Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Building a business is tough. It takes grit, never-ending days, missed family birthdays, and more coffee than you thought it was possible to drink.
Unfortunately, many business operators do all of this and see initial success but then - crickets! They hit a plateau or, worse, fall off the cliff entirely.
This is The Business OS, a show powered by JustCall dedicated to ensuring that you don't get lost in that Bermuda Triangle of irrelevance.
Join us as we talk to entrepreneurs, business leaders, and real-world operators - folks who know your struggles better than anyone else. They are also the ones with the knowledge and playbooks to help you succeed. Through candid conversations with our guests, we make sure you’ll walk away with actionable takeaways to help you think ahead and pivot fast.
True, building a business is tough - and you have to hustle. But it does get easier when you have a Business OS.
Matt Tait [00:00:00]:
When you scale and grow as fast as we have, it's not pretty. You go through, like very small parts of this was great, but for the most part, you're failing and you're figuring it out. And that kind of iterative motion is what can allow you to be really good if you're honest with yourself the whole time. So for us, when we noticed that as we had grown just astronomically a couple of years ago, that's when we actually took a step back and we said, hey, this is time to double down on our values and on our training. This is The Business OS, a conversation.
Tom Burgess [00:00:37]:
Powered by JustCall, dedicated to giving you the tools and knowledge needed to win your business. Hi everyone, and welcome to another episode of The Business OS podcast, a show powered by JustCall where we try and help business operators avoid irrelevance. We know what it's like to start your own business. After potentially years of planning, preparing only to watch it fail can be pretty devastating. Most people don't really try again, especially if they have a fallback option. But our guest today, Matt, wrote a different story.
Tom Burgess [00:01:17]:
He started his career as a lawyer, which we're certainly going to get into. But coming from a family of entrepreneurs, being one was always the plan. After sales and marketing leadership roles in various companies, he did find himself running a business. But for someone else. And like all true blue entrepreneurs, he thought, I got to do this for myself. So his first company was in restaurant tech. If you ask him today, he would probably advise almost anyone to not get into that line of business. Although it failed, it did teach him several valuable lessons, not the least of which was the failure was normal and should be talked about more.
Tom Burgess [00:01:51]:
And it taught him to brush himself off and try again. Today, his second company employs over 80 people all across the world and serves over 650 clients. By every measure, he is a success. But he still talks about the failures that got him there openly and honestly, and advises all entrepreneurs to talk more about their feelings and their failures. He also has his own podcast where he helps business owners navigate the messy middle period of a business. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome my guest today, CEO of Decimal and host of the After the First Million podcast, and recovering attorney, Matt Tait. Matt, welcome to the show.
Matt Tait [00:02:31]:
Hey Tom, thanks for having me. I'm looking forward to this and I really appreciate you having me on.
Tom Burgess [00:02:36]:
Yeah, of course, we're excited to have you. I'm actually pretty excited for this first question, which, which kind of deals with your early start in law. I have attorneys in my family. My father's an attorney, my brother in law, my wife's a paralegal for the federal government. So I'm surrounded by them, knowing early on that I was not going to be going into law. You talk about being a recovering attorney. What does that mean to you? In your own kind of terminology? But also, I want to point out, was there anything going through the law journey that kind of helped you get to where you are today?
Matt Tait [00:03:11]:
Oh, yeah. I mean, first and foremost, I'll get in big trouble if I don't say, in law school, I met my wife, and that made it all worth it. And she is a real lawyer. Her dad is an attorney. Her sister is an attorney. So, like you, I'm a little bit surrounded by it. You know, when you go to law school and take the bar exam, they don't tell you that once you pass, even if you don't want to be a lawyer, you still have to pay dues for the rest of your life. So that's why I feel like a recovering attorney.
Matt Tait [00:03:42]:
Like you said, I grew up around a family of entrepreneurs. In fact, I was just at a family reunion over Labor Day. And crazy enough, we had 60 people in one house. And in that 60, I looked around and there were actually twelve people who had either started or run their own company or large organization. And that just normalized doing it for me. But when I was trying to think about what I wanted to do, I asked my dad and my grandpa, both of whom had their own businesses, kind of what they would recommend, knowing that I wanted to be an entrepreneur. And they said, you know what? The first couple of years of your career, no matter what, are training, and we think it'd be. Both said, I think it'd be a great idea to go to law school.
Matt Tait [00:04:21]:
You'll save a hell of a lot of money on legal fees. To be fair, they were totally right. But I think, more importantly, what being a lawyer, what going through law school really teaches you is how to absorb and synthesize massive amounts of information very quickly and to come up with alternative options, and both to think inside and outside of the box at the same time. And, I mean, you know, as an entrepreneur, you are wearing a million hats and you are bad at a lot of them, but you're able to kind of, as a lawyer, it taught me to be able to just kind of slow the world down and, and organize chaos in my brain, because, quite frankly, I don't care how big of a company you are, you could be Eli Lilly or Amazon. Or you can be a small two person company. You're a dumpster fire. It's just a matter of where you look.
Tom Burgess [00:05:08]:
Yeah. And to me, like the way I think about that too, is most of the lawyers that I know have this, you know, the rational brain or the rational thinking, which is being able to ingest information, whether it's positive or negative, and then think about the various paths to an outcome. I feel like that could help the entrepreneurial mindset as well. Very good. Now you're at Decimal. Now I want to talk about the idea around fully remote work. And I've been in fully remote or hybrid companies for the better half of ten years. But when you start a company like Decimal and it's already kind of marketed as this fully remote work environment, what does that mean? How does that, especially in growing a fully remote company, what are some of those ideals that you need to look out for? And how does that kind of help the company culture?
Matt Tait [00:05:54]:
You know, I joke with my friends, and I've had them, that you can lazily build a great culture when you have an office, because you're just around each other and you can hang out, you can walk by somebody. When you build a remote company, you have to be much more intentional about everything that you do and much more intentional about how you say what you say. Every company, and particularly remote, needs its own foundational anchor or true North Star for Decimal. That's our mission and our values. Our mission is to make it easier to be in business. Part of how we do that is doing bookkeeping and tax and financial operations. Another way we do that is through the podcast. After the First Million, we normalize and talk about the struggles of scaling a business and how hard that can be.
Matt Tait [00:06:41]:
So that's our mission, and we talk about it a lot. Our values are do the right thing, default to transparency, move fast, make things better, and win together. And those four values not only anchor us, but when we compliment somebody, when we give a kudos, when we help a client, we actually talk about and tag our values the best. It was actually really cool this summer. About a month ago, I was giving an exit interview to one of our interns, JJ, and I just wanted to see how his experience was, because I think one of the toughest things about remote is when you're younger in your career, you're just still learning about what it's like to be an adult, let alone how to do a job. And remote does make that harder. And I really don't love it or recommend it. So I wanted to see from JJ how the experience was.
Matt Tait [00:07:30]:
And one of the takeaways was, he goes, you know what? I think I'm probably the only kid going back to Butler business school this year that could walk into class and tell them all the values of the company I interned in. And he goes, you repeated them all the time. The team repeated them. Your clients talked about them. That, to me, is the anchor of a remote culture.
Tom Burgess [00:07:52]:
That's amazing. And I think that's sometimes missed. When you have a mission or kind of like your culture statement, to be able to live that out and actually live that out with your customers is a really important way to go about it, because I've seen it, and we've probably both seen it, where you've got a company culture, you got a mission statement. But, like, how much does that come up? We talk about it in kudos or awards or kind of like the company culture when you see success, but it's almost kind of flipping it. When you start to see stress or failure, that's when that mission statement truly comes into play, to start living by it and actually to kind of flip that. Matt, let's say you're. Whether it's a Decimal or previous companies that have this kind of. Whether it's remote first or just this very strong culture that drives around a common goal or a north star.
Matt Tait [00:08:42]:
What'S.
Tom Burgess [00:08:42]:
Your mindset take when you feel like it's starting to slip? You know, like we start to see maybe just kind of getting to work, doing the daily stuff, or your company's just maybe going through a rough time. How do you try and bring it back to that mission, especially in the fully remote work environment?
Matt Tait [00:08:57]:
Look, we've gone through that. We're four and a half years old. We started January of 2020. And when you scale and grow as fast as we have, it's not pretty. You go through, like, very small parts of this was great, but for the most part, you're failing and you're figuring it out. And that kind of iterative motion is what can allow you to be really good if you're honest with yourself the whole time. So, for us, when we noticed that, as we had grown just astronomically a couple of years ago, that's when we actually took a step back and we said, hey, this is time to double down on our values and on our training. Because what's key is when you have a 20 person company like me, I, and Jacob, my co founder, we're pretty much with people almost every day, which means that the values are what we're living and what we're talking about.
Matt Tait [00:09:48]:
But when you grow to 80 people, all of a sudden I've got direct reports who have direct reports. I've got four layers in an organization, which means I need to train every layer on the importance of the values, the importance of the key behaviors that lead into those values, and how to continue to encourage and nurture those values. So I started putting together monthly meetings with each layer of the organization, with the managers, with the directors. We started doing small groups where we talked about key behaviors that led into values. We did a lot of breakouts because, look, we're in a business at Decimal where you can go to any place and get your bookkeeping done. And yeah, I do think we do it better and we're more responsive. But our biggest differentiator is our people and our culture. How we do it, how we believe, how we help is much, much different than the other people in our industry.
Matt Tait [00:10:42]:
And so doubling down on culture is what we did, and the effect was immediate and amazing.
Tom Burgess [00:10:47]:
Awesome. Yeah, that's pretty admirable, especially, at least in my mind. Bookkeeping seems like a very, you can tell me to be quiet, but it's an old school business. And so to try and modernize that into like the tech forward, which kind of leads into my next question. But blending that kind of work model that we see so much in SaaS, which is like the people and the culture elements, it's really cool to see. Now, you mentioned before that you want Decimal to be one of the most AI and tech forward companies in the US. What exactly does that mean to you? I want to get a sense for taking that old school business now, making it very modern. But what does that mean in your speak?
Matt Tait [00:11:26]:
So there are two parts of what we do in very broad terms. There is the execution of work, whatever that is. And there is the client relationship. And our clients and our team deserve us as a team and as a company to continue to get better and to be the best at both. And quite frankly, that's where services in general and accounting is probably one of the worst. They focus only on the output of work and not actually on the client service and client experience. And so for us, when I look at being tech forward and AI forward, I look at what that does, is it makes the execution of output and work, bookkeeping the bill, pay the payroll, the invoicing, it makes that more efficient and better. And what that also does is that improves my margin, which gives me more time and money to focus on.
Matt Tait [00:12:18]:
The client experience, so I can create better relationships, I can create better help for people that need what we offer. And look, you're totally right. I always joke that the three worst things about running any business are HR, it, and accounting. And if you're big enough, legal is close. Number four. So our job is to not be on your mind, but to give you a great experience every time you have a need to pay your bills, get paid, or track it all.
Tom Burgess [00:12:46]:
Yeah. And do you have, do you have some kind of like, key strategies or even just key execution points for how you do that?
Matt Tait [00:12:52]:
Oh, 100%. I mean, look, we have a three layered approach to the execution of work. Layer one is how much can we get technology to accomplish? Layer two is we've got a great team in the Philippines and spread throughout the world that does the execution of the rest of that work. And then we have our us team that is doing client relationships and final QC. The goal of each layer is to pull work from the layer above it. And what AI does is it puts the tech layer on steroids. And what the Philippines team does is if you empower them and treat them the way that they should be treated as human beings, all of a sudden they can take the work layer off of the us team, which increases their capacity for more clients at better relationships. And so, to me, it's the execution of that type of a strategy.
Matt Tait [00:13:44]:
And look, to be fair, accountants are not the world's quickest movers when it comes to change. So I, quite frankly, love competing with accounting firms and accountants because we can be literally generations ahead of them before the marketplace catches up.
Tom Burgess [00:14:00]:
Yeah, that's pretty, that's pretty eye opening. Very good. Now, we saw somewhere that you got a quote, and I think it was kind of tying together.
Matt Tait [00:14:11]:
Being a co founder, that's a dangerous statement, by the way.
Tom Burgess [00:14:14]:
It's all right, you're going to get a couple of these. But it's also something that I like after thinking about it was super parallel. We talked about the idea of being a co founder is one of the closest. It's like the closest thing to marriage. Like I said, it didn't take me long to see the parallels. You're co founding a family, you're co founding a life together, so it makes a lot of sense. But you're a firm believer that it needs to be a partnership built around core competencies. How do you uncover this? Like, how does that, what does that mean as you kind of approach business or approach business with a co founder? I mean, you have experience in starting businesses, whether it's successful or failing, how does that blend together with being married?
Matt Tait [00:14:57]:
I think a lot of in both cases. And look, when you really, truly give yourself to a job, like you do when you start a business, like starting a business isn't working 40 hours or 100 hours a day or a week. It's working 24/7 like, no matter what, it's always in the back of your mind. And if something happens, you're going to jump in because you're the business owner. So it is a lifestyle decision, no matter how you balance it out. And when you're working, you're quite frankly, spending more time with the people you work with a lot of times than you are with your home and your spouse. And I'm lucky enough to have an amazing, ambitious, driven wife. And what we have found is that between the two of us, we compliment each other really, really well.
Matt Tait [00:15:45]:
She is a lot more organized on a daily basis. She likes to plan ahead. I'm the, I can wake up and figure out a plan and get going. Now that we've got three kids, that's a little bit tougher to do, but we balance each other out really, really well in our mentalities and our styles. But we share a Venn diagram, a core set of values on who we are and what we want to be as a, as a marriage, as a family, as a parent. And that, I think that Venn diagram is really, really important. And that same principle applies to co founders, where you want people that have complementary skills that, like, for me, I am, I always joke that I am a great leader. I am very good at convincing people to jump off a bridge.
Matt Tait [00:16:29]:
I'm a terrible manager. I can't get them to line up to do it. So I need people around me that are more organized, more able to be that kind of day to day blocking and tackling, detailed management. And I need to be okay trusting them to do that. What we need to share is that core set of values, many of whom are shared with the values of Decimal. Because look, quite frankly, when youre a fast growing startup, the values of the company start as the values of the founders and how they push those down through the business. So that type of Venn diagram of a shared core set of values, and, and for me, it also adds, and look, I made bad choices in my first founding team, and I made great choices this time. And what I ultimately learned is I want people that are curious, very detail oriented, very driven, and very resilient.
Matt Tait [00:17:21]:
And I think if you have those four core competencies that I share with them, then we can go from there. And that's a really great foundational starting point.
Tom Burgess [00:17:30]:
Yeah. And you kind of answered the second question there is like, I'm assuming the idea of core competencies comes into play. When you have an idea, you're thinking about, who else am I going to bring into this kind of process? And you mentioned you failed the first time. I'm assuming that's because your core competencies maybe didn't line up or you didn't understand to kind of look for those, what you're strong at versus what someone else is strong at to kind of get it together.
Matt Tait [00:17:57]:
Yeah, I think that's part of it. The other part of it for me, too, and it's something that I like to talk a lot about, is I hadn't yet in my first company taken a step back and really thought through who I was and who I wanted to be and divorced that from my work. And it took failing at my first business, which was restaurant marketing tech, which you're at, I wouldn't really ever recommend anybody doing that, but it took me stepping back after that and figuring out who I was as a person, what my core set of values were, because then I knew how to align that to other people, and I just kind of assumed a lot and I didn't. Sometimes in work and in our careers, we just get going and we let the snowball drive us rather than driving the momentum. And once I stepped to the backside of that momentum, then everything changed for me.
Tom Burgess [00:18:56]:
Really cool. Yeah. And tying this back to the idea of co founders or just entrepreneurs, you have to wear every single hat in the beginning. So when you tie that to the idea of maybe co founding and just understanding and taking a step back and looking at yourself versus what you want in a business, when do you start to shed the hats? Because you bring up a really good point, and that I think a lot of leaders need to hear is that you are good at what you're good at. But it's almost more important to recognize where you need help and where you need other people to step in. And that goes from the top, bottom. But what are the kind of indicators that tell you, okay, I can start to give these hats to the people that probably wear them better.
Matt Tait [00:19:41]:
That's a tough thing for anybody. But to me, when you're busting at the seams, because you will and you do frequently, and you look at what is the best, highest use of my time and what fills my cup, what do I enjoy doing when you're unable to do either of those things, then all of a sudden you need to pull something away. And, you know, one of my recommendations to companies is a lot of them, and particularly in tech and in accounting, people hire salespeople way too soon. And the reality is, startup sales is a learning journey. And until you've really learned all the nuances and all the patterns and lived it as a founder, you can't teach other people to do it. And so I'm a huge proponent of sell the first million yourself or get close to it, and then you've learned enough through the course of time to scale sales to allow somebody else to do it. And I think those are, that's the other piece of it, is founders are unique. Like, really good.
Matt Tait [00:20:47]:
Founders are uniquely good at stepping into uncertainty and figuring out certainty. Most people are really bad at that. So you have to assume that who you hire isn't going to be great at it, and so you want to be able to put them in a position to succeed.
Tom Burgess [00:21:05]:
Yeah, that's well said. Extremely well said. Now, talking about the kind of the, going back to the core competencies again, your current co founder was an intern at a previous company where you worked together. So talk to me about the relationship you have with your current co founder. How did that come about? Just from, like, working together when he was an intern? I want to learn more about that.
Matt Tait [00:21:28]:
So, Jacob is 27 years old now, and he and I have worked together for almost eight years. So he had dropped out of college after a semester and became an intern at a company that was kind of incubating my last one. And then he came in and helped us. And through that, what I learned was not only did we share a lot of the same core values, but principally, Jacob is one of the smartest people I've ever meth. And the things where he is uniquely bad are the things where I'm uniquely good, and the things where he's uniquely good are where I'm uniquely bad. And so it was a really good complement of skills. And there's also a shared value that I wouldn't ever recommend for people, because I don't think that most people can do it. But Jacob and I truly are the type of people that have strong opinions, but they're loosely held.
Matt Tait [00:22:22]:
We will argue like crazy, but if you have a better, more reasoned argument, we'll switch in a heartbeat. And Michael, our coo, now has the exact same value. And it took us a while to find the right person that shared that, because, like, realistically, most of us are too prideful to truly live that. And it is a very lip service thing that people say that's just fundamentally untrue most of the time. But through working with Jacob and now through working with Michael, we have all found that, look, we can, we can say and stand up there and make you believe absolutely anything in our opinions. And we sound like we're super confident and we're totally full of shit. But we can also change in a heartbeat if you come up with a better reason and have no scars or pride about losing that argument.
Tom Burgess [00:23:14]:
Sure, it's. It's like being humble in nature. I love that. Um, and it's someone say, like you're the peanut butter taste jelly, or if you're in the golf world, you would probably be a pretty good duo on the course, the ham and egg type situation. So that's really good. Going back to one other quote here on the CEO Wisdom podcast, you talked about three parts to help normalize your feelings around success as an entrepreneur. Share those again. Now, I want to get a spin on why those are super important and thinking about your journey, but would love to hear it.
Matt Tait [00:23:46]:
So it's not just normalizing your journey as a CEO, it's putting you in a position to be successful. So, as you and I know, being a CEO is really hard and some of us are addicted to it and probably crazy, but the reality is, is a lot of our days really, really suck. And what I have found is that in order to be successful, I think a lot of particularly fast growing company CEO's need three things, and you need to be able to focus, number one, on your own physical and mental health, whatever that means for you. I have a whole routine and regimen that I do every single day, every week, every month, and I'm also constantly reevaluating and adding to that. And it works for me. The other thing is, I think everybody needs to have a paid coach, somebody that you actually pay money to for an unfiltered view of you. And I think that that is really essential because friends, mentors, investors, advisors, like they're only going to go so far, but a truly good coach will tell you what that mirror looks like when they hold it up to you. And the third thing is a peer group and a peer group of people that are doing something similar.
Matt Tait [00:25:03]:
Because, you know, one of the greatest ways to learn is to listen to other people's experiences and not have to fail yourself every single time. And the peer group gives you that. It also helps to remove some of the isolation of the role. Like look, as Decimal has grown, Jacob and I used to do everything together. We used to edit each other's emails. Still, like in big things, we literally will edit each other's emails. But there's a lot now that me as a CEO, I can't even talk to him about first. And a peer group gives me that safe place to do that and a group of people that just understand what I'm going through and, and that really, really helps.
Tom Burgess [00:25:45]:
That's no, that's amazing. And it's what I think is really eye opening is that the more and more, especially as we talk to entrepreneurs or CEO's, the idea of your personal health and your mental wellbeing is of the utmost importance. We had Julie be on an episode earlier and this is what she's doing. And it's I think to emphasize this point, as you start to go down the path, whether you're a CEO, an entrepreneur, a manager, it doesn't matter who you are. The idea of taking your personal health first is the, the only way that you're going to be able to provide the success that you have as an individual. So do you have any recommendations on some of those peer groups or like what you've been doing? And I guess the second point here is that because you've started to recognize that, you know, you as a human being versus you as a CEO needs to kind of refuel your tank to then be that CEO. How does that extend down to the entire team at Decimal?
Matt Tait [00:26:48]:
So what I have found, and to be fair, like my wife and I also found this out with our marriage and with each other during the pandemic that it was real. And we had three young kids. Like my kids are now 1010 and seven and a half. So during the pandemic, like, oh, it was nuts. And we actually finally looked at each other part of the way through and we said, you know what, I was like, Terry, you need to go find your own thing for a couple hours every day or an hour every day. And I don't care what that was, I started playing tennis and paddle ball and it was just like a way to get out of the house even during the pandemic in a what felt like Safeway. And that stuff became an important part of our routine. And what we found was that by doing that, by taking time away from our family to focus on ourselves, that it made us better during the times when we were all together.
Matt Tait [00:27:36]:
And that same principle applies at work where when I focus on myself, when I give myself time to. To just think, to be alone, to work. I'm on Zoom after Zoom after Zoom after Zoom, when I can actually let the brain in my head do things that aren't just listening and talking. Great stuff happens, and it filters down to the company. It also makes me more patient. I'm a better listener, and I'm better able to think through and understand complex problems. So all of that is what I have found is that by focusing on me, it makes me better at the time I'm spending with other people. And in the past, I've been so much of the, like, grind all the time.
Matt Tait [00:28:20]:
And I just thought if I worked long and hard enough, great things would happen. And the reality is that working better has been much more effective.
Tom Burgess [00:28:30]:
Yeah. Yeah. I'm assuming you've had burnout before.
Matt Tait [00:28:33]:
Oh, 100%. I mean, after failing my first company, total and utter, like, rock bottom burnout, like mental, physical. And it was kind of through that period of time that I rebuilt my own psyche, my own mental capacity, my own physical well being, et cetera.
Tom Burgess [00:28:51]:
That's amazing. Now, to wrap this up, Matt, this has been a really great talk, but I typically like to get kind of, like, one or two strategic takeaways out of our guests to see, like, you know, for our listeners what it's something they can action today. So based on our entire conversation, if you can give one takeaway for, you know, someone that's thinking about becoming an entrepreneur, they have ideas, or they're in that spot right now, whether they're succeeding or failing, what's the one thing they can action today? From our conversation, honestly, I go back.
Matt Tait [00:29:18]:
To, like, figure out who you want to be and who you are. Like, who is your authentic self? And that sounds cliche, but most people don't take the time to do that and then figure out from there what makes you happy and what you want to do and how do you feed that person. And I think once you do that, the rest can follow. If you don't do that, it'll crumble at some point.
Tom Burgess [00:29:41]:
Very good. Well, Matt, thank you so much for joining. And to our guests, we hope you enjoy this episode. Check out Matt. Go to Decimal. Check out what they're doing. They're turning a very non modern industry into a pretty, pretty modern place to work. Thanks again.
Tom Burgess [00:29:57]:
And this was another episode of The Business OS podcast.
Matt Tait [00:30:00]:
Thanks, Tom. Appreciate it. Thank you for listening to The Business OSite.
Tom Burgess [00:30:07]:
If you're looking for more resources on how to navigate growth, please go to justcallio/thebusinessos.com and don't forget the.
Matt Tait [00:30:15]:
Journey is easier when you have a Business OS.