E120: How being likeable can make you rich.

29:49I just think I sold my first company because of my network. So I think the soft skills thing doesn't have a direct, oh, you invest in it, it just pumps out money. But my experience would tell me that you invest in this stuff, you get good at it. and it will absolutely create value a lot of it yeah i think i think you said the word direct i think there's direct and indirect ways right um but what's direct get what do you have some examples like what would be a direct like way of sale yeah yeah i was gonna say your your first business was services my first business was services selling yeah and like it is like you know i make jokes about uh sas companies taking us to sports games but like look they have to have a chance to like create a human connection to win you over.

30:38Cause like, you know, why would I use Amazon buy with prime or why would I use North beam over some other thing? Right. And there's practical reasons, right? Like they do a service, right? I use North beam or, you know, maybe a better one is postscript because like postscript is SMS. Now, like at the core of SMS, it is a commodity service. Postscript has built tools and features to make it better, but they have to explain that to you, right? They have to have a chance to actually get that done. And I think the soft skills open the door. Talking about soft skills, Alex Bella's one of the coolest dudes ever, right?

31:11So like, he just has them. So my first business selling soft skills, I sold Ridge a contract to do their marketing services, right? And now I'm the CEO of Ridge. Roughly 10 years later, we figured that out. All the money I have is because of my ability to get in the room with them and be like, hey, let me explain to you everything I know about marketing. And they want to be in the room because I'm at least making jokes. right yeah um and the indirect way is employee retention yesterday ridged hundreds of thousands of dollars right multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars i play no part in that anymore right it's it's not even you're not even connor right connor connor's running the team that actually makes all that happen right and i'm running the product team or i'm talking to the guy who runs the product team to make that happen so it's like now indirectly the system's in place where i'm just kind of managing it and making sure those people stay plugged in, right?

32:03And if we lose a critical person, I'm going out there and recruiting somebody else. So that's the direct and the indirect way. And yeah, all your network, very indirect, but it's made you who you are today. Yeah, 100%. I think the employee thing is huge because it's also starts at the top, right? If you and Connor and the other founders of Ridge all put value on soft skills, that will bleed down into the organization. Like people will see how you guys interact with each other. And then when you bring somebody else in, like your first hires are basically like little mini me's, you know, like, especially if you're a first time founder, like you, you do not have the actual experience or know how to like hire somebody objectively.

32:48You just hire the person you want to have a beer with. Like, that's just how it works. Right. So like the first 10 people in your company are little clones of yourself. That's most probable. So I think how you actually lead and how you show up, pretty important because those 10 people, if they're good and they can grow with the company, they're then going to be the ones hiring other people. So you're like, if you start out just not really investing too heavily in being like pretty good on the soft skill side, like being likable, I think down the line that bites you in the ass. And it would come in like the quality of the people you have around you.

33:23You wind up with like talented terrors. Totally. Nothing worse. Yeah. And so like, let's talk about early teams being homogenous. Like, I think it's not a coincidence that me and Connor were born six months apart or whatever. Right. Like, it's because we, there's just a lot of cultural cues being a young dude living in suburbia being, you know, the age we were when we came up. Like, there's just, there's shared history and knowledge and culture. And so it's very quick to get to like what the hell we want to talk about. And, you know, me and my wife were born three months apart. Right. I think there's no coincidence that these things happened.

34:03Is that like we're very quickly getting on the same page because we have a lot of shared experiences, especially in the age of the Internet when we came up. Like it's not like we have to be from the same town anymore. Like we watch the same movies and all the same YouTube channels. So I think your first hours do end up being very homogenous. But then like as companies get bigger, you need different skills. you have to recruit those people in. I mean, for maybe six years, I don't think any women worked at Ridge. Like that is like the reality, right? It was Daniel and his buddies and it was me and Connor and then we slowly built out this thing.

34:37Now we have a very strong female leadership team. But like that is - But it kind of makes sense though. Like you also make sense because your customer was also you. Like it was basically like you guys were selling sort of to yourselves, right? It's like we're selling to other young men. I had to add women to my team right away because our customer is like 90 % female and I'm not. So like, I kid you not, I have a phone in my office. I think I've said this before. I have a phone that I get the, all the girls to use Instagram. So it's like, it defaults to a female perspective of Instagram. So I can pick this phone up.

35:14It just sits on my desk over here and I can actually browse Instagram as a like 25 year old woman. because my feed's not like that. No, yeah, dude. Your feed's hockey highlights and grilling videos. Dude, I get watches and like blowing up and mountain bikes, like people doing dumb, like men doing dumb things in the world. It is weird how much the internet's been siloed. Most brands are leaving money on the table with SMS, not us at Ridge. SMS is our number one revenue driver and PostScript is the reason why. Here's the deal. SMS is an email. If you treat it like email, you're doing it wrong. Postscript gets it.

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37:34If you're serious about scaling up, go to postscript.io, tell them Sean sent you and get a free SMS audit. Your competitors are gonna do this. If you sell pans, they are rushing right now. So if you're not on PostScript, you got to get here before your competitors. Get that free SMS audit. And the results for Ridge in 2024, we had a million opt-ins. We had 500 ,000 new subscribers. Revenue was$37 million. Grew 100 % year over year just on SMS. The ROI, 108x. This is 151 % increase year over year. We had 106 % increase in revenue, 108x ROI, and close to 500 ,000 new subs. SMS is killing it for Ridge.

38:17We think Postscript is the way to go. We think Postscript is the best name in SMS. They have a five reason why. They're not going to waste money on send. They're not going to leave your customers out to dry. You're going to get more subscribers. They're going to instantly convert them with AI. They have auto optimization for profit. They're going to keep you compliant. I think SMS is still the frontier of messaging customers and Postscript is the best name in it. Ridge did$40 million in SMS last year. this year we'll probably double again,$100 million in SMS probably because of PostScript. Thank you for sponsoring this podcast.

38:49Thank you guys. Talk to you later. All right, Matt. So we just did 30 minutes on soft skills. I think maybe that's enough soft skills. We should pivot to a different topic, but let's summarize it for the audience. Why are soft skills so important? How do they make you money? You have some good tips you've written down. Dude, I think, I think ultimately you're going to see, I think the framing of indirect and direct is great, but I think that you will actually find your life and business is far more enjoyable if you go into it trying to be likable. I think that being likable will make you more money.

39:25It will, you will find that like, there's just a law of attraction. This is just how the universe works, but like people will want to work with you and for you. They will want to tell other people to come work with you. Every meeting you go into will be more fun. Like I actually, like people say I hate meetings. I'm like, I don't. I like hanging out with my, like just talking creative and solving. I might go into meetings and get annoyed because we're talking about the same thing for too long. But I overall just like interacting with the people I work with because they're great people. We have fun.

39:58And I don't think you can have fun in business if you don't actually try to be likable. I think you, I don't know how that works. Like they're just, there's two opposing thoughts. Dude, I totally like the idea of trying to go into the day, trying to have like a fun quotient to fill up. It's like, okay, we have to have some amount of laughs today. Cause dude, look, if you want to, like, I always tell the team this, we've chose to make money the hard way, like selling weird things on the internet, right? Like if you wanted to make more money, you should get an oil and gas, right? And if you want to do something serious, like, yeah, Elon is catching rockets.

40:31So go, go, go apply there. So like nothing we do is life and death. Things can kind of wait. And like the very worst thing that happens is the customer's mad about their wallet. We'll ship them a new one. Right. So. Dude, 100%. You know, another one, since we are like, we're so digital now, I think people need to relearn how to write and that people should just write like they speak. You're actually really good at this. Like if you ever watch Sean's like posts on Twitter and then you meet Sean in real life, that's the same person. like a hundred percent you like you literally just write like you speak and i think a lot of people in corporate america so like this speaks to the non-founders now but so much of our life is digital and it's like on slack or via email or like you're writing a memo and my god the jargon and the buzzwords and these like long paragraphs nobody speaks this way so i think a very easy way to just be more likable is to write like you speak, especially in this digital world.

41:36It will go so far. Well, dude, also, it's just proof you're not using AI. That's true. But yeah, like I, yeah, I mean, I'm very much like what you see is what you get, right? So whatever I'm typing, it's exactly how I'm going to be. But that's just proof, you know, it's coming from me, dude, because everyone's just running everything through AI now. Let me ask you a question. Do you, are you more of a like praise people in public kind of guy? critique in public? Or do you go one-on-one with people? If you want to say something nice to them or you have feedback? Yeah. What I found is best, and this is a good tip.

42:12People listen to the podcast for those sick tips, right? So we're an educational podcast. We don't have to be funny and entertaining. So all that likable shit doesn't really apply here, but this is a good tip for everybody. You know, We have a company standup and people really like getting shout outs on the company standup, right? So it's everybody in the whole company and they're being told they did a great job. That works. But I can't do that for everybody every day or become disingenuous, right? Am I just going to run through the list of every employee? You did good. You did good. You did good.

42:44So it's like spiraling, dishing those out. And then if I want to do like more team morale boosting, I just spend, I haven't, I probably haven't done this at all this year, but it's probably once a quarter. I just individually DM every single employee being like, hey, I noticed you did this. You did a very good job at this. Thank you for doing it. Thank you for caring. Thanks for working here. Like, it takes a whole night because like, you know, 100 people to send 100 individual messages and think about what they did. But that matters. Yeah, it totally matters. Like going above and beyond, making sure people feel seen.

43:17So I'm just dedicating more time to do more of that, you know. Yeah, but that's good. I think that's really good leadership. I really do. I don't, again, this just comes back to the, I think in North America, we build companies to exit them. And if you build a company to like, you've been in Ridge now for a while, you're probably going to be in Ridge for a while longer. This is going to make your life more enjoyable. Like, man, you want to talk about soft skills, making more money. If you don't like running your company or being in your company, that's bad for your wallet. It's straight up. You will burn out.

43:55You'll flame out. You'll quit. You're going to do something because you're just, you can't exist like that for long. So I think that's really important. You know, the other thing I do is, and I'm just a fan of this, especially with like the, every company, whether you're at the very top or like there's people within the organization, there are people that like are around you that are more important relationship wise than others, right? So like my EA is a good example of this. She has been my EA for five years. She just went on mat leave. She just had a baby. So I don't have her now for nine months.

44:28My life is awful. Alyssa needs to come back to work. I like her mat leave replacement. Erin, she's great too. But like, I really like Alyssa. But when she went on mat leave, it's like the first thing I did is I bought her$1 ,000 in DoorDash cards. Like we call it skip the dishes here. Just because I know that like food is going to be the biggest thing that they deal with. So I think that there's ways to do little things for the people in your organization. I'll give you examples. I had a lead developer in my last company. His anniversary was coming up and him and his wife had not been in the same place for a while.

45:06There was some immigration thing. So the minute she was in town, I sent them out for dinner together. That kind of is so inexpensive, but it builds loyalty and retention. And that's how you make more money. It's like you need people to be with you, I guess is the short of that. Yeah, look, and like, this is the unfair ask for an executive, because you have to be in charge of all the money coming in, all the problems, everything stops at your door, and then you have your own life, right? You have your own family, you have your own people trying to hang out with you, your own friends, whatever, and then you have to care about 60 people underneath you, or 100 people underneath you.

45:41You have to go above and beyond to care about more people. It is just, you do have a larger basket, too, of responsibilities, right? Like, it's just, you're in charge of way more shit, and finding the capacity to get that done is hard. That's why most people probably should not be an executive. Dude, I tell people this all the time. It's like I had somebody recently, we were chatting about just like career advice and like how to move up in their career. I'm like, maybe you shouldn't. You know, like the further up, if you look at like a traditional organization, the further up you go, the more it rolls uphill.

46:14Totally. So like the more people that like you have to be responsible for, the more that your job is less about getting work done. Like this person in particular is a like a doer. They like to be productive. Their identity is tied up in it. And they should because like they're amazing at their work. They should never move up into management. When I was in like back way back when I was like in software, software engineers fall victim to this all the time, right? Less so today, I think, because you can be an individual contributor in a meta as an engineer and make a load of cash. But you used to have to go into management of some kind.

46:54And I don't know how many software developers you've met. They're not good people, people, broadly. When I was building stuff, most of my friends were socially terrible. So they should never be in charge of other humans. Yeah, there's some sort of law that it's like promotion to mediocrity. It's like if you're really good, you get promoted. and then you get promoted until you stop being good, right? Like that's, and it's just a mismatch of careers. So I'm glad it sounds like Meta fixed it, but yeah, totally. Like people get promoted to jobs they shouldn't have. You might remember that Ridge switched to RichPanel about a year ago.

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49:20If that's interesting to you, go to richpanel.com slash demo to book a demo. That's R-I-C-H panel.com slash demo. Get started today. Thank you so much, Rich Panel, for supporting the world's number one e-commerce podcast and being on the greatest show on earth. Let's get back to it. Matt, I'm going to ask you a question. This is just interview Matt section. I was just thinking, you talked about, you know, not everybody should be an executive, like rolling uphill, you know, people shouldn't be promoted. Do you feel like you've made any career mistakes? Can you think of anything you're like, oh, that was a mistake?

49:58oh like when i was an employee or like or like things that like you should have done differently in your career obviously your career worked out you're a you're a co-host of the most successful podcast on earth but uh like is there things that like you did like actual tips for listeners right you're starting to get a little bit of gray hair in the organization so like what are some mistakes you've made in your career as a okay so as a founder like as a entrepreneur uh i think there's this, I think there was a period of time in my career where I think it was like the Simon Sinek years where like leaders eat last.

50:36And it was all about like being a servant leader. Um, and I think I lost sight of the fact that my business was also there to serve me. And like the whole point of getting into business was to create wealth for myself. Um, like the, the, I lost sight of the asymmetry and the risk reward. So like, I didn't pay myself enough. I left too much money in the business because I just thought that's where it needed to be. So I think if I look back, it's like I just didn't capitalize as much on the risk that I was taking early on. And that might be easy to say in hindsight, but I think a lot of entrepreneurs, depending on the books you read, can fall victim to this.

51:22Your company should still serve you. It's one of, if not the most important purpose of a business is to produce profit for its shareholders. And I think I spent like a good three or four years like on the reverse of that, you know, thinking that I was here to serve the company. That's interesting. I'm in the middle of that right now where I have not paid myself all year. So I've been living off of, you know, Twitter payouts basically. But why? you know well we sort of sales are up this year profits up this year but as soon as the tariff hit like we just didn't know how crazy it was gonna get so we did a we did a riff we fired 12 something people and i'm not gonna do that lightly if i'm gonna fire 12 people i'm also gonna i'm like the first person to take a cut was me so i took a cut you know months before that where i'm like hey i think things are gonna get weird we had we had some sort of tips that like we were going to enter into a more populist you know or nationalistic situation just because like we we have relationships with warehouses in mexico and mexico shut a bunch down so we saw this happening and yeah so i took i took cuts way before that so if i'm going to fire people i'm going to probably eat first but uh but yeah i'm gonna know that right now so it's a good lesson to share what what are the great lessons what what are some failures you might have had in your career Oh my gosh.

52:50Dude, saying yes to everything. I did some stupid. My first company like yours was Service. We did UX design and development in the early days of e-commerce. Before there was Shopify and you could buy a theme, people used to pay a lot of money to get these stores built in the early 2000s. That was my company. We would just build these things and do all the back integrations long before Shopify was a thing. So, dude, I like, I was so hungry and so driven that if we had somebody come in and be like, this is my business and I want you to build me an e-commerce store, I would just say yes. So like, I built a weird amount of firearms and like ammunition stores, like just very much against, not even against, like it was just out of alignment with like what I like to do.

53:49I'm like, I don't care about guns like at all. And I did that over and over and over again for a period of time where like we were just doing work that I was not interested in at all. I would say the only times I would say no is like where it was clearly like that's illegal. You can't sell that online. Like that was obvious. Don't do that. But I've sold everything on the internet. Like I was doing the math the other day. I was looking back over like my last 20 years in e-commerce. I think if I tallied up like all of the sites that I had a hand in building or like initially growing, like all in over 20 years, I've probably sold like$6 billion worth online.

54:31And in like every category that you could think of, like everything in a home, everything that you carry with you, car parts, like everything. and I think I look at how I act now and I say no 99 times out of 100. I don't know if this is just an age and a financial thing. Like I still, on the other end of that, Sean, is like the advice that you give, which is like you should try to get financially secure as fast as possible. And I think I was just trying to do that, but I think I took it way too far. I was like, you're gonna give me money? Yeah, I'll do that. Like, you want me to walk your dog?

55:10Sure. you know i had no idea what i was worth yeah dude no i uh a very wide breath and then just doing whatever you like because it's it is it is privilege advice being like okay you'll be selective with opportunities and like it's one of those things where it's like you know you will come in and out of privilege throughout your life right so like you know if you're if you're successful now fantastic you can have a very narrow focus on what you want to work on but Dude, I remember the agency days. I mean, we were doing like a Uber competitor. We were doing their SEO. We were like, we literally sold every possible service.

55:48Like we did SEO and Google and Facebook and customer service. And I would do your ops for you. Like whatever it took to get the client in the door. And because I'm like, we'll land and expand, right? There's a thing called the live. They got bought by Target. We're like, we were doing their SEO, right? And then we were doing the company called Flex Cup. They were like a menstrual cup. We were doing their PPC. We were just doing their Google. So it's like, it doesn't matter. We'll work with anybody for anything. So I've definitely been there. Yeah, I think that it is easy to go back and say like, oh, you know, you should be selective with the opportunity.

56:21I do, I think there is something to be said though, like when you're younger to go very deep in one thing. You know, like I was like you way too wide in what I was doing. Because remember, early 2000s, early to mid 2000s, the internet was, I think, much smaller than it is today. And the number of participants in the internet economy was much smaller. So at that time, I knew how to write code. I've been doing it since I was 11. I was just in a good spot to be digitally native compared to most of my peer set. And there was just so much opportunity that I went. I was just so wide. I was just doing way too much stuff.

57:07And I bet you I would be wealthier had I just gone a little, gone more deep in like one area. Yeah. Well, okay. Do you know how, um, discord betting groups work? No. Okay. Okay. So it's like a very, very common scam on the internet in the modern age, right? Where you start posting Lamborghinis and Ferraris and airplanes on Instagram and Twitter. And you're like, I got this through gambling. If you want gambling tips, like, you know, sign up for my Discord or whatever. That's a thing? Yeah, dude, it's bad. But okay, so you're giving away gambling tips. And then the way it works is you don't know anything about gambling, but like but you just you have so many people in your group let's say you have 10 000 people you give 5 000 people one team you give 5 000 people the other team right then half those people lose and they're pissed off but you turn them okay they have 5 000 people who had the correct team right now the next game comes up you give 2 500 of them one team you give 2 500 of them the next team and you're guaranteed to get at the very end you know 10 people who really believe everything you say and then you're like okay for the next tip you have to give me ten thousand dollars or whatever right because you just made them so much money five trips in a row they're like this guy this guy never loses but it's just this law of large numbers how does that relate to what you're talking about that is going wide right so like that when rich when my agency was doing everything for everybody i was just getting incredibly wide and who was going to pay me the most amount of money for one thing and then same i i found the winner my betting group i found rich right so like if i go back in time there's probably a way where i could have just narrowly focused on one of those things and got way more equity or way faster or made more money or figured some out but i didn't i took the wide approach i think i think you took the wide approach as well right i did yeah and i think the, I think I wasted a lot of time on a bunch of crap, but ultimately, there's the thing, like ultimately we did narrow our focus and ultimately we did sell that company in 2018.

59:24And even that company and all of the investment in like building network led me to meet my current business partners. And I invested in this company and on and on and on, right? Like it kind of all has worked out, but I do look back and I'm like, there were definitely things that had I gone deeper in that, I would have, it would have been far more lucrative. I just missed it. Yeah. And that's like, I asked you this question. It's very unfair because I was thinking the whole time, I'm like, do this rigid, like, can I think of any personal failures in my career? And it's really hard. There's things I've gotten wrong, but like, I like doing all of them.

1:00:02Like, I'm really glad we got here. Yeah. There's definitely paths where I could have made more money. I'll give you an example. Me and Connor sold a service at the agency where we would pay for upvotes on Reddit. Okay. So like if you had a subreddit and you wanted to, like, you know, if someone was saying bad things about you and you wanted to have a good post be at the top, we would get that done for you. Right. And we had to pay for those in crypto. Right. So this is like 2016. this is before the crypto run-up right like i think we were buying ethereum for 20 dollars right so like because the person wanted ethereum or bitcoin so we were making all those purchases and so if i just would have purchased a little bit more then i would be worth a ton of money right but like you know i lost sight of that i'm like whatever this is just some weird internet currency so i can buy this weird illegal upvotes or whatever So I think I was the first one on the team here to use Ceres because I was really excited about getting a data warehouse at HexCloud.

1:01:09I just felt like with all of our channels, everywhere we're spending, we had a bunch of different tools that we were looking at. And I just wanted all the data in one place because I just thought that we were missing out and leaving money on the table. And I really thought that having a clean data warehouse, we were going to make money. The return on this is huge. and I'm seeing it already. I asked the growth team at HexCloud to send me information and they sent me these awesome looking sheets and I'm like, was that from Saris? Yeah. I'm like, so I'm stoked. Everyone at the organization is adopting it.

1:01:43At the management level for me, it's really, really important that I don't have to go. People send me five different spreadsheets or digging around and they pull data. Every single piece of data at HexCloud is being pulled into Saris and I'm really stoked. Yeah, Jason got me on it. And I was super hesitant about data lakes, data warehouses. You hear these things all the time. And I'm like, our business is too simple. Why am I going to pay an additional fee to have the information I already have access to put in one place? but then they actually set the thing up for me and then I realized like how backwards what we were doing was so we have something called the daily growth dashboard okay and it's all spend from all marketing channels and all revenue from all markets put into one thing and then that's just grown over time we've been using it for like eight years at this point so there's so much data in there and it's so manually manipulated so we have somebody pull in ring revenue in Canada every day.

1:02:42Okay. So we probably have four full-time people who are just feeding information into this. And Sarah's just replaces all of that. Sarah's is like, look, we'll just hook up directly into all the Shopify markets. We have five of them. We'll pull in all of the Amazon markets. We have eight of them. We'll pull in wholesale information. We'll pull information from Fulfill. And so I've rebuilt the daily growth dashboard, but with actual data connection and not just people typing into spreadsheets so um you get more accurate information and then you just have the next layer of insight to pull from there so now i can see ring customer cohorts from amazon we never had that before because no one was actually pulling that information in so yeah it's pretty cool uh yeah i mean it probably pays for itself just from like the the data entry employees that don't have to do that anymore um and what i'm most excited about too sean is like how we layer AI over all this data at some point, you know, like I want to, I want to chat GPT this stuff and just be like, Hey, tell me what this was then and compare this year over a year and, and not have to like log in and look stuff up.

1:03:49Like I'm getting Tableau reports and things like this out of it, but I want to just be able to talk to it and get it there. And I think, I think that's next. Yeah. And so one reason I was hesitant is I thought the future would be Shopify built an AI, right? Or Claude hooks up to Shopify and Amazon and all these different things. But actually, I don't think that's going to happen. I think what's going to happen is you're going to have to take your data and put it into something you own and control, a data lake or a data warehouse or whatever you want to call it. And so that's why I embraced Sarah's.

1:04:17I think Shopify will roll out a data tool or other people will build awesome AI data tools that then you take your data and plug it into. So if you want to be ready for an AI future, There's a couple of different ways AI could happen. I think the most likely one is you actually have to have all your data in one place. I don't think it's going to be smart enough to pull in just Ridge Amazon data or whatever. So anyway, you have to set that up. You got to pay people to do it. We went with Saris based on Jason's recommendation. I'm paying them. I was paying them before they sponsored the podcast, but they like Jason so much, they came on board.

1:04:47So thank you so much. Did I ever tell you my Ethereum story? No, please. Oh, God. Okay, so again, go back to networking and the value of relationships and the value of soft skills. So one of the guys in this mastermind group that I got into, it's like 150 of us. There's 150 people, by the way, that I met a decade ago in Napa at this event. Like, dude, the people in that event were like, it's hilarious. It's like Brian Holiday and Tim Ferriss. And like, you just go through it. But it's like everybody much earlier in their careers, kind of everybody was like looking for connection of other people doing cool.

1:05:27Happened to be like a really good 150 people. Anyway, one of the guys, his name is Dimitri. And Dimitri's son at the time was working on this like crypto thing. He was really smart kid. Dimitri's son turned out to be Vitalik Buterin. Yeah. So I remember thinking, I'm like, this sounds shady. you like why why are you investing in this like i guess you're kidding everything but like you know and dimitri i think had a really successful sass company too right like he had he was in his own right a great entrepreneur and a really smart guy uh and i remember sitting in a room listening to him talk about this ethereum thing like this this crypto project and i'm like imagine just putting like 5 000 bucks into that stupid thing at that time instead of just dismissing it outright as Like that was the craziest idea I'd heard that at that time.

1:06:19Yeah. Yeah. So look, I mean, I think there's all these pockets in your career where like, okay, if I would have zigged when I would have zagged, I would have made more money. But, you know, avoiding bankruptcy, avoiding failure is like probably the number one rule of the game. Did you ever get close? Well, I didn't have any money. That's the thing. It's like, dude, close. I guess you were so, you're already at zero. You are close. Yeah. Like, yeah, like close. I mean, I really can't stress that like me and Connor lived in a one bedroom apartment that was$1 ,400 a month and we didn't have a car.

1:06:55Like it was like we were, we were the brokest you were going to get. Like, so I guess like I probably on paper, I had a negative net worth. We had loans and but I mean, I would have filed bankruptcy and there was nothing to collect on. You know what I mean? Yeah. I didn't have any assets. And that was... Oh, go ahead, Matt. No, I was going to say that's one thing I don't know how I would handle is like absolute scarcity. Yeah, I'm sure it'd be bad. I mean, and that probably makes me risk adverse today. And look, we're going to do a money episode. Mike requested to come back for that episode. So we'll get Mike on here talking about, you know, cause, cause he has some stories where he was worried he was going to get close.

1:07:42I got close with like the first, with my, in my sort of first company days, we get close twice. And that was more, that was not because like, I think the mistake was I didn't really understand cash flows and like 13 week cashflow and, you know, managing receivables and like all the finance and business stuff. Like I was pretty good at selling and I was good at building. But I didn't like know how to actually run a company. And we kind of got up to like doing 10 million bucks a year, 10, 11 million bucks a year, but with like no real great financial controls. And we got really close. Like we had, we had really big clients that paid us a lot of money.

1:08:27And when the economy ever took a turn, it's like people slow down paying you, but you still have like your biggest expense and service is your people. So I still had this massive payroll and receivables almost took us out twice. Like for sure. Yeah, dude. And it's one of those things where you can have a healthy business. Like we're not even talking about any debt or anything. It's just like getting, getting paid or, you know, we have a friend, they didn't tell me this. I heard this through the grapevine, so I'm not going to blow them up, but you know, one of those big box chains just went bankrupt and they were the single largest shareholder so like we're talking about seven million dollars in receivables you're not gonna get right like you're gonna you might get 20 of that when you go to a bankruptcy hearing right um and you actually probably won't even get that because there's gonna be so much secure debt on top of you like you're just some invoice like it's unsecured uh and it sucks like yeah there's every day there's a new pathogen trying to take got these businesses, right?

1:09:29And it could be receivables. It could be a bad shipment coming in. It could be an error on whatever. You know what I mean? It could be tariffs. It can be like a lot of things that take you out. Yeah. I guess that's the thing. Like when it comes to mistakes, if I look back, I had no knockout punches clearly at this point, but like lots of, I don't know what to call them, like micro mistakes, you know, like little interactions with people that I probably still every now and again think about and I feel awkward and embarrassed. You know, like my temper was too short or like I said something really stupid in the moment because I'm Italian and hotheaded sometimes.

1:10:12That kind of stuff for sure. But like, no, I don't think like any big miscalculations that set me back years, you know, like no, no, no near death. Thanks. Yeah, dude. uh there's i've done a million things i'm embarrassed about with people i stuff to see sometimes so look that's that's human life man like you you sign up for what you sign up for um but yeah so it's one of those things just thinking about your career i mean like i don't think i've i don't think there's specific things i'm like oh i failed at that there's a lot of stuff that like it could have went good but we have what this is all the time out of 100 universes like what outcome are we in we're in a top five universe you know what i mean like Like, I'm not trying to get sympathy, but literally when I moved to Los Angeles, I was living in bunk beds.

1:11:03Like, they're called$500 because that's what I could afford to live in. You know what I mean? It's so crazy. Yeah. And now I don't. And it's awesome. So, like, you know, we're a top five out of all the possible universe's possible outcomes. And, like, yeah, I'm sure there's things that could have went better. But, like, we're still in the game. We have a lot of people who are falling out of the game. And like there's, you know, money's one of those things where like when you don't have it, like it probably consumes you completely. Right. We're talking about like, oh, you know, things could be slightly better, but people commit suicide over to this type of.

1:11:36So yeah, just stay in the game, man. Like it's a fun game. Yeah. Yeah, it's so people's backgrounds. Like I actually wonder too, if the more, like if the worse off you started, I wonder if ultimately you actually are better at, at like, you know, you become more likable and your soft skill game gets better because you have no choice. Like it's a survival game. Like I need people to like me because I need people to give me money because I'd have none. Like is that, I wonder if that's true versus like, I'm just saying like anecdotally, like all of my rich friends were just douchebags. And I'm like, they're just like the least likable people I know.

1:12:18Not that they're not likable, but they're the least likable. Oh man. And then like my friends that were broke, like wrong side of the tracks broke, were the most fun. Yeah, well the thing about this, I'm 5 '8", I'm kind of fat. I'm horrible at sports. i've never had any problem dating or or my love life you know what i mean you're just you're likable that's it yeah it's yeah because it's what you have yeah it taught me to be funny very early on so we haven't talked about that the the value of a decent sense of humor and like and maybe this just comes from not taking yourself seriously i don't know i haven't thought too much about just like how to be funny.

1:13:00But I will say like of all of the freaking founders and like, you know, a lot of them, dude, most of them have a pretty good sense of humor. Like most of them have like sarcasm, sarcasm on lock. They're pretty self-deprecating. They're like, it's a consistent set of personality traits that I've noticed in like my CEO friends. Oh yeah, dude. I mean, no one wants to be around boring people, but yeah, dude. my number one advice is be funny yeah there you go yeah that's the the climax of this episode dude you just got to be funny like learn to go be funny that's it no big deal dude it'll help in every aspect of your life but look we did this episode because i think it's something you can actually improve on i think you can make yourself more likable right um and do not be scared of looking like an idiot uh like you like we all have those memories of those like us being incredibly cringe but like you try to remember a time where someone else was cringe you can only remember the times you were cringe right that was that is huge that is human nature you think about yourself way more than anybody else yeah nobody actually cares and nobody remembers that is like the most powerful thing yeah yeah yeah i mean there's probably people listening from my old days were like no We remember.

1:14:20We remember. I remember what you said very clearly.

1:14:26I'm also kind of a spaz, dude. I've spazed out a bunch. So maybe that's on camera somewhere. Yeah. No, this is great, man. Should we wrap it? Is that the pod? I think we appreciate all the operators, listeners. We always have cool new things happening. Our newsletter has tens of thousands of subscribers, right? Could you believe that? we can email tens of thousands of people. If you want to be one of them, please subscribe. We have marketing operators, a slightly worse version of this show. We have finance operators. Also, we're every day. We're active on Ecom fuel. Matt, please sign into Ecom fuel and post.

1:15:06I haven't done that yet. You're right. There you go. That's good. Yeah. Thanks. You know what? And Andrew just sent me like a little welcome package with a really nice note. So I have to like get on there. I was an e-com fuel before. I was just like, I might be the least active member. No, there's some members that are not very active, but we're trying to breathe life in that community. We've already sent probably a hundred people over to it. So we tried to do the Slack thing. I can't get these guys to post in Slack, but I'm getting them to post in e-com fuel. So there's other people actively engaging every day.

1:15:40Please come join and hang out with us. Yeah, he does a great job community-wise. Like, man, my hat's off. because like when I have logged in, I really enjoy reading everything. It's awesome. Yeah, you're right. I should get on there and post. Thank you to all of our fantastic sponsors. Thank you to all of our fantastic listeners. Thank you to North Beam, PostScript, Rich Panel, Saris Analytics, and the most important sponsor of all, Fulfill. Five softwares I use, five softwares I pay for, five softwares I was using and paying for before they started sponsoring this podcast. We got cool stuff coming, man.

1:16:15Thank you for being on this journey. E-commerce has been hard, but we have a really cool thing we're going to do for the end of the year. It'll blow your mind what we're going to do. Is that right, Matt? Absolutely. And if you are listening to this point in the show, please go like and subscribe and do whatever you have to do on YouTube or Spotify or wherever you get this poison that we call a podcast. It strokes our egos and it's really important. Yeah, that's a good call out. Well, dude, I love hanging out. We have a week worth of recording coming out. We're going to do next week. I can't wait.

1:16:46Me and Matt hanging out a lot. Talk to you guys later. Goodbye. Bye.