In this episode of the Business Blast Podcast, host Tyler Wagner interviews serial entrepreneur Tom Matzen, who has founded 82 businesses and helped clients generate over $100 million in sales. The conversation opens with Matzen’s dramatic story of turning a $21 million IPO into $10 million of debt within six months, illustrating his "Dolphin" strategy: align with peers who share your collaborative mindset and avoid “sharks” that exploit you. He then shares his core business insight—start with a high‑ticket, high‑margin offering rather than low‑priced funnels—to generate cash flow, hire teams, and bootstrap growth. Matzen emphasizes an outcome‑focused approach, arguing that services should be sold on the results they deliver (e.g., new clients, sales) rather than on the tasks or tools used. He introduces a goal‑scaling technique he calls “annuagging,” inspired by coach Anurag Gupta, which multiplies targets to ensure actual performance far exceeds original aims. For personal fulfillment, Matzen highlights the importance of maintaining momentum and viewing life as a journey, not a destination. He recommends Michael Gerber’s The E‑Myth for building systems that let a business run without the owner, and cites Jay Abraham’s principle that anyone with valuable knowledge has a moral duty to serve as many people as possible. Finally, he promotes his nonprofit’s free three‑hour masterclasses at masterclass.entrepreneurempowerment.org, aimed at reducing small‑business failure worldwide.
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Welcome to the Business Blast Podcast. I'm your host, Tyler Wagner. This episode is brought to you by Authors Unite. Authors Unite provides you with the support you need to finish your book. Best part is, after you finish your book, they take care of the entire publishing and marketing process 100% for you. So if you want to become a successful author, make sure to check out authorsunite.com. Now let's jump into the episode.
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All right, everyone, welcome back to another episode of the Business Blast podcast. I'm your host Tyler Wagner, and to start this one off, I want to know, would you like to get paid for your results you deliver rather than the time you put in? My guest today, Tom Mattson, clients wake up, check their inbox, and meet pre-screened prospects daily. He has started 82 businesses of his own. More importantly, his personal clients have generated more than $100 million in sales in dozens of industries. Tom is all about doing good and making money at the same time. So welcome to the show, man.
Hey, I'm super excited. And what I forgot to tell you, the most exciting part, Tyler, is my son's name is Tyler as well. So you must be a cool dude.
Oh, you didn't tell me that before.
That's sick.
All right. So that does make this interview that much better. So Tom, the first question that we ask on this show is what is the best story from your life that has an underlying valuable message?
I think a good example of that is how I turned $21 million in an IPO into $10 million in debt in 6 easy months.
Wow, yeah, I wanna hear that.
Now the short version, because we only have 5 minutes on the podcast, is we took a company, a franchise company public on the Toronto Stock Exchange. And we, as planned, I stepped down as CEO, we put in a public company CEO that we knew had experience to play with the sharks of the public company market. And about 3 and a half months later, he took all the cash in the treasury, we got delisted, and ended up putting the entire thing in a receivership. And on paper, I went from $21 million in worth, my piece of the shares, to some $10 million in debt in less than 6 months. And so the big advice was, you know, there's a book out there called "The Strategy of a Dolphin." I don't know if you've read it, but it's really cool. And it basically says people are either sharks, dolphin, or carp. Sharks, dolphin, or carp. Sharks are the kill or be killed. We all know about that. Dolphins are the team player. It's all about the pod. It's about having fun. And carp— carp are those friends of ours that are always getting eaten by the sharks. Every time you talk to them, another shark has gobbled them up. So the big lesson is, uh, make sure you play with your kind. I'm not saying like everyone should play with dolphins, but if you're a dolphin, you should play with other dolphins because the shark's job is to eat you. That's their job. That's their job. And so when they eat you, who's the fool? You played with the shark. And that was a very, very expensive lesson, Tyler.
Yeah, that sounds pretty expensive. Well, thank you for sharing that.
So, okay, how about that as a subtitle? How I Turned $21 Million in IPO into $10 Million in Debt in 6 Easy Months.
I subtitle I actually love it. Well, because what's interesting is like when it starts out, like when you first said that, you think it's gonna sound like a gain and then it like throws you off 'cause you're like, "Oh, I went from $20 million to $10 million in debt." And I was like, "Oh, I thought you were gonna say like $20 million to $100 million or something." And then it was no, $10 million in debt. And I was like, "Okay, I gotta hear this story.
What happened here?" Yeah, well, the normal version of my bio always includes how I made and lost millions over the years multiple times. And this was certainly one of the more dramatic ones of those.
Yeah, man, that's wild. So perfectly leads into our next one. So what is the most valuable piece of information we should know that's within your expertise or industry?
Yeah, I thought about this thanks to your pre-show notes, and I would actually say that the single most valuable information, because I'm in the business of helping authority entrepreneurs share their wisdom with the world, and in that context, starting your first sale with a high-ticket, high-margin program, as opposed to what is conventionally taught as a funnel. Tripwire, free item, or whatever, nice and low, and then up to $297, then $497, then $997, then $2,000, and work your way up. All of the— not all, the vast majority of the big players out there, I've had a chance to share the stage with many of them, get to know them behind the scenes, they make their money off of high-ticket, high-margin programs. They don't make it off their $2,000 launches. They make it off their high-ticket, high-margin programs. They teach start small, work your way up, but that's not how they made their money. And so what I've now learned, and this took me, uh, years and millions of dollars of testing, is it's so much easier to start with high-ticket, high-margin as your first purchase. You've got the cash flow, you can do it right, you can hire a team, you can, you can have other people collaborating on it, and you can make money as you grow, or what the tech guys call bootstrapping.
Right?
Bootstrapping is where you self-fund your growth. Startups are supposed to be a temporary phase, not supposed to be a permanent condition. Yeah, that was so big lesson I learned. It's another story, but, uh, yeah. So for me, it's, it's, it's start with— if you're selling your wisdom and knowledge, find a way to package it up so that you start with it in a high-ticket, high-margin way.
I could not agree more. Um, and then, uh, could tie in, but what's your best piece of overall business advice? So not necessarily industry-specific.
Yeah, it totally ties in because it applies all over the place, but it also applies to the programs. The only way someone new or relatively new can do that is they need to focus on outcomes. They need to focus on outcomes. And I was thinking about this in advance of your questions. When you focus on outcomes, you can guarantee results. When you focus on outcomes, you're talking deliverables that matter. So if you're building websites for someone, that's not an outcome. Website is not an outcome. Website is a tool to generate something that leads to an outcome. Maybe it's a lead generation tool, maybe it's a lead conversion tool, right? You know, there's different purposes for websites, but that— websites are not an outcome. The outcome is a new client, or the outcome is new sales, or the outcome is 1,000 people on your list. And that's even not an outcome. Don't be fooled by that. That's actually the path to another outcome. So if you focus on outcomes, and that's either make— in the business world, make money, uh, save money, stay out of jail, or better life. Those are the 4 big ones. Then you can create something that people actually want because you're talking their language. You're not talking a process or a tactic, right? Like, you, you're in the book space, right? People don't want a book. They want what a book will get them, right? The authority, the positioning, the main stage. And maybe even selling a high-ticket, high-margin program, right? That's what the book can deliver for them. They don't want the book. They think they want the book, but they don't want the book. They want what the book gets them.
Yeah, no, I agree. I always tell all my clients that too, that like when you're putting together like your packages, if you will, it always should be results-based. That's what I always say because, and ultimately that makes it easier too to scale because like what you see So see all these packages out there on the market that are just like all like buffed up. And what I mean by that is they have all these things that don't— like it could be a list of like 30 things because they want to perceive, you know, they want the perceived value of it to look good. But you know, it's all things that don't actually produce results. So like what you should really do is try to— and that's fine if you started out that way, like it happens to a lot of people, but you should like go back in and look at your package and actually X out everything that is not result-based. Because what you'll realize is that the people that are your potential clients or your real clients, they don't even care about how much you're doing. They just care about what the result is.
And that's the solution, right? Yeah, solution. They're paying you to bring order from chaos.
Yeah. And I think that's the biggest confusion is a lot of people, what they try to portray is they want the person that's paying them to think that they're doing all this work. And at the end of the day, I don't care how much work the person is doing, honestly. I just want to know that if I give them this money, that this is the result that I'm going to get. And if it only takes them 1 minute because they've mastered it in such an amazing way that they can do it in 1 minute, then that's fine.
I don't care. Absolutely. In fact, the longer you're in business, the more you appreciate that.
Yeah, yeah. I'm like, okay, this person is definitely legit. That's crazy. So yeah, no, I think that, I'm glad that we, you know, kind of dissected that more. So next one I got for you is, if you could give your younger self one piece of advice, what would that be?
Oh, this is really cool. I haven't asked that question about the younger self part in a long time, and I loved it. And it had me thinking about, 'cause my answer's changed over the years. And now my advice would be, nobody, nobody reaches their goals. So don't set a goal you want to reach. Instead, follow a friend of mine who's one of the top business coaches in the world, in my opinion, Anurag Gupta from The Difference Engine. He takes companies that do $10 million a year, Tyler, and gets them to $1 billion a year. 100% success rate. Crazy, crazy, amazing guy. And he starts off by saying, if your goal is to make $100,000, let's say, the first thing you need to do is double that. So now you're playing for $200,000. You with me so far? Then you build triple redundancy to achieve the $200,000. So you come up with 3 separate strategies, each capable of achieving the $200,000. Now you've effectively 6x'd your goal, right? $100,000 to $200,000, 3 of those is $600,000 you're shooting for. When your original goal was 100. Now, as you put in and execute on the 600, you blow past your 100. So it's called— and I call it annuagging your goals as a tribute to Anurag Gupta. Um, and it's a concept that the first time I heard it, I didn't get it. The second time I heard it, I didn't get it. The third time I heard it, I went, holy cow, this is profound. It's why we don't reach our goals. Yeah, because we set goals for trying to get to—
I get it. No, that makes sense to me. That's amazing. Well, it's like a different mindset about it. Really, a lot of times that's all it comes down to, because once you set it up in that way, like, even if you don't hit the $600,000, like, you're gonna definitely hit over $100,000.
The key is you got to do it for real. Like, you got to play it for real. Each of them have to be $200,000. Work it out, get your best planning in place, and then you're absolutely right. Yeah, 1/6 is like 18% of your goal or so.
Yeah, right.
We can do 18% of our goal.
We can do that. So, then, kind of going a little bit down a different path here, in your opinion, what is the key to happiness?
So, for entrepreneurs, it's one thing in my experience, momentum. Momentum. When we have too much pressure and noise, we get stuck. So, for entrepreneurs going forward gives us momentum, going backwards gives us momentum. Oh, yeah. I'm going to overcome that. Right? But we hate being stuck. We hate being stuck. And so if you're an entrepreneur, focus your entire world on how do you create and sustain momentum, and you will be happy. You will be inspired. For outside entrepreneurs, I was thinking about this. If you think of just the general world everywhere all the time, I learned this from a race car friend of mine early on. Life is a journey not a destination. If you're always playing for the finish line and that's the only thing that gives you joy, your life is going to be filled with vast periods of non-satisfaction and brief moments of joy, even if you're one of the best race car drivers in the world. Same goes for any profession, same goes for the normal journey of life. So focus on life being a journey, not a destination. Now, frankly, if I knew how you could do that, I would probably be a life coach, but I'm not. So don't ask me how, Tyler. I just know that it's really important to have that attitude.
Yeah. And then what is the best book that you've read and what was the number one thing you learned from that?
I used to be an E-Myth Mastery Coach with Michael Gerber. So, "The E-Myth," "The E-Myth Revisited," I think is still a classic book for entrepreneurs. His philosophy was we need to spend more time working on our business and not in it so that we can create a business that works with or without us. It's the difference that separates entrepreneurs from small business owners. It's the difference that separates 7-figure solopreneurs from 6-figure solopreneurs. And it's the difference that separates 8- and 9-figure businesses from 7-figure startups. Creating systems, creating processes, some of them sound boring, but the more you can do it, the more your business works with or without you. And that's really what it's about, right? Then you have a business that serves you. And so, yeah, to me, I think The E-Myth, E-Myth Revisited, people that know it love it, and people that don't go, what? Who's that? Never heard of it.
Nope, I know it very well. I believe it. And then what is your favorite quote and why?
Uh, old business coach of mine, Jay Abraham, he always said, if you have something of value, you have a moral obligation to serve as many people as you can. So it's way more about the money than the money. It's about serving others, right? If you've got something of value, if you've learned something unique or different or powerful You have a moral obligation, in his opinion and mine, to serve as many people as you can. You need to learn how to do that.
Yeah, man, I agree. Dude, this was a really good one. Um, so the last one I have for you—
bang, bang, bang! You got to be organized. Yeah.
Um, the last one I have for you is, where can our audience best find you online?
Well, we do something called 3-hour deep dive master classes, uh, where we take these topics and just teach, teach, teach for 3 hours completely free. I think that'd be the best thing a listener could do. Just go to masterclass.entrepreneurempowerment.org. It's a non-profit foundation we've set up to reverse the failure rate of small business around the globe. A big chunk of that is our masterclasses. masterclass.entrepreneurempowerment.org.
Perfect. Thank you again for coming on, man.
You got it.
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