Keeping the Sales Energy Up | Ep. 09

Hello and welcome to the BeyondBusiness Podcast. My name is Charles Mackay. Today we interviewed Matthew Hurl from BrandCrush. Matt will get all into what BrandCrush does throughout this episode. Matthew is a career sales guy. He's come through the ranks and worked in pretty much. I can nearly, nearly bet you that if you've been a small business or a small to medium business that he has run and tried to sell you something in media advertising, banner ads, all sorts of things around, you know, as that media landscape has evolved. But he started his career literally outbound, cold calling to regional Victoria and regional New South Wales, and that was where he got the love for sales and he progressed his career literally all around the world, selling from roadie reps to retail to all sorts of things. He's had a fascinating career and is now at that journey of starting his own business at BrandCrush. And he's on that, you know, journey of understanding what it means to be a business owner and how to really build it for scale and build it for long term. It's really interesting conversation with Matt. I'm really looking forward to handing it over. So without further ado, let's get into Matt Hurl. Happy Friday. Welcome to the Beyond Business Podcast. How are you, mate?

Yeah, good. Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

No worries. No worries at all. Tell me, tell me, whereabouts in this world, in this current environment, are you sitting? And where would you normally be sitting? And yeah, give us an update.

So a normal Friday would probably be at our office in South Melbourne with our team around us and leading into Friday drinks right now, dialing in from my kitchen table in Torquay, down the Surf coast, families in the background. It's chaotic, very hard to focus, but it makes it fun and kind of exciting as well.

Yeah, that's awesome. That's awesome. So, Matt, I really appreciate you coming on today. Let's rewind a few gears and go back to first introduce yourself. So you know, Matt's the co founder of a business called BrandCrush and has probably built his career through sales and I'll let him more tell that story. But where did everything start off from you for you, Matti, where did it all begin?

I would say that my drive for sales is definitely what has shaped my career. But funnily enough, it started at Subway, right. I was a sandwich artist and I'm proud of it. It was my first job in Ballarat and I would like make it my mission to basically upsell everyone that came through ordering a sub into Honey Mustard Mayonnaise, it didn't matter if you're getting lobsters, if you're getting meatballs, if you're getting a blt, even if you were getting, like, your breakfast bagel at Subway, I would piss you and persist until you had honey mustard mayonnaise on that sucker. And I got a kick out of it. I got a kick out of shaping the decisions that people may. I didn't realize it at the time, but only about 4% of the population can make a decision on their own. And so it's actually pretty easy to shape people, how people think. But that's an interesting superpower that you've actually got to learn to control. And it's not always right to shape what people think either, because they need to own the outcome of their decision.

Yes, I can totally imagine that. How long were you flipping subs for?

I don't know. I think about eight or nine months. And then it was off to uni. But, like, that was such an awesome phase of life. It was when you first had got your driver's license. For me, living remotely 20 or 30 minutes out of a small country town, that sense of freedom. And it was just an awesome period. And I always look back on that fondly. I never look back and think about the mundane stuff of having to literally make people sandwiches. I think back, and I remember the relationships that I formed with either teammates or I remember the feeling of driving to and from work, even just that feeling of empowerment, knowing I was able to start generating my own income and that independence. And then, yeah, I do remember some clients that would come through and order their food. And I definitely remember plenty of my friends that would come through and I'd give them ripping deals that were not necessarily all above board on their meals.

I like it. I like it. So then you moved into, obviously, university, but I actually wouldn't mind going a little bit further back because you've said you found a passion for selling flipping sandwiches. How did you make. And you said that, you know, what is it? Only 4% of the population can actually make a decision. So how did you end up studying? Whatever you're studying. But what was. Did you do that for the sake of it, or what was the driver for that?

So in terms of university, for me, that was a time in my life to grow up. I went to a school where it was implicit that that was, like, a positive outcome. And that was kind of an undercurrent through the school. It was a really great school for ag and other things, but definitely there was an undercurrent that going to tertiary education was like the outcome that the school wanted to see. No one, when I went into it, told me that you would come out of that period in Life with a 24 or $30,000 debt. No one explained that it might take me, you know, another eight years to pay that off. And if someone at that time had said, oh, would you prefer to go to uni or would you prefer like a $30,000 deposit to put into property? I look back for me, I take the property or the deposit every day of the week. But that's not right for everyone. What university give to me was three years of my life that I got to grow up a little bit or had time to grow up. And I needed that. I still need that now. The more time I can get to grow up, the better. And university was a great middle ground between, you know, totally being pampered at home life. I was an indulged child. I'm not going to sort of deny that. And university was like the first step to independence and, you know, learning how to live on $50 a week, which, you know, in my mind then correlated to a bottle of vodka and then like maybe 10 carrots and that awesome 2 minute noodles, butter sausages, awesome sausages. But it did help shape some of that early independence again. That period in my life was definitely very powerful for shaping relationships that still stick with me today. I think about two of the relationships and friendships that I've got in my life now, and they're two people that I went to university with. I was lucky to go to university in an Alpine resort. And the reason I ended up going to university was basically to live in an Alpine resort because my passion was kind of the outdoors and the Alps and skiing. At the time I did the only university degree that you could do at that uni, and that was a bachelor of business. It really focused in tourism and hospitality. Towards the end of the degree when I was sort of starting to understand a little bit more about what my interests were and my passions were, I shaped that those studies more towards marketing and like the marketing principles. But weirdly, there's no, there is no university for sales. So. But if I, if I had a sales subject at university, then I probably would have clued on even earlier to what, what interested me. So I got involved in like, more official selling in a, like through a couple of different. I was exposed to it in my early career through a couple of different ways. I think very early on I met someone who was dating my Housemate. And she was working for a company that basically sold advertising within kidsmart handbooks to promote community safe messages, educating kids about cyber bullying and, and essentially it was advertising. And that job was a commission only income. Right. So if I didn't sell anything, I didn't earn anything. And whilst I at the time I had very low overheads, I was unbelievably motivated by the fact that I could earn three times as much as my friends and doing the same or less hours if I was good at it. And so there was all of a sudden this disconnect between like when I was in hospitality, for example, during studies.

Yeah, you do your eight hour shift or whatever it was.

Yeah, your income was aligned and controlled by the hours you put in. And then what I like my first exposure to sales was you could break that, that connection and you could align your income with your results as opposed to your hours. And you know, being, I don't know, naturally I like to optimize things and maximize everything. And so if I could get more of my personal time back and still get the same or more income, like that was a great trade off. So that was a really interesting experience. Then traveled, you know, overseas, Canada and whatnot. And having some of that sales, early sales experience actually, you know, helped me gain employment. It helps you understand how, what sort.

Of like to phrase it to what sort of selling you were doing now, I mean today, like what were you doing? Like, tell us about, like how are you getting lists? Like how are you calling people?

Selling was 100% outbound. It was sophisticated in that we would use a program that provided lists for us. If the lists were no good, you could always flip open the phone book. Back in the day that was also acceptable. But these leads were not qualified. The, the person at the other end of the phone didn't know I was about to call them. We didn't know who they were. We didn't know, you know, we would have regions that we're allowed to call into. So I was calling into Orange. Orange is out the back of New South Wales, Sydney. At the time I called Orange, I'd never been to Orange. I knew nothing about orange. I just pictured oranges, to be honest. Right. So I'm calling the, I'm calling the fish and chip shop. I'm, you know, I'm calling the dentist, I'm calling the, you know, the local motor mechanic. I'm asking all of these people to support the kids in their community, keep their kids safe and positioning it and phrasing it In a way that make it, made it very grassroots. But realistically that money was just going from them and 95% of it was going to the publisher of the deal. You know, depending on if I'd got the deal signed off on a fax or if I got the deal signed off via an audio recording, I would make somewhere between 20 and 40% commission on that deal. And so we would be selling this advertising anywhere between like 300 bucks for an advertisement, up to nine or ten grand for a full page. And so for, you know, a 20 something year old to, to be making 50 on that, it was awesome. Like it was, it was, yeah, it was exciting. So come back to your question. Like the selling was just brute forced. It was persistent. It was like you would, it was like you would dial and you would try and not put the phone down in between dialing because that was a waste of time. You would try to hit 100 outbound phone calls per day. And out of that, if you got two or three conversions to someone actually buying from you, that was an unbelievable day.

Right.

So you're spending probably eight hours, eight hours reaching out to unqualified people to get three deals across. Across the line now, you know, back then we didn't have some of the things that, you know, sophisticated, nurturing stuff that we have today. We can go into that. But it was just brute force. It was. And I was like a dumb tool in that whole chain. Cog. Yeah, cog. Yeah. But at the time I didn't know any better. And there's kids still coming through the ranks today that don't know any better. And, and if they can still make a chunk of change along the way and learn some things, what you do learn and sort of. I took that experience and ended up doing a slightly more sophisticated version of that in radio advertising sales. And in direct radio advertising sales, you still need to prospect. So you need to be looking at the newspaper, looking at billboards, listening to other radio stations, looking at who's advertising online, looking at all the other places that people advertise. And you need to be writing down notes of who's spending money to get their brand or message out there. You then need to sort of overlay that with who else in your team is already potentially speaking to them. And you need to be first to the punch so that you could potentially win that business for your brand or whoever you're representing. But then even in that business, we had to do a chunk of outbound and we'd call it like two hours of Power. But we do that like six hours a week, right? Yeah, ideally four hours a week, but really six hours a week. The only reason you wouldn't have to do as much outbound sort of outreach is because the deals were traditionally a little bit bigger. So instead of selling, you know, a $300 a deal, you might sell a, a $30,000 campaign or $40,000 campaign. And so what that process sort of taught me was the sophistication you could have in prospecting and then the sales strategy around obviously booking the meeting, coming into the meeting, setting an agenda, which is something that I thought was way too professional, but a really interesting way to frame up what you're going to ask them for in terms of information and then doing the discovery and actually quantifying. Quantifying basically what their pain points are. So, you know, let's say you're going into a car dealership and they've got 100 cars sitting in the car dealership. And that car dealership has been receiving free finance from the manufacturer for the last five months. But it's coming to the sixth or seventh month of them holding the cars in their lot. And after that six months, they have to start paying 5 or 10% or whatever percentage on each of those vehicles. It also, it all of a sudden starts costing them thousands of dollars to have that inventory sitting in their parking lots. And so if they can spend $30,000, right, to break even and just sell those cars and move them on and bring in new cars that are on free finance, that's a good result for them. So qualifying, quantifying basically their pain points to understand what an okay, good and exceptional result would be if they're looking for an ROI or if they're looking for a break even. And so that was a really interesting learning curve to go through. And the direct radio sort of experience was an unbelievable asset to my, you know, furthering my sales education because it really taught me to be disciplined and have that structure. Structuring your week and then structuring how you go back and sell in a solution to a client, how you close them and then ideally how you retain and grow them as well, which again, that's changed a fair bit. That landscape has changed a fair bit as well.

What would you say, you know, through sort of in the last couple of years especially, but through that 15 or so years that you've been selling, what do you think hasn't changed? And then what do you think has dramatically changed in the way you have to sell?

Yeah, really good question. So the things that I think haven't changed and will never change around selling or being any sort of business development or revenue generation part of a company is the persistence that is required to do that. In that role naturally you get more no's than you do yeses. If you were getting more yeses, you'd be killing it. And you don't need to listen to me right now. Switch off and go back to the beach. But if you are like 99.9% of sales or business development people in the world, you are stacked up with way more nos and yeses. And so having the persistence and the resilience to actually push past that re energize yourself personally. And it is the personal thing, how you manage your energy flows, that is something that will never change. The other thing that I think is part and parcel with that and a part of re energizing yourself is managing your energy levels almost through creativity. A lot of the time you do need to be creative with how you're selling and how you're proposing a solution to a client. And that creativity is something that will energize you naturally. So persistence, creativity and resilience are probably the things in any BD role that will never change in terms of how you sell. And what's evolving very quickly and has changed dramatically throughout my career is, is who you try and sell to and what information you know about them before you try and sell to them. And if you're not leveraging technology to pre qualify those prospects that you're going to sell to or keep selling to, then you're absolutely crazy. Because the technology today allows you to totally screen who's interested in you, or even totally screen who you should be selling to based on what else they're doing, where else they're going, where else they're potentially spending their dollars. There's a lot more analytics available today because of the data that's involved with most modern day transactions. There's a lot more sources of data that we can use to build business cases as to why, you know, valid business.

How do you think the, you know, the 20, 21, 22 year old Matt would have gone with that information now as opposed to just here's a list of people call them and deal with the nose. Do you think you could have handled it?

No, I don't to be honest. I mean, I'm in a role now where I have to be so much more sophisticated every day. I have to be way more analytical. I have to look at so much more data and to Be honest, I kind of wish that I lived back in the, in the suits days where it was just cowboys selling media because those guys made a killing because effectively they were selling a lot of the time average solutions to people that didn't know any better in a market that was way less fragmented.

And that's been the monumental shift though, where now buyers have got so much more education and information. Like the reality is the seller doesn't even have as much as the buyer anymore. So that's what's happened massively.

You look at someone today going to buy a car, they probably like. I actually saw this experience the other day. My mother in law is looking to buy a car. The dealer had someone drive a car out to their house to drop it off to do a test drive, which a, that's. That whole experience is totally new in car sales. But then she's pointing out the fact that you could type in a code into the back bumper bar and that allows you to open the bumper without the keys because the keys could stay in the car. Cause with that particular car you could go surfing and leave the keys in the car. And the dealer was like, the representative of the dealership was like, oh, I didn't even know that. So she knew that because she jumped on blogs, she'd done her research and all of a sudden she's down the funnel, she's looking at the actual car, but way more educated because she's way more interested in learning product knowledge for what she's about to pursue.

Yeah, yeah, 100%. I couldn't agree with you more. And it's just how you then have the empathy as a person on the other end of the line to just navigate them through the journey with those shifts. What challenges have you seen and where people have failed and people have succeeded as things have evolved, We've all seen it where people are stuck in their ways and just won't change. But you know, if it is it, you know the same behaviors in a nutshell that's worked. Like where have you seen it work and not work?

Yeah, it's interesting. What you see a lot in selling is you see the lazy salespeople want to get deals across the line by discounting, right? And so as soon as you start discounting, you, you're reducing yield or margin, whatever, however you want to look at it, you're reducing that individual's belief in what they're selling. You're affecting the whole value of whatever the asset is, whether it's media or something else that the company owns. And then you're also devaluing your time and then you're saying to a client, hey, buy this. It was that. But now it's this, like why, why is it cheaper? And why was it originally that price? Was it really ever valued at that price? I see people selling today, like especially in media sales, and it cracks me out.

Right.

But Australia in particular has a massive sale centric buying community across retail and across business. And it's disgusting because like the real price that something's worth is whatever someone's prepared to pay for it. And so like back it, like charge that and find clients that are prepared to pay it or change the value that it's listed at. Right. Because in media I see these pictures at the moment where they're trying to sell like 10,000 impressions worth $80,000, but it'll be discounted however much percent down to $10,000. That's just bullshit. And if someone's buying it, looking at it like that, through that lens, and they're buying it thinking they're getting a good deal, then they're actually an idiot.

I absolutely agree with you and I think it's classic too, the Black Fridays and all of these things that just actually kill your support. Supply chains, they, they make so much disruption to everyone.

Yeah.

You know, only to sell twice a year, but, you know, or would you just prefer this much more consistent line that just grows over time that's much more predictable, much more scalable and like, I flat out agree with you on that totally.

And so like they're just pricing. Price management's one thing that I see as a really interesting trend across every channel. Having a really strategic approach to what you're selling, like how you're selling it, when you're selling it. What, like the product offering. There's so many more things that you could focus on other than just dropping your price. And I would love to see sellers doing more of that and buyers looking for more of that, looking for value adds, you know, as opposed to just discounts.

Yeah. So as you've progressed through, obviously creative, you know, you've had a few roles and things have escalated. So tell us, you know, now, without going into the detail of what your product does or anything like that, but what was the main problem that you saw in the marketplace that you thought that you could have a crack at? And. Yeah, right, what's that, what's that problem look like?

So just to frame it up, BrandCrush, which is a company now that I've co founded, it basically allows brands to connect with consumers through a network of influential businesses. And so what we saw in, what I saw coming off the back of an influencer platform and working in an influencer business was that the fragmentation in endorsement through micro influencers was definitely a trend that was growing, grabbing traction, being desired and admired by brands. And I basically applied that online social ambassador or social influencer approach to businesses. You know, if you think about the trust that you have with your local butcher, or with the person that looks after your kids at daycare, or with your yoga instructor or personal trainer, even the trust that you might have with the community manager in your co working space or your concierge in your office foyer, those real world people are unbelievably powerful endorsement tools for brands to leverage where people work, live and play. And so for me, we recognize that there was this massive movement towards digital, like to buy a click on Google at the Moment averages out $1.50. To buy a click on Facebook globally across all channels at the moment averages out at about $1.23. What we recognize is that we could help brands reach consumers in the real world for a lot less than that, in a way more engaging way that was authentic, genuine and also scalable.

It makes sense. And what so with that problem like so at the end of the day, you're looking at through your career too, you've gone from selling a product that didn't no one knew about to then working with someone that had a bunch of lists that you sold to or sold lists of and then sell banner ads or ads online to then sell platforms and marketplaces. And now you're going to let's remove the technologies. At the end of the day it's how do you get the biggest bang for your buck to the right person?

Yeah, yeah. So for me it was basically about creating authentic, genuine touch points for brands to reach consumers. But I would say over that, that the evolution of technology has allowed that to come about. Because without technology there's no way you could scale that. So our platform now allows a brand to book a campaign with a hundred gyms around Australia or a thousand gyms around Australia and America and they can do a campaign, they can push out one single brand message through all of the individuals that work within that gym. They can pay out to all those gyms if there's a remuneration as part of the campaign or the collaboration. They can manage all of the logistics around getting product or brand material. There's. And doing all that to all those thousand locations wouldn't be Possible without tech?

No, no, of course, it makes total sense. So you've identified the problem and it seems to be a problem and it's, you know, now a problem. What are you starting to see, like brands now? I know that you work with bigger brands, but, you know, as you're starting to, you know, with what's going on, the current environment, localized brands are going to start building again. People are going to look at that footprint of traffic and how far food comes and all these sorts of things. Like, what are the problems you're starting to see now in the current marketplace because it has been so stressed and how, you know, whether you guys have pivoted? Don't need to go into the detail of that. But what's the problem starting to see and what you're seeing out of the back of this?

Yeah, I think, I mean, definitely we're right in the middle of COVID 19 and that's definitely been a challenging time for a business that connects brands with people in the real world. And so do that. You need people in the real world. We've been lucky that we have partners on our platform that do, you know, hundreds of thousands of food delivery boxes every month to consumers homes. And so you can, you can insert brand samples or messages into those boxes and then that's a really interesting time to reach families. You know, we work with partners on our platform who deliver the food, like takeaway food to people's homes for Deliveroo and for Uber Eats and for Menu Log. And so again, you know, for brands out there that want to reach consumers when they're right in that moment about to eat something or whatever, that's a really interesting proposition. We've added inventory to our platform that basically allows brands to reach residential towers through concierges in residential towers and get messages to people direct to home.

So those are all so plowing into it though. Like, what's the problem that you're seeing? Is it that, you know, because obviously digital now is, you know, all of these businesses that haven't gone digital now, gone, oh, I've got to go digital. So the networks are absolutely flooded. Like, what's the core problems you're starting to see that you're starting to be able to.

Here's our play. This is where we see it going. What we've realized in the last 18 months, two years of building BrandCrush and building a network of everyday businesses is that putting Covid aside for a second, those businesses have amazing reach. They are their own media solution. Right? The customers that come through their physical doors every day, or the customers, even the customers that they email or the customers that they message and amplify to across their social channels are all a media solution. So what we are trying to become, and the problem we are trying to solve is to democratize the world's media, right? And so what we're saying is that every business that has any physical, digital, or social reach on the planet can now monetize that with our platform. And we think that that's a game changer because these are the guys that are paying rent. These are the guys that, you know, have to outlay a ton of dollars a lot of the time on stock, or they're, you know, they're paying massive costs to be able to facilitate that foot traffic. And so now we're saying you can monetize that. And so whether that's an event company running events, or whether that's a shopping center that has thousands, 20,000 consumers coming through their shopping center every day, or even if it's a massive grocery supermarket, they're doing a lot of that sort of selling offline in PDF packs at the moment. We're gonna systemize the whole process, obviously leveraging technology, and as part of that, we aim to democratize the world's media.

I like it. And tell us a little bit about the theme of this whole podcast is talking to people that, you know, we're in a really interesting space at the minute with COVID that's going on. You know, the world's globalized, but we're going to start shrinking. It's going to change. The world's changing again, and people are starting to be a bit more conscious, I think, of what they're consuming, where they're consuming, and all that sort of stuff. What, you know, what's Brand Crush doing? What are you guys doing as a business to try and help enable this to happen? Is it something that you are doing or Tell us a little bit about what the values behind your business are to. To help make the world a better place and also make businesses better as well.

It's a tough one. And there's always a fine line when you're a startup. You're scrapping for every dollar you earn and you're conscious of every dollar that you spend. It's like a very fine line between having this epic, carefree place to work where no one is a number, or, sorry, everyone's just a number, or whatever. In our environment, everyone is crucial and has a massive impact in the business. Every person in our business is unbelievably accountable for set outcomes. We have this balancing act between driving core outcomes that the business needs to achieve its milestones. And those milestones might be related to getting to a revenue level where we need to raise some more money to grow faster. Or it might be, you know, milestones of transaction volume to show the health of our marketplace, or it could be milestones around, you know, the type of businesses that we onboard. What we do as a business is really try and empower our team with, you know, the freedom to go away and do their jobs. And we trust that they. We already trust that they're doing it to the best of their ability. We trust that they are out there hustling as hard as they possibly can. And we try and as a leadership team, basically just take away any barriers to them being successful. And then from a cultural perspective, there is a lot of flexibility around, especially at the moment, you know, when people are homeschooling, when people are potentially being stood down. Like we've had to stand down a couple of people. Or in between, when Covid first hit and Jobkeeper, you know, we stood people down. We stood people down and then still had them showing up to our daily calls and they just wanted to show up to be involved in the company. And, you know, those people that give and give and give like that are the first ones that we hired or put back on as soon as we could as well. So it goes two ways, but from our perspective, trying to build a culture as a young startup, it's hard because there's got to be this reality around everyone just going out and working hard to do their job. But then there's an old school mentality that if people aren't in the office, are they really working or are we getting out of them?

Where does that subculture come from? The, you know, that you have to see people to see that they're working?

I think that, you know, my.

Is that from investors or is that like, you know, that they feel like if you're not, you know, because that is what I would call a brawl, a bullshit rule these days.

I think that that's probably been blown out of the water during COVID especially now. Yeah, we've proven that we can still survive and thrive working totally remotely, staying connected virtually.

But.

I guess there's that question that you always ask when you're paying payroll is, are we getting the most bang for our buck with that role? And there's a ton of distractions at home, whether it's everything from putting the washing out to looking after the cat or whatever, I don't know. And to me, I probably lean a lot more towards the work from home, thinking my business partner probably leans a little bit more towards the office environment. Not because she wouldn't trust people that they're working hard, but more so that we can try and build a stronger culture and bring people together and collaborate more, have better communication. So there are pros and cons for both, both sides of it. You know, time will tell which, which is the best.

What has, you know, with this environment. What's two things, like, one that you've, you've learned that you didn't know was going to happen from, from your team and how in what you've adjusted that you didn't really think was going to happen. And then what's one thing that you're just like, wow, that is just a bit of a shock to your system that you weren't expecting.

Yeah. So look, we coming into COVID 19, we were setting up for another capital raise. And as a tech startup, the capital investment that comes into the business is your lifeline. That's what allows you to keep growing the team, to speed things up and to keep building the tech. And when you're planning for a raise, you're typically getting to the end, towards the end of your Runway, right? So that's when you're like, you're in a box, it's filling with water and you're getting to the top and you're gasping for air. So it's like, it's scary, right, because you don't want to get to the point where that water goes above your head and you haven't created more room in the box to get more air. It's game over. So we're at a time where, you know, we were growing unbelievably quickly, month on month. And then Covid hit and we took an absolute hit, you know, to our revenue. And we've been blown away by the support that our early stage investors have given us. They have been not just supportive, but also mentoring us to think and look at what the next two years, three years looks like. And there's a dramatic shift in the startup world, going from a state of growth to a state of profitability. And that's been a massive shift because for the last five years of my life in tech startup land, it's been all about growth, like profit. What's that? I haven't heard about profit for five years. All of a sudden, I'm working in a business that is now Very focused on getting to a break even and a cash neutral point where we can survive for an indefinite period of time without more investment. And if we ever take investment on again, it'll be to grow, speed up growth, not to survive.

And so that, yeah, that is awesome to hear because reality is, it's funny money too. And you can't breathe. Like, if you want to ever breathe properly, you've got to survive yourselves. And it probably goes right back to your point of when you started working at Subway, you had a bit of freedom.

Totally, totally. Until, to be honest, until this business gets to a point of cash neutral or profitability anyway, it doesn't feel like a real business. It's like the word startup to me kind of shits me because it's like, oh, yeah, startup, what's that code for? That's code for a business that's losing money. And I don't want to be that. I don't want our business to be that.

You're two years old now. Like, you're not a startup. Yeah, it's a buzzword and I think it's done now too.

So slowing down some of the growth, but changing our structure. So we've had really amazing advisors and mentors and investors, you know, force us to really focus on what are the revenue drivers and levers within the business that we need to focus on. And we have done a massive remodeling of how we're going to focus our sales strategy and our product strategy to basically just 10x that path to profitability. And so literally this whole Covid thing has basically given us an unbelievably rewarding shakeup because we could have kept going along with it with an okay business model growing top line revenue quickly. But sometimes top line revenue in a marketplace where you could only be earning a very small percentage of margin is a lot of work to not get much bang buck. And so there's no secrets in saying that we're pivoting towards selling our software. And when you're selling software, there's way more margin, it's way more scalable in terms of you can like the cost to acquire a customer actually stacks up because you could spend 500 bucks, get a customer, but you know that they're going to spend $5,000 in the first year, depending on what they are.

Yeah, it's fascinating too, this week it's come up because Australia, we've been quite, you know, sheltered. In reality, we missed 2008. Like, we didn't really hit that, you know, global recession in, you know, when you look at it, I think it's 29 years straight. We've had positive growth. Yeah. So I read an article this week which talks about that. Reality is in every 10 years there's two years that are going to be pretty average and one shocker. And you need to plan for that and no one does. You know, they generally plan for growth but don't plan for the bad time. So it was just really interesting article and it's an interesting thing to think about in this current climate.

What baffles me is not just little businesses that don't have money put aside to survive, but there's big businesses out there that can't survive a month without revenue. And that's scary. That should be built into their dividend model. That should be built into that. Cash reserves is like rainy day money. I don't know, I've only ever thought about it personally, but it's something every business should be looking at. I heard yesterday that one of the most iconic sort of cafe restaurant bars in Sydney, you know, the bucket list has gone under through this. That is a business that like is iconic and just obviously, you know, challenging time but tough cash management. So yeah, the modeling has forced us to change. We're expect like in this market, if you're a startup, don't expect to raise cash until like 20, 21, 22 at least because everything is drying up and you need to be doing your modeling.

For and like reality is where the businesses that we're talking about this more sustainable growth too. So you know, if you want to be and we've talked about this previously on a couple of the podcasts of, you know, the custodian. Custodian to your business, you actually leave it in a better place. So you know, you don't actually. It's like a farm or a property. You don't own it. You're the custodian of it. You come in and you should make it better. And when you leave it, the business should be stuck in a better place. And those ones that you've just talked about, like reality is whoever was running those big enterprise businesses has not set them up for the future. Yeah. And we're not like this is only probably the start of, you know, we had fires at the start of you that's, that's going to happen again. Like everything in the world speeding up. So if we don't slow down, it's just going to keep happening. So you need to plan for it. So I think, you know, it's a Fascinating lesson to go through with what you've had to in the last couple of months, but a lot of people have. But at the stage your business is at too, it's just amplified it so much. So I can imagine how stressful.

Yeah, tough, but probably rewarding. And now I look back, you know, I think Steve Jobs said you can always never make sense to things until you look back and connect the dots. And then when you look back, that's when it makes sense. And I look at personal life and business life and it makes. It's so clear now to get that lesson now is actually something that I'm grateful for.

So, yeah, yeah, it's awesome. So if you were to give a tip to like someone that is owning revenue for a business, not the owner, you know, your background, you've sold into people that have probably run revenue for a long time, what would your, you know, tip be at the minute? And not even at the minute, like the theme of the last few years you've had to that person, how's it really going to help them in this really over noisy, complicated, challenging environment? What would it look like?

I mean, there's so many ways you can tackle this question. Everything from how they look at the product positioning to how they segment their customer base, how often they're talking to their customer base from. Let me think about that. So from my perspective, if someone's in charge of driving revenue for their business, I'd probably look at their current revenue pot and then create some Personas about who's bringing in the revenue in that pot. And so let's say you end up with four Personas. I would look at. Out of those Personas, which one has the most margin in it? And then align your resource investment with that Persona. Whether that's more salespeople selling for that particular customer or whether that's more marketing towards that particular customer or whether that's building more products that that customer could potentially buy, or even looking at what else you can do across those other customer Personas to get them behaving more like the one that's the most margin. So it's a really tough question to answer generally, but looking at your customer base from a Persona level is probably where I would start. And that Persona starts from behavioral traits, pain points, and then also price points that they are prepared to pay for your product or service.

Don't hang out with the discounters that just want it for the cheapest price, huh?

Exactly. Exactly.

Awesome. So Matty, you're two years into brand crush and it's been a journey. What has that journey to the vision looked like and how sort of far into it compared to what you thought you would be?

So two years ago I said to my partner, we'll only do this for two years. I get reminded of that pretty much every day. The vision is always unbelievably optimistic and rose colored and you know, the real warts and all outcomes is probably a lot more exciting and a lot more rewarding than what the original optimistic vision is. You know, raising cash. And I know this talk's not necessarily about that, but that's a process that I actually wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. Raising cash is so hard because, you know, you just want to build your dream. You think you're going to solve a problem with what you've built or what you're building and then the raising the cash is like, it's like sucking air out of that. If you push through, obviously you find people that believe in that vision as well and they support the vision and then they're on the journey together and in an ideal world it comes to fruition and then, you know, some other bigger fish wants to by that and everyone's a winner, including the supporters. But for me, what I've probably realized is that the initial vision was mainly about the outcome and the, what I thought would be the end of the road, the exit or whatever. And what I realize now is that it's probably more about the journey. And if it takes two years, cool. If it takes five years, well, do you know what? That's probably not a bad thing either because every day we're learning, we've got an awesome team that we're building and the human connections, which is powerful. And when we get to a point of profitability, I don't care if I'm working in this business for 50 years.

So I think it's that flipping that mindset too. It does. You start to flip into abundance and then it becomes really exciting and it's like, well, I don't need to get rid of it now.

Exactly.

And we're talking. This conversation has come up a couple of times this week around you think of athletes at the minute where there's no date now, there's no Olympics, there's no football, there's no. So it's actually all about the process now. It's about your behaviors, it's about your resilience, it's about your discipline, it's about all of that shit that you don't want to do.

Yeah.

And it's no different in business in a nutshell.

Yeah, you've definitely nailed it. When you're thinking and focused on an exit or an outcome, it's a scarcity mindset. And when you're focused on the journey, it's very much that abundance mindset. And I would say it's something that I'm working towards. And the closer we get to profitability, the closer I'll be to that abundance mindset. And purely because until you're at that point as a business, you are at the mercy of investment. And that, that, that's tough. It's a really tough process to go through.

Totally. It's exciting. It's good to hear that it's, you know, that it's moving and you've pivoted and it's, you know, it's going well and you're excited about it, which is awesome. So tell us your in the last couple of years, Matty, what's your most, your biggest success story or your most proudest moment that you know as a business owner, what would that be?

Proudest moment, last couple of years. It wouldn't be a business. I've got a little three year old boy who's running around and you know, my partner and I are just unbelievably proud parents. And that topples anything in business for anyone out there who is, you know, I watched a podcast.

Watch one.

Listen. Sorry. I listened to a podcast the other night and it was talking about the mindset of super successful entrepreneurs. And the mindset, you know, basically determining what those entrepreneurs focus on and what they either outsource or cut out of their life. And I was talking about your daily activities. It could be $10 an hour roles like doing the washing or cleaning the car, all that sort of stuff. This talked about the super entrepreneurs outsourcing that and paying someone else to do it. Then it talked about them basically reducing their family time down to minimal or nothing. Right. And that's because it leaves them so much headspace that they can focus so much more on the business and, and maybe their health and their personal development. And I thought about that. I'm like, I get that for someone who hasn't had kids yet and you might think like that. And I've definitely written goals in the past and my goals said that actually in my goals when I was younger, I put a percentage of how much I was going to be focused on family versus business. And it was something like up to 42, the age of 42, you know, I'm going to be 70% focused on business. And then after 42, it'll start to ratchet back towards family. All that is out the window now. And I'm not saying that I'm the best dad because I'm definitely very, you know, or the best partner. I'm very work focused.

It's a journey.

But doing it together, doing that as a team, that's something that I now work a lot more towards and that's something I'm trying to get better at. Getting that family unit on the bus and focus together is probably the most rewarding thing and the most exciting thing that I could do that is positively impacting my business life. And in terms of what I'm most proud of outside of that, it would be proving an idea like so bringing this concept that every business could be their own media, whether that's gyms, cafes, yoga studios, Pilates studios, and building a platform that brands actually use to collaborate with those at scale that had never been done before. And now we've got campaigns happening all over Australia and America using that concept and executing to create great brand, engaging brand touch points. And so that's super exciting as a creator, because you have a vision and to see it come to fruition is immensely rewarding.

Yeah, that's awesome. So to give us an update where you're at, Mattie, how big is the team? How many customers do you have globally? So we can report back on this in a couple of years to see where we're at?

Yeah, cool. Good question. So the team here in Australia is around about nine. We have some, you know, some devs and stuff that are all over the world and we've got about four staff across the US that work on a contracting base. But let's say, let's say there's 20 people involved in bringing BrandCrush to life around the world. You know, we've got about 850 businesses that have listed their inventory on our platform. So there's about three and a half thousand media listings across our platform and, you know, and then there's about 400 brands that use our platform as the marketplace. So let's say there's about 1200 clients and 20 staff and we're across two countries. And I'd love to come back and talk about where we are in a couple of years time and I think it'd be a good story.

Yeah, it's very exciting. And it's all just getting started. I love it.

Early days, lots of exciting things to come, that's for sure.

Awesome, Matty. So I just wanted to really thank you for coming on. It's been interesting to just hear how your career and some of those early things have built you into the business person you are and how sometimes, you know, we all do it. You don't think of those things in those early days that actually shapes who you become and also don't forget them because they are the most powerful things. So there was some absolute gold in there. So, Matty, really appreciate you coming on. I hope you enjoyed it, and I'm sure we'll be in touch some stage soon for another one.

Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.