Harbert Podcast

Partnerships help build companies: Matt Pierce

August 17, 2021 The Harbert College of Business
Harbert Podcast
Partnerships help build companies: Matt Pierce
Show Notes Transcript

Matt Pierce describes Immediate as a “financial wellness company.” His company partners with employers to allow employees to access earned but unpaid wages ahead of the usual payday schedule, thereby avoiding high-cost short-term loan options for pressing financial needs.

Pierce says thinking beyond the ordinary can be critical in moving a business forward. “In order to get deals done, in order to make things happen, sometimes you’ve got to be creative.” 

Before founding Immediate, Pierce worked in business development leadership roles at multiple established  companies and startups.

He is a 2004 finance graduate and earned a Harbert MBA in 2005.

Narrator:

Welcome to the Harbert College of Business podcast with your hosts Currie Dyess and Sarah Gascon.

Currie Dyess:

Today's guest is Mr. Matt Pierce, Matt began his career as an early stage team member at Greenway, growing into a business development leadership role responsible for 250 plus partnerships nationwide. After a Greenway IPO, and subsequent acquisition by Vista, Matt moved on to lead sales, and business development at Pri-Med Amazing Charts.

Dr. Sarah Gascon:

In today's episode, we will discuss Matt's startup journey to IPO, and blue ocean opportunities. Matt, War Eagle, and welcome to the show.

Matt Pierce:

War Eagle, thank you guys for having me.

Sarah:

So great to have you. You completed a finance degree here at Auburn, and wanted to transition into the healthcare administration. You were able to intern at East Alabama Medical Center, but they didn't have an internship. So can you describe how you found your way to East Alabama Medical Center, and an internship?

Matt Pierce:

I sure can. So I'll give you the really quick background. My grandparents moved to Auburn in 1953, so I was kind of really ingrained with Auburn DNA from the beginning. And so as I went to school at Auburn, got my finance degree, I was ready to go into getting my MBA, and thought that I wanted to go into healthcare administration. And I was talking to my grandmother, her name was Virginia, we call her Ninny.

And then I was talking to Ninny one afternoon, and I was telling her about how I want to go work at a hospital, and she said, "Oh, well, you should go talk to Terry out of East Alabama Medical Center." And I said, "Terry, who?" And she said, "Terry Andrus, he's the president." And I said, and I go, "What would I talk to him about?" And she said, "An internship."

And I said, "I'll give it a shot." And so I hopped in my car and drove out, I guess I kind of assumed that my grandmother was pretty close with Terry, so I went out, and I just kind of popped into the office, and his assistant was there. And I said, "I'm here to meet with Terry Andrus." And she said, "Okay." And I said, "Tell him, it's Virginia Pierce's grandson."

And she came out and she said, she walked in and came back, and she said, "Yeah, Mr. Anderson isn't really sure who you are, or who your grandmom is." And she said, "What is it you're here to talk to him about?" And I said, "I want to talk about an internship program." And she goes, "Oh." And she says, "We don't have an internship program."

And I say, "Right, that's what I'm here to talk about, can you give him this?" And I had actually created like a three page internship, I had just kind of documented out what I wanted to learn. And so she took it back into him, and she came back out, and she said, "Why don't you just sit here, and wait for a few minutes?"

And they made me wait, like two hours. And so I sat out there, just kind of twiddling my thumbs, this was before smartphones and all that, I didn't have anything to do I think I was counting stuff on the ceiling. And finally, she says, "You got five minutes." And I walked in there, sure enough, he had no idea who my grandmother was.

And I pitch him on this internship, and I get done with the pitch, and by two, three minutes and he says, "Well, we don't have any budget, this is not budgeted." And I said, "Great, you don't have to pay me." And he said, "Well, when do you want to get started?" And I said, "Tomorrow?" And he said, "How about let's shoot for Monday."

And so I ended up having a six week internship at East Alabama Medical Center, and loved it, It was a lot of fun, I got to go around, I mean, I designed the internship program, I guess I should love it. But I got to go around, and try all the different areas of the hospital. I was in purchasing for a few days, I got to ride around in an ambulance for a couple days.

I was in the ER, which was pretty intense. I got to scrub in for a couple of operations, it was a really great six weeks. But what I found at the end of the six weeks was this wasn't something I was really passionate about, right? It was something that I thought from the outside looking in seemed interesting to me, but I kind of came out of the end of the internship going, "I like that, I don't necessarily know that's what I want to do for a living."

And so it kind of guided me as I went into my year and a half stent and the MBA program, that I didn't want to go focus on health care administration, I wanted to do something that's a little more broad. And so I actually went and focused on marketing, as I got into the MBA program.

Currie:

Wow. And listening to your story, it seems like you create a lot of opportunities for yourself, and of course, that's indicative of the entrepreneurial journey that you are on now. What are some experiences early on in life that led you to having these qualities, and these characteristics?

Matt Pierce:

Well, I think there's a lot of it. For me growing up, I kind of fancied myself a good athlete, and I know you guys can empathize with me there, like when there's something you're excited about and love and want to do, I mean, from a very early age, I wanted to play football at Auburn. That was my thing.

And so I learned early on that, in order to achieve a goal, you had to set effort, and focus, and work at it. And in some cases get creative, from five to nine, I didn't make it as a quarterback at Auburn. I did try to walk on as a punter at Auburn, and I had a really good trial. Ended up meeting the guy who's to this day a good friend of mine, he was the deep snapper for Auburn's, his name's Jeremy Wells.

And we end up being roommates when I was in grad school, but I met him going through that process and trying out. And so really, what I found kind of growing up was there's a lot of opportunity out there, and it takes passion, it takes hard work, and it takes focus. In a lot of cases what it takes is creativity.

And that's one of the things that I've learned through throughout my career is that, in order to get deals done, in order to make things happen, sometimes you got to be creative. So yeah, it came down to, writing an internship program to go in, and try to get something at East Alabama Medical Center.

And in an early job of mine, one of the things that I learned, it was probably one of my favorite sales stories, for me personally was, I was in 100% commission role where I actually went out, and was trying to sell post-op ice therapy packs to a physician practice, an orthopedic practice in [inaudible 00:08:01].

And I'd been calling these guys for six straight weeks, and the guy came in one day, and he walked in, and said, "Listen, I got bad news." The staff doesn't want you to do these post-op ice therapy packs, is going to take up freezer space, and that's where the staff likes to keep their frozen lunches. And so we're just going to have to pass."

And I said, "Wait a second, so you're telling me the only thing preventing you from signing a contract with me is freezer space?" And he says, "Yeah." And I go, "All right, I'll be back." And I think he thought I meant I'd come back like in a week. I drove down to Lowe's, I bought a freezer, and then I tipped the guy like 40 bucks to hop in the car, and drive back down the street to the practice.

And we wheeled a freezer into their break room, and I had a contract in one hand and a pen in the other, and I walked out and I said, "Hey, doc, took care of the freezer space." And he goes, "Well, all right, we'll do it." And so he signs a contract. And it was like a $5,000 a month contract.

So all that to say is it takes some creativity, right? You got to push the envelope in certain areas. So I feel like I learned that early on, and I've continued to try to do that throughout my career.

Sarah:

Yeah, creativity, ambition, adaptability, all of those elements, obviously, provided you an opportunity to be successful on each one of your companies. So working within those companies, what else have you learned, not only about yourself, but about the evolution, and using those characteristics.

Matt Pierce:

I think one of the big things that I've learned in my first job, which I started as an intern, when I was in grad school with Greenway, again, Mike Hairston, who's also an Auburn grad, and Auburn MBA, came and did a group interview, and hired me to start as a marketing intern. And then it kind of worked my way into business development role in Greenway, and what I learned there is that it wasn't just about hard work, right?

It was also about building relationships, and about being open to learning. So one of the things that I did, kind of in hindsight, that I think was really mature, I honestly don't know what made me start doing this, but early on at that company, I was employee 55. And I took the initiative of going to people that I looked up to, people that were in roles that I would like to be in one day, like VP roles, when I'm starting out as a manager.

And I come in, and I would go to them, and I would ask if I could take them to lunch once a quarter, or if I could come bounce questions off of them when I was wondering about things, or trying to formulate a plan, or a strategy. And I kind of took that initiative, and I did that with a lot of different people at Greenway, and it gave me a chance to learn, right?

I know there's a movie one time where they said, "When you come to work, dress for the role that you want to be." And I was always kind of like, I don't really want to dress for anything, I just want to work for something, right? I want to work for the role that I want to be at.

And so I always took a kind of a mentality of always be learning, always try to get better, look for people that you look up to and admire and try to learn from them. And then the last thing that I did, and particularly at Greenway is our CEO is, again, an Auburn guy, T. Green. And I would always try to beat T to the office.

So one of my favorite things was that I knew that he had to walk past my office to get to his, and when he walked in at 7:30 men, I mean, some days I came in on two wheels to get there at 7:28. But when he walked past my office at 7:30, he'd see my lights on, and he'd see me in there working. And when he'd pull into the parking lot, there'd be one car sitting in there some days, right?

And so I would usually try to get there between 7:00 and 7:15, because I want to beat the CEO to the office every day. And in a lot of cases, I would try to outlast him at the office, I would try to be there after him. I wanted him to see me there when he got there, and see me there when he left.

And that was to me like a work ethic thing, right? I wasn't doing it just to check a box, I was actually working while I was there, I wasn't just sitting in there watching YouTube videos or anything, I was getting work done.

And to me, it was one of the things that I believe, and candidly I've never asked him about it, but I believe that probably one of the reasons that I've moved up in that company, was because they saw the work ethic, and they saw the work I was willing to put in. And so those were things that just kind of started early, and carried through for me.

Currie:

So you helped Greenway go public, and that's really not an experience that a lot of people get, can you just talk a little bit about that experience?

Matt Pierce:

Yeah, so I was 30 when we went public, and I was really fortunate to get to be a part of that whole process. What was really neat was in my role in business development, I'd kind of worked through, I started building a reseller program, and then a national lead gen program. And then in September 2011, T. Green, our CEO got up and gave a presentation [inaudible 00:15:31], there's like 2,000 people there.

And he starts talking about how the innovation, and the electronic health record business, which is what we did, we offered software to doctors to help them with scheduling and from a clinical perspective. And [inaudible 00:15:45] about how innovation is really rapidly changing, but the government have gotten involved, and they had kind of dictated some terms that we needed to, and every vendor needed to build out, to meet some standards and requirements.

And so he said, "Here's the deal, that has kind of taken over our product roadmap, and so we want to evolve, and still be able to innovate, and the way we're going to do that is through a third party, App Store. Very similar to Apple, we're just going to do this with technologies that can layer on top of our system."

And everybody, I mean, the place is going crazy, this is great, this is awesome, they're clapping. He walks off the stage, and there [inaudible 00:16:27], I was sitting standing along the side, and he walks by, and he fist bumps me and he goes, "Hey, you know that app store thing?" I say, "Yeah." And he goes, "That's your new job, get to work."

And I remember looking next to me at Mike who is my boss, and I go, "What?" And he goes, "I've been meaning to talk to you about that." And it was really fun, because I got this first kind of startup experience of being what they call an intrapreneur, right? Where you're building a startup inside of a company.

So you got some like safety net and a set of salary, and I get to pony up a bunch of my own money to get this thing started. But I remember on that Monday, getting a blank whiteboard, and starting to draw out what I thought this thing should be, names that we thought we should call it.

And having a team of people come in, and really just have to build something, and see it go from literally whiteboard, to when I left a few years later was about 125 marketplace partners, and they were processing about four to five million in revenue, just through those third party relationships.

And so it was fun for me, because as we were building that, the launch of the Greenway marketplace was literally the week before we went public. And so what was nice about the Greenway marketplace, was that these companies would still sell it, and then we would get a revenue share on the back end. So we'd get 15 to 30% of every dollar that they sold, but that was coming into us as all margin rev share, right?

The only expense was my little salary, and whatever it costs for us to build out this website. And so the street loved Greenway marketplace. And so it's so fun, I think it was on my fridge for a long time where in the Wall Street Journal, they were talking about Greenway, and there was some little blurb in there about this Greenway marketplace.

I was like, "That's my baby." [inaudible 00:18:17]. My name wasn't in there, but what I had started building. And so it was so fun to be a part of that, and then to get to experience everything. I mean, this is when T. and some of the other leadership team were on roadshows, meeting with all these big time investment bankers, and prepping, and trying to get the market really excited about what we're doing.

And I would get these late night text messages from T., and I go, "Hey, I need the latest stats, I'm going to meet with Goldman Sachs tomorrow. And I need the latest stats about how many companies we have, and how much revenue is flowing through there, and where we are." And so it was just a really fun experience for me to get to be a part of that, and invaluable in my career.

Because not only did we go public, but then a year and a half later, we got acquired by a large private equity firm Vista, and they took us back private, and so I got to go from employee 55, right up, go public, be acquired, taken back private, and then merge the two of our competitors.

So we're 1800 employees, and I think at that point, it was like 70,000 doctors on the platform. And when I joined it was like a few 100, and so it was just like this huge, up into the right like the hockey stick growth that people always see and talk about, that I got to experience firsthand. So it was really a fun ride.

Sarah:

Yeah, that's such a great story.

Currie:

It's unbelievable.

Sarah:

Yeah.

Currie:

Sounds like you should have been in those Goldman meetings.

Matt Pierce:

Maybe there's some Goldman meetings in my future, that would be fine.

Sarah:

Yeah, you never know. Well, speaking of partnerships, can you share your perspective on the importance of partnerships, and developing those relationships?

Matt Pierce:

Oh my gosh, I could spend a full afternoon talking about partnerships. I'm such a big believer in the value that partnerships bring to a company. And we're experiencing this here at Immediate right now, because, especially, when you look at companies that are in high growth mode, there's only so much you can do internally without going and raising just a ton of money, and investing heavily in a direct sales force, right?

And so, we did a really good job at Greenway of building out, I think at one point, we had a little over 50 direct sales reps. And what we found was those direct sales reps could go out, and drive business on their own, but they're doing the full thing, right? Like cold calling, and then they're going and driving the sales process, they're closing it.

And I said, "Well, what if we could go build this?" And what we did I think around 2008, or 2009, was we built a national lead gen program, where we signed up 44 different companies in one year. And those 44 companies, every Monday afternoon, I held a training program, where I would go in for an hour, and I would train them on what [inaudible 00:21:12], how we do it, how we're different from everybody else, and how they're going to get paid.

And those guys would go out and start and start generating leads for us. And so what we do is under those 44 companies, we're talking 500 to 1,000 people that are out proclaiming what Greenway is doing, and trying to open up doors for us. And so partnerships to me, and distribution partnerships like that are a great way for you to expand your reach as an organization, without having to hire another $60,000 a year sales rep to go do it.

And so it's a big part, in my opinion of why we were able to scale really quickly at Greenway. That first year, those 44 partners generated over $5 million with the revenue in net new sales. And so we've replicated that in other places I've gone in my career, and we're building... I spent this morning for about an hour and 15 minutes training 38 sales reps, from a new payroll company that we've partnered with here at Immediate, where we're trying to rinse and repeat.

We're going to go do the same thing where they can go out, talk this up, and try to find as many new customers as we can. So I think the value of partnership is really strong for companies.

Currie:

Yeah, well said. So Matt Pierce, founder and CEO of Immediate, what is Immediate, and why did you start it?

Matt Pierce:

So Immediate as a financial wellness company, and we partner with employers to offer a voluntary financial wellness benefit to their employees, so they can access their earned but unpaid wages anytime they want. To put it really simply, we provide on demand pay, and the reason we do that is because today the alternatives, while I wait for payday next Friday, the alternatives are I can run up credit card debt, I can overdraft an account, or I could turn to a title or payday loans.

If I find myself in a pinch, let's just say I walk outside today, and knock on wood this doesn't happen to me. When I walk outside, and I've got a flat tire, and I need 125 bucks. Well, if I'm living paycheck to paycheck, which 78% of our population is, I'm waiting for that next payday, I have to turn, potentially one of those predators just to make ends meet.

At the same time, if today is let's just say it's Wednesday, I may have earned $400 so far this week. And so what Immediate does through our Immediate pay app, as we give people the ability to access up to 50% of their pay, for a nominal flat rate, it's just three bucks. No cost to the business, and this ATM like fee every time I go in and make a transaction.

So if you went in today, Immediate pay app, and said, "It's Wednesday, I've earned $400, I've got 200 available, I need $125, to fix this flat." I go and request 125, we send you 122, we can put it in your bank account, onto a loadable debit card we're partnered with Visa and MasterCard, we can load up card 97% of all debit cards in the US, we can load them up.

Legally, we have to say within minutes, our average transaction time is 12 seconds. So we talked about Immediate pay, it literally is Immediate pay, you can get money like that. And then what we do, is we just through an integration with payroll systems, you write a deduction report back into your payroll system, so we can get reimbursed next Friday.

It's just a line item on your pay stub, so you'll have health insurance, 401(k), etc. And then it'll say Immediate pay, $125. So we're really about building a socially responsible platform, that helps people give them a responsible alternative to predatory lending. And if we're being really honest, one of the things that we're trying to do, is we're trying to eradicate predatory lending services.

Because they create cycles of debt that people can't break, and I believe that if we can go in, and really do a good job in partnering with enough companies, and impacting enough lives, then we're going to create generational change as it pertains to wealth, and pay disparity across the US.

Sarah:

How have you been growing that?

Matt Pierce:

Historically, it has been primarily with a direct sales team, and we just hired a VP of partnerships, a lady named Lindsay Seal here in Birmingham, we hired her, she has a background in Shipt, where she ran the partnership program at Shipt, which is obviously a darling of the Alabama tech scene.

And they built up required by target in 2017. And so we're now starting to build out more of a partnership program, but historically, we've done it through a lot of direct sales. I actually just did this, as we did an end of the first half of the year update for our team, and for our investors earlier this week.

So over the weekend, I was crunching numbers, and I sent the numbers to Michael [inaudible 00:25:51],, who's an Auburn grad, he's our chief operating officer. And I sent the numbers to Michael, and I said, "Is this math right, because this seems like a pretty big number." And he came back and said, "Yeah, the math is right."

The number is from January 2020, until the end of June 2021, we've grown our monthly transaction volume, meaning the people who are going in and requesting $100, our average is 130 bucks. So requesting $130, we've grown that transaction volume over an 18 month period by 14,206%. And so that is something that I say is a little bit of a humble brag, but it wasn't just me, it's a team that now is 40 people.

In December 2019, it was just me, I was the only full time guy, and now we're up to 40 employees. And it's just really fun to see that kind of growth, and a lot of it has been because of some of the financial instability, and the spotlight that the pandemic is put on that in our country that, where we've just seen usage go up and up and up. And knowing that we're able to kind of fill the gap, right?

There's a lot of situations that employers don't know about, where if a significant other loses a job, that husband's not going to come in and go, "Hey, we were a dual income family, and now we're a single income family until my wife gets on her feet." They just don't know about that.

What they do is they say, "I'm not going to go talk to my company about it, I'm going to try to make ends meet by going out, I'm going to collateralize my car, and get a 300% APR title loan for 2,500 bucks." Well, 2,500 bucks when you got to pay it back at 25% a month, gosh, that gets really expensive.

Until my wife gets back on our feet and finds another job, we can pay it off. And so we really are a way for employees to go in and access that money when they find themselves in need, or some kind of unexpected circumstance happens, we just kind of fill those voids.

Sarah:

What inspired you to create Immediate?

Matt Pierce:

Well, it's funny, because it kind of spun out of another startup that I had gone down the path of, so I mentioned earlier, my grandma Ninny, she's since passed, but in 2016, she had a stroke and was discharged, actually from East Alabama Medical Center, where they took great care of her.

And she was discharged, and she went home, and really, candidly we did not have a good experience with the in-home caregivers that we were working with. And the first three months, we fired three different agencies. And I was living in Atlanta at the time, and I got a phone call at noon. I was sitting down, I was having lunch, and my grandma called me.

And so I answered I said, "Hey, Ninny, how you doing?" And she says, "Man, I'm so sorry to bother you, but my caregiver never showed up today, would you mind coming over, and helping me get up and get going?" And I said, "Yeah." My heart just broke a little bit. And I said, "Yeah." I said, "Ninny, I'm so sorry, let me hop in the car I'll be there in two hours."

She goes, "Two hours?" And I said, "Yeah, I mean, I could try this, I could speed a little bit if you want, but I'm probably not going to make it in less than an hour and 45." And she goes, "Wait, is this Matt Pierce?" And I said, "Yeah." And she goes, "Oh, my goodness, I was trying to call the next door neighbor, Matt."

And so she called the wrong person, so I hung up, I called Matt, the next door neighbor, who's a great guy, and he's a pilot, and happened to be in town that day, and so he popped over and took care of her. I then started thinking about why in 2016 I could get a push notification that a Uber was two minutes away from my house, or a notification that the Instacart just dropped off my groceries on the front doorstep, but I can't get notified if somebody doesn't show up to take care of my grandmother.

And so I actually went and hired a couple of developers. I was working at the time I was doing a lot of growth consulting, I was working with a couple different companies, just kind of helping them build out sales in partnership programs. And I went and hired a development team to build out a pretty rudimentary caregiver transparency platform.

Where we can triangulate where a caregiver was, when they clocked in and clocked out, what's now actually referred to as electronic visit verification. And for about an 18 month period, I started building that, and [inaudible 00:30:14] as a side hustle, we're signing up kind of small mom and pops, like 20, 30, 40 employees.

And I decided summer of 2018 that I wanted to go into this full time, but in order to do that, I wanted to land a big customer. So I went and pitched a group that was about 2,000 employees, and I got done with this presentation that I felt really good about. And she says, she goes, This is nice, but it's just a bandaid on my problem." And I said, "Well, what do you mean?"

And she said, "My issue is not people not showing up, my issue is turnover. It's upstream, I've 62% turnover every year. And if you can help me solve that problem, I think the problem downstream ceases to exist." That's interesting. How do we solve it? She goes, "It's easy, it's money." And I said, "Well, how do I solve that? I'm not a bank, I don't know what I could do for you with that."

And she goes, "I don't either, you're the technology, I want you to figure it out, right?" And so I left a little dejected. And I was having lunch the next day with, who is now one of my co-founders, a guy who'd been mentoring me for at this point, probably eight years, he's been a mentor of mine now for about 10 or 11 years, and his name's Mason Beard.

And Mason is one of my favorite people in the world. His grandfather was Jeff Beard, who was the Athletic Director at Auburn in the 50s, that's actually how we met. Mason didn't even go to Auburn, but there's an Auburn connection, right? And we met over dinner one time, and he was a partner of mine, his company was called Wellcentive. And they were a partner of ours at Greenway.

And we met one night in 2011, and he told me about how, "Yeah, my family's names on the Colosseum in Auburn." And I'm like, "He's just making that up." And it turns out, he wasn't lying. And so I was having lunch with him the next day, and he had just sold his company Wellcentive to Philips, about a year earlier.

And I actually was planning on pitching him to invest in the company. And he said, "Well, tell me a little bit about your no's?" And I told him about what had happened the day before, and he said, "That seems really interesting, maybe we should do that." I said, "Do what? I don't even know what she's talking about." And he said, "We'll go do some research, and let's talk in a month."

And so I showed up, I went out and I started exploring, and what I figured, and a lot of this goes back to like my first job, right? When I was at Greenway, and we were building out partnerships, one of the things that we found out was about building an API, an application programming interface that allows you to expose certain sets of data to third party companies, without having to give them access to the entire database.

So what I figured out was that if I could go and leverage existing API's with time tracking and payroll systems, we could get the feeds of data of what hourly rate someone has, and in how many hours they've worked, so we can get access to that data, now what we need is the money, so we can actually give people access to money, right? We got the data, we just need the money.

So I went back to a month later, and I said, "I figure it out, I think I know how we could do this." And he said, "How?" And I explained it to him. And he goes, "Great. What do you need?" And I said, "I need money."

And he goes, "Well, I'll tell you what, why don't you go out, and try to pre-sell this, and find some people that are willing to do it, it makes sense to, and then I'll put some money up, that we can use to actually load up people's bank accounts, when they make requests for earned wages."

And so that's really how we got off down this path, what we figured out was, we were building a vitamin, a nice to have for 30,000 home care agencies, but here's this painkiller for four out of five people living paycheck to paycheck, 160 million people in the US workforce. And I'm like, if we're going to go, we better go big, right? Let's not go build something that's super niche, let's go build something that's going to impact a ton of lives.

And so we set off down the path to launch this company in October 2018, and we went, and we self funded it for a little while, and then we started building out this product. I actually went through Alabama Launchpad here in Birmingham, which is a pitch competition. There's delivered by the Economic Development Partnership of Alabama, EDPA, and we won $100,000.

We go back to the hard work. It was a pitch competition that I said, "I'm not going to get up on that stage." And so that made me get up there with a better business, so I may get up there with a lot of different things that could resonate with the judges and whoever, but I tell you what, there's not going to be a single person who gets on that stage that is better prepared than me.

And so I did this pitch 44 times in the 24 hours leading up to me getting up on the stage, and giving a pitch. A five minute pitch, I finished in four minutes and 58 seconds, like to the tee, and we want $100,000 in non-dilutive funds, which really helped springboard us, and go out, and start hiring the first people outside of me.

And so we started building this really with a mission of positively impacting the financial well being of a million Americans over the next three years. And so by the end of 2024, our goal is to have a million people on our platform.

And by the end of this year, we should be at about 300,000 people on our platform, and then we'll go from 300,000 this year, to end of next year, we're going to be at a million, and then we're going to build this path out to hit where we need to be with active users by the end of 2024. So it's pretty exciting.

Currie:

Yeah, that is unbelievable, remarkable growth and vision, honestly.

Sarah:

Yeah. Congratulations. Those competitions are not easy to win.

Currie:

Wow. Yeah.

Matt Pierce:

Well, I did leave out one little part, I lost the first time. And when I lost, I lost to a lady who was a senior in high school, and I remember just like walking out of this place looking like, "How in the world did that just happen?" And I decided... I'll tell you how it happened. I didn't prepare hard enough, I didn't put the work in.

And I mean, I put in some work, she had a really great story, she had a really good business. And I think her I think her business is doing just fine, but they're not doing as good as us. And so then I got a little jaded, right? That's, not to keep harping on Michael Jordan, but that's another log in the fire from his acceptance speech, right?

Like I said, "That's just one more thing that's going to drive us, and we're going to do this again, and we're going to make sure that we're better prepared, we're going to make sure that we pitch this better than anybody else, we're going to make sure that everybody in this place knows this is who this money needs to go to." And so the second time around, I won 100 grand.

And so you're right, they're not easy to learn, but it took work and effort, and storytelling, right? A big part of that is being able to, in a concise way, go in and go, "I got five minutes to share the story of why we're doing this, who it's going to impact, what the problem is, how we're going to solve it, and how we're going to change the world." And now we're well on our way to doing that.

Sarah:

Yeah, we really love, I'm glad you brought up Alabama Launch Pad, because that's such an important aspect of growth and development within the state of Alabama. So I'm glad you touched on that.

And we could share with the students, undergraduates, graduate students, that is available for them for the entrepreneurs, or even if you're not in business, any ideas that you have, you could enter those competitions, and get a lot of feedback, and you have a ton of business people from all over the state, and even the government that will assist you with that.

Matt Pierce:

It's such a great program, and we got, look 100,000 we got a ton of financial value out of the value along the way from the judges. I'll tell you one of the guys that's on our advisory board was one of the judges, who I felt like we got so much value out of in the process, that I ended up asking him to join our advisory board.

And then I've actually gotten a chance to be a judge after that, and I have a meeting next week with an Alabama Launchpad winner, that reached out and said, "Hey, I really appreciated the effort, and the input that you gave me when we were going through this, and right now I'm facing this kind of challenge, and I want to see if I can get 30 minutes on your calendar to come in and talk about it."

So to your point, it really is something that I believe the tech ecosystem in this state is really inclusive, and is really helpful. And we're all about trying to build each other up, and so there's a lot of value in participating in it.

Sarah:

Yeah, thanks for sharing that.

Currie:

That's so encouraging. And there are so many lessons to be learned from listening to your story, listening to this episode in particular. Something that we were curious about Sarah and I, what advice would you give yourself, if you were an undergrad or you're back in grad school right now?

Matt Pierce:

The biggest thing I would tell myself, I can actually say I was a better student in grad school than I was an undergrad. I think the big thing is that you should approach school as a job, right? Like when you get in that mindset, like I think about it, when I got to grad school, people that had gone out, and been in the workforce and come back for their MBA, what they were doing is that show up, it didn't matter what time their classes were, they'd show up every day by eight and they'd leave about five or 5:30.

Whereas I was still, early on, like the first semester I was still in this kind of undergrad mindset, where I'd roll into class, and I get done, I go to the gym, I go shoot some hoops, and take a nap. And then I go to dinner with friends, and then at 7:30, 8:00 o'clock I'd start studying, and then I'd be up to like one, and then I'd rinse and repeat and do it the next day.

And after that first semester I was like, I see these guys kind of excelling, I go, I need to do what they're doing. And so I started operating like that my last two semesters of grad school, and I think that really helped. So one, my school perspective I'd say, approach school the same way that you would approach a job.

The second aspect is... The second thing I would share, and what I would tell myself back then is, and I did it right before grad school, I would have jumped in earlier on trying to learn what I really want to be doing. Most summers, I would take classes at Auburn most summers, but usually I would do that so I could have afternoons off, and go to Lake Martin.

I wasn't doing it so I could get ahead, "I want to say here, so I can be in school, and then I'm going to go to the lake." I think I would have spent more time those summers trying to do what I did my last summer, was getting internships, and trying to learn, and trying to figure out, in some cases it's not figuring out what you want to do, is figure out what you don't want to do, right?

I learned that at East Alabama Medical Center. It wasn't that I wanted to, I found that I didn't want to do that. And so it helped me to kind of squeeze it down and figure out where I want to be. I'll be really candid, I didn't know what I wanted to do when I finished, but I knew that I liked healthcare, I just didn't want to be at a hospital.

I knew that I liked software, it was kind of cool, this was like 2005, I was like, I feel like this is where the world's headed, and I was just really fortunate to meet Mike, and see the intersection of healthcare and software, right? And it was just a perfect fit for me. I recognize that not everybody's in the right place, at the right time, all the time.

But I look at those things and I go, you know what, the reason I was in the right place at the right time, when there was an email that went out at 4:30 on a Tuesday afternoon, I was sitting in the MBA lounge, because I had learned after my first semester, I needed to approach this like a job.

I'm sitting in the MBA Lounge at 4:00, 4:30 on a Tuesday afternoon when an email comes out from, and the guy's name was Dan Gropper, who was the head of the MBA program at that time. He sends an email, he goes, "Hey guys, I know this is short notice." This is the entire MBA program. "I know it's short notice, but Mike Harrison from Greenway is going to be here at 5:30 for a group interview for anybody looking for an internship, if you can join, join."

So because I wasn't taking a nap, or off somewhere, because I wasn't still operating the way I used to, I was in the right place at the right time, where I got to go meet Mike, and then that kind of set me off on this path. And so I think the advice would be just to operate, and look at school as if it's a job, focus on it it's a job. And if you do that, I think you're going to get a lot of value out of it.

Sarah:

That's really great advice, and definitely valuable for students, whether they're participating in an undergrad degree, or a graduate degree, I think that's really great advice. A lot of our students, or at least in the experience that we've had, they don't really know what they want to do, and they turn over into graduate school still not knowing, and not really sure.

So the fact that you're emphasizing the internship, and seeking out other opportunities, or in this case, even following some of the business people that are in graduate school, I think that's valuable. So we really appreciate your time. How can our students reach you?

Matt Pierce:

So I'm pretty easy to get ahold of, our website is joinimmediate.com and I'm Matt@joinimmediate.com Feel free to connect with me there over email or LinkedIn. Just look me up on LinkedIn, I'm on there. I try to post on there pretty frequently, and I think those are probably the two best places to get a hold of me.

Currie:

Thank you so much, Matt, we really appreciate your time, War Eagle.

Matt Pierce:

Glad be here, thank you guys, War Eagle.

 

Narrator:

Harbert, Inspiring Business