What matters most in your business?

Hey everybody, this is Matthew Paulson. I am recording a video here at the Bakery downtown in Sioux Falls, and I want to talk a little bit today about what really matters in your business and what your focus is and what your priorities are. If you look at any kind of startup, VC kind of company, really the values of that company are one, showing user growth and then two, getting future investment. So you look at any company in Silicon Valley, they're typically not profitable. They're dependent on that next round fundraising to continue operating. And then the goal is just to get out, get bought out by some bigger company someday for an exit or for an ipo. This model works for some people and it does create financial freedom in the lives of some entrepreneurs. But that model places very little focus on the quality of life of the entrepreneur. Because when you're a startup and you're working for a startup funded VC business, you typically have to work for 50, 60, 70 hours a week. You're chained to an office and you have to be located kind of near wherever your investors are. So that model does work, but it has some real limitations which make it a hard model to make work if you have kids or you're just not in a stage of life where you can be at the office all day, every day pounding away at your startup. So kind of the two things that these companies focus on, fast growth and future investment. These are kind of two examples of what I like to refer to as a core value currency. So for the purposes of this discussion, a core value currency is simply something that is measurable, finite, and has value to you as a business owner. So core values are something that matters to you more than anything else. They are kind of a specific metric that you optimize for and shapes your future business decisions. One thing that some entrepreneurs will focus on is location independence. I want to build the best business I can under the constraint that I don't want to have to be at any specific place or time. If that is your core value, location independence, you're not going to build a business where you have to be in an office or have to take in person client meetings. So those kind of restrictions that you place will kind of shape the future growth and direction of your business. There are a lot of different core value currencies you can focus on that will help shape the direction of your business. You can focus on gross revenue. How much money can my company make? Size, you know, how big can my company get? How many customers and employees can it have? Growth? How quickly can I grow my company Profit Profitability, you know, how can I make sure that I'm taking the most money home at the end of the day possible? So efficiency and optimization, like how can I get the most amount of work done with the least amount of kind of human effort? You know, time and flexibility. Can I work on my own schedule without regard to anybody's else's, you know, demands for my time, fame, you know, how do I get people to talk about me? How do I get people to respect me? How do I get people to know who I am? Location independence. How can I run my business wherever I want? Or am I tied down to a specific location? Generosity? Am I giving my customers the best possible value for what they're paying? And then kind of resilience. How long can my company run without me being directly involved at MarketBeat? One thing, if you ever kind of interact with our business, you'll know that it doesn't look like or operate like many other companies do. We've had quite a bit of success. We have 430,000 people get our email newsletter every day. We do more than a couple million dollars in revenue. But we don't have a corporate office. I have an office because I want one, but my employees don't have an office. We don't have regular working hours. We have a very lean staff. It's me, two employees and four contractors that run a company. We rely heavily on software, systems, automation and outsourcing. So my team members and I, we all have the freedom to kind of work where and when we want on our own schedule, you know, as long as we get our work done. So for us, you know, that freedom of time and being able to work kind of where and when we want, that's really important to us. And there are just some things we can't do because of that self imposed limitation that we have. And that's totally okay. We probably can't grow 10 to 10 times the size we are now without a bunch more employees in an office. And I'm okay not growing that big because just having 10 times the amount of money that I have today is not as important to me as it is to have the freedom of my time. Just to be able to stay at home with my kids when I want to feed my baby, 8 month old daughter in the morning and not have to go to work right away if I don't want to, or to play with my 4 year old boy, I want to take him to the gym where he likes to go play. We can go do that on a Friday afternoon. Because we've prioritized time and freedom over growth and some of the other things in my business. What else do we focus on? We focus on just really efficiency. I don't really like to manage people. It's not something I'm great at. I'm not a big people person. I'm an introvert by nature. So I recognize that I can't do this all myself. But we can do it with a pretty lean team if we rely heavily on software systems. So just a lot of the stuff that we do is automated or outsourced or delegated in ways that typically doesn't happen at every other company. Our newsletter that we send out 400,000 people every day, there's no human writing that. It is compiled all through the data that we gather and kind of the software that creates it and sends it out. So you know, other people have newsletters, they have people write them and send them out, which is totally fine. But for us, you know, we've been able to hand it over to a piece of software so a person doesn't have to do it. So with that automation, you know, we can run very high margins. That's important to us. Small team, you know, really close knit. Me and a few other people that I would like to work with. And I just don't need to have 20 or 30 employees, nor do I desire or want that. So it's, you know, we built a business that can exist with that small team in place. So we are definitely kind of a weird company by that measure. And I'm totally okay with that. Yeah, I mean those are kind of our key core competencies, you know, profitability, flexibility and just efficiency. You know, I'm more concerned about what I can take home at the end of the day in terms of profit than I am in top line revenue, just stuff like that. I believe everyone in the company should be able to work where and when they want to and not have to be in an office all day. I also believe that anything that can be automated or systematized should be just to gain a maximum operational efficiency and really to create a consistent experience for our customers. And also just kind of a consistent. When you hand something over to a piece of software, you know it's always going to be done the same way. When you hand it over to a person, that's not always the case. I really like having software do stuff that a human doesn't have to do because you know it's always going to be done right. If it's done right the first time. So, you know, if you're building a business, you're thinking about building a business. You know, nobody can really pick out what your core value currencies are. You know, they kind of have to be unique to you, your business, your personality, and really what your goals are for your business. How big do you want to be? Where do you want to work? How much do you want to work? So I'd encourage you this weekend or whenever you were seeing this, you try to think about two or three measurable things that you want to focus on in your business. What are your core value currencies going to be, and how can you permanently sear them in your company's vision and mission statement? Once you can figure out those two or three things, whether that's gross revenue size, business growth, profitability, efficiency, time and flexibility, fame and fort, or I guess fame and being known, location independence, generosity and resilience. Once you can kind of pick two or three of those that are really going to be your core competencies, you can let them shape the future vision and direction of your business. So think about what two or three of those you can focus on. Put those in your mission and vision statement and say, okay, how can those core value currencies create some restraints for my business that will actually help me achieve what really matters to me over the long run? I think that's pretty much it. Yeah. Bye.