Christine Schlonski [0:02]
Hey Gorgeous! This is episode number 252 with Amazing Matt Inglot.

Matt Inglot [0:07]
Hey, this is Matt Inglot. You are listening to Heart Sells! Podcast with Christine Schlonski. Enjoy!

Christine Schlonski [0:13]
Well, I’m so excited about our guests today we are going to talk about how to build a business intentionally. And Matt really knows what he talks about because he went from an 80-hour workweek, buried and dapped. Trying to run a brick and mortar business to actually redefining his ID client are going for remote work, and suddenly only working 20 hours a week making a six-figure income, while being happy and fulfilled. So we really need to listen to this episode if you want to know what to do if you’re not just going for growth, but you really go for business building with intention. Matt Inglot is the Founder of Tilted Pixel that is an agency dedicated to helping six and seven-figure membership site owners to grow their business. Matt’s 15 years of experience in working with digital products and membership sites has allowed him to see what works and what doesn’t, across a wide range of membership businesses, and to be able to quickly spot the issues that are preventing your site from growing. So I can’t wait to dive into this conversation because this will make a huge difference in how you see your business. And how you are adjusting in case you are not 100% fulfilled right now. And you do feel like you’re struggling and hustling, but you do not really love 100% of what you do, then this episode is just right for you. Enjoy.

Christine Schlonski [1:50]
Well, I am so excited to have you on the show today, Matt.

Matt Inglot [1:54]
I’m really excited to be here today.

Christine Schlonski [1:56]
I know and I love your so to speak sales story, I think it’s so inspiring. So you tried to make like the brick and mortar business work, and kind of wore yourself out to figure out that an 80-hour week is not what you wanted. And now you have this amazing business, you work less, and you make more money. So this is really, really cool. And I know that lots of our listeners are trying to figure out how to make life easier. So let’s just start off like, how did you do it?

Matt Inglot [2:35]
Yeah, I did it the hard way so this has been like I guess the story of my life. Is that nothing works unless I do it in a way that actually congruent with how I want to live my life and I have to learn that lesson multiple times and it just been the recurring theme and that fits so nicely of this idea of the Heart Sells! Podcast because you know I think it’s about more than starting a business so. As you pointed it out I did have a brick and mortar office. I started my company right from university. I was still going to school. I was trying to run my business. I knew I didn’t want to work at a corporation. I had tried that, it was miserable. So I knew I kinda have to do things my own way. But in the process of trying to be a Big Shot Entrepreneur and create this Amazing company that would grow quickly and do these school things. I realize I accidentally created the exact type of environment that I didn’t work in, I didn’t want to work in. I had an office, I had employees, I had to come in every single day and because I was the owner and because I was trying to manage this big thing that I didn’t really even know how to manage. I was working like insane hours like I always say I was working 80 hours a week but the reality was actually I was working a lot more than that. But I never track exactly how long and at some point you just stop believing me. So you know basically I was waking up at 5 in the morning you know no matter what the weather and no matter what how I felt. I work all day at some I fit in some sort of studies as well and then I’d be you know living the office way after the janitorial staff had already left basically passing out in bed at like 11 or midnight and just doing the whole thing over and over and over again. And it completely has worn me down.

Matt Inglot [4:28]
And then eventually the whole thing just kind of imploded in my face because I realize I could not go on. As I started digging into it I realized well actually I do have a cool business here somewhere but there is a couple of problems. One I don’t want to go to an office anymore. It’s terrible, it’s expensive, it wears down my psyche. It’s not right for me. Two is we were taking on too many clients, which doesn’t sound like a problem until you realize most of those clients weren’t actually generating real profit for us. We were building websites and there was a small percentage of clients that we did a lot of work for. They were 5 figure clients, they were excellent clients and that’s really where the money came from. And then we do a lot of these $5,000 websites, and they would put a lot of time, time drain on me and my team and we weren’t getting much out of it. So I knew I had to pair back the clients which is something I’m happy to go deeper into. cause it really is essential to how I felt my life. And I realize that I just kind of have to rebuild it almost from scratch. So I shut down the office and found someone else to sublease and I started a new journey where I mean you know fast forward now it’s 2020 I love my business we’ve gone to a bunch of changes since then as well and every single time everything has worked well for me and I make money and I been happy it’s because I kind of pushed aside conventional business wisdom, how does my day, how does my business, how does my life need to work so I can actually wake up happy.

Christine Schlonski [6:11]
I love that it’s such an important question. And, you know, I kind of asked that on a regular basis. Because sometimes you kind of get carried away with certain tasks or projects. And then you do what you have to do to make it work. But it might not be 100% in alignment with what you imagine your life to be. And I think it’s also important that people actually look at how I want to live and then build the business around that lifestyle.

Matt Inglot [6:54]
Yeah, it’s something that’s missing because you’re not going to pick up a business book that talks about this. Especially none of you like real true, like classics that have stood the test of time. And actually what did open my mind to this originally, but then it took, you know another decade for the lessons to really sink in was “The Four Hour Workweek” which I’m sure has come up many times over. You know, the book’s not perfect, but ultimately, it forces you to really question why and how you’re doing things in your business, and how that affects your life. Whereas most business books are really geared towards the corporate executive. And basically, how can you build bigger, faster, stronger, which isn’t the answer always if you just want to be happy?

Christine Schlonski [7:39]
Yeah, I love that. Can you say that again, please?

Matt Inglot [7:43]
Which part?

Christine Schlonski [7:46]
You know, building and you know, bigger, stronger? It does. If it doesn’t make you happy. It doesn’t make any sense.

Matt Inglot [7:53]
Yeah, so most corporate books are focused on the corporate executive and how you can build something that’s bigger, stronger, faster, and not actually what’s gonna make you happy.

Christine Schlonski [8:05]
Yeah, and for me, it’s so important that you are happy because you only have this one life. And when you give your gifts to the world, when you build your business, you put everything in there, right? It’s you, but maybe you build it so you can sell it at some point. But still, like all the sweat that goes in there, all the love that goes in there. You want to make sure you’re happy each and every day while doing what you love.

Matt Inglot [8:33]
Yeah, absolutely and the good news is like that is actually possible. You can architect that. If you build your business intentionally.

Christine Schlonski [8:42]
Yeah, yeah. Let’s talk about building a business intentionally because that’s also where the sales part comes in. As you mentioned, you had a big switch in the structure of your clients. And I know that many listeners might be still at the point where they think they have to take everybody on board just to make it work. And maybe we can put a little bit more light on these belief systems.

Matt Inglot [9:10]
Yeah, absolutely. So you definitely don’t have to do that when you’re, when you’re completely starting out, it’s a little bit different. No matter who your first client is, I’m very happy that you got your first clients. So if you’re truly starting out, just go out there and make some sales, learn some things because you need to get an idea of what you enjoy and what works for you. But very quickly, you do start getting clients and you do start realizing, hey, this didn’t work that didn’t work. You know, why did I end up working 14 hours, you know, in a single day and you know, sat there in my bed, unable to sleep at three in the morning because work was still turning in my mind. All that stuff starts happening. And that’s where you can start peeling back and start thinking about what you actually want your business and your life to run together. And the two cannot be separated, right? I mean, your business is a huge integral part of your life. And there’s a lot of ways a lot of areas that you can focus on. But the big one to me if you’re running a service-based business, especially, is the type of client that you choose. And that’s something that I thought very hard about. And I’ve helped other students kind of figure out their ideal clients. And there are basically four things that you really want to look at, in order to figure out if a client’s right for you so at a high level, the first thing first things first, is taking on that type of client has to be profitable. Which, you know, going back to my own story didn’t always happen for all the clients that it seemed like money was coming in. But when I actually looked at the value of my time, not to mention my team costs and everything, and the time and effort it took me to sell to that client. We weren’t really making money, not in any appreciable way. And a big part of that is the size of a client.

Matt Inglot [11:03]
So if you try to take on like, they’ve tried to build your business around taken on, like $500 clients, let’s say, you come up with a service that you can bang out in a couple of hours, you charge 500 bucks. That sounds awesome until you realize how much of these $500 clients you need to have in order to even make 50,000 a year. Right? Like suddenly that’s I think, 100 clients that you would have to take on, well, where are those 100 clients going to come from? And that’s, that’s only $50,000 a year. And that’s not counting business expenses or anything that doesn’t turn into $50,000 a year income. So you very quickly realize that there’s a minimum size of clients that you need. And that’s kind of the first thing is like, how expensive or how big is this client going to be? And are they going to be profitable? And then the second thing is, is this client actually gonna get huge value from working with you. So this is kind of the type of client and type of service that you’re offering, it’s such an uphill battle to sell a service that your particular target client doesn’t really need. So in our case, we’re very good at building websites that convert visitors to customers. And nowadays, we’ve actually niche that down further. And we only work with people that have membership sites or some sort of digital products. But that was our magic sauce, our secret sauce was we could take visitors to your website and we could turn them into leads, we can turn them into customers, not everyone is going to value that the same way.

Matt Inglot [12:33]
If you’re making a few million dollars in sales from people coming to your website, any chance to increase that is gonna be super valuable to you. Right? If you can get a 10th imagine getting a 10% lift on those kinds of numbers that means 100 hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in return on investment. versus if you go and you try to sell the same website, the same capability to your local restaurant down the street. They’re not going to care. Most of the restaurant’s business does not come from their website. And their economics are very different. They’re probably not making millions of dollars a year. And certainly, their margins are very low. So hiring you is going to be a different business case for them, and they’re not going to be willing to pay the same thing. So you got to pick clients that are going to get really good value from working with you. And that’s kind of the business stuff. But then you gotta start thinking about your lifestyle goals and how you want that business to look like. So then you can start breaking that down further, what kind of client Am I going to be happy working with. And that could mean a lot of things because different people’s criteria are different. So for example, one thing that was really important for me is I didn’t want to work with clients that needed a quick turnaround time. So for example, anytime I took on other agencies as clients, I was miserable because they tend to want to give you to work last minute and then expect it tomorrow. So I wanted to make sure I was doing the type of work where, you know, timelines were measured in weeks or even months and we could do good work at a good pace, and not constantly be in emergency firefighting mode for someone else. That was a huge thing to remove.I didn’t want to do the type of work that I felt was dull or boring, which everyone has a different definition of that. But very important, you don’t want to sit down and basically not want to go through your day. And you kind of start breaking out these criteria. It could be something like, you know, the 9 to 5 is sacred for you, you want to spend the rest of your time with family and kids and everything. You don’t want to take on clients outside of time zones, that you’re in or else that’s going to become a problem. Or maybe you are, you know, you know, a morning, you know, whatever, early bird and maybe you want clients outside of your own time zone because then you could wake up at 5 am serve those clients, do your stuff, and then be done by like 2 in the afternoon. Right? So it’s very specific to your lifestyle.

Matt Inglot [14:55]
And then the fourth thing, which is more kind of strategic is once you’ve kind of figured out all this stuff Like who’s going to get value from you, who’s going to be profitable? Who fits your lifestyle goals is then the fourth kind of extra trick is what kind of clients are actually clients you already have some sort of connections to whether that’s connections in your network connections by way of geography. So, for example, if you live somewhere where the oil industry is big, maybe oil clients could be worth exploring. If you live somewhere where software’s big, software clients are worth exploring, you know, you start thinking about geography, you start thinking about what sort of interest you have, what sort of memberships and communities you’re in, so you kind of try to think about where you’re ready to have a bit of an unfair advantage. So those things in total, again, like client profitability, being able to create value for clients, lifestyle considerations, and the client kind of being in your sphere of influence. Those are really, in my opinion, the secrets to finding amazing clients. And it sounds like a lot of work, but you start doing a kind of soul searching. And you can start building a very different, much more intentionally designed business.

Christine Schlonski [16:10]
Yeah, I love that. So how did your mindset actually change after you discovered that you wanted to work with clients that were able and willing to pay more for your services and not pressure you on timelines? Like, how did that? Yeah. How did that shift that transformation happen?

Matt Inglot [16:31]
The most surprising part was that it became easier to say no, right when somebody came interested in the website for this or that because I had such clear criteria over who I was looking for. It became so easy to refer them to someone else or just turn them down. And whenever you do that, that sounds crazy, because you’re turning down money and you could have this client and it all sounds wonderful. But the thing is because we’re in a service-based business when we take on a client, we give up a lot of our time to that client. And we give up a lot of if you know, if you have a team, you give up a lot of your resources of that team, like there’s a huge cost to take it on that client. And you can only take on so many clients at a time. So by saying no to the wrong clients you’re actually freeing up that time and resources to find the right clients and then to serve those clients. And at the end of the year, that means you’re going to make more money, right, like flat out and you’re going to be happier while you’re doing it. So for me, that was the biggest change. I mean, there were other changes too, but just having that clarity of mind to be able to say no, and then be able to take that time and devote it elsewhere was phenomenal. It changed my business.

Christine Schlonski [17:46]
Yeah. And did it scare you the first times were you nervous about saying no?

Christine Schlonski [19:12]
Yeah, I love that. And I also found that turning down clients or referring them to someone else is incredibly empowering. Having, having that audacity or that opportunity, or that potential, or whatever you want to call it to say No, it’s really empowering because we, well, most of the people learn to be nice, and to say yes, and to be friendly and not being really clear of what they truly desire. So oftentimes, we come up with compromises. And when I started to say no to the client first and cooperate, and then now my own business, I find At each time very, very empowering.

Matt Inglot [20:04]
Yeah, it absolutely is. That’s an excellent point. And that actually bleeds over to the clients that you say yes to, which is I think what your point is, it becomes easier to do other things like stick to your prices and stick to your process. Don’t basically don’t be a pushover. I think most of us really in services we start off as pushovers. I certainly did. I would do anything and everything to please a client. But then I realized that there is a distinction between trying to make a happy, happy client and trying to create results for a client. And those were not always the same two things like sometimes clients would suggest things that I knew were bad ideas, or just put all their time and attention on things that really didn’t matter. Like, I once re-did a logo for a client 12 times. And it was basically the same logo. It wasn’t even like logo design. It was just how their logo was placed on the website. And none of that mattered. I guarantee you that the final result, which wasted way too many hours of our time, had no impact on their business. So, yeah, being able to say no being able to have a backbone being able to go for the exact result that you’re envisioning for yourself and for your client is absolutely empowering and allows you to run a better and more focused business where your day is not robbing from you over silly stuff that you can just kind of opt-out of.

Christine Schlonski [21:28]
Yeah, totally. And what I love you brought us a really, really cool gift. And it’s actually the ideal client worksheet. Tell us about it.

Matt Inglot [21:38]
Yeah, absolutely. So hopefully I’ve made the case for why picking the right clients matters and I’ve told you all of these criteria. I have this all laid out in a worksheet. It’s a Word document, so you can actually type in it, you can make it your own. And it takes you through these criteria with specific instructions and examples and you can find all of that at freelancetransformation.com/FBS that’s freelancetransformation.com/FBS it’s there waiting for you to change your business.

Christine Schlonski [22:11]
Yeah, Awesome! And I really want to encourage you to hop on over there and to download that word document and really work with it. Right? Because that’s, you know, just downloading doesn’t help you. So, getting that clarity and really seeing how Matt has changed his whole business, and as so much happier in his life is working so much less as producing much better results. You know, you don’t need to go 4-hour workweek, if that’s your goal, perfect, but most of us we love so much what we do that we love working, but really find that balance that’s good for you, and what do you want your life to look like? And then you know, put your business around those desires and make it work the way you want to make it work? Because after all, you created the whole thing. So why not create it in a way you want it? So I will also put that in the show notes under the resource tab. And yeah, I can’t wait to have another conversation with you because I still have so many more questions. Thank you so much for this episode, and I’m looking forward to our next.

Matt Inglot [23:21]
Thanks so much, Christine.

Christine Schlonski [23:23]
I really loved all the thoughts that Matt chat and also his path. I think it’s really, really inspiring, and a great reminder of asking ourselves better questions. Are we still loving what we do? If so, that’s great, but if not, what are the steps that we can take to move into fulfillment, to move into happiness, to not fall into the trap of working too much for too less and not with the right customers? I just loved everything that Matt shared and I’m really looking forward to the next episode with him, but for right now, hop on over to christineschlonski.com find the podcast tab. And there you will find this episode including the transcripts, show notes, the amazing resources, Matt’s gifts and author, the book he has mentioned. And once you’re there also the invitation to join a wonderful, heart-centered community of impact-driven entrepreneurs who are thriving to live their life beyond their wildest dreams, while helping others to make their wildest dreams come true. And that takes place at the Heart Sells! Members Community you can find that as well in the resources mentioned, or you can hop on over to heartsellscommunity.com and just join this amazing community. Thank you so much for being here. Have a wonderful day, wherever you are in this beautiful world. And I’m looking forward to seeing you for the next episode with Matt.