Using Your Passion & Implementing Core Value Into Your Business With Matt Leitz

Passion can greatly impact everything you do, particularly in building and running a business. If you want to ensure the success of your profitable venture, implementing a strong core value in its foundation is necessary. In this episode, Matt Leitz discusses the importance of using your passion as fuel to run your business smoothly and letting your values lead your team toward success. He also explains how your impact is directly proportional to your income and the best approach in keeping the two aligned at all times.

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Using Your Passion & Implementing Core Value Into Your Business With Matt Leitz

On this episode, we have a guest that I am excited to speak to. He’s got an incredible background and a great story and I’m sure we’re going to learn a lot of things that are working and not working. Matt Leitz, I want to welcome you to the show. It’s such a pleasure to have you.

Thank you so much. I’m excited to talk about wealth because that’s a topic I’m still exploring and learning about myself. Hopefully, we can all make some progress together in this journey.

I love it. Before we get started, do you mind maybe telling our audience a little bit about yourself, your background, where you came from, and how you ended up in the seat you’re sitting in now on this show?

I’m excited to be in this seat. We just bought a new office building. After months of remodeling, this is one of my very first days of me sitting in this office, so I’m excited to be here.

Congratulations.

Thank you, but the journey to be in a position to get an office building was a rocky one as every entrepreneurial journey is. I got started in college. The first business I ever got recruited to was a multilevel marketing company. I was quite certain I was going to be wealthy and retired after three years. It didn’t work out as planned but it certainly got me inspired. I learned a lot. From there, I got interested in online businesses and this was the late 1990s, early 2000s. It was a much different time than you had to hire developers to build websites for you. I remember the first time I was asked what language I wanted a website programmed in.

My answer was English. I had no clue, didn’t know the first thing, failed for years, and took years to make my first dollar. Eventually, I started working with a good friend of mine who was flipping houses. I was like, “This guy doesn’t know what he’s doing but he’s making a lot of money.” I helped him grow his business and ultimately, we got the idea to start a social network for real estate investors to help them do deals together.

At the time, the name of our company was going to be RealEstateBaller.com and turned out that wasn’t a great name. That is when I got advised by a mentor that we needed to invest in a good domain name and saw that RealEstateInvestor.com was not being utilized. We made a strategic, much the same way that you can acquire real estate. Julie, I know that you do a lot of creative real estate deals. You can do the same thing for domain names and not a lot of people realize that. Over the years, I’ve acquired. RealEstateInvestor.com was a good one and BoardGames.com. We started a board game company that ultimately was a massive failure, at least financially.

That would’ve been fun though.

It was a lot of fun. I don’t want to say it was a failure but to make you feel better if you’re reading this and you’ve had some failures. To think somebody with a track record and an online business would fail starting a board game company called BoardGames.com. No matter what failures you’re having, just know that they don’t get any more embarrassing than that. It’s okay because from every failure always comes great opportunity.

In that process, we built a chatbot using a program called ManyChat. Not only did we build a bot for the board game company, but I also cofounded a company in the real estate education space called Clever Investor with Cody Sperber. We build a chatbot for that company and for a few other projects that we had and everyone was massively successful.

We ended up falling in love with chatbots. Went all-in and started a company called Bot Builders. I’m proud to say, we got the plaque back there on the wall that we hit the Inc 5000, just missed the Inc 500. We’ve got a small team that’s growing and that’s how we’ve gotten here. It’s a long and windy road.

As entrepreneurs, we’ve all been there. I’ve had several up and downs in 2022 alone. It’s part of the business. If it was easy, everybody would be an entrepreneur. It takes a lot of work.

As cliché as it sounds because everybody does want to get the results and enjoy the fruits of their labor but early on when I was trying to start my first online business. I remember the pain and agony and losing the money. Some of the best advice that I ever got is when I sat down with lunch with a mentor of mine. I was honestly choking up.

I was trying to not cry in front of somebody I respected and he gave me some tough love. He said, “Matt, the thing you got to realize is that it’s never going to get easier whether you make more money or less money. It’s always this. It’s always this mixture of tragedy and triumph. Go two steps back, one step forward and it never ends. Until you can learn to enjoy it, you’ll never have a breakthrough.”

Since that day, I’ve always focused a lot on my perspective on things. When things come my way and a lot of times and I know that you, Julie, and The Diamonds do a lot of live events. I’ll give you an example, I remember one time we were at an event and everything was melting down. It was a total catastrophe in terms of this event. I start laughing and going to work and handling it. Everybody’s like, “What? What’s your deal?” I’m like, “I’m halfway done fixing this problem while you folks are all freaking out over here.”

It’s recognizing if you’re reading this, it’s no surprise that, “This is going to be hard.” Of course, it’s going to be hard but when those things happen and you stop and recognize that, “I knew I can’t get to where I’m trying to go unless I go through this first.” That means I’m right where I need to. I might as well enjoy this bump in the road because if I’m not enjoying it, then throw in the towel. It’s not even worth it. It’s truly not. I know that’s cliché, enjoy the journey, whatever but you got to do it. You have to.

If you’re miserable every day, you’re not enjoying what you’re doing. You’re just unhappy, miserable and eventually, you’re going to probably end up walking away from what you’re doing.

That’s right, and you should.

Passion plays a big role in any business that you have or run.

In terms of passion, one of the best things I’ve ever heard on that topic, he had a show called Dirty Work.

I remember that, Joe Rowe.

He had a saying and I’m going to butcher this but it was, “You shouldn’t follow your passion but you should take it everywhere with you.” What’s that to say is that the perfect example for me was the board game business because I was following this passion but the reality of it is it wasn’t necessarily the passion for board games. It was the passion for building businesses because people are always looking for that thing, like, “How can I follow my passion?”

It’s like you can learn to have passion in everything that you’re doing. He’s interviewing these people, doing the dirtiest jobs in the world that are whistling at work and loving it. When you can recognize that it doesn’t have to be this exact thing that is “your passion” or your calling. A lot of times, these things change and morph.

The direction you start now isn’t necessarily where it’ll end up but it’s learning to recognize it’s that intersection of it may not be this thing. Do I want them to write on my gravestone, “Matt Leitz built great chatbots?” Probably not. I found this thing that we were good at and it did overlap with what a trend was and building an amazing team and servicing clients. Those are all things that you get passionate about no matter what the actual business idea is.

I agree. For me, it’s always about the client first. It’s never about me. It’s about the client and making sure they’re getting fulfilled or done appropriately for their business and messaging.

One of the things I’d like to share with people is getting clear on what you’re all about in terms of either your relationship with your customers, with your team, with the world. The way to do that is to create a set of company values and what you make all decisions. For us, we’ve got these values. A lot of times, companies do these things that nobody ever cares and maybe they review once a year but for us, our values are things that you hear repeated constantly.

In terms of our relationship with our customers, one of our values is we’re in this together. It’s this thing where it’s recognizing, “We help you. You help us. We’re a small business. You’re a small business. Another one of our values is growing together.” It’s by immediately indoctrinating all team members and not even paying clients. We’ll even share these things with our potential non-pay clients.

We do the same thing. My whole team right now is working on one client. None of them are involved with it but we’re a team. My team is stepping up and they have my back as a team to help. That goes whirlwinds ahead because now it is hard to find good reliable people. You got to treat them well.

Most entrepreneurs are a pain in the ***, like I’m a pain in the ***. There was a meeting where I’m like, “Nobody on my team is feeling me on this one particular topic.” It made me go, “Stop. Let’s anchor back.” When I address them now, it’s going to be like, “Let’s get back to, ‘What is our values? What are we all about?’” It’s got to be bigger than Matt Leitz or Julie Houston. It’s got to be, “What is this cause that we have?” At the end of the day, you got to create a movement if you want to create wealth. There’s got to be something to rally behind. This is way off cuff here but when I think about organizations, things come and go and change.

I learned about creating values from a mentor of mine who did the same process with ExxonMobil, Honda, and Procter & Gamble. At the end of the day, I sat on a small board with him and we became friends. It didn’t matter what I brought to him. Every single thing is always anchored back to the same exact thing. What are your values? How do your values answer this question? If you’re deviating from that, then you’re going to lose it.

If you’re reading this and you don’t have that set of values or if you have a set of values and it’s not something that’s real, it’s not on your wall. Your people aren’t repeating it on a regular basis. You might go, “It’s just me.” That’s even more reason to sit down and clarify that. If it’s just you, it’s pretty easy because you don’t have anybody to run it by. Even if you have one person, you could be the person that creates them but then you look at them, you agree to them and now we have a universal language in which we can grow from.

I did that with my team when we started our company. The first thing we did was sit down as a team to review what our core values are as a company and what our values are for our clients. It boils down to them first. It’s always about them.

Our number one company value is empowered to succeed. We tell anybody who works with us and this is both internally and externally, “If there’s ever a moment where you don’t feel empowered to get your desired result, you’ve got the training, the support, the tools, the guidance. It’s your responsibility to speak up and let it be known. We’re going to make sure to rectify that to make sure that you’ve got everything you need to be empowered to succeed because it’s vital that we remain in alignment with our values.”

I got to ask you, Matt, in all your years in entrepreneurship, is there one major big thing that was your holy crow moment, a learning experience that you could think of? I’m sure we all have them but is there anything in particular?

There are many.

You could give advice to our audience from something you’ve experienced.

I’ll come back to the example I made earlier of acquiring domains creatively. It’s realizing that you can get anything done. There’s no playbook for how to do things. The Diamonds are a perfect example. They took a situation where it’s like, “There’s this money, this overage that people don’t know about. If we can help people to go get that money, then I’ll do it on their behalf then they’ll give me a cut of what they make.” If you can get somebody else’s plan and save a lot of time, that’s great but realize that when you’re playing this game, you can set the rules as long as it’s a win-win and it’s not breaking the law. Whatever it is, it’s going to help achieve either.

Do not break the law.

I can’t come on their show. Realize that if there are better ways to do everything, figure it out, and put it together. There’s this feeling when you’re newer that it’s like, “I don’t know. I don’t have experience. I don’t have.” The truth is nobody freaking knows. I’ve created $3 multimillion businesses and there are quite a few things that I could be considered an expert in but there’s constantly like, “I have no idea of what I’m supposed to do.”

You wake up and you figure it. With a smile on your face and if you got resources, cool. If you can take a shortcut, do it. Great. At the end of the day, it’s just go. As long as you’re doing right by people, keep going and make moves. That’s the big thing. Make moves and recognize how business often comes in breakthroughs. That’s a very important concept for people to wrap their heads around.

I was making a video talking about my history in business and I was in my garage. I found all my old tax returns. It was such an exciting moment because I saw my first year in business was $17. The way I made $17 is I bought a t-shirt for myself, so that wasn’t even real $17. That was me. The second year was negative $134. I’m like, “I don’t even know how that line could have a negative,” but I got one there. In the third year, I made $37,000 and that was a breakthrough.

Was I rich? No, but that’s coming from making nothing to $37,000. The year after that, I went from $37,000 to $1.5 million, breakthrough. It’s this thing where it’s discouraging if you think, “I’m likely to go through a lot of muck and not have any major jumps.” You have to have that hope that understanding and real belief that at any moment you could pop it. All it takes is one thing that converts that clicks. If you can take one thing, it could be a webinar, a sales page, or coaching.

A lead magnet.

It could be one thing that pops. You’ve got to be patient in looking for that thing and keep trying things but then when you find that thing, you got to drill it as hard and as deep as you possibly can. there are a lot of marketers on here. One of the best pieces of advice that I ever got was we paid to go to a mastermind event with Ryan Deiss and Perry Belcher.

For us, it was early in our business. It was a very big deal. We came in and they were like, “What do you need help with?” We’re like, “We’ve got this product that’s doing well. We released it so we don’t need to worry about that. We’ve got this one over here that’s struggling, so we could use some help on that.” Perry goes, “That’s your problem.” We said, “What do you mean?” He goes, “You’re asking for help on the one that’s not doing well instead of the one that is doing well.”

It’s something I often requote, he said, “You’ve got to starve the ponies and feed the stallions. When you find that winner, you go all-in and push everything you’ve got in on it.” That was our first multimillion-dollar product for that company. It was like, “We can optimize this thing that’s got traction. That’s making us money and that optimization would take the same amount of work as this one over here. That might never even take off. It might never go anywhere but this has already proven that it’s got some legs.”

If you can take one thing and optimize it, think about The Diamonds. They don’t have eighteen webinars. They’ve got one really good product. I’m sure they have more but that’s their lead edge because you can always add things on the back end. That’s the important thing to realize. You can always add more stuff but if you don’t have one thing that’s giving you a way to predictably grow and scale your business, then none of the other stuff matters at all.

That stuff should get a small fraction of your time and attention. Your energy needs to go on the thing that’s going to give you. It’s the tip of the spear. It’s the thing that’s going to bring the people in and you grow from there. Until you have that thing, you got to focus everything you got on getting that thing that’s going to give you the growth.

That’s an incredible feedback. I love how you’ve been so open and pulling back the curtain on things because it’s amazing to hear everybody’s entrepreneurial journey. It’s good for all the viewers, especially now, to see there’s a world of opportunity out there for you if you have the desire to take the entrepreneurial path.

You can enjoy getting beat up knowing that breakthrough awaits. When it comes, you celebrate. You got to enjoy it. Every time you get a win, it’s a sign from the universe, “Keep going. Let’s go.” Show up every day and smile.

Is there any 1 or 2 books you would recommend for our readers to read? I like to ask this occasionally because I know us entrepreneurs are always reading or most of us are reading some.

I don’t read a ton of books, admittedly. You think partially because I don’t have a very good attention span and I’m also not a very good reader. Although, I’m getting better over the years. I was diagnosed. I had a little bit of dyslexia as a kid. I’ll listen to stuff more than I’ll physically read it. It depends on where you are in your journey. If you’re looking for a little bit of inspiration on your path, The Alchemist is an amazing book to give you that inspiration and guidance to go find your thing. I probably would recommend a lot of the same elementary, as it may sound. If you haven’t read How to Win Friends & Influence People, it’s a staple.

I have my whole team reading that book now.

At the end of the day, if you mastered that book, you don’t need a whole lot of others. That’s as good as it gets but there are so many good books. I read a little bit differently. When I need something, I go to Amazon. I find what it is that I need. My wife’s like, “Why do you have all these books that you don’t read?” I rarely ever pick up a book and read it from cover to cover but I very frequently go, “I need a little bit of inspiration on the topic of abundance.”

This is the book that I recommended to you, The Alchemist. This is a little different. It’s a story but I have this uncanny tendency to almost get called to what it is that I need to read at the right moment. There’s so much value. I open up a book and I’m like, “I’ll find what it is that I need when I need it.” Maybe I’m discouraging people from reading.

Not at all. You’re letting people know that it’s okay. You don’t have to read books all the time. You can listen to audio. There are other methods and ways to get the information that you need.

A hell of a lot of people way smarter than me would say that that’s horrible advice and that you should read a book every week. I don’t know. The older I’m getting, I’m realizing I got to go with what works for me a little bit more and quit. I want to improve and get better but sometimes, when I try to do things in a particular way that isn’t my style, it’s painful. At the end of the day, it doesn’t get me where I want to go faster.

For our readers, again, anything we discussed here with Matt, you can get more information at UndergroundWealthSecrets.net/Leitz and we’ll have more information about everything that Matt and I discussed. Matt, before we close, do you have any final words you’d like to share with our audience?

Wealth is a great topic and I’ve given a lot of advice here that’s probably not as pragmatic as maybe people want, especially since I teach chatbots. If you want to learn about a specific skill, go learn it. The topic of abundance, for example, here are two books written by two of the leading thought leaders of our time. This one is Deepak Chopra and this one is Peter Diamandis. This is the guy who taught Elon how to go into space.

These two books, even though they literally have the exact same title are coming from completely different perspectives. Peter Diamandis is like, “If we want to get abundance, what do we physically need to do to achieve that? We need to feed people. We need to get energy. We need to do these things.” Whereas, Deepak Chopra is, “There’s never-ending abundances all around you. You need to learn how to tap into it. You need to look at it from the inside out.”

I do think that a very big piece of this is that no matter what you’re trying to do, you’re getting onto this because you’re looking to generate wealth. I know plenty of people with lots of money who are not happy. I do believe that the very first step is learning to appreciate and recognize everything that you got that’s amazing. That can happen with the smallest habits. Every morning when I wake up and I pour my glass of water, I take 30 seconds to have some appreciation for everything that I have. If you’re reading this, chances are that many people around the world would consider you already to be wealthy.

It’s this thing where you want to go for more. We’re not trying to compare ourselves to poppers here but knowing that if you are not feeling that level of appreciation for everything that you have, then it’s not going to matter if you have a little bit more. If you can continuously keep yourself in check, you’ll immediately attract more abundance to you in your life because of the fact that you’re recognizing that you’re already in that place. I do think that there’s a little bit of forward work that needs to happen along with the outward work because otherwise, you’re going to be running and going.

When you get there, you’re ultimately going to realize that you’re not any better off than you were because you still haven’t adapted that level of understanding of what matters at the end of the day anyway. That’s how we started our conversation. Realize that sometimes you’re doing things because you think you ought to do them, you should do them, or you need to do them when the reality is you don’t have to do any of it. It’s all in how you want to go about doing it. Maybe sometimes it’s a path that is more proven but if you take that path and you’re not happy, it doesn’t matter anyway. Always continually checking in as you go.

Matt, thank you so much for being a guest on Underground Wealth Secrets. It is such an honor having you. You shared some incredible feedback and things that you’re utilizing in your own personal business and yourself. That was a great perspective to see. It was a refreshing perspective.

I probably didn’t give enough tips on Facebook Ads.

It refreshing to see you focusing on your purpose and a lot of plays on the inside as well as your actions on the outside. That’s a big piece. A lot of people don’t cover that. Thank you for that.

You’re welcome. Thank you.

You are always a blast when we get to connect.

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About Matt Leitz

I’m a lifelong entrepreneur with more than my share of failures. My business philosophy in a nutshell: your impact is directly proportionate to your income. Through the years we’ve built three successful ventures and hit the Inc 5000 list 5 separate times. I’ve been published in Entrepreneur, Inc and Success and appeared on ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox.

Our current company BotBuilders recently hit the Inc list at #647. We provide pre-built, customizable chatbots for all types of businesses that generate leads, increase sales and improve support. Our bots are inexpensive and allow anyone to produce results using automation, even without technical skills.

At the end of the day, we believe that technology can bring us closer together. We create experiences that are fun and facilitate real human connection.

ADDITIONAL SKILLS: Public Speaking, Sales, Marketing, Copywriting, Webinars, Events, Sales Funnels, Advertising, SEO, Email.