Getting Raw Ep # 12 Matt ONeill

Welcome to Getting Raw. It's Richard and Mark Toutounji, and today I've got a very, very special guest, Matt O'Neill. Good to see you.

Good to see you. Thank you.

If anybody hasn't seen you in the fitness industry, I don't know where they've been hiding under a rock or something.

Because you'd say that.

If you've seen Matt, you'll see him on TV. You'll see him at any fitness convention you go to. He's the man to be when it comes to nutrition and fitness industry.

Thank you.

So I want to know, you've been in the industry for a while now. I want to know what the secrets are. I'm also very, very interested in your online program because this is Getting Raw. We like knowing about business. So we're going to have to not talk about nutrition for a bit. I'm going to focus on the business because this is what I'm really interested into. How long have you been in the industry anyway for? Like, what's the story?

20 years or so.

Over 20 years. I think 29 or something, yeah.

Something like that, I'd say. So I've seen a lot of stuff. So, you know, when it comes to like weight management, nutrition, and, you know, ideas and entrepreneurial sort of propositions and that, seen a lot. Know what flies and know what will just tank. And know it takes A lot of persistence to get it going. So it's a nice vantage point to have at this stage of your career, I guess.

I think it's exceptional what you've done. Because let me tell you about, like, you go in the fitness industry, you have a lot of fitness people, fitness people, fitness people, fitness people. And then you've got Matt, nutritionist. You have 2 or 3 nutritionists. So why did you choose working with nutritionists and fitness? I mean, you started so long ago back when it probably wasn't a really big thing. But did you see something coming there in the future?

Yeah, well, I guess it was a natural progression. It was studying exercise science. I'm an exercise physiologist. That's where it started. And then we learned about metabolism and metabolism naturally led to what do you put in your body? And so then it was on to nutrition. But my interest in fitness meant I want to teach personal trainers about nutrition because they were all firing questions at me, you know, should I eat protein? What about supplements and that? As soon as I was a dietitian, people wanted to know. And I knew there was so much rubbish out there. The mission then was to put people straight, to educate them, and that just led down a career of building educational courses, resources, and that sort of thing, and the tools to help PTs do what they need to do, which is nail that nutrition component.

And it was the PTs asking for this information that wasn't there?

Yeah, it wasn't there at the time. There were very few nutritionists. Typical dietitian would work as a dietitian. The typical fitness trainer would work in fitness. There wasn't much crossover. Sure, there was courses, you know, the Cert III courses and that sort of thing at the time, but there wasn't anything on top of that. Trainers I've seen 10 years ago, some of them have even gone on to be dietitians. So it's good to mentor those people, see them come along.

That's good. Now, let's talk about your TV first. I mean, I see you pop up on the screen sometimes when I'm eating my breakfast, and you've always got some sort of food in your hand and you're comparing that sort of stuff. Was TV a thing that you just thought, okay, this is another way to get out there, or why did you go into TV and how did you do it? You know, everybody wants to have some sort of media segment or TV segment.

People might be surprised to know that from 1996 to 2000, I worked at Choice magazine. I was their food policy officer and media spokesman. So it wasn't like I banged on the door of the TV stations and said, look, I want to be on Sunrise and The Morning Show. It was more the case that in one day you had the 3 channels with news crews, and then you also had Today Tonight and The Current Affair would come past the Australian Consumers Association because they wanted an opinion from Choice magazine.

Right.

And so I did like 50 combined print, radio, TV, one day I did 50 interviews. You know, bang, bang, bang. Just launched. It was like a whirlwind. And I guess that was that opportunity that was part of my job at the time. And when you say things that people get and they go, oh, great, I like that advice, or that was a quick little grab, or it's something different, then they ask you back. And, you know, here we are, you know, well over a decade since I was doing media, where Today Tonight, Morning Show, Sunrise, they're still asking me back. And it's great. So it's that momentum. And

I'm assuming in the early days you got asked to do it free. Now I'm assuming you get some sort of benefit revenue from that, do you?

Yeah, yeah, look, some of it's paid work as well. Some of it's quid pro quo. And, you know, as you know, you can't put a dollar value on the exposure you get on TV. You know, everybody wants that, you know, 15 minutes of fame. And when you get that repeat exposure, it turns into dollars in terms of business. Because I know if I'm on the telly, people go, oh, that's Matt, that's right, I was going to do his program. And the next day you can see on the orders online, it comes up.

Loving that stuff.

So that regular TV exposure is really important.

Now that's good. Now you get your TV exposure, but then you go one step ahead, which I see a lot of people on TV not do, where they go, okay, I'm getting this exposure, how can I best monetize it? And this one I really want to talk about is your, I mean, I guess your engine, which is SmartShape. Tell us a bit more about the SmartShape, the Jump Metabolism. I mean, online programming is tough. I know the online world is hard. So tell me about the ups and downs of that.

Yeah, well, my business, core business is called SmartShape, SmartShape Centre for Weight Management. And that's producing courses and resources for fitness professionals. So we do online nutrition courses, physical activity for fat loss courses to build on their normal PT training. We do resources. So we do tip sheets, we do seminar presenters packs as well, things they can just buy off the shelf. That was first. That was done for 10 years or so.

I've done that before. I have been to one of your seminars about 2000. So I've got that. That's good. The next stage then?

And the next stage was then, well, and this is part of me always wanting to do a weight management program. I wanted to do a weight management program. I wanted to compete in the commercial market. And Metabolic Jumpstart, which the program was to give dietitian-designed diets to the masses, and that has an online component which we can get into the detail of. And that now has monthly subscription, pay-per-order, and that sort of thing. So when I'm on the telly, people go to that, especially if it says on the telly, Matt O'Neill Nutritionist.

We love the links on the telly, don't

we? They Google it, they find you, and then if you've got your website sorted, they'll go and click through to pay. So it is designed to do that. If you're not on the telly for a while, then You don't get as many orders. It's as simple as that.

That's good. It's perfect. It's really using the publicity there and then getting it online. So tell me the biggest success as an online program. What does it give you, an online program?

The online program, because the proposition for visitors to the metabolicjumpstart.com website is that they can get a metabolically matched diet plan, report, and 4-week program from Matt O'Neill. And so from Matt O'Neill being on the TV, they trust me as well. It's not just somebody they don't even know. More likely to part with their dollars. And we've really stacked the value for that. It's essentially like for the fraction of the price of seeing a dietitian, it's currently only $49.95, you can get—

Is that a one-off?

That's a one-off. That's the first part of

it.

That's the initial. And that's to get a diet plan from me, fraction of the cost. So for that price, people are just curious. I'm curious to see what Matt's diet will look like. You know, we tell them their calorie burning figures, their metabolic rate figures, Because all these things people want to know, but want it from someone they can trust. So what we found was that then trainers would recommend it. Because, you know, you know the trainers, they do their exercise well, but the nutrition part—

And they see you around and they go, yeah, Matt's on TV, trust him, good.

There you go, I'll send my clients. Particularly those that aren't interested in nutrition. I said, send your clients to me, I'll sort their diet, get them better results, and then they'll start raving about the PT business. They come and sign up for that. We also have a membership, it's called the MJ Club, and we on-sell that at the purchase, and that's $9.95 a month. So naturally, I just want to see the membership numbers go up and up and up. And that's public. Now we have a new club system that enables trainers and fitness businesses to start their own club, pay on behalf of their customers, and we just want to build those chunks up as well.

I think it's genius. I mean, you've got the one-offs from the TV, General public. And you've got the ones from— I mean, then duplicating a list, for example, personal trainer might have 20. We get it, there's 20, 20, 20, 20, 20. So I think it's very genius what you've done. Tell me, having an online program, tell me some of the hair-pulling moments out, the failures in online business, or what's been a challenge for you?

Well, it's constantly fun. You're always learning, and you should never think you're an expert. No, at all. You often think you know enough to be dangerous. Yes. Probably the— you can always enhance a page. You can tweak and tweak and tweak. But then you've got to decide it's good enough to go. So you can't be a perfectionist, because as soon as you think your website or your page is perfect, then something changes. Google changed their policies. There's a new Facebook feature and that. You've constantly got to be on top of it. But look, the biggest disaster and the most costly disaster was when, unbeknownst to us, our website and 5,000 other websites websites was hacked and killed by, you know, a hacker. The whole IT went down. Took us 3 months to rebuild.

3 months to rebuild?

3 months to rebuild. We had a backup, but it was in pieces. Of

course.

Tens of thousands of dollars. If you look at that on the bright side though— Always a bright side. We got a new programmer, we added some enhanced features, and we've come back and recovered just in time to launch 160 clubs.

Right.

For a chain of fitness centres. So what that meant was we just got smarter with backups and that. So take-home message, have a backup.

Backup.

Daily. Daily backup. Daily backup ready to go. And if your web host says, we back up, take your own download.

Don't trust the web hosting people ever.

Even if it's 2 gigabytes, you know, every day, do it. So there's safeguards in place now to recover very quickly. But, you know, that happens as well. You've just got to get smarter and you do it. You'll find you won't have a point if you want to do a pure online business. I don't think there's a point where you say, great, I've created it, now I'm just going to go and sell it. You'll always have to tweak it. And be prepared for that.

So that's the failure, obviously. What's the biggest success that you see online program versus— because I mean, I see a lot of people that don't have that online presence and they're selling their stuff ad hoc. What is the advantage of having an online business?

Well, the advantage online, and I guess the This is the holy grail for an online business is that you wake up the next morning. You know, I've got an iPhone app that runs my orders. Yeah. My ecommerce.

Yeah.

And I click update and I see the orders go down the page, $49.95, $49.95, subscriptions $9.95, $9.95.

Yeah.

And then if there's a training course, I see $299 and so on. And that gives a daily total. Yeah. So, you know, daily you can get rewarded for seeing, oh, people just paid that all online. It's gone into my bank account. I mean, it sounds like it's making money. It's rewards for your effort, but it's nice to see that data on that app. So that's the big thing.

So that's the driver for you to see every day you get that ding ding.

Yeah, that's nice. And if you're on the telly or you know you've done a promotion and you get a spike in that, you know, hey, that's worked and I can tweak it. The nice thing is that the real-time data on it, you can change and adjust. So if you thought, You know, we sent that email and nobody read it. You can change it and do it differently next time. So it's, I guess there's a lot of little stuff-ups you can fix, and that's nice online. Whereas if you go and print a book, a lot of my dietitian colleagues printed a book and the book tanks, you've got all these books in stock. You don't want to do that. So online doesn't have all those fixed costs.

Good. Where do you work from? I mean, you've got an office, you've got people, you're by yourself. How does the structure work? What's the

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Initially it was working at home. I like to work at home. Then I had a part-time office manager that came in and helped out with everything. And it was a natural progression. You know, we've now got a full-time admin person, a full-time office manager, and the dietetic part of it. So designing the diet plans, which we've paid— the software we've developed ourselves does 80% of that. And I've got a full-time dietitian. dietitian that works for me, which then does the rest of it. So the actual diet design I've pulled out of. And I mean, just before we were discussing it, I was on the online discussion answering questions and that, but I don't do so much of that anymore. But my job is really to go out the front and say, come on guys, get on your diet.

You're the spokesperson.

It works. So, you know, the tip is get yourself into a position where you can be the spokesperson, drive new business. And then if you have your checklist, you can hand it over to others who really want to get involved in what you're passionate about.

Do what you do best and do it well.

Yeah, I mean, I joke with my staff and I say, I'll set this up, I'll give you a checklist, and then I will get out of the way. And they say, Matt, will you get out of the way and let us do this? And I'm getting better at getting out of the way myself. And that's a hot tip for people. I think if you try and be involved in too much, you'll Don't stuff it up for yourself. Stick to what you're good at.

That's good. So where's the next 5 years for Matt?

Well, look, the mission, the simple mission, Mission Metabolism, is to jumpstart the nation. So, you know, a couple of weeks ago we hit 13,000 people jumpstarted. Huge. Huge. And that's great. That's businesses going, well, 13,000. I mean, think of a PT saying, well, what if I had 13,000 clients? You know, you think that's fantastic. However, it's not 130,000. It's not 1.3 million. There's 23 million people in Australia. And I think that's a good thing that keeps you motivated. A very clear vision, which is jumpstart the nation. That's the mission statement. I like it. And everything has to build for that. So when we did 1,200 people in a week, which was our peak, then that just means, you know, a lot more PT businesses to help them. Sort their nutrition, gym chains, that sort of thing. More chunks of people. So you don't just go, oh, I had 4 individuals sign up, but I had 4 individuals that made a decision to jumpstart 50 of their clients. So then big groups.

It is amazing because it's, it's, and it's the same with the personal trainers. It's like you can choose to train every individual, or you can choose to make such a difference in a nation worldwide just by implementing different things in your business. Learning how to do the online stuff, there's challenges always involved, but getting out there and giving it a go really on a bigger scale.

Yeah, well, it is a bigger scale. I mean, and when you have some things in place, you can scale up. For us now, it's a simple case of I might need another dietitian, I might need another admin coordinator, we may need to have more customer service. Being an online business, if you've got customers, you've got to have customer service in place because they expect to email and get a response. So you can have stuff-ups, but as long as you fix them really quickly, the customer service people love that. So we can scale, and essentially the mission too is to help every PT start their own MJ Club.

Excellent.

And it's all designed easy interface to do that for them.

Excellent.

They can do it without much time and effort.

Excellent. And we'll just quickly touch on that because we're running out of time, but I find if you can actually get an MJ in your club, In regards to retention, what are the trainers finding out now when they do that?

It is a big push on retention. I think one of the big mistakes you can make, whether you're a PT or a fitness business, is to think, we're going to now sell weight loss. We're going to sell it at $200. We're going to make a lot of money. When you do that, you're actually putting up your hand and saying, we're in the weight loss market. That sends your customers out to comparative shop with Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, pills, potions, lotions, and that sort of thing. I'd recommend fitness businesses use something that fixes the nutrition component, like Partners, for example. Here's my pitch. Partners to let us look after the nutrition, which takes a lot of expertise.

Yeah.

And the fitness business then has happy customers with fantastic before and afters.

Yeah.

Because diet and exercise is solved. And then concentrate on your fitness services. More boot camps, more training, more packages, seminars on fitness. Makes sense.

Why be an expert when you don't need to be an expert when you can just do what you're supposed to be doing really well? Matt is online, so generally you can find Matt on Facebook. I know you've got a big presence on there. Where else can they find you? Where do you— what circles do you play in?

Yeah, yeah. Well, most of the time I'm trying to travel less, so it is the online presence. So you search for Matt O'Neill on Facebook, you'll find me. Matt O'Neill's Metabolic Jumpstart Facebook page as well. Matthew O'Neill, no I think all you just need to

do is just Google him. Matt O'Neill. Matt O'Neill. You'll find him. Google Matt O'Neill, SmartShape. And thanks for your

time, mate. Thanks so much. Cheers.