The Stress-Per-Dollar of Online Sales with Matt Putra

Josh (00:00:02) - Hey. Good day everybody. Welcome to The Deal Scout. On today's show we're going to talk about e-commerce, the business of online. We just made it through Black Friday, and we're getting ready to gear up for the holiday season. And you e-commerce people are probably gearing up to make money. And at the end of the day, you want to see more money in your pocket. So today we're going to talk about that. Matt is an expert. He's a CFO, he's super smart and he's made a lot of money for himself and for others. Matt, welcome to the show.

Matt (00:00:32) - Thank you so much, Josh. I'm really honored to be here.

Josh (00:00:34) - Yeah, man. If we had people in the audience, we'd be like, yeah, Matt, go, Matt, go! So, uh, Matt, we meet in a coffee shop and I'm like, hey, Matt, what's up dude? What? Who are you? How do you answer?

Matt (00:00:46) - How do I answer? Oh, man.

Matt (00:00:48) - Okay, well, I say, um, I am a very lucky person that gets to work with businesses around the world, helping them scale their businesses with more cash and less stress.

Josh (00:00:58) - Yeah, more cash sounds awesome. Less stress. That also sounds awesome. What about more cash and more stress? Do you see that a lot in the businesses that you work with?

Matt (00:01:08) - I mean, actually, yes. I mean for sure. Uh, you know, there's a concept of, uh, of stress per dollar. So you could be a highly paid freelancer and you're just chilling, and then you want to build a whole firm out of it. Then you have like 40 employees. So there is a concept of more stress per dollar earned. However, what we can do is work on the cash flow, accounting, tax compliance, government, uh, team alignment side of that stress and begin to remove those things for you. So at least you know, you're you're you're trying to figure out how Bob relates to Susan and how do you help their relationship, but you don't have to worry about how you're paying them next week.

Josh (00:01:43) - Yeah. Hey, that's pretty cool. Uh, give us a little bit of the story, right. Every podcast show, we're going to ask you what your story. Why? Because we want to know context, okay, blah blah blah. This guy's saying all these things, but if you haven't done it or if you haven't lived it or if you haven't experienced that, how do we know? How can we trust that you could do it for me, right. So absolutely kind of given that that is a.

Matt (00:02:04) - That's a very important question. Uh, because in fractional CFOs, there's a lot of people these days that weren't CFOs before, they were fractional CFOs, you know, so luckily for me, um, so I was appointed by a board at 32 to be a CFO of a private equity group. And we had, uh, like eight businesses under our umbrella, a whole bunch of audits. We had, um, you know, very high eight figures, low nine figures in capital that we were supposed to manage.

Matt (00:02:31) - And we were doing deals across Canada, anywhere from 10 to $500 million. Um, so as CFO of that group, uh, I had to do all the back office, of course. So tax, insurance, audit risk, investor relations, capital raising. And then I got to work deals. Side two. So looking at new deals, uh, is this the right fit? What might this company do if we do the investing. Uh, how would they perform? How can we help them if they get in trouble? So I got to touch really everything on both sides deal side by side, sell side, all that stuff. Uh, and of course, running the business, um, you know, and then, you know, that was me. I was commuting from my suburb to, like, downtown Vancouver, Canada, so I was commuting three hours a day. Uh, so I'd leave at six, get home at six, and I'd get like an hour with my little kids every day only.

Matt (00:03:21) - And, uh, when Covid happened, uh, I got all this time back. I work from home. I saw my kids all the time, and I was like, well, this is what I've been missing. So I told them I was like, hey, uh, what if I just work from home after COVID's kind of. It's all over. They're like, no, you got to come back to the office like full time, you know? And so I said, well, peace out guys. So then I started working fractionally, uh, for e-commerce businesses, started by helping a couple of friends and then just ended up being really good at it. And more people ask for help. I started helping them. And then at some point we realized, I think we have product market fit and there's something we can do at scale. And, you know, now we're kind of 15 people in 30 clients and from the UK, US, Canada, Australia.

Josh (00:04:06) - Good freaking job, Matt.

Matt (00:04:08) - Thank you very much.

Josh (00:04:09) - Yeah. So I think this this, this, this stance that you took in terms of what's important to you, right? This is the whole golden handcuff conversation that I've had a thousand times. It's you're standing in front of something and come back here, make a lot of money and leave what? You know, leave that at home. Now, some corporations, I think, are getting wiser and they go, we value you, we want you. We want to figure this thing out. We need a little bit of both. Um, but anytime you draw a line in the sand, you're going to have to force people to make a decision. And you chose your kids. I did. Now, how old are the kids or were they at that time?

Matt (00:04:47) - Uh, well, they're currently nine, eight, six and three. Uh, and this was, uh, 20 late, late 2020. So they were six, five, two and didn't have the other one when this conversation happened.

Josh (00:05:02) - Uh, Covid, baby, I have a Covid baby, right?

Josh (00:05:06) - Yep. You nailed it.

Josh (00:05:07) - Nothing else to do. You know, we might as well. So you made the decision to, you know, do that. So does that mean you're working from home right now? And there's, you know, I'm.

Matt (00:05:17) - In my basement office. In my home? Yeah. Yeah.

Josh (00:05:19) - Neat. So if you look back at the decision you made. You made the decision to say no, this is the route we're going to go. And you're just like, was that was that a scary decision? Or where you're just like, I got money in the bank, I'm okay. Or was it?

Matt (00:05:33) - No, this is super scary. So scary. So, um, part of my story is that I didn't make good money until I was in my 30s. I made shit money the whole time in my 20s because I. Anyway, various reasons, but, um, I thought it was going one way, and then I pivoted.

Matt (00:05:48) - And of course, sometimes when you pivot, you go down first to go back up. So we did not have a ton of money. And I told my wife and I was like, look, I think I have to do this. And I was like, there's so much money we have. And I think here's a number where if it doesn't work, I'm going to go back to work. And we have never hit that the, the, the death number or whatever that, that day zero number. Um, but my wife, to her credit, was like, look, I think you should try. I'm with you. If we have to move to Argentina for a while, make this work. We can do that. Uh, or somewhere. Bali and, uh, yeah, we just kind of jumped in both feet and never looked back. And, um. Yeah, if I.

Josh (00:06:27) - Asked your wife, what is your superpower? What would she say?

Matt (00:06:31) - Oh, man. I think she would say it's my ability to connect with people, um, to like, listening and conversation and making them feel like kind of cared for and warm.

Matt (00:06:41) - I would say that's. I mean, I'm good at numbers, sir, but that's the real superpower.

Josh (00:06:45) - You're such a weird CFO because, like, most CFOs would be like, yeah, numbers, Excel spreadsheet, you know, C name, whatever formulas. But good job, dude, that's really cool.

Matt (00:06:56) - Yeah, well, I mean, look, I, you know, it's a bit of a it's whatever. I being appointed by a board at 32 is pretty young for a CFO. And there's a reason for that. And I say I think it's just my ability to connect. You know, I can get things done because people know that I care about them. Yeah.

Josh (00:07:13) - Cool. Matt, you brushed over something and I already got permission from you not to. You know, there's no question that I can't ask. And if I go there, you could always, like, say no. But when you said you made shit money in your 20s and you're like, well, that's another story.

Josh (00:07:26) - No, let's make it today's story. If you could go back. And how old are you now?

Matt (00:07:30) - I'm 38.

Josh (00:07:31) - Okay. 38. You go back and you're talking to your 20s self and you're like, listen, here's how to not make shit money in your 20s. What would you say?

Matt (00:07:39) - Yeah, I would have said to to. Listen to myself earlier. So I was in a job where I thought it was going to be the right thing, and I stayed in it long after I started hating it. I would have said to start bouncing around to trying new things faster, because once I started bouncing around, I started figuring out what I wanted to do. So then the bounces got more focused and then I got to where I wanted to go.

Josh (00:08:05) - That's so good, giving yourself permission to bounce around, because when I was growing up, it was like, Josh, you need to pick something and stick with it. I'm like, I don't know what I want to do. Yeah, but bouncing around over the years made me.

Josh (00:08:19) - I touched venture capital or private equity. I'm a firefighter here and I was zip up whatever. But over time, I found my zone. What was the day that you knew you were in your zone?

Matt (00:08:33) - Yeah. Well, I think it's it's it's basically the right day. Um, I went to work for a local manufacturer. Uh, I turned down a job for nearly double the money because I wanted to work in a small company to get a certain amount of experience that was more focused. Right. And I was installing their sort of enterprise resource software. So it did shipping and inventory and all the stuff. Okay. So I'm getting in there, and I realized that there's a SQL database behind it all, and I never knew SQL before. So I was like, oh, see what? It was cool. So I started ripping all the data out, chopping it up. And I approached them one day and I was like, hey, by the way, this product line is doing really well.

Matt (00:09:09) - It's supporting the rest of these product lines that are not doing really well. If you either change the pricing or cut some of these, you will make a lot more money as a company. And I could quantify it. So we started making those decisions. Over the next six months, net income went from below 0 to 20%, um, or 10% in the first year, and then 15% in the second year that I was there. So that day, that presentation was when I knew how much I loved accounting and finance.

Josh (00:09:35) - You're cool man. So all right, so now you made this stance. No, honey, you know, here's the here's the death number. If we drop below this in our savings and our checking, I'm going to get back to work. Right. I'll go do this. And and, you know, I'll just figure it out. You don't have to tell me numbers, but how close were you to that number?

Matt (00:09:54) - I didn't get close at all. Okay, cool.

Matt (00:09:56) - Yeah. Um, it was, I would say so. I was obviously very nervous because I hadn't done my own business before, but I replaced my income in three months. I doubled it in six.

Josh (00:10:05) - Ah, freaking awesome, dude. All right, because you have a product product market fit for your value proposition and the needs of the service, but that came from bouncing around and trying to figure it out, right, 100%.

Matt (00:10:21) - And and you know, the other thing too, that helped me was I was early to market sort of in this fractional CFO kind of boom that happened in like 2020, 2021. So my close rate in those first year was like 50% of the people I spoke to was like, we're signing up, like right now, and there's more competition and more of us and people are more professionalized generally. So close rates are now like 20%. But we've hit a point where we can begin optimizing stuff that other people can't because we're at a size. I mean, we're not big at all, but we're only gonna do like a million bucks this year.

Matt (00:10:53) - Um, but we're at a point now where it's like we have resources to invest in other things that people can't always yet.

Josh (00:10:59) - That's cool. So. And you're in year what?

Matt (00:11:06) - I'm in year, uh, three. Three.

Josh (00:11:08) - Cool. Yeah. Um, along this journey, what was like, some of the challenges. So you went from solopreneur, um, to now hiring people, um, managing people, managing expectations and deliverables? Yep. Uh, and are they a remote force?

Matt (00:11:24) - Yeah. Fully remote. Yep.

Josh (00:11:26) - Super cool. So you didn't say, oh, you got to come here in my basement and, you know, be around my, you know, screaming kids. They can be with their screaming kids.

Matt (00:11:34) - Exactly. Yeah.

Josh (00:11:34) - That's cool. The fractional CFO role that's somewhat new. Right. Because there's this idea of like do I need this full time? Can I do fractional kind of give us the pros and cons like let's just say, um, you know, I approach you and I go, hey, I need this work.

Josh (00:11:55) - Do I hire you guys fractionally or do I hire full time CFO? What are some of the ways that you can kind of help them make that wise decision?

Matt (00:12:03) - Yeah for sure. So you know basically anybody under. 20 million. It's probably not going to hire a CFO for 2 or 300 grand. Right. So even that there is like, well, you can either hire someone for 300 grand or you can go fractional or part time. Um, once you're bigger than that. The question is, do you need full time? So one of our bigger clients is going to do almost 100 million in revenue this year. And I'm fractional there. So, um, for them, it was we need someone right now. We need someone who walks in the door, who knows what they're doing. Um, and because I work with e-commerce companies all around the world, I have a framework of stuff that I know how to do already. So I walk in. I was effective right away. Yeah. Um, and then the question is when? So now we're talking about when do they want to move to a full time.

Matt (00:12:53) - And really the question is like, how much how how often do you feel you're not getting stuff when you want it, right? So if I'm only two days a week, if you email me on a Friday, you're not getting an answer till Monday. Is that okay with you and when is that pinch point. And so for them that's that's the discussion at that bigger size in the smaller in the smaller. But you know sub 20 million you're definitely not hiring a full time. So then the question is well what do you want to get from your CFO. Or do you not need one at all? Is the question to be honest? Yeah, I would say that if you, you know, if you have if you're over 5 million, a good CFO will will cover their own fees. Sometimes they'll cover double their fees.

Josh (00:13:32) - Just the number that you said.

Matt (00:13:34) - If you're over 5 million in revenue.

Josh (00:13:36) - Okay.

Matt (00:13:37) - It's a slam dunk for us to cover ourselves. No problem.

Josh (00:13:40) - So if you're over 5 million, you could essentially pay for yourself easy.

Matt (00:13:45) - 2 or 3.

Josh (00:13:45) - Times. All right. So you and I are going into a pitch. Here's an e-commerce business. They're right at 5 million bucks. Graham has been doing their books and they're accounting and they're like, ah, grandma, I love you. But, uh, we need to go chat with Matt. You and I go in and you go, look, I'm gonna pay for myself. Here's how. Um, what does that look like?

Matt (00:14:05) - Yeah, I mean, so we're going to start easy stuff, right? So negotiate your payment processing fees. Typically you most people haven't done that. Um, and and they should. So whether or not you need somebody everyone who's listening go negotiate your payment processing. If you're over 5 million Shopify will play ball to some extent. So go do that. Stripe will too. If you're a SaaS. Um, the next thing is we'll look at shipping recovery. Sometimes you can recover from shipping that didn't go well. So there's there's some there's some very quick wins.

Matt (00:14:33) - And you don't even need a CFO for all those things. But we'll do it. Yeah. From there. The big one for e-commerce is marketing. So we know how to grow and scale marketing efforts while maintaining your margins. We don't know how to make creative, but we know how to forecast, to plan. We know how to communicate with your agency. You know, communicate with your team so everybody knows what the parameters are around your marketing. One business I walked into, they, you know, I paid for myself two years in two years in two weeks because they were just suboptimal doing their marketing. The the CFO at the time said, you can have this many dollars to spend every month on marketing. Those are the dollars. Use those you can't get any more. Well, that's not how you do it, right? Yeah. What you do is you set a either a blended Roas like return on ad spend. So every dollar must return X target. And then you set some windows around it and you work within the windows.

Matt (00:15:28) - So when I did that they started spending more money. Why. Because there was more profitable customers to be acquired. So they made another, I don't know, 100 200 grand EBITDA in like three weeks, the first couple weeks that I started. Um, the other thing is then just scaling back unprofitable acquisition. So we had a client where they wanted to grow really, really fast, but they were acquiring customers with a 15 month payback. So basically what that means is, you know, you pay for somebody now. And over the course of 15 months, they paid themselves back. That's too long. So we help them understand. Here's a good rate. Your payback should be in this is how much you should pay to acquire customer. So we they scaled down but they have more money in the bank. So then they can scale up a bit on a slower path. So marketing is one. Then we look at uh can you get terms with your suppliers. How do we get you terms with your suppliers.

Matt (00:16:18) - How do we negotiate with them? That's a big one for us. Uh, we also look at hiring. So we teach people how to hire from offshore, where we do the hiring for them. So you're going to get a good ops person for two grand a month instead of like five. Um, those are just a few of the ways, I guess.

Josh (00:16:35) - Yeah. Uh, the the marketing is, is such an important thing. Um, how much should I spend for marketing?

Matt (00:16:44) - How much you spend okay. Good question. So if you're a typical e-commerce business, I'll talk about this in terms of, um, a contribution margin. So let me explain that. I get the sense that you know what it is, but I'll just for your listeners if they don't know. Um, if you have a dollar of revenue, remove every single variable costs. How many cents are left over is your contribution margin. So if you have a dollar cost of goods sold is going to be let's say it's uh, $0.30.

Matt (00:17:11) - So $0.70 shipping is 10 or $0.12 or 60 or 58 and shipping payment processing whatever whatever. Then you're left with around like let's say 50. Then you have to acquire the customer that's, you know, $0.30, let's say. So you have $0.20 left. Over $0.20 is your contribution margin 20%. So spend in such a way that your contribution margin is between 20 and $0.30, uh, or 20 or 30%, um, 20% is on the lower side. If you go less than that, it's actually pretty stressful and hard and risky. Uh, 30 is the higher mark. If you if you let it go higher than 30, you're leaving profitably on acquired customers on the table for somebody else. Basically, yeah.

Josh (00:17:54) - So the beautiful thing about this is, you know, like if marketing is working and for every dollar I spend, I get $1.10 back, how much are you going to spend in marketing? Yes, we're going to keep doing this as long as you have capacity on the back end to fulfill.

Josh (00:18:08) - Right.

Matt (00:18:09) - Exactly. Yes. Yes, exactly.

Josh (00:18:11) - So you are looking at the data to help people make these wise decisions about how to spend their money. Hey, boys. Girls, you're spending money here. If we spend money like this, it's going to be more money in your pockets at the end of the day. More money, less stress. What is the most unwise way to spend money rather than just, you know, scratch off lotto tickets? But like with an e-commerce business, like you see it and you're like, you're wasting so much money, let's not do that.

Matt (00:18:40) - Yeah, a couple things I see. Um, one is, uh, over hiring, hiring too much, hiring too many people too fast. Right? We know that one, though. Every every dollar. Fixed cost requires 4 to $5 in revenue to cover it. If you're an Amazon business, it's like 6 to $8 to cover a dollar fixed cost typically. So just hire slowly, right? Um, a big one lately that I'm seeing is continuing to restock slow moving SKUs.

Matt (00:19:06) - Um, so you look at the 8020 rule, right? Well, 20% of revenue comes from, you know, 80% of revenue comes from the top 20% of your SKUs. So start pruning the bottom 10% of the SKUs every quarter, let's say, don't have to go crazy and prune 50%, but start stopping reordering these things that don't move. Because what's happening is you're taking a bag of money and you're putting it on the shelf. And now if you want to hire somebody or marketing or whatever, that bag of money is stuck on the shelf, you can't do anything with it until somehow customers buy it from you, but slowly unlocks. But I would say that's a big one for people. Um, especially going into this year, uh, people are starting to get a handle on marketing. Um, but inventory is still a problem for sure.

Josh (00:19:50) - The velocity of money, being able to apply that to someone who's going to produce rather than this thing on the shelf that might produce a return, but it might be next year when you need that money today.

Josh (00:20:00) - Yeah, yeah. When you're working with people, you know, we get approached on like sometimes with like bridge loans or uh, um, what is that called? Um, uh, factoring. Right. Yeah. When you, when you take a look at that, like a business is producing and the opportunity comes out, when should we be paying attention to maybe factoring or some type of bridge loan to, to go after something bigger, like how do you how do you approach those kind of thoughts and conversations?

Matt (00:20:29) - Yeah. Good. Very good question. Um. I would say. That. Okay. Well here. So a general principle that I have for debt is to match the timeline of payback for the debt with the timeline of ROI for the usage. Meaning, um, if you're going to use a credit card, use it on something that gives the money back in 30 days, right. Because you have to pay it off in 30 days. So ad spend is a good reason to use a credit card.

Matt (00:20:57) - Uh, because you're going to spend a dollar today. You should get $2 back or so, and you can pay off the card and roll it. Right. Um, don't use credit cards for inventory because inventory takes anywhere from 2 to 6 months to actually sell. So you're locking up this high expense money in something that you can't get it and paid back. So use a bridge loan or a term loan for inventory. Um. So with the general usage in mind, uh, I would say if. You have a scalable funnel. Then you put money behind it. But do it slowly, right? What I see is, oh man, I can acquire customers and it's the first person is profitable. So I'm going to dump 100 grand into it next month. Well, you can't always scale that fast. Um, I worked with the company that went their ad spend went from, uh, 500,000 a month, and they cranked it to one and a half over the course of the next three. It's too fast.

Josh (00:21:53) - Wow.

Matt (00:21:54) - You can't do it. You have to. You can't do that. You need to go top of funnel and build awareness, and then, you know, all that stuff. Yeah. So I would say that's an area where again, if you have a scalable funnel put money into it. But like do it carefully.

Josh (00:22:06) - Yeah. Yeah. Slow growth or restrained growth is sometimes the best decision. You pump that and it spits out all these things. You're going to have drop leads, you're going to have mass churn. You know, like you can, you know, miss out on these clients and the lifetime value of these clients because you've taken them on too fast and can't handle them.

Matt (00:22:28) - Yeah. And we did the same thing. So we hit uh, uh, like about 400,000 in my second year. And the whole next year we, we only did 400,000 again because I was trying to figure stuff out and make sure we knew what we were doing first.

Josh (00:22:40) - Yeah. Do you I mean, I'm glad you did that because it's good, I think, to push the pressure point to see what you can do.

Josh (00:22:47) - But you were stunted for a year. Right? But you learn the systems, processes, operations and then you went up to a million or.

Matt (00:22:56) - Yeah. And some people can do that year faster than I did, but that's how long it took me to, to to feel like I could hit a button and scale and not like, piss people off all the time.

Josh (00:23:05) - It's going to happen. You're going to piss people off no matter what you do.

Matt (00:23:09) - Yeah, of course.

Josh (00:23:10) - It just happens. Um, so now do you feel like you guys have or are at the point where you can scale the fractional CFO side? Yeah.

Matt (00:23:20) - So we've got so, uh, a couple of things we use like an iOS version operating system. Right. Yeah. Familiarity there. I would say I'm a different CFO than I was CEO than I was six months ago. iOS. Um, so now everybody on my team knows where we're going in three years, where we're going in one year, what everyone needs to do in the quarter, what everyone needs to do every week.

Matt (00:23:43) - We all know what to do to maintain traction. All of us, every single person in the whole company. So that's huge, right? Um, the other thing is we've got a lot of stuff documented, a lot of training videos. Um, we have a lot of process documentation. But the big one, to be maybe. Right. Honest. I have a guy in my team who's our director, who's just brilliant when it comes to process, people managing, you know, QA. I could not do this without him. His name is John. John, if you're listening, I love you, but, uh, uh, but for him, we wouldn't be able to scale. He's built all this stuff without even me asking people.

Josh (00:24:20) - Product process.

Matt (00:24:22) - Totally.

Josh (00:24:22) - Do you have to have those things to to scale? I struggle with process. That's not. I'm pretty good with people developing some good products. Yeah, but I'm spending a lot of money developing process. iOS does it really well of of spelling out how to do it.

Josh (00:24:39) - Gino Wickman, shout out to you dude. Good job.

Matt (00:24:41) - Shout out. Yeah. And then I will say as well that I have another CFO on the team that we he started as an analyst and just was a brilliant. And so he's now has his own clients. And again you know if if he didn't do that I would have all the clients myself which wouldn't work.

Josh (00:24:56) - So yeah other than your ability to connect with people and this, this weird mix between highly analytical CFO but highly empathetic and empathetic whatever compassionate towards people and have the ability to connect there. Do you have any other weird trades like, uh, or, you know, video games or, or certain types of book or collector items or anything like that that I should know about?

Matt (00:25:23) - Uh, I do MMA, so I do jiu jitsu and kickboxing. Do you really? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Josh (00:25:29) - Brazilian jiu jitsu.

Matt (00:25:30) - 100%.

Josh (00:25:31) - Nice. How tall are you? Uh, 5858. How much do you weigh?

Matt (00:25:37) - 180.

Josh (00:25:38) - Okay, so, yeah, you got some powerful legs. You could you could kick pretty hard. Awesome, man, I.

Josh (00:25:43) - I mean, yeah.

Matt (00:25:43) - I mean, I'm older, right? So I'm a bit slower than these younger guys, but, uh, but I do. Okay. When we spar, I do. All right. Yeah.

Josh (00:25:49) - Next time we see each other, mat, we're going to fight. Oh, do you do it, too? I did. But I still got in with the old guys. I think in my head I'm still 20, dude. So 100%. You hurt me.

Matt (00:26:00) - How old are you, Josh?

Josh (00:26:01) - I'm 42.

Matt (00:26:03) - Okay, okay. Got it. Yeah. You can still bang. That's fine. We're good.

Josh (00:26:07) - Yeah, man. We'll roll. Um. Awesome, man. Wow. You're pretty cool. So you're the the the financial guy. Like the movie the accountant with with Ben Affleck, right? He's the badass guy, but he's right.

Josh (00:26:18) - That's you basically.

Matt (00:26:20) - Well, you know, I can also I can weld, I can drive an excavator. Bobcat's like, I was very I was very blue collar before my collar was white.

Josh (00:26:27) - So your white collar with a little bit of dirt on it, right?

Matt (00:26:31) - I think so, yeah.

Josh (00:26:32) - Yeah. Very cool man. So Matt, as you're, as you're going on, what's the future look like? Right. You got four freaking kids. Got wife. You got your your job in the basement, right? Like you're cranking. You got a scalable team. You guys are doing well. You're profitable, you're having fun. You're going on podcast shows. Like, what does the next three year look like? If we sat in one of your rocks and socks meetings?

Matt (00:26:53) - Man. I mean, I wrote a vivid vision, right? So I don't know if you've heard of that book Vivid Vision. Um, so I have a pretty clear vision of what I want the three years to look like.

Matt (00:27:02) - Um, let's start with, uh, I'm going to be doing scholarships in the home countries of the people that I employ. So Argentina, Buenos Aires, South Africa. Um, here, of course, as well. Uh, we want our staff to be, you know, the top 30th, whatever the higher percentile of where they live and work. So in terms of earnings, we want to do profit sharing. Uh, we want to have some partnerships with universities where we're doing research together. Uh, and we want to be doing like 5 million a year in revenue. Um, and we want to be serving more clients in more countries, just like helping them win. That's what we all get up for every day is we want people to win. And so we're going to be helping lots of people win with service, but with courses, uh, with coaching and a few other things as well.

Josh (00:27:48) - Do you think you'll ever. Which is awesome. Man, I love it. Do you think you'll ever, like, step into the, uh, spot of private equity or holding or family office where you guys start acquiring your own businesses?

Matt (00:28:02) - I will, I will, uh, look at that again one day.

Matt (00:28:05) - I did that too early with.

Josh (00:28:06) - Some partners.

Matt (00:28:08) - And it was really hard. We bought a business and it closed. And a week later, the EOS thing changed. And so that was really hard. Um, and then I learned that buying and acquiring is is harder than I maybe thought before. Yeah. Now I'm a better CEO then I than I was then, and I think I could do it again now, but I need to make sure that my team can run sort of without me on the day to day. Once that happens, I think I will be looking at it again for sure.

Josh (00:28:38) - Cool. If you could fight anyone, living or dead, pastor, you know, whatever pastor present, who would you fight? Who would you bring into the Octagon with you to fight Anderson Silva? Oh, before. After he broke his leg.

Matt (00:28:51) - Before.

Josh (00:28:52) - Oh, get him in his prime.

Matt (00:28:54) - Yeah, man, I, I think I could I mean, he picked me to pieces, but I think it'd be a great learning experience.

Josh (00:28:59) - Yeah.

Josh (00:29:00) - Nice I would fight. What's that?

Matt (00:29:03) - Him or sensei.

Josh (00:29:04) - Oh, nice. Oh, yeah. Heavy hitters. Man. I think I'd want to fight Uriah Faber or, um. Um. Um, what is the name? The the French dude? Uh, John.

Matt (00:29:18) - Uh oh. GSP.

Josh (00:29:19) - GSP. Yeah. Saint-Pierre. Yeah. I hope he's not listening. He's be offended. I forgot his name. Well awesome, man. All right, so back back to fractional right? Yeah. Do you get do you, do you ever get like, approached by companies who want all of you. And they're like, I want you to, you know, leave what you got going on. Let's try to get Matt full.

Matt (00:29:41) - Um, the conversations only happened once. Okay. Uh, um, and at the time, it was a no. Um, would I ever consider it? I mean, I don't know, I really love this kind of having my own business and kind of, you know, we go skiing Friday mornings all in winters.

Matt (00:29:55) - And, you know, I want to have that flexibility. So if I could get that, plus everything else, maybe. But I don't know, man. I think one of the things I love about owning a business is, you know, the market shifts and you have to figure out, like, what do you how do you shift along with it and fun. I just kind of enjoy that. Like I enjoy that a lot.

Josh (00:30:14) - Yeah. When it comes to like problems that you have internally. Right. What keeps you as fractional CFO for 30 businesses now? Freaking awesome. Good job. What are some of the things that keep you up at night where you're freaking out and you're like trying to figure out, like on a day to day basis, where's your brain go?

Matt (00:30:33) - Yeah. Um, one of the things that's very live for us this quarter is stable again. Um, that's not dependent on the amount of energy that I personally have. So when I have energy, of course, leads come in because I'm active on all the things.

Matt (00:30:46) - But when I'm tired, it's so slows down. So what I'm working on is a big lift. This quarter is getting that off my own energy. Once we do that, um, then the next thing is going to be sort of really strong client success. Uh, team. And then really when that's done, we know how to recruit, we know how to QA. It's the business can grow without me. Uh, I'll still be in it, but that's the big one for us right now. Stable lead gen.

Josh (00:31:14) - Super cool. 20 years from now, you and I are wrestling on a mat somewhere. And we look back and you go, I did it. If there was, like, one metric whether the business succeeds, fails exits or not, but you could look at one metric and go, I'm so proud of that. What would that one metric be?

Matt (00:31:31) - No one measures this, and I don't know that you could, but it's like your family NPS call it. Uh, we would that that would be the how I know I did it.

Matt (00:31:41) - Well, what.

Josh (00:31:41) - Does that mean?

Matt (00:31:42) - Family. It's not even a thing. But, you know, you have you have employee NPS, like how much they like working with you and, like, if you could measure your family, like, how much your kids love you and how close you are with your wife, like, that's the metric that would that would be my measure of success.

Josh (00:31:54) - I interviewed a guy. I interviewed a guy, uh, Neil Bawa, who tracked his, uh, intimacy evenings. So, you know, he he has it on a spreadsheet. He built a spreadsheet. I'm serious. Dude, you can't make this up.

Josh (00:32:09) - Oh, man. Whatever. So maybe you can track this.

Josh (00:32:13) - Uh.

Josh (00:32:14) - Yeah. Well.

Matt (00:32:15) - Yeah, I know. Right? Yeah. That's interesting. No, but for me, 100%, that's what it is all day. Yeah. Like, uh, it's why I left corporate. Um, it's why I'm doing this in the first place, so.

Josh (00:32:26) - Yeah. Super cool. Matt, uh, where could people go to engage with you guys? Like, hey, man, I got an e-commerce business. We're at 5 million bucks. I want it to pay for itself. I want to get rid of grandma. She's not doing a great job. Yeah, they want to hire Matt. Where could they go?

Matt (00:32:41) - Yeah. Two places. Uh, one is our website. So SEO is my is our website. And then LinkedIn. I mean, look for me on LinkedIn. Matt Putra um, I'm pretty active on there. Answer lots of questions. Uh, try to post stuff when I have energy, but, uh, we also make tools, so I'll send you. You asked about, um, contribution margin. I'll send you a tool that you could give to your listeners that would help them figure out how much to spend on ads. But yeah, LinkedIn website, both the best places I'd say.

Josh (00:33:08) - Cool. And what we could do, uh, for you all listening.

Josh (00:33:10) - And we'll put that in the show notes and you could give me a link for that tool that you have. So if you want this tool and you'd like to, you know, learn more about it, go in the show notes and click on it. Matt, was there another question that I probably should have asked you that I screwed up and did not ask you?

Matt (00:33:24) - Well, you didn't ask me if I have cauliflower here.

Josh (00:33:27) - Take off your headphones, bro. I couldn't even see, man. That's do.

Josh (00:33:30) - You?

Matt (00:33:30) - I don't actually, but what I tell my wife is I want just a little bit. So I look tough.

Josh (00:33:35) - Yeah, I want to look here. I'll. I'll twist your ear and give you cauliflower. You did. I had to get it. You're always like, after the wrestling match. I'm always like, squeezing the blood out, you know.

Josh (00:33:44) - They're sore, they're sorry.

Matt (00:33:46) - So I'm waiting. One of these days, one of them's going to pop off and I'll be very excited.

Josh (00:33:49) - Yeah, man. Well, maybe there's someone out there who could do that for you. I have some friends I could send your direction to give you some cauliflower here. Okay, let's do it.

Josh (00:33:57) - I'm happy to.

Josh (00:33:57) - Help. All right. Hey, y'all dealmakers out there. I hope you've enjoyed this conversation. As always, do me a favor. Reach out to my friends and say thanks for being on the show. Their contact information will be in the show notes below. Just say, hey, I heard you on Josh's show and I want to connect if you have a deal. Or maybe you're a deal maker and you want to talk about it here on the show, head on over to the deal scout.com, fill out a quick form, get you on the show. We're going to be running something special in the future where if you have a pitch or a presentation that you want to try to practice your pitch or get your pitch in front of the community, we're going to be raising some money for charity.

Josh (00:34:32) - So if that's of interest to you, you want to pitch your thing, but tie it to some type of purpose head on over the deal. Scout com say something about pitching and purpose in the thread and, uh, we'll see if that works out. So then we'll talk to you all on the next episode. Bye, everybody.