Josh:    0:00-0:33          Welcome to the work the system podcast where we help entrepreneurs make more and work less using systems. I'm your host, Josh Fonger. And today we have a special guest, Matt Baker. Matt is a money strategist and business coach passionate about helping entrepreneurs solve their most challenging comes. Matt is the VP of corporate strategy and international expansion at fresh books. Alright, Matt, welcome to the show. Before we get into the difficult, hard questions, why don't you give us the backstory and tell us how you got to be the VP of corporate strategy at fresh books.

 

Matt:   0:32-01:34        Josh, thanks for having me today. I bet fresh books for about four years now but prior to that would lead me to freshbooks has probably two specific career opportunities. One is I worked at Google for about three or four years in a space that started taking consumer products that were popular and packaging them up for small businesses. So you can think of this like Gmail or calendar documents and now today you can buy it as a small business and put your own logo on it and have that experience. And so that was a great experience for me to understand what the small Business markets like getting involved with software as a service, and sort of this, dipping my toes in a lot of that. And then the other experiences, I did another three or four year stint doing management consulting. And that taught me a lot about what the strategy mean is a word because it sort of means something different to everybody. And what these projects within large companies really, how they really work and what it takes to get stuff done. And so I've hopefully taken those two experiences and brought them to a company like fresh book.

 

Josh:    1:35-1:58          Cool. So before we get into fresh books and managing your money, well, what's something you learned from management consulting, because you know, I've talked beforehand about larger companies you work with, and most people in the world and listening to this have small companies, what some things that big companies do, that really small companies should learn from.

 

Matt:   1:59-3:131          Yeah, that's a great question. I When you when you brought that up, the first thing that popped into my mind was more around a strategy that we use that McKinsey that I think can be relevant for a small business owner and a firm that has a great reputation and tends to charge high fees, you generally think that you're, you can just price your way into projects and get to work and what I found that where the market was going, while I was there was this concept of what we called, you know, putting fees at risk, but essentially, it was being open to the pricing model and not charging everything up front, but instead, giving people less commitment up front, but trying to get some upside on the relationship around the work that you're proposing to them. So effectively, you know, instead of saying, Hey, we're going to charge you, you know, hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars, whatever you might think, but you could still get there in the end, but you're open to saying Okay, I'm gonna relax sort of the upfront commitment of fees. And so I think a lot of business owners are starting to think about different pricing models as well. And so it could be just a simple is having multiple different types of tiers or packages that you offer but it could also beunderstanding, you know what kind of client you're trying to bring on. And if they need some enticement, one way to do that is through a more flexible pricing.

 

Josh:    3:14-03:44        So with that, do you think is gonna be at least another question? With pricing model is everyone that comes here with their own pricing model and I had a client just yesterday, who was at the top of the market with how he prices his product, do you suggest going to the market to find out what they want, or special offers that expire? Or you know, kind of a foot in the door technique where you get going to buy something and then you The second thing is much higher price or what are you exactly you're talking about?

 

Matt:   3:43-4:54          Well, the first thing I mean, I would generally try to try to talk to someone about is just one recognizing that lots of big companies have full teams that are devoted to pricing and so it's  a complicated and it's a challenging piece, but if you're doing it all on your own I would say that there's a couple best practices you could look at from your own buying techniques. So a lot of people tend to just price per hour, or they just have a flat project fee. And that is a very simple approach. But oftentimes, it leaves opportunity on the table. And so what I would say is, you could do something simply as simple as just having, you know, three packages and sort of low, medium and high. And what that does is allows you to capture a bit more from the folks that are willing to pay more, but it also sets expectations for someone who picks a lower package, they're not going to then also expect that they're gonna get everything. So it kind of you know, can benefit both sides of that. And it takes a little bit of trial and error but  I think that self selection is a way to segment your clients. And sometimes it's just really hard to do when you just have a flat fee or an hourly fee. You're trying to do what's best but it's sometimes just leads to mix. Mix expectations on both sides.

 

Josh:    4:55-5:35           Yeah, no, I think it's for especially for your market at fresh books. I think it's a great simple move, I'm thinking a guy who does our pools, you know, we'd like more services, but they'd have a flat fee. And we're like, we would like this other stuff, we pay for it. But it just, you know, this is just the thing. Yeah, it's all simple stuff. Okay, so let's get into some of the things I was reading about your profile, which is these seven financial habits, and I wanted to get through all seven and not lose time. So part of your biases that, you know, because you've worked with fresh books, because you do a lot of surveys because you analyze the market, you have a huge list to go to. What are some things that you all have learned about financial management?

 

Matt:   5:36-13:23          Yeah, well, thanks for bringing this one up. This, you know, sometimes packaging up in a rule of seven can be helpful to try to remember it. But this stems from an annual report that we do have people who are working for themselves. They might call themselves a small business owner or they can call themselves a consultant or professional or a freelancer, but it's somebody who gets the majority of their income from self employment. And so we survey those folks and we ask them them a number of questions. A lot of it is trying to get into their mindset. But a lot of it also is understanding what are some of the behaviors and habits that you do financially? And then we also have the data from that survey around well, how are they? How big is their business? How is it growing? You know? So then we can kind of compare how you answered the question is on behavior to what your what your results are. And we found that these seven, and I can certainly go through them. But these seven, there's only about a quarter of people who follow all seven. And then if we look at how are the businesses of those 25% performing versus the other 75% they are much healthier, either in terms of income or clients paying on time or other ways that you measure success. So by and large, we took from that this opportunity that if you can follow these seven financial habits, you're going to really set yourself up for success as a small business owner. And then the other thing I'll just mention too, is it's not as though any one of these was not being done, it's just somebody necessarily wasn't doing all seven together, which hopefully can unlocks a little bit more of the business out. But an example would be number one is just regularly review your finances, a lot of people may avoid that, or they just don't have a consistent regular way to look at that. It can be something as simple as, you know, comparing you know, income in from month to month or comparing your you know, your cash balance in your bank, but regularly reviewing your finances is one of one of these financial habits. You learn also, by the way, the natural ebb and flow of your business. Maybe it's not seasonal, but it's definitely a term that I use a lot called lumpy. And so people, you know, sometimes you could see a lot of money in the bank account one day or one week and not a lot, the next and then you know, you know, sort of overreact to something like that. But if you can look at it regularly, you know, you get an idea of what's really in or outside of bounds what you should expect for your business. Yeah, good. The second one is maintaining a budget. This is you know, you could do this on a personal level, but certainly for your business. And in my mind, it's really just saying what you're going to do in advance of doing it. So it could be saying, How much am I going to spend, or how many new clients am I going to get or how much revenue so the budgets not just the spend, but a budget sort of a financial projection for what you want to do. And then you can compare yourself to your budget. That's a very common practice for larger companies, especially when you have dedicated staff that that have a finance role. But when you're doing it all yourself, you can sometimes skip that skip that step. But, you know, I would certainly recommend even just annual goals as a way of, you know, thinking of it as like, that's a bit of like a budget and then you can compare yourself to it. It's a lot better way of understanding your progress as opposed to just in the moment how am I feeling about about my business, from week to week or day to day? And number three is setting aside money for taxes as a financial practice, and this is this concept of you could draw any number you want, but call it 30%. Roughly, of all the money you make is not really your money if the government's money, I don't think that that's, you know, news to anybody. But at the same time, having a separate account and pushing that money in there right away, is a great practice to have the worst case that I've seen in talking to people who are self employed small business owners is if they spend it at the wrong time, and then tax time comes and they don't have it, then they're taking out a line of credit, or they're borrowing in other ways to pay the tax man, and then it just creates this cycle, and then you fall behind and you're doing some of those things. So you know, if you put it aside, you can always dip into it, if you have to, I mean, at the end of the day, you know, you're holding it, but you're holding on behalf of the government. And then once you get going in self employment for a while, then then you start to pay a quarterly as opposed to an annual bit and then it becomes a little bit more, you know, systematic but the big part is just setting aside that tax money because the best way to think about it is it's not even yours to begin with. And by the way, once you start setting aside knew that helps you understand your pricing model that we talked about a little bit earlier, because you might realize, you know, hey, I'm not I'm not I'm not pulling in as much money as I thought in this, in this account that's meant to be, you know, meant to be profit or meant to be, you know, money for me, number four would be proactively reducing debt. You know, the biggest one, I think is often credit cards, if I look at if, when I talk to a lot of small business owners, there's, they're borrowing money without thinking of it as borrowing money, they're using credit cards, which is a way of borrowing cash. So they might not have a formal relationship with a bank, or they have a line of credit, or they're borrowing money against a mortgage or something like that, but they're borrowing money through a credit facility. And if you don't pay that down, the rates are just, you know, just sort of crazy. And we hear about this more in a personal sense, but it you know, it extends into the business world as well. So practically, you know, reducing that as a great way, by the way, you know, taking on debts are a bad thing, but once you know once you have debt, you have a plan to pay it down. The fifth one would be the people. People who pay themselves as though it's a salary is a strong practice. And so you can think of it, like everything that's left over is mine to keep, or you can try to set it up front that you have a pool of money that represents the business and you're paying yourself, you know, out of that and in a consistent way. But that is certainly a best practices to pay yourself, one of the things that we see a lot is that people sort of mix their personal bank with their business. And, you know, obviously to because of the market that we're in, we serve a lot of people who are a one person business or maybe you know, up, you know, maybe only a few people, you know, certainly we have people that are 20, you know, employees and up, but in that small group, a lot of times people are still using their personal bank account. So, anyway, the point is, you know, to certainly pay yourself a salary from it. And number six is to take the time to establish the right what I would call business structure. So a lot of things start off as a sole proprietorship. Maybe you, you'd be better off as an LLC, or maybe you want to create an escort. You know, there's a lot more liability or a lot more sort of recurring oversight you have to do when you're a corporation. But at the same time, if you talk to a professional, there are benefits for you, you know, it'll pay off in the long run. And so having that conversation on what's the right structure for this, for this business, if it's going to be my source of, you know, my source of income, you know, it's worth having that that conversation so proactively picking it is number six. And then the final one is the practice of maximizing write offs. You know, some people do it, they have an app that tracks mileage, for instance, so that they don't miss out on that others have a system where they're categorizing, you know, expenses, or you know, there's lots of software where you can link your bank account and it'll help you categorize and things of that nature, but, you know, just not leaving that money on the table. Everything that you can, you know, itemize as an expense, you know, reduces your taxable income and you know, effectively helps your business you going forward. And so, you know, just to put a punch line on that, what we found is that, you know, any one of these individually, you know, at least you know, 25-30 people, or 40% of people are doing it, but it's just very few that are doing all seven. And those that you know, commit to that have had really, really strong results for the business, which is great.

 

Josh:    13:22-13:52        Now, a couple of different directions, I could go with this, but let's have your survey. At what point financially sales wise did companies start to do all seven of these things? So I'm thinking of the person who's making 50 grand a month, sorry 50 grand a year in their business, they're just starting now they're struggling, they're probably not going to focus on these seven things. At what point does people actually mentally start saying no, and actually get structured and put these seven things? Is it when they get to half million a year or a million or when is it?

 

Matt:   13:53-14:44  You know, for us, what we mostly see is that there's a there's a mark in people's minds called you know, hundred thousand dollars, or they might think of it as six figures. That is the first, you know, sort of big milestone and a lot of people that switch to working for themselves long, it may be just as they're thinking about going out on their own, that's an income, that means that they've kind of made it or maybe that replicates a little bit more of if you're switching from a traditional job to self employed, that threshold means that, you know, you can now support yourself, but that's the, you know, the biggest one, when we looked at it, I think, within the folks that are doing all seven of those, it tends to be more of above sort of a quarter of a million in annual revenue is probably the more likely threshold but the need to think about, Okay, I'm gonna treat this more, you know, as a legitimate business and people's minds tend to be that that six figure mark.

 

Josh:    14:45-15:14        Okay, so six figures, it's a real business, quarter million, you got to be doing all seven. I mean, you should be doing all seven anyways. But the idea is, then people really start making that, that shift. Now, it's, kind have a leading question. But should somebody do all seven of these themselves or the people who can do these, these do these things for you, because I'm thinking as a business owner, who really loves to sell their service or do their service, the idea of doing all 70 sounds like drudgery that they just will never do.

 

Matt:   15:15-17:11        Yeah, I mean, that's part of the challenge, too, is that a lot of people that get into the business, you know, running their own business, they like their business, they don't like doing the finances for their business or doing the accounting for the business, but they like what they're doing. And so this is all in a way considered overhead or this is all like the necessary evil of running a business so to speak. So if you can get help, you know, I certainly recommend it. I think it's hard to try to, you know, figure it all out on your own because you're trying to figure out a lot of other stuff to some of the stuff I believe like regularly reviewing your finances, you don't want to completely you know, delegate that to someone else you want to you want to have an understanding of it, whereas something like what's the right you know, structure for my business. I think you definitely want to lean on a professional. One of the other surveys we found was we asked folks out, you know, who are small business owners out in the world? What do you do yourself versus what do you what do you outsource? And we found, like an example there was, we found a lot of people try to do social media themselves. And once we dug a little bit deeper, it feels like, you know, they had this sort of fear of missing out what you might call the FOMO. And so they feel like they got to do social media, but at the same time, they're not an expert, they're not really committed to it. So they're kind of there, but they're not really getting any value out of it. You know, and so then you're stuck in that, you know, worst case of all, which is you're spending time on something, you're not getting any return. So the idea, you know, there is a great one where, if you can outsource it to somebody that can really, you know, help you get value, then that's going to be a lot better than what you're doing or maybe you just got to, you know, pull back and focus on the other things that you really care about. But, you know, I would put these seven in a similar thing, which is, you know, you want to be able to do them. If you if you can take it on, then I think you're going to be stronger, you know, financially But at the same time, there's lots of, you know, consultants and resources out there to help you to help you do these things more, more programmatically and also just more effectively.

 

Josh:    17:12-18:01       Yeah, and if you're watching this and you're getting overwhelmed, certainly shoot me an email at info at work the system dot com, I have some resources on these things. So these when I looked at this list, I was you know, I was thinking to myself, all the things that I don't do, I people do on my team, but I don't I, you know, the idea of doing these things is just painful. Because I used to do forecasts for the companies that use the budget for the companies, but I like people who are experts who know the law is to know the ins and outs, who knows the best practices to do these things for me, and they show me how much money I'm saving. And it's out by doing these seven things. And it pays for what I'm paying them 10 times over. So it's always worth it. Even if you're just a small company, you got to do these things. Because if you're gonna do them, pay someone to do it because It does pay for itself quite easily.

 

Matt:   18:02-18:44  If I could just add one thing on there too, is I also think, if you're, if you're feeling a little bit overwhelmed by Oh, seven, it's not two, right. So it's more and then these things have their own names, I would just maybe double click on something like a budget as an example and say, there's lots of different budgets out there in the budget that you may have seen at, you know, a large company that you worked for is completely different than the budget that you need when you're when you're running your business. And so I do think there's a simple way. And one way that I try to make it real for myself or for others is this is just this idea of, you know, how many new clients I need to bring on each month to feel like my business is growing. And then that way it can act as your budget and then every month, you can kind of check and see if you're on track for whatever you set out to do in advance. So it can definitely be a much simpler way of defining some of these terms.

 

Josh:    18:45-19:21        Yeah, definitely. This is great. It's great list. And if you missed it, check the transcripts on our website, and you can find the list of seven. We're good. Okay. So I wanted to ask you about we were talking beforehand, about  the fresh books compared to other services, I've mentioned that some people on my team counters I work with, send me fresh book receipts. I mentioned that accountants I work with use QuickBooks, a lot of my clients use zeros, a lot of things out there. They each have their own use, can you kind of explain to people who are just getting started? Maybe they're looking to switch software's what the differences are?

 

Matt:   19:22-20:39  Yeah, I'd be happy to, I think that there's a lot of options in the what I would call the category of accounting software. And so you mentioned a few like fresh books, and QuickBooks and zero, what generally tends to differentiate us as we start with the idea that you need to create an invoice so you can get paid, and you want to do it yourself. And so if that's where you're coming from, as a business owner, I need to, you know, send out invoices and I need to get paid, and we're going to be a very simple tool for you to do that. And then you get sort of the accounting benefit because you have all this information in one place, so to speak, and so you use our system to create those invoices or track time in order to, you know, calculate how much you want to put on the invoice or track an expense in order to rebuild it to your client things of that nature. And so it's often built for the non accountant in mind. And then you can collaborate with your accountant as you'd see fit. And we generally view the market of the more traditional accounting software like QuickBooks is for an accountant to manage your books, a lot of people get fearful of jumping in as the business owner because they don't want to mess something up, or they don't know how everything's set up. So, you know, in practice, it tends to be that the product like QuickBooks may be more used by accountants, whereas a product like freshbooks may be more used by the business owners themselves.

 

Josh:    20:40-21:11  Yeah, I like the differentiation is the simplicity and people who want to do it themselves and who don't want to add complexity just jump right in use fresh books. Now, also with the surveys that you do, a lot of my clients will come to me I'm sure listeners have cash from cashflow crunches throughout the year are different seasons. And did you learn anything through your surveys that have told you what to do during cash flow crunches or how to prevent them? Any strategies about that?

 

Matt:   21:12-24:26        Well, the thing that comes to mind that we spend a lot of time talking about is just the the idea of your, your sort of accounts receivable cycle. And I know that can feel like jargon. So let me maybe rephrase that is, you know, the sooner you can get paid, the more you can avoid cash flow crunches. And so we've tried to glean from who are the most successful business owner owners out there, like what are some things that you do to make sure that you get paid on time because that what will happen is you send out an invoice and particularly if the client is bigger than you are, they have some process whereby they pay out invoices, and maybe it's in 90 days, or maybe it's at the end of some other billing cycle. And so even though you sent out an invoice that says it's due immediately, it doesn't mean that your client you know, sort of sort of treats it that way. And so that can create the cash flow crunch, when you're not getting paid as quickly. So what we've found in terms of ways to, to get around that one is to, to look at some ways of doing automated billing. So there's some, you know, tools online where you can either, you know, get that acceptance in advance that you'll be able to charge them, or you have a tool that allows people to pay online. So that's a simple way to just get paid faster. But one is, there are services that do invoice reminders. So a lot of times when somebody's not paying as a business owner, it's just a drag, they have to like chase them. It was it was a pain to create the invoice to begin with often and then if he's not paying the invoice, then it's like, oh, I gotta spend this time kind of chasing them. And so if you have a software system in place that does that chasing for you, it can feel like you got a team member, even though even though you don't have, you know, somebody dedicated to your receivables if you have software because you can just feel like you got somebody on your side. And it's configurable so that you can send those reminders at whatever cadence you want. And you could also say them in trigger like payment fee. And so then all of a sudden, you know, the invoice they gotta pay is is more because they didn't pay it on time. So, you know, anyway, you got to use those carrots and sticks, so to speak, you know, not, not too liberally, but  it's a it's a great way. And then the other thing we noticed, we did this simple kind of survey, which was kind of a lot of fun at the end of the day, but we just look to see how often are people saying the word please or the word thank you and an invoice? And does that actually mean that they get paid faster or not? And what we found is that, by and large, more polite surveys much sorry more polite invoices do get paid faster than then the non polite ones are just the ones that aren't overtly polite. And then, and then what we did is, you know, what made it fun is then we looked at, we sliced our datas by state and said, Okay, well what are the most polite states out there versus the most impolite states? And that's what kind of made it fun. I think Oklahoma was at the top of the list and terms of, you know, the most polite invoices. But, but that's an example of, you know that language can help. Also, there's other language you can put in there like the terms and, you know, payment methods and things like that. So I would say there's a collection there that we've kind of gone through but four or five things that you can really do to try to speed up your receivables, which then help you avoid some of those cash flow crunches. With that with your lumpy income.

 

Josh:    24:25-25:29        Yeah, I love it. All good ideas. And that's one thing I've noticed whenever I see receive fresh book, invoices is the friendliness of the design and the word and stuff like that. That is differentiator. It's amazing, those little things. One thing that came to my mind, I learned early on in my career, is that one of one of my, this was when I was an employee at a company. Every time they received an invoice from any vendor, any contractor, anybody to help them with anything, they would always try to pay it as soon as humanly possible. And the industry I was in was the construction industry. So it was usually 30-60-90 days to pay. They always paid within like a day everybody they worked with. And because of that everyone wanted to work with them. Because everyone was like, wow, you know, if I work with this company, I'm gonna get paid quickly. I love working with this company. So they had the best, best service and best support from everybody that worked with them. Not because they paid more, but just because they paid faster. And I always thought mathematically, it's better to pay slower. But they had a strategic advantage against everyone else because they paid faster, which I thought was pretty interesting.

 

Matt:   25:30-25:42        Yeah, that's a great story because you're exactly right is that the the common feeling is everyone pays slower. So if you're looking to differentiate yourself, maybe that's the way to do it. You just pay on time and all of a sudden, you're viewed as a you know, great, great partner to work with.

 

Josh:    25:43-26:15        Yeah, but I mean, feel, you know, using just mathematics if you like, that's the worst idea ever. Other other thing that worth noting is that if you are going to get your AR comfortable cleaned up, try to it's a kind of a one time thing so if your average AR’s are 40 days, and you get them down to 10 days, you're gonna have a big cash influx, but you can only do it once. So, so don't think oh, I'll do that next month because you can't you can only do one month and then use that cash wisely.

 

Matt:   26:14-26:41  Yeah, one other thing I didn't mention explicitly, but it's probably worth mentioning too is just this idea of breaking up work into probably two milestones or you know, you could call them milestone based pay but a lot of times you just fall into a bit of the habit of you know, doing work and then getting paid for that work after you've done it. If you can put up the time up front and break it down. Maybe you can get three installments and so you're collecting cash along the way based on milestones are just another way to avoid that. The cashflow crunch hmm

 

Josh:    26:42-27:02 Yep, yeah, I suppose the easiest or even getting better than that is getting paid upfront, or as much as you can push that. Well, yeah. All great. All Craig techniques and great ideas. We're going to run long time here, man. Let me ask you this. So what's one question that I should have asked you, but  I didn't so far.

 

Matt:   27:02-29:09        Oh, wow. Okay. Well, I think the one that comes to mind that I try to spend time on with folks is the one skill that I think is the most important skill for a small business owner looking to the future and trying to protect themselves for the future is the ability to sell. Often sometimes at things that people want to avoid and not spend time on and our research says that people spend on average about 20% of their time in a prospecting type of capacity. And so I don't necessarily see any issue with that kind of time allotment but being good at that, and having a way that you can get new clients, to me is a real differentiator in the market to have a sustainable business. There's a lot of platforms that are coming up that help you get clients. And you know, in a lot of these either covered in the news a lot, whether it's you know, driving a car delivering food or packages or whatever, that there's a lot of platforms or there's marketplaces online, if you're a trades person or whatever, they'll match you up, but what's happening is a lot of these marketplaces tend to set the price. And then you become more of a commoditized, you know, kind of worker on behalf of this platform. And so your ability to go out and find your own clients then unlocks a lot of opportunity to do things like set your own prices, and set your own projects and, you know, pick and choose which clients you want. And so more and more, you know, the ability to do that is, you know, anyway, just, it just sets you apart, maybe a better example from a traditional sort of businesses think of a flower shop, a lot of flower shops got into the business of serving, you know, sort of being a distributor on behalf or a deliver on behalf of 1800 flowers or something like that, you know, they would get all their customers coming in through some aggregated sense. And then they were just out there doing it, but then you know, that that company was taking a third of all the revenue, and you know, they were dictating the terms to the flower shop, as opposed to the flower shop, being able to go out and get their own clients and then build their own business. So, you know, if I were to pick one of those two models, I would say absolutely, you know, learn how to sell yourself and you're just going to set yourself up for failure for so much more success. And in the long run, and you probably have had your own experiences with that being a consultant and you know, the ability to go out and find work is a real differentiator for a small business.

 

Josh:    29:10-29:54        Yep. Oh, yeah, definitely. I mean, there's plenty of good coaches and consultants that are starving, because they can't get any clients. That is one of the hardest things to do in the industry. Well, so I guess I have one more question when asked you just because of the all the survey and the data, you guys gather, all that kind of get predictions about the future. So what do you see the future of work going? Because there's so many people who are choosing to do side hustles and self employment and moonlight and do extra hours and your services great for helping people do that. What do you see that going is going to continue to grow? Or will it eventually just hit this equilibrium? Where? Because I don't think we've hit it yet. So what do you see 10 years from now?

 

Matt:   29:55-32:24        Yeah, I think well, the interesting thing too, is if you wind back far enough Everybody worked for themselves. You know, it's like a corporation is kind of a newer, newer type of thing. But if I kind of look out now from where we are today, given the next 10 years, I do think our data shows that they're, you know, 10s of millions call it you know, 20 million and above that have a traditional job today that want to work for themselves. And it's mostly driven by this idea of control, you get to control who you work for, you get to control your time you get to control the work that you do. It's all these things that you kind of don't have sometimes when you're when you feel like you're stuck in a traditional job. However, what I'm kind of seeing one is I do think we're going to see more people that decide to go to go with themselves, there's a lot of platforms, you can do that, you know, Shopify is a great example where you can just shut up set up an e commerce shop overnight and then you can use a third party to fulfill it and so if you're good at you know, driving sales, then all of a sudden you got a business. But, but so I do think more and more people are gonna try to go out on their own. However, I'm also seeing, you know, from conversations I'm having that a lot of companies are now understanding this idea of control and they're trying to open it up a bit and find ways to you know, companies like IBM, they've been known for years to do to be very remote work friendly, but lots of other companies now, you know, or maybe an entirely remote work environment where everybody, you know, kind of work from home, or there's other flexibility built into that where, you know, get more control of your schedule and more control where you live. And Anyhow, I think I think corporations are trying to, you know, trying to address that, that growing need but large by and large, I think it's moving towards this idea of the court may be afraid to frame it this way for you. Climbing the corporate ladder is no longer sort of the dream. It's more about being having an independent career in which you're feeling fulfilled by the work that you're doing, and you're making enough to live and support your lifestyle that, you know, and you're getting these experience, even in the corporate world, people are switching jobs every three years on average now, and so this is, you know, the pensions are gone and so on and so forth. So I'm kind of hopping around a little bit, but the idea is that, you know, when you get a job and I'm gonna stay in this job for 30 years or something, it's just not really the mindset of anyone anymore. And so as you, you know, as you make a move from one employer to the next, eventually one of those moves can be, oh, I'm just gonna go on my own and try to stand up this, you know, agency or consultancy or firm or what have you. So, anyhow, I see a ton of exciting stuff happening there. And so I think, you know, a lot of people are gonna move forward. I also think that, you know, the corporations and organizations are trying  to adjust it as much as they can.

 

Josh:    32:25-32:39        Okay, so the appeal to go on your own was really high. But now it's maybe weigh me a little bit because of the corporations adapting But still, the appeal to do your own way is always gonna be there. And I,

 

Matt:   32:40-33:07        So, was just gonna say, I think that's absolutely right. And I think, you know, there are some real barriers that people see like healthcare, for instance, you know, there's a, there's a real risk in people's minds of making the switch, if you're already protected. And you know, corporations protect in a lot of ways they make sure that those things were talking about before they make sure you save for taxes because they take it out of your paycheck, or they give you health benefits, they make sure it's so when you're on your own, you gotta do all that yourself. And that can be a big burden to try to make the leap. But in terms of aspirationally, I think, you know, it's moving towards a world in which people want to feel more independent.

 

Josh:    33:08-33:41        Yeah, well, those of you watching this podcast is one I did a livestream a few weeks ago, addressing that issue with health care, as a health share plan for business owners, small business owners is very, very interesting, low cost. So the market is trying to supply that solution, because that is that as as big fear vehicles make losing their healthcare, losing their benefits, and it's hard to make those things happen. Alright. Well, Matt, I won't take any more your time. Where can people find out more about you? And in fresh books.

 

Matt:   33:42-33:55      Thank you. Certainly fresh books, calm has got a you know, it's where you can go create a free trial. It's where you can go and get all the data that I talked about. You can look up the team, including myself and then personally you can find me at Mbakersin on Twitter and look forward to connecting.

 

Josh:    33:56-34:42        Okay, awesome. Well, I appreciate it. I really learned a lot. I think a lot of notes says great managing money is critical, obviously, otherwise your business doesn't last. So everyone who's joining the podcast stay tuned next week we have another expert like Matt on to share their wisdom, maybe one of my coaches or my clients, and we'll just share with you how to make more and work less. And if you want a copy of that book right there behind me work the system, you can get it at work the system calm for free, or you can win a copy, all you have to do is leave us a review at either Facebook, YouTube, iTunes, wherever you're watching this, or listening to this, you can leave us a review. I take a screenshot of that review and email to info at work the system dot com. And then when we pull in one name out of a hat a week and mailing you a copy of the book, everybody. Well, we'll see you next week. Thanks

 

Matt:   34:43    Thanks Josh.