Leaders S4: E03 - Matt Cook uses digital strategy and innovation to drive growth

david_bloxham (00:01.76)
at hi how are you

matthew_cook (00:03.022)
i'm well how are you

david_bloxham (00:04.94)
i'm very well today yes i'm in a different venue today as you may be to see if you're aching the video you usually watch is not you but our listeners i'm in my mom and dad's house today so i've changed my location so paying a visit to them so we're recording from sirene nice part of the mats are in interontoso stuff so it is great to have on the coal today with us on the leaders

matthew_cook (00:18.882)
nice

matthew_cook (00:27.702)
i am

david_bloxham (00:34.82)
there is is that the v p r busies development for cash teck currency product service over twenty years experience in a variety of different industries which we're kind of talk through and one of the reasons were really kind of interested in kind of getting him on is his experience of being a lot of leader in businesses that kind of set up the progress to kind of actually kind of return on investment and we felt that we are really interesting for people to kind of hear how that's been done you know and some of things that you've got

matthew_cook (00:54.622)
yeah

david_bloxham (01:04.92)
learned so so it's great to have you here you want to just tell us a little bit more about your kind of current role and you a little bit about your background

matthew_cook (01:07.562)
thanks for having me

sure sure currently i work with a company based in minnesota called cash tech my role primarily is to focus on the canabas industry because of the federal legislation surrounding canadas in the u s it's legal on a state level not a federal level so banking cash and storing cash securely is a major issue and cash was actually a client of one of my former company

david_bloxham (01:17.16)
sure

david_bloxham (01:22.72)
hm

david_bloxham (01:31.06)
m

david_bloxham (01:37.46)
m

matthew_cook (01:40.822)
and they asked me to help them scale out this this vertical

david_bloxham (01:45.82)
fantastic so just so just for those who don't really know so i think this is a thing not necessary kind of the thing i don't know if they've got different rules of us thing but obviously it's sound a bit like if you watched the film pole fiction but it's like legal to buy it is legal to buy its legal but but so it's because obviously the banks of federal so they can't touch the money made from it but it is possible to

matthew_cook (01:52.922)
this is u s

matthew_cook (02:00.302)
yes

yeah

david_bloxham (02:15.76)
have the money and sell it so but it's very difficult to actually invest it use it have a proper business running it

matthew_cook (02:18.722)
yes

matthew_cook (02:23.762)
yeah and every state is very different so the first states like california and colorado they had major problems they had to do pay role with cash they couldn't find a bank to keep it they had to pay all their suppliers and vendors some of those problems have been alleviated partly because of the hardware and the software and the service that we provide but banking is illegal at a federal level so

david_bloxham (02:25.56)
m m

david_bloxham (02:35.undefined)
m right okay

david_bloxham (02:48.64)
okay

matthew_cook (02:53.442)
dealing with a bank of america or a wells fargo they won't touch it any pretty much any national firm that that handles the cash cannot touch it so which is giving rise to community banks and credit unions that are offering canadas banking services it also made it very difficult for people that you know let's say owned a dispensary to get a mortgage or a car loan or anything like

david_bloxham (02:59.32)
yeah

david_bloxham (03:06.86)
m

david_bloxham (03:15.76)
m

david_bloxham (03:21.76)
m

matthew_cook (03:23.542)
at even though the businesses themselves were doing very well they had a lot of cash no one would finance equipment inventory they couldn't bank it and yet they had to they have to store cash to pay federal taxes for for when the federal government eventually does come calling all well trying to stay out of jail so it's a very interesting dynamic in the u s and like i said every stat

david_bloxham (03:28.76)
m

david_bloxham (03:45.62)
wow

david_bloxham (03:49.1)
uh

matthew_cook (03:53.582)
is is different which is what kind of attracted me to the opportunity and i get to work with a lot of great partners across the us to help basically this major problem which is a lot of cash

david_bloxham (03:59.26)
m

david_bloxham (04:09.56)
and i guess part of that is you know the problem there is obviously what they're trying to do is obviously the government is trying to kind of create a set of situations to decriminalize something that people use by keeping it all cash you're basically setting it up to stay criminals because what the people do if they don't they can't put it in the bank and they have cash they

matthew_cook (04:28.062)
right

david_bloxham (04:39.88)
some one to look after them and generally that probably puts them back in the hands of the criminals isn't it so

matthew_cook (04:43.722)
well exactly right and so part of the solution that we sell are these twelve hundred pound machines that will count validate and store currency so that if a dispenser gets robbed it's very difficult to actually get out the cash and we've seen you know an increase to your point of robberies and things like that at the local dispensary level in a lot of states because they don't have access

david_bloxham (04:49.16)
m

david_bloxham (04:57.74)
okay

david_bloxham (05:04.36)
m

david_bloxham (05:12.54)
yeah

matthew_cook (05:13.662)
to the service we provide

david_bloxham (05:17.92)
it was alios interesting about this for me because oboslyilook back for your background like you know investment adviser you know v p sales for and i uslyourune successful recruit business as well so i think what kind of interest for me is my first question this is i reckon this probably wasn't something in two thousand and seven if someone had said you're going to be doing this that you said yeah i see that in the life plan that's you you obviously doing well in it and it's obviously you know

matthew_cook (05:24.222)
yes

david_bloxham (05:47.82)
would you say would you say yes to that just out of interest

matthew_cook (05:50.882)
hundred percent um you know my career is taken a lot of different turns and i think it's probably because of a philosophy that i have which is ou know just kind of keeping your perceptive screen open for opportunities and being and being continuously curious right a lot of the business ventures i've gotten into is because i was curious about why in particular you know injustry or product or service was being done the way it was done and questioning

david_bloxham (06:05.62)
but okay

david_bloxham (06:09.9)
yeah okay

david_bloxham (06:17.7)
m

david_bloxham (06:21.06)
m

matthew_cook (06:21.082)
is there a better way is there a different way to do it

david_bloxham (06:24.84)
yeah and then i think you know that's that element of the element of like being curious is really interesting because obviously that enables you to move between different industry different types of sectors and still be successful because you're open to these opportunities i think is really key the other question i had was you know as you kind of come into this from what i'm hearing is that obviously that may be there

if you're if you're the business developed in this area then probably the people that you're selling to a slightly different to the people that you might have sold to before so for inceance you know you're selling to kind of owner managers small kind of establishment where before you've been like kind of you know salesforce know so you telling i t managers of major corporate right is a very different kind of backwarwell put mats you know career stuff from the link you can check this one thing

matthew_cook (07:01.142)
oh yeah

david_bloxham (07:27.6)
so did you have to kind of re train yourself or did you use the same same kind of sales leadership skills that you already had and just move them into a new industry

matthew_cook (07:40.642)
you know i think you know each stage of my career taught me something different that can be transferable i think one of the biggest um you just talking on the recruiting side for a little bit of the one of the biggest mistakes i see companies make is thinking that oh i need someone with industry experience in order to sell

david_bloxham (07:46.06)
m

matthew_cook (08:01.742)
you know my product or service everyone thinks that their product over their industry is unique and the reality is that comes down to a company or a person has a problem and you have a solution doesn't solve their problem and then it's really following the same set of principles in terms of uncovering what that real need is and do you have a solution that's going to solve it for them at a price that makes sense that's it at the end of the day

and i've been able to basically transfer that same skill set from investment management to recruiting to digital marketing now to canadas and who knows what it will be next um you know but i find that making connections with people and connecting the dots that are hard for some people to see is really my my strength and and then

david_bloxham (08:45.52)
yeah knows

matthew_cook (09:01.162)
presenting that solution

david_bloxham (09:04.12)
and did you when you kind of came into that you generally set yourself you know listed to do three months plan six months plan you know bringing people together you know again just kind of interest because it's such a different thing to kind of come into know how did you how did you set yourself up

matthew_cook (09:20.942)
m hm

i always find it hard and i used to try to set you know three six twelve five year plans and i never seen to and i would always look back and go wow i wasn't even close to where i thought it might be um and again it just i think it comes down to you have to con especially nowadays you have to constantly be re assessing what you're doing are we focusing on the right things on the right markets on the right you know on the right products on the right services at the right time

david_bloxham (09:28.1)
m

matthew_cook (09:54.762)
and if you're not constantly re evaluating that m you can miss opportunities and in some cases they can be really big opportunities

david_bloxham (10:04.54)
yeah i think that's that's keys it's kind of constant revaluation so that you know you know where you're going but things change you know circumstances change economy changes you know in your guess legal changes as well you know because they could quite quickly they could quite quickly you kind of mess up your business or they might have the pieces they said okay now you can bank the federal ranks and they're like okay so then you'd have to that that that would be an issue i guess kind of react to kind

matthew_cook (10:09.582)
hm

matthew_cook (10:19.062)
yes almost every day

david_bloxham (10:34.36)
very quickly if you know what i mean but i guess you think about these things so so one of the things i was quite kind of interested kind of coming out that is obviously again in your career you've specialized in helping to build businesses or building business for yourself or scaling up businesses and scale them up successfully which is obviously something me myself you know is always kind of looking to do you know what would you say the kind of most common challenges are that organization s kind of wrestle with when they're doing these types of things

matthew_cook (10:36.242)
right

matthew_cook (10:50.482)
hm

matthew_cook (11:04.482)
well i think that most companies when they start out the founder or founders are typically um you know the sales people they're the ones going out getting the clients and basically proving that that thesis that this product or service is in demand and they get a bunch of clients and they build to a certain level of revenue and then what i've seen over and over again is the typically stall at that revenue level and

and they don't know how to get to you know let's say you get to five million dollars as a software company how do i get to you twenty million and understanding that you know what got you to five million is not what's going to get you to twenty million and where i've had success and i had a mentor that ran a big company that hit me over the head with this every day which is building you have to build out business

david_bloxham (11:34.4)
yeah

david_bloxham (11:42.74)
yeah

david_bloxham (11:52.06)
m

david_bloxham (12:01.56)
okay

matthew_cook (12:04.262)
rocesses um that way you know if something goes wrong is it a mistake um that someone made and you can address it and then that's a coaching opportunity or is there a flaw in your business process so m with my both my recruiting and my digital marketing company i basically documented a process of how to do everything you know start to finish

david_bloxham (12:06.12)
okay

david_bloxham (12:21.36)
m

david_bloxham (12:30.02)
right you yourself did that like so it's not like you didn't out source that to the manager you wanted to know it for yourself

matthew_cook (12:33.202)
i

no

matthew_cook (12:39.162)
yeah because when i started my recruiting company um you know a lot of it was intuitive to me and then i started hiring people as we scaled and i realized they couldn't build at the same level that i was building at and i started to i took a step back and said well why is that and then i started analyzing how they were doing things verse how i was doing things and then once i created that process um and essentially handed it to all the other people

david_bloxham (12:54.86)
m

matthew_cook (13:09.062)
we're working for me and they started following it that's when things really took off and with with my digital marketing company we i built out a fifteen hundred step process um for how do we do digital fifteen hundred steps

david_bloxham (13:15.36)
m

david_bloxham (13:22.78)
well fifteen hundred steps or fifteen hundred words a wow

matthew_cook (13:30.402)
um and the thing is it that it was all in my head i knew how to do it but being able to then relate that to people that work for you is really the biggest barrier and so i locked myself in the room for four days basically twelve hours a day and created this process map um that then i could break down inthi smaller chunks and share with my team so we had web developers we had writers with social media people

david_bloxham (13:35.12)
okay

matthew_cook (14:00.242)
um you know and all of them had their own unique role in each step of the process and once we documented it it became very simple to then add more people add more clients because it was very scaleable at that point

david_bloxham (14:14.68)
yeah to allow you to to have that basis to kind of build on as it were for yourself then you know in some ways that's kind of that's an interesting point right because ou know in some ways that's different to quite a lot of other leaders you know it's it's almost like a scientific thing there now this is this is the science you know there's follow this know the only thing i would kind of link that to and say is a different level of business you you always think about that mac donald's thing

matthew_cook (14:18.922)
right

matthew_cook (14:38.362)
yeah

matthew_cook (14:44.342)
m yeah

david_bloxham (14:44.42)
this is how to make a big mack right you don't make a big any other way you has to always be like this wherever you are in the world and i guess it's linking into that isn't it you know

matthew_cook (14:48.002)
yep

matthew_cook (14:53.142)
well what i tried to do is basically i'm very analytical and i tried to use data to then support the process and even people that worked for me that weren't into looking at data started looking at data which was incredible because it gave you instant feedback and so even in my recruiting business we had a tool that we created which basically would

give us some probability of someone being placed at a company and the probability of revenue and once my once my recruiters started looking at that yeah yeah i should have turned that into a business but i was i was yeah i was working on and i was yeah i was working on another business at the time which took priority but but yeah once you once you build out those

david_bloxham (15:33.22)
that sounds great i could do i could do with that please sell it to me that sounds like a brilliant let's get let's get that one out of the cobord now

david_bloxham (15:49.66)
m

matthew_cook (15:52.962)
processes things go a lot smoother

david_bloxham (15:57.78)
and and then how then you know what you were doing there is identifying challenges i guess you know this is how you deal with the particular challenges and i guess that you know said about fifteen hundred step program but then how did you as you grew the business then how would you then get people to believe in this that this is the bible this is what you do you know how how do you make it like the madona think this is the only way to make a big mat right

matthew_cook (16:04.402)
hm

matthew_cook (16:24.502)
hm

david_bloxham (16:26.34)
you know i think that links into things like business rules which is quite important in our business and it's something that i'm you know dealing with at the moment as we look to react different economic pressures et cetera et cetera is what would you say the best ways of making sure this is the bible that people do care and do follow

matthew_cook (16:30.482)
hm

matthew_cook (16:46.282)
i think it's important to say this is the bible but you know it's not necessarily correct and i really empowered people to question everything that we did um and we also had very unique ways like i said basically when something went wrong we could boil it down to one of two things someone made a mistake or there was a problem with our process so when something went wrong if someone made a mistake we we would act

david_bloxham (16:54.08)
yeah

david_bloxham (16:58.36)
okay

matthew_cook (17:13.322)
they always celebrate their first mistake we would have you know we you know we'd have a pizza party or something like that because i didn't want to well yeah that's there's there's different kinds of mistakes but if it was it was something that was a learning experience i didn't want people to be afraid to make mistakes and break things and question things um so we used to have weekly meetings where i come

david_bloxham (17:16.32)
okay

david_bloxham (17:22.16)
depending on how big the mistake was the i'm sure at's right

david_bloxham (17:37.4)
m

matthew_cook (17:43.402)
and say okay you know any you know new ideas anything that went right went wrong let's talk about them and if there was a better way of doing something everyone had the opportunity to contribute as long as you could back it up with data of how to make things better so there was never like this is the only way to do it it was here's here's the road we might be better off taking a left here

david_bloxham (17:58.06)
m

david_bloxham (18:05.8)
yeah yeah

david_bloxham (18:12.7)
yeah and it's kind of work a working document then that people feel empowered by as opposed to restricted by guess because that was that would be one of the things you say is this restrictive but i guess kind of thinking about that s different you know is how you present it i guess

matthew_cook (18:13.402)
and right

matthew_cook (18:23.762)
right

matthew_cook (18:28.402)
yes and and if you create a culture where people feel like they can really make a difference um it's amazing the output you can get from them

david_bloxham (18:35.96)
m

david_bloxham (18:39.24)
yea so taking that forward you know and then you think about you know your what you've done now how would you then what would be the key pieces of advice that you would kind of give to business leaders that want to kind of follow you know we all want to follow that you know how how do i get a business to scale and then manage to get someone to kind of invest in it what would be the key piece of advice you would you would talk about that

matthew_cook (19:07.102)
well number one document your processes m if you have that then you have a scalable sellable business m because if you ask a lot of yeah if you if you ask a lot of entrepreneurs what their goal is you know everyone has the dream of selling their company to someone for you know a billion dollars and retiring somewhere hot um the reality is that you have to think about well why would someone want to buy your business

david_bloxham (19:10.48)
yep

david_bloxham (19:16.88)
the secret source as it were eh

david_bloxham (19:31.46)
yeah

matthew_cook (19:37.022)
and even if that's not your ultimate goal you know if someone was to come in today and you were to say here's why you want to buy my business it is you know here's what are you know here's what we're really good at here's where we think we can get to here are all of our documented business processes that would be easy for another company to come in and just simply follow and maybe take it to greater scale because they have more funding more people whatever it might be but how

david_bloxham (19:37.7)
m

matthew_cook (20:06.862)
and then when you do that you'll get your company to the next level and then you can decide you know what the what the best step is but most of what i've done in my career is help company's scale by creating those processes for them whether that be how to hire better how to manage better how to market better how to sell better it's all about creating you know repeatable process that you know when i'm long

david_bloxham (20:22.54)
yeah

david_bloxham (20:27.46)
m

matthew_cook (20:37.042)
on it can still grow the business

david_bloxham (20:41.18)
and you know you've obviously worked in the technology industry you've worked an advisor you've worked as a co now and you've seen different innovation so so what is your you know what has been your kind of reaction and how have you integrated nnovations into your your processes because i guess when we're talking about having this step process what you're also looking is how can i make this process more efficient right

matthew_cook (20:45.182)
hm

matthew_cook (21:04.342)
right i mean i'm all about efficiency i don't like to spend money unless i have to um and i mean the i would say the biggest example would be how i scaled my recruiting my recruiting business um you know we right away the focus was on how do we get people to come to us so we built out this inbound marketing engine um that helped us grow at three thousand per cent

david_bloxham (21:10.04)
yep

david_bloxham (21:17.96)
m

david_bloxham (21:25.52)
yeah

matthew_cook (21:34.462)
through the financial crisis we were on profit magazine thought fifty list as one of the fastest growing companies and people asked me well how did you grow so fast and it's because we built out a process for how we market our solutions online how do we leverage contents and social media how do we maximize the efficiency of our of our website so that we were generating we're generating about a hundred and fifty new leads a month

david_bloxham (21:51.96)
m

matthew_cook (22:04.262)
for recruiting business and these weren't these weren't you know someone just saying maybe i'm interested these are people saying i need to talk to you today um

david_bloxham (22:06.72)
yeah

david_bloxham (22:14.02)
yeah just just if people don't know because they're not in the industry i promise you that's really really good that doesn't happen in the g c s well i can tell you i have to work half of those things so

matthew_cook (22:19.542)
right yes it is

yeah well the best story i have is you know my phone rang one day and i picked it up and it was the vice president of sales for apple in copertino california and he said i was on your website i read a couple of your blogs and some of your white papers i'm going to have my legal team send you a contract and then we'll start working together and and that's how i started working with apple but it was

david_bloxham (22:29.66)
m

david_bloxham (22:38.64)
yeah

david_bloxham (22:49.5)
wow

matthew_cook (22:54.402)
all the work in the business processes that allowed us to get to that point and ultimately when i sold that business what they really bought was the engine that i created right and the brand because they tried to replicate what we had done for years and and finally just said well if you can't beat them by them

david_bloxham (22:59.5)
m

david_bloxham (23:16.62)
fantastic ah i think the other thing that's interesting about that is obviously you know alongside the recruiting business you're able to create that kind of digital marketing business as well so you know that was that

matthew_cook (23:25.562)
well that that's exactly what happened once we were once we were on that that hot fifty list i had recruiting clients saying well can you do that for us and then i had to create a basically it became very simple because i had already built out the processes now we just had to tweak them a little bit for how do we do it for another company and once we did that that business scaled even faster and that's what kind of precipitated me selling the recruiting business because that

david_bloxham (23:36.98)
yeah

david_bloxham (23:43.56)
m

david_bloxham (23:47.66)
m

david_bloxham (23:54.42)
test him

matthew_cook (23:55.402)
that business was going so quickly

david_bloxham (24:00.54)
i mean just now personal questions ovioslyyou've had those successes and i'm assuming you know probably the the things that have happened have allowed you to have a what now what now drives you you know because you're obviously not the sort of person like yeah know i'll sit back and go and live in somewhere that sort of thing so so what now drives you

matthew_cook (24:17.482)
yeah

matthew_cook (24:23.122)
basically the same thing that's always driven me um you know i look at a lot of companies like the company i'm working for now their issue was cash is dwindling there's here's an industry that's exploding with cash how do we take advantage of that and there's going to be something else that comes along that will be the same thing um

david_bloxham (24:31.56)
m

yeah

david_bloxham (24:37.54)
yeah

david_bloxham (24:45.36)
just to stop you there so just obviously that's really interesting so if you go into like a kano dispensary cause you not use apple pay men so they can't take you have to take a payment in cash

matthew_cook (24:58.342)
they have to take everything in cash viz a master card everything is illegal um you can't use interact debit anything now in canada it's very different but in the u s it's ninety percent of the transactions are done in cash there are some companies that are taking payments but that's a very dangerous game to play a lot of those are getting shut down

david_bloxham (24:59.14)
that's crazy yeah

uh uh

david_bloxham (25:08.66)
m

david_bloxham (25:13.9)
well yeah

david_bloxham (25:19.9)
well so to get back to the wall just just fascinated by its is an interest like an industry growing in front of your very eyes isn't it that's yeah

matthew_cook (25:24.102)
yes

matthew_cook (25:32.582)
right and i think that that kind of answers your question which is really i you know like getting up you know in the morning and being presented with a challenge that no one really has an answer for and you know when i tell my kids what i do for a living i always say i connect dots so i try to you know see a problem that no one really has the solution for and how do i connect the dots to bring it together

david_bloxham (25:36.56)
m

david_bloxham (25:46.74)
yeah

matthew_cook (26:02.422)
create that solution and that's essentially what i've done over the last eighteen months and what i've done basically my whole career

david_bloxham (26:04.76)
m

david_bloxham (26:13.26)
and you know for you kind of looking forward now you know for this business and the kind of role you're in you know kind of industry you're in i guess now what your kind of keep rarities you know as a leader of this business

matthew_cook (26:28.642)
really just making sure that we're efficient with our time we have a very small team and part of the reason we have a small team is because we are efficient we need to be leveraging and building out some more processes now that we identified truly what the sweet spot is we have to then build out the process for how do we deal with a community bank a credit union because again state by state

david_bloxham (26:34.18)
yes

matthew_cook (26:58.462)
very different so we have to say okay now who are all the players how do we basically roll this solution out and a lot of the a lot of the banks we're looking for someone to kind of bring all the pieces together and so we've done that now we've replicated that from multiple banks and now it's just getting in front of more banks and showing them how to do it

david_bloxham (27:00.12)
yeah

david_bloxham (27:11.66)
yes

david_bloxham (27:20.68)
yeah how to kind of ye have to kind of interact with is and do it legally and you know in a compliant way so that you know everyone one says the right side of the law if you know what i mean yeahthnyou know so as you as you're doing this now and like you talked about the processes would you then now be trying to build in and bring in some of your experiences from potentially the kind of the

matthew_cook (27:23.682)
right hm

matthew_cook (27:30.202)
yes and i always state i'm not a lawyer so don't ask me for the legal advice on it

david_bloxham (27:50.6)
marketing you know do you have competitors out there like other companies that are doing this so obviously you've got to try and present the breast service but also you've got to look at how to stay ahead of the game

matthew_cook (28:05.702)
yes i mean the one nice thing about the company i'm working for they were a client of my digital marketing business so we already have a bit of a head start because we're generating um you know about ten thousand unique visits a month to to our site but i use kind of the processes from my recruiting business to bring on a new account executive will be building and we'll be leveraging things like you know the new a technology that's come out

david_bloxham (28:20.46)
m

david_bloxham (28:27.66)
m

matthew_cook (28:35.542)
um we had chat g p t write a number of blogs for us that were incredible that will be publishing so it's always about what's next how can we stay ahead who's coming you know there's lots of software programs that you can track what competitors are doing online fortunately in this industry it's relatively a little which gives us a huge competitive advantage and gives us you know a runway over some of the bigger bigger

david_bloxham (28:42.16)
yeah

david_bloxham (29:00.76)
m

matthew_cook (29:05.462)
companies that can't go after this space because of the loss

david_bloxham (29:08.4)
yeah

yeah it's really really interesting and just mentioned the b t and sly on the kind of innovation side obviously someone who thinks about process how are you you know have you now put that into your process do you think it's a gain changer is it i'm not entirely sure myself you know maybe i'm a bit of a philistine but i don't know

matthew_cook (29:28.942)
yeah

matthew_cook (29:34.422)
well it's interesting i wrote an article for for so i actually was just re reading it this week i guess in end of twenty seventeen i wrote it about how artificial intelligence was going to eliminate millions of sales jobs and you know at the time i didn't even know how how they were going to but i just knew there were a lot of lower level sales jobs that were going to be effected because you know just automated you know um out

david_bloxham (29:39.86)
m

david_bloxham (29:43.66)
m

matthew_cook (30:04.302)
reach on whether it's linked in or email there's a lot of automation that was already taken place and i just knew it was a matter of time before a i optimized that and now after playing around with um with open eyes platform i haven't a hundred percent figured it out but i found a number of uses that can certainly help me i have some friends that are c f s large reinsurance companies real estate companies

and they're finding ways to use it for actual arial calculations and m and looking up you know m problems that they're identifying in whether it be tax or legal advice so it's it's really interesting how people are starting to use it but i'm not sure really how it's going to shape what i'm doing right now but i've found a couple of uses for it immediately

david_bloxham (30:40.36)
m

matthew_cook (31:05.022)
which are saving a lot of time

david_bloxham (31:05.24)
okay that's a yeah i think again it's like putting it into the processes making sure that you know you can help your process make you more efficient and yeah it's definitely something that we in our business are kind of looking at but like you said i mean you know probably for me to learn from me for this is to really get that process now you know this is how we do things you know and get that right you know you know there's some handwork for me the

matthew_cook (31:12.162)
yep

matthew_cook (31:28.922)
yes

matthew_cook (31:34.782)
well yeah and it's actually interesting to say that because if you're looking to hire employes and you say to them i have a process for doing this it makes you more attractive as as a potential employer as well

david_bloxham (31:35.22)
a

david_bloxham (31:40.7)
m m

david_bloxham (31:45.86)
m

yeah totally we very much now that within the companies that we work with the ones seem well organized and re able to build people's careers and push things forward together or the ones that generally people kind of go for as the ones a bit haphazard and don't seem to have a plan and dumping to have vision the ones that people generally don't yeah i think it's been it's been a very very interesting conerfaceconversation with set as well so so i think you know my last question for you really

matthew_cook (31:57.522)
right

matthew_cook (32:01.382)
right

david_bloxham (32:18.1)
is you know we're talking there about you know how to progress and how to kind of scale how to kind of build these businesses you know my last question for you is really you know how how do you kind of you know

david_bloxham (32:37.04)
deal with you know the fact that that's goin kind of happen you know you're kind of working towards that you know again this is for people that may be looking to do this and maybe sometimes it doesn't happen you know and maybe sometimes you know you you're working towards this and there's that disappointment element or you know you have to do these things because this is happening you know how do you kind of there's kind of two speed thing that happens sometimes how do you deal with that because i think that's the sometimes something that people struggle with

matthew_cook (32:37.342)
yeah yeah

yeah yeah

yeah and i think you know a lot of the companies that i've you know worked with in the past they do kind of get frozen a little bit a little bit of you know kind of the deer in the headlights where they don't know and you know as long as you don't take big risks you know that could put the business in jeopardy trying something different is you always have to be you always have to be thinking a little bit

david_bloxham (33:25.96)
m

matthew_cook (33:34.702)
different and there are some people that you know they think they want to scale their business but it could be a very good um you know lifestyle business and there's no need for it and you don't really need to um and you might be perfectly happy and that's fine i think we talk way too much in the business world about how everything has to be you know a billion dollar valuation and i know i know a lot of very successful wealthy people that you've never heard of an

david_bloxham (33:36.12)
yeah

david_bloxham (33:41.16)
m

david_bloxham (33:44.7)
yeah yeah

david_bloxham (33:48.76)
m

david_bloxham (33:59.06)
yea the unicorn

matthew_cook (34:04.802)
never will but they're living a pretty good life

david_bloxham (34:06.24)
yeah yeah because you know ten million dollar valuation if that's you own that valuation then that's that's just as good isn't it really in some way brilliant okay so you know it's been really really interesting today i really appreciate taking your time you know just some of the real kind of interesting stuff i watch your watch watch the company with interest now to see how you're kind of growing alongside the industry and i think

matthew_cook (34:13.002)
yeah exactly

matthew_cook (34:22.982)
oh thanks for having me

david_bloxham (34:36.undefined)
you know thank you very much for your time and thanks your insight so thank you very much a great day

matthew_cook (34:39.062)
thank you do it