The Digital Business Investor: Why People Still Pay You When AI Can Do It

We call it the 30-30-30 rule. You increase each of those 3 areas across your business by just 30%, you've doubled the business.

Today's guest is Matt Raad, an angel investor with 30 years of experience buying, growing, and selling businesses alongside his wife Liz. He has been featured on Rich Dad Radio, Entrepreneurs on Fire, and the Australian Business Podcast. Together, they run the eBusiness Institute where they have coached over 1,000 people and built a community focused on buying and building online businesses.

When you're buying a website or an online business, the 3 main areas that you wanna tweak, and this came outta buying bricks and mortar businesses, is profit, traffic, and conversions. Seriously, set your business up for sale from day one. It'll help you set up a much better business. You'll be better focused on the figures and the systems, particularly automating it.

In this episode, Matt talks about why investors want digital agencies, how AI can make those businesses more profitable, and what customers still pay for when AI can do the work.

Why are they wanting to buy up agencies all of a sudden? Because they know they can be automated. You put a bit more money behind them and you can scale them a lot easier, and it's recurring revenues. People still want the service; they just want the outcome.

How many people do I need? What type of skills am I looking for in 2026?

Clients who traditionally would be hiring anywhere from 10 to 15 outsourcers are now down to one or two. So who do you hire these days? It's.

First heard about you in, I think it's, I'm going to say it's 2020 or 2021. Yep. And it was on Captain Fi's website. I know you've been featured on his podcast quite a few times and I was listening to him talk with you and— Did you know I coached him? I didn't know. Okay. You coached him.

Yeah. I taught him how to build that business up.

There you go. So we actually, I heard about you from there and it was like, I did like a course. Digital Investors course, which I did, and it changed the way I thought about digital assets particularly and websites. So that's how I first came to know about you.

Yeah, thank you. Well, what, so these days I coach people like you, Nas, and congratulations, mate. What you've achieved in this last 3 or 4 years is exactly, gives me a buzz. That's what I love seeing success stories like yourself who no prior experience with digital. I come along and show you the way and look at you, what you've achieved. You know, you've got an amazing business and you're helping lots of people and you're using these digital skills and now hopefully using AI skills a lot as well. And my background is why I'm so passionate about that is both my wife and I are in business together, have been for 30 years. We're both from the country and didn't grow up with computers. And now we make all our money on computers and have done for a long time, but we Our actual careers started buying and selling traditional bricks and mortar businesses. I've never had a job. All I've done is been an entrepreneur all my life and just bought and sold businesses and don't come from an entrepreneurial family at all. Come from, I'm a farmer, come from a farming family and as does my wife Liz. And so that's why these days we love teaching total beginners like you were once upon a time, Naz, and getting results. And our thing Nas these days is we get people to start small and safe. So like buying simple little websites or building simple websites and then build on their skills and then eventually build to a big exit somewhere down the track.

You can go and see those results because they are everywhere on your podcast, the results that you've gotten with hundreds of thousands. How many students? Thousands now? Over 1,000 students now?

Yeah, it'd be over 1,000. Yeah. That we've personally coached. Yeah. And then we reach a lot more students in that and we're in the US now and stuff like that. And we're on podcasts talking about this all the time. I love it.

So, well, I want to kind of open up because I really want to focus on like the service-based business and what I want to get into is around digital assets, service-based businesses and agencies, because there's a lot of hype. So for people who are like just getting started or they're a founder, they're a service provider, what do they start to need to think about how to use and think about digital assets as actual traditional assets?

Yeah, really good question. So traditionally there's always been, and like I'm from Australia, people made a lot of wealth out of real estate. It's a physical asset. And then there's shares. And these days, of course, there's crypto, like you mentioned. And for, as you all just heard, as your listeners heard, for Liz and I, business as well, traditional bricks and mortar businesses. But these days, of course, and actually it's since in the 2000s, there's this thing called digital assets, which is online businesses or digitally driven assets. And they are very real. They're just like physical real estate. So I guess if we start with where Liz and I started with digital assets, our strategy was 15 to 20 years we bought and sold bricks and mortar businesses. And then literally when we saw the internet, we figured out how to do that with online businesses and we realized, oh, these are virtual assets. And we just treated it like how I mentioned, you know, real estate investors used to flip houses. Well, they still do and they invest in houses. We've never really done the real estate thing in a big way because we don't like debt. We were always in debt with our bricks and mortar businesses that we bought and sold. And we always had physical inventory in warehouses. So we owned wholesale import businesses and stuff. And we realized, oh, when you go online, ooh, it's just like real estate. So there's an address. Mm-hmm. which is the URL or the website address. And then there's the physical property, right? So you want to buy, what does it, they say in real estate, you want to buy the rundown house or the worst house in the best street. So we were always trying, that's what we literally did. We just flipped, like people flip houses, we flipped websites. And so we'd buy it. So then you've got the website, like, and all the assets that come with it that sit there. Okay, they're virtual, but to us they're real. They're just as real as a physical asset. And I think that's the big distinction that people need to realize in a website, just even the age of the website, the list that it comes with, that, you know, the, that, that's an asset in and of itself. Okay. You can't physically pick it up and whatever. You can't physically renovate it, but to us it's still an asset. And then within the website itself, like there's the way it looks on the internet, we can renovate that just like how we used to give a house a quick coat of paint. When we first buy a website, we'll give it a quick makeover initially, and then we might do ongoing work on it. So bottom line is, if you are new to this field, start viewing every single website that you see online as an asset. So Nas, even these days, especially in the last year or so, YouTube channels now are viewed as an actual asset. Same sort of thing. It's an asset. Okay? It sits on someone's channel, but it can be bought and sold. So the beautiful thing, once you start flipping your mind around to an asset, you realize it can be renovated or fixed up and you can buy and sell it so you can add value to it and you can sell it and make money.

The thing that when I first heard about on that Captain FI podcast, you said content is an asset. I was like, what does he mean content's an asset? You talked about when you find a website which is available for sale and it's got like 60, 70 blog posts on it, the content is an asset itself.

That's right.

There's different layers of how they can look at you know, as a business, building their business for an exit, looking at potential like content sites and like, you know, blog sites and, you know, things, people talking about fitness and how to actually get people to change their mind or view these things as digital assets because there's a lot of money to be made as you guys have made plenty of money. And also now with the acceleration of AI and these different tools, how we can actually utilize them. So that's kind of want to set a bit of the frame of like those pieces that we should be getting into.

Because as you pointed out, content sites have changed because of AI. So, but with it, AI is the biggest opportunity ever, but it's also a big challenge to say traditional content sites. So now the strategy's changed, but in terms of assets, content is still valuable, but it is obviously the cost of producing content now is zero, or it's your AI cost. So we need to be smarter with it. So where, what the content does is drive eyeballs. Where the real asset is these days, just food for thought, throwing it out there. The big asset online now is eyeballs, traffic, because clicks are rarer. Okay. So clicks now are harder to come by. What happens when that case, clicks are rare. So the value goes up, goes through the roof. So there are old rundown websites. They're neglected. Or people just sell off because they think AI is going to kill it or whatever, but they've got assets. We call it finding the diamonds in the rough. When you start sifting through and looking around, there's some pretty good opportunities out there that aren't being capitalized on. And it's all about getting a following in this day and age of AI. That's what AI proves, that people want real followings and communities. If you can build a website that has a following or buy one and fix it up, that's the value. So that's the new play with, it's not traditional content sites, but it's those sorts of information sites that just sell, basically we sell electrons like advertising or information products or whatever. That's the easiest way to make money online anyway.

I speak to a lot of other agency owners, speak to a lot of service-based businesses. Most people like myself kind of included don't sleep as much as they used to because they're thinking about AI. They're either thinking about it in terms of like, Is it lowering the barrier to actually start doing this stuff, which is all great things as well?

Really good questions. Yep.

How are people, how can we kind of get a mindset frame here around how can we view AI as something that can support us, but also at the same time, you know, should we be like completely terrified that it's going to like actually take some of the agency roles away?

So it will definitely change it, but, um, We say this at our workshops. Maybe you would've heard this at one of our workshops. This was from the founder of GitHub, and he said, pessimists sound smart, optimists make money. You've got to flip it around. You've got to look for the opportunity. Naz, you are too young to remember this, but when the internet came around, and I remember when the first internet and boom hit, it was exactly the same thing. People were freaking out and businesses were saying, oh, like there's, there is, so there's a large element of hype. That's what I was going to say. But, and it's not always necessarily the early adopters that make the money. I think it's the smart people that make the money and the optimists. So you've, so what we're being handed here at a very blunt level is instead of, you know, in the old days you used an ax to cut down a tree. Now we've got a chainsaw and you're literally You think how long it takes, especially if anyone from a farm will know how long it takes to cut down a tree with an axe. It can take you hours and hours and hours on a really big tree. These days we do it with a chainsaw literally in 5 minutes. It's exactly the same with AI. So it's definitely going to disrupt people, but it now is at a very basic level. What we're seeing in our community, the foundations are still super, super important. You think of everything you do in your agency or for our listeners. If you're in a business now, especially in an agency where you're dealing with people, you're helping them build websites and stuff. Sure, the website build can be done in minutes, but the foundations count. That's not where the money's made anyway. It's in the advisory role that will always need someone to interact with the human and to also get them across the line in terms of the foundations. And what we're seeing now is people are saying, well, I can build a website, say, our clients are saying, well, go for it. And they go, yeah, I'm too busy. I'm on the tools. And they build a, let's call it what it is, pretty useless website. But AI admittedly, just even in the last month, is getting better at building websites. That's fine. But people still, no lawyer or accountant or plumber is going to sit there and do all the digital marketing stuff that you need to do to get a website. There's a big difference, as you know, from building a website to getting it, to getting the phone ringing. in that business and to converting to leads. There's all that, all the foundations of that still is required. And what we need to do is use these tools to automate everything that we do in our businesses as much as we possibly can. So really that's the skill you want to focus on these days, no matter what industry you're in, is learning, you know, and I know it, everyone says it, but it's true. You need to at least learn how this AI works so that you can automate as much as you possibly can in your business. And And don't believe all the hype that's out there. I can tell you now, everyone's still winging it, Nas, even the gurus. Because even I've just been down the rabbit hole in a big way with AI. And even AI itself can't keep up with its own documentation. It's so frequently wrong. And I'd pull it up and I screenshot and say, no, you're wrong. What button do you press here? And it'll come back and say, oh, you're right, Matt. That just changed yesterday. Our own source documents not updated. Great. How, like, they're in a, it's an AI race at the moment. It's incredibly exciting. And it is, you know, people will lose their jobs and stuff, but not for people that are listening to your podcast because you've got to learn, you guys have got to learn how to use AI to your benefit. Remember that saying, you know, pessimists sound smart, optimists make the money. And that's been my journey as an entrepreneur. You hear about a recession coming and everyone freaks out. My personal mentors who are very high net worths, man, they get excited in a recession. That's when you make most of your money. That's how Liz and I did with online. We started buying websites in 2008. It was a global financial crisis. It was the best time ever to be buying digital assets. And if we hit another recession, just throwing it out there, not giving financial advice, but Far out, it's a good time to make money with digital assets and agencies.

You talk about the mindset so much, and I know actually when I was preparing for this podcast, I forgot a lot about the, like actually putting stuff in mindset because I was so excited about strategy and execution. But really, you know, fundamentally you need to start with the right mindset.

I'm over the top optimistic as you are, Nas. You're Greek. Yeah. They're the most charming people on the planet, right? So you've got it in spades. You guys have got it in there. My mentor taught me that because I used to, sell a few businesses to some Greek Cypriots. And he said, oh, tough your luck. He said, are you having fun with them? I said, yeah, they're really charming. See, you guys make money. And I'm being serious. Optimism carries you through in everything and enthusiasm does. And I think it is exciting with AI. It looks scary, but watch what's about to happen in the next 12 months. I think it's just going to get better and better for us in the digital space and people will be left behind. And that's where we as digital advisors come in to help them. So for your listeners, if you run a digital agency, seriously, you're just going to have to adapt. Okay. Building websites will be cheap, but someone's still got to do it. And so what we do now is, and what our clients are doing, just on that note, we literally just smash it out in AI and that takes time and effort still. You've still got to know the foundations, how to get a good website. And then literally you can either hire someone to build it for you for way less than what it used to. within the next 12 months, AI will fully build it even in WordPress with Astra Elementor, which is what we normally use. So I don't think that bit's going to go as quickly as what people think, but it's really easy even now to— we are just outsourcing the building of these sites very easily. That's not where the value is. And the client knows that as well. You know what's coming is the client is going to want to know, well, how do I implement AI in my business? That's what we're already starting to get asked right now. And that's where there's gonna be huge opportunities. And that's why I'm saying, if you're in this digital space, for goodness sake, make sure every week you're carving up some— if for some bizarre reason you're not using AI, you need to be getting on top of it. Because once you've got that knowledge, everyone's winging it at the moment. No one's 100% sure. But once you've got that dialed in, imagine what you can offer to businesses just even by being able to implement AI. We had one of our clients, she was a total beginner and she figured out how, like playing with AI, doing some basic automations, right? For white collar, certain niche of white collar businesses. She went to a conference and she stood up and said what she was doing and she just said, oh yeah, I can automate everyone in this room's business. Like I'm playing with it. Here's what I'm doing. And it was just an offhanded thing that she said, As soon as she sat down, everyone, all these old business owners came over, done business cards. So she rang up Liz and I panicking going, I've got to automate like 50 businesses now. What the hell do I do? And so there's that much of a demand, I think, with traditional businesses for automations as well, which adds value to those.

Well, that's right. You're solving actual real problems. And I think the website or the The front of that particular thing, whatever the tech is, is not valuable, but it's who's gonna assemble it, how is it gonna be done strategically, and how does this fit with the business outcomes of what they're trying to achieve? And if you hit all those 3, you tend to just take care of the problem, right? Yeah.

And I was just thinking, you are the perfect example. Think of the service that you offer with helping people on LinkedIn, right? And outreach and stuff like that. Yeah, that's going to become more and more automated to the client, the customer. They don't care how you do it. The outcome is, what do they want? They want the leads. Yep. And they want someone like you to set it all up for them and make it easy. Hopefully over this next 12 months, it's going to get even easier for you to set that up. So then, you know, and what it means is you can reduce your staff count. That's what we're seeing happening before our eyes with most of our community members. They're no longer do we have teams of 10 people and 10 outsourcers. Those days are gone. Now we're down to, most of our guys are down to just 2 or even 1 teams of 1. And yeah, like in your business, you could say AI is going to transform it, but it's going to transform it in a really good way because people still want the service. They just want the outcome.

So tell me, like I got a message yesterday about someone wanting to invest in capital. I know a couple of other agencies have also had a similar message. What's happening in the agency acquisition space? Wow.

So I'm glad you brought up the pessimist side, like what the pessimists would ask, which is, because now we're going to go to the Greek Cypriot side, the optimist, right? Because yeah, people are worried, understandably, using agencies as an example. But talk about making money. Optimists make money. Guess who wants to buy up agencies? Just when everyone's, you know, the beginners or the pessimists are panicking about it, guess who? The way you get rich is follow the big money, right? That's what we're always talking about. Yeah. Our mentors, the big money is buying up agencies. So you can go and listen to our Digital Investors podcast and hear interviews with all the top brokers talking about this. I know all the top brokers in the world and they've said this is the new gold rush. People, big buyers like private equity firms, venture capitals, like people that have, you know, you've been approached to and other agencies we're seeing getting approached to. Why are they wanting to buy up agencies all of a sudden? Because they know they can be automated. You put a bit more money behind them and you can scale them a lot easier and it's recurring revenues. Agencies have beautiful recurring revenues. Also, they've done their homework. They know exactly what I just said. The service isn't going anywhere. It's going to be actually accelerated by AI enablers. And it's these, the big money is very interested in buying up digital agencies going forward into the future if they've got recurring revenues, because it's the same thing with digital assets when we're buying websites. They want the eyeballs. We went to a very exclusive event where it was, there was a big venture capital company from Australia. So I'm in angel investing and stuff, and this big private equity company, venture capitalist, sorry, came out from America and he said they're now investing into companies that are really good at AI implementation, like digital agencies and stuff. And they're going into very specific niches and they're buying up old-fashioned businesses and they're just literally implementing the AI system. So this is a very famous venture capital company with unlimited funds. We're talking, I think it's even into the hundreds of billions. Like this, it's massive. They're investing hugely into AI. And he said, that's one of their big niches now is AI is so good. They're using agencies to fully AI legacy old-fashioned business. So they did, they bought an old-fashioned accountancy firm and they're just fully thrown in. And so they've said, we'll give you 50%, you keep running it, we'll AI it and we'll float it on an IPO in 5 years. That's the same concept. People, what the big buyers are looking around is where can we implement AI the best and digital agencies and SEO agencies and all that sort of stuff, those things that you think would be disrupted by AI, they're coming up with the idea. You can go and ask AI yourself if you want to check this. They're identifying them as really good assets to own for the future because AI can so benefit them and you can scale them. So for private equity and big-time investors, we're always looking for a 10x return on the money. And so that's the sort of businesses you're trying to target in Onto. And the other big thing with agencies, there's no debt, there's no risk, like not the traditional risk that you have with traditional businesses because it's a service business. That's why service businesses absolutely rock. Funny, Nas, I never used to like service businesses when I was buying and selling bricks and mortar. It wasn't my thing. I didn't see them as real businesses because they revolve typically too much around the owner, all that sort of stuff. Now I've completely flipped it and I've realized that's a really dumb thing to think. Service businesses rock, especially in this day and age because there's no risk, no debt. You can walk away if you—

Most of them are bootstrapped, right? They'll bootstrap most of them.

Grow with no debt and they can be scaled magnificently, like either with money or AI. It's service businesses rock.

So for people who are like, either have got to an agency and maybe they've gotten to like $15K, $20K MRR, monthly recurring revenue. What should they be doing? They'd be thinking, okay, what if I don't want to exit? Like, is it about a decision about exiting or is it just like set your business up right from the get-go?

This is my favorite topic. So this is what I help people with every— I've been doing this for 30 years, helping people with advice on this. Well, definitely the last 20 years. And in this particular day and age, it's a really, really important question. Now I'll start off with, if you are in that boat and you're listening to this, or if that's your goal, You've got to think about your life's vision. And it sounds strange, but I used to sell businesses in the millions up to $20 mil. And when I'm helping people exit those, it was always the most important part of the conversation is what do you actually want here? And then we work backwards from that. We construct it around that. So if you're a young guy like yourself, maybe you want to flip businesses and that's cool. So we do an earlier exit. If your life vision is to, no, I want to do a $10 million exit. I want to do an 8-figure exit. Like, I, I, that's just my bucket list. We go, okay, that's a different strategy. So it comes back to, and how hard do you want to work? What do you want for your family? Where are you at in life? What does your partner say? Like, seriously, this sounds like it's the sort of stuff that people don't think about, but you'll sabotage it. But once you've got a vision and you know what you're working to, then it's really easy. And you just, if anyone just tells me their vision, right, cool. Here's what you do. Because I've just done this so many times. And with an agency, Like you said, if you're getting to say that $15K a month recurring, what I would say is, and I know this is a cliché, but seriously, set your business up for sale from day one. Point there was really good is bottom line, no matter what your vision is, even though I just said it's so important, bottom line, there is no harm in setting up your business as if you're going to get the tap on the shoulder and someone's going to pay you out, or you might suddenly want to sell it. It'll help you set up a much better business. You'll be better focused on the figures and the systems, particularly automating it. And then you're kind of set. So I think always setting your business up for sale is a super powerful piece of advice. And because most people, they don't set a strong intention. So when you're a go-getter though, which presumably your listeners are, particularly if they're at this point in the podcast, It is worth thinking about that. Now, when you get to that $20K a month, $15K, $20K a month, basically the real secret is to get the maximum exit. If you did want to sell, it's recurring revenues that you can rely on. That's the mo— that if you can get that recurring, then we build on that and that's what gets you the bigger multiple. Fall back to our digital asset main strategy. We, when you are buying a website or an online business, you, the 3 main areas that you want to tweak, and this came out of buying bricks and mortar businesses, is profit, traffic, and conversions. So you need to be always on top of those. So in a digital agency, it's exactly the same. Get your profitability up, put your prices up to what the market can bear. You've got to test that all the time. Make sure you're getting traffic, which is your sales funnel and your prospecting. You've got to be working on that all the time. And conversions, you've got to have those dialed in. You adjust, you do the numbers. If you, we call it the 30-30-30 rule. We learned this off a mentor of ours years ago, is you increase each of those 3 areas across your business by just 30%, you've doubled the business. So the money that you get in your pocket. So they are worth getting laser focused on. Every high net worth, ultra high net worth entrepreneur I've ever worked with, and they've taught me the same thing whenever we go through figures, We're always looking at where can we put the prices up? What are our highest GP products, highest gross profit products? How can we maximize those? How can we get more sales in the door, more volume, and how can we get more conversions? And then if you want to break it down even further, really, when you think about it in a business, it's very basic stuff. There's only 2 parts to business, which is sales and delivery. And I'm a massive fan, as I'm sure you are, Naz, sales. That's how we've turned around every single business. I'm not an accountant type where I try and cut costs and all that sort of stuff. That's important. Leave that to the accountants. Sales will turn around any business. So tactically, get out there and sell. So if you know you are going to, you want to do an exit on your business, you've got to expand those sales somehow, but not at the expense of profitability. You need to be very careful you're not cutting margins and stuff. So you just need to look at your sales funnel. There's actually a lot to this. This is, it's a really cool topic, but it, there, I don't know whether that's not tactical. It's more strategy, I guess, those 3 areas. But for a digital agency owner, you should be able to figure out where's your conversions happening? Where are you getting your sales from? You need to expand that. That's a huge one. AI helps us in every single step of the way. I'll be brainstorming with AI as soon as you finish listening to this podcast. But literally take you an hour, less than an hour, and then go down the rabbit hole and put aside a Saturday morning and do it properly. And Gemini is brilliant for this, but so is ChatGPT and Claude actually. What am I saying? But anyway,

they're all good. They're all pretty smart.

They're all good. Well, one thing I've noticed though, because just inside thing that we've noticed is anecdotal from both Liz and myself, we use the 2 models when we're researching renovating businesses. and certain niches and like agencies, we do a lot of work. We're very bullish on agencies. We're ourselves, we're looking to buy digital agencies or add or do JVs with agency owners. When we use Gemini, we know the numbers. So we've got a good KPI because we looked at so many thousands of deals over the years. Gemini's scarily accurate and I reckon they've scraped everyone's Gmail accounts over the last decade, probably. Why not?

Probably.

And yeah, and it is scarily accurate in telling us the benchmarks for, okay, you want to, a business like doing this much turnover should have this sort of GP, gross profit. You want to, and the areas that it says to dial in to fix up the conversions. Yeah, it's very, very accurate. So I would use AI to brainstorm that.

They're all good, but some have different strengths, right?

We do a lot of renovations of businesses and at the moment we're just, we're deciding which ones do we want to buy or invest in ourselves, in particular like agencies and where we're fixing things up. And yeah, gosh, Gemini has been mind-blowing and we throw it out, give us different business models. So if you own an agency and you're worried about AI, like Nas was saying before, and you're thinking, oh, it's a bit legacy or I'm a bit tired, start brainstorming. Like just do it on the weekends when you're not distracted by work. Do the negative thing with Gemini and say, what am I missing in this business? Here's my business. What are the other business models that I can do? We're doing it in our own eBusiness Institute. It's a coaching business. It's going to get disrupted by AI without a doubt. But every single business these days could benefit from a community. That's the big play as well.

If you are an agency and you're kind of getting approached to sell, obviously you've got a sort of stable business and you want to diversify some of your income. You want to maybe look at acquiring other businesses or continue building your agencies. What are some of the things that they should be thinking about in terms of like which assets to buy, where to kind of put my money, how to diversify, how to kind of future-proof AI-proof stuff?

We get asked this ourselves all the time and Liz and I ask ourselves this in this AI age and we've come up with, you know, we're going to stick to what we know, which is agencies and buying online businesses. For if you want to diversify your income, I would see that, give the answer that you just said. It does come down to your vision. This is why it starts out with like, if you want to do a big exit and you want to do it reasonably quick, say within the next 2 to 5 years, that's reasonably quick in business sales. I would definitely then be doubling down on what you're doing if you've already got a winning system. And like, say you had an agency, right? You could go out and buy other digital assets like content sites, blogs, whatever. SaaS businesses, but you are diversifying a bit too much. Depends on your personality. Whereas my, I think in this day and age, focus is the key depending on your goals. So if you want to get rich quick, I'm going to use that word rich quicker. It's not, there's no such thing as getting rich quick as we all know, but seriously, if you want to do a big exit pretty quickly and you've already got a successful agency, why the hell would you go and get distracted and buy content sites, or, you know, you hear me talk about how awesome they are. But if you're into security and you want a bit more semi-passive income, you might do that. But if you're just after that big exit, and again, you gotta look, well, why do I want semi-passive income? Is it for the dollar amount? Okay. What are you really after? My advice now doesn't even matter what your vision is really. If you've got a successful agency and you're good at it, and especially with AI now, why the hell wouldn't you bolt other agencies to it and just get the numbers up? That would be the way to do it. If you're a good operator and you're already doing well, and then just get the hell out, have a 12-month plan. So I'll give you an example. We've got a lovely couple that I've personally coached over many years and I know them personally. He had never done the digital agency thing. So he came to me and he'd seen all these success stories and he was doing all sorts of different awesome businesses. He's got lots of digital skills, very skilled. I said exactly this, mate, just get focused and do the digital agency. You want cash flow, go digital agency. And it worked by surprise. So then he's stuck at it and I've just constantly said to him and his partner to stick at it. And he had the same question, Nas. I want to buy what we call them portfolio sites, semi-passive sites. And I said, what's your goal? Because I want to make millions. And I want to do it in the next 5 years. I said, stick at this. This is working. You've got a skillset. You've proven you've got runs on the board. He started to hit $10,000 months, started to hit $20,000 months, then he started to hit $50,000 months. And I'm saying, mate, just stick at it. Fast forward to today, he's about to sell that for many millions of dollars.

Wow.

And he said to me just the other day, oh, thank goodness. I just, it's the first time in his business career, he's stuck at one thing all of 5 years, whatever it is. But I think that's the power of focus these days is if you're good at something and it's working, double down on it and then do the exit, get the hell out, take 6 months off and decide what you want to do in life. Rinse and repeat and just 10x it the next time. That's how most entrepreneurs do it. And it's boring, but if when you're a younger guy, like I'm the example. I've owned, Liz and I in the past would own portfolios of businesses and websites and stuff like that. And that was what our mentors did. These days I'm moving away from that. I'm learning, okay, focus on what you're really, really good at and one or two key businesses if you can. Now portfolios is still powerful and it's more secure thing. if you're after the money, especially if you own a digital agency. So Nas, can I just point something really important out here that we've just taught our community? We had a very, got a very high-level friend of mine who's a very high-level business coach. And he, over the years, he and I have had very almost parallel paths, right? In coaching people, but he's with bricks and mortar businesses. And he said to our community, Oh, we've, I've been doing this for what, 15 years? And what he's noticed is, and this is what we teach as well, when people start a business through to growth, getting to that first $10,000 a month profit is hard yakka. But when you get there, so think of your journey, Nas, and any of your listeners think of this, you know what I'm talking about. Once you But because it's all new, there's a lot of challenges. But once you get to 10 grand, you generally have got what? You've got at least 1 or 2 people working with you, even if it's part-time from Upwork, whatever, a couple of VAs and AI. It's pretty, it's kind of the first sweet spot. It's pretty easy. Sigh of relief. Okay, Nas, now we're going to go to the next level, 30 grand. And we go into the hard zone again, few challenges. But what he found was when the really big first sweet spot for most new business owners is that $30,000 a month profit. When you get there, most people find this is pretty easy. It's pretty sweet now. I've got 3 employees, whatever, or these days it's just a couple. And then it basically just doubles each time. And we found exactly the same thing with online businesses and agencies. You get to 60 grand. So To go from $30 grand to $60 grand, like it's, there's a bit of work there. It's not gonna sugarcoat it. It's not easy, but it's worth it. When you get, when then go from $60 to $120. So when you reach all these double milestones, it suddenly gets easier and then you go into the hard zone. So why that's important from a coaching mentoring point of view and for any of your listeners and for you is think about what your goals are. So if you want an easy freedom lifestyle business, which is what we teach people, Is then just set your goal for $30 grand a month. It's the sweet spot. That's a million dollar asset right there. Yeah. That's a million dollar asset. You can cash out any day of the week for a million bucks. I'm not giving financial advice. You know, there's, there's whatever the usual, but within reason, like literally that's the number. So if you want a lifestyle business, this is why I'm saying, think of your vision here. If you want a cool family-friendly business or a lifestyle to travel around the world on your laptop, I would suggest First goal, $10 grand, $30 grand. And then if you're a real go-getter and you want to go bigger, then go for your life. Go to the $100 grand a month goal, but just recognize you're going to do a lot more work, but it's going to be worth $100 grand a month. Now we're net profit. Now we're talking a significant business, $3 mil plus or whatever, depends on your goal. So then all you've got to do is if you want to grow to that, the quickest way to grow to that $100 grand from $30 grand, Buy another agency or buy another business. No matter what business you're in, bolt it on and you'll get there a hell of a lot quicker. And then buy 2 or 3 because you've got, and just recognize there's going to be a bit of pain, like a few growing pains and challenges. You're going to work your butt out, but when you reach that next milestone, then it gets easy. And once you get them bedded in, then you decide then, okay, do I want to sell it for $3 mil or do I want to go for $30 mil? If you want to go for $30 mil, then we need to talk. We need to look at that because there's a lot more to it, but that's what we help people do. And he found exactly the same thing, really interestingly, with every single business he's ever worked across in all industries. So we just stick with either digital agencies or anything to do with digital, right? He does everything from plumbers through to accountants through to any business you can think. And he said the numbers are nearly always the same and he's really analytical and they've kind of track this. And I just thought that was so interesting and it really helped all our members as hopefully it just helped your listeners in terms of your planning. So everything we've talked about here today, it kind of revolves around that. What do you really want? And that was what I learned 30 years ago, 20 years ago when I started working with these people, helping them sell their businesses. I realized I better ask them actually, what do they want out of life here? Why are they selling business? What are we Do we need to? Because I can help someone grow a business in, you know, if you say to me, sell it next month. Okay. That's different to if we sell it in 12 months or in 24 months. And so you can, I can help people renovate businesses up to whatever level they want. Just depends on their vision. As long

as they're— I love the way you break things down into such modular steps and, you know, the 30-30-30, profit, conversion, traffic, and now also adding with, you know, a 10-30-10. Well, and then add another zero or add more zeros as many as you want. But I love the thing about focus in an AI world where attention is your focus. And I struggle with this with myself because I get through these phases where I want to do everything and you're just too excited and you've got your brain is exploding with ideas and you're like, I just need to focus on this singular thing that makes me money and helps me push my vision. And I think that's where you talk, you keep anchoring back towards vision. Yeah.

Yep.

A lot because that's the pillar point, which grounds you to go, no, no, no, we're building this, you know, we're building this for Liz and the kids or whatever it may be for you to actually get you here. So it's always that grounding point. The accelerator for that is and has to be and can only be AI right now. Obviously people are like, you cannot do anything good without people. How many people do I need? What type of skills am I looking for in 2026? And what AI operations should I be kind of focusing on?

You hand me the hardest question of the whole interview. Everything else is just awesome up until now. I'm in the same boat. This is overwhelm time. I can only go off what I'm seeing across. So we have a big range of a big community that we're working with on all sizes of businesses, plus all the businesses that they're working with and helping with. So we're seeing this plus all my friends who are in traditional businesses and are very, very successful people, we're all having this discussion. I think in this next 12 months, it is about the change. We are starting to see already, like I mentioned, clients who traditionally would be hiring anywhere from 10 to 15 outsourcers are now down to 1 or 2. I know even in our business now, AI just accelerates everything. It is literally automating almost every step of the way in a digital business, in all those 3 areas. Conversions in particular, it is brilliant at. It's really good at helping amplify traffic. And also in terms of profitability, AI will help you find areas in your business which will make you a lot more profitable. It comes up with scarily accurate scenarios of what you can charge for certain products or services. It's got all the benchmarks. You don't have to hunt around for the secret insights. It's all been scraped and it's sitting there. So Who are we hiring these days? I would like to say you want curious people who are go-getters. It's funny you asked that question. I just realized I'm getting asked this on every podcast now about what type of person. Okay. A similar question is, who makes it in this day and age? Like, what characteristics do you need? And I guess that's sort of like what you're saying, like, who do we hire? I think the hiring, what I'm seeing is the hiring's coming down dramatically. So even in, I'll share a really cool story. My daughter is into coding and that's what she's chosen. She loves IT and she's working with a friend of mine and a new friend of mine who runs a gaming company. And they're, so it's a SaaS company essentially, but it's gaming and it's all, he's just using AI and he's just like me and you and all of us. He's just— Self-taught on it, gotten right into it. And he said to me the other day, he goes, Matt, your daughter is the— I'll be doing a hiring freeze after your daughter. Like, it's probably the last. He's got a big team. He said, I probably won't ever hire any more people because it is mind-blowing what AI is doing in even his business. He has a massive team. We're talking a big business here. And he said, your daughter's the last intern we'll be taking on. So next year, none. And so what he's looking for, and like what you are asking, is people like my daughter and yourself and your listeners, they're looking for go-getters, people that will figure this stuff out and will just— so my daughter's not trained on AI and gaming. She's a hardcore coder. She's still at uni, by the way. She's just an internship, but She's smart and curious and wants to work it out and enthusiastic and realizes it's important. So who do you hire these days? It's go-getters, high achievers, people that are willing to work it out because we're all winging it with AI. There's no textbook for AI at the moment. We're all trying to learn off each other and AI itself, and even AI itself is still learning. So yeah, where do you go? With who do you hire these days? Man, that's a tricky one.

I really respect the honesty because I think it would be easy to say, get yourself someone who's AI native or whatever, but I think,

yeah, we should talk this out, shouldn't

we?

Figure it out. Your audience members could put input too.

But the community is so important, right? To get around people who are learning and you're gonna get ideas. and you're gonna meet people who may lead to like a JV or something interesting, right?

Well, that's what happens in our community. So I'll just give you the perfect example. I just interviewed one of our really successful students, a young guy today, and he was a vet just 9 months ago and he's just hitting $20,000 a month now in a digital agency. He's never used, like he's totally retrained. But you know what's accelerated him? He said, Matt, I'm in your, we've got a very, very private community where we have, it's called the Champions Labs. and he's just hanging out with a bunch of people, including Liz, my wife, who's really good on AI, and they're just brainstorming this stuff at least once or twice a week. They have a special session called the Smart Bar, and they just brainstorm along with a couple of our coaches. And so we just let the clients come in and brainstorm as well, because like what you said, we realized we can't handle this ourselves. We need young guys like John. And he just said to me today, the reason— I was saying, how the hell did you go so quick with this? He's a gun on AI. He goes, Matt, it's from hanging out with Liz and the coaches and all the other guys in our community, we're just figuring it out. And then I go off and play with AI and you've got to learn off people. So that's the sort of person you want to look for if you're hiring someone or you want to work with someone is the go-getters that are out there. Like you said, Naz, it's a good point. You can't just go onto Upwork and hire someone that's AI native, although that does work to a degree. If you are not good with AI, That actually there's some really good people on places like Upwork that are awesome. They will set up in agencies. So I'll share that with all your listeners. Even for our guys that are advanced with agencies, they are going onto Upwork interestingly, and they've recognized this arm of the business where I think I was talking to you about this off camera, was a huge opportunity to bring in AI automations into businesses. And a lot of people starting to ask that. So like with big accountancy firms and stuff. So, um, one of our coaches, Lucy, she doesn't know how to do the AI stuff. She just hired someone on Upwork. Literally, he spends about 2 to 3 hours setting it up for these businesses. She's charging like $6,000 or something, and she pays him $1,000. He's happy, she's happy. And she's just landed, you know, she's getting client after client. She goes, Matt, it's the easiest $6,000 I've ever made. And

the client's happy because they've probably like saved 30, 40, 50, 60 grand, right? From the offices.

The clients just told her, like my mate with my daughter, uh, we're not hiring, like, it's kind of sad, but we're not hiring, you know, people to do all this work anymore thanks to your AI automations. And, and, and they're, you know, they're doing simple stuff like fixing up their databases, but also just, you know, email re— like client reactivation, all that sort of thing. And yeah, she's just hired now 2 people off Upwork to do that.

Wow.

Pretty cool. So they're out there. So maybe, maybe you and I, maybe you do hire AI-native people. I don't know. 'Cause I don't know.

It depends on the use case.

Look, I'm being honest about it. It is something that we're all talking about. It's a really good question. I think at the end of the day, you know, you know what counts here. You can, there is 2 theories, I suppose. If you set up really, really good systems as you know, like you could hire C-grade operators to run them then. But I still lean towards, I've got to say, hiring. I like to be surrounded by people that are better than me and hiring A-grade operators and letting them run with it and using AI.

Yeah, makes sense. Matt, thank you so much. Tell me, where can people find out about your program if they want to work with you? Where are you most active?

Sure. So you can find me at the ebusinessinstitute.com.au. So we're here in Australia, but we're all around the world now. Um, follow me on LinkedIn is a great one, or listen to our Digital Investors Podcast. Just, you'll find it on Spotify or on YouTube. So go and listen to all the stories that we've got there or reach out to us at eBusiness Institute.

Perfect. I will drop all those links in the show notes. Matt, thank you so much for your time. Appreciate you. Thank you so much.

My pleasure, Naz. Great to be here.