Ep. 201: Mat Boyle – More Impact. More Profit.

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Full Episode Transcript:
Adam:



Welcome back to Count Me In, the podcast that brings you
impactful people and stories from across the world of management
accounting. I'm your host, Adam Larson, and joining me today is
Mat Boyle, CEO of Online to Offline, to discuss how businesses
and management accountants can make a big difference in the world
by shifting their focus from profits first to mission first.
While this is much easier said than done, as you'll hear, Mat's
inspirational story is an important reminder that it's possible
to do well in business and even better than ever when you measure
your success by something greater than the bottom line.


Adam:



Well, Mat, I just really wanna thank you for coming on the
podcast today. Thanks so much for sharing your time with us. And
to start off, I wanted you to kind of walk through a little bit
of your story with us as we were kind of talking, coming up to
this call, you mentioned something that you learned to focus, no
longer focusing on profit, but on the impact your business was
making, and that's not something you hear every day. So maybe you
could talk a little bit about that with our audience.


Mat:



Yeah, sure. Adam, thanks for having us. So the sort of condensed
version of the backstory, I'd built quite a large sales training
business. So I had four offices around Australia. We had a stack
of businesses that will help in their sales teams, really
navigate through the changes caused by the internet. And from a
profitability point of view, it was amazing, but there was this
kind of hole inside me that it was really unfulfilling and my
days was spent training sales people that didn't want help. They
needed it, but they didn't want it. So it was just this horribly
unfulfilling sort of thing. And I met this guy back in 2015 who
was an Australian guy that worked with the Thai immigration
police. And he started talking to me about the work he was doing
over in Thailand and how he was involved in rescuing kids out of
exploitive situations and women outta sexual slavery and human
trafficking.


Mat:



And the more we got talking, the more things just sort of opened
up for me and the, you know, my heart sort of went, I've gotta
see this. So about six months into the conversation, and I
eventually convinced him to take me over to Thailand, and I spent
three weeks working with him and his team in Thailand doing the
front lines rescuing kids outta brothels and women outta brothels
and just seeing this depravity, which is human trafficking, and
you know, that some of the sites and the sounds were just
horrendous. But the thing when I was talking to all these women
and that, that the stories were identical, that they all needed
money and got caught up in this life because someone gave them a
job that they shouldn't have lent to money from someone they
shouldn't have.


Mat:



Or they were promised a job that didn't exist and they were all
taken advantage of by their desperation towards money. So when I
was sitting back in Australia and I'm sitting back in a boardroom
a few days later, I sort of had this idea of, well, instead of
businesses paying me to train their sales teams not to do the
work that I've paid them to do, I've been paid to do. What about
if I just could automate and outsource all of these elements of
the sales process, businesses could pay me to build the systems
and manage the systems and they're gonna make more money, but
then I can go and create jobs in these developing countries where
all these women are getting exploited and train them how to
operate my system and actually be able to use my business as a
way of making good.


Mat:



So that's what we started to do and started to develop all these
systems that can automate and outsource big chunks of the sales
process, but do it in a way that no one actually ever realizes
it's not been done by you. And in 2018, we ended up opening our
first outsource center in the Philippines, which has gone gone
amazing. And then Covid has gone slowed down our growth and we
are on track to open our second center in Thailand sometime sort
of before sort of March next year.


Adam:



That's quite a story. I mean, to have something like that caused
such an impact on you that you want to completely turn your
business around, that can't be an easy decision to make. And it's
a very risky one.


Mat:



It was a very easy decision to make because I made it with my
heart, not with my head. It was an incredibly risky situation.
And the journey between sort of 2016, 2017 when the idea came and
where we are now, we certainly have faced the consequences of
that, you know, of that decision. Because going through this
said, I made it purely with my heart of going, I have to make an
impact from there. And I kind of threw out all conventional
business acumen around, well, what happens to your existing
customers? What are you gonna do with everything you built up?
And so over a period of a few months, we ended all of our
contracts. I just stopped prospecting for new business and didn't
replace them. And just focused our whole energy on trying to fix,
solve this problem and, and tried to create these systems and
open the center.


Mat:



And, you know, as is often the case, it always takes twice as
long as you think it's gonna take and takes three times the
amount of money that you think it's gonna take. And, you know,
through all of that journey, the consequence is we actually went
through complete financial meltdown and we lost our house, lost
our cars, and basically went down to having $50 to our name at
our kind of lowest point. And you know, that's kind of where we
were able to kind of keep persevering and keep getting through.
So like fortunately now we're in a much stronger financial
position than we ever have, and the business is going great, but
there certainly was a big journey from start to where we are now,
which has been challenging.


Adam:



So maybe we can talk a little bit about that journey, about
becoming to the success you are now. I know a lot of that
contributed to getting the right people in place in your
organization to make sure that you were doing the business in the
right way. Maybe we can talk a little bit about that to how that
became successful.


Mat:



Yeah, so there was a few kind of phases where I was first in that
survival phase where it was just me. I was just hustling. I was
just, you know, I was robbing Peter to pay Paul and I didn't
really have a financial strategy in place other than how can I
pay this week's bills type of strategy. And that, you know,
although that was getting us forward, that was creating other
holes with taxation and a heap of other kind of just areas that,
because I was so single minded focused on the goal at hand and
trying to do everything myself or being left behind. So I started
to look for support teams and one of the sort of first pieces I
put into place is actually bringing on a fractional CFO. I've
been working with a lot of the accountants and, you know, all the
accountants, all they kept doing was just filing my tax returns
and telling me, because you've done A, B, and C this way, this is
what we've had to do.


Mat:



So they're just telling me about their problems and how they've
stuck a bandaid over it rather than actually working with me to
try to solve the problems. And that just kept making, compounding
the problems, you know, and just putting us deeper and deeper and
deeper in a hole. So I'm, you know, one side, I'm, you know,
busting, busting everything. I've got to ...