09: The Fear of Failure Drove Me with Matt Clark

Matt Clark, the president and CEO of Corcentric — a Fintech company that helps companies to purchase, pay and get paid. We talk about Matt’s origin story, his successes, his setbacks, and how he overcame them. Why Corcentric implemented EOS and their “Traction experience.

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The Fear of Failure Drove Me with Matt Clark

Our guest is Matt Clark. Matt is the President and CEO of Corcentric. Corcentric is a fintech company that is helping companies purchase, pay, and get paid. Corcentric has been growing really fast. It was created as a result of a merger of Emerytech and Corcentric, the original Corcentric. Now they are called Corcentric. They employ 300 people in Philadelphia, primarily Philadelphia and Washington DC area, but they are also in Europe, in the UK, France. So they are now expanding by leaps and bounds. And they just recently went through their latest private equity round where they raised $8 million to fuel the expansion. So I’m very excited to have Matt on the call. And Matt, welcome. Great to have you here.

Thank you for having me, Steve. My pleasure.

That’s awesome to have you. So tell us a little bit about your origin story. So how did you get there? You know, it must have been a long and winding road for you.

Very long and winding road that probably started when I was really a child. I watched as I was growing up as a kid, I watched my dad who I would classify as a serial entrepreneur. So I watched him in as many different business endeavors, whether it was starting companies, he at certain points had his own race car driving team and was a professional race car driver. So got a lot of different exposures to different experiences just from kind of, you know, sitting there and being a sponge off of his experiences.

And, you know, I went to college and I had dreams of being a big broadcast journalism star and being a sportscaster. So there was a little bit of that, you know, a little bit of that idea that I was gonna do something totally different than my dad had done. And I know that, you know, frustrated him that I wasn’t gonna study business or take that kind of more traditional path. But yeah, long story short, you know, I got out of college, things didn’t fall the way I wanted them to fall from a broadcast journalism perspective.

And on my own, ended up getting a job at a technology startup in the DC area. And that was really my first exposure to what that whole world was like. And being that it was a startup, I was doing a little bit of everything. I was selling, I was project managing, I was managing developers. I was pretty much doing everything from soup to nuts, customer support.

And so I got a little taste of everything and really enjoyed that and worked out that around that time, you know, my dad’s business, which you had mentioned before, AmeriQuest, you know, was a primarily a group purchasing organization, but they had purchased an e-commerce technology platform that would help, you know, scale the company and be able to manage the growth of transactions that were taking place within that GPO. And the company happened to be headquartered in Northern Virginia, happened to have some similarities to the startup that I was working at.

And so my dad basically said, hey, I just bought this company. I know nothing about running a technology company. You’ve got more experience than I do, even though you don’t have a ton of experience. And I was brought into, again, another kind of startup environment where it was pretty much myself and a couple other people that were tasked with doing what we had to do to service the Ameripas business, but then also given the opportunity to see if we could create something else on top of that in other endeavors.

And that really is where the story started with Corcentric. Corcentric was the business that was acquired by AmeriQuest and from that point forward, really a long, probably a 15 year plus journey of kind of building it brick by brick and continuing to figure out ways to expand the portfolio and the customer base.

I mean, what fascinated me when we first met, which was around three years ago, when I spoke to your research group, you were still running Corcentric and Corcentric was kind of the little sibling. So there were the two companies, I would say Corcentric was the little one and it ended up essentially like a reverse takeover.

I don’t know what to call it.

It ended up being the name of the whole group. So my question is about how did that unfold and what’s the size differentials when you started? And the other question was, how old were you when you really get started? You must have been in your late 20s, right? When you started.

So probably even earlier than that, it was probably like my early to mid 20s was when I came and started working in the core centric business and really taking that thing on. So very young, but felt like, you know, I also at times felt like I had a head start just again from, you know, growing up around my, my, my father and understanding, you know, how things work. And so I felt like I was maybe mature beyond my years, but you know still very young when that started and, you know, really when I got involved in the Corcentric business, it really had $0 of revenue outside of, you know, the AmeriQuest customer relationship, which now was our parent company. So we had $0 of revenue really coming from any external entities.

So we didn’t really have any customers to speak of and really no revenue to speak of. So it was really starting from ground zero from that perspective. And, you know, the business, the AmeriQuest business was probably in that 10 to $20 million range in terms of where they were at in their life cycle and their revenue growth. That business continued to be what you would call a steady growth business, single digits, year over year revenue growth. And then when we really started to get the AmeriQuest thing going, it took on more of the shape of a successful technology growth story where we were growing 20, 30, 40% year over year. So you could see how that gap would be closed up. All of a sudden it would flip around and they become the major part of the business.

So, when I, as I remember around the merger time, you were about the same size, roughly the same size.

Revenue contribution wise, it was probably about 50, 50 split.

So, actually had the core centric was the growth brands.

It was, yeah, it was the growth engine to, you know, the beauty of bringing those businesses together was, you know, the AmeriCorps business was steady. So in the early days when, you know, when we weren’t generating a lot of revenue, but you know, it takes money to make money, right? We were still, you know, still needing to invest and spend money. You know, we had the AmeriCorps business as a backstop and really as an investment arm that allowed us to do what we had to do to build the business. And then we were able to kind of return the favor as we started to grow and become this very high margin business that was throwing off a lot of EBITDA.

So, you basically had a good visibility of what it looks like to run kind of a traditional business, the Meritech logistics and procurement type business and then financial service. And then you had the Corcentric, which is a technology business. In your view, what is the major difference between running a technology driven business to running a traditional non-tech business? And what are the specific challenges to that?

I think the biggest difference is just kind of the mentality of how the businesses in the different, you know, in those different arenas are built, right? So in a traditional business, you know, especially like a brick and mortar business, you know, the expectation is like, you have assets, but those, you know, whatever those assets are costing you better be costing you less than the money that those assets are returning, right?

So, you know, profitability is probably way more, you know, way more important, way more magnified in a kind of traditional non-technology type business. With a tech company, you know, there’s this kind of, and it’s become more and more prevalent, and I don’t think it’s necessarily a good thing but there’s this mentality where you know making money isn’t that important especially early on and you just do things at all costs right to whether it’s sales and marketing or whatever you got to do to kind of get that revenue engine going and to get the growth figures that that are looking at so it’s kind of growth growth at all costs versus you know that kind of brick by brick measured you know growth that you know other other businesses try to achieve.

So I think what was fortunate is having that DNA of both sides of that coin led us to a balanced spot of understanding that yes, you do have to make investments to grow the business, but do so responsibly, do so in an effort to still be profitable, even profitable every year since inception. So striking that right balance answers the second part of your question, which is what’s the most challenging, right? Is sitting there saying, okay, if we did spend more, if we did sacrifice even a margin for growth, where’s that right, you know, where’s that right line, right, where’s that right trade off of, okay, we’re gonna invest more on the front end here, there might be a bigger picture more down the line, return on that, and what’s that right balance of profitability versus growth. That’s a constant, you know, push-pull kind of equation that you gotta manage as you scale your business.

In the business arena, profitability is the compass, and growth is the journey. Navigate wisely to reach the destination of sustainable success. Click To Tweet

Yeah, that’s definitely, and especially when you have to self-fund the business, then it becomes a bigger question.

Yeah, yep.

You know, how do you balance the stability of the company so that you don’t run out of cash, but also grow it as fast as you can so that other people don’t have time to copy you, and that’s gotta be a really difficult challenge to manage. So, Mark, tell us a little bit more about that. Give me some of the great successes that you had personally as an entrepreneur with Corcentric and what have been some of the major challenges or setbacks that you managed to overcome.

Sure. I think from a success perspective, I truly believe every business needs kind of that, that cornerstone account, right, that flagship account that really takes you from kind of a thought and a concept and a dream to, you know, okay, we’re, we’ve arrived and we’ve got, you know, and we’ve got some ability to really make something special here. And it’s really trying to find what that cornerstone or flagship account’s going to be. And then as an entrepreneur, you know, it’s an all hands on deck effort, right?

And sometimes you gotta present yourself as a bigger company than you actually are, or you’ve gotta overcome some credibility concerns or scalability concerns that you really don’t have a lot of good answers for if you’re just kind of getting started and you don’t have those things in your back pocket, whether it’s references or examples of exactly how you’ve done exactly what you’re saying you’re going to do for a, you know, for a larger customer.

So really, I, you know, I look back at, for us, that was, you know, an engagement we landed with Daimler, you know, it was a really large engagement where we, we kind of leveraged everything you got to do in a situation like that. It was, you know, it was relationships and it was, you know, personal credibility and just really a, an amazing story that would probably be its own podcast of, you know, it looks like it was dead and then it was not dead and we never gave up and really managed at the end of the day to land that flagship account.

So that was one really proud moment, but probably prouder for me was, you know, we would be nothing if we didn’t execute, right? So it’s one thing to land the account, to sign the account, to get the opportunity to do what it is you’re trying to do. But then you got to execute. And, you know, in terms of what that looked like and how we executed and, you know, the relative flawlessness was what we executed that particular engagement, which just really came from people, you know, I keep saying individual acts of heroism on a daily basis, you know, people just doing whatever they had to do, you know, pulling all nighters, working over a week, you know, just doing everything we had to do as a team to pull that off and you know, it gives you that confidence where you sit back and once you’ve done that you look and you say, God if we can do that, you know, there’s nothing we can’t do and it just sets you on this trajectory from that perspective just from a cultural and kind of mental projected perspective.

But then also, you know, the size of that opportunity and the revenue that it generated gave us so many more opportunities to do some things that allowed us to continue to make investments, to go to a board of directors and say, see, I told you so, there was something here. So, it had so many different benefits and it was such a milestone for probably me personally, but also for Corcentric as a company to be able to complete that full life cycle of landing that account, executing it, and then continuing to have that as a key important customer as we go forward here.

So that’s fascinating. Matt, did you have some really difficult moments where you thought that this whole thing might go away, it might fall, you might become a failure, and your dad’s gonna feel like he would have the business? And what was that like, and how did you come back from that?

It’s a great question. I think, I’ve always told people, when people ask me, what would you attribute some of the success you’ve had to? And I’ve read this from other business leaders and entrepreneurs. For me, probably one of the biggest driving forces is fear of failure, fear of not achieving what I personally think I can achieve. And so, I don’t typically tend to have a lot of moments of doubt, because I just know that that, you know, that that that fear is going to motivate me to go above and beyond and to be kind of relentless to say like I am going to do everything I possibly can and run through a brick wall to make sure that, you know, somehow we’re going to make this work.

So I never felt like there was going to be a moment of failure because I have that fear combined with kind of some optimism that combines to create something pretty powerful. And it also serves to, it really serves to work off complacency. You know, that’s what I always say, is like no matter how well things are going, I always have this thought in my head like, okay, if I let the foot off the gas pedal at all, you know, something’s gonna not work out well for us. So I think that’s, you know, more the feeling that I’ve had throughout, you know, throughout my whole.

Fear of failure is not a roadblock; it's the fuel that propels us to conquer the mountains of challenges. Click To Tweet

Can you give me an example where this fear was particularly potent and where you were like really scared about a situation?

I think, you know, I’ll never forget the feeling of when we actually, going back to the Daimler example, when we actually got that business signed, you know, my dad, you know, was super excited. Our CFO was super excited. And I just remember sitting there being like, this pit in my stomach being like, oh my God, we actually have to do this, right? You know, like, you know, once it becomes real and really knowing like the success or the failure of this, again, it takes, it takes a team, but the success or the failure of that was gonna be, you know, solely, mostly relying on, in my lap, you know, that was probably the most acute sense of fear that I’ve ever felt, really.

I’ll be honest with you, I think I haven’t had something since then that’s been so kind of daunting and overwhelming to say, look, this is literally the difference between success or failure. And not only that, but a Fortune 500 manufacturer has entrusted us with, what we were doing for them was really kind of taking over the billing for all of their, in an outsourced fashion, for all of their top 1000 customers. So then you’ve got this, you know, this fortune 500 company that’s entrusted us to take over a core business capability of theirs and, you know, just trying to go to sleep at night, processing that is a little daunting.

A lot of the line there must have been, I can only imagine.

From, you know, the second part of your question was, you know, some failures or some things that didn’t go well. I think if I could do it all again thing, I think investing in the right sales leadership earlier on in our life cycle. So I think we held on to kind of that entrepreneurial mindset of like, using the term I used before, the kind of the individual acts of heroism I performed on a daily basis to sell, that probably lived on too long and making that shift from kind of that entrepreneurial model to a model that’s more built to scale.

And that probably exists in other areas of the business, but it’s felt most acutely in the sales arena because that’s really the tip of the sphere and without sales, nothing else really exists. And so I always tell people in smaller businesses, I say always, you know, invest in good sales leadership, invest in sales methodologies and processes that are built to scale earlier than you think you have to, because it’s tough to play catch up when you don’t do that. And so that’s something that I think, you know, again, if I could do over again, I would do differently.

So, switching gears here, when we first met, obviously it was Debbie Tyler’s Vistage group, which you were a member of. And just two weeks ago, I was interviewing Nick Beavers, who’s also been a member of Debbie’s group. And Vistage, obviously, you’ve been Vistage for a few years, so you know what it means to have a peer group. But more broadly, who have been your major mentors in your career, and what did you learn?

Yeah, there’s no bigger mentor than my dad. And again, that happened really early on as a child, just listening, just being a fly on the wall, listening to how he dealt with business situations, good, bad, people situations, financial situations. I gained so much knowledge. People always ask me, do you have your MBA? And I said, yeah, I have an MBA from DCU, Doug Clark University. And that was really, you know, I learned more, I think, from just, you know, again, being a fly on the wall, watching him, you know, understanding what, you know, what, how decisions get made and important stuff, right?

But really, the heart of the matter of running a business and, you know, you’re not always going to make the right decisions, but you have, you know, you have your core values, you have your principles that you feel very strongly about. You have your own set of mentors that you kind of look for those foundational principles from. So he was first and foremost a mentor for me. I’d say expanding it outside of my dad and a lot of what my dad stands for comes from these other individuals that I’m going to talk about. Big, big fan of Peter Drucker.

So I’ve spent a lot of time studying and reading his materials. We are a big Jim Collins people, so big on kind of good to great. And then probably more recently, you know, very much into a gentleman by the name of Ram Charan, who has spent time in the boardrooms and C-suites of a lot of really successful companies, and he has a way of, you know, taking very complex things and distilling them into very simple kind of concepts and kind of brings you back.

You know, whenever I read his material, it always kind of takes me out of the weeds and brings me back above and says, okay, what’s really important here and distilling it into simple concepts. So those are some of the more bigger influences in terms of my philosophies and the way that I try to have, the kind of financial principles I try to have in terms of managing people, making decisions, the really important things that you doon a day-to-day basis.

When life serves as your classroom, every mentor becomes a professor, and every experience adds a chapter to your book of wisdom. Click To Tweet

Yeah, well, but we share some influences then because Dr. Tucker is my number one hero as well in terms of marriage.

Oh, I didn’t know that, okay.

So, going back to your father, I mean, do you remember a specific situation which really stuck with you where you saw him struggle with a decision and how he got to it and how he made it and what he based the decision on and what happened?

Probably when I was just old enough to kind of understand what was going on, happened to be probably the low point of his whole business career. So he had started a business, it was actually a truck leasing business in New Jersey, and he just ran into some hard times. He had built a good business, had signed some really good accounts, and ran into some tough kind of macro conditions combined with what was going on with the business.

And, you know, I ended up not only being in a situation where the, you know, the business was bankrupt, but it bankrupted us personally. And, you know, watching somebody in their lowest lows and watching the integrity at which he, you know, went through that, how he kept his cool, you know, how he just kind of not even going into it, you know, going into it, I couldn’t even imagine what he was feeling in terms of what it meant to him personally, but more importantly to his family. You know, he had young kids. We lived in a town that was, you know, pretty affluent. So, you know, it wasn’t normal to be not successful in that environment.

So just so much pressure and, you know, to watch him manage through that. But I think more importantly, watching him coming out of that, you know, this was a very accomplished guy in a lot of cases, but realized that coming out of that, he really had to chop wood and just deal with what’s right in the here and now. And then watching the full kind of reclamation there of kind of going to work. He wasn’t somebody that liked, hadn’t gone to work for somebody in a really long time, but had to go work for somebody in a smaller business and have a boss and do more of a kind of nine to five thing.

But he knew what he had to do for his family and what he had to do to kind of get back to a position where he could then take his next shot at an entrepreneurial endeavor. So that whole life cycle of watching not just the business side of it, but the personal side of how he dealt with that will be something that will stick with me forever, really.

It’s kind of hard to imagine him going through that because I know him as an extremely conservative.

Yeah, you only know him as, yeah.

He has no money in the bank, and to imagine that he’s deep in the bank is kind of mind boggling.

Yeah. But he also, you know, he also takes a lot of lessons from that, right? And even as we, you know, as we’ve, you know, entered these really tough times, right? The times we’re all going through with, you know, with the COVID-19 crisis and kind of the macroeconomics, you know, it was kind of the drive. I remember when we were talking to our board of directors about doing this deal we just did for getting the capital we just brought in. And there was points in time where it was like, oh, well, maybe we should just wait, not do a deal right now.

And we don’t necessarily need the cash to survive, but, and maybe it would be better conditions to get a deal done, kind of post COVID. And he was so forceful with the board to say like, we have no idea where this is going, right? And he who has cash is king and we need to get this capital in even though we don’t have a immediate dire need for it, but who knows, who knows what’s gonna happen. And if capital markets dry up and this thing goes longer than people think it’s gonna go, we don’t wanna be sitting there saying, God, we had an opportunity to put some capital in the bank and we did it. And so I know that’s so informed by, you know, the experiences he had, you know, earlier in his career.

This is really, this is really cool. I like that story. So Matt, we met about three years ago and then you started implementing EOS two and a half years ago. And I never asked you this question, but I really like to ask it to you now. Why did you, why did you find EOS and how did you find EOS and why did you decide to implement it?

Yes, I think, you know, I’m a pretty voracious reader, especially a business book. So, you know, I had read a lot of different books and different business, you know, ways to operate in a business operating systems. And, you know, I always found myself saying when I would, you know, I found myself in a position where I knew we needed to shift from, again, kind of being, you know, truly, you know, purely entrepreneurial, where everything just kind of, you know, happens organically and there’s no kind of rhyme or reason to it to some semblance of a more structured, scalable, you know, built for growth kind of situation.

And as I read different, you know, philosophies or business operating system models, you know, I always came away saying, I could see myself implementing this piece or that piece, but the whole thing just doesn’t seem realistic. It doesn’t seem practical. It doesn’t seem like something that would stick. And then somebody had recommended Traction to me, and when I read it, I was like, I got to the end of the book and I was like, wow.

I was like, it’s really simple, but it makes a ton of sense. It ties together a lot of the concepts of people that I respect a lot, like a Jim Collins, you know, taking kind of, you know, bits and pieces, some Drucker stuff in there. And so when I got through it, I said, you know, I can actually see myself implementing this and I can see it sticking. And that was what was important to me. I didn’t want to, you know, introduce something in the organization, have everybody go through, you know, a whole bunch of, you know, change and then have it be something that dies out, you know, a couple quarters later or a year later and everybody’s like, all right, on to the next thing, what’s going to be the next, you know, the next thing.

So, you know, that was, you know, it hit all the notes for me in terms of, you know, the simple concepts of, you know, simplifying the business, you know, accountability, you know, operating off of kind of clear metrics, understanding who you are and what’s your target market. Those were all things that we really needed to get ourselves coalesced around. And then the way it was distilled in the book and then in the process, you know, again, was something that I thought was practical and something that could actually be implemented successfully and more importantly, it could have staying power.

What was very interesting when we started working on it was that you just merged the two organizations, Corcentric and Emory Tech, and you had a huge leadership team, actually, which was a big concern for me because we started with 18 people, the leadership team, which doesn’t make implementation necessarily easier.

No, not at all.

But you go through it and you actually, I remember you saying that you want to use EOS to make the merger more seamless. And I wonder what the thinking was behind it.

So knowing that we’re bringing together two different organizations, two disparate leadership teams that had operated in a very siloed fashion. I thought, you know, some of the things that were most important, that continue to be so important from, you know, the whole EOS model is, you know, we got to get people speaking the same language, right? Like that’s the first step in trying to like, bring people together. Like what’s the language we’re all going to use that we’re going to know when somebody is saying something, what they’re talking about.

And so I thought, you know, that was really important. I thought, you know, breaking down these silos, creating an ability for people to interact on a regular basis, but interact where we’re talking about the the right things and the most important things was huge. So I really viewed it as a way to accelerate something that I think would have taken probably many more years to achieve had we not done it that way. You know, if we not implemented EOS, I think it really accelerated the, you know, is it perfect, was it perfect?

No, but it certainly accelerated our ability to, you know, to make that, it really amounted to an integration. It really managed, amounted to a merger, even though we were working within the same kind of umbrella company for many years, you know, it was people that hadn’t really interacted on anything other than a surface level capacity up until then. And so it really accelerated things from that perspective and allowed us to get, you know, positive momentum post kind of merging those groups together much, much faster.

So looking at the EOS tool set, and you’ve been through most of the tools, if not all of them, which tools stand out for you as you feel are the most impactful for Central?

I think probably, you know, the tools that have had the most impact on us are, the whole concept of rocks, right? That’s been the most impactful because I think as a fast moving, very aspirational organization, our biggest problem was not knowing what to say no to and saying, or saying the opposite, saying yes to everything. And everything was the most important thing, and everything was the thing we needed to be prioritizing the most, and everything was the high priority.

So just going through that process of setting rocks so that everybody knows when push comes to shove, this is what is most important, is hugely impactful. And I think working bottom up from the whole rock concept is, having that waterfall from your longer term vision to a more defined three year goal, to a more defined one year plan, to what are you gonna do this quarter? And being able to tie that bottom up and top down, I think was huge, not just from an execution standpoint, but being able to take that out to the rest of the organization as we were growing really fast, was one thing we were finding, right?

As your organization grows, rocks become the lighthouse, illuminating the path for every team member, ensuring they navigate with precision and purpose. Click To Tweet

Is that, you know, at maybe the upper levels of the organization, we all knew where we’re trying to go to, or maybe we thought we did, you know, probably got a couple of different answers, even amongst the leadership team about what we were trying to accomplish and what we were trying to do. But at least there was a decent understanding of, you know, the big picture.

But then as you got like every level down in the organization, there was less and less of an understanding of, you know, where are we going? What are we doing? Why are we doing what we’re doing? Why are we prioritizing what we’re prioritizing? And so having that one, that one kind of top-down, bottom-up way to kind of frame that whole thing up and then using that to align how different departments set their priorities is something that makes it very efficient and it gets everybody, we’re up to 500 employees now, it gets everybody aligned as quickly as possible really on a quarterly cadence, which is critical.

Do you feel that there is a point of to which US will support you and there will be a point beyond which it will not be any more sufficient?

I think the foundational principles are good, you know, that they can scale probably pretty well, you know, as we grow. I think there’s some things you probably have to, you know, think about or layer in as businesses get more complex as you get larger, you know, sometimes, you know, I think when I look at EAS, I think the beauty of it is the simplicity, I think also some of that simplicity might have trouble, you know, meeting the needs as businesses really get, you know, really get much, much larger and more complex.

But I think the principles, you know, around, you know, the long term vision, back working, The principles around the long-term vision, working backwards to your near-term goals, the concept of ROCs, the concept of having the cadence that you have on a weekly basis, on a quarterly basis, on an annual basis, those things are all critical no matter what the size or complexity of a business is. I think there’s probably just you know things that. You know need to be either tweaked or modified to satisfy you know maybe the needs of a large organization.

Any tools that you feel specifically are missing from the arsenal that could add to the slate if they were EOS tools? Anything that you need to do outside of EOS because there’s no tools?

Now, off the top of my head, I can’t think of anything. I mean, I think, you know, I’d probably probably turn it around and say, the tools will work, the tools are all there, it’s just, can you leverage all of them effectively? And I think that’s the key is, how are you leveraging the tools? And so if I were to say that maybe there was a tool missing, I’d probably introspectively look and say, well, actually the tools there, we’re just not leveraging it correctly, or not leveraging it at all, right? So I think anything that I would say, and I’m sure you would call me on it too, you turn around and say, well actually if you use this tool the way it was intended to be used, it would solve for that exact situation. So that would be my.

Yeah, let’s stop this conversation now. So you started at Corcentric, you started running Corcentric and you had no revenue 15 years ago, so if you knew then what you know now, what advice would you have given yourself to the young Matt Clark as to what you should pay attention to in growing Corcentric?

Yeah, I think it’s essential what I talked about when I was talking about the sales side of things earlier, and it really, not to be an EOS advertisement here, but honestly, anybody that I talk to that’s got early stage companies, you know, that’s one of the first things I tell them to do. I say, go, I’ll either give them a copy of Traction or I’ll tell them to go out and order a copy on Amazon. And I’ll say, just read it and come back to me and tell me, you know, what you think is, why you think you shouldn’t put this in place right now.

And, you know, it’s very rare that somebody would come back to me. I don’t think it’s happened yet. I mean, people read it and they’re like, wow, that makes total sense. And it all goes along the lines of, you know, starting to implement something like that earlier than you think you have to. Because the earlier you start implementing it and you getting into that cadence, you know, the simpler it is gonna be for you to scale the business. I think that’s a mistake that a lot of people make is, you know, they, you know, are heads down and you gotta be, your head’s down, just kind of in the business.

And then all of a sudden you turn around and you’re like, oh my gosh, you know, we’re having success but we’re not built to, you know, to support it going forward and built to scale. And so I think, you know, implementing these kind of things earlier than you think you have to is the number one piece of advice I would give because it just makes that ride a lot smoother. You’re always going to have challenges, you’re always going to have bumps in the road, but it really helps it. And then, you know, it’s very difficult to play catch up. You know, it’s really difficult to, you know, once a business has kind of like spawned its own kind of expansive reach, it’s a lot harder to bring that back in than if you kind of, you know, manage that as you grew on an ongoing basis.

That’s true. I always say that this is a low hanging fruit for companies to implement together. It’s something that is not very expensive. It is not very complicated and it can improve things immeasurably. So why breach with it? There are some private equity companies that do this, their 100 day plan, one of the steps is get them on EOS and this is one less things that the private equity fund manager has to worry about.

Right.

Run themselves in a organized fashion. And then we just look at how to drive the business model from there.

Yep, absolutely.

Well, Matt, I really enjoyed our discussion. So if our listeners would like to learn more about Corcentric, about what you do, and they want to reach out to you, where do they find you?

Yeah, so websites, Corcentric.com. You know, we’re on LinkedIn, we’re on all the social media avenues there, so you can find us anywhere there. And certainly I would encourage folks to go and learn more. And I’m always an open book and an open line of communication, so if folks wanna reach out to me directly, regardless of whether it’s about what we talked about today or what Corcentric does, please don’t hesitate.

So, what’s the best way to reach you directly? Do you have a Twitter account that people can hit you up on?

I don’t. I think LinkedIn is probably the best way. I try to get people to, you know, I’m not hard to find on LinkedIn and then if you shoot me a message I can get back to you. So that’s probably the best way to reach me.

All right, that sounds excellent. So listen, I know that the football season is up in the air and no way to attend Eagles games. How would you make up for that?

You know what, I keep telling everybody, I’m somebody that tries to look for the positive and everything. So I’ve been spending, I usually travel 75% of the time. So I’m spending so much more time with my family. And that’s something that I wouldn’t trade for anything. So it’s been great from that perspective. And I’m sure we’ll get sick of each other eventually, but that hasn’t happened yet. We’re just trying to have as much fun and enjoy each other’s time and make the best of it as we possibly can.

Listen, Matt, I really enjoyed it. It was wonderful to talk to you. Shoot me any questions that you like me to ask our listeners and I’ll make sure that we get that on. Or if you know someone, a professional service or technology entrepreneur that would be a good guest, then shoot me their name and I’ll try to lure them into the show. good guest, then shoot me their name and I’ll try to lure them into the show. So everyone have a great day.

 

Important Links:

• Pinnacle: Five Principles that Take Your Business to the Top of the Mountain
• Stevepreda.com
• Corcentric’s website
• Matt’s LinkedIn profile
• Steve’s EOS blog
• Join a webinar with Steve
• Book a free consultation with Steve