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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 ...