Latest / The Inspired Stories Podcast / Matt Remuzzi's CapForge Journey: From Dot-Com Crash Layoff to 90-Person Accounting Firm

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Matt Remuzzi's CapForge Journey: From Dot-Com Crash Layoff to 90-Person Accounting Firm · The Inspired Stories Podcast

0:04
Welcome to another edition of the Inspired Stories podcast,
0:08
where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from
0:11
their successes and be inspired by how they've overcome
0:14
adversity. My name is Anthony Kotaspodi and
0:17
today's guest is Matt Ramazzi, founder and owner of Cap Forge,
0:21
a bookkeeping and accounting firm based in Carlsbad, CA
0:26
Capforge helps small and mid sized businesses keep clear up
0:30
to date financial records while offering tax, strategy, payroll
0:34
and CFO style advice. They take the stress out of
0:38
numbers so owners can focus on growth.
0:41
The firm is known for its flat rate pricing, 24 hour response
0:45
promise, and it probably claims more five star reviews than
0:49
almost any other bookkeeping company in the US.
0:53
Matt launched Capforge in 2000 after a sudden layoff from
0:57
the.com crash. What began as a solo consulting
1:01
shop has grown to a team of more than 50 professionals serving
1:05
clients nationwide. He holds a bachelor's degree
1:08
from UC San Diego and an NBA from San Diego State University.
1:13
He is also a certified QuickBooks Pro Advisor and the
1:16
author of the popular guide QuickBooks Bookkeeping.
1:20
The 10 Most Common mistakes Everyone Makes and How to Fix
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Back benefits.com. All right, back to our guest
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today, the owner and founder of Cap Forge, Matt Ramuzzi.
2:28
Thanks for making the time to Share your story today.
2:31
Oh, thanks for having me, I appreciate it.
2:33
So, Matt, what kind of work were you doing before Cap Forge?
2:37
Well before cap Ford goes back a long ways, but the last job I
2:41
had where I was an employee, I was working as a consultant for
2:45
small businesses, helping them put together business plan,
2:48
financials and the written business plans to raise capital.
2:53
This was in the.com boom at the time, you know, venture
2:57
companies were giving money to just about anybody who could
2:59
attach.com to the end of their name.
3:01
Not unlike how now if you attach AIT business, but different
3:07
story. But yeah, I was working as a
3:09
consultant. My company that I worked at was
3:12
in turn venture backed and just wasn't getting the traction
3:16
asthe.com boom turned into the.com bust.
3:19
They stopped getting funding and I was laid off one day, rehired
3:24
as a contractor to finish projects, and then summarily let
3:28
go again shortly thereafter. But I knew there was still a lot
3:32
of people out there that needed this help.
3:34
They just couldn't afford it at the rates, you know, I was being
3:37
billed out at as a consultant. So I went out and did it.
3:41
Basically what I've been doing before, but on my own at a rate
3:44
that would make sense. You know, I could get clients
3:47
myself. And that was really what turn
3:49
this into a 25 year long entrepreneur journey.
3:53
So let's go back to where you were first laid off and then,
3:57
you know, brought in as a contractor and then let go
3:59
again. When you got laid off the first
4:02
time, what was that like? Was that incredibly stressful or
4:07
did you? You knew you were going to land
4:09
as a consultant anyway, so you felt all right.
4:12
It was I, I, they had already told me kind of they were going
4:16
to let me go on Friday and bring me back on Monday as a 1099.
4:20
So I knew I had, you know, a paycheck would continue.
4:24
But I could already see the writing on the wall, right?
4:26
This wasn't going to be a long term situation.
4:29
They made it sound like maybe 6 more months.
4:31
It turned out me to be 3 weeks. So what I had envisioned as a
4:36
time frame to figure out what to do with myself was much, much
4:40
shorter than I had thought originally.
4:43
So, and I only graduated from the MBA program in May.
4:48
I got laid off in early September as an employee and
4:53
late September as a contractor. So I mean, I'd literally been in
4:56
the workforce not even six months and I was out of a job.
5:00
So it was nerve wracking. And So what were those first
5:04
days and weeks like? You know, somebody who's not
5:07
been through that before, Most of us have.
5:09
It's incredibly stressful. It was I, you know, was
5:13
fortunate. I'd always been taught from a a
5:16
young age to be physically, fiscally responsible.
5:19
I had a good amount of savings and I figured, you know, I knew
5:24
that there are other people out there who needed what I knew how
5:27
to do. As limited as it was and as
5:29
young as I was at the time, I still had certain skills that
5:32
were valuable in the market. And I figured, OK, I'll give
5:35
myself till January 1st. If I can come up with some
5:38
clients, cool. If I can't, I'll be looking for
5:42
a new job anyways. But this, I wanted to have my
5:46
own business for years and years.
5:47
I just never knew what it was going to be, right?
5:49
So this kind of got handed to me on a silver platter here.
5:52
Now you've got a set of skills and you know how to find people
5:55
out there who need these skills and they're willing to pay for
5:58
it. That sounds like a business.
6:01
Let's give it a try. That just tells me a lot about
6:05
your mindset when you talk about going through a layoff as having
6:10
this handed to you on a silver platter.
6:13
You saw the opportunity in it to, you know, become a business
6:16
owner for the first time. Yes, yes, I like I said, I had
6:21
wanted to be an entrepreneur from, you know, age of 12 or 13,
6:25
right? I was always coming up with
6:27
business ideas, but I didn't have the confidence to pull it
6:30
off. I felt, you know, huge sense of
6:32
imposter syndrome. How am I going to go launch even
6:34
though, you know, lawn care business, I don't mow the lawn
6:37
at home, right? I don't mow the family lawn.
6:39
How am I going to start a lawn care business?
6:40
I don't know how to run the lawn mower.
6:42
So I never really was able to make that leap as much as I
6:46
thought I wanted to until this confluence of events, which I
6:52
chose to look at as an opportunity, largely because I
6:55
had that savings, right? I knew I wasn't going to be out
6:57
on the street. I wasn't going to go hungry.
6:59
At the time, I wasn't married. I didn't have a family or kids.
7:02
So I said, this is, you know, I can't make it now.
7:05
I should just give up this entrepreneur dream and go get a
7:08
job. But this is the window of
7:11
opportunity to give it a try. And so how did you go out and
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find the first client? I largely had a network of
7:19
people I knew from the job I had been doing.
7:22
So I just sent out a bunch of emails saying, hey, I'm no
7:26
longer with, you know, the consulting company, but I'm
7:29
still working with people, you know, I'm saying optimistically.
7:34
I'm still working with people who, you know, need this.
7:37
And I'm happy to engage, you know, directly.
7:39
If you know anybody, here's what I can do.
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Happy to, you know, meet and have a conversation.
7:44
And people I'd worked with in the past, you knew me and you
7:47
know, oh, you know, so and so might be looking for that.
7:49
Or I heard this person or honestly, some of the clients
7:53
we'd turned down or had a conversation with at the
7:56
consulting company where we'd quoted them $25,000 to do a
8:00
business plan and financial projections.
8:02
I went back to them and said, hey, if you guys are still
8:04
looking, you know, I'm out on my own now and I could do it for
8:07
7500 and I was going to be the one doing it anyway and 7500 was
8:13
going to be what I would have made anyway.
8:15
So you're just kind of saving the margin on that.
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And they go, Oh my God, yeah, 25 didn't make sense.
8:19
But for 7500, you know, let's talk.
8:22
So I was able to pick up 3 or 4 clients between getting laid off
8:26
and the end of the year. That gave me the, you know, the
8:29
willpower to keep going and think that this could actually
8:32
work. So 3 clients, I'm going to guess
8:35
that wasn't replacing your income, but at least it gave you
8:39
the confidence to keep moving forward.
8:41
With it, absolutely and at that point I had a relatively low
8:46
burn rate. I was sharing an apartment with
8:47
another guy so I, you know, my rent wasn't that bad and I I
8:52
could get by on less than I had been making, which is why I was
8:55
able to have the savings I had to give it a try in the 1st
8:58
place. So yeah, again, it just gave me
9:02
the the idea that maybe I don't have to run out and get a job,
9:05
maybe I can build this into something which was.
9:07
And did you call it Capforge right from the beginning?
9:11
Yes, I was. I actually originally the first
9:15
name I came up with was Entry Point Ventures 'cause I thought,
9:18
well, I'm helping people get started.
9:20
Entry Point Ventures makes sense.
9:21
Entry Point ventures.com was available, but I was still in
9:25
touch with a bunch of friends from the NBA program.
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So I thought, well, let me run it by some of them.
9:29
And my good friend Mike Barden said that's the dumbest name I
9:32
ever heard. He he immediately made several
9:36
rude comments around how that name could be misconstrued in a,
9:41
in a not safe for work fashion and things.
9:44
So as OK, she said, you need a name like Xerox or Google.
9:49
It doesn't mean anything. It's short.
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You can use it for anything because who knows if five years
9:52
from now you'll be writing business plans.
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So I went back to the drawing boards.
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I was playing with little parts of words.
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I came up with capforgecapforge.com was
10:00
available. I was like, that's it.
10:01
I'm not thinking about this anymore.
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I'm just going to grab that and I'll fix it later.
10:06
And so have you gone back and attached meaning to it now?
10:10
Sometimes people kind of say, well, what does it mean?
10:13
So I've backed into the idea that well, cap short for capital
10:16
is money right for just to make. So it's kind of make money cap
10:20
for, you know it all right. But really, that had no part of
10:23
my thought originally. I was just scrounging around for
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something short and meaningless that I could use.
10:30
So this was started in what year specifically then?
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2000. OK. 2000, right when the bubble
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popped and you went along for the first, I don't know, 10-12
10:42
years, you were doing primarily consulting work.
10:46
How did this sort of evolve in the first few years?
10:48
I was doing well, so it started out as consulting.
10:52
What I learned in the first year of doing consulting was that I
10:56
was frequently in an ethical conundrum, right?
10:59
Because people are coming to me and saying I want your help to
11:03
raise capital to start a business, say OK, great.
11:05
Then they'd tell me their idea and I'd go that's a terrible
11:08
idea. So you're not going to be able
11:11
to raise $0.10 with that idea. However, if I say that they're
11:15
not going to hire me, right? If I.
11:18
So my line became, I can help you write a business plan and
11:23
create financial projections, but of course, I can't guarantee
11:26
that you're going to be able to raise funds with it, Which to me
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was, OK, I'm caveatting this and I could sleep, OK, taking their
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money to create the plan. But I didn't really like it,
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right? Because I couldn't, I couldn't
11:40
give my honest opinion. I couldn't give them real
11:42
feedback if they were coming to me with these harebrained
11:46
schemes to raise millions of dollars.
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Or I mean, it's one thing to raise from institutional
11:51
investors, which is going to be very difficult.
11:53
But if they were taking it to raise money from friends and
11:55
family, Oh God, I, I have some level of responsibility, right?
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If I'm helping them get $500,000 out of grandma and grandpa and
12:02
Uncle Joe for some business that I think has slim to no
12:07
possibility of working. So so how do I get out of that?
12:10
What I pivoted to was creating software so they could create
12:15
their own business plan and their own financial projection,
12:18
sort of a DIY software to let them create a business plan and
12:22
financial projections. I pivoted to that and I started
12:25
selling that online. It was the very early days of
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Google where if you put the right words in your headline,
12:31
you would come up in the search results at the top, get a good
12:35
amount of traffic. And for a number of years I sold
12:38
software rather than doing the individual consulting because I
12:42
just felt like then you create whatever plan you want, I just
12:45
gave you the tool. What was the software called?
12:48
So I had one specifically focused on restaurants, which
12:51
was restaurant funds. Then I had one specifically
12:54
focused on getting SBA loans, which was sbacash.com and then
12:59
one for bars, which I think was called Start a bar.com.
13:05
So was this like an early SASS who was downloading this?
13:11
It was not a subscription, it was just a here's a package
13:15
software. And really what it was was Word
13:17
templates with a bunch of pre written sections and
13:20
instructions on how to customize it.
13:22
And a really complicated Excel, multi tab Excel spreadsheet that
13:28
I'd built where they could just put in some basic assumptions
13:30
and it would generate AP and L balance sheet cash flow
13:32
statement for them. So they could then take it,
13:35
print it off, give it to the SBA or investors or whoever they
13:39
were going to ready to go. They didn't need to know how to
13:42
write a business plan or do financials.
13:44
And it would give them that as an end result.
13:46
And it was 99 bucks to buy the software.
13:51
It was. I started out actually literally
13:53
mailing. I'd burn CDSCD ROMs and mail
13:56
them. And then I switched over to, OK,
13:58
you can just download this. That seems easier.
14:01
Of course, over the years I found some bootleg copies.
14:03
People were knocking them off and selling it on eBay and stuff
14:06
and I was like, all my hard work, what are you doing, you
14:09
filthy pirates? It's painful.
14:14
It's so common though, yeah. So much work went into that and
14:17
then to see some clowns selling it on eBay for half the
14:20
legitimate price. Were you able to make a living
14:22
selling the software? Yes, I made quite a good, I mean
14:27
it was multi 6 figures annually selling the software and
14:31
providing some additional support.
14:32
And then I had an add on service.
14:34
If you've written your business plan and financials and you want
14:36
me to review it, you know for another 500 bucks you could send
14:39
it to me. I do your do a review, give you
14:40
feedback. But yeah, that was actually a
14:44
fantastic time in my life because I was still single at
14:47
that point, but I could do this business literally from anywhere
14:51
with very little effort. So I travelled all over the
14:54
world. I went on scuba diving trips.
14:56
I did a bike ride from San Diego to Florida with a friend of
15:00
mine. We rode our bicycles across the
15:03
country. I mean, I just had a fantastic
15:06
time living it up. What I didn't do was future
15:09
proof this business because as Google search results changed
15:12
over time and you had to start buying sponsored results and so
15:16
on, and other people jumped into the market, I did not keep up
15:21
with that. I was resting on my laurels.
15:22
So lesson learned the hard way. I should have been continually
15:26
adding content and building a community and doing other things
15:30
that I saw other people subsequently do and saying to
15:32
myself I should have been there. I was early in the game, but I
15:36
did not keep it up. I was having too much fun
15:38
running around the world traveling and seeing different
15:41
countries and going on trips. But.
15:45
So what point did you have to pivot from that What?
15:48
At what point did you have to pivot from the software to
15:50
something else then? So in 2004, sales were still
15:55
going strong, but I could see already that there was
15:58
competition and it was declining.
16:01
I'd prior to the NBA, had a lot of experience in restaurants and
16:04
I thought, you know, what would be the perfect restaurant to own
16:07
would be a catering business. Because the biggest challenge in
16:11
restaurants is knowing how many people to have on staff on any
16:14
given night, how busy are we going to be and how much food to
16:16
purchase? Because again, don't know how
16:18
busy you're going to be that man.
16:19
If I had a catering business, I'd know those two things months
16:23
in advance. People prepaid.
16:25
That'd be the greatest thing ever.
16:28
And as it happened, there was a catering business for sale in
16:31
San Diego at that time. So I negotiated to buy it.
16:35
I used an SBA loan, which I have, you know, I knew how to
16:38
get an SBA loan and I acquired that and I ran that for four
16:43
years and then I sold it in 2007 right before I got married.
16:49
And that was a great experience in acquiring an existing cash
16:53
flowing business and building it.
16:54
And it was a terrible experience in knowing why catering
16:59
businesses were so hard. Yes, you know, food costs and
17:02
labor costs ahead of time, but for what?
17:06
You know, on a given Saturday, I might have 8 events, right?
17:09
So each event was just one of eight, two of eight, three of
17:11
eight, right? But that three of eight event
17:14
might be somebody's wedding, their once in a lifetime
17:18
experience that they'll remember forever, right?
17:21
So the pressure to perform and do an amazing job for that, even
17:25
though it was just one of eight on Egg Saturday for me, I did
17:29
not understand that environment, that pressure cooker I was
17:33
signing up for in that business. So it was a good lesson,
17:38
acquiring a business, growing a business, selling a business.
17:40
I learned all those things, but I also learned something about
17:44
what kind of businesses I didn't want to be involved in going
17:47
forward. And so you guys maybe drop the
17:49
ball a couple of times on those weddings, is that what I'm
17:52
reading between the lines here? Well, yes, I mean, some things,
17:57
there's, there's so many factors in that because we would do
18:00
look, you know, we had our catering kitchen, right?
18:04
But the events would happen at locales all across San Diego
18:07
County. So things would come up.
18:10
A traffic accident blocks the catering truck from getting
18:13
there or a flat tire or somebody doesn't show, or we had a fire
18:18
in the kitchen one time, right? And so we didn't often screw up,
18:25
you know, deliver the wrong menu to the wrong location, although
18:28
that happened occasionally and we had to fix that.
18:32
But it was more often just, you know, the things happened.
18:37
And as much as you'd say, well, you know, I sure life happens,
18:40
right? Things just don't always go the
18:41
way you plan. It's very hard to tell that to a
18:44
bride 45 minutes before everyone's supposed to sit down
18:47
and eat that, hey, things happen.
18:50
I'm sorry that it happened on your day.
18:52
Right. I'm sorry.
18:53
You're the one that it happened to, you know, And I know it's no
18:57
consolation that of the last 200 events, 197 of them went off
19:01
without a hitch. So it was.
19:06
So you you sold that business then?
19:08
I sold that business in 2007. And then I thought, you know
19:12
what, this is a great way to be an entrepreneur is I'll just go
19:15
and buy more businesses. I'll improve them.
19:17
I'll improve the management, I'll improve the cash flow,
19:20
profitability. Maybe some I'll sell, maybe some
19:22
I'll keep. So I got my license to be a
19:25
business broker because I thought the best way to find and
19:29
buy businesses is to be a business broker.
19:31
I'll get first look at everything.
19:33
I'll buy the ones I like and I'll sell the ones that I don't
19:36
want for a Commission. So win, win, I thought.
19:39
I started in January of 2008 and I did it for four years and I
19:44
sold 36 businesses in that time and I never bought 1.
19:50
Because. I would always see the warts I
19:56
there was. I mean a good portion of them I
19:58
would have not had any interest in running anyway, but even the
20:02
ones that were marginally interesting I could just see the
20:05
problems. I became more of a pessimist
20:07
than I probably naturally was. Just I could see the all the
20:10
ways things would go wrong, the amount of work and hassle and
20:13
headache I would see when a buyer would buy one of these.
20:17
All the stress and the, you know, the amount of things they
20:20
had to learn and take over in short order to be able to try
20:22
and even get, you know, keep it at status quo, never mind
20:26
growing it. So that was a good learning
20:30
experience along the way. What I also learned was almost
20:35
all the small business owners I ever talked to had terrible
20:37
books, right? Because the first thing you do
20:40
in in the business acquisition or as a business broker is you
20:45
say, OK, let's figure out how much this thing is worth.
20:46
Let's take a look at the financials.
20:48
And they go, oh, yeah, the books, they're six months
20:50
behind. Or, you know, Aunt May does that
20:52
much. She doesn't really know
20:54
QuickBooks. But I, you know, can't fire her
20:55
because she's relative. There was always some story,
20:58
right? The CPA only does it once a
21:00
year. Or here there's that shoe box
21:02
full of receipts. Can you figure it out for me?
21:05
Whatever, you know, was always there was always a story.
21:08
Bookkeeping, professional quality bookkeeping for small
21:11
business seem to be in short supply.
21:14
Very few businesses had good quality, up to And up until that
21:27
time, I'd always thought of bookkeeping because it seemed to
21:30
be something where the, you know, the bookkeeper would go to
21:33
somebody's office and sit in their office and go through
21:36
their receipts and sit at their computer and do it all.
21:39
And I thought, I don't want to do that.
21:40
I don't want to be limited to San Diego.
21:42
I don't want to be in a limited market.
21:43
I don't want to be, you know, driving back and forth or, you
21:47
know, even trying to staff for that job.
21:50
So when I saw that there was somebody doing virtual
21:52
bookkeeping, I thought, I don't have to go to people's offices.
21:55
Now, my market could be the whole US and, and the employees
21:58
could be anywhere. And the business, you know, the
22:01
customers could be anywhere. And this starts to look a lot
22:03
more interesting. And as it turned out, somebody
22:06
else outbid me for that business.
22:07
I actually attempted to buy that one.
22:09
Somebody outbid me for it. So I thought, well, how hard
22:12
would this be to just start? So I decided I'll start it.
22:17
I'll see how it goes. If I pick up clients quickly,
22:20
great. If it doesn't really work out or
22:21
I don't like it, I'll try something else.
22:24
Turns out it worked out pretty well.
22:26
So how did you pick up those first clients?
22:29
And you resurrected the Cap Forge name to do this under.
22:31
I've continued using Cap Forge for everything.
22:34
So Cap Forge, Inc owned the catering business, Cap Forge,
22:37
Inc owned the software business, Cap Forge, Inc now owned, owned
22:40
the business brokering and now it became Cap Forge Inc, the
22:45
accounting business. Those first few clients was sort
22:49
of similar referrals and connections from business
22:51
brokering people that I'd met along the way.
22:55
Also back then, I don't know if it still works now.
22:57
I haven't tried in years and years, but Craigslist ads, you
23:00
know, for small business services, throw it in there.
23:03
If you're looking for a good bookkeeper, you know, give me a
23:05
call. And then as soon as we started
23:08
getting clients and they liked us, you know, referrals are
23:11
huge. People ask other business
23:14
owners, they know, hey, who do you use for accounting?
23:16
Who's your bookkeeper? And word gets around.
23:18
So I always, all my experience in restaurants and consulting
23:22
and everything else, it was always a customer service focus
23:25
in accounting. Customer service is like the
23:28
bottom of the list of what most accounting firms focus on.
23:31
So me coming to a, you know, customer service first made a
23:35
good impression. We were able to get referrals,
23:37
good reviews and just build from there.
23:41
Nice. And so how has it evolved into
23:44
today take us through the different services that you guys
23:48
provide? Yeah, When we started, I was
23:51
only doing bookkeeping and that was true for many years.
23:56
I got enough clients myself or I was doing the bookkeeping.
24:02
I was doing everything sales, you know, admin, billing,
24:05
everything. As soon as I had about a dozen
24:08
clients, I hired A bookkeeper. I said, OK, here's what's going
24:11
to happen. I'm going to go find clients.
24:14
You're going to do all the. And that's what we did.
24:18
And then as soon as that person was kind of filled, I hired
24:21
another person, another person. I think it was probably I had
24:24
four or five bookkeepers before we had anyone who was anything
24:27
other than a bookkeeper. I was still doing everything
24:30
else, sales, billing, admin, everything else.
24:32
But we grew, but over the years just continuing to add more and
24:37
more bookkeeping clients. And then people said, hey, can
24:39
you also, you know, you're doing a great job with the books.
24:41
Can you also help me with payroll?
24:43
Can you also help me with tax? So we figured out a way to help
24:47
with payroll. I hired ACPA and then another
24:51
CPA and another CPA so we could build our tax department and
24:55
then started doing some advisory CFO work and so on.
24:59
It was all led by demand from clients, right?
25:02
It wasn't kind of inventing new services and then trying to
25:05
market. It was all, OK, I've got a
25:07
demand base here already. Let's not have them go somewhere
25:13
else if we can provide it to them and add to the value, the
25:18
the overall aggregate average value of each client, right.
25:20
So that's what we've been doing. And so how many?
25:25
What's your head count like today?
25:26
How many folks do you have? We're at about 90, folks.
25:31
And how many of those are bookkeepers versus payroll?
25:35
So bookkeeping is still just because it's that's where we
25:39
started, it's still the predominant revenue stream.
25:44
It's probably 75% is bookkeeping, 20% tax and then 5%
25:49
other. OK.
25:52
And who do you serve like company size, industry,
25:56
geography? So geography is really pretty
26:00
much the entire USI think I'd have to go double check, but I'm
26:05
pretty confident in saying we have a client, at least one
26:08
client in all 50 states, including Alaska, including
26:11
Hawaii. You know, and all the the
26:14
contiguous 48 size and type is we're we're pretty agnostic in
26:19
that we have people who are, you know, solo practitioners, people
26:23
like I was a A1 man consulting shop doing a 203 hundred KA year
26:29
up to businesses doing 25 to $30 million a year.
26:33
It's more about whether or not they've gotten to a place where
26:37
they need an in house accountant.
26:39
If they've gotten to that, then you know, they often will
26:42
transition us out, you know, Hey guys, appreciate everything
26:45
you've done over the years. At this point, though, it makes
26:47
sense to bring this in house. Hey, no argument for me.
26:50
I get it. I appreciate all the years of
26:51
business. If you know anyone else, great,
26:53
you know, send them over. But no hard feelings.
26:56
I mean, you've grown. That means you've been
26:57
successful. I'm glad to have been part of
26:59
it. But you know, there's millions
27:03
and millions literally of small businesses out there who need
27:06
accounting help. But it doesn't make sense to
27:07
have somebody on staff doing that.
27:10
So outside of the referrals, which is a really powerful
27:14
source of new business for you guys, how well your clients
27:17
finding you? Well, podcast is a great way.
27:20
I've been on a lot of podcasts and and YouTube videos with
27:24
various people. Also the books that I've put out
27:29
have helped and you know, general content on the website.
27:33
SEO draws traffic in and then probably actually the second
27:38
biggest source is partnering with people.
27:41
We partner with business brokers as, because I know, well, you
27:45
know, they for them to do their job, they need the, the sellers
27:48
to have good financials. So a lot of times they'll come
27:50
to us and say, hey, you know, Joe wants to sell his tire
27:53
business, but he doesn't have any books, you know, and I'd
27:56
love to help him sell it, but we can't do anything until we've
27:59
got something to show a buyer. So great, we'll do a project,
28:02
catch up to three years of the last books, file the back taxes
28:06
and get him in shape. Now he's gone from something he
28:09
would have just had to close down to something he can sell
28:11
for 500,750 thousand, whatever the number is.
28:16
So partners like that who know what we do and we're
28:19
complementary to what they're trying to achieve, are a great
28:23
fit for us. Who else is a good partner for
28:25
you besides business brokers? So sometimes Cpas who don't have
28:30
an in house bookkeeping solution will do the books and send out
28:33
those clients back to them for the taxes.
28:36
Sometimes software people software integrations, like
28:41
there's software specific to people who own Pilates studios
28:45
and yoga studios, right? They use a software called Mind
28:48
Body. We happen to have a pretty good
28:50
system for integrating Mind Body into QuickBooks and working with
28:53
them. So if I know you're a gym owner
28:56
and you're using Mind Body as your, you know, POS system and
29:00
client tracking system, then you know I'm a great fit to work
29:04
with you on the accounting side because I can do that
29:06
integration or law firms using certain law firm billing
29:10
software and things like that. So really anybody that's working
29:14
with a number of small businesses, business coaches,
29:17
right, are a great fit for us because it's hard to be a coach.
29:20
It's hard for coaches to give good advice if they're looking
29:23
at the business and saying, I don't really know how you're
29:26
doing because you don't know how you're doing.
29:28
So it's hard for me to coach you.
29:29
So let's connect you with Matt. You can get your books in shape.
29:32
Now we're both looking at good, solid, accurate current numbers,
29:36
and we can both figure out a path forward for you.
29:39
So how many books have you written, Matt?
29:41
2, the one you'd mentioned in the intro, and then there was a
29:45
second one around, specifically e-commerce bookkeeping.
29:49
We have a lot of folks in the e-commerce space and they, you
29:53
know, have specific challenges with their books.
29:56
I've got a couple more in the works that haven't quite
29:58
launched yet. But yeah, I find I enjoy
30:02
writing. So it's not a struggle for me.
30:05
And it's not strictly a marketing effort.
30:07
I kind of, it helps me to think more clearly when I sit down and
30:11
put thoughts to paper, organize it, put it in chapters.
30:14
What do I want to get across? How do I want to help people?
30:16
And and then the byproduct of that is a book that then, you
30:20
know, helps generate more interest.
30:23
So the book that we mentioned in the intro, QuickBooks
30:25
Bookkeeping 10 Most Common Mistakes Everyone Makes and How
30:28
to Fix Them. Pull out one or two of those
30:31
common mistakes. Highlight them for us.
30:34
So one of the most common mistakes that people do is they
30:37
don't reconcile their books, right?
30:39
They will go to either get QuickBooks Online, they'll
30:42
connect their bank account or their credit card account.
30:45
It'll start pulling transactions in and they'll just start
30:47
throwing them into, oh, that was office supplies, that was rent,
30:51
that was marketing, which is a good start.
30:55
But if you don't, then pull up the statement for that bank
30:58
account. Start with the starting balance,
31:00
make sure that's correct. Go through each transaction,
31:03
make sure it's on the statement, and then come up with the right
31:06
ending balance that's on the bank statement.
31:09
It's very easy for stuff to get missed, go in the wrong spot.
31:12
Or that software integration that seems so handy might have
31:16
missed a handful of transactions, it glitched or
31:18
paused or something happened, or it pulled the same transaction
31:21
in two or three times by accident, or once in a while,
31:25
something that was supposed to come in as 1-2, three came in as
31:27
132. If you never reconcile, if you
31:30
never do that second step in comparing the transactions to
31:33
the statement to make sure they're right, what happens over
31:36
time is it's more and more wrong.
31:39
You have more and more garbage transactions, missing
31:42
transactions, duplicate transactions in there.
31:44
And now while you feel like, hey, I've spent all this time
31:46
doing my books, you're actually looking at incorrect values.
31:50
So that's something we frequently see people skipping
31:53
that step because they don't know how to do it.
31:54
It seems complicated if you've never done it, but the result is
31:58
you end up looking at bad data. Yeah, that reconciling it, you
32:04
know, one of the things I think that you guys are really known
32:06
for is this three times accuracy check process.
32:10
You've got human oversight, you're combining it with AI.
32:13
Can you talk a little bit more about how this process works?
32:16
Yeah, Every set of books we do is looked at by two people every
32:20
month. There's the primary person doing
32:22
it and a second person that reviews the first person's
32:25
entries, just to make sure nothing got overlooked.
32:27
And then with my background in putting together software to
32:31
look at numbers, we also built something even before AI was a
32:36
big thing. And we've since layered in
32:38
additional AI, it goes through and does the kind of checks that
32:42
it would take a person hours, but takes the AI and the
32:45
software seconds to do. And it's things like looking to
32:50
see if there's multiple vendors who are probably most likely the
32:55
same vendor. You know, sometimes you'll have
32:58
somebody will put in, you know, Anthony Kotaspati and then
33:03
somebody also put in Tony Kotaspati and then somebody also
33:05
put in a Kotaspati. And it's really all the same
33:08
person, right? And all should be going to the
33:10
same place and it should all be condensed into one.
33:12
But because different people at different times saw it, put it
33:15
in differently. Didn't realize there was already
33:17
an entry for that. You know, now you end up with
33:21
with mistakes. And the software is very good at
33:23
finding that kind of stuff, which would take in a person who
33:26
said they could find it, of course, but it might take them
33:29
an hour of looking through to realize what's going on where
33:32
the software finds it in seconds.
33:34
So we go through everything with those three checks every month.
33:39
So that way, by the time you get to the end of the year, it's tax
33:42
time. If there's anything to clean up,
33:44
it's one or two minor things. It's not.
33:46
Oh boy, we have a year's worth of garbage to sort through here
33:50
to get this right. And at that point, it's trying
33:53
to tap into your memory bank to be like, oh, what was that?
33:56
What was that for? Yeah, you're taking care of this
33:59
stuff as you go along. And you got, you know, 2 human
34:02
beings and the AI checking it. And we were just talking before
34:06
about some of the common mistakes, you know, reference to
34:08
your your one of your books that you wrote.
34:11
Matt, what is maybe a really unusual mistake that you saw
34:16
somebody make and how'd you help them through it?
34:19
More unusual mistakes, probably things like misunderstanding,
34:27
for example, how an asset works versus an expense.
34:32
They'll buy, let's say an expensive laptop and they'll
34:35
think, well, that's a, that's an asset.
34:37
I'm going to have it for more than a year.
34:39
They'll put it on the balance sheet, but then it never gets
34:42
recaptured as an expense. So they overpay their taxes as a
34:45
result. They could have written it off,
34:47
it just didn't get captured right.
34:49
So they're using Google or ChatGPT to try to help them do
34:54
bookkeeping rather than using somebody who's an actual
34:56
professional in it. And it ends up, you know, it's a
34:59
fixable mistake. It's not that big a deal.
35:01
But they're, they're trying to overthink the process.
35:04
They're getting the information somewhat right, but it ends up
35:07
getting giving them a bad result.
35:09
So I mean, there's no shortage of ways that people mess up
35:12
their books and and usually to their own detriment,
35:17
unfortunately. So we mentioned in the intro
35:21
about this 24 hour response time that you promised.
35:25
Did I get that correct? That is correct.
35:29
If you e-mail us today, you'll hear back today 9 times out of
35:33
10. But the latest you're going to
35:35
hear back is by tomorrow at, at or before the time that you
35:39
emailed us today. Communication is the single
35:43
biggest thing that I think we get judged on, any accounting
35:48
firm gets judged on and, and most of them honestly fall
35:50
pretty short, right? Because if you think about it,
35:54
people aren't hiring us because they're tax experts and they're
35:57
just checking our work, right? They just want to see if we know
35:59
what they know. They're hiring us because they
36:01
don't know about this stuff. So honestly, we could do a
36:05
terrible job on their tax return.
36:08
They wouldn't necessarily know, but they know.
36:10
Did they get back to me quickly? Did they answer my questions?
36:13
Were they in? Was it understandable answers in
36:15
plain English? Or were they throwing a lot of
36:17
tax jargon at me? Were they kind of, you know,
36:20
rude and condescending? Because I'm not a tax expert.
36:22
But I wanted to ask them how these things work.
36:25
So what we get judged on is how well we respond, how quickly we
36:30
respond, how thoroughly we respond, how friendly and
36:32
helpful we are, right. So I want to make sure we're 10
36:34
out of 10 and all that stuff. Then yes, we're also going to
36:37
hire amazing smart tax folks and and bookkeeping folks who can do
36:41
a great job on the actual work. But the clients who hire us,
36:45
that's really not what their criteria is, right?
36:50
You would think it would be, but it's it's really how well they
36:53
work with us. And that's why I think a lot of
36:55
accounting firms, hey, I'm great at tax.
36:57
I'm great at bookkeeping. Why do I have to, you know, talk
37:00
to this guy who doesn't know anything about it, right?
37:02
I did great work. You should just trust me.
37:04
I sent him his tax return. Why does he keep bugging me?
37:09
You know, and there's so many industries where if.
37:13
People. Would just layer in a little bit
37:15
of customer service, their business would take off to the
37:18
moon just through word of mouth. And it occurs to me, having
37:23
recently transitioned from an accounting experience that was
37:27
like what you're talking about. That is certainly 1 industry
37:31
trades is another one. You know, I get a plumber to
37:35
show up at my house or an electrician to come on time.
37:38
It's, you know, just just that bit of communication is a big
37:41
differentiator. And I wonder if that's a big
37:43
part of the reason why you guys, as we said in the intro, have
37:48
almost more positive reviews than any other bookkeeper in the
37:52
country. How do you guys go about that?
37:54
Yeah, I mean, it's a point of pride for us and but I think it
37:58
it's not because we've done anything amazing on the
38:01
bookkeeping and tax. Yeah, I think we do a great job.
38:03
Our numbers are accurate, but there's a lot of people who can
38:06
do accurate books and, and provide accurate taxes.
38:10
But as I mentioned, I come to this business from years in the
38:14
restaurant world and years of customer service where that was
38:18
the big differentiator, right? And that was really a key part
38:22
of the experience. You want to make the experience
38:25
as easy and frictionless and, and expectation meeting as
38:30
possible for those clients. And to the extent that you
38:32
don't, they're not going to be super happy and they're going to
38:36
be susceptible to switching to someone else who treats them
38:39
better, who they vibe with more, they feel like is a better
38:44
experience. Not even if you're doing amazing
38:47
tax work, right? They're not necessarily
38:50
cognizant of that piece of it. They don't know what they don't
38:53
know about what you are aren't doing for them technically on
38:56
the tax return, but they know if you're a jerk or not.
39:00
That's how they're going to decide who they go with.
39:03
So, you know, it's a big part of my ethos here and, and
39:07
management philosophy is not just to hire people who are good
39:10
at their job, but they're also nice people, partly because I
39:14
have to spend 40 hours a week with them, right?
39:16
So I don't want to spend time with jerks, but I certainly know
39:20
that my clients don't want to spend time with jerks either.
39:22
They want to work with people who are nice and friendly and
39:25
helpful and trying to work in their best interest and that's
39:28
what comes across. That's why we get really good
39:30
reviews. That's why people refer us to
39:33
other people because they've had a good experience here.
39:36
And that's the fundamental reason I think we've been really
39:40
successful. Because I put that not not to
39:44
the exclusion of everything else, but equally weighted with
39:47
doing a good job professionally is providing a great customer
39:50
experience. What's the employee breakdown
39:54
like? What percentage of folks are in
39:55
a centralized office versus distributed?
39:59
Well, pre 2020 it was almost everybody was in office.
40:05
We had a handful of people who are remote today there's six of
40:09
us in the office out of the 90 or so folks.
40:12
So it is really we were everything we do is cloud based
40:17
and digital to begin with. We were not a kind of firm that
40:20
printed everything out and stuck it in a big filing cabinet
40:22
somewhere. So making the transition to to
40:25
letting folks go remote. Wasn't hard.
40:29
From a technical standpoint, it was very easy.
40:31
It was a little challenging for me because I was used to being
40:34
able to pull everyone into a big meeting room and kind of, you
40:37
know, give a State of the Union address and get feedback in real
40:41
time and everything else. So it was an adjustment for me
40:43
to learn how to manage a team that I couldn't get in front of
40:46
directly. But it's been a it really net.
40:50
Net has been a great thing for us because now when I want to
40:54
find the very best bookkeeper that I can find for our next
40:56
hire, I have the entire US as my hiring pool.
40:59
So it doesn't matter if they're in West Virginia or Wyoming or
41:02
Florida or Seattle, right? I can find them, hire them and
41:06
make them part of the team. Whereas before I was limited to
41:08
people within driving distance of the office.
41:12
Much bigger pool that you can draw from.
41:14
What does the future cap Forge look like?
41:16
Any new growth plans, new services?
41:19
What are you guys thinking? Yeah.
41:21
I mean, I think the next initiative for us is really to
41:26
branch out our footprint. So right now, although we're
41:30
remotely distributed team, all the sales efforts really still
41:33
are generated here at the San Diego Carlsbad office.
41:37
What I'd love to have is people placed in other places, somebody
41:42
in LA, somebody in Dallas, somebody in New York, etcetera,
41:45
who is sort of an outpost for marketing sales and and lead
41:50
generation in those areas. All the work still done by the
41:53
remote team, nothing would change there.
41:55
But I think to the extent we want to continue to grow, we
41:59
need to have a physical presence in more locations on that
42:04
business development side. OK.
42:08
Where do you think the future of the industry is heading?
42:12
What do you think? What are the big changes that
42:13
are coming? I think, I mean, obviously it's
42:16
impossible not to see the impact of AI already.
42:20
And what's harder to to judge is how quickly and how deeply
42:25
that's going to take over some of the things that we do.
42:28
There's no question it will be, you know, there will be some
42:31
help. We're already using it to some
42:34
degree, but I think fundamentally the clients are
42:38
still going to want to interact with people, right?
42:41
Unless the clients are robots, right?
42:43
Then I don't think the the service providers can be robots.
42:48
So I think it will evolve a bit over time, the amount of time
42:53
that we spend doing some of the work we do now.
42:57
But I think what it's going to allow us to do is have a given
43:01
bookkeeper, a given CPA, have more clients because they can
43:06
spend more time with those clients because they're spending
43:09
less time doing some of the entries and data and
43:13
reconciliation work that they're doing now.
43:16
But I don't foresee a place where people are going to be
43:20
satisfied with just entering their questions into a chat box
43:25
and not being able to interact with a person and have that
43:28
comfort and confidence that comes with a human to human
43:31
interaction for something as complicated and and impactful as
43:35
taxes and accounting. Well, I think probably everybody
43:38
listening has had an experience where they've interacted with a
43:41
pretty good AI chat bot, you know, in a different service
43:45
providers website that they go to.
43:47
Even as good as they have become, it's still not a
43:50
replacement for talking to a human.
43:52
There's so many times where my end result is still send me to a
43:56
human. Like we didn't drill down into
43:59
the nuance of my question. That's what you're talking
44:01
about. Yeah, I think that's what's
44:05
happening. And I think there are a lot of
44:07
old school accounting firms still out there, the guys that
44:09
are still printing everything out, doing it all on paper,
44:12
mailing people stuff, getting, you know, here's my fax number,
44:16
that kind of stuff. I think those guys, a lot of
44:19
them are either just going to end up retiring and closing up
44:21
shop or getting bought out by the next generation who are
44:25
going to then convert them and going to get them up to speed.
44:27
But, you know, the ones that don't want to change or
44:30
resistant to change are going to eventually have to either step
44:34
aside or, you know, learn to adapt.
44:38
I think the direction of this industry is tech forward, but
44:43
it's not all tech. It's going to be a blend.
44:47
Yeah, the tech is going to allow more of that human interaction,
44:51
people who spend less time sort of double checking those entries
44:55
and more time being able to talk about strategy and that kind of
44:58
a thing. Yeah.
45:00
Yeah, let's shift gears, Matt. I would be interested to hear
45:04
about a big, serious challenge that you've overcome in your
45:07
life and how you got through that.
45:10
Yeah. I, you had prompted me to think
45:12
about it earlier. And I mean a couple of things
45:16
come to mind on the business side.
45:18
One of the early challenges we had, this was probably three
45:22
years into the business. So at that point I probably had
45:27
six or seven employees and you know, a good number of clients.
45:31
I was the sole source of income for my family at that point.
45:36
And one of the employees open an e-mail they shouldn't have
45:40
opened and we essentially became the victims of ransomware.
45:46
They got a hold of all of our files and, you know, threatened
45:51
to delete everything without, you know, if they didn't get a a
45:56
significant pay up. Basically wiped me out for the
45:59
year size payment as a result. And of course, you know, it
46:05
happened about 11:00 in the morning.
46:07
And by 5:00 that night, I mean, I was, I was devastated.
46:11
I hadn't, I had no idea how to resolve this because, you know,
46:16
you can call the FBI, call whoever you want.
46:18
Nobody's going to be able to fix it in the amount of time that
46:20
they've given you to respond to this.
46:22
There's no way I'm going to be able to go back to every single
46:25
client. I mean, I could have, but the
46:27
idea of going to every single client and saying, hey, we've
46:30
had a data breach. Hackers have all your data.
46:33
I don't have control of it anymore.
46:35
Can you please give it to me again, but to a different system
46:38
that you know, doesn't like. There's just no it it was, it
46:43
was I, I don't even know. I mean, I was in the the depths
46:47
of despair. I thought I saw everything I'd
46:49
worked all that time for built up just evaporating.
46:54
And it was, you know, I was just, I was just gutted.
47:00
I I don't know, I there's no words for how upset and how
47:05
devastated I was. And how did I let this happen?
47:07
You know, why didn't I have better protections?
47:09
You know, you ask yourself a million questions.
47:11
What could I have done differently?
47:13
Of course you want to be upset with the person who did it, but
47:17
you know, it wasn't, You know, obviously they didn't do it
47:19
maliciously that the person on my team that, you know, allowed
47:22
them in. It wasn't.
47:24
Yeah, mad. But it's too late, right?
47:25
That doesn't that solves nothing.
47:27
It doesn't. They already felt completely
47:29
devastated by it. So as it turned out, the person
47:37
who had originally set up RIT had, unbeknownst to me at the
47:44
time, set up a backup system that was sheltered from what the
47:53
hacker had been able to get into.
47:56
And so by about 8:00 the next morning, we figured out that we,
48:02
in fact, were able to keep a copy of a safe copy of
48:07
everything we had up to that point.
48:09
And we're able to change everything over, moved
48:14
everything to a different server, you know, updated all
48:16
the passwords and everything else sort of behind the scenes
48:19
while I was still emailing them and saying, well, I'm trying to
48:21
get the money together, you know, don't do anything yet,
48:23
Please give me some more time. But in the behind the scenes or,
48:26
you know, shifting everything over and by about noon that next
48:34
day, I was able to tell them, you know, hey, you know what,
48:38
I'm not going to pay it. And other words, I don't get
48:43
into everything I needed to say. And, and we were able to restore
48:49
everything and keep everything. And, you know, they essentially
48:53
walked away with nothing and we were able to continue doing
48:56
business. And of course, you know, Reed
48:59
tripled our efforts to harden all our systems and firewall
49:03
else. But I mean, that was about 24
49:06
hours of the worst hours of my life.
49:09
I, you know, the financial loss was one thing, but that really
49:14
was a far backseat to the idea that I was going to have to lay
49:17
off all my employees. I was going to have to let all
49:20
my clients know, you know, I just, I was just imagining the
49:24
worst of the worst of how bad this thing was going to be or,
49:28
you know, the idea. Well, maybe pay them, but did
49:31
they then release the files or did they go ha ha, how about,
49:34
you know, just kidding, send another, you know, payment or
49:37
we're or we would back in 48 hours to do it again.
49:40
Yeah, somebody like that isn't particularly scrupulous.
49:43
Right. Why would they?
49:44
Why would they honor their their word?
49:47
You know you have 0 leverage if you make the payment and then
49:50
they decide not to do anything anyway or ask for more who knows
49:53
what. So it worked out the best
49:57
possible way it could have worked out, but between finding
50:02
out and it working out, you know I.
50:04
What a roller coaster. And then were there, was there
50:08
any downside? You know, did that the clients
50:11
data get leaked on the dark web somehow or was there any fallout
50:15
from that? We informed all the clients once
50:18
we had everything secure that we had been hacked and we advised
50:22
them, you know, here's the precautions we recommend you
50:24
take. And if, you know, we got a lot
50:27
of emails saying, Hey, thanks for letting us know.
50:29
We'll we'll do those things. We got a few emails saying, how
50:32
did you let that happen? And what, you know, I think a
50:35
couple people cancelled. I mean, you know what, I that's
50:40
their right, right. I can't be angry at them about
50:43
that. And All in all, it was much
50:46
better by, you know, miles than I could have expected at the
50:51
time that I found out about it. But you know, like I said, we've
50:55
since completely overhauled our system.
50:57
But it's, I think it's one of those things you just don't
50:59
think it's going to happen to you till it happens.
51:01
And then you realize, well, now it's too late to to wish I'd
51:05
done more. And how crazy that?
51:08
What was this? Some developer that had created
51:11
a a backup of your system that you weren't even aware of at the
51:14
time. Yeah, he, you know, he kind of
51:16
just said, yeah, I, I do that for everyone normally.
51:20
And I guess I didn't mention it to you and, you know, it's just
51:22
a good idea and you know well. It's a fabulous idea.
51:27
You did right. If you need to bill me for that,
51:29
go ahead, that's fine. So, but I mean, he just as
51:38
easily could have never have done that or it was just I, I
51:42
wasn't necessarily thinking about calling him at the outset
51:46
just because I was just in the midst of this.
51:48
How do I solve this? You know, how do I solve this
51:53
problem? Not necessarily, you know, Oh,
51:56
well, maybe I should see if somebody else has a back that's
51:59
in the. Why did you reach out to that
52:00
person? I think I was just kind of going
52:04
through all the scenarios and who could possibly help with
52:08
this. And I reached out to him and I
52:11
didn't. The original reaching out wasn't
52:15
to see if there was a way to say, but it was really more
52:17
about, you know, can we find out more about who these guys are?
52:21
Is there a way to figure out, so can we do something?
52:24
Do we like, did he have any experience with this kind of
52:27
situation? And he's the one who said, well,
52:29
maybe we should, you know, let's see if we got the backup.
52:32
It's a backup. What backup?
52:33
What are you talking about backup?
52:36
That was the most beautiful word you'd ever heard.
52:38
I I yes that that is fantastic news if there is a backup.
52:43
Don't get my hopes up though. Check first, then.
52:46
Right. So I, you know, I, I talk to
52:51
small business owners, entrepreneurs all the time and I
52:53
always look, it's never a straight path from A to B,
52:58
right? There's always, there's going to
52:59
be twists, turns, you know, you're going to take one step
53:02
forward and 17 steps back. You know, on on different
53:06
occasions you're going to run into walls.
53:08
It's, you know, no matter how anyone that shows you or tells
53:12
you about an overnight success story, right?
53:15
Instant disbelief because probably they've been doing it
53:20
for 10 or 12 years and probably they've had all kinds of fails
53:23
along the way. The more it looks like overnight
53:25
success, the less likely it is that had anything to do with
53:29
that. Going on behind the scenes, what
53:31
agony and stress the person's been enduring.
53:35
You just see suddenly they come to light in your world and you
53:39
think, wow, how did they do that so fast?
53:42
They did it from years of grinding behind the scenes Yes,
53:46
exactly. There there's there's.
53:48
A story there, I guarantee it, right?
53:49
They tried that business six other times.
53:51
It didn't work. The seventh time they took
53:53
everything they learned from the first six times and made it look
53:56
like, oh, it's so easy, right? But no, those YouTube videos and
54:01
shorts and TikTok thing, you know, like, oh, start a
54:04
business, work from the beach on a laptop half an hour a day, you
54:06
know, easy passive income. No, none of that's true.
54:10
I don't care who's telling you or what the story is.
54:14
It's not how the real world works.
54:15
I'm so glad you shared that message.
54:18
Let's shift gears again. Tell us what your superpower is,
54:21
Matt. I think my superpower is.
54:26
Being able to delegate, I know a ton of business owners who have
54:32
a lot of trouble letting go right.
54:34
They they may hire people, they may build a team, but still
54:38
every decision, anything bigger than what size paper clip to buy
54:42
has to get run by that right. They have a very hard time of
54:45
letting any of the real decision making or any of the real power
54:52
leave their hands. And I get it, right?
54:55
What got us here a lot of times is wanted to do everything the
54:59
best we can and feeling like nobody's going to own it like I
55:01
own it. Nobody's going to treat it like
55:03
I treat it. But as much as that may be
55:07
somewhat true, right, by the same token, you're really
55:10
handicapping yourself if you can't build a team, if you can't
55:14
empower people to to make their own decisions, be responsible,
55:19
take ownership themselves. So I think one of the things
55:22
I've been good at even from the early days is allowing other
55:28
people to let me show you how I do it.
55:31
If you come up with a better way, great.
55:33
I will never, No, no, you got to do it my way.
55:36
If you come up with a way that works better, that gets there
55:38
faster or cheaper or does a better job at it, great.
55:42
I'm going to learn from you. Now, I don't know.
55:44
I don't claim that I know everything and I don't claim
55:46
that I have to have my hand and everything.
55:48
I'm happy to let other people take it and run with it.
55:52
And as long as, you know, we put some guard rails in there and we
55:56
kind of know we're on the same page as far as the goals, then
55:59
I'm happy to let them go. And so I think that's what's
56:03
enabled us to get to the size that we got to.
56:05
I think a lot of people stall it. 456 employees and a business
56:10
that's 750,000 a $1,000,000 a year or something because that's
56:14
as much as they can do with still keeping their arms around
56:18
everything. And they're just, they just
56:20
don't see a way that they can let some of these decisions go
56:24
and empower people off. I let him, you know, if he's
56:27
going to know too much, he's going to go start his own thing.
56:29
Well, maybe, maybe not, but you know, that's not probably a good
56:33
reason to not show him how to do certain things or try to keep
56:37
information hidden and things. So I think my superpower is
56:41
finding really talented, ambitious people and giving them
56:45
the ability to go and and build. And we both benefit.
56:48
They benefit, I benefit, the team benefits.
56:51
Was that a natural thing? For you or did you have some
56:56
growing pains and being able to let go of certain elements of
56:59
your business? I think it's something I've
57:02
always known has. Been important and I've always
57:07
tried to do that. I think I had some good mentors
57:11
very early in my career in in the restaurant world where I was
57:15
a manager and the the mentors I had that taught me how to be a
57:19
good manager. It was always, look, you can't
57:23
be promoted up if there's not somebody to replace you, right?
57:26
So by not training someone under you to take over what you can
57:29
do, you can't then move up. And that resonated with me and
57:34
it makes sense. I, I want people to cross train.
57:36
I want them to grow in their position.
57:37
I want them to be able to do more.
57:39
Because if I say, hey, look, this is your job and this is all
57:42
it's ever going to be. And I'm never going to train you
57:43
to do anything else. You're never going to have the
57:45
opportunity to grow. How motivated are they going to
57:48
be to stay? And as soon as they've kind of
57:50
maxed it out, So I want them to do more.
57:53
I want to do last. To me, the definition of a
57:56
really successful business owner is someone who could be gone for
57:59
a month and it wouldn't make any difference, right?
58:02
The business would continue to have sales and grow and bills
58:05
would get paid and, and everything would run smoothly
58:07
that the business owner's gone for a month.
58:10
A lot of businesses, you know, like I was out for Friday and
58:13
things fell apart. It took me 3 days to put it back
58:16
together. I was out for six hours.
58:18
To me, that's, that's a sign that you know, you need to do
58:22
better at building up your team and empowering them to do more
58:27
and not being, don't be the cog in the wheel.
58:29
That's that's key to the whole thing.
58:31
Because then you can never take a day off.
58:33
You can never go on vacation. You can never even be out sick,
58:36
right? You're just stuck because you've
58:39
set it up in such a way that you're the gatekeeper for
58:42
everything that matters, you know, to continue to grow.
58:46
A successful business through all of these challenges, mindset
58:50
is critically important. How do you keep the right
58:55
mindset? Do you have some habits in your
58:58
day, get you started, keep you on track?
59:02
I think what I've learned. Over 25 years and, and it
59:05
certainly hasn't come it, it certainly wasn't there in the
59:08
early days and even now I still sometimes struggle with it.
59:12
But I think the idea that I keep in mind is nothing is ever as
59:15
good as it seems. Nothing is ever as bad as it
59:18
seems and all you can do is try to improve a little bit every
59:22
day, right? We're not looking for home runs,
59:24
we're looking for a little improvement every day.
59:26
And if you do that by the end of the year, it looks like three or
59:29
four home runs, right, Aggregated together, but a
59:33
little bit of improvement every day.
59:34
What did we do yesterday that we can do better today or what?
59:38
You know what was the problem yesterday we can fix for today
59:40
forward and stuff like a hacker coming and stealing.
59:46
All your data. That was a pretty.
59:47
Dark day so most days after that feel like yeah some bad things
59:51
you know it wasn't that bad wasn't as bad as that and on the
59:53
flip side you know if there's been places days where how we
59:58
got you know 3 or 4 new agreements in this big client
1:00:00
this great referral OK but you know let's we don't want to hang
1:00:05
our hat on that and rest on our laurels like I did in the past
1:00:09
with the software and kind of got too excited too ahead of
1:00:11
myself every day is. You know, just trying to improve
1:00:15
a little bit, improve a little bit, grow a little bit and not
1:00:19
let any one thing get us too excited or too depressed because
1:00:23
today's going to, you know, tomorrow's going to come like it
1:00:27
or not, right? And it's going to be another day
1:00:29
and we're just going to keep on trucking.
1:00:31
I like that incremental improvements.
1:00:33
How can we get? Better every day.
1:00:35
Matt, I've just got one more question for you today.
1:00:37
But before I ask it, excuse me, I want to do 3 quick things.
1:00:41
First of all, anybody who wants to get in touch with Matt or his
1:00:44
company, capforge.com is the place to go.
1:00:48
There's a contact form on there. They've got a phone number,
1:00:52
e-mail, everything you need to know to get in touch with
1:00:55
capforge.com. Also, as a reminder, if you want
1:00:59
to be the hero advisor that shows your clients how to get
1:01:02
their employees access to therapists, doctors and
1:01:04
prescription meds that, as paradoxical as it seems,
1:01:08
actually increases the company's net profits, reach out to us at
1:01:11
AD back benefits.com. Finally, if you are enjoying the
1:01:15
show today, a quick comment or review on your favorite podcast
1:01:19
app goes a long way towards helping others discover our
1:01:23
show. So thank you for taking a quick
1:01:25
moment to do that right now. All right, last question for
1:01:28
you, Matt. A year from now, what is 1 very
1:01:31
specific thing that you hope to be celebrated a year from now?
1:01:36
If plans go as they're supposed to, we should be celebrating our
1:01:41
100th employee hired. That would be very exciting to
1:01:45
me because it means that we've been growing, that we've been
1:01:48
hitting targets, that we've been adding clients, that, you know,
1:01:51
people have continued to be happy with our service and
1:01:54
referred their friends to us. And I would be super excited to
1:01:59
get to that milestone. That would be fantastic.
1:02:02
Love it. We'll check back in in 12 months
1:02:04
to see how. That's coming along.
1:02:06
Matt Ramuzzi from Capforge. I want to be the first to thank
1:02:09
you for sharing both your time and your story with us today.
1:02:11
I really appreciate you. Thank you for having me.
1:02:14
It's been great. Folks, that's a wrap on another
1:02:17
episode of The Inspired. Stories podcast.
1:02:19
Thanks for learning with us today.