How to Start a Successful Coaching Business with Matt Balducci

Transcription

Hey, welcome to today’s episode. I’m excited to have you back on the Healthpreneur Podcast.

Today I’ve got the pleasure of interviewing an awesome coach. His name is Matt Balducci and we’re going to have a good conversation about coaching. Let me give you a little bit of a background as to who Matt is. He’s a highly sought after high-performance coach for high-achieving individuals; mostly entrepreneurs seeking to create mass momentum in their lives.

He’s on a journey and mission to become his coined avatar, “The Modern-Day Superhero,” and bring as many people along with him. His 100-day high performance accelerator helps his clients generate one year’s worth of results in just 100 days while generating mass momentum in their health, productivity, relationships, income, and self-development.

We’re going to have a great conversation. I think you’ll enjoy this one. Without any further ado, let’s bring Matt Balducci onto the show. Matt, welcome to the Healthpreneur Podcast. How’s it going, man?

Matt:               It’s going awesome. Thank you for having me on. I appreciate it.

Yuri:                Absolutely. It’s always good to connect with new friends and people who are doing great in the world of business and health. You’ve got an interesting back story. You played baseball for Team USA as I understand it, way back in the day. Then you evolved into running your own business.

Can you tell us how you got to where you are now? What does our tribe need to know about who you are and what the journey’s been like for you?

 

Matt’s journey and what he’s doing now

Matt:               I grew up in Chicago, so I’m a Midwesterner.

Yuri:                Cubs fan or White Sox fan?

Matt:               I’m a Cubs fan. I grew up on the south side so I should be a White Sox, so for all you White Sox fans out there, I’m sorry. In terms of the Cubs, now it’s awesome. I lived through my whole childhood not winning and now they’re winning and it’s awesome to watch. This year they’re having a rough-ish week. We’ll see how it goes, it’s 162 games.

I grew up out there in a low socioeconomic status. My dad’s a mechanic, my mom’s a stay at home mom, and I got taught hard work from a young age. I grew up working. Since I was 16, I had the typical 30, 40 hour a week job while going to school and playing sports.

I ended up playing the traditional Midwestern sports; basketball, baseball, and football. I excelled in the football and baseball realm and then I ended up pursuing baseball and I got to play on a couple USA teams. We won a silver medal and a bronze medal. One was in Italy and the other one was in Amsterdam, which, for a 16-year old boy, was an adventure.

I ended up going to college and I was a premier walk-on at University of Illinois. Unfortunately, they brought a new coach in. I got tendinitis in my arm, my pitching arm, and I got cut right away. My baseball dreams got cut short in terms of playing college baseball. After that, I ended up getting accepted into an internship called College Works.

I ended up running a $80,000 painting company as a freshman. At that point, I got bit by the entrepreneurship bug but, realistically, it was the fact that I could compete again. I looked at it as a sport and went from baseball into the business world fast. I learned that I had a knack for talking to people, sales, and managing people.

It was an adventure and it was a great year. I made around $25,000 as a college student in six months, and that propelled me to realize that I can make a lot of money.

I ended up going through college. I started a marketing company. I took it to about a half a million dollars in revenue, then I dropped out of college my junior year. Just for the listeners and my mom out there, if she ever listens, I did get my degree a couple years back. It was mainly for my wife.

When I got married she wanted me to get it so I took some online courses and I got my degree from Illinois. I dropped out and after I dropped out, my business collapsed on me. I went broke. I was making great money to basically I had no money left. I went into the corporate world for about a year and a half, switched jobs four times, and did not enjoy the corporate world much.

I got the opportunity to come and help run a branch of College Works in Michigan and Illinois, did well, and then I started up my general contracting business in Maryland. My wife’s family lives out here so now I live in Annapolis. Basically, over four years, I took my business from zero to 2.6 million in revenue. I had 50 contractors work for me, had 40 plus sales reps, and built up an infrastructure.

It’s been fun. It’s been a lot of ups and downs. I lived in my office when I was 22 and after my first year of running my business in Maryland, my number one employee is the guy who’s buying me out now.

He left me for the year. He had a family issue and continue working with me. It took a huge toll on my growth for the next year. He ended up returning a year later and we became business partners. He ended up being the guy who is going to take over completely this year.

It’s been a journey on the business end for sure.

 

Acting instead of making excuses, courage, and patience

Yuri:                Yeah, no kidding. That’s awesome. If you were sitting down with someone over a green juice or coffee, and they were venturing into their own business, what would be your go-to wisdom to share?

Matt:               I would say to act right away. One of the things that is one of my greatest strengths is that I am an action taker. Sometimes to a negative. I’ll just go do something and if it doesn’t work I’ll keep trying; try, fail, and adjust. I know a lot of people out there, especially in the health and fitness industry, want to start a business, don’t know how, and end up making excuses for a long time.

When I use the word excuses I don’t mean it in a negative way. I say just take the leap and ask yourself what’s the worst that can happen. I think my first tip to anybody out there, I don’t care what industry, is just try it. Act.

The second one is, if possible, start it up on the side of what you’re currently doing. That’s what I’m doing right now.

I’m starting up my new coaching company, which I started two months ago. It’s looking like it’s going to do about a quarter a million in revenue this year, but I’m doing it while I’m running my other business. Even though I sold my company, I’m still running it for the next six months.

Instead of waiting until the end of it and then starting up, I’m using these six months as a side hustle and basically putting myself able to sell out and then walk into, hopefully, a million-dollar business in 2019.

I would say that’s a huge thing that I’ve seen, especially working with a lot entrepreneurs. Sometimes they’re slow to action. You know and you’ve probably seen that. You’re in working with a lot of different people. You give them something awesome to go do and then they take forever or they make excuses.

After action, I tell people is this, “You have to have some patience.” Now I’m the worst at patience. Literally the worst. My personality type is horrible when it comes to it, but I’ve learned this over time. I’m doing a fitness show in the fall and I associate a lot of analogies with working out. I had a massive transformation in the last year.

What you notice when you’re lifting and going through the process is that you’re getting very small, incremental adjustments. Over time it grows, and then you create momentum. Then suddenly you look in the mirror and you say, “Holy crap, I have six pack. How did that happen?”

Yuri:                Especially when you can see it in the before pictures.

Matt:               Oh, yeah. It’s insane. You hit it on the head. I think it’s tough sometimes for business owners, especially getting started, is they don’t have the before picture. You know, they forget what they were like when they first started and then they don’t realize it.

I tell people sometimes to make a quick video of when they’re starting out so they can laugh later. I have videos of myself when I was younger and it’s funny to watch the transformation of how I talk, sound, and my confidence. You can even see the body language. You can see that you’ve transformed and even if your revenue or your profit isn’t where you want it to be, you can see that you’re developing.

Those would be a couple quick tips for anybody starting a business.

 

Coaching and looking at incremental steps instead of a big goal

Yuri:                That’s awesome. I want to touch on a few things you mentioned. One, a lot of entrepreneurs are so focused on tomorrow and the future. We’re so stuck in the weeds, in the trenches, that we don’t come up for air and acknowledge the progress we’ve made.

With your physique, you can have the before and after, and you can look back on the before like, “Holy cow. This is an amazing transformation.” A lot of times entrepreneurs are so focused on the gap, right? On what they haven’t done yet.

They fail to look back on where they came from. I think success in life is gratitude and appreciation, and being able to acknowledge those small wins. It’s being able to say, “This is not as fast as I want to go, but look at where I started. Look at what we’ve done since then.”

I think it’s a good analogy to use fitness and body transformation back into business. There’s so many parallels. That’s cool. The other thing you mentioned is, what’s the worst thing that can happen? This is a question we ask everyone we speak to when we do strategy calls.

I believe one of the most important traits for success in anything is courage. I think a lot of people want to be certain that what they’re about to embark on is going to produce whatever result they want. The reality is, you can’t get that.

It’s like if I were to say, “Hey, Matt. We’re going to start this transformation and I can’t guarantee what you’re going to look like a year from now, but I need you to have courage to go through the process with me.” A lot of entrepreneurs want to see the proof before they act.

In my experience, it doesn’t work like that. You must take the action to see the proof. It’s almost like you must believe it before you see it. Would you agree with that?

Matt:               I 100% agree. I think that you’re hitting it right on the head, Yuri.

The company that I run and that I just sold has a huge sales force of college students. They’re all millennials and over the last seven years, I’ve coached hundreds of college students about running businesses. What I’ve discovered is that the best entrepreneurs that I coach are the ones that can jump in and see the big picture. They can see the long term, visualize what they’re going to have, but then they forget the long-term goal.

I hate to keep using fitness, but it’s just like weight loss. If I would have started last year at 27% and said, “Hey, I need to lose 50 pounds,” – which a lot of people do and fail because they’re focused so much on 50 pounds – I’d stand on the scale, see that I lost half a pound and think it’s not working.

What I tell people is that I call them momentum metrics. You must figure out the actual metrics that you’re willing to track along the way and forget the big goal. When I say I want to run a million-dollar coaching company, I’m not focused on a million dollars because if I focus on that I’m going to go insane.

You know this being an entrepreneur yourself. When you focus on that result so much, you’re going to go insane because you’re never going to quite get there. You’re never going to be satisfied. Instead, how can you have small wins every single day?

Utilizing fitness again, talking to all the health coaches out there, I focus on three things. My nutrition: I eat the same meals every single day. I’m kind of an extremist when it comes to that, and I don’t expect people to do that. I’ve eaten the same meals every day for the last six months straight.

I drink two gallons of water every day. On my desk, right now, I have my gallon of water sitting there and its half-drank already. I’m going to get through that by noon today and then refill it. The last thing that I focus on is my body fat percentage. That’s the component that I look at versus my weight loss.

You can go into a lot more factors when it comes to that, like lean body mass and things like that. In business, you must figure out your metrics. You can’t look at the million dollars, you should look at, “All right, how many client meetings am I doing,” or, “What is your standard of performance that you’re looking to have.” Again, I call them momentum metrics so once you start doing them over and over, they become ingrained in your consciousness and you don’t even have to think anymore.

You just wake up every day and its part of your lifestyle. When you first start on anything new you must understand that you’re going to go through four phases, especially entrepreneurs.

Your first one I call the honeymoon phase. You’re just freaking jacked, you’re excited, you’re running a mile a minute, you’re telling everybody about it, and then a couple weeks later, just like weight loss, a couple weeks later people stop going to the gym. Same thing with entrepreneurs. Suddenly, they’re not seeing the results they thought they were going to see and they’re not wealthy yet.

Then they hit what’s called deception. There’s a good YouTube video out there with this laid out. I also have a YouTube channel that you can go check out, but they hit deception and this is where I think a lot of people get lost. They sit there and think, “Well, I’m not seeing the success yet.”

They can’t see the big picture. They’re like you said, Yuri, they’re in the weeds. They’re lost, they’re stuck, they don’t know how to get out of it, and all they must do is just keep tracking their metrics. Eventually they’re going to get out of it.

What they’re going to find is that they’ll be consciously incompetent, which means they’re going to know that they suck now.

That’s the hardest part: when you realize you’re not as good as you thought you were going to be, you must learn, and it’s going to take time. That’s after you start tracking your metrics. We’ll use sales calls, which is what I track for my employees, my sales force. I track how many calls they take and how many clients they meet with. That’s what generates our revenue.

I don’t care what their closing rate is in the beginning, but eventually their closing rate always, no matter what, gets to about 40%, which is insane. Every single time. I don’t care if you start off booking at 10%, by the end of the year everyone averages out and it’s simple. It’s just because we’re tracking one specific metric. Eventually people get consciously competent; you know what you’re doing.

Then you can move onto your next skill set.

Yuri:                That’s valuable. Entrepreneurs, business owners, and even people in general focus on the outcome, right? They’re focused on, “I need to make a million dollars,” or, “I want to be five percent body fat and 300 pounds of muscle.”

That creates a lot of anxiety because you’re not focused on the next action to get you there. What you just mentioned, focus on the process and metrics you have control over, makes all the difference. If you reverse engineer things properly you set the outcome and reverse engineer how we get there.

If all your focus on a day to day basis is simply the small steps, the metrics that you can control, it’s inevitable that you’ll hit your outcome. I think that’s great advice that you gave to our listeners. Listeners, if you’re setting goals without focusing on the things that you can control, you’re going to go down a rabbit hole of anxiety and won’t achieve your goals.

Matt, was a moment in your business where you made a big mistake or something didn’t work out as well as you’d hoped? What was the lesson you learned?

 

Growing your identity before your business and building legacy

Matt:               I would say there were two of them. This is a good question by the way. I think every entrepreneur loves this question. The first one is that, and this sounds kind of self-help-y, but you can only grow your business as big as your identity allows you go.

It hit me multiple times in my career where my business outgrew who I was. What happened is that my business would either collapse on me or fall backwards. It would always catch back up, like a rubber band. What I had to learn over time was that self-development is almost more valuable than even your business growth.

Your business will always grow to who you are. Reading books, podcasts, listening to your podcast, Yuri, and reading your books, and different things like that. You must seek people that are awesome. You must go and stretch yourself.

Anytime that I’ve fallen back, failed, my businesses collapsed on me, it’s because it was a rubber band effect where I got cocky. I thought it was doing well, which I was, and then suddenly man, it was like a snap effect. That leads into number two, which is what I’m a big believer in: Momentum.

Obviously, it’s a standard word for life, but I always look at an analogy in life which is a fast moving train. When you can get your train moving at 100 mph, it’s pretty impossible to stop. It would take a long time to stop that train. You know, once you get the train moving at 100 mph you absolutely need to just keep going.

One of my biggest weaknesses in my life, which I’ve fixed recently and am working on, is keeping the momentum going. I built a strong momentum in my 20s and then I coasted for about a year and a half.

I took my foot off the gas and my train started slowing down. I woke up one day and realized I wasn’t at 100 mph anymore, I was at 30 mph and I wasn’t very happy with it. I was like, “Crap, I got to get my train moving again.” Then, it takes a while to get that train going. Those would be the two things that I’ve noticed in my life, at least in business.

If I could go back and whisper in my ear when I was younger, that’s what I would have said. I would have said, “Matt, don’t slow down. You’re not where you need to be yet. Continue reading books. Continue working out.” I think that entrepreneurs sometimes get lost in revenue, money, and profit. In retrospect, it’s not as important as being healthy, sleeping, waking up every day having energy. Your business is going to grow naturally because of that.

Yuri:                Yeah, that’s awesome. You said your business grows to the level of your identity. That is such a great concept. It’s so powerful because it’s true. If you have self-worth issues, if you see yourself as not worthy of certain levels of success, you’re not going to get there. I completely agree with you that you must build yourself to make your cup bigger to allow more stuff in your cup.

That’s a big one, guys. That is such a great statement. That was good.

When the train was going at 100 mph and went down to 30 mph, metaphorically speaking, what did you do to get that momentum back? I know this is a big pain point for a lot of people, myself included. We go through a period where we’re just crushing it. Maybe it’s a morning routine you’re consistent with, and suddenly you’re like, “Eh, I’m comfortable. I’m good.” You get out of your normal routine and things fall off the bandwagon a bit. What have you found useful to build that momentum back up?

 

Start small and keep going

Matt:               I got lucky. I had a son.

Yuri:                Sounds good.

Matt:               Once I had my first son, I have a baby on the way in October as well, which is exciting. I know you have three sons yourself, Yuri. If you don’t have kids, listen. If you don’t have kids, I’m going to tell you right now – I’m sorry that I’m going off topic here – you better freaking work your ass off now.

I wish I could go back in time. I love, love, love being a dad. It’s one of the best things that’s ever happened, and I’ll explain in a second why. But, I tell people in their 20s, man, just go balls to the wall and have a morning routine. Wake up early, don’t sleep in.

You know, the whole Gary Vaynerchuk. I’m not telling you that you can’t have fun. Honestly, I had a blast in my 20s. I had unbelievable fun. My wife and I traveled like crazy but you can do both. Understand that you have so much time.

If I could go back, I would have said, “Matt, what are you doing with the additional 40 hours? Stop watching three hour Cubs games.” You know? Utilize that. I could have probably grown a whole other business on top of my company that I was growing, but I didn’t realize the time I had until I had my son.When I had my son, I realized that my train wasn’t moving very fast. People out there have the same issue, which I know happens a lot especially with high performers and high achievers, which is who I work with. That’s why they come to me as a coach and say, “Matt, I’m a high performer but honestly, I need to get ignited again. I need that fire back.”

You must find your real why and I know, again, Simon Sinek and The Why. Everybody’s talking about it, but it’s so freaking true. If you don’t know why you’re trying to succeed at something, you’re never going to stick to it. Once you hit deception like I talked about earlier, you’re going to stop, you’re going to quit, and you’re never going to get momentum going.

Momentum takes time to build. You first light the fire. It’s like a car. You must put gas in the car first. After you put gas in, then it takes a little bit of time to get the miles per hour up. Once you get the miles per hour going and you’re slowly accelerating and you get it to 100 mph, then you can just speed. You can literally go fast as possible, but it takes a little bit of time. It’s faster than you think.

I woke up one day, looked in the mirror, and I wasn’t very happy with where I was, honestly. Outside of my business and my income, you know, I had this awesome family. I had everything. I had the car, the house – I just bought a house actually – but I had the car and everything that you can imagine.

Everybody from where I grew up looked at me like I was God’s gift to life and I wasn’t happy. I sat there and thought, “What is different now than a few years ago?” Basically, I wasn’t pursuing greatness anymore. I wasn’t pursuing who I was supposed to become. What I did was I sat down and said, “All right, Matt. What is the life you want to live and why are you doing it?”

I said, “All right, so I have my kid and I want to build this legacy.” I wanted to create this legacy in my future, but once I had my son it rang to me. I have this person that’s looking up to me and, honestly, I wasn’t being a great example for him. I was overweight, out of shape, and lazy. I had this outside looking in financial success but I was not being the best version of myself.

I started making incremental changes.

The first being health, which I think is the most important for anyone out there. Obviously, everyone who’s listening can agree that without health, no matter how much money you make, you’re failing. It was after I started rebuilding my health that I looked at my company and said, “Okay, is this my passion?”

I love what I do. I love what I built. I realized it wasn’t the life I wanted in 10 years. That’s why I ended up selling my company and starting up my coaching business. I said, “I want to help millions of people.” Before I even started my coaching business, I started a YouTube channel and – it’s crazy – once you get clear on where you want to go and why, everything starts lining up.

People start coming out of the woodwork to help you get there.

If you came to me a year ago and said, “Matt, you’re going to be a coach. You’re going to be a high-performance coach. You’re going to have a YouTube channel. You’re going to be writing a book. You’re going to be waking up at 4:30 every morning and you’re going to have a six pack and be in the best shape of your life,” I probably wouldn’t have laughed at you but I wouldn’t have believed it.

It wasn’t like that happened overnight. What people must understand out there is that if you’re trying to rebuild your momentum you must sit down and first figure out why the heck you even want to go after whatever you’re going after. It doesn’t have to be as extreme as where I’m going right now.

I’m trying to accomplish as much as you possibly can in one year. What I found with it is that it wasn’t like I did all that at once.

It sounds great now when I say it out loud, but it got stacked on each other as I went. The clearer I got, also the more productive, I started looking at my time management and my productivity and realizing that I wasn’t doing the necessary things in my day. I started creating boundaries with people.

Even in my business I stopped taking phone calls at certain times. I scheduled in family time. I just became this machine when it came to my day. If you can see my office wall I have a calendar printed up there and I track my morning routine, literally, like a crazy man. I have 12 things I do in the morning and I literally label it out.

The reason is, like I mentioned earlier, you must figure out who you want to become, your identity, and you must realize in the beginning that it’s conscious. If you read a good book called “Incognito” by David Eagleman, it talks about how to take things from conscious to unconscious.

That means creating habits like in the book “Power of Habit” by Charles Duhigg. What you’re going to find in both of those books combined is that it takes time to recreate who you become. If you’re trying to rebuild your momentum, you don’t want to go do the same thing you did previously to build your momentum, because then you’ll be in a circle, which is what I was in.

I would get in shape, out of shape, in shape, out of shape. I would grow out my business then I would have a slow year, then I would grow, then I would say, “All right, Matt. Time to go again.” Then I would do it again. Then I would get cocky.

This time around what I realized is no, you just must change who you think you are and you must go all in. Again, it all comes back to why. For me it was that I have a son, and I have kids now, and I want to be the best example I possibly could be. It wasn’t a matter of providing income. That was already there.

It was, what do I want them to look at when they go tell their friends at school? I want them to walk into their school, and I know this sounds cocky, but I want them to look at their friend and say, “Hey, my dad could kick your dad’s butt.” They’re proud of me, you know? They’re proud of their dad. I was very proud of my dad. It didn’t matter how much money he made.

He was a hard worker and a great guy. I was very proud of him when I grew up and I wanted that same feeling, but on a massive scale. To help the people out there that are like, “Listen, Matt. I’m in the same boat you were a year ago. I have this success. I’m a high performer.”

To start, figure out one thing to change in your life now. Honestly, if you’re not healthy, first do that. If you are healthy and you feel good about that, then start small and keep going. There’s another good book – I hate to keep throwing books out there, but this year I’m reading 60 to 80 books, so there’s a lot of knowledge in my head right now – it’s called “The High Performance Habits” by Brendan Burchard.

There’s this unbelievable quote in that book that I loved. I used to love, “Light yourself on fire and people will come out to watch you burn.” That’s a good one, but this is even better. This was unbelievable.

He said, “Yell from the rooftops what are your goals. Literally yell them and the village idiots will come out, which are the people that are going to tell you that you can’t do it. There’s a lot of them, right? But the village leaders are going to come out and show you the way.” Every time I say that out loud I get freaking chills because it’s so true.

As I started yelling from the rooftop that I was going to become a bodybuilder, when I was 27% body fat I said, “Matt, you’re going to become a body builder,” I had to change my identity so I ate like a body builder, worked out like a body builder, and had a personal trainer.

I changed my identity by yelling, and I’d tell everybody. Luckily I have a very supportive tribe that I know and have around me. I’m sure there’s people out there that are like, “Oh, he’s probably not going to make it,” but now I’ve proved them all wrong.

People started coming out of nowhere and started helping me on that journey. Then, when I started my YouTube channel, literally out of nowhere people started calling me and that’s when I first started getting my business consulting clients. That’s what built my confidence.

Through weird connections I hired my own coach. He is a guy who runs a multi-million-dollar company right now all online. All this came together by knowing where I was going, taking full action, and understanding building my identity up.

Yuri:                Totally man. That’s good wisdom and great advice. One of the things I loved is that you talked about your why being your son. A lot of times, we get more jazzed up about doing things for others more so than ourselves. I’ve personally found, when I set goals with our company, instead of setting a company revenue goal, and I say this very overtly to our perspective clients and our clients as well, is that when we work with someone our goal is to get 90% of our clients to 2X ROI within four months or less.

That is everything we focus on. Because of that it’s like, “What has to be in place for that to happen?” It becomes exciting when you can be obsessed about the results you create for other people or the reason why. For instance, you know, your son, or for someone else it might be something else. Instead of us selfishly focusing on ourselves then there’s a cap, there’s a ceiling to that.

But when we focus on what we can do for others and others are that reason why, whether it’s people you want to serve or family, it’s limitless what can happen. We start thinking so much bigger. That was tremendous, man. Awesome stuff. This has been really inspiring and I know our listeners are getting a ton out of this.

 

The Rapid Five

Are you ready for the Rapid Five?

Matt:               I am.

Yuri:                All right, so here we go. Five rapid fire questions. Whatever comes top of mind is probably the right answer. Number one, what is your biggest weakness?

Matt:               My biggest weakness is, it’s crazy, my exact opposite.

I’m an extreme action taker and what I must do is control. This is what’s been part of a lot of my failures. After I take a lot of action and get results I get cocky, then I’m oddly lazy. I oddly want to be the laziest man alive but I’m also the most extreme action taker you’ll find. I’m either one or the other. I would say my biggest weakness is keeping myself in action mode versus going back to the lazy Matt mode.

Yuri:                Well, I can relate to that.

I’ve come to recognize that there are times where I’m going to go full in and there’s times where I got to take time off. It’s almost like an athlete, right? You can’t be competing all the time. You must take that off time. I mean, I don’t recommend watching TV, but there are some nights where I’ll just watch three hours of Ballers, or some Netflix special because I need to just chill.

I get that. That’s cool. All right, number two. What is your biggest strength?

Matt:               It’s probably being able to act without worrying about the result. It is something I’ve always done and I guess the second one is my super power: being able to recover from failure or suffering rapidly.

I hate the word suffering because I’ve not suffered like people out there have, but  could recover very fast from business collapses, or like I said, sleeping on an office floor, or when I dropped out of school, or when I didn’t make the baseball team.

I quickly recapped and got going versus letting it put me into any sort of depression.

Yuri:                Wicked. Number three, what’s one skill you’ve become dangerously good at to grow your business?

Matt:               Sales and, honestly, likability. I’m able to build trust relatively fast with people and not in a manipulative way. I care. I care when I talk to people and I want to get to know them. I would say that’s my unbelievable skill that I can teach now, too, which is exciting. It’s something I’ve taught people.

Yuri:                Nice. Number four, what do you do first thing in the morning?

Matt:               I have a crazy morning routine. I’m not going to take up your listener’s time with it, but I have 12 things that I do in the morning from meditating, visualization, stretching, drinking apple cider vinegar, and things like that. They are all health-based and identity-focused. Then I drop off my son at daycare and hit the gym every single day right after.

I have a pretty intense morning regimen. I track it.

Yuri:                Love it. That’s awesome. Finally, complete this sentence: I know I’m being successful when …

Matt:               I know I’m being successful when I literally am on fire. When I’m on fire I don’t care if I’m making money. I don’t care what the results are. I wake up every day jazzed up and ready to go. I just feel good. Again, sometimes it’s weird, it oddly happens sometimes when I’m not making money but it’s because you’re in the pursuit of greatness and you just feel amazing when you’re doing it.

I would say that’s when I’m the most excited.

Yuri:                That’s awesome. Matt, thank you so much for joining us on the show today. This has been a great conversation. What is the best place for our listeners to follow you online? You mentioned you had a surprise for them before we started recording as well.

Matt:               If you guys want to follow me, there are a couple different places to do so. First, I am offering anybody who is part of Yuri’s tribe and community a free 60-minute business momentum maximizer session.

If you want to do that, just go to the website, go.mattbalducci.com/momentum. You can schedule a 60-minute free session with me where we can see if I can help you create some business momentum in your life. Besides that, if you just want free content, you can go to my YouTube channel, which is Matt Balducci. I put out two videos a week. One’s a book review and the other one is awesome videos where I talk about morning routines, success habits, sales, and business.

If you just want some fun daily content, I am a crazy content machine. I put out videos on my Instagram. I have two of them. One’s called @MatticShockFitness, which is just fitness motivation, then I have a business one @mattbalducci and then I have Facebook as well, which is just Matt Balducci.

There are lots of places where you can follow me but for anybody out there that needs to create mass momentum, honestly just opt into a 60-minute meeting; not because I’m going to sell you, but because I might be able to help you get things reignited and build that momentum back up.

Thank you so much for having me on.

Yuri:                Dude, this has been a great conversation. Thank you for taking the time and sharing your journey and wisdom with us. Guys, take advantage of the call. Matt’s a solid dude who knows what he’s doing and if you think there’s a good fit there, why not?

It’s complimentary and I’m sure he can help you out. Matt, thank you for offering that. That’s generous of you and your time, and I just want to acknowledge you for all the awesome work that you’re doing and have done in the past, and what you’re continuing to work on. I want to acknowledge you for that.

Just again, thank you for joining us today.

Matt:               Perfect. I appreciate it Yuri, and you keep kicking butt, keep pushing me, and I’m going to chase after you.

Yuri:                Sounds good, buddy.

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Yuri’s Take

All right, so I hope you enjoyed that interview as much as I did. I want to show one of the big things that jumped out at me from our conversation, which was the idea that your business only grows to the point of your own identity.

Personally, that was the thing that stood out the most out of all the amazing things we spoke about.

If you can relate to this then that’s great, and if you can’t, that’s totally fine as well. It’s such a great concept because we only can attract into our lives that which we believe we are worth attaining. For instance, if you want to build a multi-million-dollar business but you can’t even visualize yourself doing that and enjoying the fruits of that labor, it’s going to be very tough for you to do so.

If you want to build a multi-million-dollar business but you have self-worth issues, for instance, you don’t feel comfortable around other people who are wealthy because you feel inferior – you don’t feel you’re good enough. Those are going to be energetic road blocks to getting to that next level. The whole idea here is to build yourself up from the inside so that you can enjoy the outside results.

Whether that’s a morning routine where we have some meditation, visualization, gratitude, setting big goals for yourself, and seeing, acting, and feeling as if it’s already happened, is helpful in building your identity to the point where you feel worthy of the specific results you want.

I struggled with this for a long time because soccer was such a huge part of my life for 24 years. That was all I wanted to do – play pro soccer.

I always identified as a pro athlete, and when I stopped playing in my mid 20s, I had this transition period for several years where, even though I started my business, I still felt like an athlete. I still felt like a soccer player. Even to this day, I still hang out and dress very casually when I’m at home. I’ll wear soccer outfits. Not like full team jerseys and stuff, but just training tops and stuff like that because I like it.

I remember not feeling worthy when I would travel business class. I would feel like I was out of place. It didn’t feel right. I wasn’t supposed to be there. I was just an 18 or 19-year-old kid in my mind, even though I was in my late 20s and early 30s. It took me a long time to readjust and tune up my thermostat, my self-identity, to be more congruent with where I am now.

If you can relate to me, just understand that we all go through that. I think there’s this imposter syndrome and these are all things that everyone deals with, no matter how successful or unsuccessful they are. These are universal struggles and I think the great thing about having your own business is that it forces you to grow.

It forces you to grow infinitely more than if you were working for somebody else because if you’re punching in and punching out there’s not much growth that has to happen there unless it’s a type of company where you can progress forward. When you’re running your own business, the buck stops with you. You can’t mess around, and if you do, then the business is not going to do what it wants to do.

Anyways, I think the whole message here is to grow yourself if you want to grow your business, right? Everything we want starts on the inside.

This is something I teach my kids. I’m like, “Hey, guys. You see that car out there? You see the couch? You see that lamp? You see that chair? You see this desk? How did this all start? Where did these come from?” I get them to understand that everything in our physical world started someone’s head. It started as an idea, as a thought, as a vision, and that’s where everything starts.

The message that I want to leave you with is to focus within to get whatever you want outside, okay? With that said, if you’ve enjoyed this episode remember to give the Healthpreneur Podcast some love on iTunes. Head on over to iTunes and if you haven’t subscribed to the podcast, do so and a thumb up or review would be greatly appreciated. I want to thank you for taking the time and joining me today.

Continue to get out there, be great, do great, and I look forward to seeing you in our next episode.

 

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