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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 try to get ahead and with boosting our revenues and bringing on more staff. But on the other hand, I'm now creating this big problem with taxation and all those other kind of compliance matters because I'm just putting every cent that we make back into growth. And the accountants that we're working with just didn't actually stop me and shake me and kind of help me put a proper plan in place. So I brought this CFO on, who spent the time to kind of just understand what we were doing, understand where we were at the business, and really kind of, you know, on an emotional point of of view, helped me kind of, just kind of, you know, remove the shame around that.

Mat:

But then from a logical point of view actually said, Well, we need, let's just get, get a clear understanding of where you are now, but let's put some frameworks in place and let's start the process of kind of digging, you know, digging you outta this hole and doing it properly. So that's been, you know, been an amazing kind of thing where he doesn't know what the answers are to the questions about how, for how me to grow the business. But what he's been able to do for me is be able to ask me the right questions and keep the right focus to make sure I'm putting the right information and then building the right frameworks around it to be able to, you know, allow me to kind of, you know, slowly get on top of the taxation issues and, and slowly start building a really stable foundation underneath the business that we had that's gonna allow us to continue to grow and make a bigger impact.

Adam:

That's great to hear. I mean, there's something that has been written about on many research papers and articles at IMA is that the CFO of the future is not just a number cruncher, but is somebody who is truly a business partner, has a seat at the table and hearing your story. It shows that your CFO is sitting there doing that. How has your CFO been able to help guide or help give the best advice for strategic decisions moving forward as you look to the future as your business continues to grow?

Mat:

Well, it's really, he's been both a hand broken accelerator, so he's really kind of just worked within us of going, understanding my vision, understanding where I, you know, where I want to go and where I want to take this. And then also understanding what the risks, what the risks are. So in certain areas, like with our growth with wanting to open our second center, he's really pumped the breaks on that and said, Well, let's cost it out. Let's budget it out. Let's make sure we've got the sustainability before we go and commit to it. So he's helped us get very clear on where we need to be as a, as a company before we can take on that extra risk. He's also sort of just helped us look at where our income comes from and what, what income has been kind of in the one-off project work versus the recurring everyday work and kept challenging me to refine our product offering to build better sustainability and increase that kind of lifetime value, which has enabled us to sort of accelerate growth on the other end.

Mat:

So he's really been that, you know, again, he's just the accelerator and brake that, just telling us when to speed up and when to slow down.

Adam:

As I'm hearing you talk about the different growths and being able to, you know, stop when you need to stop, put the brakes in and go when you need to go, what role has technology played in this whole process of growth within your organization?

Mat:

Well, look, technology has just really simplified communication and simplified sort of tracking. So we've built in the, the systems that we're still, still refining, but we've built in these systems of sort of financial tracking that we know exactly where we are as a company at any point in time. We know what our liabilities are, we know where our income is, where it's coming from. We also know where we are and benchmarking where we are compared to where our goals are and where we need to be. And because all of that's happening in real time, we can have more of the conversations we need to have about how can we increase our revenue this month? Why is our expenses, you know, you know, why our expenses more than what we sort of budgeted for. And, you know, either resolve issues and what I call kill the monster while it's small. So deal with issues while they're small or be able to kind of just go out there and make some, make some adjustments to go and bring some more income in to keep us on track. So it's been vital.

Adam:

Yeah, that's, that's something we've been hearing as well. Just the fact that it kind of shrinks everything down to make it communication better to make financial statements better, to make it easier to analyze your data, to understand where the money is going, to understand what things are looking like for the future. So it seems that it's having the same impact that it's having for a lot of other organizations for you as well. Something that's really important is communication within the organization. And how has, I mean, I don't know how big your organization is, but how has your organization as a whole kind of shifted in this whole changing?

Mat:

Well, we've kind of been able to empower a lot of our team from there. So part of our sort of modeling with all of this and looking at our growth is we really wanted to gamify and incentivize our team for, you know, our client retention and all that kinda stuff. Cause the longer we keep clients, the less churn we have, the more, you know, more growth we have, the more profit we make. So we've been able to kind of flow all of that kind of data down and actually really incentivize our team for their performance and for, you know, for keeping clients. So, you know, through that we've been able to sort of just have those sort of daily progress reports that all of our agents see, you know, how they're working, you know, the results they're delivering for their clients compared to benchmark, if they're ahead of target or below target. And if they are ahead of target, what type of bonus and incentive they have in place. So having that, that there, that they can see on a daily basis and, and had that in real time numbers has, has been a massive help in them actually reaching out. It's really changed their behavior that they're reaching out and asking for help and being more proactive with making some of the changes, you know, to the campaigns that are helping us deliver better results for our clients, which therefore improves our bottom line.

Adam:

So if we go back to kind of where we started, where you were talking about how you wanted to focus no longer on profit, but on impact, how has that had personal effect on you, as in your leadership style and how you've kind of guided your team through this?

Mat:

Well, it's been been massive, and it's one of those things I get asked that regularly, and it's really hard to answer from an exact point of view because who I am now to versus who I was six or seven years ago, I'm a completely different type of leader. But the probably the biggest impact that everything has is when I wake up in the morning, it's not how much, you know, my focus isn't on how much profit I can make. My focus is on how many jobs I can create. And, and that's that whole driver. And then when I am looking at my organization, it is about, you know, right, how can I build the best team culture? How can I support the community that our center operates in? And how can I support my team as much as possible and make their life better for being part of our team?

Mat:

So everything has gone around that. It just happens to be that the byproduct of all of that has been that we serve our clients better, we give them better results, which means we actually make more money. So it happens to be that the cycle we've created is the more impact we have, the more profit we make, and the more profit we make, the more impact we have. But, you know, when I started this, it wasn't about making profit and it's something that I had to, through the journey get quite comfortable with in the fact of I can actually have this business that is making such a profound impact in lives, and it happens to make, you know, make it a tremendous amount of profit that I can live off and I can live very comfortably off. And there was a lot of guilt, you know, that I had to kind of work through with that because it was, you know, I couldn't give it away fast enough. I couldn't put enough money back into jobs fast enough. And every time I did that, there just happened to be more money coming in, coming in as a result of it. So it's been a great consequence, but the focus now is not about about profit, it's about about jobs and being able to impact our communities and sort of, you know, improve the lives of people around us.

Adam:

It's something that just makes you think and wonder like, what if every organization was focused on that? Would we live in the same world we live in?

Mat:

I don't think so. I think there, there is a shift and it's coming and it's evolving. And I know that sort of journey that I went through was, you know, from a very selfish business that, you know, it was just about me and my family and, you know, putting food on the table. And there was nothing kind of wrong with that. But then I had my eyes sort of awakened to something that I'd, you know, had no one knew existed. And, you know, we had six kids very close together, and as I'm hearing these stories about parents having to sell their kids into these exploitive situations or renting them out in exploitative situations and, and that, you know, my heart just opened up and went, like, I just had to see it. And then when I saw it, you know, my mind kept opening and then I went through this phase of I'm just gonna keep growing my business here and making more money here so I can donate more money.

Mat:

And that was that kind of thing of, I'm gonna make more money so I can make more impacts. And then it evolved into, I'm just gonna make more impact so I can make more money. So that was kind of the evolution that I went through and that took a period of time. And I can see on the broader scale, a lot of businesses are kind of at different phases of that evolution toward, you know, moving away from profit and onto impact. But I surely believe that if more businesses focus on genuine impact and genuinely improving the lives of people around us and improving the environment we live in and making some positive impact in the world and in whatever, you know, scale or whatever sort of area is important to them, if more people did that, things are gonna change and change for the positives,

Outro:

This has been Count Me In, IMA's podcast providing you with the latest perspectives of thought leaders from the accounting and finance profession. If you like what you heard and you'd like to be counted in for more relevant accounting and finance education, visit IMA's website at www.imanet.org.