Christine Schlonski [0:02]
Hi Gorgeous. This is episode number 192. Our amazing guest today is Matt Marcoux

Matthew Marcoux [0:09]
Hi, this is Matthew Marcoux. You’re listening to Heart Sells! Podcast with Christine Schlonski. Enjoy.

Christine Schlonski [0:15]
I’m super excited to have Matt on the show today. He is a certified financial planner and the co-founder of Candorpath Financial; a fee-based Financial Planning firm in Orlando, FL. For over 18 years, Matt has provided clients and business owners with guidance and knowledge in four core areas of planning, which are Retirement Planning , Tax Planning, Estate Planning and Investment Planning.. When he is not working with his clients, he is enjoying spending time boating with his beautiful family. I’m so excited to have Matt on the show today because he went from being an employee to finding his own company. Having a really high success level of supporting his clients. We’re going to talk about what inspired him to take action to actually start as an entrepreneur, and why financial planning is so important when you are running your own business. Have fun, and let’s tune in. Well, I’m so excited to have you on the show today. Matt, welcome.

Matthew Marcoux [1:25]
Thank you so much for having me. I’m very excited to be here.

Christine Schlonski [1:27]
Yeah. And we have such an exciting topic, a topic that for many people, it’s kind of intimidating, just like sales. And it’s very sales-related because you will only get to the point where you worry about it or where you start thinking about it if you have enough of it, or you worry a lot about it. If you don’t have enough of it and that’s a wonderful topic of money.

Matthew Marcoux [1:52]
Absolutely. Yes. We love talking about money. We love talking about money in a couple of different contexts. One is helping clients as a financial advisor with 17 years of experience. I love helping my clients just managing the day to day finances. But what I have found is that helping small business owners not only with their finances but scaling their business has been an area of excitement for myself and my business partner, John Kennedy. That was really the thesis behind us creating Candorpath Financial, our advisory firm. Yeah, awesome.

Christine Schlonski [2:25]
Yeah, awesome. Tell us a little bit. You stressed that in 17 years, and obviously, we heard it in your bio when you got introduced to this episode. What gets you so excited and fired up about this topic that for many people seems like a little burden, or they don’t have enough education around it and it just, never really is a topic of super joy for many people, especially starting out or being a solopreneur small business owner?

Matthew Marcoux [2:53]
Yeah, great question. John and I started off with a larger firm and I can have only what we could describe as our Jerry Maguire moment. We were working in a larger firm, we were just going through the motions, and we had an epiphany that said, “The way things are going, there’s got to be a better way.” And so we did the whole who’s coming with us. And we both stood up in the room. And we were the only two that ended up leaving. But the good news is that when we left, all of our clients ended up coming with us when we formed Candorpath Financial. That gave us a very unique perspective that not all entrepreneurs get to have is that we were able to hit the reset button on our business, and yet still have revenue coming in the door. Again, I know that most of the time those two are mutually exclusive. You either hit the reset button, branch out sort of business and start from scratch, or you continue doing things the same old fashioned way and finally get fed up with it as we did. And so again, we were in a very unique perspective to do so. But when we got this opportunity, we knew that we did not want to take it for granted. And my business partner John Kennedy, is an avid reader, avid podcast listener. And so he came across and as most entrepreneurs do. What I’m holding up, for anyone that’s watching this today, is the Four Hour Workweek. This book really spoke to us. It’s one that we sat down, we read cover to cover together. And we were just trying to find out, where are their ways for us to work smarter, not work less. I know, the book promotes only working four hours. But that’s not the point of the book, the point of the book is to stay. You are very good at doing certain things. You should not be the jack of all trades. There are ways for us in this, especially in this economy that we’re we’re here today. There are people that specialize in areas that you have weaknesses in. And being able to find those people and include them in your business is something that we took a great interest in and almost become passionate about. For us, this was the turning point in our careers was the thing, “Okay, we’re going to hit the reset button. How can we do this in the smartest way possible?” that’s something that we’ve really been excited about.

Christine Schlonski [5:03]
Yeah. And I love the book too. I remember reading it when I was still at my corporate job. And I remember that feeling. It was like winter. There was a huge bookstore and I walked by, I saw the book, I was like, “Oh, what a title, so intriguing!” I went and got it. It was cold. The days were short, it was dark in the morning, it was dark in the afternoon. I really felt like I need that freedom. I need to really go for my dreams instead of following some career path that was a great experience, but not what I wanted anymore. So the book really was an interesting read and inspired me to take action. So I totally get where your passion comes from because I felt the same when I read it. But also, he didn’t start out this way.

Matthew Marcoux [5:55]
No.

Christine Schlonski [5:56]
And worked a ton and So yeah, I’m going to make sure I put it in the show notes as well, Tim Ferriss, the The 4-Hour Workweek. If you haven’t heard it yet, we highly recommend it.

Matthew Marcoux [6:09]
Highly recommended, it’s not going to be applicable. And the things that I’m going to talk about today are probably not applicable to all different areas of businesses. But there are probably a handful of things. And that’s our think our hope today is that there’s a handful of things to take away from this, that maybe apply to your business. And for myself and our business, Candorpath Financial, I’m a certified financial planner. I have four main core competencies, and that’s, investments, taxes, retirement planning, and just overall financial planning. So, I wanted to focus on those areas. I didn’t want to have to figure out who’s scheduled my meetings or who’s going to answer my phone calls or who’s going to do my bookkeeping. These are areas that we took from the book to figure out, “All right, we’re good at a certain amount of tasks. What can we offload onto somebody else or onto a team?” And so we from this book, in our business, we’ve outsourced six main areas, and that we have found to have been extraordinarily helpful. And really the old model from our old firm was to have that office manager that jack of all trades, and we had one and we love her dearly. She was a really, really great office manager at our last company. She did some things really, really well but the people side of it, the touchy, feely stuff she was incredible at, paperwork, answering phones, those are things that did not come as naturally or things that she wasn’t as interested. Yet, we still tasked with doing those things. And so again, hitting this reset button and recreating Candorpath Financial we said, “Okay, well, first of all, let’s outsource our phone systems.”

Christine Schlonski [7:47]
Give me one sec to make sure that we don’t lose the audience. Because you talk, that might be intimidating. They might be just getting started or struggling a little bit to even get some sales into the door, making some revenue, some money to be able to outsource but we are going to talk about why it is so important to invest that kind of money and what will help you to generate even more money. So stay tuned. Because Matt had has figured out an amazing system where he helps entrepreneurs to really get to the next level by you not doing everything yourself. We are all guilty of it. I did everything myself at the beginning and then I figured out I need to outsource stuff because I didn’t know about certain things. I never felt good about outsourcing. So you have like the emotional, the financial thing going on, the not knowing. And now we’re going to talk about how you can get to the point where you feel great about it, where you see results, and where at the end of the day, you will make more money because you made that decision that you might be fearful of.

Matthew Marcoux [9:00]
All of that revolves around having a finite amount of time, we have two finite; the finite amount of resources and money; and a finite amount of time. And there’s going to be a sacrifice on one of those two, either it’s going to cost you more, but free up your time, or you’re going to do it all yourself, and you’re going to save money, but your time is going to be completely blocked up by all of these different tasks. And so I think that’s a great point, Christine is that, you either have to make a decision and especially on the onset is having that appearance, maybe have a larger firm than what you are or a larger salesforce than what you have, because sometimes that’s needed to get that sale, to show that there’s more behind you than just yourself. Again, at the beginning of this, we were a little concerned that it’s two of us. What are people going to think? And then we started to realize that the people care about us not care about who’s answering our phones as long as the phone is being answered, or who is scheduling our meetings as long as the meetings are being scheduled. Or who’s doing their bookkeeping or all these different things party planning. Again, we realized that there’s only a finite amount of time or money and you’ve got to make a sacrifice on one of those or the other.

Christine Schlonski [10:13]
You got to make a decision, right? There’s no other way. And hopefully, it’s a smart decision that supports you to free up time for what you are really brilliant at, instead of running around like a headless chicken. That’s probably what a lot of entrepreneurs do. That’s what I did at the beginning. I wanted to figure it out, I needed to figure it out. I had that drive. But you know, there probably would have been some smarter ways if I would have known. So that’s why we wanted to have the episode so you can help the people to understand from your learnings, from your point of view, and we help them see what you were able to accomplish because you choose this path. You said you started with outsourcing the phone system.

Matthew Marcoux [11:02]
Yeah, we started small. So let’s start small, let’s make sure that our phone is answered at all times in a professional manner. And again, we ran into these problems at the larger firm when our office manager went out sick. Well, there was only one more line of defense before it got to us. And all of a sudden, we’re in the middle of a task answering the phone. And it’s not that I’m too good to answer a phone. But as a lot of people listen to this podcast know, when you’re in the middle of an assignment or you’re working or you’re trying to get a sale or whatever it may be. The last thing you want to do is be interrupted. And so that was the first area when we recreated our business was that we hired a receptionist, a Virtual Receptionist who the hours from 7 am to 7 pm answer calls, forward them to us, took messages, and could even make outbound phone calls for us. Maybe confirming a meeting or doing something small in that nature. And for us, that freed up a tremendous amount of time so that we could focus on again the areas that we wanted to focus on. Yet, when someone needed us we were available to them.

Christine Schlonski [12:02]
Yeah. Love it.

Matthew Marcoux [12:04]
Yeah. And then we continue to progress. So we went from a receptionist to schedule our meetings. Again, this was something done by a person at our last firm, the back and forth between finding out a good time, rescheduling, canceling. And I think maybe a lot of people now are and hopefully, some of those podcasts are using a Calendly or one of these scheduling software’s, which has really revolutionized the scheduling game, I guess it would be, because it’s now done at the convenience of the client or the end-user, not necessarily a human going back and forth between figuring all of these things out and you know, how much of a time drag that is and trying to get three or four people’s schedules created. It’s now done with the click of a mouse. That was the second area that we decided to outsource our services. The third for us was, listen, we’re at holiday season right now. So we have a lot of client events going on, a lot of holiday parties. And again, the old way was for us to do the figuring out what food we’re going to have for our client events and finding the venue and then getting there for setup and doing a less. So we outsource a party planner. Again, it’s us just trying to think outside the box. We’re not good at creating events, but we’re good at showing up and meeting with our clients and being the smiling face behind it. And so again, we decided, again, it was a capital issue. Do we do this all of ourselves and save money? Or do we free up our time, have a party planner come and from A to Z to plan the entire event to just have a show up to it? And for us, I think that was probably one of the biggest helps we have and we have a great party planner now that is outsourced, we pay our hourly wage, a fair amount. And for us, it allows us to just do what we are good at doing.

Christine Schlonski [13:50]
Yeah. And also, one thing to consider is when you do that outsourcing, especially a party planner and event planner, they have all the connections in the market they need where you would start from scratch. So it’s not just that they organize in a beautiful way, but they know where to go for the best food, they know where to go for the wines you want and everything. So it makes life so much easier.

Matthew Marcoux [14:15]
Not even that, but our last event was actually canceled. And we decided to do an event at a golf place, you know, having clients come in one of these large golf venues, and they actually closed down and closed for six weeks, and it canceled our party. And it was myself and my business partner with a shoulder shoulders and said, “Okay, it’s canceled. Move on”, our party planner negotiated to move it a couple of weeks later, got 50% off the bill. So now think about that, from our standpoint is the cost of the party planner, basically because of our inconvenience is not being covered by the venue, because they made a mistake. Things like that we end up making money back in the margins by again doing it the right way. That’s a great point.

Christine Schlonski [14:59]
What happened when you started to outsource these things? What happened to your business? What was the growth? So when people might be still fearful about giving it a try, because sometimes you never know what you’re going to get. I had a virtual assistant that didn’t work out. Then I had a virtual assistant that worked out but you’re still there to train you. So it’s like going back and forth. But still, at the end of the day, I feel it’s like a huge help.

Matthew Marcoux [15:26]
Yeah, and it’s, I agree with you, this is not a perfect science. They’re going to be people that come into your lives or outsource that don’t necessarily work. Yes, we find those are learning experiences that we had. We’ve had mostly positive experiences with all of the different partners we’ve worked with. But I think again, at the end of the day, it didn’t help scale our business but we are very big with work-life-balance. I have three children. I have a three-year-old and a six-year-old. My business partner has a one-year-old and a three-year-old and so for us, our focus was, “What can we do to spend more time with our families while our business is running behind the scenes?” So if I want to take my son to the park in the morning, and I have calls coming in and emails coming in, I know that; a.) those calls are being answered, those emails are being helped along by my virtual personal assistant that I have, which we’ll talk about in a second. All of these things are still happening behind the scenes. Yet, I am spending a moment with my family and not wondering about my business. So the growth certainly comes. And that’s a great part of it. But I think my main focus was work-life balance and increasing the time because as we very well know, life is it only has a finite amount, and it’s continually getting shorter and shorter for all of us. So I want to make sure the time that I’m here I’m most present with my family, and yet still at the same time, creating a wonderful enjoyable business that we have. So for us, it was more of on the work-life balance side than on the scale side. But all of these things are so important to scaling your business.

Christine Schlonski [17:04]
Yeah, definitely. And I think it goes hand in hand, like when you’re really happy with yourself, when you’re happy with the results, when you know you’re serving at the highest level, you need to have that counterpart. So when you put emphasis on your family and you want to spend quality time, then, either way, you can’t be distracted. You don’t want anything happening when you are with your family. You want to be able to have that flexibility, that freedom to make those decisions. With the right support system, that works.

Matthew Marcoux [17:38]
Absolutely. Just think about that party example I gave a moment ago. We just had a client event last weekend. If I was doing everything from planning it to making sure the food was there on time to make sure the clients were at the event. I would have shown up to that stress. I would have been all day planning this and working it making sure this person’s coming in. And because we outsource that, I literally, the party was at [7:30] I showed up at [7:15]. Our clients were there, it was happy, the food was there. The event we had was wonderful. I had no stress. I’m sure that, that came off, at some point talking to my clients at this event that I wasn’t sweating my brains out because I was running around going crazy. I let the party planner do all the work. And I would just showed up, and I was relaxed and calm. And I felt good. And I wanted to engage with everybody. I can tell you again if I had done all that work, the last thing I’d want to do is talk to somebody. The small things you can’t put $1 off on but I can tell you’re so incredibly important.

Christine Schlonski [18:35]
Totally. Yeah. Since you were not stressed and you were that smiling face that you wanted to show up as it does have a pretty big impact on the relationships you’re creating with your clients on how you show up for them and you know, that will definitely pay off in the future.

Matthew Marcoux [18:53]
Absolutely.

Christine Schlonski [18:54]
Yes, I just love that. What kind of advice would you give because I know you have so many clients and obviously you have an insight in the finances and how they are set up and what happens for them, what could you give us an advice for somebody who maybe is just starting out or is in their first or second year of business and those things still feel a little bit scary to make those decisions to outsource?

Matthew Marcoux [19:24]
Yeah, I can completely understand any apprehension someone would have. But I think maybe starting with the next topic that I was going to discuss this actually having that virtual personal assistant, that’s almost the way to tiptoe into this. That’s not the direction we went in. But now hindsight being 2020 going back to it, we have an amazing virtual personal assistant that John and I have. She actually lives in New York City, we are in Florida. So the fact that she’s not sitting next to me or in an office next to me really is no big deal because of technology. But she has single-handedly changed our opinion of actually now bringing more of a human element to this outsourcing thought process. And again, going back to the book, Tim Ferriss was very passionate about actually going to the human side of it, the virtual personal assistant. What we have actually done is with our virtual personal assistant, she now is the person over all of our other outsourcing partners that we have. So again, again, reading further into the book, you realize that having one of them can now control and now it’s exponential. So now when the party planner needs a question, she goes to my virtual personal assistant. And so she asked, she asked the question, weeds out anything that I don’t need to know about, and then she ultimately produces it to me. So we’ve really started to revolutionize, we started to really grow this thing and follow sort of the loose itinerary of this book, to make sure we were doing all those things. Our assistant right now, her name is Allison. She does amazing work for us. She really is that line of defense before someone needs to get to us. She’s helping us with some of the event stuff that we’re doing, gift-giving for clients at this time of year, Christmas cards, I mean things that we really just need help with and don’t have time to do. She’s really taken the ball to run with those. And what we love about it is maybe the same thing that you had a hard time with at the beginning. So I think you mentioned you had an assistant who didn’t work out. If that was an employee, how difficult would that have been to make that change? It would have been a lot more difficult than to call whoever you were using or the sources that you’re using and say, “Listen, I need someone else assigned to”, that’s probably a five-minute process. You have to re-train the person. There’s whole that whole issue but we have just found that we luckily found the right person for the first time, but if it took two or three times for us, I think that’s still would be far easier and less expensive than three hires. That you would need to have made and then had that rough conversation with to walk out the door. So even with that mindset, I still think it’s a great way to grow business.

Christine Schlonski [22:09]
Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. I just love that. And I’m so happy that we are having actually another call set up. So I just want to make sure because you brought us something really interesting where people can get some support on those interview questions. So can you guide us through your amazing gift?

Matthew Marcoux [22:28]
Absolutely. So what we decided is, well, two things. One is that we wanted to give back to the outsourcing world. So the first thing we did as part of our firm, we hired a CPA and he is actually a fractional CFO. So a small-medium-sized business would like to outsource their CFO type duties. You can hire Michael, and he will come in, do your fractional CFO, help you with making sure your financial statements are in the right order. You’re trying to sell your business, whatever it is help you with that process, and only hiring him on an hourly basis, which is really, really great, you don’t have a salary. The second is that someone is looking for a financial advisor and looking to outsource the personal finances to us, we’ve created a really good checklist for being able to interview another financial advisor. So if you head over to http://www.candorpath.com/interview/, you’ll see a PDF on there to be able to download and it will show you some really good questions to ask another financial advisor or us if you have some questions and are looking to outsource that part of your life and not have to deal with the day to day finances in your life.

Christine Schlonski [23:32]
Yeah, awesome. Well, I can’t wait to talk to you about that a little bit more especially about, once you make sales and you actually have a business and not a hobby anymore, how to treat your finances in a smart way so that you can stress less, have created more relaxed lifestyle or create the lifestyle of your dreams and the business around it. I would just want to send people to really get those interview questions because I think they are crucial to pick the right person. The link is going to be in the show notes as well with all the resources. So you can just go click, and you’re already on the right page with the right resource. And yeah, thank you so much, Matt, for this wonderful first interview and the knowledge you’re sharing and the excitement about The 4-Hour Workweek book by Tim Ferriss that has probably inspired hundreds of thousands of people all around the globe. I’m really looking forward to have the next episode with you.

Matthew Marcoux [24:32]
Thank you so much for having me. It’s been an absolute pleasure to be here. Thank you.

Christine Schlonski [24:35]
Well, I just love the advice that Matt shares and it’s so important that we need to understand how to scale, how to focus on our businesses so we can have more impact. We’re not wasting our time with things that we do not enjoy, that we might not be good at but we think it needs to be done. So outsourcing is really crucial. Then also setting up your finances in the right way is super crucial. Hop on over to https://christineschlonski.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=61658&action=edit&classic-editor. Find the podcast tab for the show notes, for the transcripts, for the links to connect directly with Matt. And also for the wonderful resources, there is a link to the wonderful book, The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss that obviously has changed Matt’s life and has influenced mine as well. And then also Matt is sharing the wonderful resource, the important and difficult questions to ask your advisor so that you know exactly who to talk to and how to talk to you and advisor. So it helps you to set up your financial planning in the correct way. Next time we’re going to talk about, The Importance of Financial Planning. You do not want to miss the next episode number 193 the importance of financial planning. Thank you so much for tuning Have a wonderful day wherever you are in this beautiful world. And I’m saying bye for now.