I Built 3 Businesses to $64M/Year - Here's What Actually Worked
In this 60‑minute talk Matt Ryder shares how he scaled three companies – Sales Sniper, 7th Level, and Dialer – to a combined $64 million annual revenue. He walks the audience through his personal entrepreneurial journey, the operational structures he built (a call‑center‑to‑software pipeline, a low‑overhead sales‑training membership, and a partnership‑driven SaaS product), and the high‑level strategic framework that underpins hyper‑growth. Ryder stresses that growth is driven less by sales tactics and more by understanding and exploiting external forces – economic cycles, political climates, social trends, and technology shifts – and by building resilient, data‑driven operating systems. He illustrates how he used consumer‑confidence indexes, demographic segmentation, and political targeting to optimise close rates, and how he mitigates risk by diversifying client bases and constantly mapping competitive moats. Throughout, he highlights the importance of financial independence from the business, lean leadership (≈25 h/week), and a relentless focus on product‑led, partnership‑led acquisition rather than paid ads. The talk ends with a preview of his framework for external‑force analysis, continuous improvement, and competitive mapping.
Chapters
You may be sitting there and wondering like, how do I scale a business, grow a business? How do I understand the business that I'm selling for better? And in this video, I'm actually giving a talk to a whole bunch of pretty successful business owners in Australia on exactly how I managed to scale multiple businesses to over 8 figures. And even at one stage, a combined sort of $64 million a year. So yeah, it's pretty in-depth. This is the part 1 because it's quite long. So yeah, make sure you watch all the way through the end and comment part 2 if you want me to release the second part. All right. Thanks, Kayleigh. Thank you. So final speaker. Final speaker is known for being an authority on sales. Yeah. Matt Ryder, also for his deeply sexy nature and constant urge to eat boobies. So Matt is going to be talking about the systems and structures he used to do $64 million in revenue a year. Hope you guys enjoy the slideshow. Gamma made that shit in like 10 seconds. Let me see, which way am I going? How do I go up? There we go. And go back? All right, cool. That's my wife. She's a smoke show. So you can tell if someone's good at sales, right? Okay, cool. So my name's Matt Ryder. So I'll start off with like the authority stamp. So grew an agency with like no ads to about $2.5 million a month around there. So that was Sales Sniper. We did like sales and marketing for, I think it was like 165 different businesses. I did it with James, if he's still, he probably left, little fucking dick. He doesn't want to watch me speak. So we did that with James. That was great. At the same time, about like sort of halfway into that, started 7th Level with Jeremy Miner. That business when I came in was doing like $20 grand a month or something. So I came in, took equity ownership, and then drove the business. That got up to about $4 million a month. So all in all, like during its peak of like both, it was like $6.5, $7 million a month. We had like a couple hundred staff and it was a pretty sort of big and arduous organization. One of them was heavily ads driven and like product driven. The other one was like more organic driven, right? Partnership stuff like that. So I have a pretty good understanding of like ads, but also like non-ads based growth. I like non-ad space growth better, but like you need both eventually. That's like kind of what was always used on gyms and stuff like that. So I met Brooke and Scott. And so I've done a bit of that. So I've done brick and mortar and then I've done the online space. Currently, so like my like side hustle is like a sales training, has like around 1,000, 1,100 sort of paid users doing around $100 a month each, right? Takes me like 2 hours a week. I have like a VA that runs it, all the code coaches work for free because I like to run a cult. But in reality, like, I just have a big network of salespeople and I let them sell people in it to when I want and I don't have to pay them anything. So like, it's like $100 grand a month in my pocket for doing basically nothing and it makes people angry, which makes me laugh. But that's a fun one. I signed up, I started the school scanning about 100 people a day, right? Into like a paid membership. I don't run any ads for that. I don't run any traffic whatsoever. I just sort of talk about it on my socials every couple of days. I don't like to bombard people with stuff, but that's sort of doing its thing. I also have a YouTube channel and that sort of drives a lot of traffic into B2B and B2C. I try and keep a good mix of both so that I can keep both things happy because of the software company. I do a little bit of consulting as well. It's pretty minimal, but like it's there. And then sort of like, I guess my main focus in terms of time is spent on Dialer. Dialer is a software company. It's like a telephony system. That helps people get in touch with more of the leads. Like people like Resync are on it, SheSells is on it. And I just sort of like had a huge problem with getting ahold of my leads when I was running 7th Level. We had 50,000 leads a month. We only talked to like 8% of them. So when I sold my equity, I was like, surely there's a way around this. So I sort of went into a deep rabbit hole of how to fix it. I started a call center to like problem solve it. So I knew that I couldn't like, I had to problem solve it. So I decided to start a call center called the SDR Call Center. Then from there, 9 months without having like a front end of the software. That gave us the ability to problem solve like how to actually get it to work the way we wanted it to work. Then once we'd figured it out, we started to dev a UI. Then I sold the call center and then we just rolled it all into the software, right? That software, it's doing pretty well. We launched almost like 13 months ago now. It's at like $500K per month in pure rev from just software, which is pretty good for software. It's at 52% gross margin, 15% net. Yeah, there. 15% net. Net-net has a 10% growth month grossly growth, right? So about 10% each month it grows. The first 12 months was $4.2 mil, $6.3 net profit. And we averaged the net new customer of 95 new customers, 95 new users per month, right? No advertising whatsoever. We didn't do any, like I barely spoke about it. I spoke about it a bit. But it was very heavily product-led and partnership growth, which I like doing. So I'm lucky to have a very good Rolodex. Like most, a lot of people have hired me to do stuff from like Brunson to like everyone in that space. They've usually, they've hired me to do something or other. And so like I'm good, I'm lucky enough to have a network of people that like have given me money instead of me giving them money. And so like that gives me a good ability to sort of like, say, hey, can you check this out? Like Ryan Serhant, he's coming to Dallas soon. I texted him saying, hey, I started a new software, would you check it out? He goes, yep, sweet, I'll have the managers hop on. So I hopped on with them. I did the same thing with like Cole and his team, and Andy Elliott and Cardone, all that kind of stuff, 'cause those guys are all on the platform now. And so like, and then we're breeding partnerships with them. I'm flying up to Cardone headquarters and Pace Morby's headquarters in a couple weeks to go and negotiate some partnership deals over there. So I'm a big fan of that kind of stuff. I don't work a ton these days. I probably work about 25 hours a week. I attend one meeting per week for Dialer. That's it. It's just the dev meeting. It's like the DevOps meeting. I don't have any other thing to do with it other than that because like I don't want to. So we have a good team in place. This is my 5th business now. It's also my business partner's 5th business. His name's Declan Redmond. We were in the Special Forces together. And he's exited his last company to Quadrant for $35 million. And so neither of us need money from the business, which is one of the keys to good growth. If you need money from a business, in my opinion, you don't make very good decisions. So like making yourself financially independent, like what Charlie said, from your business is really what I think allows you to actually grow one well because you make completely pragmatic decisions and nothing is emotional, right? So, okay. So what I wanna talk about is something a little bit different. Like I don't really wanna talk about like sales and marketing strategies and that kind of stuff because like there are just a lot of them. But what I did want to talk about was like the actual sort of big picture strategy that I think a lot of people miss when it comes to like hyper growing especially. I think that's my specialty. Hyper growing to $30 million is probably my specialty. I have absolutely zero interest in being a part of an organization once it's $30 million, right? It's just not fun anymore for me. So I don't want to do it. I'm not good at doing things that I don't enjoy. I'm just going to find a shiny thing and sort of run towards it. And so some of the things I want to talk about are the strategy, the execution, the data, the adaption, and what like high-performance business systems look like. And some of the things that I think are like tragically lost in the world of business coaches that just talk about fucking revenue strategy, right? So I'm going to talk about the external forces that are sort of trying to understand uncontrollable external forces, internal operating systems, execution cadences, data decision-making, and then like a continuous improvement process, right? Okay, so first thing, if you guys have questions, just feel free to ask, right? Like as I go, I might use big words that Scotty might not know, right? So, all right, so economic forces I think play an enormous role in people's businesses, and like I don't really see anybody talking about it, probably because it's an incredibly boring and dry subject. However, like, when you're running like 7— like, the size of a business isn't really indicated by the revenue. It's indicated by the consumer base, right? So like, if you have a widget company that sells widgets for $3 and you do $1 million a month, you have a fucking monster of a company, right? If you have a business coaching that does $2 million a month but it's $25 grand, it's like, okay, like, you don't have a big company, you just have a good revenue. It's a very different thing. And so when you have like large customer bases, like 7th Level had 5,000 new customers per month when I was running it, right? And because we had like low ticket, and so when you have a customer base like that, you start to get quite interesting data points that are sort of become more obvious because data points in small pools are difficult to recognize patterns. But when you start looking at larger data sources, like it becomes easier, right? It's like, it's sort of easier to see when you're spending a million $10,000 a month on ads, it's like easier to see where the chains break because you're putting so much stress on it. And so some of the things that I really noticed is that economic forces play a huge role in close rate. And they're actually— you can play the game. You can't change these things, but you can play the game. So for example, after Trump won in 2020, the midterms were in '22, and they were extremely contentious over in the in the US, and it was clear that red was going to fucking wipe the floor with the Dems, right? You know what I mean? Like, hell yeah. But like, so, right? And so like, I changed all the marketing to red states only, right? Because like, blue states were going to be sad. And so like, why am I going to try and fucking sell to sad people? You ever tried to sell a depressed person? It's impossible, right? So like, I was like, okay, cool, we're going to like, Is that— is that right? Sweet. So we're going to market to red states, right? And that's an easy thing to do inside of Meta. And it's like we just prepared all the campaigns. And I was like, we had a blue state campaign and a red state campaign, right? It's like, look, sweet, man. So when the midterms came in and the Democrats got destroyed, I was like, sweet, turn on the red campaigns, right? And they crushed it. You know what I mean? So it's like it's just an easier way of doing it. So like having a look at like the political landscape and the economic landscape is really important. One of the other things that I noticed, especially when you're doing like funding and financing, is that like you have to speak to your vendors, right? Like you have one here about like what are the parameters that decide if somebody gets approved or not, right? Because these are trackable and like quite obvious economic factors like debt-to-equity ratios, inflation, interest rates, housing prices in certain areas. If the housing prices are going up, inflation's inflation's going up, interest rates are going up, then like their debt-to-equity ratios are getting worse. And so like don't try and pitch finance to a 37-year-old guy that's married because chances are he's only just bought his home. He's not gonna get approved 'cause of debt-to-equity ratio. So put them into a different funnel. Right? Like these are things that like you can see, you can track, and like you don't wanna be overly heavily leveraged in any one particular area of your business. And that is a theme that you'll see today. The reason why why I have that theme and why I don't like doing that is because like my dad lost everything when I was about, probably about 20 in 2008 during the GFC. So I've financially supported my family since I was 20 years old, right? I've supported everyone in my family. And like I've retired my parents and yeah, my mom refuses to retire. She works for me. But like, so he had super heavy risk against a singular client being Motorola. He used to supply, telecom infrastructure. And when Motorola started to kind of go in a different direction, like, that whole thing collapsed. Plus the GFC happened, and they moved from US to Australia right as the currency conversion switched, and they lost half their money overnight, plus their income, plus their business, everything. And my dad had a stroke, and it was a whole thing, right? And he's kind of like never himself again. But like, for me, so I'm like, that's never happening to me. It's like, oh, poor dad. But it's It's like, yeah, just don't have one giant client. Like, that's stupid, you know. So, like, I look at that with every part of my business and I try and assess the risks so I can be as aggressive as possible whilst mitigating as much of the damage as possible, which is why every single business I do fucking works. Like, I hit winners every time, right? And it's because it's extremely planned, extremely strategized, and I know what I'm doing. And I look at the factors that most people don't because they're just too lazy to look at them or they just haven't thought of like the potential risk factors and how to mitigate them, right? And so like you want to kind of like know those things. And so like you try and do what's called a 5 key forces model. So like everyone should do this. They should go away and they try and figure out like what are the 5 external factors that I can't control that directly affect my business, right? And so, I'll go to my actual notes. So like a big one is like economic factors, right? So like that's your number one, like economic forces. Is there a downturn coming? The easiest way to do it is have like, pay the money to get a live feed for the Consumer Confidence Index. And then like break that down by demographic and you'll be able to see like one of the more interesting ones is by generation. Gen Z, Millennial, yada yada yada. And so, like, you'll see, like, how different economic and social and political factors, like, change the confidence of the different consumer profiles, right? If you guys have questions, just ask. Like, I know I talk fast and stuff like that. So, um, so, like, if I know that my demographic is Gen X and Millennial, right, like, they will see certain things as bad, and Gen Z will see certain things as good. So like that gives me an idea because your close rates are far less tied to the, to the strength of your closers than what they are to the Confidence Index. I fucking guarantee it, right? You, you can look at the consumer trends over the last few years and then look at your revenue trends and you will see an exact one-to-one correlation, right? Because like you can't out-market and outsell the sentiment of an entire nation. Like it's just the way it is. Doesn't mean go, "I have a bad mindset." No, it's just like these are external factors that we can't control, so we should take them into consideration. And it means that we stop making juvenile and knee-jerk reactions to inevitable outcomes because of the environment. It's like getting really mad, saying that we have a bad mindset because I got wet when it's raining. Your close rate went down because everyone is sad. Like, you don't have a bad mindset. Just deal with it. And it's not gonna get better that time soon, so figure out how to become more efficient in other areas, right? Like, this is why I kind of hate business coaching, to be honest, 'cause they just tell everyone it's mindset, and it's like, that's fucking bullshit. But anyway, it's science. [Speaker] Just out of curiosity, I've heard some horrible data out of Victoria recently. I was just curious as to whether you picked that up or anything. Retail pricing businesses are down 50%. Yeah, yeah. Huge numbers. I mean, like, I'm far more US-focused, to be perfectly honest. And like, certain things are very robust. Like, for example, like COVID was an amazing example where like, there was a tremendous opportunity to take market share. And so like, sometimes you have to intentionally weather a storm, I think, in order to kind of like come out the other side. And like, I think for me, like, I probably took 10 years of market share in 2 years just because, like, I just went— me and James, we went hard in the paint during COVID Hard. Oh, it's the best thing that ever happened to me, right? I paid my Illuminati fee, right? It's good to go, you know what I mean? So yeah, right? So your economic factors play a huge role. So like, as a business owner who wants to grow, you should be tracking the economic trends, you should be tracking the confidence indexes, you should tracking, like, especially the markets that hit you most. Like, in sales, when I was CEO of Seventh, I ran a report every month which was like an industry report of the major industries that we serviced. And so I knew, like, what the sentiment of solar was. I knew because, like, when they changed the solar subsidies, like, I stopped marketing to fucking solar. It's like, because those dudes are dying. So it's like, you just pivot to a different one, you know what I mean? And like, that, that's It's just good business, you know what I mean? It's not like Rocket Surge or anything like that. Okay, political and regulatory forces, right, are another big one. Okay, like elections, taxation changes. Okay, like ad regulations, GDPR, TCPA. These are things that you want to sort of just look at and know that there are forces that are governing some things that happen in your business that are outside of your control, but you want to understand them so that you can see things again. Why? It stops us from making stupid knee-jerk reactions and go, "Well, that didn't work." It's like, "No, mate, like it did. It's fine." Right? Like let's have some patience about it and realize that like it's not always going to be rainbows and unicorns. Yeah? Right? And like my job when I was running Seventh was basically like, and Sales Sniper was like, you know, and James as well. James is probably like this to me. Right? I'll be going, "Let's do this!" And he was like, "Well, maybe calm it down." Right? So but it was like, you know, okay, like how do we grow? How do we maintain profit? How do we do this but like understand like the chessboard that we're on and just try and make the right moves so that we win over the longest period of time? You know, so it's not all short-term focus, right? Like certain offers can become non-compliant. Like these are things, you know what I mean? Like the regulations around funding in Australia took a dramatic turn, right? The regulations in the US took a turnaround funding, I knew they were going to do that because I was speaking to the reps at the funding companies every single week. So like, I was like, where are you at? I knew that FINMarket was going to go down about 4 weeks before everybody else because everybody got approved one week at 7th level. Everyone, 100% approval rate. Everyone was going, this is amazing! And I went, this is terrifying, what's happening? So I called them and I said, what's going on? This isn't normal. Oh, it's great. I said, what's going on? And I kept on the phone. She goes, we can't sell the paper. For those of you who don't know how most funding works is they get the loan, they sell the loan, paper buyers. Most of it was going to Silicon Valley Bank. Do you guys know what happened to Silicon Valley Bank? It went bust. So they stopped buying the fucking paper. So what they did is they pumped the books to make it look more attractive to get another buyer. I knew that. All right. So I changed the entire fucking sales strategy to mitigate against against not having any funding, right? And so like this is, again, this is why you can keep winning, right? But like everyone had the capability of doing that. I just like, I just thought it was weird, so I looked into it instead of going like, this is amazing, right? Because for sure it wasn't. Social and cultural forces as well, right? You know, again, reds and blues and Minnesota and what's happening here, like probably not a good idea to market in Minnesota. You're just probably wasting money. You know what I mean? So like there's a lot of stuff going on that we can use to our advantage or at least just understand it. So it means that like we, again, we have some context when things don't go the way we wanted it to. All right, now I'm gonna talk about what you do with that information later. Technology forces, AI algorithms, automation, yada yada yada, right? Again, these are things that you wanna know like because like competition factors and stuff like that. I'm gonna go over market and competitive analysis in a second but like, You know, as these things change, like you guys understand moats, right? Like a moat around your business. A moat is like, you know, it's a ring around your business that people can't replicate it, right? So otherwise you're a commodity. Yeah. So if you don't have a moat, then you're just a commodity. If you're a commodity, then eventually you have a price. It's just a race to the bottom. Yeah. I mean, or you have to be that influencer that reinvents himself every 6 months, right? It's like, now I'm an AI guru. All right, dude. Right? So marketing competitive forces. These are— this is really interesting. I love doing competitor analysis, right? Because I think competitors are a huge strength to understand. Because what— like, if you create Rome, right, then every road that is made and every city that is made eventually leads leads to you, right? So like understanding your competition, doing like a Venn diagram of how you line up and how they line up is a very interesting way to understand and get the correct market positioning. And yeah. How long, it's also been a long time since then, when you're doing your competitor mapping, have you looked into game theory and predicting like what markets people are gonna move into and their pricing structures to match? So the most accurate way of predicting future stuff is the predictive markets and gambling. Right? So— Polling market. Yeah. So if you watch the prediction markets and all the gambling markets, because for example, polling is completely inaccurate, but people put their money where they think it's going to go. You know what I mean? So if anything around you is in the prediction markets, it's a really good analysis. But for competition, Competition mapping, like once you establish your moat, it makes it a lot easier to map the actual competition because you can sort of see who is like close to you. But then you have real competition and perceived competition, right? Like you can say, like for Dyler, Alaware is our perceived competition. It's not. Like we're a different product, but the market will see us in the same way. So then what I'm doing at the moment is like I have all of their key phrases mapped, right? And then I have like our counter phrases, right? And then like, and they've done the same to us. Like— Do you lose business to them currently? Or there's like no competition? No, they lose a lot of business to us, but they have something that we don't, right? Which is like, it doesn't really matter to go into, but like They're probably our most direct competition from a market standpoint, but not from a technology standpoint. So you just compete on like, uh, yeah. So what does mapping mean? What do you mean by that? In which context? You mentioned words, map words against. Oh yeah, so like if you see the words that people use to describe their product and service, like that's what they're putting out into the world. So like you can take those words and go, what are my equivalent things, right? And so you map those across and then you can have a look and then you can say like, these people do this and I do this. And then you can try and have a look at the terms. And then like when you have your sales calls come in, right? And yeah, the easiest thing to do is like get the transcripts from your sales calls, whack them into AI and say, what are the problems people come in and actually buy for? You know what I mean? And then like that's where your terminology comes from. Right? So. So you have a really high pickup rate, that's what you do? So pickup rate. Yeah, that's one of the things. Yeah, exactly right. So like, and if you ever watch my socials or go back through them when I was running the call center, I never talked about the agents. I only talked about the efficacy of the system behind the agents. And I was able, and then I tried to shift the marketplace and the conversation into compliance and pickup rate because it was the last thing the competition wanted to talk about. Because it's the worst thing they do and the best thing I do. That's your USP. Yeah, yeah. Just extending on Sackville's point around the game theory point. You go and you map your competitors and you've got your Venn diagram, you see where you fit in. Do you then look to where your competitors are most likely going to go or are you being purely reactive to where they're at? Yeah, no, I just, I sort of I run my own race and I have my own, like, you know, I think Rich was talking about the vision, mission, values, right? So it's like I have a super clear mission and a super clear vision, and then we have a DevOps pathway to sort of get to that eventually.
