721 – Spanish coffee, Paella and growing companies: Tom interviews Matt Shoup

Episode 721 – Matt Shoup
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute, the entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multi-millionaire. Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with episode 721 of Screw the Commute podcast. I'm here with Matt Shoup and I thought this guy was a Jesus follower, but I found out he, one of his companies, actually painted a baby. And I'm really questioning whether I should have a child abuser like that on. He's going to tell you about that in a minute. Mean this guy's got so many awards, the whole episode would be tied up. But I got to tell you, you know, you have really made it when you get the Angie's List super service award. All right. You have that's the pinnacle. It's like the Oscar of awards. But he's got all kinds of companies and they're all great run very ethically and million positive reviews. So we'll bring him on in a minute. All right. I hope you didn't miss episode 720. That was How to Stay Safe on Public Wi-Fi. I mean, everybody, including myself, was touting the lifestyle business and digital marketing and nomad working and all that stuff. But there's just some little things you can do to stay safe, or you can just give your money to a bunch of scammers because it's so easy to to steal your stuff when you're on public Wi-Fi.

[00:01:39] So that episode tells you what to do, what not to do. Okay. Make sure you follow me on TikTok at tiktok.com/@digitalmultimillionaire. Still have that one is I think it's pushing getting close to 700,000 views. And I've got several hundred short training videos there for you to check out. Make sure you pick up a copy of our automation book at screwthecommute.com/automatefree and you will thank me because if you just do a fraction of what's in that book, you will save yourself hundreds and hundreds of hours of fighting with your computer, which that time could be spent making inventing pirate patches or I don't know. You know, so we'll tell you about that, too.

[00:02:21] So let's bring on the main event. Matt Shoup is an award winning serial entrepreneur. He's an author. He's a keynote speaker. He loves Spain and he's an aspiring Paella chef. I don't know if that's right or not. He'll tell me he's a Brazilian jiu jitsu black belt. You know, I love that kind of stuff. And a Spanish coffee addict. And he's grown multiple companies from the ground up. Matt, are you ready to screw? The commute.

[00:02:54] I am so ready. Tom, How are you? Thank you for having me.

[00:02:57] Oh, I'm thrilled to death. We love entrepreneurship around here, But. But I saw you. One of the things I saw written about you or by you said you made a lot of money in college, and then you spent three times that much. What's that all about?

[00:03:12] I did? Yeah, that. That formula didn't work too well for me. Um, no. Grow. Growing up, I found business at a young age, and business was always my thing. And I was really good at making money, finding ways to make money. I just never, never had a strong financial blueprint of the basics of how money works, Right? It's money in, money out. It saves some, spend, some invest some. And I spent more than I made. Right? This this culture makes it very easy to do that. So I found myself pretty, pretty, you know, pretty in debt back in 2005. And, you know, that was when a big transition point happened just in my life. And and that's when the perfect.

[00:03:50] Time to get married, right? When you're in deep debt, you find some really rich girl, right? Is that what you did?

[00:03:56] She was so rich, man. I think she had like $2,700 in her bank account. Well, we go we go to these galas now, right? We go to these fundraising galas, and we've changed our financial picture significantly. So people joke. They give her the elbow. Hey, Emily, did you marry him for his money? And she's like, no, he married me for mine. I had like three grand in the bank. And he was he was dead broke.

[00:04:17] Well, you sure turned it into something. I saw somewhere. You started a foundation.

[00:04:22] We started a scholarship. Scholarship through. Yeah, through Colorado State University. I studied abroad in college and fell in love with Spain. Fell in love with the experience. So back in 2007, we started an endowment so similar to a mutual fund, we donate money. Anybody can donate money and it kicks off interest in the form of scholarship. And we've sent about 17 students over to Spain.

[00:04:48] Oh, beautiful. Now, yeah, I have a scholarship fund for persons with disabilities. I have my own school, actually. And. And yeah, I love, love helping people that are in need now. What'd you love about Spain so much?

[00:05:01] It was at a time in my.

[00:05:03] Life when I think if I would have if I would have gotten to Germany, I'd be in love with Germany. Like wherever I went. It was just a very impressionable time. I've you know, I grew up kind of in the same environment, hadn't really left the nest per se. Where'd you grow up and experienced the world? So northern New Jersey till I was ten. And then we moved out to Loveland, Colorado, and it was, you know, always pretty close to home, close to, you know, close to home base. And just going there and being able to experience the world different points of view, obviously a different language, a different culture, those little nuances really push you out of your comfort zone where.

[00:05:36] You learn Spanish because you were teaching Spanish for a while, right?

[00:05:40] You know, yeah, there's only so much you can learn in a in a classroom setting. I had studied it middle school, high school, college, you know, the typical, you know, 60 minute class here and there. I did a little bit of translating at a local elementary school, so I used it outside. But yeah, that five months that I spent in Spain, I learned more in five months than ten years of school.

[00:06:01] Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you had to do it. That's, that's for sure. So. So how did you get into jiu jitsu?

[00:06:08] So my wife, when we were dating, I had to fight her off.

[00:06:13] Because you're such a stud, right? Is that what it was?

[00:06:15] No. Well. Well, yes. Am No, not back then. I got you know, I got bullied pretty severely growing up. So I, you know, found a lot of things that I think would, you know, mask the fact of I was an easy target. So I started lifting weights a lot in high school. And I got I got real lippy, real mouthy, thinking that that was going to protect me. And I was out drinking one night, four guys down in Denver. Uh, they. They kicked my ass pretty good. Emily's dad heard about that story, and he's a longtime martial artist, and he's like, Hey, maybe you should. Maybe you should check out martial arts because, you know, those muscles aren't going to protect my daughter. So I did five years of Krav Maga, and then I just decided to step into a jiu jitsu academy one day, not really having any idea what it was about. I thought I was going in there for a kickboxing class because it was an MMA gym and I'm like, Why are these guys rolling around in pajamas? That's weird. And they literally threw me out there with a kid half my age, half my size. This was back in 2007, and he did whatever he wanted with me. I mean, he had me tapping, crying, just humiliated. But I was hooked immediately.

[00:07:23] Yeah, well, I you know, I said I've been in all my life. People on here know that you I've been in a lot of, you know, real violent encounters. And it's a dangerous world out there and it's getting worse. That's the problem. I mean, we went through that period of knockout game where people were like, they just get one shot at some unsuspecting person and knock him out just for fun or for, I don't know, indoctrination or whatever they're trying to get into. So that's when I came out with brutal self-defense and then having been into the art much. But I do love Krav Maga and, you know, I like the stuff that's not real fine, super fine tuned because yeah, cut out.

[00:08:02] Krav was cool. There's no katas, there's no form, there's no belts. It's basically zero to murder very quickly. Yeah. And it comes, it comes from Israel, right? Like they say, hey, we're surrounded by our enemies and we all join the military and we need to know how to kill somebody very quickly if we're being attacked. And I liked that because I learned a lot pretty, pretty quickly. We never did anything on the ground. So that's why jiu jitsu was very appealing. Yeah, that's.

[00:08:31] That's one shortfall that you know I'm not the the agile on the ground so that's why I was interested I was asking before we started about, you know, how to protect yourself when you're, when you're on the ground. I have a lot of ways to do it, but they're not really they would get me kicked out of any gym, put it that. Absolutely.

[00:08:53] Absolutely.

[00:08:54] Yeah. But, um, so. The other really major accolade that I think that attaches to your business is Tim Farnsworth. Tell me about that.

[00:09:11] What a what an amazing story. So back in, let's see, 2007, that was probably 2007. We were doing a lot of door knocking and canvassing and very, you know, traditional, well-known painting company painting for the painting company. Yeah. Just a couple of years.

[00:09:26] Established this one of your major businesses?

[00:09:29] Yeah, that was my that was my first one.

[00:09:31] I got fired from a job I hated, and we launched a residential paint company with the last money we had. And I went out and I was just guerilla marketing like crazy. And I would drive by these high school kids holding signs for home builders. And then there was always somebody dressed up around tax season like the Statue of Liberty. And I go, What? I go, What a stupid thing. I go, Who would ever call a business? So and I kept saying, this is the dumbest thing ever. And then somebody dared me to do it. And I go, You know what? Maybe, maybe it works. So I. I tried it and we had the phone ringing off the hook. So we implemented that into into our marketing strategy. And then we ran into Tim. We had expanded the business down to the Denver area and we just ran into him. One day he was shaking a sign for another place of business and he waved to us, waved to him, took him to lunch. And then, yeah, the rest was history. He was with us for.

[00:10:22] Just over a decade.

[00:10:24] Oh, wow. Wow. It's no wonder he stays so skinny. Jeez.

[00:10:28] I couldn't do five minutes.

[00:10:29] What he was. He was doing. Did he ever.

[00:10:32] Go into any actual contests? Because they do have contests for that.

[00:10:36] You know, it was interesting. He he caught a lot of media attention. He was one of the most consistent guys. He was out there about four, five hours a day. And yeah, he got invited a lot by other sign spinning companies that had contests. We got a call from the Ellen DeGeneres Show back in like 2010, 2011. So, yeah, got a lot of attention. But he never, you know, he, he was always very loyal to the company and never really wanted to go anywhere else or do anything else.

[00:11:04] Wow.

[00:11:05] Now, this pirate patch that I mentioned earlier, was that like invented out of necessity to speed up your jobs for fixing damaged walls or what?

[00:11:17] We can't say that. But the reality was my my business partner in that venture, Dave Sward, he and I got in the painting business together in college, and back in 2010 we got fired from an interior paint job because we promised the customer that we could Oh yeah, take care of this drywall patch, no big deal. We'll figure it out. So we're trying to use these spray cans. They're absolutely horrible. And she got mad. She fired us. So we're sitting there defeated at a Qdoba burrito restaurant, and Dave's very technical, very inventor esque inventor like. So he draws this thing on a napkin and he goes, Hey, if we can make this, we could completely take care of this issue, this problem that we have in the business, and we wouldn't have to go spend $400 on a on a drywall contractor. So I said, man, go figure out a way to make it and we'll sell them. And he did. So we got a prototype. We figured out small quantity manufacturing and then large scale and yeah, we had it in home, not Home Depot. Sorry, we had it in Sherwin-Williams Ace Hardware just selling wholesale to them. And then we really hit it big on Amazon and it's really been just all online since then and it took quite a while to get it profitable. But it's a cool story. It was an idea on a napkin and everybody told us it would never make it to market.

[00:12:33] Well, I watched the video of it.

[00:12:35] And you made a hole in a wall disappear in a few minutes.

[00:12:39] I tell you that.

[00:12:40] And I know it's fun.

[00:12:43] Yeah. And it's not. I tell people.

[00:12:44] It's not perfect for every single kind of knockdown texture, but but about.

[00:12:48] About 90% of it. It's going to give you an amazing result. And, you know, we go read and respond to every message and review that we get that we can. And it's getting it's getting great reviews. I mean, it really it really works. It's 20 bucks. And as long as you clean it out when you're done, it'll it'll last you a long time.

[00:13:04] Is that for the whole kit with the scraper and all that?

[00:13:08] We started with the kits and what happened was just the shelf life of that drywall. Mud was. It was drying out. So we just sell the tool now and the only thing somebody needs to buy is a little putty knife and some joint compound. Yeah.

[00:13:22] Yeah. And so, so you didn't expand into different patterns.

[00:13:26] You know, we did.

[00:13:27] The, you know, it's an eight by eight stencil and we found that a lot of the patch patterns are that size or smaller, but you can actually for a bigger patch, you can do it in pieces and let it dry. Just the, the cost to manufacture a piece of metal that big getting bigger than an eight by eight, it just doesn't make it cost effective. You're actually going to be. Yeah I thought it was plastic.

[00:13:48] Yeah. No, it's metal. There's some.

[00:13:51] Knock offs there that are made of plastic, but plastic doesn't hold the form as well as as the metal that we have.

[00:13:57] Yeah.

[00:13:58] So, so then Mr. serial entrepreneur here folks got into the roofing business.

[00:14:05] Which, which I'll.

[00:14:06] Tell you, if there's a business.

[00:14:07] There's, there's a lot of rip offs in. It's roofing.

[00:14:10] How did you.

[00:14:11] Get into that?

[00:14:13] So when we started the painting business back in 2005, our first big experience with insurance claims from hail storms was oh eight Windsor tornado. We got hit by a big tornado. So we're, you know, out working for all of these roof contractors. And I'm just watching the way they're doing business. And it's just I mean, there's no integrity. They're just artists. And, you know, we found a couple of good ones that we had great relationships with. But we're standing there on the ground or on the ladder, you know, painting a house to only so high. And I'm like, We don't want to get on the roof. That's scary. That's expensive. It's work comp. So we were just scared of it, honestly, for a while. And then we just got so fed up leading into 2020. It was a big storm we had in 19. We had sent jobs to this roofer and just just weren't getting the service that we wanted for the clients and go, We've got to figure this out. So when COVID hit, we were in a really unique position where we had some time and some bandwidth to explore roofing. And we we partnered with a crew that's been doing this for decades, a supply buyer that's been amazing. American Roofing Supply. Got to give a shout out to Brandon Hitchcock. Just an amazing guy. Everybody kind of laughed at us. They said, Oh, you're going to get into this roofing thing. And Brandon was like, Just whatever you need, guys. He helped us get it off the ground. And it's it's rocking and rolling. So yeah, we're it was a great addition. And now we, you know, we can serve the customers better. They have one point of contact. They know what kind of reputation we have as a painting company. They're going to get the same people, same service, same same experience.

[00:15:43] Yeah. I mean, my.

[00:15:44] Dad, you know, was building houses, you.

[00:15:47] Know.

[00:15:47] Long time ago. So I've been around construction a lot. I don't pretend to know all the details, but. But I saw this guy on YouTube because this I've got 11,000ft² here, and I had exact same quality of stuff. Exact same stuff, everything. Class A contractors won bid was 61,001 was 31,000.

[00:16:11] And I'm thinking something's something's up here. All right. Yeah.

[00:16:16] Yeah, that's about right.

[00:16:17] It's same in painting. You know, you have a $5,000 paint job. You can have a window of 25 to 2000 500 to 8000. Yeah. And all kinds of personalities in between, too. I mean, it's. It's just the home trades, the home renovation remodel trades. They get a bad rap. But also say that, you know, many times the stereotypes are true. It's people that are great at the trade or the craft. Maybe, maybe not. But they they aren't great at business and they don't care to be. So there's really a lack in service. We we don't identify as painters. We are we're leaders. We're business owners that happen to paint and put on roofs. And we really focus on the foundations of business and running a solid business first.

[00:17:01] Yeah, that's a great way to look at it. I mean, I'm in this fancy neighborhood and as soon as they cross into my neighborhood, the.

[00:17:07] Price goes up by many thousands of bucks. But I.

[00:17:11] Mean, even even finding somebody, I needed a walkway built and it took two years to get somebody to come out here. I actually saw him working another job and blocked him in.

[00:17:22] So he couldn't get away and get over here to my house and give me a damn estimate.

[00:17:29] But now, you know, I made a joke about this painted baby thing. Painted a baby. Tell him that story. I saw you do it. I don't know if it was a TED Talk or something, but it was a cool story.

[00:17:43] Yeah. So in the.

[00:17:44] In the residential painting world, a normal sized paint contract, it's about $4,000. And back in 2011, I'm sitting across the table from from a customer that had worked for for prior self-made guy lives in a big beautiful mansion on the golf course. And he was receiving a proposal from me to paint a vacation home. It's this multi-million dollar home. It's this million dollar baby, he calls it, and had a $60,000 proposal right in front of him. And I'm sitting there selling the way that I really used to sell right feature benefit A+ five star shiny marketing brochure and keep pushing the contract across the table to get him to sign. And he keeps pushing it back and he just finally looks at me and he goes, Matt, cut the crap, your shiny marketing brochure. It's crap. He throws it across his office and he said, I want to know about a time that you screwed up and what you did about it. And he really threw me off and threw me for a loop because we're just not we're not taught to sell that way. We're not taught in society or conditioned in society to show up that way. Right? Look at social media. Everything's perfect and beautiful and wonderful. So he says, Just just tell me about a time you screwed up. I said, Fine. You know, we painted the wrong color on a house once. And he goes, That's not a big deal. That's easy to fix. I said, Fine. We painted the right color, but we actually painted it on the wrong house.

[00:19:02] Nice.

[00:19:03] And when I said that he leans in, he's very engaged, very curious. I had him hooked. He's like, Drama, want to hear about that? So there was something to that. So I share the story of.

[00:19:12] Literally sending a crew to 2712 blue sky.

[00:19:17] But there was a court in a drive. They went to the court. They were supposed to be at the drive. We completely prep and mask and prime this this house that we weren't supposed to. And, you know, and again, my goal is to get him to sign the contract. So he's he's again, still not signing it after this and go I don't know what else to tell you. And I really didn't want to share this story of one of our worst days in business, which is when we had a paint sprayer explode on a job site. And I told him, I said, Bill, I'm going to tell you this, but you have to sign the contract. I said, We painted a baby. And he just he leans in, He says, What did you do? And yeah, you know, Mama's coming out holding her baby, bringing the painters snacks and drinks, admiring the paint job. And on the very last day of the job, our painter Raul, he's getting ready to spray black semi-gloss paint on this garage door. And 1 in 1,000,000 that the paint gun jams. It's just a freak accident. It's never happened before. It's never happened after that. And the gun explodes everywhere. All over everything, including mama and baby. So he. He calls me hysterical. I race over to the job and we have, you know, a lot of chaos to triage. And, you know, the point of that story is.

[00:20:25] Anybody that's listening to this that is a business owner or.

[00:20:27] Going to be there's going to be a point when you have to declare and decide what are your company values, right? What is that vision? What is that existence statement? Oh, we're filled with integrity and honesty. We do the right thing. Well, you don't have to do the right thing when you're not faced with a situation where there's a right thing to do. So in this situation, like, we could either run, hide, deny, blame it on something else or make it right. And it was, you know, very expensive to fix the issue. We needed to make sure baby was.

[00:20:56] Dangerous.

[00:20:57] Dipping that baby into.

[00:20:58] Turpentine, isn't it?

[00:21:00] You know? Yeah, it was all.

[00:21:01] Water based, right?

[00:21:02] So we're like, take, take baby to the take baby to the bathtub and rinse baby off. But like, luckily nothing hit the baby or the mom's eyes, you know, anything that caused the damage. But, you know, the point is that we made it right. We had a big issue to correct. But so many times in business, we don't want to share those stories of mishap, of misfortune of when we showed up. Less than perfect. Your one star review. It's your best review to get encourage a business getting those and there's there's a strategy to how to.

[00:21:30] Respond up to a.

[00:21:30] Point.

[00:21:32] Don't go don't.

[00:21:32] Go do a bad job on purpose. But like if you screw something up and, you know, business business potential people that want to do business with you, they're like, all right, great. They did great work, Great work, great work. What happened here? The review that somebody writes, it's either a troll review or you've got something that actually was was a problem. And then the way you respond to and reply to that shows what you're made of. So so I'm telling Bill how we made things right. And he's like, okay, Matt. He's like, I've heard enough. I'm good. Sticks his hand across the table shakes it. You're the kind of guy I want to do business with. He goes, You know, I wanted to know you've never had a job. Go sideways with me. This is a big deal of a house for me. It's my million dollar baby. And I just want to know what happens if a shit show ensues. And he goes, That's a that's a pretty big shit show. He said, And yeah, so, you know, I left that sales engagement really baffled and confused and really went on this journey of experimenting and sharing these stories of imperfection, not trying to paint a picture of perfection all the time. And I've found that you, you connect with people on a deeper level, and those connections build deeper trust. And then that trust is what ultimately builds your business. So we've implemented sharing our Painted Baby stories personally, professionally, within everything we do here in the company. And it's been cool. And then I started the book, gosh, like six years ago and finally finished it at the beginning of this year. Yeah.

[00:22:57] And you know, I read a study that, you know, people do not believe five star reviews. Because if you have all five star reviews, they automatically think it's fake. The actual best level is like 4.7 is the most credible, believable. And I know when I go to buy something on Amazon, I immediately go to the one stars that's I hardly ever look at the five stars. I go right to the one stars. So I really go, you know, believe in that, that you got to show, you know, your downside. So. So tell them more about the book.

[00:23:35] Yeah. So so when I wrote, you know, when I wrote the book.

[00:23:38] I, I obviously had my painted baby story. And it really, it breaks down into what I call the.

[00:23:43] Six.

[00:23:44] C's of brave and vulnerable storytelling. So the first three are called the three C's of changing your story. So this experience I had with Bill when I was sitting there, he called me out. He made me consider how I was doing business. And then I committed to changing how I was doing that. And I really found that we were just trying to be so buttoned up all the time. We were overpromising underdelivering and when when I realized this, I go, okay, now we need there's power in storytelling. So the next three C's are the three C's of storytelling, So it's capture craft and communicate. Every business has, you know, a moment within their business story or that leader's personal story where they can capture the essence of something that went really bad. Craft a story around it, and then communicate it in such a way that it's going to drive that potential customer future team member vendor to to action and establishing relationships. So when when I wrote the book though, I said, you know, my story is great, let's go out and collect other stories from other business owners, business leaders. So the book is a collection of stories of people that have experienced some some really amazing adversity and came out on the other side of it. And it shows you a step by step process on how to call yourself out and just change. Don't you know, don't don't eliminate your shiny marketing brochure. That's great. Keep doing that. But don't forget about what makes you human and find a great story to show that to the person that that wants to trust you. And people want to trust a business, right? You go out there, you want to trust them. And when it when it's put on the line is when, you know, the painted baby happens or the latter drops off the roof, hits a car. Right. Whatever that situation is.

[00:25:27] Yeah. Those those brochures are great to keep, especially to make like paper airplanes because they're a little heavier stock.

[00:25:34] They fly better when they. Yeah.

[00:25:36] They're about $4 a $4 a page. Right.

[00:25:39] All right. So here, here you go. Put you on the spot.

[00:25:42] Give me your painted roof story.

[00:25:45] You know, it was it was really funny. So have a good friend. We have a we have a building that we purchased here for all the companies. We have the gym and all the all the businesses here and the gentleman I met who owned it, he's he's from Spain. So we hit it off. He's become a great friend. He had a hailstorm at his house. And we come out, we repaint the house, the gutters. He's got a detached shed. And he just said, Hey, I've already got shingles on the shed that that don't need to be replaced. Just match the shed to the to the house. So we go, great. So we you know, we call we order the shingles. It's the same shingles that are on the shed. And we do the job and everything's looking good and we're literally standing back there. Me, my project manager, Steven and the homeowners names Rodrigo. And we're standing there and we're like, Man.

[00:26:29] The roof looks.

[00:26:29] Beautiful. Look at look at the paint. And I'm going from the house over to the left looking at the shingles and go, Steven, do you see.

[00:26:37] The shingles over on that, on that shed and like ones.

[00:26:39] Black and then ones gray. So they were two totally different colors. And we're both standing there and Rodrigo doesn't see it and said, Hey, Rodrigo, go.

[00:26:47] Check, check that out. I go, They put the wrong shingle on your house.

[00:26:50] So like, how many businesses just just in that moment a customer doesn't know. Customer doesn't see it. He never would have if we didn't share it. But Steven and I are like, that's that's the wrong shingle. And I said, Hey. And he goes, Oh yeah. He goes, That is the wrong shingle.

[00:27:05] But but it looks pretty good.

[00:27:06] And we and we and we found out the supplier, they accidentally delivered the wrong shingle, so they were willing to fix it. But just, just moments like that, it's, you know, those little moments of, hey, we could have pulled one over there. And he trusts us more because we did that. He told me that he goes, you know, no one else would have would have said anything to me. I didn't know any better. So when you're faced with those moments in business, in life and leadership, that's really when you can stand out from the crowd.

[00:27:32] Yeah, well, come on.

[00:27:33] Over to Virginia.

[00:27:34] Beach until I get my roof done. That's right.

[00:27:37] I'll put the wrong shingle on it. Everything.

[00:27:39] Trust any of these guys over here? Um.

[00:27:42] I did see a very interesting, um, YouTube video where it was a roofer guy. He kind of exposes and tells people what to watch for on roof jobs and stuff. And he did this, this experiment where he put out a tarp and he bought like five different bundles of different shingles, you know, the brand, all the different brands. And then he, like, shook them for one minute on top of the TARP.

[00:28:10] Right?

[00:28:11] And then he and his assistant carefully scraped up all the aggregate or whatever it's called and weighed it and found out which shingle, you know, had the least stuff fall off of it, even when it was brand new. I can't remember the name of it, but which shingle it was. But boy, there was a big difference in the quality of the shingles.

[00:28:33] Yeah, there is. I mean.

[00:28:35] They make they make them all the way from builder grade up to the tip top top of the line. And yeah, that stuff makes a difference.

[00:28:41] Okay, come on, Matt, I want you to put some solar shingles on for me.

[00:28:45] We haven't messed with the solar. We have not gotten into the solar yet. That's a that's a big thing out here in Colorado.

[00:28:51] You got a lot of sun. So, yeah, there's a.

[00:28:53] There's a lot of solar.

[00:28:53] Out here.

[00:28:55] All right.

[00:28:55] So we're going to take a brief sponsor break. When we come back, we'll see how we get a hold of this painted baby book. And also, I'd like to hear what a typical day look like for this serial entrepreneur, which we love on this show. All right. So, folks, about 25 years ago or so, I kind of turned the Internet marketing guru world on its head and that people at my level were charging 50 or 100 grand up front.

[00:29:22] To.

[00:29:24] Help you with your small business. And I knew a lot of these guys. You give them 50 grand up front, they'd be hiding out in.

[00:29:30] Spain and and eating.

[00:29:32] Those, whatever those PR.

[00:29:34] Things are. I don't know what that is. So. So I said, I'm going to.

[00:29:39] That's too risky for small business people. I'm going to charge you just an entry fee. It's like ten times smaller and then I'm going to tie my success to your success. So for me to get my 50 grand, you have to net 200 grand. Well, people kind of like this and 1800 plus students later, it's still going strong. I mean, I could have quit.

[00:30:01] Around.

[00:30:02] 2000 when I hit multi-millionaire status, but I'm a crazy fanatic, small business helper lover. I just love it. I eat it up all day long. And so we have the longest running, most unique, most successful mentor program in the Internet and digital marketing ever. And I triple dare people to put their program up against mine and nobody will do it because they'd be embarrassed. So. So you get an immersion weekend at the retreat center here in Virginia Beach. We have a TV studio. We shoot your marketing videos for you. It's all one on one. We don't believe in group coaching because I have to. If you're advanced, I don't want you to be bored if I'm talking to a beginner and vice versa. And you get a scholarship to my school, which you can use yourself or for extra training or gift it to somebody. And with the way four year colleges are going now, you are crazy to shove your kid in there to get debt, you know, and learn how to protest is all they do. So. So check it out at great Internet marketing training.com. No high pressure. Get in touch with me. I'm easy to get a hold of and we'll talk about your future online.

[00:31:14] All right. Let's get back to the main event. We got Matt Shoup here, the serial entrepreneur. Since he was a kid like me, I think I started around ten years old myself and just done great things, doing great things with scholarships.

[00:31:29] And.

[00:31:29] And service and people in an ethical fashion, which is what we're all about here. Because a lot of people know, Matt, that I have a TV show in development in Hollywood called Scam Brigade. I go after bad people that, you know, hurt others. So. So what's a typical day look like for you, Matt?

[00:31:46] Yeah. Thanks for asking. I wake up about 4:35 a.m., depending on the day. Grab a spanish spanish coffee.

[00:31:54] Go to the go to the gym. So that's my.

[00:31:56] Time. Oh, and.

[00:31:56] What's that thing that I've been talking about? What is that? Oh, yeah. What is it? Yeah.

[00:32:01] Paella is.

[00:32:03] A traditional.

[00:32:04] Yeah, a traditional.

[00:32:05] Spanish dish made with rice, meat, vegetables, seafood. They're made very regionally. Right. So every different area of Spain kind of has their own kick on it, their own spin on it. So people would.

[00:32:17] That.

[00:32:17] Would be their specialty. You know, it says aspiring paella chef.

[00:32:23] So yeah. So I learned how to cook it.

[00:32:25] When I was over there living, my host mom gave me her recipe. So I love I love sharing the coffee that.

[00:32:32] You ran out and patented it probably, too.

[00:32:34] Not. Not yet. So. So working out. I'm working on. Yeah, I'm.

[00:32:37] Working on giving it my own twist and my own spin. And I love having big Spanish dinner parties here. You know, every every couple of months we'll invite people over and, you know, cook paella and a whole bunch of other dishes. Um, so that's been fun. But yeah, no, my, the, you know, my day starts, you know, early in the morning. I get done the most important things that, that I need to get done right now, for example, I'm on the pod match app, so I'm always reaching out, looking for great, great hosts like you to come on their show. And then kids get up, have breakfast, take them to school, and then my day, you know, it can vary. I can be going on a podcast or doing a speaking event here locally. Maybe I'm traveling, I'm a licensed realtor, so I may have some some real estate deals, some real estate work to do.

[00:33:18] Your businesses are run by others.

[00:33:21] Yeah. And I've got I've got a great team of people that that really help to run the daily operations of of things so I don't have to necessarily be with with or in any particular business. And you know I'm really focusing on, on growing them, making new connections with people that can help grow them. But then I still love to teach. So like one of my big passions is teaching kiddos and children's jiu jitsu. So three days a week I'm back here at the academy about 430 teaching, and then I'll stay and help with the adults class and then come home for family dinner. And you know, I work mostly Monday through Friday. I keep my weekends.

[00:33:57] You know, pretty close, tied for.

[00:33:59] Family. You know, if we've got some travel or some other events that are going on, we'll we'll, you know, shift schedules a little bit. But I, I love the fact that I can be in the morning breakfast with the kids home for dinner, you know, most most days out of the year.

[00:34:14] So your kids.

[00:34:15] In jiu jitsu.

[00:34:17] Oh, yeah, yeah.

[00:34:18] They, they started when they were about.

[00:34:20] 4 or 5. Wow.

[00:34:22] My son Riley's 15, and then my daughter Hayley is. Is 12. And, you know, I look back, I was talking to Riley the other day said, man, you know, some of the stuff I went through as a kid, you know, getting beat up and bullied and things like that, I go, That's just a bad feeling. And he goes, Yeah, just don't know what that feels like.

[00:34:38] And I'm like, That's so cool. Like, that's so cool. That and he's been he's been faced.

[00:34:43] With situations where somebody's trying to bully him and just the confidence and the grounding and everything and they're not.

[00:34:50] Out there going.

[00:34:51] And abusing the skills that they have. I mean, they're standing up for themselves and others. So just a really cool thing to to give them something that I never had and to give a lot of these kids tools that I didn't have until I was well into my adult years because, like bullying, that's that's serious business that really affects the kid in lots of different ways. And I know how it affected me. It wrecked my confidence and my certainty and just my belief that people were good in the world. That took me a long time to to to come around to the other side of that. And it definitely affected how I grew my business in the early days, too.

[00:35:25] Yeah, I found that when I said I had the nightclub, I saw the dark side of the world. Jeez. I mean, you were in.

[00:35:32] Constant, you know, it was, you know, seven days a week. You know, I got four days off a year, and it was out in no man's land and middle of the night with no sheriffs, no police around. And, you know, it.

[00:35:44] Was a it was an.

[00:35:45] Interesting experience. Let's put it that way.

[00:35:49] So how do you you must.

[00:35:50] Have you must have 100, 100 stories. Oh, yeah. Right.

[00:35:53] Tons of stories to share.

[00:35:54] Oh.

[00:35:54] Well, I'll tell you, one of them one of my favorites.

[00:35:56] Because, you know.

[00:35:58] I tried not to hurt people. I spent a lot of time with Aikijutsu and Kato because I'm going to get sued. You know, if if somebody causes trouble and they end up with bruises, I'm the the big.

[00:36:13] Shot guy.

[00:36:14] That's going to get sued. So I used a lot of wrist locks and and control techniques.

[00:36:18] But this one.

[00:36:19] Time you have to picture this, folks. So one of the tenants of self defense is you try to never be in between two bad guys. You want them to be, you know, have to climb over each other to get to you. So I'm in the lobby and I'm in between two bad guys, two drunk bikers that want to kill me.

[00:36:40] So. So the one is standing.

[00:36:42] By the front.

[00:36:43] Door.

[00:36:44] And the other one's in the lobby and I'm in between them. And so I'm thinking, Oh, man, I'm in bad. I'm in a bad situation here. You have to realize when you're not in a good.

[00:36:52] Place, you know? So.

[00:36:54] So the guy in the lobby. Started charging at me. So I just stepped, sidestepped, and I tipped over a chair in front of him.

[00:37:05] He tripped on it, flew over and knocked his buddy out the front door and I locked the front door. That was my that was my self-defense technique. It was like the Three Stooges, So. Oh, we got lots of stories like that. But anyway, so tell them. So Painted.

[00:37:22] Babies, the big book, it's out right now.

[00:37:24] Right?

[00:37:25] It is, Yeah. It's out on Amazon. Yeah. Paperback hardcover, the Audible's launching. And just. Just a few weeks. Don't know when this show will record that yourself. I did. Yeah. It was funny. The publisher said, Oh, you're not a professional voice actor, but said, you know, there's just there's something that that an author that reads their own book, people that know me or that hear me on a podcast, they're going to go buy the book. And then it's, you know, it's Morgan Freeman reading my book. You know, that just doesn't it just doesn't connect.

[00:37:52] No, it's.

[00:37:52] Absolutely true that if the author can do it, it's much better. I mean, I have I have one of the top guys in the country that advises me on.

[00:38:01] Audiobooks, and that's what he says. So so you can get it on Amazon and.

[00:38:08] Just super duper. Now, what if they need their house painted?

[00:38:13] Yeah.

[00:38:13] You know, so you can find. Yeah. All of the businesses that we have here, you can find everything on mattshoup.com.

[00:38:20] There's links to all the other companies. And from there, yeah, you can link to all the businesses. I've got some free tools for business and leadership growth for business owners and then you know, all of the info there about my books, my leadership retreats to Spain and then we'll be, we'll be launching a podcast soon.

[00:38:42] Wait a minute.

[00:38:42] Wait a minute. We didn't talk about the leadership trips. Tell us about that.

[00:38:46] Oh, yeah. You know, so I obviously love Spain and I love sharing the.

[00:38:50] Culture with people here. And one of my big dreams has always been to.

[00:38:54] Take.

[00:38:55] Groups of business owners, business leaders, just busy professionals over because it's such a different culture. You can unplug, unwind, disconnect. And then in my adventures back to Spain, I found the the Camino de Santiago. It's a 500 mile pilgrimage over 30, 40 days. You literally just walk all day town to town.

[00:39:16] From you know, southern France over the Pyrenees and across northern Spain from east to west. And what.

[00:39:23] We're doing is that.

[00:39:24] It's about 500 or 550, I think it's like 700km. And, you know, I've found that most business owners can't get away for 30 to 40 days, but they can for 7 or 8. So what we're going to do in September is we're going to take a small group over and hike the last 115km. So 70 miles, six days. And, you know, we're really just going to focus on we're so busy here in United States. So disconnecting, unplugging, recentering, revisioning and replenishing just so we come back with some real clear focus on just what's important in life. And, you know, it's a great physical challenge, great camaraderie between business leaders. We're going to do some coaching along the way. You know, and you've got food. I mean, just the food, the the culture, the history that we're all going to experience together. It's a once in a lifetime experience.

[00:40:17] Matt This is not fair. It's just not fair. I don't hear anything for.

[00:40:22] Fat, overweight people that could barely walk 500ft, 500. You know, you.

[00:40:27] Know what's funny is.

[00:40:28] Somebody asked me, well, how do you train for this? And I said, you just you just walk. I did this for the first time and the dude's joking. Like he's a shorter guy.

[00:40:38] You sell your cars.

[00:40:39] What you do?

[00:40:41] No, he just. He just.

[00:40:42] We walked it and.

[00:40:43] I mean, it's everybody goes at their own pace. And, I mean, I've seen it.

[00:40:46] Down to, you know, five year old.

[00:40:47] Kids with their family. They walk three, four miles a day. I had a 77 year old woman just come.

[00:40:54] Flying by me, passing us up last time I was there. But no mean people of all shapes.

[00:40:59] Sizes, ages, backgrounds. You just go. You go as far as you can every day.

[00:41:04] I'd wear out my shoes before I got that far. So gotta have good.

[00:41:07] Shoes, good shoes and then Vaseline on your feet with with a good pair of synthetic socks. I mean that's a there's definitely there's a laundry list of tips that make the experience and the hike go a lot better. Blisters will kill the experience. So you want to avoid those?

[00:41:23] Yeah.

[00:41:23] Wow.

[00:41:24] So what a what a guy. Yeah.

[00:41:26] So thanks so much for coming on, man.

[00:41:28] It's been really interesting. And we love serial entrepreneurs and you've created a lifestyle business that sounds like other than painting the occasional.

[00:41:38] Baby, you know, it seems like you got a good deal going.

[00:41:42] So to your listeners, you know, whatever whatever.

[00:41:45] You're getting ready to do, make sure that it.

[00:41:47] Makes your life better, more.

[00:41:49] Enjoyable and joyful. And think about business. Obviously, you've got to make money, pay the bills, support the family, leave something behind for your family. But like, just think about the story and the legacy you want to leave behind and how you want to contribute to others and impact the world. And we just we miss that many times in business. So just challenge everybody to think about that.

[00:42:08] Yeah, think about that and.

[00:42:10] Goes.

[00:42:11] Right along with it. If you're doing that, you can probably do a lot of good in the world for other people too. So thanks so much for coming on, man. Can't can't wait to hear the feedback on this episode. Been really powerful and tell your painted baby stories out there, folks. Don't try to be perfect. All right. We'll catch everybody on the next episode. We'll see you later.