471: Unlocking Success through Strategic Goal-Planning, Partnerships, and Providing Services with Matthew Gartland

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Ann Morrissey:: Hey, there. This is Ann from the Food Blogger Pro team, and you are listening to the Food Blogger Pro Podcast. This week on the podcast, Bjork is interviewing Matthew Garland, the CEO of SPI Media, the SPI, AKA Smart Passive Income Media community is full of online entrepreneurs who have come together to build their online businesses through SPI’s wealth of educational content, community building opportunities, and training experiences. In this interview, Matthew shares a story behind his own entrepreneurial journey, which led him to start SPI Media along with Pat Flynn.

They also talk about the benefits of offering services and leaning into the skills that you already have, and how you can solve real-life problems by doing so. They round out the interview by discussing the importance of strategic goal planning, the power of community, and how building partnerships earlier in your career can help to not only build an audience, but to sell to them. Whether you’re just starting out or years into your business venture, we think this will be a really insightful episode and hope you enjoy it. If you do, please share the episode with your community. It helps our podcast so much and it means a lot to us. And now, without further ado, I’ll let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom:: Matthew, welcome to the podcast.

Matthew Gartland:: Bjork, thrilled to be here. Thanks, buddy, for having me.

Bjork Ostrom:: Yeah, this is one of those conversations where we get on, we have an hour to record this podcast, we have to be accountable to ourselves to not spend the entire hour catching up, talking about what’s going on within our businesses, personal lives, whatever it might be. We have a lot of different connections, one of which is we’re in a fantasy football league with some other really great entrepreneurs and creators, so there’s so much for us to talk about. But today, we’re going to stay focused.

Matthew Gartland:: Stay focused.

Bjork Ostrom:: We’re going to be talking about online business, business building, we’re going to be talking about some systems and processes related to that. But what I want to do, like I do with every interview, is just to hear a little bit about your backstory. I know that you started growing an agency, that agency eventually got acquired or kind of merged into Smart Passive Income. We’ve had Pat Flynn on the podcast before, but fill that story out a little bit. What was the agency and when did you start it?

Matthew Gartland:: I started it as my very first startup right after I left my corporate career, I’m pleased to say and grateful for a career in corporate America. I was in a leadership development program right out of school, sort of like an in-house executive, MBA sort of a thing, and it’s where I started to really kind of give sharper definition to what I’ve been able to play forward into any variety of the startups I’ve been a part of now for over 13 years.

So I had a six-year corporate career, and got out, and that was the very first one, and it was timely and sort of serendipitously, I got lucky in that my background is IT, data science, building of information systems, strategically working with sales and marketing business partners to solve really complex questions and challenges, to grow enterprise companies. That was my corporate career. So I loved emerging technologies. I also just personally loved storytelling. So even in college, I was electively studying the Arthurian legend, Greek and Roman history, the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, Joseph Campbell and the Monomyth, which we know now today as the Hero’s Journey.

Bjork Ostrom:: So the question for you is how often do you think of the Roman Empire?

Matthew Gartland:: Less these days.

Bjork Ostrom:: Do you remember that? Do you that, where it was, there’s that trend where people would ask their… I think it was like… I’m not on social as much. Maybe you are –

Matthew Gartland:: I’m not on socials that much, either, but-

Bjork Ostrom:: Okay, so there’s this trend where people would… I think it was like a spouse, a wife would ask their husband, “How often do you think of the Roman Empire?” And they were like, “Oh, maybe once a day.” And it was like this idea of suddenly all these people realizing their significant other thinks about the Roman Empire all the time. Anyways, but you literally thought about the Roman Empire-

Matthew Gartland:: I literally thought about it, yeah-

Bjork Ostrom:: Every day, yeah.

Matthew Gartland:: I should have, in retrospect, I got within an inch and then I didn’t do it, choose to take an entire semester and study abroad in Greece, so not Romans, but I wanted to actually go there, and I almost did, and I should have. But the interesting, and again, unplanned synergy that happened was my enjoyment and professional career with technology, and especially emerging technologies, different forms of SaaS and different solution building with my personal enjoyment of stories and storytelling, essentially content converged right at the moment with the blogosphere popped off.

So I saw opportunities that were already starting to percolate online with blogs, in particular, of essentially something I could do with my entrepreneurial spirit that I hadn’t yet done. So I wanted to build something, wasn’t entirely sure. So I just started what I think a lot of us sometimes do that are kind of first-time entrepreneurs, which I started a service business, right, before I had a product. And I was already really decently invested in what it takes to write well, because I was doing a lot of writing and even then editing my friends’ papers in school.

I was an honors kid, so that was another layer to all of this, in terms of reading, and writing, and helping people with their honors theses. I wrote an undergraduate honors thesis, so I kind had this weird notion of I can help with manuscripts, I can help edit people’s written stuff into a better shape. So that was the genesis of the very first agency. I would think of it today as like a creator studio, because it evolved rather rapidly into not just working on books, but also doing podcasts and newsletters. And again, what we would think of today is all of the content types for a creator business. The only thing that we didn’t end up doing was video, we never got into video.

Bjork Ostrom:: Sure, which at the time would’ve been people who are doing video, but it would’ve been early. It’s not like video today-

Matthew Gartland:: Super early.

Bjork Ostrom:: … where it’s almost like table stakes for creators.

Matthew Gartland:: Right, even podcasting was relatively early.

Bjork Ostrom:: Early, yeah.

Matthew Gartland:: So this got started in 2012, 2013. I did quickly meet Pat within the first year, but our core focus was working with nonfiction authors, folks that had traditionally published books or were working on their first one. This was also, sort of again, just sort of magical timing of the internet, Amazon KDP arrived on the scene and became a major-

Bjork Ostrom:: Can you explain what that is for people who don’t know, KDP?

Matthew Gartland:: Oh, absolutely, Kindle Direct Publishing, which is now ubiquitous in terms of our understanding of like, “Hey, if you want to write and publish, self-publishing is an option.” It wasn’t always an option, or at least it was really, really hard. And then, Amazon developed an entire ecosystem of tools for-

Bjork Ostrom:: You could have a tool that you’d write a book, and it would be formatted in a way where you could just have it show up in the Kindle Store.

Matthew Gartland:: Yep.

Bjork Ostrom:: So suddenly, it’s like you’re able to get a book in front of millions of people in a digital format, with the ability for them to purchase it with one click, versus 20 years ago, you’d have to get a book published, and you’d print it, and you don’t know how many you have to print. And so a massive change in the world of publishing for authors.

Matthew Gartland:: Oh, yeah. I mean, it brought down the walls, in terms of barriers to entry for people that wanted to be authors that had some version of a manuscript. They could now, yeah, format in different types, EPUB, MOBI files, get really kind of nerdy about it. And then, I forget the exact chronology, I’m pretty certain that the digital KDP side came first, but then eventually, print on demand came as a fast follow through Amazon. So then, you could even have a physical version of your self-published book, so that created so much demand. So for the bloggers, the writers that were really emulating and inspired by Seth Godin, who is still hyper relevant, but he was going through a mega moment. This was in the immediate wake of Tim Ferriss’s first book that really cracked open a lot of people getting interested in entrepreneurship and working for themselves in different ways.

Bjork Ostrom:: 4-Hour Workweek, is that-

Matthew Gartland:: That, the 4-Hour Workweek book. Yep. Check me on this stuff, thank you.

Bjork Ostrom:: Fine, that’s great. Yeah.

Matthew Gartland:: Last pass, important details. But yeah, it was, again, I had a good idea and I got really lucky, and I think that’s sort of-

Bjork Ostrom:: Which is often how it goes. It’s the luck of timing, it’s a good idea, and it’s hard work, and it can’t just be any one of those. It kind of has to be all three of those. And sometimes, what it seems like happens is you work hard, but it’s not the right time, and it eventually is the right time, and then you catch it, or maybe you’re not working very hard and it is the right time of which you’re lucky. And then, eventually you’re like, “Wait, I’m going to start trying at this. I’m going to start working hard,” and then it unlocks. But I think that’s the hard part, is sometimes people feel like, “I’m working really hard on this thing and it’s not happening.” It’s maybe because it’s not the right time or the timing isn’t exactly as it should be. Not that it’s always exactly as it should be, but there is definitely market pull conditions for a thing.

And sometimes, there’s also luck involved, but we talk about this idea of luck wears overalls, like hard work and luck often go hand in hand, so-

Matthew Gartland:: I like this.

Bjork Ostrom:: Yeah, totally get what you’re saying with it. So you’ve built this agency, it kind of coincides with the rise of early creator economy. You’re helping creators in lots of different kind of mediums. Maybe not video, but writing, publishing, blogging, maybe creating content on social. You build that up, and then eventually you cross paths, let me know if I’m fast forwarding too much, with Pat Flynn, Smart Passive Income. Some people are familiar with that. We interviewed Pat many years ago, but he kind of was somebody who did and still does speak to creators who are interested in building an online business. What was that moment like? How did that come about?

Matthew Gartland:: Another sort of serendipitous thing. You mentioned our fantasy football league on the front end of this, Pat is included in that league, and that is the very first interaction I had with Pat, through a mutual friend. As I was building that league for the first time, someone who recommended Pat to be in the league, he said yes, that’s sort of just a weird sort of brand new reference. But then the first project together was in 2012, I want to say… No, I’m sorry, 2015, which was his first manuscript, self-publishing, that we worked on together, but we just kind of hit it off. So I continued to be invited by Pat into the next project idea he had that was in some way creative.

Me and my team, as my team continued to grow, we sort of shared something of a symbiotic storyline in terms of Pat’s building of the first generation of SPI, then as I was building my creative team at that time. So yeah, we became fast friends, we were invited very deeply into the strategic process of what Pat was trying to do, or at least me personally. And rather quickly, I kind of became sort of just a business partner on the side, not formally, but was just really privileged and grateful that Pat trusted me with bringing really big questions and ideas, and we’d kind of just talk about it. And then, we had an opportunity, not all the time, but most of that work lent itself to what we could do. So we did, and that included online courses.

So fast forwarding to around 2016 era, when online courses then became sort of one of the next big things for what of course we’d now call creators, to codify their expertise and create now a new asset to sell. We cut our teeth on that real fast, learning of all of the technology systems to be able to do that, hook them up to different payment gateways, and just the whole kind of marketing apparatus to get people in. So we cut our teeth on that, did a lot of course development for other clients as well, not just Pat. So yeah, that was a whole other kind of moment, sort of like the broader ecosystem, and the economy of online entrepreneurship was the advent and the introduction of online courses.

So yeah, it wasn’t planned in terms of what we ultimately did, but I think in many respects, that’s a good thing. It was never forced. We grew organically. The friendship intensified, the trust was immense. So by 2018, by that point, I’d actually sold another agency, which is a bit of a side quest on the story. So during this whole time, another good friend of mine started an e-commerce agency, and there was also a great moment in time with what was occurring with specifically Shopify and a lot of DTC merchants getting there, and starting their own small businesses on Shopify. He was starting to grow that. He needed a business partner that was really on the ops, and finance, and systematization, and data, and contracts, and all of these things. He was very much the big idea, big energy sales guy.

So there was even a point in time where I had two agencies operating at once. My other partner, John and I, got within an inch of even merging those two agencies together, to create a content and commerce, like mega agency. We ended up not doing that. In retrospect, a good thing. And then, we sold eventually the e-commerce agency to a much larger direct to consumer e-comm agency, but we grew that rather significantly and had a really close strategic partnership with specifically Shopify Plus, which is their real kind of upmarket version of their tech stack, servicing 20, 30, $40 million a year direct to consumer brands like Chubbies Shorts, Bombas socks, some of those kind of darling companies-

Bjork Ostrom:: Of which I’m wearing right now.

Matthew Gartland:: Are you really? Yeah, I mean they’re amazing.

Bjork Ostrom:: Bombas socks. Yeah, yeah, totally.

Matthew Gartland:: It was a wonderful experience, it was a really hard experience. We kind of grew too quickly at different phases, and that’s another kind of teachable thing, which is for folks listening, the business that you’re building, and what is success, how do you define that in numbers? Is it always about revenue? Are you always just trying to scale and grow that? And to the extent that you’re building a team, how fast do you build a team in concert with just revenue, and demand, and all of these other factors that at least someone like me, and I think, Bjork, someone like you, you’re always just trying to balance these things in your head, and then ultimately also spreadsheets and data, and plot these things out, so you have stable, profit-flowing businesses, right?

Bjork Ostrom:: Yeah.

Matthew Gartland:: And that’s been a commonality in my career across my creative agency, which was just me. I didn’t have partners on that one. The e-comm agency, that was chiefly my job. I was the COO of that company. And then, I guess, bringing it back to Pat’s story, after I sold or we sold the direct to consumer e-conn company, that was in late 2017. Then in 2018, maybe like also a lot of us, I kind of felt like that chapter of my entrepreneurial career was complete or nearing complete. Writing an agency, a service business is hard. It’s really enjoyable, I still wildly promote service work. I think too many people these days maybe pooh-pooh service work, and they just want to be creators, and then just have online courses that sell themselves. And I don’t actually think that that’s terribly good advice, we could maybe come back around to that. Yeah

Bjork Ostrom:: Yeah, but basically, I think as long as we’re talking about it, interesting to double click on that-

Matthew Gartland:: Yeah, go for it.

Bjork Ostrom:: We talk about, a lot, what are you after? And if people are after creating their own job, to replace their current job where they work somewhere else, maybe they don’t enjoy it, or it’s not a good fit, or they just have a vision of a future that they want to build, one of the best ways to do that is to figure out how to trade time for money, and to create some type of service that you do for others. That’s going to, most often, you’re going to be able to compress that into a shorter period of time, to a certain revenue number or profit number than you would to scale some type of creator business.

And then, I think often, would be interested in your thoughts about this, you can work backwards from that and start to backfill some of your time, whether it’s you have a gap where maybe you’re not as busy, or you just intentionally start to pare down the clients you’re working with, in order to build on the side. I mean, so many businesses have done this. I think a Basecamp is the ultimate example, where they originally were a services business, doing web design, web development, and then built these products kind of on the side. And then, obviously now one of the most, well-known bootstrapped software businesses.

I think the same thing can be true for the creator world. We’ve had many different interviews with people who they start a video business, and they shoot video for other creators, and that helps them transition into being an entrepreneur. And then, 10% of the time, they’re working on their own site or their own social, and then it’s 20% and 30%, and over time, they start to scale it up. Is that kind of what you’re getting at, is like-

Matthew Gartland:: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom:: … the value of a service business is pretty immense, in that it allows you to relatively quickly, if you’re focusing on an area you’re interested in and you have unique skills and abilities in, scale up?

Matthew Gartland:: Yeah, exactly, especially for folks that aren’t raising money, like they’re bootstrapping. So why not be revenue generating from the jump, if you can?

Bjork Ostrom:: Yeah.

Matthew Gartland:: Right, and I’m not saying that that is for everyone, snap easy to do. I don’t want to create maybe the wrong impression there. But I find that if you’re trying to work for yourself, if you’re trying to replace a traditional source of income with just your own sort of income, that at least as a first, perhaps, not always, but perhaps definition of success is just to match that, right? It’s a very common story, and I think it’s a good one as a starting point, not that… And they’re always. It’s like, yeah, then do services, lean into the skills that you already have.

You can go to market faster. Velocity is always a really key thing in any kind of small business or entrepreneurial venture. And I think something else that is really under celebrated, under discussed is that it keeps you sharp, because things change, like so much has changed in the creator economy by itself over the last 5, 10 years. So if you are doing services, I find, through my lived experience, anyway, that you’re closer to the flame of what the market wants, what your customers ultimately want, and there are pains, the language that they’re using to talk about those pains, the needs that they have, things change and evolve. So when you do services, you’re that much closer-

Bjork Ostrom:: Which is kind of customer development, product development, like-

Matthew Gartland:: Yes, it’s like R&D, it’s like paid R&D.

Bjork Ostrom:: Yeah, if you were creating a product, one of the first things you should do is have those same conversations, but you just wouldn’t be getting paid to do them. You would be trying to convince people, “Please get on a call with me so I can ask you questions about your pain points,” as opposed to if you’re doing a services-based business, you’re helping people solve those problems, getting paid to do it, and also then getting informed as to a potential product, whether information, or software, or physical product that you could be creating to solve that problem, that people are coming to you to kind of get help with?

Matthew Gartland:: Yeah, and at least per the thesis, you’re de-risking your chance of being wrong. If you didn’t do that, if you just sat in your office or anywhere, and you just created a product because you thought it was a good idea, without talking to a lot of people or talking to very few people, and without trying to get some feedback loops going, then you could be building the wrong product or you could be positioning it the wrong way. You could be using the wrong language. So if you can test some of those methods and the services through a services offer first, you can at least, again, and I’ve seen this prove true, it’s not like a totally unproven thesis, then your margin for error reduces, which I think is a very valuable thing to consider, again, from almost like an operational mindset, about how I think about product development for small business.

Bjork Ostrom:: Yeah, I had an email conversation with somebody who’s a food creator, and she was talking about just the painstaking process of trying to build traffic to her site, and she wanted to eventually monetize it. And the back and forth that we had was around she was doing these in-person meal planning classes, and people found them to be immensely valuable. And my feedback to her was like, “Oh, continue to explore that. There’s something there, and it could potentially be made digital, but just because it’s in person doesn’t mean it’s bad.”

You could have something that is a in-person class that you do once a week, and maybe there’s a digital version of it, and then the online component of it is lead generation for that class, versus I think a lot of people start with the idea of like, “Hey, I’m going to try and just grind away at creating content for two to three years, in order to get enough traffic to work with an advertising company or do sponsored content,” which works, you can do it, but to your point, sometimes you might think, “I’m creating a type of content that people really want,” and you don’t actually know if they do want it or not. And doing some of that service-based work allows you to see, “Is this something that people actually want?” In the purest form, are people willing to pay to get this problem solved? And if they are, that’s probably an indicator that there’s something more there.

Matthew Gartland:: Right, you’re onto something. Exactly. And then, just keep listening. It’s what we did through both services companies, so my creative company, Creative Studio, and then the direct to consumer e-comm business, which a quick maybe story back there that perhaps kind of illustrates the point is we solved, through software, through… This is almost a Basecamp-esque story. So through our services business, the e-comm one, we collaborated and co-created software with one of our biggest clients, which was Chubbies Shorts’, crazy brand, if you go check that out, returns and exchanges software, because in direct to consumer e-comm, and some of us are consumers of that, we buy socks online, or shoes, or whatever.

The traditional experience, a lot of it’s been solved these days is returning that stuff is a pain in the butt, right? The traditional process was very manual. You had to download a PDF return slip, you had to print it, fill it out-

Bjork Ostrom:: Tape it on, yeah.

Matthew Gartland:: … go get your own box, take it to UPS or somewhere. It was just, it’s a bad process. So we invented software that moved a lot of that experience into the browser, as people were interacting through a particular brands consumer website, you know, on Shopify. It was a separate piece of software that integrated with Shopify, and it was like, “Crap, this is a product,” but we solved our own problem. We kind of did that and incubated it, and then we eventually spun that out into a new company that went on to raise gobs of money, and it’s on a rocket. But we would never have been able to figure that out on our own. We did it because of services, and we were solving real problems through a service lens.

Bjork Ostrom:: That’s great. Before we continue, let’s take a moment to hear from our sponsors. As you know, you’re listening to the Food Blogger Pro Podcast, but maybe you didn’t know that we actually have a membership for food creators and food publishers like yourself. We’ve actually had this option for 10 years. We talk about it occasionally on the podcast, but recently we had this realization of like, we need to let people know that we have a membership, because sometimes people don’t know that exists.

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So coming back out, we double clicked, now we press the back button, to hear the completion of that story around you and Pat are working close together. You eventually decide to merge, or the agency that you’re working on, that becomes SPI Media, Smart Passive Income Media, where you work directly with, essentially, the type of people that are listening to this podcast, online business builders, creators, content creators. When did that happen? And then, talk a little bit about the SPI community, what that looks like.

Matthew Gartland:: Yeah, I’d love to, and there’s a really strong tether between the two. So after the e-comm agency was sold at the end or towards the end of 2017, it kind of galvanized within me, okay, what is my longer-term future and vision for then the Creative Studio that I had. And what just kept coming up is we were solving of new problems for folks like Pat, though not exclusively Pat, our other clients. It was that the forms of content in 2017, online courses were still doing quite well, but the zone was getting flooded, if you will, with then online courses. Barriers of entry come down, zones get flooded.

Same happened with books even, and we saw this happen up close, all this self-publishing capability, as we’ve already hit on, from Amazon, it democratized, then the whole notion of anyone can be an author. And there’s a famous Seth Godin quote that says, “When anyone can be an author, anyone can,” or, “When anyone can publish a book, anyone can, and most are going to be crap.” So there’s a quality factor there. So to keep, at least in my mind, and also Pat’s, to keep quality high, to stay differentiated, with courses we were starting to see… And by that point, even though I wasn’t a formal partner, again, he was trusting me enough. So I knew financial numbers, I knew what was happening in the business.

And it was like, “I don’t know if this is the model for the next five years. How do we think about where the industry is going to be? What are we seeing and hearing from the students that we are serving by way of selling online courses? What are they really craving?” And not just more topical feedback, but interaction feedback with our curriculums. Also, what are our friends seeing and feeling, the close relationships we had in the market? And that kind of tied it all together. It was like, “Okay, I think for me…” because I’d had, at that point, close to seven years, or six years doing agency work, it’s like, “Okay, I kind of want to be focused on one brand and be a real vested partner in that brand.” Pat and I were the closest, and he was looking to do things differently, and wanted more help. So again, it was a very natural thing.

We’d almost been dating for years, to use a dating reference, and then I was like, “Hey, here’s something we could go do in different… I don’t have all the answers, but here’s the beginning of a pretty different vision for what could be possible.” Pat enriched that as well. I kind of bent the knee proverbially, but like, “Hey, what if we just made a baby, made a company together?” So I merge in my creative team, and certain assets, and SOPs, and kind of the business apparatus, if you will. You take your SPI assets, the brand and other things, which he had in just sort of a big global, sort of single LLC company, and he had other personal projects that would then be carved out.

Then we put those together, draw a circle around that, and then bam, we co-founded a new company, and that’s SPI Media. And a big part of that thesis, that through-line was that learning and development was already beginning to change. One of the most important things or the most valuable things that we were seeing and hearing was not so much just the curriculum that we were selling on Teachable, our courses, but the interactions that we were fostering through, at that time, Facebook Groups. So we were using Facebook Groups with… And we had a lot of them, and there was one specific per course, and we were trying to cultivate, effectively, community, but Facebook Groups, not the best, it was never designed to necessarily be community, at least not the way that we think about it and talk about it today. And we have very strong opinions, or at least I do, about what is and is not good community.

So it was, again, sort of another accidental, good, lucky timing, because we had a really close, and still do, close personal relationships with the founder of Teachable, who went on to sell Teachable, and that was in the industry. So when I was talking to Ankur, who was the founder around like, “Hey, this is I think the direction that I want to go. We want to build MRR into our business, monthly recurring revenue.” We didn’t have any of that, at least not what I called native. We had some affiliate revenue that is inherently recurring, but we didn’t have our own. So started to even test the waters with Ankur around, “Hey, are you at all thinking about building this sort of capability to the future of the Teachable product?”

And he was unsure, and there were some things you could kind of stitch together, but he was like, “Hey, but three of my top guys are leaving the company to basically go a new startup that I think is going to solve what you’re talking about,” and that is now Circle. So it was just again, happy accident timing. You invest in people, invest in relationships, sometimes you get lucky, and I think that’s always something you should do. So that’s again, fortuitous timing. So this was 2019. At this point, we’d already tied the knot, we had co-founded the company in 2018, or at the end of 2018, we decided to do that.

So 2019 was kind of the start, and then I guess the rest is history, to kind of fast-forward a little bit, but having to come back and double click on anything, which is we started to pivot the business model. That’s a really hard thing to do, is to transform one’s business model, especially when you have a full-time team, which we did. Our high watermark with online course revenue, we were doing somewhere between 2 to $3 million a year in one-time purchase online courses, and then very intentionally, it was already starting, we were seeing attrition for, again, market reasons and others. So we intentionally cannibalized that to zero. Today, we make $0 from our primary revenue source in 2018-

Bjork Ostrom:: At one point, yeah.

Matthew Gartland:: … and now, so do that while you’re building a whole new, essentially, business model, which is recurring revenue.

Bjork Ostrom:: Yep, yep, and the benefit of that is the selling looks different. It’s like you’re building a community, you’re selling into the community. People stick around. That same idea we have with Food Blogger Pro, which is this recurring business model. It’s not like software, but it’s membership. And membership can be a really wonderful thing, but incredibly hard to rebuild that. But now, you’re at this point where you have members who are part of this community, and the focus of it is really the name, Smart Passive Income. We all know, and you talk openly about passive, in the sense that you could not work a day and still earn the money, not passive in the sense of you’re not going to work an entire year, but the allure is what a lot of us feel, which is autonomy.

You’re able to work where you want, it’s digital, so you’re not having to necessarily go into an office, all of these people who are building these types of businesses, and you get to see, in a really interesting cross-section of global digital creators who are building businesses. One of the things that I’d be interested to hear you reflect on a little bit is what’s working right now? Like, with the people you see within your community or that you come across on the podcast, as you guys are doing interviews with people, what are some of the things that feel like are working right now and are effective? We talked about these different stages throughout the last decade, things that did work, maybe didn’t work, but what’s working right now, at least when you look at the entrepreneurs you’re working with, or even within your own businesses?

Matthew Gartland:: A few things, it’s a great question. Might be a slightly counterintuitive answer, is at least in our community, we have the great pleasure to serve over 1,200 members, so a decent data set, is that many of them don’t identify as creators. Yes, this is an important industry term. My opinion on the record, 100 times over, I’m sure on podcasts and whatnot, is that I’m not actually the biggest fan of the term, at least at this point, in its definition, because it’s kind of been hijacked to be now a meta term that is now kind of everything. And when something means everything, it kind of means nothing, in my book.

So anyway, what I’m seeing and hearing, that I think is actually quite fantastic, that is beginning to work for people, one are partnerships, like being more deliberate with the relationship building activity that early-stage entrepreneurs, online entrepreneurs are doing, to help them not just build audience, though that as well, but honestly just sell, and sell relatively quickly, or sell faster than maybe traditional advice might suggest. If, like, “Oh, just go build an audience and eventually sell to that audience.” That could take a while, especially because audience building is increasingly, quite frankly, a hard thing to do. The more that the internet gets fragmented, the more that AI is coming and affecting SEO, which I know a lot of friends, including ourselves, have struggled with, in terms of retaining certain keyword positions, and the whole social media sort of dumpster fire. At least I’m not the biggest fan of all things social media.

Just, it’s much, much harder these days, as compared to 2010, 2012 era of social media. So the more that you can, just to go back to it, number one, partnership building, can we do co-promotion? Can we think about economic relationships? I think that’s a wonderful thing for entrepreneurs to be thinking earlier than maybe they used to around finances, essentially, like pricing, rev share models. Not that these are complicated things, they don’t have to be. And then, relationship building as a pathway to getting a business to really work, to actually getting the inputs into a business that are going to be necessary as the basic needs of a business, a little bit of revenue to get it going, a little bit of access to an addressable market vis-à-vis someone else’s audience. So partnerships is, I think, a great thing that people are thinking about more critically earlier in the process.

Bjork Ostrom:: I think that’s great. So Lindsay and our friend Nate have started a kind of side channel, and they have 6,000 followers. It’s called Snackdive, and it’s like a snack review show, but one of the things that we’ve started to do on it is try and sell. I hear what you’re saying in partnerships, in that sometimes it’s you and another business, and you’re thinking creatively around how do you create a net win situation? And it’s a little bit like that, because we’re reaching out to these companies and being like, “Here’s where we’re at, we would love to figure out how to partner.” And it’s a little bit of that early stage filtering around, like, “Is this a viable business?” And we’re in the early stages of potentially getting the first deal that we’ve gotten.

It’s like, the business is operating at a loss, but as soon as possible, we’re trying to get it to be revenue positive. Even though we have these other businesses that could support it, we wouldn’t really need to necessarily get it to a point where it’s profitable, but if it’s not that, then it’s a hobby, and we don’t want it to be a hobby. We want it to pay for itself. And so to prioritize early on selling, trying to land deals, trying to figure out partnerships, thinking of it as a business early on, and thinking about it from the perspective of building revenue and being strategic about that.

It reminds me of the conversations we’ve had around your… It’s kind of a framework that you’ve created to track business metrics, revenue, expenses. Can you talk a little bit about what profit flow is, and how entrepreneurs are using that within their businesses? And we have our friend Daryl Westerfeld, who talked about it being life-changing for him, and that’s just for somebody like yourself who loves spreadsheets, I’m sure for somebody to say, “A spreadsheet is life changing,” is really great to hear?

Matthew Gartland:: Yeah, tickles my heart. Yeah, thanks for teeing it up. Let me back into that super quick. So you were prophetic in that I was going to say, to my number one, my number two was going to be direct sellings, and they are overlapping circles with partnerships. But yeah, folks moving more into, first and foremost, a mindset, a head space again, of being more comfortable and more willing to try to make an offer on the front end of something, and sometimes, to go back to already another conversation point, and offer that as a service-based offer, in some capacity.

It doesn’t always have to be consulting, per se. There’s a lot of different ways you can design out, like a service offer would be number two. And then, number three is the tie back to profit flow, which is, and I hope I’m not wrong with my read on this, from my friends, my community, et cetera, is that this day and age, definitely post-pandemic, when that has affected a lot of different small businesses in a lot of different ways, there’s been a lot of adversity there, people do seem genuinely, I’d say this is like a Grinchy but healthy byproduct of some of that adversity in the markets over the last couple of years, is a greater literacy with business finance.

They care about business finance more, or at least that’s what I’ve seen, or they care in such that they want to learn it sooner than maybe they used to. Whereas, before, talking about budgets was like, “Oh, that seems boring. I don’t want to put my time into thinking about or designing a budget. What is cashflow? Like, I kind of think I maybe understand the notion of cashflow, but I’d rather just record podcasts versus try to think about cashflow.” So yeah, I think it’s a good thing, ultimately, in terms of what I see, especially as businesses begin to get traction and grow, is that a certain interest level is increased, is my radar, on business financial literacy, if that kind of makes sense?

And it ties back to, again, sort of as a through-line to some of these conversation points, me solving my own problem, over a decade. So going all, all the way back, not to retell the whole story, but from the very beginning of my first startup, that Creative Studio, as we were starting to gain traction, my costs were increasing, because I had to keep bringing in initially contractors, and then eventually I had made the choice to go with a full-time workforce, as our revenues were growing.

It’s like, “I need to keep these things in balance,” because at least I had chosen, this is not everyone’s choice, but I always wanted just to at least be cashflow neutral, which is to simply say, “I want to be bringing in as much revenue as I’m spending out the back, and try to be as least cash flow neutral as I’m trying to systematically grow this business. I don’t want to take on debt.” Some of my companies I’ve been a part of have taken on working debt, lines of credit, things like that, to try to grow. The Creative Studio never did. At least my personal preference is to try to avoid those dates as much as possible. Just, that’s a me decision.

So I started to slowly but surely build out, yes, in the spreadsheet at the start, a very simple just kind of cashflow calculator, and it was designed very literally in almost a calendar format. So day by day, Monday through Friday, where business activity was happening, transactions, to map out, “Okay, here are the inflows that I’m expecting from certain client receivables, et cetera, then here’s when I need to make payments on credit cards and invoices to contractors, and then eventually payroll.” And then, I started to stitch together what this looked like with data.

This is certainly drawing on my data science and information system background. I know how to build systems. It was very basic in the beginning, and then is not basic anymore. So over 10 plus years, kept adding different dimensionality to essentially the database, the data structure to it. Started to build more dynamic elements into it, so I could categorize the inflows in different ways. I could also categorize the outflows, so the expenses in different ways. I eventually built an entire visualization layer through charting, just charts, that still all lives within a Google spreadsheet ultimately. So that’s why it gets a little bit like a joke. It’s like, “Oh, this is just a spreadsheet?” And it’s like, “Yes, and it’s a-”

Bjork Ostrom:: And software.

Matthew Gartland:: “It’s kind of software with a database layer, a logic layer that’s doing all the computations automatically, and then a visualization, UI layer.” And at this point in time, to kind of, I guess, wrap up the story, it’s basically a cash accounting based business system, where you can run almost any small business, whether you have a creator business, a services business, whether you’re working just for yourself, or if you have a team, those things don’t really matter, because it’s designed to work with basically any form of cash accounting, input, output, sort of a system.

Bjork Ostrom:: Yeah, cash accounting mean-

Matthew Gartland:: Cash accounting.

Bjork Ostrom:: … meaning the cash that comes in and the cash that comes out and into your bank account, on any given day or any given month. And one of the things that I think is so great about that and that we, as business owners, when anybody who listens to this podcast will hear me talk about creators, publishers, but the term I often use is business owners, because we are building businesses, is understanding, it’s kind of like the heartbeat of a business is the product. So it’s like what is the content you’re creating in many cases? What is the actual product you’re creating, in other cases? What is the service? That, it’s almost like there’s two hearts, that plus it’s almost like maybe it’s like the heart is the product and then the oxygen is the revenue. It’s the ability for the business to stay alive, it needs to have money coming in and money coming out.

And the understanding of those numbers I feel like is what’s really critical. And a tool like what you’ve built helps people get a good understanding of how much each day is coming in and coming out, and keeping an eye on those things. It’s one of the most… I know that Pat had a season where you do the income reports on Smart Passive Income on Pinch of Yum. We did a similar thing for a season, and one of the most beneficial things for us in doing that was me taking a day, and going in, and understanding like, “Here’s what it looks like from an inflow and outflow perspective.” And even better to do that on a day-by-day basis.

So if somebody’s interested in… I know that you do licensing for that system, if somebody would be interested in connecting with you with that, there’s not a landing page or an official tool, but I know that there’s a handful of established entrepreneurs who are building businesses and using it. If somebody wanted to hear more about it, could they just shoot you an email or something like that?

Matthew Gartland:: Oh, yeah, that’s very kind. Thank you. Yeah, no fancy landing page or anything. I’ll just say, I don’t know, as most entrepreneurs do, they have crazy dreams. I have a dream of someday… I’m a good data scientist sort of a guy, but I’m not a software engineer. So maybe one day, partnering up with a CTO sort of a person, actually building software, like the Basecamp guys actually did. But yeah, for right now, it’s just a little licensing thing. Anyway, my email, yeah, that’d be great, if people are interested, it’s just [email protected]. So my first name in full @ my last name .co.

Bjork Ostrom:: Cool. That’s great, thanks.

Matthew Gartland:: Yeah, thank you.

Bjork Ostrom:: To close out, would be interested to hear, we talk about those numbers, and we talk about this idea of tracking those numbers, and getting an idea of what those look like. We talked about this idea of autonomy, the ideal schedule, business building, but if you don’t actually know what game you’re playing, then it’s hard to know what success looks like as you’re tracking those.

And one of the things that we’ve talked about before, and I think is really important to shine a light on as we close out, is this idea of using all of those tools, using all of that information, using all of that data, to inform whether you are playing the game that you want to be playing or not. And I think sometimes we can get caught up in other people’s gameplay, we can see what somebody else is doing, and then we start to do it without really defining what we’re trying to do. Can you talk a little bit about maybe how you do that, how you approach it, and how you guide the entrepreneurs and business builders that you work with on doing that well?

Matthew Gartland:: Yeah, I don’t think this could be probably an understated question. It’s so important. Three minutes probably isn’t enough, but it’s definitely a good thing to land on.

Bjork Ostrom:: Yeah.

Matthew Gartland:: Yeah, I again, have spicy opinions. I think there’s obviously a lot of hubris online. I think there’s a lot of grandstanding, and in such a fashion where I think there’s an inceptingness, right, of other people’s success and trying to then mimic, or mirror, or say like, “Oh, I’m not successful until I hit that level,” of either revenue, in terms of people sharing all of their revenue, or all the vanity metrics that usually come associated with social media followings, stuff like that.

Yeah, I think that is a really dangerous game to play, because to your point, it’s not probably the game you want to play or that you should be playing. How do you solve for that? I think one of the classic ideas that stuck with me through my entire career, and it even dates back to my corporate career, I forget where I first heard it, but it’s that classic notion of you are the average of the five people you surround yourself with the most.

So I guess you could call that community, but in a very intimate way. So just look around you, and not necessarily physically next to you, but who are the five people you trust the most that you’re trying to get feedback from? Who are you following in a social media following sense? And maybe that’s a first kind of tactical lens of some form of honest self-assessment. Like, are you following people that are honestly healthy in your own sort of understanding and mental journey of what success means? Who, if you actually are a part of a community that is trying to promote accountability, and foster collaboration, and nurturing of forward progress on your small business, are you in a good community? Is there a better community that you can maybe consider differently, if you’re not really finding that the community that you’re in is really helping you in this way?

So I’d sort of assess, I guess that’s a long way to say, number one, kind of like, yeah, who are you following? Who are you really mimicking and looking to? And maybe doing an honest assessment on that. Number two, with no time to be able to unpack it, is just goal planning. Getting into actual business methodologies that are maybe unnatural at first, because usually they are for entrepreneurs, but strategic planning, goal planning. Over the next six months, how are you defining goals? How do you assess those goals to be the right goals for you? And then, how are you aligning the work that you’re doing day in and day out, week in and week out, to the pursuit and hopefully the attainment of those goals, right? And then, how are you socializing your definition of those goals, maybe flipping back to number one, with the people that hopefully you’re choosing to be your most trusted sort of advisory board, right? Like the people that… Right? So there’s a lot there and I’m sorry we can’t unpack it today.

Bjork Ostrom:: No, that’s great. Well, we’ll have to have to have you on for another podcast.

Matthew Gartland:: Yeah, yeah.

Bjork Ostrom:: That’ll be it.

Matthew Gartland:: Yeah, yeah, just around goal planning. I could talk for hours on strategic planning frameworks, methodologies, tactics, and all of that.

Bjork Ostrom:: That’s great. Well, we’ll have to do another-

Matthew Gartland:: But goal keeping is critical.

Bjork Ostrom:: … on another podcast. People have your email address, Smart Passive Income if they want to join the community and be a part of that. There’s also the Smart Passive Income Podcast. Matthew, super great to connect. Thanks for time today.

Matthew Gartland:: Bjork, thank you, buddy.

Bjork Ostrom:: Really appreciate it, and we’ll have to have you on again.

Matthew Gartland:: Thank you. Yeah, this was a blast.

Emily Walker: Hello, there. Emily here from the Food Blogger Pro team. We hope you enjoyed listening to this week’s episode of the podcast. Before we sign off today, I wanted to mention one of the most valuable parts of the Food Blogger Pro membership, and that’s our courses. In case you don’t already know, as soon as you become a Food Blogger Pro member, you immediately get access to all of our courses here on Food Blogger Pro.

We have hours and hours of courses available, including SEO for food blogs, food photography, Google Analytics, social media, and sponsored content. All of these courses have been recorded by the Food Blogger Pro team or some of our industry experts, and they’re truly a wealth of knowledge. We are always updating our courses, so you can rest assured that you’re getting the most up-to-date information as you’re working to grow your blog and your business. You can get access to all of our courses by joining Food Blogger Pro. Just head to foodbloggerpro.com/join to learn more about the membership and join our community. Thanks again for tuning in and listening to the podcast. Make it a great week.