An Agency Story
An Agency Story
The Lessons Every Agency Owner Learns Too Late - Prospect Future
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Company: Prospect Future
Owners: Matthew Regenie
Year Started: 2019
Employees: 1 – 10
What happens when your biggest client vanishes overnight? Or when you realize—too late—that avoiding sales is holding your agency back? In this episode of An Agency Story, Matt Regenie of Prospect Future shares the raw truth about the challenges of scaling an agency, the mistakes that cost him years of growth, and the mindset shifts that changed everything.
From losing a whale client to learning the power of rapid execution, Matt’s story is packed with insights every agency owner needs to hear. Tune in for lessons learned, hard-won wisdom, and strategies to build a stronger, more resilient business.
Welcome to An Agency Story podcast where we share real stories of marketing agency owners from around the world. From the excitement of starting up the first big sale, passion, doubt, fear, freedom, and the emotional rollercoaster of growth, hear it all on An Agency Story podcast. An Agency Story podcast is hosted by Russel Dubree, successful agency owner with an eight figure exit turned business coach. Enjoy the next agency story.
Russel:Welcome to An Agency Story podcast. I'm your host, Russel. In this episode, we're joined by Matt Regenie, the driven founder of Prospect Future, a boutique marketing agency based in Fort Collins, Colorado. Hear how a 48 hour burst of passion launched his business while losing a major client became a turning point, and how his transparency and integrity shape everything Prospect Future does. In this conversation, I sincerely appreciate how candid Matt is about his agency journey. Many of the obstacles he has faced have become what seems like rites of passage that so many agencies I have connected with over the years have also faced. If you're listening out there and you haven't faced some of these same things that Matt shares, take warning. You too might be at risk for learning too late. Enjoy the story. Welcome to the show today, everyone. I have Matt Regenie with Prospect Future with us here today. Thank you so much for joining us today, Matt.
Matthew:Absolutely, Russel, glad to be here.
Russel:Glad to have you. Let's get right to it. Tell us what Prospect Future does and who you do it for.
Matthew:Prospect Future, we're a boutique agency. We focus on e-commerce companies as well as home service companies. We kind of are the jack of all trades. It's something that we're proud of. It's full funnel marketing approach. Websites, paid advertising, a little bit of SEO, a little bit of email marketing, whole nine yards. Realistically, the main reason we do that is because in our mind, everything in marketing is intimately connected. The more you know about those connections, the better you can help your clients out.
Russel:Everything is certainly more connected than it ever was before. Only continues to be more true every day that goes by. We're going to learn more about how you do all that down the road, but before we get there and you know, not that you're, got gray haired in a beard or anything, but I want to hear what young Matt was thinking he wanted to do with his life and how close did he get?
Matthew:I've been all over the place. I think one of the, the biggest things about me that's different from what I hear other people have is I've never had like, these insane life goals or massive aspirations. I've had ideas in terms of, hey, I obviously want to have a family. I want to be successful. Vague ideas of, of what success means to me. I went to school at USC cause I thought, hey, the bigger the school, the better the success is going to be. I eventually found that like, I'm surrounded by people that might be a little bit too focused on money. Truthfully speaking, that was my personal experience. I'm not saying that's accurate for everyone. I decided, hey, money isn't everything, but at the same time, it's obviously good to have. I continued down a career path where I did finance. I worked for a larger marketing agency and eventually I decided like, hey, the, the level of control I want to have in my life is going to dictate how I can perform, how I can execute for clients and how I can basically bring the most important elements in my life to the world, which is honesty and integrity and logic, so problem solving as well.
Russel:It's a great combination. I hear a lot about honesty, integrity, but yeah, match that with some logic. I imagine that's a good potion. How do you feel about USC being in the Big 10?
Matthew:This is the thing is, uh, I'm not, I'm not a big sports guy. I'm originally from New Mexico and New Mexico doesn't have any major sports teams. My family didn't raise me as a huge sports, um, watcher. I played a lot of sports and so I decided, hey, I'm going to go to USC because I want to become a big sports guy. I know that, especially in business, especially in friendships, it is very valuable to like, have that passion and that interest. But unfortunately I never really picked it up, so I can't answer that question.
Russel:All right. Hey, doesn't affect you at all. Potato patata. I know you had some experience at a rather large agency and, and sounds like some other experiences in there as well, lead us up to the point where you actually started your agency.
Matthew:One of the things that I kind of just kept running into is, I kept trying to improve and look for new opportunities. I think, especially as your, as agencies get larger and larger, they, they do form a level of bureaucracy that's harder to overcome. It's harder to change processes and systems. Obviously when you get to a certain level of scale, you're beholden to a lot more than just the owner or the employees. You're beholden to lenders. It just makes it a little bit clunkier to try and move quickly. I basically decided like, hey, I don't feel like I'm providing the value, and realistically, I didn't feel great about what I was doing, um, at that previous organization. I decided the best way to accomplish bringing the expertise, bringing the integrity that I want to, to my clients, is to start my own business. That's how I got where I am.
Russel:Okay. And was that a slow roll into starting your own business or was it, you know, take this job and shove it, um, I'm doing this and I'll figure out the rest on the backside or how did you actually go about it?
Matthew:It was a one night of pure passion, Russel, to be honest.
Russel:All right. I love it.
Matthew:I was trying to move up. I was trying to make changes and unfortunately they weren't being met with the, the acceptance I was looking for. I got fueled by that. I literally built my entire website, wrote all the copy. Formed my business, did all the research in under 48 hours when I first started out. I just, you know, continually grew it from there.
Russel:It speaks to my heart a little bit, cause I mean, I think we ended up starting the same way. It was a Friday night idea and Monday we had a website and we're calling people to sell websites. I love the jump out of a plane and figure out the parachute on the way down approach. It's always fun and exciting. You made this decision and, and you stepped out into this. What were those early days like? Tell us some of the emotions and things you were going through.
Matthew:The early days were honestly my favorite days. I think a lot of people might have a very different experience, but I had been saving, so I didn't have any major financial concerns when I started my own business. I don't think I got a client for probably the first two months. It took, took two and a half months to get my first client. But the beauty was when you're that small and you're operating as your own entity, your expenses really shouldn't be that high, in my opinion. You can operate very lean, anything that you can pay for a service or, um, a provider to do, you could internalize. It just means that you're spending more time. It's that time-money trade off. I had very, very lean expenses starting out. I had clients that found me organically. They saw my YouTube videos, or they heard of me by reputation, or they got referred to me by previous clients. Effectively I had a very clear understanding of what I felt I was worth at the time, and when you're starting out that early on with low expenses, you're actually making a decent amount of money out of the gate with just a handful of clients. I think where it got complicated is towards the end of year one, when you start trying to scale, bring on team members, uh, invest more in your own marketing, your own sales processes. That's when the revenue to expenses ratio really starts kind of tipping in a different direction.
Russel:It seems like all gravy and icing at the beginning and, uh, and then, yeah, those, all those darn expenses that start to creep up, that complicates things. One of the things that I remembered you shared previously was just, let's call it maybe your mindset or your approach to sales as being something you didn't love, or maybe didn't necessarily like to do. You can speak more to that, but that you eventually also, sounds like you kind of came around had to change your mindset there. Talk us through a little bit about how that journey was for you.
Matthew:Absolutely. What's interesting is I often hear some of the most successful agencies, they either, they usually start with a marketing or sales focused, um, front runner in terms of the business, or they start with both. They start with one person who's focused on sales and one person who's focused on operations if it's a two person led company. I started as an individual with my agency and I'm much more of an operations personality. I have people skills when it comes to like talking about what's working, what's not working, but in terms of like, really broadening horizons, networking, that type of thing, never been my, my specialty. I have this distaste for sales mostly because what I've seen in my previous job and, and just around the world, it really doesn't matter which company it is. A lot of sales professionals will make big promises just to get you in the door, and then the execution from the delivery team just doesn't really hit those in a lot of regards. I felt that oftentimes the, the implementer, the, the person actually managing accounts should be doing the sales because they're going to be the most honest and they know what the most likely outcomes are. Again, I didn't really focus on sales early on. I will say that is by far the biggest mistake I've made in my business, is waiting a couple of years to focus on sales. Truthfully, I grew off of referrals, word of mouth and reputation. If I had built sales process early on, instead of an operations process, I think I'd be in a much different place than I am today.
Russel:I'm honestly a big proponent that less is more. We can't solve all the world's problems in a day, but if we can solve one-off problems in a meaningful way that kind of put them to bed and definitely for a while, then we're doing better. Not to say we can look ahead and see everything,. Once you realized that need and that shift in yourself what did you start doing differently?
Matthew:I think the main difference is speed to delivery and time to execution and is one of the biggest factors in, in growing. Like I said, I'm, I'm an operations mindset. I build systems, I build tools. I've built tools and systems for my business that would probably support a hundred plus person agency. I'm not that size. Because I'm preparing for the future instead of focusing on, on right now. The shift has been all right, if I have an idea in terms of sales or outreach or a social media post, I film it, I write it and I execute within a 48 hour period. Otherwise it gets documented and then it just falls by the wayside. That's the biggest change is when I, when I do this research, execute on that research right away, rather than trying to compare all these different scenarios and get caught in analysis paralysis.
Russel:I love that approach, right? I think all the times we have these blinding flashes of the obvious or just a spark of an idea or, you know, that might look like. But then it dies because then there's 8 million other things that get in our way. I How do you balance giving something a, it's full, I guess, full efforts to see it through versus lots of new, quick implementation of ideas?
Matthew:I think that has been my biggest struggle. In some ways I do consider myself a perfectionist. I think a lot of entrepreneurs and business owners feel the same way, um, especially owner operators that just never get out of that stage where they're still so heavily invested in the business. You have to be okay with less than great. You have to be at that 70 to 80 percent percentile rather than that A plus range, because if you get caught up in the, hey, this needs to be perfect, or this employee needs to hit this on the head exactly as I would hit it on the head. Again, you just get caught up in more and more iterations rather than executions. At that point, you're, you're playing a quality game instead of a quantity game, and as a growing business within the first couple of years, I do think you need to be playing the quantity game, unfortunately.
Russel:Any good scientific process, which you could probably say a business is, whether we acknowledge that or not, that you've got to test the waters in a number of different areas and then find what, what tests slightly better than the others and go down that path. The other thing that, that, uh, I remember being a significant part of your backstory is you had a really large client that, uh, that you ended up losing and everybody that just heard that has probably felt that at some point in their agency life, but what happened and how in the world did you overcome it?
Matthew:It's, uh, still brings a tear to my eye to this day, to be honest.
Russel:Sorry, I don't want any tears on the show.
Matthew:It was a whale. It was a luck of the draw, they found me type of scenario. It was, you know, best case scenario, just from out of the gate. To this day, they're still one of the highest billable clients I have on record. Unfortunately it turned into a ghost scenario and it wasn't for a lack of communication, lack of effort, lack of performance. I think just something happened to their business internally and they, they basically had to shut it down. The big part with that is you need to set boundaries for yourself of, hey. Here's how far I'm going to pursue it. Here's what I'm going to do if I really want to go down a legal route, but at the end of the day, you do need to put the past behind you. You do need to move forward. That was a great learning lesson of, hey, I did have some, you know, red flags early on. It wasn't worth not taking that client. It was great to have that experience and obviously help them, uh, in the ways that I was able to, but after they left, it's just, you know, you have to move on. You need to focus on what's next and learn from, all right, if I wasn't communicating them, with them in these ways and asking the questions of, hey, what's, what's your actual profit margin look like? What's the business stability look like? I think a lot of this was logistics and, and legal issues that they may have had. Really digging in a little bit deeper than just surface level metrics, uh, can, can make things like that a lot more preventable.
Russel:We can always do the best work we can do and we can always do a better job of vetting our clients, but sometimes we just can't control a client's business. In some ways, these are just a very natural order of things. The only thing is to build our defense system, our immunity, our, our, our sensitive, sensitiveness to something like this actually happening. Coming away from that going forward, how have you built your fortress around not being susceptible that again?
Matthew:Honestly, I don't think it, like you said, um, we obviously don't manage the businesses of our clients, right? We can drive business to them. We can help improve their revenue, their leads, their sales, whatever it might be, but at the end of the day, like we don't have that level of control because most of the times, as an agency, you're not actually in their business. I think the biggest learning lessons isn't operations. It's not sales. It's not, uh, trying to prevent certain levels of churn or going down the legal route. I think it is you need to try to accept the wins that you have as often as possible so that they overcome the losses. What I mean by that is oftentimes in our industry, there's not a ton of gratitude because people always want more, right? It's, hey, we've, we hit a million dollars this year. Great job, and the feedback you get is, all right. How do we hit 1. 5? Not, hey, thanks so much for getting us here. When you do get that positive client feedback of like, hey, you did, you did an amazing job this week or whatever it might be, internalize that as much as possible so that when you do have those troughs, when someone leaves or you have negative feedback or whatever it might be, you can stay a little bit more resilient rather than having to, you know, weather the storm, uh, day in and day out.
Russel:It's no doubt that, and I continue to appreciate this more and more and really even since I was in an actual agency is how much is our mindset, uh, is important that is maintained positive. Celebrate the wins. All the things that go into, look, we're going to take our punches so we've got to make sure we really relish the, the wins and, and the other side of that. Just for perspective out there and folks listening that one of the things they say, and I don't know the exact saying, but basically we don't want any clients in our business that are over 20, 25 percent of our total revenue. This idea that, well, if we have someone bigger than that, well, we don't decrease their revenue because that has pain as well, but we have to grow ourselves outside of a client being that, such a huge percentage of our revenue. Probably there's some issues too that we have a client that would even be able to be that like, well, what are we selling that has such diversity and pricing and scope that we have these guerrilla clients to begin with? But anything from that end that you kind of look back on and say, oh man, I wish I would have realized this and worked a lot harder at getting more clients or anything from mitigation, I guess you could say?
Matthew:I think what was scary is like you, especially early on, you view clients like this as like, this is a VIP. This client's so important because they are such a high percentage of our revenue that we need to drop other tasks to focus on them. We need to make sure that they're super happy and go above and beyond and make sure that, you know, they know the amount of work we're doing. And like I said, a lot of the times that's not obviously, that's not always, uh, recognized, and it's sometimes not always that valued. I think oftentimes some of the clients with the bigger budgets, tend to care less about metrics and, because they're not, they're not fighting for their business like some smaller clients might be. One of the things was, hey, yes, this client's important. Yes, we need to deliver well on it, but we can't let these other parts of our business fall by the wayside because we're focusing so much on this one thing. We still need to, to give the quality to all our other clients. We still need to focus on sales and not take for granted the fact that we have this revenue now. I think that's really what it comes down to is don't, don't put them on a pedestal basically. Yes, they're important. Yes, you should treat them well, but they aren't your core business. Your core business is everything else that you're doing.
Russel:It becomes a self fulfilling process. You feel compelled to this client because they're paying a lot of the bills and they say, jump, you say how high. You start running more circles and then you're focusing less and less on the other parts of your business. Hopefully we've set up some red flags to anyone out there listening that has a client that's, you know, breaks that 20, 25, 30 percent threshold and is inspired to, um, set up whatever they need to set up, grow their client base and make sure they don't take their eye off the ball with the business. Anything do we want to add to that checklist for, for folks that are in that similar situation?
Matthew:No, I mean, realistically, it just does come back to sales. If you have a consistent sales process, whether that's cold or through marketing channels or whatever it might be, then you're not going to be as stressed as much when you lose clients. I think that's all it is.
Russel:I'll say one last thing because I have heard no shortages of this story of, if you think they're going to be around forever, you're dead wrong. They will not be. I've seen entire agencies close, uh, losing a large client. I've heard no shortage of stories where someone thought they were so locked in, had the greatest relationship in the world, we're doing amazing work, and six months later that client is gone. If nothing else, don't tell yourself that fallacy.
Matthew:I do have one actual, uh, extra note if you don't mind.
Russel:Yeah, absolutely.
Matthew:I think a lot of agencies, obviously it's easy to let your temper get the best of you. With that whale client, when they left, I was out, I mean, I was owed an additional large amount of money that they basically didn't end up spending. I think the big thing is they might come back and I've had that happen where clients think the grass is greener, they leave and then they come back. One of my biggest tips to agency owners, marketers, account managers, is don't focus so much on the short term that you hurt your longterm success. Because if you maintain that relationship, if you cultivate it, and if you treat people like humans. We all have issues. We all have bills. We might have problems that we're not aware of. If you give people the benefit of the doubt as often as you can, it, I think it will come back and benefit you.
Russel:We all have issues in bills. That's so, so perfectly well put. This is business and as emotional as we might feel about it, that we need to move on, you know, nope, don't burn any longterm bridges. Great advice there. Thank you for adding that. All right, we'll switch gears. One of the things that I'm just curious about is, you know, obviously had, had some successes and some punches so far, but what, what does the outlook like for you? What are you trying to achieve here? What's the big goal?
Matthew:I think the big goal for me is I want to stay boutique. I really love the hands on relationships. I'm very much integrity first. The less accounts I have, the better it's going to be for those accounts and for my team, um, as well. I don't want to be this 500 plus person agency. I'd love to get to that 20 to 30 person mark, looking at probably less than a hundred accounts total, a lifetime. What that really looks like is building a team that's a lot more intimate of highly skilled professionals, where we can really dig in and find the issues that people don't know they have. Oftentimes with marketers or other agencies, they might get caught in that cycle where it's like, hey, I've had this account long enough to where I'm not really looking for problems anymore. I have this checklist and here are the things I do. If you're not looking at it from a full funnel or holistic lens, there might be big gaps that would benefit the work that you're doing, but because you don't focus on those areas, you're, you're not getting that level of prowess or, achievement. That's where I'd like to take things is stay boutique, stay intimate and really continue to focus on full funnel. It has not been the best for me historically, cause I think, again, a lot of people say you do have to niche down, but my niche is being a holistic marketer and I'm trying to figure out how to really kind of work that in terms of my own marketing and my own sales process as well.
Russel:I appreciate your transparency on that journey. I work with a lot of folks that, that is a very part of the subject and my general approach is look, there's a million ways we can make this work. Yes, there are some elements of what the value of niching down is that makes things easier, right? This is a business where if we can make any part of this easier, we certainly want to do that. But there are also ways around it that we just take that, that essence, elements of what niching down means and, and find a way that makes sense to us. That's a journey, not a destination, when we talk about positioning. Anything like you feel like we missed as far as part of your journey goes, or that'd be worth talking about?
Matthew:I got a couple of tips. I feel like I've been talking about me the whole time. Is there anything that you've, you know, that's resonated with you that you're like, hey, like, absolutely this is, this is a huge downfall or this is a huge area of opportunity for agency owners that, you know, you consistently see?
Russel:I think just generally in my approach and agency, I always often talk about it, is the most people business of people businesses, and when you intermix people into things you have, right, just like DNA, you have no shortage of combinations, elements, et cetera, that, that are at play and work. I'm kind of almost, in that sense, anti checklist, because right, you as an individual or as a principal and owner make up so many parts of that DNA of that agency. What works for Bob over here and, um, Jennifer over here, you know, is not going to work for someone over here because of that very element and how you guys approach your teams differently and so many things like that. Always just prior to pull out where people's strengths and stories are and take those lessons as we go. Not any different than today of, hey, if we've got bigger, big, mega clients, don't hold onto them, think you're going to have them forever. Build up your business to withstand losing that client, knowing that that is an inevitability and little things like that. So many great parts of your story, I think were good lessons here. Not to say we can't go for hours and talk about all the lessons that we need to learn in an agency, but I'm, I'm curious, is there anything you want to know,? I love turning the tables a little bit. Is there anything you want to know for your own business?
Matthew:Sales, obviously, is something I'm constantly working on, never been a strong suit. I think one of my other things that I'm really focusing more and more on is becoming my own CFO, so to speak, I hired a bookkeeper early on within the first couple of months of running my business and thought, hey, I'm, I have this professional in my corner to help with my finances, consult me on taxes, consult me on expenses and kind of what that looks like. Hindsight, it, it is one of the reasons I didn't grow as quickly as I could. I think really hunkering down your expenses and forecasting what your revenue is going to look like, forecasting what your sales are going to look like, that all goes hand in hand with being the owner and driving a successful business. So if you have any tips on like, hey, here's how you manage your expenses, your bookkeeping, or here's how you connect the dots in terms of your clients, your client billables, or the time spent on each client. I think that's a huge one that people don't often categorize, right? Especially early on, tracking that time, that would be interesting. I don't like to live by an hourly, uh, rate. It's just not in my nature. It never will be in my nature. I'm going to stick pretty firm to that. But if you have, you know, recommendations on what you think that should look like, I'd, I'd love to hear them.
Russel:That's a really great question. If I honestly think about, and you can probably ask any owner that, you know, a big hurdle or, or obstacle or stepping stone to a better level of, of business success, let's say, is really deeply intimately understanding your numbers. I think there's a lot of owners that, until they have to or whatever reasons they go, numbers are boring. I want to do creative work and all those things. Guess what? It's a business. You're going to run into that one way or another. That is an actual need that you have to accomplish in your business. I love what you said there of what we also have to try to get out of in an agency space is living by the hour. Not to say, we live in a world where time is applied to things, and it's not bad to understand time. But if that's all we're billing by, and that's all we're measuring, then we're running a very finite game in terms of, you know, what our opportunities are for scaling, because we know eventually no one's going to pay 1,000 dollars an hour for, name your service. Unless that's highly strategic, they're not going to do it for social media posts or something along those lines. But you know, I think you said it well, you got to have a forecast. How far into the future can you see what you can anticipate to the best of your ability, that's going to happen to your business? I think another piece in that that's really important is understanding accounting. You don't need to become an accountant, but understanding accounting so that you can build, most people using QuickBooks, financial data and reports in a way that you can look at that report and drive meaningful information other than just, hey, we need more revenue or we need to cut expenses, right? Is it broken up into things like cost of goods sold and, um, and just all, all the ways that we can see the parts. We have an overhead problem or we have, we have a capacity issue or things like that, that the story that your financial should be able to tell. That's the part, I mean, I think you're doing a lot of good things there. I'm curious if you've gotten to that place where you're, you're looking at a PNL and making strategic business decisions from that PNL?
Matthew:I'm in the midst of really getting deep on that. Another kind of negative of having that whale client was, hey, I have, I got a lot of money that I don't need to worry about expenses right now because I'm covered and I have a lot of excess. I wasn't focusing on a lot of that planning or a lot of that accounting. Truthfully, I kind of looked at accounting and bookkeeping early on as, hey, this is for tax purposes instead of this is, this is for operational efficiency purposes. I highly encourage new agency owners, new business owners in general, to really hunker down on your bookkeeping and accounting within the first six months of running your business and getting that dialed in, getting really good at that because I think it will make a massive difference.
Russel:Great advice there, and, and, and perspective. That's what I often run into sometimes that again, not that I want to ever advocate and say, focus on your numbers, focus up on your numbers, because the real keys at the end of this game is we need to also focus on quality. We need to focus on building a great team. We need great processes that are going to create good numbers, but we have to know the numbers to one can inform the other. Don't get too sucked in by the numbers, but make them matter. Your accounting is more than just what you're sending off to Uncle Sam. That is a big misnomer that I think I run into a lot. Awesome. Great segue. Great twist. I appreciate that. We'll get back into the normal swing of things here. The last big question for you, Matthew, are entrepreneurs born or are they made?
Matthew:I think both. I was made, I definitely was not born an entrepreneur. I have a number of friends where they were a thousand percent born entrepreneurs. They did eBay when they were 10 years old, you know, they sold, you know, bought Pokemon cards. They did all the things that had that entrepreneurial spirit. I hundred percent see that in some people. For me, frankly, I never wanted to be an entrepreneur. I had friends in college that took entrepreneurship as a, as a, as a career trajectory. I thought, you know, that's not for me. I'm okay working in a business, working with others, being under someone. I kind of got to a breaking point where it's like, you know what, I, I want this freedom, um, and I'm going to take this freedom. With that being said, even if it's made, I don't think entrepreneurship is for everyone. I think oftentimes employees glamorize, uh, what it means to be a business owner. It's not always that glamorous. There are a lot of sacrifices. For me, one of the biggest ones, especially in a business of my size is you don't get that camaraderie that you often get being a part of a more established business. Being an entrepreneur, it has to be a choice. You have to believe in yourself. I think that is the absolute number one thing to be successful as an entrepreneur is you have to believe in yourself. It's different for everyone in terms of whether you're born or made.
Russel:I love that. What do you said at the end? You have to believe in yourself because you know, probably indicative of some of the parts we discussed in this conversation that you're going to get kicked. There's going to be all kinds of things that are going to try to convince you not to believe in yourself. We have to at least start there, otherwise we're fighting an uphill battle. Wonderful thought there. If people want to know more about Prospect Future, where can they go?
Matthew:Prospectfuture.com. Easy as that.
Russel:There you go. Why say more? Awesome. Thank you so much today, Matt, for taking the time out of your, your business and your day to share so many wonderful thoughts, your journeys, your ups and downs, your highs, your lows, and really appreciate you taking the time to walk through that with us today and sharing that with everyone listening out there.
Matthew:Absolutely, Russel. Thank you so much for having me on. This has been a pleasure.
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Matthew:I've had my ups and downs in terms of hiring, uh, whether that be contractors, part time employees, full time employees. One of the earliest, uh, part time employees I hired, they, they would come in and because the, it wasn't as structured back then in terms of like, when they were supposed to be working, I was still kind of learning the ropes of what it meant to, to hire and set standards for people. They'd come in and they brag about all of these things that they were doing for the other company that they were working for. In the meantime, they were posting posts on our social media page that had watermarks of their other agency. It's just one of those things where it's like, you know, it's, you got to find the right team. It was just really funny at the time, cause it's like, people can have the absolute great personality, um, and talk the talk, but at the end of the day, like sometimes you do need to do a little bit more handholding or, or make sure that you're focusing on getting them excited to work with you. Not just obviously excited for the paycheck.
Russel:Get beyond the transactional. I always use the term, trust but verify.