David VS Goliath – S1 – Episode 11 – Matt Gerchow

Speaker 1: (00:00)
Coming up today on David Vs Goliath.

Adam DeGraide: (00:02)
Hesitancy is the death of an entrepreneur.

Matt Gerchow: (00:06)
Being an entrepreneur means waking up early and getting kicked in the face until it’s time to go to bed.

Adam DeGraide: (00:14)
Don’t come with a hatchet, come with a peace pipe.

Speaker 1: (00:18)
Welcome to today’s episode of David Vs Goliath, a podcast dedicated to helping small businesses leverage technology to not only help them compete against their large competitors, but win. Your host is currently the CEO of Anthem business software, a three-time Inc. 500 recipient and a serial entrepreneur with a passion to help small businesses everywhere find, serve, and keep more customers profitably. Please join me in welcoming your host, Adam DeGraide.

Adam DeGraide: (00:49)
Hey everyone, it’s Adam DeGraide with another amazing edition of David Vs Goliath. We are so glad to have you watching and listening. Hopefully you’re enjoying the series, we’re having a great time. Today we have Matt Gerchow from Steady Content, a high paced, fast growth tech company. You’re going to learn a lot today about content and how valuable it is on the internet.

Adam DeGraide: (01:13)
But before we get into that, I want to thank our corporate sponsor Anthem Software, where you can find, serve and keep more customers profitably with their all in one software, marketing and consulting platform to help small businesses grow. You could take a 120 second tour at anthemsoftware.com. Also visit us today on davidvsgoliathpodcast.com. There you can subscribe to actually watch the podcast and get emails about it. And then also you can apply to be on the podcast. We’re getting a lot more applications right now. We’re excited about it. These guests are going to be fantastic. You don’t want to miss an episode of David Vs Goliath.

Adam DeGraide: (01:54)
Well, with all the housekeeping out of the way, let’s get right to it. Matt Gerchow, from Steady Content, welcome to David Vs Goliath.

Matt Gerchow: (02:02)
Thanks, man.

Adam DeGraide: (02:04)
So glad to have you here.

Matt Gerchow: (02:05)
Glad to be on here with you.

Adam DeGraide: (02:06)
You should be glad!

Matt Gerchow: (02:08)
I’ve heard so many good things about the podcast.

Adam DeGraide: (02:09)
Yeah, the podcast is going great. We’re having a lot of fun, getting new subscribers every single day, trying to inspire, educate and activate small businesses all over the world. And it’s… My goal is five years from now, Matt, this is the biggest business podcast in the world. That’s my goal.

Matt Gerchow: (02:27)
Wow.

Adam DeGraide: (02:28)
And I’m not going to quit until I do it. I’m going to keep trying to put out great content that’s a little entertaining, and I think at the end of the day people are enjoying it and liking it.

Adam DeGraide: (02:37)
So, Matt, it’s great to see you. When I was reading the sheet, the pre-show sheet, as they say, you and I have so many things that are similar and I don’t want to spoil your thunder, because I’m going to let you bring them up, but I’m going to say I got that tee shirt too. It’s a fascinating story with Matt.

Adam DeGraide: (02:54)
But, Matt, Steady Content is awesome. As you know, content has become king on the internet. You and I know this and the production of content is very difficult. But before you tell people what Steady Content does, tell them how you started in business all the way back. You gave me this bullet point list. And I thought it was very interesting, and I think our listeners will find it fascinating. You’ve been everywhere. So go ahead, go for it.

Matt Gerchow: (03:17)
So I got started… I grew up in Seattle and was part of the whole internet craze there. As soon as the internet became a thing I wanted in, I wanted on board, and I started my first business online in 1997, a couple years after the internet started.

Adam DeGraide: (03:35)
Me too, by the way. My very first business, there’s one of the things in common; 1997, BZ Productions, basement of my house, Rhode Island. Boom. So you keep going.

Matt Gerchow: (03:46)
Yeah. I was actually in the basement of my parents’ house on that, when I moved back home at 26, so I’d have the extra $650 a month to put into the company. I had been in computer hardware and selling computers to Microsoft and around that whole world, so the technical side of things I was pretty familiar with. And that was a loan company and it was interesting; we got going and we were really successful with it, but then things switched to only… The refinances went away and then it became only new construction loans. So it wasn’t quite as easy to go.

Matt Gerchow: (04:30)
It was interesting. I was at the bank getting a… Shutting down the business and pressing charges against my business partner, because he’d taken the last of the money from the account, and I get a call from some friends at Microsoft, or one friend in particular, who says, “Hey, that project that we’re working on out in New York that I wanted to bring you in on around Christmas-time, I’m ready for you now if you can come now.” And this was August. So six days later, I’m in a penthouse on wall street and getting the whole process started there.

Adam DeGraide: (05:07)
That’s amazing because you think about it, you’re going through a difficult challenge. You started your business, it was going well, next thing you know it’s not going so great, your partner’s stole from you, you’re probably thinking to yourself, “Man, the world’s coming to an end.” All of a sudden, a new… As they say, one door closes, a new one opens and here you are on Wall Street. Keep going.

Matt Gerchow: (05:25)
Yeah. So we had a company there, we were partnered with pets.com. Just saying that, most people that have been around the internet a long time know that that was the calamity of the dot-coms. They were the first one that went public and people were like, “I don’t get it. I don’t get how you send a 50 pound bag of dog food.” This is before Amazon Prime, but, “I don’t get how you send a 50 pound bag of dog food out and don’t lose money on it.” Right?

Adam DeGraide: (05:53)
And by the way, you can understand it. Back then how would they have even… They couldn’t even envision that 99% of our stuff now we get shipped to our front door. Right? I mean, it’s crazy.

Matt Gerchow: (06:07)
Yeah. So I did that for a while, and it was fun. Then when the company started to go away, I was recruited by the owners of that company to come down to Florida and open restaurants for Raquel Welch and her husband, called Richie’s Neighborhood Pizzeria. And I did that with Adam… Not Adam DeGraide, Adam Bernhard. Adam Bernhard is of HauteLook fame, which he sold to Nordstrom for $200 million.

Adam DeGraide: (06:40)
Yeah, amazing.

Matt Gerchow: (06:41)
Yeah, so it was a fun time. We were flying around in private jets and doing these celebrity opens and having a blast, and then we had 9/11 happen. And when 9/11 happened, there was no more restaurants. We had Malloween. We were opening up restaurants in all of the different shopping malls, the new Taubman Malls across the country, and when 9/11 happened we had five of nine restaurants opened and that was it. So I got the axe there.

Matt Gerchow: (07:11)
And I’d been looking in… Being in Florida at the time, I’d been looking into real estate developing and real estate, house flipping and whatnot, like everybody else did at that time. This is now 2001, 2002. So I got involved; a friend of mine that I had met through the building where I was at… So when they brought me down to Florida, they gave me a company car, company apartment, just luxury all the way around for the Aventura area. You’re probably familiar with it. And I met somebody that had the penthouse in my building; they had a billion dollar company in Colombia and we started flipping houses together. And that was an absolute blast, made a lot of money at it, did it as long as possible, and then we had the 2007 fallout of the real estate market, which really caused a lot of people to rethink their lives.

Matt Gerchow: (08:11)
It was interesting. I had friends that were hedge fund managers on Wall Street that now were back in chef school and deciding to just go completely different routes.

Adam DeGraide: (08:24)
One of my first partners in my second business, Tim Sawyer, he actually did the exact same thing before he joined me, at Astonish. It was him and his buddy, Tom [Kucher 00:08:36], they were fixing up houses, flipping them; buying a house, fixing it up, flipping them. Same thing. And he comes from a mortgage background as well, too. So he went through that as well, too.

Adam DeGraide: (08:45)
And this goes to show you, watchers and listeners, by the way, the journey to a successful place is never a straight line. Right? It’s always jagged all over the place.

Matt Gerchow: (08:54)
All over the place.

Adam DeGraide: (08:54)
And don’t begrudge anything you’ve ever done. I used to stock dairy shelves, man, at IGA Supermarket. Those are some of the… And thank God I did, by the way, because it shaped me for who I am today.

Matt Gerchow: (09:05)
IGA.

Adam DeGraide: (09:05)
Yeah. IGA [crosstalk 00:09:05]

Matt Gerchow: (09:05)
We used to skateboard behind an IGA as a kid.

Adam DeGraide: (09:11)
Yeah. We’re too old, I think, Matt, you and I. We’re dating ourselves. But you know, obviously you went to Colombia… It says you went to Thailand.

Matt Gerchow: (09:18)
Yeah. Well, let’s get to Colombia. I was living in Miami and I’m doing houses in the hood and I’m spending my whole day there, whether it’s looking at comps or overseeing my crews on different renovations and whatnot, and at some point… So I have a penthouse in Miami, but at some point, if I spend my whole day in the hood, that’s my life.

Matt Gerchow: (09:45)
So six weeks later, I’m on a plane to Colombia and I’m down there and it felt so awesome to just be… I felt like my problems were on the moon. They were so far away. Or, I was on the moon and my problems were on Earth, because I’m down there, my phone doesn’t work or it doesn’t work correctly, every call comes in as unknown so you don’t answer any of them and you’re… I had problems with properties and whatnot back in Miami, but it just felt so peaceful to be there and to be away from it all. So it gave me that break to work on another dot-com business. And I cranked away at it, got it done, got it sold. And as you saw in the thing, I sold it, got the first wire four hours before our son was born, and then we went from there to Thailand.

Adam DeGraide: (10:38)
That’s amazing. And then to fast forward for the listeners and watchers, you went from Thailand to Sarasota, then you moved to Mexico, then you moved to Austin. Is that where you reside right now? Are you in Austin?

Matt Gerchow: (10:49)
Yeah. We’re just north of Austin in a city called Round Rock.

Adam DeGraide: (10:52)
Okay, cool. And then you started Steady Content in 2016. I’ve worked with Steady Content, you guys have done great stuff in the past. For the listeners who are listening, tell them a little bit about what Steady Content does in 30 seconds. How would you describe it?

Matt Gerchow: (11:07)
Sure. Well, Steady Content is… The best way to explain it would be we do managed blogging. And that means that we take things from start to finish; we do the keyword research, the title creation, the content creation, posting to the sites and dashboard management. We tie it all together and we do it all. We’ve spent five years just building little tools and ways to automate that so that it’s all flawless. And it sounds like it’s simple, but I can tell you, two million lines of code later, it’s not.

Adam DeGraide: (11:42)
No, I can imagine. I’ve done content SEO for years. And when Google did their algorithm change years ago and you could no longer just stuff a bunch of nonsense words in, really intelligent content became really important, and is still vital today in a business. If you don’t have a lot of long-form content that is frequently put out on your website, or anything you’re trying to promote, you’re not going to get very far on organic search. So when somebody is listening to this, you created software to help you deploy this, right? And reading what you wrote, there’s a 28-step process in doing this as well, too, which I found fascinating. Tell us a little bit about that.

Matt Gerchow: (12:19)
So every piece of content that comes in the door has to go from pre-order stage to order stage, to ordered, to writing, to editing, and then after that it goes through a couple quality checks, and then it’s either published or it comes back from the client as a revision. Then there’s four different revision statuses. It can be in one of 28 statuses at any time, with the initial order being one. And there’s four different types of delivery status.

Adam DeGraide: (12:46)
That’s unreal. And people don’t realize this, man. When you think about the massive amounts of content on the internet, to get heard in your market you have to be a leader and an expert on these things.

Matt Gerchow: (13:01)
Absolutely.

Adam DeGraide: (13:01)
So it’s no longer good enough to just write one or two blogs a year and think that that’s going to work. Or build a website, have a bunch of permanent pages that just sit there and no new, fresh content. Content’s king, right? And so Steady Content, the whole… I loved your name, because it basically says what you’re trying to do. You provide steady, high quality content that is unique and original, that can be searched on Google, Yahoo, Bing, any search engine, to produce a result to help people drive traffic organically. By the way, I don’t know if you need any sales people, I’m looking for a job.

Matt Gerchow: (13:32)
Yeah. Sounds great, man.

Adam DeGraide: (13:35)
But this stuff is critical, man. And most small businesses don’t get it, and they get frustrated or they complain about every little last blog. I know this. I’ve worked with thousands of businesses on the internet and, man, you can always tell a client when they’re going to be too persnickety. And they hurt themselves because if you think every piece of content in the world is going to be perfect for your business, you’re crazy. And not only that, ESPN has typos, Wall Street Journal has typos. Your content… You have to have a content factor. You’re going to have challenges. Right? How do you try to minimize that at Steady Content?

Matt Gerchow: (14:12)
Well, so we go through two rounds of editing and you’re always able to do revisions. But like you said, there’s people that feel that everything is going to get read by everybody, and scrutinized, and because they’re a doctor or because they are a lawyer, that it has to be absolutely perfect. And it’s like, “Well, before you started working with us, you made your last post seven months ago.”

Adam DeGraide: (14:33)
Yeah. Or seven years ago.

Matt Gerchow: (14:35)
Right. After you started working with us, we have one post every week for the last three months and you’re worried about these four words being out of place. So that’s… It’s just a matter of… And sometimes people discontinue, and sometimes people come back and sometimes people just keep going.

Adam DeGraide: (14:52)
[crosstalk 00:14:52].

Matt Gerchow: (14:52)
But what I like to think we do-

Matt Gerchow: (14:54)
Go ahead.

Adam DeGraide: (14:54)
No, the best clients that I’ve ever worked with are the ones that just say, “Hey, listen. You guys are the experts, I trust you.” Just… If you miss the mark, we tell them, “Hey, listen. We’re going to miss the mark.” It happens all the time. But when you miss the mark, don’t come with a hatchet, come with like peace pipe. A smoking peace pipe, you know? Hey-

Matt Gerchow: (15:14)
A peace pipe is good.

Adam DeGraide: (15:16)
Peace pipe is good, right? Because you know, as they say, bad attitudes: you don’t want to come to a bad attitude to your vendor, especially the one who’s trying to get you ranked on Google, for goodness’ sake.

Matt Gerchow: (15:26)
Right. Exactly.

Adam DeGraide: (15:27)
Be nice to these people. Of course, I’m saying this self indulgently from myself, Matt, because I do this for a living as well, too. It is amazing, though, how much content is needed. But Matt… I wanted to take a quick break from Anthem Software, but when we come back, I do want to talk about the five smooth stones, quickly, in your business, which are goals; as you know, goals with plans, people, technology, process and courage.

Adam DeGraide: (15:49)
We’ll be right back. Here’s a message from Anthem Software.

Speaker 1: (15:52)
Anthem Business Software System is designed to specifically help small businesses just like yours, find, serve, and keep more customers profitably. We do this by providing you with the most powerful software automations and marketing services to help your business compete and win in this ever-changing digital world. Take a short video tour at anthemsoftware.com.

Speaker 4: (16:12)
Anthem Software. Every business has a song, let our business software sing yours.

Adam DeGraide: (16:23)
And we’re back with Matt Gerchow from Steady Content.

Matt Gerchow: (16:40)
Hey, hey!

Adam DeGraide: (16:41)
Matt, I heard… A little birdie told me that when you get stuck in traffic, you have a slight case of road rage. Is this true?

Matt Gerchow: (16:51)
I don’t know if you’d call it road rage, I just don’t do it. Every once in a while I find myself on the road and it’s like I didn’t pay attention. We’re all working from home now, or at least in our world we are, right? And you’ll find yourself on the freeway, so I’ll just pull off and get a drink somewhere, or pull off and hang out somewhere until it’s all done again. I just don’t do it.

Adam DeGraide: (17:15)
Yeah. See, because if you stayed there-

Matt Gerchow: (17:17)
Same difference.

Adam DeGraide: (17:18)
The Incredible Hulk would come out.

Matt Gerchow: (17:20)
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I’ve got a Jeep now that’s on 38-inch wheels and then it’s got a four and a half inch lift, so I’m above all the traffic, which does help. And when you give someone the tire, that is a lot better than being down low.

Adam DeGraide: (17:42)
I don’t think my AMG 55 would hold up next to your car. That’s amazing.

Matt Gerchow: (17:49)
When I’m out in the Ferrari, it’s the exact opposite. Everybody else can give me the tire.

Adam DeGraide: (17:53)
Exactly right. Well, let’s get speaking… First of all, listeners and watchers, think about it. He has a Ferrari, he’s got a car with 38-inch tires. This doesn’t happen on accident, by the way. This is because you’re a smart business person.

Adam DeGraide: (18:06)
Do you have any goals and plans for Steady Content? I’m sure you’ve listened to a few episodes. Talk a little bit about the goals that you’ve set for Steady Content and how you have goals and plans.

Matt Gerchow: (18:17)
So goals for Steady Content: I would like us to do a consistent 2.5 million words a month. And as far as SEO services go, we’ve just started a couple of other businesses; [agentserve.com 00:18:31] is one, and that’s going to cover the full breadth of SEO services. We offer backlinks through Steady Content, but now we’re launching as betterbacklinks.com and we’ll be doing that there. And then we have a full breadth of SEO services coming on, as well as PPC management. We just really want to get on the phone with somebody and not have that excuse of, “Okay, we don’t need content.” Right? Whatever you’re doing and it’s online, we’re doing it.

Adam DeGraide: (19:01)
That’s awesome, man. That’s great. And so when you sit down and you think about these things, do you have any partners? Or are you sole proprietor?

Matt Gerchow: (19:08)
Sole proprietor. We’ve got a team of nine and then right now about 650 writers.

Adam DeGraide: (19:14)
That’s great. Oh, man. That’s a ton of writers. Trying to manage 650 people, I couldn’t even imagine that. That’s [crosstalk 00:19:20]

Matt Gerchow: (19:21)
It’s all systems. It’s all systems. A lot of it’s done electronically.

Adam DeGraide: (19:24)
Yeah, it’s got to be software. So you’re dealing with… So that’s basically your team. So if you’re nine core people, what are some of the roles and functions that they operate in Steady Content?

Matt Gerchow: (19:32)
Yeah. So I’ve got a full-time web designer, full-time customer service, full-time testing. I’ve got two web developers, I’ve got two editors, and myself. And then I’ve got two admins. I don’t know if that’s nine, but it’s somewhere close to it.

Adam DeGraide: (19:52)
Yeah. You got… Exactly. I think you’re close enough. You’re close enough. So when you think about some of the tools you’re using in your business, tell the listeners and watchers some of the tools that you use, not only for your clients, but for yourself.

Matt Gerchow: (20:09)
Yeah. So one of the things I didn’t have on there, we use Stripe a lot. We use Stripe to pay the writers and we are able to do that for all of our U.S. writers. We use Payoneer and PayPal for the international writers. We’ve developed against the API for all three of those companies. We use… Well, I don’t know if I want to share my cold outreach, but I will-

Adam DeGraide: (20:34)
You don’t have to share things. Hey, first of all, just so you know, I do a lot of the things that you do, by the way, in my business. By the way, that just shows you the integrity of this podcast, David Vs Goliath, because I’m not afraid to even talk to people that compete with me in some ways and work with me in some ways as well, too. But you know, to me, it’s all… The world is big enough for all of us and people need to learn. So you are doing a cold call outreach program, you don’t have to say who it is.

Matt Gerchow: (20:59)
No, not cold call. We do a cold email outreach. We use a company called GMass for that, but I have a full-time person on that and we send out 2,700 emails a day. We’ll be taking that up to 27,000 emails a day, probably within the next three months. And those generate the inbound responses that we turn into calls.

Matt Gerchow: (21:22)
We use ActiveCampaign for contacting our clients and keeping in touch with them. We use Trello and GitHub to manage our development. And we use RingCentral for internal communications. I give that one a great recommendation because where Slack is $25 a person, and Flock, and all these other ones out there, all add for every single person you put on there. I’m able to manage all of my writers in RingCentral for free.

Adam DeGraide: (21:53)
It’s awesome. Last week I interviewed a guy named Ryan Shizradi from Tekrevol, another great tech app building company, and they have 170 employees that he manages in two different countries and three different cities, and he had some cool software that he recommended as well, too. We love having tips and advice for people because remember, it’s not just about education and inspiration, it’s about activation. And activation gives my listeners, the business owners, an opportunity to say, “I’m going to check that out,” because there’s a lot of different solutions that are involved in making something successful.

Adam DeGraide: (22:28)
So your process that you’re doing right now, we talked a little bit about that, but walk somebody through the life of a blog. So a small business who’s listening right now, maybe they do it, maybe they don’t, they want to order a blog from myself or someone like you. They order it, what happens? Well, almost like the assembly line, exactly what happens in your business to make that a reality?

Matt Gerchow: (22:52)
As someone comes in the door, we do the full campaign setup. That’s where we’re getting the tone of voice, and the audience, and the campaign keywords, and all the writer instructions, and the style guide and the writing brief. The more they give us at the beginning, the better the content’s going to come out. And then from there, we send that over to one of our SEO experts and they do the keyword research. They will find national, international and local keywords that have a good volume; usually 200 or more searches a month and that have a decent competition, one that we’re going to be able to get in and rank on.

Matt Gerchow: (23:32)
Once the keywords are done, we send that over to title creation and then title creation uses the People Also Ask. They also have a template series that they break off of so they can do the number of reasons or the top 10 or, et cetera, et cetera. And they put together usually 4x or 3x, whatever, the amount of content that’s ordered into titles. So if you ordered three pieces of content, you’ll get 10 titles and then those get sent out for approval. Then you have a thumbs up, thumbs down or an edit button, or a request revision button to where you can actually get the titles exactly how you want. We do this by email as well as SMS. This in itself was just a monumental project. But, as anyone knows, the title is the seed for creating the content. So if you have the wrong seeds, or the wrong foundation, then the content just grows from there, and it grows in all the wrong directions. So it’s really important that the client gets to see that.

Matt Gerchow: (24:37)
From there it heads over to the writers and the writers take it, they write the content. We have special templates that we use for blog post, webpage, press release, et cetera, and they’re able to build it out so it always has a similar format to it.

Adam DeGraide: (24:53)
That’s great.

Matt Gerchow: (24:54)
And then from there we send the product out for delivery. So it can either be emailed, it can get pushed directly to the website; and we can do that either as a live article or we can do it as a draft. But then, also, the client can log in and do the approvals on the website as well. So it’s pretty encompassing, and we’re always adding and looking for ways that we’re needing to add more functionalities. So that’s one of the places where Joe, your partner, helped us a lot, was in, “Okay, we need this instead of that,” and it’s helped guide some of our development along the way. So we’re always open to that with the clients, too.

Adam DeGraide: (25:39)
That’s all… Guys. You just learned the life of a blog. It reminds me of the old Schoolhouse Rocks when we were kids, how a bill gets made. You just learned how the sausage was made with an internet blog. So Matt, hang on one second, we’re going to take one more break from a great sponsor here on David Vs Goliath. We’ll be right back.

Speaker 6: (26:00)
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Adam DeGraide: (27:19)
And we’re back with David Vs Goliath. I’m your host, Adam DeGraide, this is Matt Gerchow… And I love the name by the way, Gerchow. And then Joe was trying to tell me, “Gerchow, baby! Chow down on Gerchow!” That’s great. Good thing you didn’t name your company Gerchow Content. I don’t think that would… Wouldn’t be quite the same.

Matt Gerchow: (27:39)
Yeah.

Adam DeGraide: (27:40)
Yeah, Gerchow Media. So courage, man. You know, David Vs Goliath. I believe that the stone that David took out, shoo, flung it into Goliath’s head, slayed that Goliath was courage. You’ve had mild degrees of success in the beginning, your road led you all over the world, literally. How did you have the courage to start Steady Content, and what gets you up every day and gets you excited?

Matt Gerchow: (28:03)
Steady Content came from two things. One, I was doing a bunch of affiliate marketing and I just couldn’t get anybody to do what we do, which is write, post, schedule and repeat. I couldn’t get anybody to write decent content. Everything I ordered from the text brokers and the other companies of the internet, at any kind of decent price, came back as crap.

Adam DeGraide: (28:28)
That’s another tee shirt. By the way, Matt, that’s another tee shirt I have. We have, too, ordered content from those people and you’re right. They’re piles of manure. But anyway, that’s okay. I’m not trashing them, by the way, I’m sure they’ve made a lot of changes and enhanced their product.

Matt Gerchow: (28:43)
Yep. The other was I was part of a business that needed to pivot, and I saw this as an opportunity. We had an affiliate that was working for us that was getting some really high conversions on content, so I explored it. I just found… My love is automation, and being able to build things from my mind. I call it money from the air. Right?

Matt Gerchow: (29:07)
So you have an idea and you get a developer and you guys work together to put something online, connect a Stripe, and then it turns into money in the bank. Then you follow that principle of with volume comes efficiency and with efficiency comes profit, and then you learn to do it over and over again. You know, I set out to do this for my affiliate sites and then we had some bigger and bigger and bigger clients come on board, and next thing you know we’re doing thousands and thousands of pieces of content a month.

Adam DeGraide: (29:39)
That’s that is awesome, man. So you think about the courage, guys, it takes to start a business; dream it up and then do it. I said, in last week’s episode, I said, hesitancy is the death of an entrepreneur, action is the life of an entrepreneur.

Matt Gerchow: (29:56)
I like that.

Adam DeGraide: (29:57)
And you have an interesting saying about entrepreneurialism. When I read it, you sent it over on the sheet, I loved it. It was one of the last lines on there. I don’t want to steal it. Do you want to read it? Because I thought it was so well said.

Matt Gerchow: (30:08)
Oh, yeah. You know what? It’s been said by several people, but I have my version of it that says, “Being an entrepreneur means waking up early and getting kicked in the face until it’s time to go to bed.” And I think it’s important to talk about that, though, because we get on here and we’re bubbly and happy and successful and whatnot, but I know… At least for me, probably not you Adam, ever, but I know there’s days that I wake up and I don’t want to work, I don’t want to go forward, I just want to be under the covers and say, “Okay, I’ll start again tomorrow.” And it’s really-

Adam DeGraide: (30:42)
I do not have that.

Matt Gerchow: (30:45)
Yeah. Are you being serious?

Adam DeGraide: (30:48)
I’m dead serious. Every day I get up, it’s time to go to work, let’s do it. No, that doesn’t mean sometimes I crawl out of like this, time to go to work.

Matt Gerchow: (31:01)
At the same time, I get up at 5:00 AM and I jump into a freezing pool every morning, and that kind of kicks the shit out of anything that I’m thinking about not going forward in the day, and it’s like, “Okay, you’re awake. You’re at this. Time to do it.” And then you go and you just crank all day, and it’s that saying, you got to feel the fear and do it anyway. You got to feel that anxiety of the day and just go anyway.

Adam DeGraide: (31:27)
I love that, man. So we have a lot of entrepreneurs listen to the show, we have people that have great businesses, that have many businesses. We have that guy or gal right now getting ready to start a business and they’re locked in fear. What advice do you give them, Matt?

Matt Gerchow: (31:42)
Massive productivity. So my thing right now is we’re in a stage where I’m growing again, and I’m contacting a lot of clients. I ordered a desktop clicker from Amazon this morning, so that every time I make a contact or a reach-out, I’ll click that and I can keep track of how much production I’m doing in the day. But you’ve just got to figure out, “Okay. If I only have a limited time to work each day, how can I get the most productivity?” Every time you get productivity, you’re going to feel good about the business. But when you do something that’s… If you focus in on this logo for three hours or whatnot, you’re going to be like, “Oh my God, this is going so slow.” Right? But if you hire someone on Fiverr for $10 to build the logo and you do that, or give that to 10 different people, and then you pick the best one… This was a $200 logo off a 48 hour logo. You let other people take over some of those things and just… Productivity. More and More productivity [crosstalk 00:32:47]

Adam DeGraide: (32:46)
I love that. I love that. So here’s Matt, he runs his own business, makes a ton of money, but he still wants to be productive; has a little button on his desk. We used to have a bell we would ring every time we’d sell something. And I love that as well, too. So any final thoughts, though, for someone who’s discouraged right now?

Matt Gerchow: (33:03)
For someone who’s discouraged? Boy, I would say spend time on your knees, talk to God. I don’t know how that fits with your audience or whatnot, but I pray every single day, my wife and I pray every day. See how often you’re cursing. I feel like the more you curse, the further you are from your relationship with God, and people believe, whatever.

Matt Gerchow: (33:31)
I’ve been in business with people that were my business partner and they were atheist and their life was falling apart, and on my end life was great and I’m living in abundance. So most people would say, “Ah, whatever. He’s got these other issues going and whatnot,” but I can’t say enough about just having faith and trust God to carry you forward.

Adam DeGraide: (33:56)
And on that note, by the way, prayer is important… By the way, I pray too, Matt. And I do also curse; I’m working on that myself as well, too. Here’s what I would say to you guys listening to David Vs Goliath: you got to trust something bigger than yourself to help you through the day. And business is not easy. Your partners can help you, but what better partner than the Almighty Himself, on your side?

Matt Gerchow: (34:19)
Exactly.

Adam DeGraide: (34:19)
Hit your knees, that’s Matt’s advice. I love it. This is not a religious podcast, although I will tell you the last couple of interviewees, it’s kind of turning into that. But anyway, thank you so much for watching and listening. Matt, thank you for joining us today. And our listeners.

Matt Gerchow: (34:33)
Yeah. Thanks for having me.

Adam DeGraide: (34:34)
Great to have you. Listeners, tune in next week; you never know what you’re going to learn. You never know what you’re going to hear. I’m your host, Adam DeGraide. This is David Vs Goliath podcast. Have a fantastic day.