relationships at our company. He'll do some ops stuff and then Ryan is going to kind of be our principal software engineer. He'll have the title of vice president of software engineering or something like that. So it's going to be a pretty big change for MarketBeat. We currently have two full time and two part time employees and then we're going up to four full time and two part time employees. That's a pretty significant change. Obviously these are senior level guys so they'll have pretty significant payroll commitments. So it's exciting that this is going to happen, but it's also kind of scary. You know, I'm effectively, I'm going to be more than doubling my payroll by hiring these two guys other than. Yeah, because they're not cheap. So it's a big financial commitment for the company. It's kind of a big commitment for me to kind of give up some stuff that I'm good at and have been doing for a while. And you know, there's also, you know, a risk and maybe an opportunity for the company culture. When you have a small team, it's really easy to change the culture by bringing in new people. So, you know, one good Apple could raise the company up, one bad apple could take the company down. And in my, that's kind of why I'm really careful hiring. I know these two guys well. So I don't think that'll be an issue. It is just a very uncomfortable spot for me because I'm not great at hiring, not great at interviewing. Not a natural strength of mine in kind of negotiating salary and benefits and training. There's a lot of stuff that aren't within my kind of natural skill set that I have to do to bring these guys on board. So it's ultimately, it's an uncomfortable time for me personally. But six months from now, I'll be thrilled that I did it and it'll be a very good thing for the business. Rebecca had a very good way to describe what's happening here. She said, you know, Matt, it's kind of like that you're playing Monopoly and you unexpectedly landed on Boardwalk and Park place. You weren't 100% sure what you're going to do with that real estate yet. But you know, they're incredibly valuable and you'll figure out something to do with them. So obviously, you know, Brian and Will are two very high quality guys. About a week ago I didn't think it was a major possibility that this would happen. But over the weekend I got a phone call and they said, hey, Bright Planet's gonna shut down. You know, you had mentioned maybe you'd come work for MarketBeat someday if bright Planet shut down. Well, that day's today. So Bright Planet, you know, is gonna be no more. And then Ryan and Will became available. Both very high quality, intelligent, smart, sharp guys and you know, they're going to be a great addition to MarketBeat. Not 100% sure what each of them is going to do on a day to day basis yet. Have some ideas, trying to work through that. I'm going to try to train, you know, do a. We're going to do like a marketbeat University on Tuesday where I'm just going to try to teach them the entire business. Never really done that before, so we'll kind of see how that goes. But I'm learning a lot as part of this process. You know, I'm getting people on our health insurance policy, getting set up for payroll. I haven't done this in a while. You know, MarketBeat's been around as companies since 2008. First employee was 2013. First employee, second employee was 2015. Third employee was early 2017. So it's been almost not quite two years since I've hired anybody. That tends to be our cycle is we hire somebody every two years and now we're hiring kind of two people. At the beginning of 2019So it's been a good learning experience for me. Well, hopefully it'll be a good thing for the company and hopefully record a follow up video about how it's going in a week or two from now. So that's what's happening with MarketBeat. We're bringing in two people. I'm excited. We'll see how it goes.