Christine Schlonski [0:02]
Hey Gorgeous! This is episode number 253. And the amazing Matt Inglot is back on the show today.

Matt Inglot [0:08]
Hey, this is Matt Inglot you are listening to Heart Sells! Podcast with Christine Schlonski. Enjoy!

Christine Schlonski [0:14]
Well, I am so excited that Matt is back on the show today after our amazing conversation on the last episode about how to build a business intentionally and all his wisdom, how to tune in not just going for growth but for fulfillment and happiness in your business, in your life. We are now actually taking it further and deeper by really getting into the matter of how to build a business from your heart because we know that Heart Sells! and also how you can actually or you need to track how you create value for your clients. So you make sure that they have a deeper why and working with you and really enjoy what they are getting mad as the Founder of The Tilted Pixel, an agency dedicated to helping six and seven-figure membership site owners to grow their business with an experience of over 15 years and working with digital products and membership sites, he has actually seen what works and what doesn’t across a wide range of membership businesses. And he’s able to quickly spot the issues that are preventing your site from growing. And Matt has had an amazing journey from of working over 80 hours a week, being in debt trying to run a brick and mortar agency to actually freeing himself creating a business that he loves, and actually working only 20 hours a week, but making a six-figure income. So enjoy this wonderful next conversation. Well, I’m so super excited. You are back on the show Matt, welcome.

Matt Inglot [1:55]
Thanks so much. Glad to be here again.

Christine Schlonski [1:57]
Yeah. I loved our conversation about really making sure who your ideal client is and your wonderful worksheet, which people can get at the freelancetransformation.com/fbs and really work with it. Because you mentioned that it’s so important to pick the right client, that not only helps you to make the profit and help your business to grow, but also is a client you enjoy working with. And that’s also where the Heart Sells! come in, right? Because when you sell from your heart when you are really in love with your customers, magic will happen. So what does Heart Sells! mean for you?

Matt Inglot [2:43]
That’s an awesome question. I love it. I mean, I basically rephrase that then selling from the heart. And it comes back to exactly what you said. Like if you are in alignment with the types of clients you’re taking on, you love what they do, you believe in what they do, and you believe in the results that you can create for them, it actually does become a lot easier to sell. Because you can just have a conversation with a client, find out what’s bothering them, find out what would be an amazing problem to solve for them. And then you can just tell them, hey I can solve this. And you can say, with full confidence, you can back that up with your previous results. And you can really be the expert that leads them to a better solution, and know that if they hire you, they will get a better solution. That was actually one of the things that really bothered me when I was starting my agency and going through a lot of different clients. Sometimes a client would come to you and they would want a website. And they didn’t really have a really good reason for it other than they knew they had to do it. And then you’d build that site for them. And you couldn’t really track whether you created value for them or not, right? Sometimes they’re happy, sometimes they kind of started wondering, well, why did we spend the money on a website, and everyone was just kind of clueless, myself included. And that was never a good feeling. I like it when a client can spend, you know, however much money they spend with us and get five to 10 x return on that every single time. And by having such a narrow focus, and having spent time really learning where I can deliver value, it’s been a lot easier to get on that call. And just, it’s not even selling at that point. It’s just knowing, hey, I can help you. Let’s do this together. And here’s why. And that, that really is hard-selling for me. It’s not pick up, pick up a book about, you know, sales techniques that you can use to get the clothes. That all comes naturally at that point because you’re the expert, and the client has a problem they really want solved and therefore they want to help are the expert. It just sales becomes so easy?

Christine Schlonski [5:03]
Yeah, I totally agree. I always tell my clients, I help them to make fun conversations instead of sales conversations. I really enjoy that conversation. It’s not something you need to be fearful of or like, panic about. It’s just it’s a natural conversation to people. One needs help, and one has a solution, they get together. So it’s pretty, pretty simple, actually. So do you remember the very, very first thing you’ve ever sold in your whole life?

Matt Inglot [5:38]
I don’t know if it’s the very first thing I ever sold. I mean, I tried a lot of different things when I was younger, in high school was kind of where I really clued into the idea that entrepreneurship was a possibility. Before that, I was basically on track to become like a computer programmer from Microsoft or something because, you know, I knew how to program computers. So yeah. Seemed like the natural but less than inspiring career goal. And then I had a friend in high school who was selling stuff on eBay, and doing like preposterously well with it. So I kind of clued me into wait a minute, there is some that could be done here. So I decided to start selling computer hardware since I knew computer so I figured, well if I know computers, I should sell computers. The problem with that idea was that there’s actually no margins and computers whatsoever. The whole the I managed to get an account a wholesale account with a major computer distributor. But the problem is that the volume I was doing which was zero, my prices were higher than what you could just get at Best Buy, meaning it was cheaper for me to go to Best Buy and resell the component than to actually buy it through my wholesale account. So I ended up selling a total of one single hard drive to the same friend that was selling his stuff on eBay and doing really well and I think he did it more out of pity than anything else. But I am pleased to say that from that less than awesome start, things did improve drastically and I learned about things like margins and ideal clients and you know how to actually make money from your work.

Christine Schlonski [7:17]
Yeah, I love that. So I’m always interested in knowing like what was the very first thing that as a child you got money for and how did it feel?

Matt Inglot [7:27]
Oh, unfortunately, I don’t have any awesome stories of like starting lemonade stands, but I did start a gambling ring in high school. I guess I kind of count for a couple of weeks, I decided to become a bookie and let people bad on different stuff that I didn’t really understand like sports and stuff. And you know, I basically taken a few dollars in bats, and sometimes I’d be paying out sometimes I get to keep the money. I’ve never been quite sure if I actually ran it the way you’re supposed to run it. But I think I was up a few quarters every, you know, every week and eventually I got bored. And you know, we’ve done jobs that’s probably the first thing I can really remember actually, like getting paid for. As a kid, I just, you know, I didn’t have that lemonade stand, I had dreams and ideas of like games I would write, that would make lots of money, but that never really got to that like beautiful stage of getting paid for. And if anything, like when my wife and I do end up having kids, like I think that is one thing that would really want to push for us to like, you know, not forced them to become entrepreneurs, but create opportunities to be entrepreneurs and to get paid for you know, your work, and just see what that feels like at an early age.

Christine Schlonski [8:48]
Yeah, yeah. Love it. What a cool story. And I actually you you took something if you would have known how to run it properly. I mean, that’s a business with a lot of profit.

Matt Inglot [9:01]
Yeah, exactly.

Christine Schlonski [9:04]
So, I can see that entrepreneurial blood is definitely there since the beginning of time for you and that’s, that’s so fun. Cool talking about fun. Can you share a fun fact with us?

Matt Inglot [9:19]
Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, I do get to sit in front of a computer a lot. As a result of my work, it’s all digital. So to be perfectly honest, when I’m not working, the last thing I want to do is still be at the computer. So I like to tinker and build stuff, my garage is all a wood shop. There’s no room to park, the cars. It’s all woodworking tools and stuff like that. And currently, I took on a really big ambitious project, which is to build my own custom pinball machine. So when I have free time, I’m either working on that or I’m working on learning the things I need to learn in order to build it. And that’s been a lot of fun.

Christine Schlonski [9:59]
Yeah, that’s cool. Awesome. Yeah, I love that creative part that, you know, whatever you do you put that fun component in. And so many people are missing that component in their life. So I really want to encourage everybody listening again, like have a look, how much do you enjoy your life from a scale of 0 to 10, right? Where are you? And how often do you have fun, is working fun for you, is it not and then definitely need to change something. But make sure you have more fun in your life because it will help you to sell more. Have you also found that that when you feel amazing when you have fun when everything is light, and then flow that people just focus you like magic?

Matt Inglot [10:44]
Oh, yeah, absolutely. My own personal level of happiness and what’s going on in my life is you know, very much reflected and my agency’s quarterly results 100% and, you know, to your point about like, people looking at whether they’re having fun in their lives, I mean, we’ve talked a lot about how to make business fun and fulfilling. But back to like me building pinball machines, like, one of the problems I discovered in my life is even if I was really enjoying my business, I wasn’t really making good use of my free time, I would do what most of us do and just sit down and watch Netflix for, you know, it’s all been, it’s all been, it’s all been built now to be binge worthy. So you watch Netflix for the next three hours, and I actually started getting really dissatisfied doing that day after day. So I decided this is terrible. And now I basically never really watched Netflix, I’ll watch YouTube because you can learn a lot of cool stuff from it. But you know, I try to make every evening something that’s like productive on a personal level. Like whether that’s my hobbies or like spending time with my wife or like friends or just doing something that’s not passive, because you can look back on that and say, Hey, I actually enjoyed that whereas TV just blurs together.

Christine Schlonski [12:01]
Yeah, I don’t watch any TV since years.

Matt Inglot [12:05]
You’re not missing much.

Christine Schlonski [12:06]
Yeah, that. Yeah, like all the negative news and stuff and all the commercials like every five minutes. It’s just mind blowing and I decided not to spend my time. I mean, I do enjoy good movies, but definitely, then it’s intention. It’s an intention. So can you share one of your favorite books was also a book that has influenced you most? Does it come down to a Four Hour Workweek or is there something else?

Matt Inglot [12:36]
Yeah, um, well, I’ll share to them because I did mention Four Hour Workweek in the last episode and like to be perfectly honest, that’s probably been the book that’s influenced me most. Because here was someone saying, you actually have permission to rearrange your business and life around you and like we were we were talking about in the last episode, most business books are not read and like that they’re all written on the idea of creating this big successful business. And that can really start brainwashing you. Whereas, you know, what Tim Ferriss said is look at it the other way, your time is more valuable than your money. How can`you build a money generating machine that doesn’t either suck up all your time or doesn’t make you miserable however you want to look at it, like, you know, you and I, we love working, Tim actually loves working too. He talks about that a lot. He does not work the four hour workweek. But you know, he is very intentional about how he structures his business. And that’s a lesson that has just stuck with me. The other very influential book, though, has been Million Dollar Conulting which is basically like, like, that’s really the like Bible of consulting. That’s where a lot of modern consulting ideas ultimately originate from. Alan Weiss is brilliant, but it’s one of those books that people I think, dismiss because it’s been around for so long and what they don’t realize is he’s actually updated it. So it’s no longer like talking about like Rolodexes and fax machines. And the consulting lessons in it are just as relevant today, as they were a couple decades ago. So I mean, again, if you’re in services, it is a must read because it really dissect how to build a successful consulting business.

Christine Schlonski [14:20]
Yeah. And it’s, you know, it’s a lot on relationship building. So and that never gets outdated, right? Because we all we are all looking for wonderful relationships that help us grow in life and business. So that’s, that’s really cool. And when you are now at the point where you, you know, you have turned your business around, and your life has changed. How do you deal with setbacks? Is that like, you know, is there like a secret? What to do like a formula you use or what do you do to get yourself back on track?

Matt Inglot [15:01]
Yeah, that’s a great question because I’ve definitely dealt with setbacks. And I’ve dealt with setbacks even recently, like, it’s, you know, the problem with podcasts interviews is you hop on a podcast and you’re basically you’re taking one story, you’re taking one snapshot of a person’s life and you get to learn from it, but it always feels like the podcast ends with and they all lived happily ever after. But no human life is like that. Because even if your business is awesome, that doesn’t mean your personal, life’s always gonna be awesome. And realistically, your business is not always going to be awesome, too, right? There’s ups and downs. So no matter how intentionally you build things, there will still be problems. And I’m still trying to figure stuff out but the things that have really helped me is past experience. I mean, when I was like, really just like, you know, done like my, I needed to shut down my office, my agency was failing. I thought like I had hit rock bottom. Having that experience ended up being valuable because now when there’s bigger numbers that play and bigger problems, it always helps to go back to that moment and know that I made it through it. And that I found a way to make it work. And it’s never really like the end, right? Even if my current business were to fail, or some other catastrophic thing happened, like, you know, as long as I’m awake and breathing, there’s an opportunity to do it all over again. So that’s been the biggest thing for me because it makes it easier not to panic. The other thing that really helps is just knowledge and experience, right? Like, I know how to get clients, I know how to sell services, even if I have like, whatever reason, for whatever reason, a really bad string of potential prospects that didn’t close. You know, that still happens sometimes there’s an element of, you know, random chance and how you’re feeling and all of that stuff. I can still go back to those principles. I know I’m doing right thing, I just have to stay the course, the next one will close. And if not, then the next one will, and I don’t have to panic and run around like a chicken with its head cut off and just like make a big mess of things. I can be a lot more logical, a lot more detached, a lot less emotional about my problems, then, you know, 20 year old me would have been able to be.

Christine Schlonski [17:23]
Yeah, I love that. And there’s always there’s always a solution for everything. Even if you can’t really see it in this moment, getting kind of detached, is probably helpful. And you know, we’ve been all in situations where we didn’t know how to figure it out that moment. But whereas we kind of found a solution because we looked for it.

Matt Inglot [17:50]
Absolutely. And that’s a really good point because that’s the other part of it is being entrepreneurial and how you solve it, right. There’s that entrepreneurial think outside the box mindset, the solution is never to panic. As soon as you panic, like your brain shuts off, it stops coming up with solutions. But when you step back from the problem, and start looking at other possibilities, including alternatives that you think you don’t want, like shut down the business, shut down the business might not be what your brain ends up coming up with. But if you start going down that road of thinking and you start realizing what you have to do, sometimes you get other ideas that was kind of part of my thought process. When I had to close my agency. Well, I started thinking about what is closing my agency look like I started realizing I could get out of the office space, I could restructure my team, I could change my overhead, I could change what it was like to work there. And suddenly, I didn’t need to close it at all, but it was willing to explore those different possibilities that led there.

Christine Schlonski [18:48]
Yeah, yeah, I heard a really good saying the other day, I don’t know if that’s a quote or I need to, you know, say some name to it, but I was like, are you willing to lose everything to gain everything. Mm hmm. And I think in those, like situations where you don’t have the answer, that that would be something to look at, like, Am I willing to lose this? So that at the end, you know, I might gain so much more and you gain so much more freedom and clarity and fun and excitement and amazing clients. Like looking back, you probably would say it was totally worth it.

Matt Inglot [19:30]
Yeah, absolutely. And you know what, that was a hard decision to make, especially the office because I had just expanded into a bigger office like not even two years before everything kind of came crashing down. I had spent like, I think, like 20 30 grand on lease hold improvements, you don’t get those back if you improve the landlord’s property. That’s not yours, right. So there was a lot of sunk cost and a lot of sunk ego into that space. So You know, it was really hard to let go of it. But to your point, if I hadn’t let go of it, yeah, I think the business still would have been struggling. And to this day, and at some point, you just got to ask yourself, like, how much more damage Do you want your past decisions to make? versus how willing are you to just change course and, you know, accept the short term costs for those long term rewards?

Christine Schlonski [20:26]
Yeah, wonderful. Was there any parting piece of guidance or advice that you would love to leave us?

Matt Inglot [20:35]
Well, I mean, the theme of everything we’ve been talking about is be intentional about your business. And don’t be afraid to really look at it logically. And look at it from the perspective of is this actually what I want to be doing? Is this built in a way that is actually making me happy? And if not, then don’t be afraid to ask the hard questions because chances are, you’re better business isn’t, right. And that’s not because you are bad as an entrepreneur. It’s like, we all start our businesses with certain ideas, and then they just kind of start taking on a life of their own. And if we’re not building them intentionally every single day, then they will get away from us. And they will, we will end up in situations we don’t want to be in. I mean, I keep evolving my business, our focus has changed a lot. We’re going through like a big re-branding right now and it’s awesome. And it’s great. And, you know, the past worked for us in the past. It’s not working today. And what do we do we change it.

Christine Schlonski [21:37]
Yeah. awesome. And to help people to maybe change or adjust or get really, really clear about the people they want to work with so that at the end of the day, their business works because if you don’t sell you don’t have a business, you brought us the ideal client worksheet. So tell us a little bit about it and where people can find it.

Matt Inglot [22:01]
Yeah, I think for most people, especially people in service-based businesses, that is still just an amazing place to start, because what I learned both from myself and from interviewing over 180, other freelancers, agency owners, other people and service businesses, is so much of our pain, our problems, the places where we get stuck, all stemmed back from the types of clients that we chose. And that has a lot to do with just the client’s profitability. With whether these are clients we can create amazing value for with, whether these are clients that can fit into our lifestyle choices. And it’s not as obvious and easy to figure out, figure that out as it sounds. So I put together a worksheet that walks you through the different criteria for choosing clients, and lets you start mapping that out for yourself. And I promise we actually go through this exercise and you map out a couple of hours to do it. You will come up with some sort of revelation about your business and if you then go one step further, and actually change what types of clients you’re pursuing as a result of that worksheet, you will have a better business, you’ll have a more profitable business, you’ll be working less, you’ll be happier. So it’s well worth going through that exercise. So you can find that at freelancetransformation.com/fbs.

Christine Schlonski [23:19]
Awesome. Well, thank you so, so much for sharing your wisdom. And for Yeah, the encouragement I feel that was a really two wonderful episode, empowering people to dare to get clear on the lifestyle and then built the business around it so that everything makes more sense, right. So thank you so much.

Matt Inglot [23:41]
Absolutely. It’s been a really fun conversation.

Christine Schlonski [23:43]
What I really enjoyed this episode, too, with Matt. I love how openly he shared and the value he’s bringing to the table. And getting clear on how you can actually track the value you create for your clients, is I think a very, very important point. So thank you so much for having been here, hop on over to christineschlonski.com find the podcast tab. Over there, you will have the Show Notes, the Transcripts and all the resources, including the wonderful gift that Matt has brought us. And the books he has mentioned, as well as all the links to connect with him directly. It’s just one click away. And when you over there, sign up for the Empowerment Notes. That’s empowerment right into your inbox, my free gift to you. And if you feel that this is aligned, you want to join the Heart Sells! members community. This is an amazing community where you get support and heart-centered business building so that you can scale your business, grow your business, create your business, have the right mindset, learn how to sell from a place of love, because Heart Sells! and also connect to this amazing community so you have support All around the globe. And you can check that out the invitation as well at christineschlonski.com and find the podcast tab. Have a wonderful day wherever you are in this beautiful world and I’m saying bye for now.