00:27 Hey, welcome back to another episode of the Growth and Scaling Podcast. Today, we are gonna get happy and optimistic and look forward to our futures with the man, Matt Drinkhahn. Matt, tell us who you are and what you do.

00:41 Dude, thank you for the opportunity. And I'm gonna dive right in here, Todd. If you're looking to get happy today and optimistic, you have not come to the right place. I will not make you happy and optimistic. That is something you've got to nurture from within but to kick off. Yeah, I'm excited to be here with you after the conversation we just had. What I do and who I am. So I'm a father of three young daughters. I have a beautiful wife named Julie who I've married way out of my league. And, I solve a very particular problem in the marketplace for entrepreneurs and those who are growing their business. And it comes in one of two shells. One of them is I solve the problem and help people who have already achieved and they run a successful thriving business. And the business is in the low end seven figures, probably in an eight or nine figure range. 

01:29 Right.

01:30 And this is the leader who they have all the money, they have it all on paper. They're empty inside and they're stressed and they're a pain out of their mind. They're trying to do everything themselves in the business and they get home to the end of the day. They don't get the appreciation they get. We wish you were here with us more. Now that is the leader that I serve. They have a lot of ideas in here and to get them all out and put into action when they're the bottleneck, that's incredibly difficult. So I help them solve that. On the other side of the equation is the person out there who's listening, who is in the process of growing and scaling their business. They've not done that yet to the level where they've achieved, where they might want to achieve. And they need to know, what are the problems? I don't know how to anticipate them yet. 

02:18 Right.

02:19 I am doing everything for everyone in my business. How do I help them to learn how to do it themselves and empower my people? The person who is in that position, I coach and serve at a high level too. So that's what I do for my career. And I love to do more than anything, is help entrepreneurs run their businesses more effectively. That's it. Yeah.

02:35  I love it. Well, that's it, huh? That's a very easy fix, it sounds like.

02:44 Well, it's very simple. It's not easy. Nothing in life that's worthwhile as easy. It's very challenging. And it is simple. It is simple. Many times they try to make things too complex. You're trying to make it so complex of how to hire the right person and keep them in the right seat in the bus. How many people, they have someone leave their company and quit and later they're like, oh man, I was blindsided with that. Or, oh, I never saw that one coming. Oh man, if only this had happened, if they had kept their end of the bargain. Well, many times I would look at the owner of the company, I would say, what is it about them leaving that you, Mr. or Mrs. owner, need to own about the way your company operates? And many times it's in the expectations that we set in the very beginning, we're not laid clear. You know, and people come in, they expect to do this role over here, they're six months into the job, they're doing everything but that role, and there's no standard operating procedure in there. I help them do that. So that's, anyways, I'll draw back out because you're getting me fired up here. I can go down a rabbit hole just like that with your tides if you want to.

03:46 Well, I love it. I love the rabbit holes because honestly, the listeners of this podcast are those people. These are the high performers. These are the ones that make it past the launch phase. They have a business that's successful. They are generating positive revenue and a lot of them don't know what to do next. And I feel like, and almost everyone I talk with, they're running into the problems that you're talking about because it's one thing to launch a business, it's another thing to take that business into the next stratosphere. And you and I both know that the only way to get there is to get yourself out of the way, right? I mean, you cannot be everywhere and everything to all people. And what you're talking about with the burnout and the family balancing and the team balancing, all those things, you know, where do you feel like, I know these are all common problems, but where do you feel like the problem starts? What's the common denominator in all those guys?

04:40 Well, the content I'm near number one is the leader. It's the person who is leading, running that company, who is the bottleneck or is trying to figure out, you know, how to level up, get to that next place. So I'll give you an example of that person. That person, when COVID came around at least, I'll give you a very personal example. On March 25th, I believe it was, it was a Friday here in 2020 in North Carolina, where I reside. And there's an order that came out from the governor saying, stay at home, meaning you cannot leave your house unless you are an essential worker. I think people around the country probably resonate with this idea, except probably happened in a bunch of different states. And I was in that as well. I was already working from home, so I was gonna be okay with it. But the challenge was my wife was working 30 minutes away in downtown, and she couldn't go to work anymore. And we had a full-time caregiver come in to Nanny and be present with our kids during the day and she couldn't come here, right? So now, now the challenge shifted and plus COVID's happening and paying for executive business coaching is not exactly the same as keeping the lights on, you know, paying for your employees. I thought I was gonna be out of business. 

05:49 Sure. Sure enough.

05:50 So here's the answer to your question. And I felt it full on when I came to this realization that what happens if all my clients leave me? And that is an example of what you might call fear thinking or deficit thinking or the problem becomes larger than life. It hasn't even happened yet, and it's become so huge in your mind that you start to take reactions out of fear, right? So I went to that place and I'm an eternal optimist. So I'll be very transparent. I'm an eternal optimist I always think the positive thing what I can learn from this scenario and at that moment I had this big ball of fear and it was crushing and if your audience never had a crushing ball of fear Well up inside of their chest and the side of their throat. They're like they can't breathe. That's what it felt like for a minute when, man, now, what are we gonna do? 

06:40 Yeah.

06:41 And then here's how you take the win. Here's how you make yourself the hero. If you don't know how to do this, you can reach out to me or you can study the subject or reach out to Todd or any number of people who can and have done this successfully, is I switched the thinking from that fear of deficit to playing offense, to playing offense. And this can be questioned, and this is the key thing. If your audience is not driving, then I would take notes here. The question that guides you is the thing that shifted the whole trajectory of my business. And the question that guided me was this, how might we double the size of our business in half the time during this season of life that we're in? And that was very intentional, all of that half the time, because now, instead of coaching all day from home, virtually now, I can only do that half the time. So my wife's half the parenting and I'm doing the other half the parenting duties during the daytime, right. 

07:31 It make sense.

07:32 So half the time to actually add value to clients over a coaching call like this, right. So that's one. And then number two, we still had ambitious growth goals, even though some stuff happened in the world, right. So we didn't want to stop doing that and just try to maintain. We want to keep growing and do it in an environment where I had to work half the time. I'm used to working. How do we do that? That's the key thing is to ask yourself a question that plays offense to where you want to go rather than a question or a thought that only takes you into one place and it's a very defensive reactive position. We want to keep playing offense. So we did that. And like the story that you shared with me, we played this offense in COVID. And I started to reach out to everyone that I could think of. And that list, Todd, it was everyone on my LinkedIn, my Facebook, my Instagram, everyone in my cell phone, which is 880 people load right there. So reach out to all those people, see if I can add value, offer a conversation with them, no charge, just check in and connect and see. You need someone to listen and you need someone to chat with right now. And the strategy worked, you know, it worked to help people and it worked to grow business. And I know the people I reached out to and Todd, by the way, I have a goal of reaching out to like 6,000 people. I reached out to 938 people individually in 10 weeks, average of about 93 a week. 257 of those people responded. 257 out of 938 responded. Only 257.

08:55 Crazy.

08:56 That's like 25 or 30%. And, are those 257? 

08:59  That's pretty good.

09:01 Well, yeah, it could be. At the same time, there's people that didn't take the time of day, and maybe they're in pain, and maybe they never got the message. I don't know, no judgment for them. 

09:10 Right, right, right.

09:11 Those that reached back out, 257 of them led to a total of 54 conversations. After those 54 conversations, 40 of those were not people that were my ideal client. I handed them to people on my team. 14 of them were, and we got three new clients from it, and our company as a result of that action, and then what we did after that, our company went two and a half times the size. We were already a high six figure company, and we went well into the seven figures at that time. So it was a very solid year opportunity to serve people by playing offense. But you asked the question, how do we do it? And I'd say it started first in the mind by switching from fear to abundance, and how do we play offense with the right question. That's how we play offense. That's the feedback to the guests.

11:37 I love it, I love it. I absolutely love it because so many people are out there trying to build, trying to grow, and they are hitting that fear moment where they are feeling like, holy crap, what do I do? I can't control the marketing, I can't control all the sales day to day, I can't do customer service. Where do I get out of this bubble? And you are exactly right. I'm jumping into the offensive mode and building a strategy, building a team. I feel like, and maybe you can extrapolate on this, but I feel like every time I feel overwhelmed, it's generally because I don't have a strategy or a plan. And the moment I put together an actual plan, like you had this list of 880 people plus your LinkedIn plus whatever, you had a plan to execute, and now you're focused on the plan, you're not as overwhelmed. You're like, here's my plan. This is what I'm gonna do. How do you help people visualize and set that that strategy in play for them so that overwhelm goes away and the fear leaves them and they feel motivated and excited about what they're doing.

12:45 You're saying the triggering word overwhelm. And then how do we help them to get to a place where they're excited by their vision and not overwhelmed by all the obstacles in front of them? And as a coach, I'm gonna put my coach hat on for a minute. Remember, this is what I do for a living. So it's entrepreneur running a business. It's also coach. So here's the coach mode, is I ask myself a couple of questions. And the first question is, if I look ahead and I wave my crystal ball, I look in into it and I'm peering into the future. And Todd, here's what I see. And three years, I see blank. And, oh, well, tell me more. So whatever it is that you're looking to visualize, well, give yourself a timeline, say one year, say three years, and tell me what success looks like to you. Right, so I start with that by doing a visualization exercise slash question where I ask, what is it that success might look like to you in a year or three from now? And whatever they share, and this is the same for every person, doesn't matter, we've gotta start somewhere, I ask everyone that same question. They share the answer. And then from there, I keep asking them, tell me more, tell me more, paint in some of those pictures, those details. I remember a client one time telling me they wanted to grow a business where they were doing retail car trading online and they wanted to sell cars. They wanted to sell them online. They wanted to do these big brands and in talking to them about their vision, they shared this great big vision of what they wanted to do. Okay, the second question is, what are the biggest challenges that might try to slow you down or stop you? or this biggest obstacle. So let's get really clear on those. Here's the coaching tip of the week for those of you leaders out there that might apply this to your team or apply it to yourself. Whatever you say the challenges or the barrier, the obstacle is, okay, tell me more. Okay, anything else. So get the second one out, okay, tell me more. 

14:35 Right.

14:36 And then anything else. And usually it's the third or fourth time you say anything else. That someone goes a little bit deeper than the surface and they share what the real challenge is. This works just as well

14:51 Interesting.

14:52 If you sit down by yourself and you ask yourself those questions. So, I mean, if we're overwhelmed right now, if you are overwhelmed right now and you're running a business, you're like, I don't have any time to sit down and go and do some thinking and work through this because I just got to keep going. I got bills to pay and all this stuff to happen. Well, if you just respond in your mind with, I've got so much over with, I don't have time to stop and sit down and think. And you've just hit the reason why it's important that you sit down and think as soon as possible.

15:21 Right, right.

15:22 And if you're operating in that place, you're not operating like a true CEO. You're operating like a bootstrap CEO from the ground up doing everything yourself, where when you operate in the world that I get to play in now because I've seen others do it, I've been coached on it. The CEO activities are the ones that are the strategy, the big level thinking activities. And if you don't have time for those, you're not making time for those, you're still down there trying to resolve client number, 50, 15,000 on the list and trying to talk to them for an hour or two to resolve a problem about something, then you know what? I'd say good for you that you're serving that client, making them happy and poor for all of your employees and your business and your family, because you're gonna have to take the time you spent with them and stay back in the business and take away your time from everyone else. And the challenge is, how are you going to develop a system and a strategy to use your most powerful asset, which is your thinking, and use that on a consistent basis to grow? And that would be the solution to overwhelm, is to use that. 

16:25 I love it.

16:26 And it may lead you to a place where you did what I did, which is hire people. So many business problems are out there because we have the owner who chooses to run on a strew string budget, have one person do the work of three different departments. And if that person, when they get to the burnout overload stage, which they will inevitably, right? And they quit, the next person that comes in for this job description finds out they're doing three other jobs as well, that's how you stay stuck in the rat wheel, right? So, yeah, so I'll, yeah.16:52  They quit. Yeah, it is. Not to mention, not to mention, not everybody is cool as the founder. I mean, not many people have the mindset of a founder that can jump in there and run lots of hats and even do a pretty decent job at some of them, right? Most people that you hire are not that type of solution provider where they can just jump into any scenario and even multiple times a day change. What problems they're solving. They don't think like that. And for those of you listening, listen to Matt. I mean, this is not the ideal scenario. You don't hire someone for five jobs. You hire someone to do a job, do it better than you can do. And then from there, you move on to the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. Matt, I cut you off. What else did you want to add to that?

17:42 I want to add on top of what you just said because that's brilliant advice is that if you're going to hire someone for a role and make it crystal clear to them that I need you for this and when you do this to the best of your ability And you master this You have job security. You've got to be able to do this So for example, let's say I'm hiring for a controller to do my finances right, if I'm doing that and I look up a month later. They've been hired and in addition to being the controller, they're also doing, you know, time sheets and pay statements and paying all vendors. And they're also creating the online, the online marketing. And they're writing all the thank you cards to all the clients and they're keep track of everyone's birthday. And they're doing like 17 different things that are not the most important thing for them. That's a challenge. That's on the CEO's shoulders to make sure that they are being crystal clear. 

18:37 Totally.

18:38 Here's what's most important. I think a lot of CEOs, Todd, I don't believe that they do a great job of this. They either go to the side of micromanagement, which that's a great way to make sure people don't stay, 

18:53 Exactly.

18:54 or just free for all, just, hey, I'm a hire for this. I trust you can do it. Just go do it, go do it. And I believe in that trust and verify, trust and inspect while someone is new, so they're doing it to the standards. How do they do it? I don't care so much how they do it, as long as they're living to our standards of our company, living to our core values, and they're getting it done, there's no challenge or no micromanagement. If you meet once a week for the first two months to get them on the right path, then let them run wild and do it. So those are a couple thoughts about that.

19:27 Well, and you just said something else that's vitally important. You said to our standards, you know, core values, mission statements, having a vision for your company. These are all things that oftentimes go forgotten as companies are in launch mode, they just don't think about that. They just think about the product, the solution, and they're moving and they launch and they're, and they're now they're out there and they're, they're in a position to grow and scale, but they don't have those foundational pieces there yet. What do you do?

19:56 Right. Yeah, well, I'd start with this. That way, what's the purpose of a core value of mission statement of vision? What's the purpose of all that? Anyways, it's to show us that this is where we're headed. This is how we're going to get there. And when you're on board, this is how we live to these standards. It's going to help you get what you want most too. Yeah, so another opportunity for taking a note here. Dear listener out there if you are an owner of a company and you have not asked every single person that directly reports to you What matters most to you? What do you want most? Why are you here? Now what matters most to you if you don't know that you asked them once when you interviewed them three years ago And you haven't followed up That's why the culture is what it is People when you know what it is that matters most to them and you frame Here's how we can support you and help you get that by working here. And by the way, we'll help you get that, and you'll help the whole company and all of our clients get to this place too. Then we all win. That's why you have a vision and a core mission and core values is so that everyone can win. But if it's just some staying on the wall that no one understands, what does it actually mean? And you don't base your decisions off that and be guided by that. How do you know if you're giving great client experience? Well, you ask the clients, how do you know if you know, put the right person on the right seat of the bus. That's the core value. How would you know that you're doing that? You interview all the people and you see where they are their satisfaction level, and are they getting the job done for what's clear in their job? You know, these are things that might be blocking and tackling. There's not really a place you don't learn these things in college. You don't learn these things at business school. You have to learn them from the school of hard knocks, right? Or from a good business coach. But those are things that you don't know necessarily.

21:51 Right, right. But a lot of people are gonna say to you when you say that, well, I don't have time to do those types of things, I don't have time to do these types of things. Those are exactly the people that need to take a step back and look at themselves and say, if you don't have the time to do that, you're doing your CEO role wrong. Is that right?

22:08  I would agree with that statement because if you don't have time to do it, I didn't have time to exercise when I was nearly 280 pounds, which by the way is about 70 pounds more than what I'm at right now. I didn't have time for that. Didn't have time to raise three kids and run a business when COVID happened. And, you know, when you put yourself in scenarios that maybe aren't the most comfortable and they're the things that will give you the best upside, you figure them out. And that's what we figured out with exercise, with eating a healthier diet, with getting outside with COVID. You know, we figure these things out to the best of our ability. So I would challenge them. If you don't have time for it, that's why we need time. Great, Matt. Where do I borrow the time from then? Well, if you do an honest inventory and assessment of your business and your life, maybe it comes from the two and a half hours of Netflix every night. Maybe it comes from you know, having a couple extra adult beverages at night and sleeping in an extra half hour as a result of it. I don't know where it comes from, but if you're not in great shape, you're not exercising, you're not doing any strategic thinking and planning, and you're always in your business, just work, there's gonna be something that breaks at some point, right? So we've gotta find that time. 

23:18 Yeah, 100%. 

23:19 Gotta find it somewhere.

23:22 Now, Matt, there's some things that are unique to you that I wanna kinda touch upon here because now we know who you help, how you help them. You and I are both very passionate about this topic. We are very, very uniquely set with and equipped, I think, with the mentality and with the mindset that we have to help people with these problems. But you're doing some unique approaches to help people solve these problems. You have a, you have a podcast of your own, Eternal Optimist podcast, which I love. I love the whole premise of it. I am an eternal optimist, and I think that's what is connecting us here on the show today in the way that we have. But there's also other things that you're doing that other people can be thinking about. Will this help my business? Will this help what I'm doing? You're live on the internet every single workday, right?

24:12  Yes, yes, that's right.

24:13 What else are you doing to kind of evangelize this process and help people because you have a very giving Mindset you're out there to help and give and provide value to people whether they give you value in return or not Why do you do it? How are you doing it? Where are you present and help us understand what your mission is?

24:40 Great, well, I'll give you a very detailed step-by-step in two minutes or less, here we go. Why I'm doing it is I wanna play offense for the world. There is so much negativity going on right now in the world with social media, with the news. You look at it out there, you would think this, the world's never been in a worse place. Then nothing could be farther from the truth. You know, there are so many categories you can look at where the world has made so much progress, and yet all we hear is negative. So my show is about offering a hope and you can do it to positive attitude by sharing stories of successful people. So we do that. I do two episodes a week, the Eternal Optimist Podcast. Now, if you're wondering, well, how might our listeners be able to level up their game kind of at home where they are? I've got a way to do that too. The way I do it every day, Monday through Friday, 7 a.m. Eastern Time, on my account, the Eternal Optimist Podcast on Instagram. Yeah, every day, Monday through Friday. What I do is I do a 10 to a 20 minute live stream where I tackle a business challenge or a life challenge or an attitudinal challenge. And we walk through, here's a way to solve it. And I'll work through my biggest business challenges. For example, how do I make a more targeted effort to get referrals? That's a simple business challenge. Well, that was the thinking time question a couple of days ago that I'm addressing on Friday morning in the live stream this week when it happens, right? So taking a different business challenge or life challenge or something you hear about and commentating and working through it every day. That's what I do. I'd say that it helps me to solve my stuff and it helps others to see that you can make time to do this. This is part of what making that time. We made that time for 15 minutes every morning to go live. There's no script. It's all improv. It's working on the business and working on our games every day. 

26:24 I love it.

26:25 You know, to take it a step further.

26:26 Love it.

26:27 I have a master sales class called Get Clients at Will, which I'm launching on September the 21st here and whenever this episode launches, it's gonna be in Q3 of 2023. And I'm gonna accept 12 to 15 people in this first pod where we're gonna work on getting clients at will. For the moment, you have that first appointment through onboarding, through getting referrals and creating great big client fans, it's getting clients at will. So if your average sales anywhere from $2,500. I'd say $125,000 a month with a client, then sign up for this and I'll show you how I've done those types of numbers over the course of the last 25 years and helped a lot of people and served a lot of clients. So check out my Instagram for that, yeah.

27:12 Love it. Matt, this is fantastic stuff. The content today, fantastic. The topic, I think it went right where both of us wanted it to go, and I think we've been able to help some people. For those of you listening, if you haven't done so already, go check out Matt, follow his podcast, jump onto his social media, figure out what he's up to, because you cannot do this alone. You need people like Matt, you need people like peer groups. You need things that are gonna help you accomplish more than you can by yourself. And it's hard to ask for help, let's just face it. So find these people, find people like Matt, find people like a counselor or a peer group, and start putting your game plan in order of how you're gonna grow and scale effectively. Matt, I appreciate your time so much. You've been a huge asset to our community, and we can't wait to catch up with you in the near future.

28:02 Thanks, Brother. It's been a real pleasure. And thank you for sharing everything so openly today. It's just been an amazing before this conversation even happened. Just, you've been great. So thanks so much, Todd. Real pleasure. Thanks.

28:13 Hey, appreciate you. We'll talk to you later and see all the rest of you on the next episode of the Growth and Scale in Podcast. Thanks.