From Boobs to Bankruptcy to Billionaires with Matt Haycox

0:01Light that spark fire nation JLD here and welcome to entrepreneurs on fire brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network with great shows like duct tape marketing. Today, we'll be breaking down from boobs to bankruptcy to billionaires. To drop these value bombs, I brought Matt Haycox into EO Fire Studios. Once the UK's biggest strip club operator, Matt was bankrupt by 28. Since bouncing back, he has gone on to invest over 500 million in UK businesses and helps other business owners avoid his prior mistakes. And today, Fire Nation, we'll talk about Matt's story. We'll talk about how to come back from losing everything with bankruptcy.

0:39We'll talk about shifting into business loans and how a business owner can actually improve their chances of getting funded when they need it, and so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Matt and our sponsors. Yes, that's another sale on Shopify, the platform that simplifies selling online and in person. Sign up for a$1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash onfire, all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash onfire to take your e-commerce business to new heights. Outbound Squad, hosted by Jason Bay, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals.

1:18Tune in for convos with leading sales experts and top performing reps to help you land more meetings with your ideal clients. One of my faves, the monthly ep with Jason and Ethan, where they share hacks, tips, and tricks. Listen to Outbound Squad wherever you get your podcasts. Matt say what's up to fire nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with what's up fire nation thank you for having me it is a pleasure to be here you know when it comes to being successful I'm not going to say necessarily people disagree with me but I think the big point people miss is I truly believe you can't be happy you can't be successful unless you are happy.

2:00Now, that sounds really wishy-washy. And as we get to talk, you probably know that that's not my style with business. I want to do it. I want to make the money. But I honestly think unless you're happy, what are we doing anything for? And that's whether it's business or sport, all the money in the world, all the medals in all the world. If you are not smiling from ear to ear, then I don't think you're successful. Well, Fire Nation, as you heard in the introduction, and maybe it brought a little smile to your face. We're talking about going from boobs to bankruptcy to billionaires. And we're going to learn a lot of great content around this topic.

2:32And I do want to start, Matt, with your origin story, because you have a fascinating story. We're going to be getting into some of the specifics. But first off, how did you get your start in business? Well, my dad was a businessman. He was an entrepreneur. He had his own business. So I guess growing up around that, you know, probably gave me that entrepreneurial spirit because I guess I didn't know anything else. And I knew from a very early age that I was going to be in business. I didn't know what I was going to be in business doing, but I just knew that I wanted to be in business. I mean, I remember being 10, 11 years old and going to bed, you know, reading biographies of other entrepreneurs, reading business magazines.

3:14And I used to, I mean, as a teenager, I kind of bought every get which quick scheme. I toyed with every possible idea. You know, I used to go down to the market selling anything. I mean, selling Pokemon. It shows how long ago this was. Selling Pokemon, selling inflatable chairs with inflatable cushions on. And the first thing I decided I was going to do to both make my millions and meet the girl of my dreams was to trade a domain name, a web domain name, to Natalie Imbrunia. Now, I don't know if you know who she is, or I don't know if anyone listening to this is as old as I am to be able to remember.

3:53But in about 1996, it was the beginning of the main names. And a friend of a friend had just bought SpiceGirls.com. And he was, you know, at the time he'd sell email addresses. So you could have like, you know, John at SpiceGirls.com. And that's how he made the money originally. Then he sold the name to the management team for a big six-figure sum. I mean, obviously, this shows how long ago this was. And I decided, well, I can do the same, and I can get a double whammy. I'm going to go and buy NatalieAmbrulia.com. It was a famous Australian singer and TV store at the time. And I was going to go and sell that domain name back to her management team, and it would both make me money and get me to meet her, and me and her would run off into the sunset together.

4:39So I bought this domain name for like a couple of dollars online, and I made a very little poor website to go along with it. And I rang up her PR team and told them I planned to sell this to them. And they immediately hit me with, you're blackmailing us. We're going to call our lawyers. And I tried to explain to them I wasn't blackmailing. You know, I just got in there first. But long story short, they wouldn't buy it. They wouldn't buy it from me. So I ended up selling it to a fellow fan for about£500. And I never made my millions or got to meet Natalie. But I guess technically buying it for two pounds and selling it for 500 pounds was quite a big ROI for a 16-year-old.

5:17And then it was onwards and upwards. I think that's impressive. I mean, I was about the same age around that time as well. And I can remember going to my dad and being like, hey, you should buy RedSox.com and Celtics.com because that was like our local NBA and professional sports, both baseball and basketball teams. and honestly, I don't know where you were getting this stuff for$2 because back in those days, it was pretty expensive to buy these domains for a year. It was like a couple hundred bucks and my dad was like, a couple hundred bucks, that is just crazy money. There's no way. We have to pay that every year and I'm like, no, believe me, it'll be worth it.

5:55I was like this 15 or 16-year-old and he wouldn't do it. I didn't have enough money saved up to buy my own domains or enough actual – I wasn't convinced that it was going to work either. I just thought that it could someday be worth something. I didn't realize that.com was going to carry such strength in the years to come because these were the early days. But it is kind of fascinating what we do when we're younger. And you look back and you're like, man, if I'd only had a couple thousand dollars in the bank, what could I have turned that into? Because turning$2 into$500, I mean, that is insane ROI.

6:28And I will say, we talked in the introduction about how Matt did own the biggest strip club, or he was the biggest strip club operator in the UK. And then some things happened, and he was bankrupt by the time he was 28. But let's kind of step back a little bit here, because many people would look at the strip club industry as unsavory, to say the least. So what made you enter this vertical? Well, just backtracking a little bit before then i mean the first the first proper business i got involved with was um was a business selling uniforms like corporate clothing for bus drivers and security guards and it was a family business not my family but it was a business that had been owned by a family and my dad actually invested in it and i went to work in it uh doing some sales it was my first proper proper job i was 18 19 years old when i left school um but unfortunately this business was a total disaster uh you know the family management team that owned it they'd run it into the ground they were you know best incompetent worst fraudulence and um you know my dad he put a silent investment in he wasn't really interested to kind of get involved in the business and and make it work so i'd be coming home every night after after work you know i still lived at home and i was kind of complaining at dinner saying dad this is ridiculous you know that they're stealing your money they're not running it properly and after a few weeks or a few months of me kind of drilling on at him he finally gave in and said you know what I'm not going to do anything about it but I can't take your money anymore you do what you want with it because you can't make it any worse than they've done and I literally went in the next day and fired everybody fired everybody apart from this this old guy who worked in the warehouse actually a little old guy who'd done nothing wrong and I had to start that business effectively from scratch with customers who didn't want to deal with us suppliers who didn't want to supply us you know bank banks who were calling in the overdraft no staff no morale no direction nothing and so I effectively really cut my teeth learning how to rebuild that business and dealing with every conceivable problem you can imagine and that's what I did for three years so my first grounding as a business owner my first business educational experience was being thrown in at the deepest of deep ends whilst probably being on fire as well and having to having to learn and deal with every problem and for over three years I think that business was losing about 300 000 pounds when i got involved and in its third year it was making 30 grand now not huge numbers but you know but but the principle and the turnaround for you know for a 19 20 21 year old guy uh was was obviously immense and it was the best training ground that i could possibly ask for uh but i also knew by that point that i was no longer interested i was bored uh and i wanted to i guess that that business needed structure and i wanted to go and do something that I enjoyed which was always going to feature in my future life as one of the key criteria for me choosing a business so I wanted to go and get into bars and clubs not specifically strip clubs at that time but just bars and clubs and I went and opened I went and opened a pub typical English pub and I had two or three of them over the course of a year and to varying degrees of success they were okay but they were never making big money and I realized the reason they weren't making big money is because it was very difficult to make money from only selling liquor you know only selling alcohol alone we needed other streams of income now whether that was going to be people paying on the door to come in or selling food or whatever it may be we needed other income now outside of work uh i used to i used to spend probably four or five nights a week in the local strip club and i knew the girls well and i knew the manager well uh and i'd be picking their brains on the business model deemed that because i was such a big fan of the strip clubs that probably qualified me enough to go and open one.

10:11And I thought, I've got these bars that are selling alcohol, but they need something else. I know. Let me turn them into a strip club, and I can kill two birds with one stone. And that was how I first started in Wakefield in 2004. And you went from there to being the biggest operator of strip clubs in the entire UK. And that's just a really quick climb to success. But then, of course, by the age of 28, it all came crashing down. So kind of talk to us about how that ended up happening. Because to be honest, and a lot of people in the audience know this, bankruptcy can be very traumatizing, very hard to recover from.

10:52So as you tell us that story, kind of continue through that to how you mentally recovered from bankruptcy and losing everything. Sure. Well, when I opened that first club in March, April 2004, it was quite successful from the outset. You know, I'm also making millions, but it certainly hit the ground running. And I knew I wanted to go and open more, but I also didn't have any funding to do anymore at that point. And I got introduced to a finance broker. I mean, I knew nothing about raising finance at that point, but I got introduced to a finance broker who was going to show me how to get a loan on my air conditioning, actually.

11:28So he went and got me some asset finance. you know i basically signed a piece of paper and this paper said we now own your air conditioning but we're gonna you know give you this 30 grand and you can rent it back off us i was like oh wow that's uh that's pretty cool um what else can i what else can i refinance instead of my air conditioning and that was that that introduced me to the world of finance uh and i and i used the assets of that first the first venue to raise finance and then go and buy the second venue and then by then i'd learned more finance tricks and i used that to go and buy the third venue and basically over the course of the next three or four years, because you've got to, you know, anyone who can remember that time knows this was a very heady time of aggressive money.

12:08You know, it was very loose with capital. You know, people wanted to borrow, lenders wanted to lend. And if you knew what you were doing, it was pretty easy to get your hands on money back then. And over the course of four or five years, I raised literally tens of millions of pounds. But I was completely over leveraged. I didn't appreciate it at the time. And I kind of parlayed my strip clubs into normal clubs, the normal clubs into shops, the shops into a property portfolio. So by the time I was, you know, 27, 28, I had, you know, this massive portfolio of businesses. I was, you know, I thought I was doing amazingly.

12:43I was living super well. And I guess, you know, I kind of felt like all my dreams had come true, but I was very over leveraged. You know, the finance was expensive. The repayment terms were very short. and at the time again I never really noticed because it was pre-credit crunch your lenders kept giving more money if I was ever short of money they'd just lend me some more which again obviously knowing what I know now I know it's a recipe for disaster but as a as a hungry 24 25 year old when when lenders are kind of wanting to give me money it almost felt like it made sense at the time but in in 2000 and in the beginning of 2008 the world was starting to change you know the words credit crunch had just been muttered and we all knew something bad was coming didn't particularly know what it was um but i i knew well two things happened one is i'd been to some mainstream funders and they said that they were going to refinance me if i achieved um if i achieved certain metrics so i went away for the next six months and i achieved the metrics that they asked me to achieve so i came back in probably june of 2008 and said right guys i've done what you asked me to do please can we have this refinance and that refinance would have would have cleared all my short-term expensive debt and taken some cash flow negative to cash flow positive and if it had happened I probably wouldn't be sat here now telling you this story but the credit crunch had started all these lenders had started to close their doors and they didn't want to lend to us or to anyone back then so I had no choice but to go back to my lenders and say listen guys I can't afford to pay you back over the period over the period of time we agreed I'm not asking you to I'm not asking you to have any kind of bankruptcy or major delinquency from me here but instead of paying you over two or three years I might need five or six years or seven or eight years you know whatever I need but you keep charging me interest charge me some penalties if you need to um but uh you know we can find a way to get out of this together some people said yes too many people said no and for me it was it was very much an all or nothing situation needed to happen and these guys who were saying no was there look Matt we don't need to agree anything with you because we've got your personal guarantee so if the business doesn't pay us you'll pay us i was like guys i'm 27 years old i've given about 45 million pounds worth of personal guarantees you know where do you where do you think i'm finding this money from uh but because even these guys who were probably half a generation older than me they hadn't felt the bad times either and they just thought uh yeah i guess thought i'd find a way to deal with it uh and they put and they put me into bankruptcy uh and the first the first card started to fall down in probably july of august 2008 literally two months after everything couldn't have been more swimming uh first card falls down and and not and knocks the whole stack down and by september literally three months later from you know from walking out of that bank you said look we can't refinance you just yet but still everything was okay in the business three months later all the businesses have gone bankrupt i've been declared personally bankrupt and i was you know i guess i went to bed one night a multi multi-millionaire woke up the next morning uh in a house with negative equity with no business uh with no income uh a wife and a one-year-old daughter so i guess following that onto onto you know what you asked of how did i recover from that bankruptcy you know how how was my mental health and and or depression whatever at the time i can always say i don't really have a a soundbite exciting answer here I just always say look I didn't feel I had a choice or I did have I had two choices but one just didn't suit me you know I woke up and I could have sat on the couch and wallowed in self-pity and watched you know Jerry Springer all day and you know and talked talked about what could have been or I could have gone out and gone back to work to make something happen because I had a wife and a daughter that needed providing for and quite simply I always took the view that I've got to look after my daughter and I know that I wasn't born to be poor so sitting on the couch and moaning about what's gone wrong isn't going to isn't going to provide any solutions for me I need to you know bite the bullet swallow my pride and get back out there and start start to work again you know yes it's not going to be the same work as yesterday yes my ego is going to have taken a bruising but if anything you know I can I know how I achieved what I achieved last time and I can probably do it a lot quicker this time because I I know the mistakes to avoid and I know the shortcuts to take.

17:08And ultimately, that's what I did. I got up the next day, went back to put some, I guess, put some food on the table and start to build some income. And I just tried to do it a lot quicker and a lot faster than the time before without making the same mistakes. And Fire Nation, having interviewed now 3 ,700 successful entrepreneurs, 99 % of them have a story where they essentially lost it all. But they learned so much that, like Matt said, he knew he could come back and do what he did before faster because he knew the process. He knew the steps. He learned from his mistakes prior. So these successes that are followed by failures, it's a very, very common story.

17:51the key here is to continue to take action. And Fire Nation, we have so much more to talk about when we get back from thanking our sponsors. Did you hear it too? That's a sound I love to hear. That's the sound of another sale on Shopify, the e-commerce platform revolutionizing millions of businesses worldwide. Whether you're selling running shoes or rain gear, Shopify simplifies selling online and in person so you can focus on business growth. A few of the many tools Shopify offers include an in-person POS system an all-in-one e-commerce platform. And Shopify even lets you sell across social media marketplaces like TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram.

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19:56Get early access to HubSpot AI today at hubspot.com slash artificial dash intelligence. So Matt, we're back and you shifted your business into providing business loans, which is pretty interesting because you had gone through the ability to get business loans pretty easily. And, you know, I mean, that$45 million number that you share is a huge number. So you saw from the consumer side that side of the borrowing business. And now you're moving into actually being the provider of these business loans. So talk about some of these common problems that you see with business borrowers. Because I want my listeners to really learn from the experience you gained doing what you do providing business loans.

20:42And talk about those common problems that business borrowers are making time and time again. I think one of the biggest problems that business owners or business borrowers make is that they're very disorganized. They don't have the clear information ready and available to them. And also, even more worryingly, is they have no understanding of the finances of their business. And I can't tell you, now this is going off on a slight tangent, but I can't tell you how important I think it is for people to hear this. that when I get the details of a business to look at making a loan for them you know I'll obviously ask for various financial information accounts bank statements etc etc and when we analyze those that's invariably going to bring up some more questions that we want the answers to and when we go back and we ask that the business owner you know what is that on your P &L account or how is that there on your balance sheet I guarantee nine times out of ten the answer is I don't deal with that I've got an accountant who does that or with a finance director does that let me put you in touch with them now I honestly think that is the gravest mistake that any business owner can make now not not necessarily just in finance you know in any particular area but especially in finance I think the first thing any business owner should do you don't have to be a trained accountant but you've got to have a solid grasp of the finances you know you've got to understand the difference between profit and loss and balance sheet you know the difference between profit and cash flow and if you can't answer simple questions on your uh on your financial statements then you know best case is you're not going to be able to run your business as efficiently as you should be doing and worst case scenario is you're going to be getting robbed in some way from a you know from an unscrupulous finance director or business partner or someone who has got more knowledge than you so you know one of the biggest mistakes people make is not understanding those figures and not being able not being able to present them um so and i also think you know so many business owners are very over optimistic uh when it when it comes to what their figures are you know that they're unrealistic ultimately all the lender wants to know is two or three very simple things they want to know why do you want the money they want to know how you're going to pay it back and they want to know if you don't pay it back what is their route of recourse you know What's their backup plan to get paid back?

23:04And as long as you can answer those three questions pretty clearly, then you're very much on your way to being able to raise a business loan. Fire Nation, I hope you're understanding this process because when you go through the need of getting a business loan, there's some problems you can avoid by knowing these things prior. And there's a lot of people that are listening right now, Matt, that I'm sure are saying to themselves, well, what if I really do know that I need a loan for my business? Like what are things that I can do to improve my chances of getting funded the right way? What would you share with them?

23:39So like I just said, you know, the two or three things a lender wants to know is what do you want the money for? How are you going to pay it back? And what's their recourse if it goes wrong? So when you put your loan proposal together, you want to be answering those questions as clearly and demonstrably as you can so that the lender knows exactly what's going on. What is your business doing? How does it make its money? If they put money into it for you, what is that going to make your finances look like? Is it going to grow something and therefore that's going to make it easy for you to repay it back?

24:11Or if you make a mistake, is there any fat in your business? Is there any support in there to be able to make payments during bad months, during slack times of income. But if you can demonstrate your financial information to answer those questions, then you're effectively doing the lender's job for them. And you're looking very professional, which is, I guarantee you, that is more than you can say for 90 % of business loan propositions. So you want to have up-to-date financial statements. You want to support those financial statements with bank statements. You want any supporting information, such as contracts or documents that can put this whole thing together.

24:54And aside from that, I think one great piece of advice that anybody should listen to is you need to understand your personal credit profile and you need to work on it if it's bad. Now, people will always say, why do I need good personal credit? This is a business loan. And the answer is twofold, really. One, nowadays, most lenders will want some kind of personal guarantee from you as a lender, as a borrower anyway. now whether that's for the full value of the loan or partial is going to depend on certain circumstances but chances are they're going to want some kind of personal guarantee so they're therefore going to want to understand what your personal credit profile looks like but almost more importantly than that even if they don't want to guarantee they want to see how you operate as an individual because how you operate as an individual is probably going to dictate as how you operate as a business owner and if they look at your personal credit reports and it's showing that you've got bounced payments everywhere, that all your credit cards are, you know, a couple of hundred dollars over the limit, or you're missing payments and making it up a couple of days later.

25:57Even though the net effect of that might show that you're still solvent and you've still got a lot of money, what it's really showing is that you're disorganized as an operator. And when any lender is going to lend money, if they've got the choice between lending to someone who's organized and who makes their commitments on time, and someone who's disorganized and doesn't make the commitments on time, it's pretty obvious which direction they're going to err in. Fire Nation, tons of great content from Matt here. A person who's really been through the ringer, come out the other side, went to a really interesting industry and niche, succeeded there and is now sharing his knowledge, his experience, his value.

26:35Matt, what's the one thing you really want Fire Nation to get from our conversation? What's that final value bomb? I think for me, the most important thing that I've learned over the years is the importance of a mentor or someone that you can absorb information from. I think when you listen to all the stories I've been talking about over the last 20, 30 minutes, really, I've been talking about making mistakes because I didn't know better. And what I try and do now when I provide business finance to people is that as well as giving them money, I give them support as well. And I just can't overemphasize how much smoother your business journey can be, how much more stress free it can be when you can take advice from people who've already trodden in the steps that you want to go.

27:23So whether that mentor is a real person, whether that mentor is a book or an Instagram account you want to follow, just do everything you possibly can to absorb information so that you don't have to make the same mistakes that people who went before you did. Matt, if Fire Nation wanted to connect with you, if they wanted to learn more, what is the best way they can do that? What's your call to action for our audience today? So you can get me on all things social. I'm the Matt Haycox. That's T-H-E-M-A-T-T-H-A-Y-C-O-X. I also have a podcast, which is the Matt Haycox Show. And you can listen to that on all the places you normally listen to your audio or watch the video versions on YouTube.

28:05And I have a website that brings all of this together where we talk about business finance, business problems, and everything in between. And that's www.matt-haycox.com. Fire Nation, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. You've been hanging out with MH and JLD today, so keep up that heat. And if you have direct questions for Matt, find this episode on the podcast app. Podopolo, post a comment, get the conversations rolling. EOfire.com. If you just type Matt in the search bar, the show notes page will pop right up with everything we talked about. And of course, you're a podcast listener, Fire Nation.

28:42So listen to the Matt Haycock's show. That's his podcast. Matt, thank you for sharing your truth, knowledge, value with Fire Nation today. For that, we salute you, brother, and we'll catch you on the flip side. Thank you for having me. Hey, Fire Nation, a huge thank you to our sponsors and Matt for sponsoring today's episode. And Fire Nation, over the last decade, I've interviewed more than 3 ,000 of the world's most successful entrepreneurs, and I created a revolutionary 17-step roadmap to your financial freedom and fulfillment. I put it all into my first traditionally published book, The Common Path to Uncommon Success, personally endorsed by Seth Godin and Gary Vaynerchuk.

29:17The Common Path to Uncommon Success, it's the step-by-step guidance that you need to achieve the lifestyle of your dreams. Visit uncommonsuccessbook.com. Order a copy, you'll be on fire. Catch you there or on the flip side. Now that is a sound I love to hear. It's another sale on Shopify. And right now you can sign up for a$1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash on fire, all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash on fire to take your e-commerce business to new heights. Outbound Squad, hosted by Jason Bay, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals.

29:56Tune in for convos with leading sales experts and top performing reps to help you land more meetings with your ideal clients. One of my faves, the monthly app with Jason and Ethan, where they share hacks, tips, and tricks. Listen to Outbound Squad wherever you get your podcasts.