Episode 147 – Alex Sanfilippo

---

Automated Transcription

---

Richard Matthews
Heroes are an inspiring group of people, every one of them from the larger than life comic book heroes you see on the big silver screen, the everyday heroes that let us live the privileged lives we do. Every hero has a story to tell, the doctor saving lives at your local hospital, the war veteran down the street, who risked his life for our freedom to the police officers and the firefighters who risked their safety to ensure ours every hero is special and every story worth telling. But there was one class of heroes that I think is often ignored the entrepreneur, the creator, the producer, the ones who look at the problems in this world and think to themselves, you know what I can fix that I can help people I can make a difference. And they go out and do exactly that by creating a new product or introducing a new service. Some go on to change the world, others make a world of difference to their customers. Welcome to the Hero Show. Join us as we pull back the masks on the world’s finest hero preneurs and learn the secrets to their powers their success and their influence. So you can use those secrets to attract more sales, make more money and experience more freedom in your business. I’m your host, Richard Matthews, and we are on in 3…2…1…

Hello and welcome back to The Hero Show. My name is Richard Matthews and I have the pleasure of having Alex Sanfilippo on the line. Did I pronounce that right?

Alex Sanfilippo
Not quite Sanfilippo.

Richard Matthews
There we go. Did I get it right that time? Sanfilippo Yeah, you got it. Yeah, there we go. Got it right the second time. Awesome. Glad to have you here. So for those of you guys have been following along with our journeys, we’re up in South Carolina for the holidays this year moving a little bit from our COVID stuckness in Florida. I hear you’re in Florida, right is that where you’re at now?

Alex Sanfilippo
Yeah, Jacksonville, Florida. Just pretty close to the ocean. Beautiful place. It’s nice weather. I think I’ve got a little bit warmer weather than you do now.

Richard Matthews
My favorite thing about Jacksonville, we stayed there a couple of years ago for Thanksgiving. And we were staying in a little tiny RV park like in the middle of the city. And I can’t remember exactly what it was called. But we drive into the RV park. And this little old guy who owns it I mean like really old super nice guy but was probably pushing 115 is what it looked like. And he’s like giving us the tour and taking us around the thing and it gives us the map. And he’s okay, so over here is like there’s a walking path that goes down to the river. He’s like your kids can swim there. There’s a little dock there’s all sorts of swimming and he’s like, just so you know, there’s alligators in there. But if you avoid the alligators is a great place to swim. I was just like wait, swim with alligators Who does that?

Alex Sanfilippo
Florida man does it, he met Florida man that day congratulations!

Richard Matthews
Yeah I met Florida man Florida man swims with alligators. I was like, yeah, that’s not happening. So you know, maybe it’s something they used to do back in the day. So who knows?

Alex Sanfilippo
I’ve never done that. But it doesn’t surprise me. We hear stories about that all the time. My wife sent me a video the other day. And the headline of it was Florida man jumps in water to save dog from alligator and literally this guy. There was a video, he jumped in the water and he has a cigar in his mouth. He doesn’t take the cigar out of his mouth, he grabs the alligator opens it up, pulls the dog out throws the dog on the shore and then throws the alligator and walks out. And just like that. I’m like this is where I live like but you know the listeners they kind of get a different perspective of me I live close to the ocean and we’re a little bit different that close to the water. You get some more of like a beach guide and like a swamp Florida man. All right.

Richard Matthews
Yeah, so we definitely, because we went all up and down the West Coast and the East Coast and then went all through the center of Florida and very different cultures. Despite only being like an hour apart.

Alex Sanfilippo
Yes. Very different. That’s, that’s the only way you can describe it is very different.

Richard Matthews
But anyways, Florida was super cool love staying there. If you’re gonna get stuck somewhere for all of COVID, Florida is a great place to do it. It’s not a bad spot. Awesome. So let me go ahead and introduce you for our audience who doesn’t know who you are. So Alex is the host of the top of funnel entrepreneurship podcast Creating a Brand which can be found at creatingabrand.com. You’re also the founder of podmatch.com, which is a free service that automatically matches podcast guests, and hosts together for interviews, which I believe our team actually might use to book some of our guests, which is pretty cool. So what I want to do to start off with Alex is why don’t you tell me a little bit about what your business is like now? What you’re known for? Who you actually serve, how you drive revenue, that kind of stuff?

Alex Sanfilippo
Yeah, sure. So creating a brand on that side of things, which is my podcast, it’s really top of funnel, which is usually what podcasts are. So it’s really my free educational element. And I started it because I saw that there was people who were looking for that type of content. So it’s more of like a masterclass style podcast. So I’ll bring a guest on a subject matter expert. And we’ll just dive deep into that topic. And there’s not a lot of conversation back and forth is more so like, Hey, give us the five ways to do this, or five points for that. And that’s really the focus of it. And it’s done really well. I’ve been really fortunate to just have a great audience for that podcast and just some amazing guests. Come on. So that’s been really fun. And what kind of came out of that was PodMatch because I realized it is kind of difficult to find guests sometimes. I remember when I first got started, Richard, you probably remember this too. When you first got started. It’s like, will you be a guest? We were like, what Why? You know, like who are you? And why? How’d you get my email address, all these different things. And so I just kind of thought there needed to be a way that we could actually help people do that. That’s what PodMatch is. So PodMatch automatically. It connects guests and hosts together. It’s actually very similar to like an online dating app. But I’ve been married too long to use any of those. I know I age myself a little bit there by saying that, but everyone’s like, Oh, this is kind of like Tinder. But for podcasters. I’m like, sure. never actually use Tinder. But it sounds like that’s probably right. Sounds similar. Yeah. So we kind of broke into two tiers, we have a free version, because I desire to be a service to an industry that love that’s been really kind to me. And we also have a paid plan, professional plan, as we call it. And that’s more for like the daily podcasters, or the guests that has a new book that’s coming out that they really want to get in front of just a ton of people. And that’s that’s the other option available. So the basic plan, the professional plan, and both work really great. We’re getting really good feedback from our members with it.

Richard Matthews
Awesome. That’s really good. I was just telling my staff the other day that we’re going to really ramp up my podcast guest interviews this next year, because we run a service called push button podcasts, which is a full service podcasting agency, we do a white glove service for podcasters that basically goes everything from the stop record button all the way through editing and creation of social media stuff to publishing and promoting and advertising and the whole bit, so they don’t have to do anything for their podcast other than show up and record. And so we’re teaching a whole thing called, how you build a content machine using a podcast as the base is we’re gonna be doing a lot of podcasting, going on other people’s shows this next year to talk about that service and talk about, how you build a content machine from a podcast. So anyways, we’ll probably be a be stepping up our game a little bit and take advantage of what you guys do over there PodMatch. And that’s a great service that you’re doing.

Alex Sanfilippo
I’ll tell you what it’s so needed for me, doing all of the things is I’ll just call it, which I’ve sub a lot of it out. But initially, I was doing it all because that’s kind of where most of us start. And it’s it’s a pain to do everything podcast and related, I wanted to do interviews, and then I’m like, oh, but there’s 35 things I have to do after an interview in order to actually get it out in front the world and somebody actually see it. So the service you guys are providing that white glove service is really cool. So I’m excited you all are doing that.

Richard Matthews
35 is putting it mildly. Yes. So what we’ve worked out is it’s an average of 10 to 15 hours of work depending on how quick you are for every single hour of content you produce on your podcast. And so people who are doing a podcast a week, it’s almost a full time job. And but you have to have a full time job where you have people who have skills in audio editing and video editing and graphic design and writing and social media is like finding one person who can do all of that is really really difficult. And it’s one of the things that stopped our podcasts from being able to go for the first couple of years because I was trying to do all of that. And it was just a pain in the rear end. Anyways podcasting is a is a super cool thing. And I know that just the way that the business community is going, was it this last year 2019 podcasting surpassed radio listenership Is that right?

Alex Sanfilippo
Yeah, I believe so. And this year, it took off even more over summer, like blew up. I mean, podcasting has just been the last couple years in particular, like, it’s kind of crazy that podcasting is 15 years old, and the last two years have just shot through the roof with listenership like you can’t go anywhere now. And people not be talking about a podcast they heard, or oh I’ve this podcast episode that I heard. And yeah, it’s pretty wild. But it’s definitely grown a lot.

Richard Matthews
And what’s interesting too, is podcast. The term podcast has grown from like online radio show to include online video shows that may or may not be hosted on iTunes, something like that, though, a lot of people on YouTube are calling their shows podcasts now on Facebook, live shows are calling their shows podcasts. And so it sort of grown to include this, like multimedia, regular show content, whether that’s politics, or, the show we have here, which is talking to hero stories and stuff like that. It’s just turned into a huge industry. And it’s only going to continue going.

Alex Sanfilippo
Yeah, it’s really cool to be watching and to be to be part of it is really cool. It’s a great time to get in. For anybody who’s like been thinking about it, it’s a good time to jump into podcasting.

Richard Matthews
So from a business standpoint, is PodMatch your primary revenue driver in your business? Yes, it is. Yep. And that’s a full time for you?

Alex Sanfilippo
Yeah, as of the time of recording this 10 days ago. So I’m 10 days into to doing it full time.

Richard Matthews
Awesome. And do you guys do you have any full time staff other than yourself to run that service?

Alex Sanfilippo
It’s me, my wife and a business partner. And he and I are 50/50 at it and my wife handles all the administration right now.

Richard Matthews
There’s three of you so far.

Alex Sanfilippo
Yeah, we’re looking the first week of January to hire our first VA. We’re finishing up like the SOP’s for them. So standard operating procedure, writing the instruction and things like that. So yeah, we’re looking to add our First Person, January and then we’ve got a CPA that we’re partnering with and an attorney as well that works with us. Of course, those are contracted right now we are not at the point where we’d want to hire them. But those are kind of like our contractors that that we do some regular meetings with and make sure that we’re keeping up to par on from a tax standpoint, a legal standpoint.

Richard Matthews
Yeah, it’s a lot of fun. I need to do some of that stuff with the tax stuff at the end of the year. And I’m like, oh, man, not a fan of taxes. But Yep. So what I want to find out from you, then, is your origin story. So I say on this show, every good comic book hero has an origin story. It’s the thing that made them the hero they are today. And were you born a hero? Or were you bit by a radioactive spider that made you want to get into, podcasting become an entrepreneur? Or did you start in a job and eventually, move into this whole entrepreneur space? Basically, you have a story, we want to know what it is.

Alex Sanfilippo
Yeah, I knew you were gonna ask this question, because you asked this question. And I wasn’t quite sure how to answer it. Because I started off like born a hero. But I lost my way, I guess you could say, and, and went into the corporate world, which is nothing wrong with the corporate world wher I’ve learned a ton from it. But I kind of made my way back to entrepreneurship many years later, but so I’m kind of like a hybrid there, if you will.

Richard Matthews
Yeah. So when did you start your first business then?

Alex Sanfilippo
Yeah, so I start my first business at 10 years old. It was really interesting because I got into selling used golf balls. I lived in a neighborhood that had a golf course across the street, I remember one day, I’d like to keep the story kind of brief here. My dad was driving home, I was in the passenger seat. I saw some kids on lemonade on the side. I’m like, What are they doing? Can I do that? And my dad’s like, my dad was an entrepreneur too. He’s like, absolutely, you can like have mom go buy you this stuff. And all that. So I sat out there. And as a 10 year old kid actually did the math in my head, I was sitting around selling and I’m like, I’m gonna sell like 12 of these at my current pace before I have to go inside. And my mom paid this much for the material. And this is basically what I’m making per hour. And there’s, there’s no profit in this, why am I doing this. While I’m doing this I’m watching the golfers that are pretty close to them. And they were kind of interested in lemonade to something like come over and get lemonade, because we’re trying to sell the people just driving by, I was like golfers are interested in let’s move it over there. So we moved it over there. We sold a lot more, but I was watching them. And this is a neighborhood golf course. So like Tiger Woods isn’t playing in this neighborhood, right? Every other golfer is hitting the ball in the water and then grabbing another one and hitting the water and then throwing one over the lake and trying to hit it from there. So I was like, man, I wonder if we could like get those golf balls out. Because turns out, they’re pretty expensive. Like one of the guys was telling us he paid like $3 for each of those balls, and he lost three of them at one time. It’s $9. It’s more than making an hour. So more or less, what I did is I ended up getting a golf ball retriever and started pulling out the water and just clean him up and then sat out there with lemonade and golf balls to see if anyone would want him. And sure enough, these golfers started buying them. So I employed my brother and my neighbor. And we just started like creating a system. So it was like after the golf course closed for one hour every day, we’d go grab as many as we could we clean them the next morning and Saturday morning is when we’d like be selling it all. So like we just kind of get over inventory all week and sell on Saturday. But I can remember the 10 year old kid this is from 10 to 12. Because after the age of 12, you’re not really that cute anymore. And you can’t get away with sitting there selling golf balls anymore. But this worked for me when I was a cute kid, right. And I remember we would make about $100 on a Saturday morning, which was great. So we’d be bringing $300 for the three of us. And that was a great business when the rest of kids and neighborhood were making $4 and $5 selling lemonade. And that was kind of like what opened me up to entrepreneurship. And what I thought was really cool about that is up till that point. I mean, I was only 10 so like, I still had time to like develop skills, but I wasn’t like very smart when it came to school. And my brothers were musicians, and I didn’t have that talent. And I wasn’t good at video games. Like I was kind of like an awkward kid man. I was like, what am I good at? everyone else around me has some skill. And I realized, Oh, I’m great at business. And without ever being told like my brother and my neighbor and anyone else ever joined us. They always looked at me as the leader and like, okay, Alex, how much we price for? Like, how can we sell this to them? And like we’re 10 year old kids talking about this, of course. And it was one of the things I really discovered like a passion for entrepreneurship at that age.

Richard Matthews
That’s awesome. So my story is sort of similar. I was 13. And I had just read the Rich Dad Poor Dad books, and had a whole whole pile of things that I had ideas, lots of them. And I convinced my dad to give me a $50 loan because he wasn’t going to give me money to buy materials. But I was like if you give me a $50 loan, I’ll pay you 10% interest when I get it back, right that kind of thing. And he agreed to that and then he did loan me the ride to the big box store. So I gave me the right a big box store. So I went down and we bought that all the big candies. So it was like the big giant nerd ropes and the big 100 grand bars, the big snicker bars and all this stuff that you can’t get on campus because I was a freshman in high school. And I brought all my candy to school and a big bag and it was like the quintessential guy on the New York street showing them the wares under there. And it was my candy bag and I sold probably 15 $100 worth of candy during this. Before I tell people I got shut down by my first government agency at 13 because they told me I wasn’t allowed to sell on campus without a business license

Alex Sanfilippo
Public school system and it got you.

Richard Matthews
And because I was 13 I couldn’t have a business life. So I was not allowed to sell anymore. But anyways, I remember like the first lesson that I had on that was on the whole revenue versus profits, because I bought candy for $50. And I sold it all. And I had $100. And then I had to pay my dad back $50 and the $10 that I owed him for, the interest or whatever, $5 can’t remember what it was. And then I had to go and restock my inventory. And I had even less money than I started with. And so like, I had inventory, but I had no dollars. I was like, what just happened? Like, I sold all this stuff, and I have no money. And I had to go back through the Rich Dad Poor Dad book and be I got the next one. And I was trying to figure out what the hell happened. And you’re like, learn the difference between revenue and profits. Because I didn’t know.

Alex Sanfilippo
Man. You’re brilliant, though. Cuz you also learned about inventory costs. I mean, you already passed at 13 what everyone at shark tank has a problem with, right? They show up. They’re like, we don’t have any money. We can’t figure out why. And like, how much inventory do you have? Right? Like, it’s the first question gets asked you figure this out at 13. You must be a genius, Richard. That’s crazy.

Richard Matthews
Well, anyways, it was just a hard lesson. Because I was like, I sold all this stuff. And I was, I thought I was rich. And then I had to pay everything back and buy inventory sell more. And I had no money. And I was like, What happened? Like, hold on a minute. So I learned about inventory cost 13. But yeah, that’s how I got started in the entrepreneurship world. So anyways, it’s always fun to find other people who started this space.

Alex Sanfilippo
We both got really cool stories. Man, I love hearing that. Thank you for sharing that. It’s cool. Absolutely.

Richard Matthews
So my next question for you, then it’s about your superpowers, right. So every iconic hero has a superpower, whether that’s a fancy flying suit made by genius intellect, or the ability to call down Thunder from the sky. Heroes have what I call a zone of genius, which is either a skill or a set of skills that you were born with, or you developed over a course of time, that really energize all your other skills. It’s the one skill that sort of connects everything else together. And it’s a superpower that sets you apart and lets you help your clients to slay their villains, so to speak, and come out on top in their own journeys. So with that sort of framing, what do you think your superpower is in business?

Alex Sanfilippo
like that you use the term zone of genius, it makes me think of a Gay Hendricks, who has the big leap, that’s what he calls you have a zone of excellence and his zone of genius. And I think for many years, I was actually not I know, I’m kind of going off course, here just a little bit. But for many years, I was stuck in my zone of excellence. And that’s like, what pulled me away from entrepreneurship was actually getting into a big corporate job was really good at almost everything. I don’t mean to sound like prideful by saying that. But almost everything came natural to me. I mean, I ran a sales team, I ran commercial operations, like there’s all these different things that like, if I got into them, they would do exceptionally well. And it’s because I put 110% in all the time. But business again, that’s what came natural to me. But I realized years later that was in what would be considered like a zone of excellence, I was good there. But it wasn’t my superpower, I wasn’t in my zone of genius, or where I was like really able to thrive. And I realized it because like a lot of it because of the the bureaucracy, of course, like it’s involved in it, right? Like a big corporate billion dollar company, you have to wait six months to do an idea. And it just wasn’t like my area. So but what I realized later on, and as I’ve gotten more and more into entrepreneurship space, starting the podcast, starting PodMatch. doing all these things, I realized where I’m really good, is actually responding to other people’s needs. And seeing an idea from that. I think that many entrepreneurs, we kind of get a bad rap, if you will, because we have these ideas, and we want to push it out to the world and we get salesy or really marketing and heavy about them, instead of first saying, Okay, what is the need that somebody actually has? Can I find an actual human with that need? And if I can I build an idea off of that need as a response, instead of just being, here’s my idea world, take it, buy it, use it, instead, I’d say like, hey, what are you struggling with? How can I help? And I think that if I had one superpower, it’d be that ability to be able to talk to somebody and sit down and really understand the root problem they’re having, and find some sort of trending offer a solution based off that problem that I’m seeing.

Richard Matthews
Yeah, that’s really excellent. So yesterday, I was on another podcast. And it was a young college guy who wants to get into entrepreneurship, and start a business. And his first thought was, I’m going to start a podcast and interview entrepreneurs and learn everything I can. I was like, genius. Good on you kind of thing. And one of his questions was, how do you build a business? How would you start? And I was like, my answer to that question was essentially, you have to find a group of people that have a couple of like things. First thing is they need to have a problem that’s causing them pain. The second thing is they should have money and have a willingness to spend that money to solve their problem. You get those two things. Then your other part of the business is you develop a unique solution that solves that problem. And then your last part of the business is figuring out how you can get that solution to that market. That’s your marketing and your message and all that kind of stuff. That’s all there is really to business is those three things. It’s group of people with problem, money, willingness to solve that problem, unique solution, and then marketing that connects those things. Everything else is just like stuff you have to figure out along the way.

Alex Sanfilippo
You actually got into that last part of like actually marketing it to him because you have to say it in a way that they can understand. You had Tim Fitzpatrick, I think it was Episode 131 with him. And that was really good. Like if anyone’s like, Oh, this sounds really interesting what Richard just said, seriously go back and listen to that episode, because that was awesome, where you guys really got into like, the words to use to really get that idea in front of the right people. But anyway, I don’t mean to sound like an advertisement for you. I just really liked that episode, and Tim’s a friend. So like, I had to throw it out there.

Richard Matthews
Yeah, Tim’s a good guy. And I think I’m not sure if it was Tim, but I think we may have had him on for our second episode, and I don’t remember off the show. Okay. But anyways, that’s a really unique thing for having as a superpower is just realizing, not everyone sees that. And it’s particularly rare in the entrepreneurship world as you said, a lot of people get into, they start with the idea. And then they try and go and find a market for it, instead of starting with the market, and then building something that helps solve that markets problem, which is a much different way to build a business. But it also generally works a lot better and faster.

Alex Sanfilippo
Yeah, I’ve seen a guy who’s done the other way for a long time. this is a superpower I developed over time, I wasn’t born with that way of just knowing to like, look for those problems, but I’ve gotten better and better at it. And it’s not just to identify the problems, because everyone has a lot of problems. And I’m not saying that, we shouldn’t be sensitive of that or empathetic toward the problems people have, but they’re not all an idea that you’re gonna be able to profit from or be able to build a business or a solution around. Like, it’s not always the case. And it’s up to us to be able to really identify that. And I think that’s kind of like where my sweet spot is, with that superpower. I can see the problem. But then I can also think about, is there really a solution needed here? Because a lot of people they have like these problems, you’re like, ooh, someone should build a business around that. And if you really think about, you’re like, No, that doesn’t really make sense. Or like, that’s not the space that I want to be in. Because I don’t ever see it really going anywhere. I’m not driven wholly by profit, I’m more like, I seek to be a person of value, not a person of profit. That’s one of like, my core beliefs. But there’s some things that like, I can’t really serve people, if I’m spending all my time to do something that’s not gonna have any return, I’m going to waste all my time, my energy on something that like is a problem that might not really exist, right? So I know I’m rambling there.

Richard Matthews
It’s one of our one of those. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should problems as like, one of my favorites that have been just over the last couple of years is the rise of the automated bots systems that happened with like Facebook bots, and IMS, bots and all those other things. And I remember sitting down with a client who had spent an obscene amount of time building like they recreated Zillow through a messenger bot. And like, and I was like, why, why would you do that? Because no one’s gonna go and think to themselves, like, I want to go in and talk to a robot and tell them like, you know, go back and forth like, hey, what kind of house do you want, and it’s gonna give you options. I want a two bedroom and then go back to the next thing and like what area and you tell them and go back and forth. And you’ll have this like, 20 minute long conversation to get to the point where it shows you essentially search results in the chat thing that you didn’t have to open up into a browser anyways, like, I was like, Zillow already exists, right? Like, does all that stuff way easier? Yeah, I was like, so you solve the problem that nobody wants. Like, nobody wants to do that. Right. Yeah.

Alex Sanfilippo
Yeah, that’s an interesting one. I have not seen that that must have taken an unbelievable amount of time to build those automations. And those responses. But yeah, it’s good, good project for somebody, I suppose project.

Richard Matthews
And, you know, it’s cool to see like what you can do, but yeah, it’s not. It’s not it’s not ever going to be a viable business because they started with a solution and not with a group of people that had a problem. Because like, that group of people that have problem already have the solution for it. And this solution is not better. It’s worse. Like it’s phone tree on text message. Right? True.

Alex Sanfilippo
Yeah. I mean, check Testing, testing the market is really important. And seeing what’s already out there. I think a lot of us, we get so excited, we have an idea that we just like, Oh, I’m going to start doing this. But it’s really important to do your your due diligence and make sure Okay, is there anyone else already in this space doing exactly what I’m thinking? Because you don’t want to get like six months in and be like, Oh, man, there’s like four or five big players in this space that really own it like that, that shouldn’t stop you if you really have the desire to do it. But it’s already there. You have to really think, Okay, do I have any unique value? I’m going to add? Do I solve a problem in a different way than the rest of these people? Where am I planning on doing exactly the same thing? Because Yeah, you might not want to actually jump into that it’s something to really be mindful of, is to take a look around before you just take action.

Richard Matthews
So I want to dive into one other thing that you mentioned, because I think it’s a really unique framing for that and it’s the idea of the the zone of excellence versus a zone of genius. So I had I had a real good friend of mine a couple years ago now got in front of us, we had a small group mastermind there’s like six of us and you know, all you know, hit hit certain revenue levels in our business and we’re looking to take it to the next level and she used to work with The high end like fortune 5000 CEOs and help them grow and things like that. And all of them are, you know, millionaires, multimillionaires, billionaires, that kind of stuff like super successful dudes and ladies. And she was like, there was the common thread that all of them had. And she would have talked to them all about this. So it’s like they every single one of them, if they were in that millionaire plus category running a big successful business, they all had the one rule they followed, it was like you have you have your your one thing, right? What what we would refer to as your zone of genius and like that’s, they were ruthless about only doing their one thing. And everything else got delegated to other people. And, and learning how to do that. And her encouragement to us was like, you need to figure out what your one thing is. And I’d like to frame the framing of like, there’s a lot of things you can be really good at, like, you’re there in your zone of excellence. But there’s the one thing, that’s your zone of genius, and like that’s where you can, you can really next level. And for me, it was learning how to how to see and thinking systems that’s like my zone of genius. And that’s where, like the push button podcast was built and turned into a nice scalable business for me. And I’m just sort of interested in like, what what are your thoughts for someone who’s sort of in that space and struggling looking at the things like, hey, I’ve got a whole group of things in my on my plate here that I’m pretty good at that I can do good things with I can make profit with but how do you sort of determine in that plate of things? What is your zone of excellence? versus what’s your zone of genius?

Alex Sanfilippo
Yeah, first off, we all we’ve all got, like that zone of genius. And the idea is to get yourself into that zone of genius from excellence, right? Like because we’re all going to be in that excellence phase. And you have to spend some time there. Like you can’t say, Okay, I’m only going to be a genius. I know, I sound like gay Hendricks right now if anyone has ever read his book, but he talks about, like how we have to do the things we’re excellent out. But we also have to find a way to get into that, that genius zone. And I think for me, the first thing that we have to do, because many people don’t actually know what it is, like many entrepreneurs that they’re good at a lot of things like entrepreneurs these days are so savvy and like smart. Like, it’s rare that I talk to someone who’s like an entrepreneur, they’re not like, wow, you’re a genius, you know, like I could learn so much from you. But like, not everything they’re doing is pure genius, like when they’re posting something on their social media. Unless they are actually in that space. Like that’s not that’s, that’s an administrative task for them at some at some sense. And they might be excellent at it. But again, that’s not the thing. So I think the first practice that I recommend to people, is just sit down alone with a piece of paper, and a pen in a place that you are highly inspired. So for me, I’ve mentioned them in Jacksonville, Florida, I live just a few minutes from the ocean. To me, it’s to go walk out to the ocean, and sit there alone, no phone, no music, it’s just me a pen and some paper. And I think about it, okay, like what is waves? It’s it and you know, like, but like, I feel inspired in that area. And I’m at that moment of like, Okay, what am I? What am I really good at? What do I uniquely add to the world? Like, what’s my value add? How do I serve people in the strongest, most powerful way that I possibly can? and figure out what that that genius is? Or that superpower, right? Like, how do I really figure this out. And the thing is, we all really know this, we just have to dig deep enough to find it sometimes. And if anyone’s like, I just don’t even know where that is, it’s a combination of something that you are far better than most people at and something that you thoroughly enjoy. But I’m really good at keeping a schedule a calendar. But that is not my zone of genius like that. That’s not it, because I don’t necessarily enjoy it, it’s going to be something that gets your passion going to get you excited that you’re also just really good at but finding it I think it starts with just getting alone. And, and that for me has been a great practice I do on a regular basis. Quarterly, I try to sit down and really think about it. It’s something is changing every quarter. But I refreshed and like okay, let me make sure I get back to it. Alex, am I actually doing the thing that is my superpower or I’ve I slipped away and gone more just into the administrative excellence that I that I carry myself in?

Richard Matthews
Yeah. So I have I have a couple of recommendations along the same line. So I think absolutely should get alone and think through those things. And actually, like, get some ideas about where you’re at. And then the next sort of step there is like learning how to filter the things that you’ve put down. And for me the filter that always that I always tell either clients and friends stuff who are trying to work through things, figure out where they fit is anything that’s that anytime you run into the run into a thought or you’re discussing things with other people, you say, Oh, that’s easy, right? Yeah, that’s easy. Anyone could do that. Like that’s, that’s a tell that you’re you’re you’re skirting around your zone of genius, because it’s easy for you. And the reason it’s easy is because you have both the skill set and the joy that goes with it. Right. That’s sort of the talent, you’re finding the right spot. And the other one is, is generally speaking your superpower, your zone of genius, is going to have a thread that sort of runs through all of your other things. Right. So like for me, and this took me forever to figure out because my my zone of genius is in like I see the world in systems, right? I don’t actually like see the things I see the systems that make them happen.

Alex Sanfilippo
We’re innovators Cuz I get it.

Richard Matthews
Yeah, like that kind of thing I see I see all the little code things, right, not actually code. But I see I like, like, you know, I was I was I’ve mentioned on the podcast few times, like, last year, I was like, I need to learn to draw. So I took a drawing class and like, I didn’t listen to the teacher as much as like a normal person would, I was like, watching what they were doing and breaking down their system. Because most people don’t know how to break down their own systems as well as, like I do. And like, by the end of the month, I was like, drawing drawing human anatomy stuff, my wife is like, you’re just dumb, like, because not because you’re dumb, but because I hate you. Because it took me years to get as good as it took you to get in like four weeks.

Alex Sanfilippo
That’s funny.

Richard Matthews
And so you know, and like, so my my, like, my zone of genius allows me to get good at things really quick. So I have a lot of things that have fallen into that zone of excellence. And what I realized was like, hey, it’s the thing that’s actually making me have a wide zone of excellence is all these little things that are, they’re all tied together back to this one zone of genius. And everyone that I’ve talked to, that we’ve really sat down and dived into where their zone of genius is, you can find that right. So one of my best friends and business partners, he his superpower is empathy. Like his like, it’s amazing, his ability to like, put himself into someone else’s shoes, and like actually experience the world the way that they do. Just insane.

Alex Sanfilippo
I want that one. Real quick, I’m gonna cut you off, I was on another podcast, and he asked me what my superpower is or what I wish it could be. And I went the wish, what I wish it could be and I wish I could be empathy. That’s incredible that you know, something like that. I don’t mean to cut you off. But that’s like it. That’s an outstanding superpower to have.

Richard Matthews
It’s an it’s an excellent superpower. And he’s one of the coolest guys I know. And it’s, it’s super fascinating. Because we started going through, he’s got the same kind of thing, where he’s had a lot of things that he’s really good at. And we started going back through his life and like, how did you get to this thing, and when we really think about it all came back to like, he had this skill and empathy that allowed him to understand people and really, like dive into things and get them right anyways, it’s, it’s the common thread and all of his things in his zone of excellence, was they all came back to empathy, right? And mine, same thing, the breath of excellence that he had, they all came back to my love of systems. And I would imagine if you really thought about it, a lot of the things that fit into your zone of excellence, are going to come back to that, that ability to see the solution to problems that are being presented.

Alex Sanfilippo
Yeah, you’re 100% right. And I think that, you know, anyone who’s listening who’s like, oh, wow, this, this makes so much sense. The goal is to figure out how to operate in that in the your genius, right? And your superpower because there if you’re doing a podcast, even there is so much work that goes into like we talked about, it’s like, Okay, how can I get more of my time to do the thing that is my superpower? That is my zone of genius, instead of getting, I guess, bombarded and stuck in just what I’m decent at or above average, or that I have to do right. Like that becomes the the ultimate question for people to answer, I’d say.

Richard Matthews
Absolutely. Yeah. And it’s like, that’s the that’s the tough part is like, how do you build a business? That that is based around your zone of genius. And what I mean by by based around it is that your contribution to the business is directly in your zone of genius, right? It doesn’t, it doesn’t mean need to mean that like, Hey, I’m good at systems, therefore, my business is selling systems, right? That that’s not what it means. Or it means that like your contribution to whatever problem you’ve chosen to solve for people, is in your zone of genius. Does that make sense?

Alex Sanfilippo
Yeah. Oh, yeah, it definitely does. And I’m in complete agreement that that’s, that’s what it’s all about. That’s how you succeed long term. And don’t turn into more of like a cog, if you will, right. Like someone who just now is stuck doing the task. They can’t ever grow anything. Like that’s how you keep yourself growing heat, the business of selling is by being able to do exactly what you’re talking about here. Man, I think that you’re hitting it just right, Richard.

Richard Matthews
Well, thank you. So I want to I want to flip that then and talk about the other side of your superpower, which is your fatal flaw, right? So just like every Superman has their kryptonite, or Wonder Woman can’t remove her bracelet of victory without going mad. You probably have a flaw that held you back in your business, something that you struggled with, for me, it was a couple of things, right? I, for the longest time struggled with perfectionism where I wouldn’t actually ship products or services because I was like, there’s just another couple of tweaks I can make. Or maybe I could, I could rerecord that video for the South 1,000th time because I need it to be exactly perfect, right? Whatever it is, I struggled with perfectionism for a long time until I realized that it’s like the lower standard that you can hold yourself to. or one of the other ones was a lack of self care, which came across in a lot of ways. But the first and the most important aspect for that for me was I would let clients walk all over me I didn’t have any good boundaries set Oh, like calendars phone times when people could get ahold of me. And I said yes to everything. And a lot of that was just being a young entrepreneur and needing revenue and not learning how to actually like set up healthy boundaries and set up a good health care and then like actually, you know, take care of yourself so you were healthy and fit to come You know, show up and and do good work. Um, so like, those are a couple of my flaws. And I think but more important than what they are is how have you worked to rectify them so people who are listening might learn a little bit from your experience.

Alex Sanfilippo
Yeah, so I’ve got two that I’m gonna share, the first of which is that perfectionism as you called it, and the other is an addiction to productivity. I’ll start off with talking about the perfectionism. So for a long time, I was like you, I was like, I could just record this video one more time and be great. Or if this website could just look a little bit more like this, it’d be like, perfect, right? Like, how many times have we said that like, and having that that standard, that idea isn’t a bad thing. It’s how you learn to manage it, right? Because it is dangerous. Here’s the thing, nothing is ever perfect. Like, I’m a believer, I’m a Christian, I follow Jesus. And even the Bible says, like, well done good and faithful servant is what you’ll hear one day, when you go to heaven, not perfect job. Like, God doesn’t have that standard for us. And we do, right, like, so it’s kind of crazy that we hold ourselves to that, but I get that we have this desire to do something excellent for people. But it goes back to what my superpower actually isn’t this how I learned overcome it. I let my superpower drive me instead of my one of my biggest downfalls, if you will. And if I truly am I creating something to serve somebody, it’s in my best interest to meet their need as quickly as I possibly can without it being perfect, because they’re just looking for a solution. Here’s a great example of this. And this was actually from Seth Godin. And there’s something I learned from him when he and I had a conversation. He said, Alex, if you were a lifeguard, new lifeguard not really that great, you’re not perfect at it, you haven’t figured it all out yet. And you saw someone drowning in the water? Would you go out and save them? Or would you first go try to find a better life guard, they can go out there and save them because they could probably do a better job with it. And that was like a lightbulb moment. For me. I was like, that’s good in the water. And I would go pull that person on the water, even if it was ugly. And if I did it wrong, like, I would make sure that I did that to go save that person. And I think as entrepreneurs, we have to think about that. If we’re struggling with perfectionism, we have to be willing to start exactly where we’re at to start serving the need that someone else has. So for me pod match was a great example. We launched that thing at MVP level. I mean, it was ugly, like,

Richard Matthews
it hurt me to level product.

Alex Sanfilippo
Yeah, thank you minimum viable product, like it was like it was functional. It worked. It solved the problem. But it did not look pretty doing it. There was nothing sexy about it yet. But here’s the thing, everyone who was using it forgave me for that, because they’re like, Oh, this is great. It’s solving my need, it’s helping me it’s doing what needs to do. And over time, you should be focused on continuous improvement, right, like, get better over time. And so that’s what I’ve been able to do. And so Potlatch was a great example of me learning to, to overcome that perfection, perfectionist mindset, if you will. And the other thing that I still struggle with, this is probably still a current struggle for me that I’m working through. But I’m addicted to productivity, which like maybe sounds a little like, no, that’s a good thing, right? Like I like to be productive. But sometimes I spent too long my inbox because I’m like, I could probably get inbox zero in a day, if I keep at it, right. And then I’m not working on my my superpower, my job, my zone of genius, I’m working on something that I’m good at, which is getting through my inbox and keeping it clean. But that’s productivity for the sake of productivity, not productivity for the sake of results, or solving a need or meeting a problem. And that’s when I still have to meet through. And that comes with just a lot of self discipline of setting up. Even like literally on my phone, I will set a 30 minute clock and be like you can play in your inbox for 30 minutes. And then you’ve got to stop. And oh, Alex, you’ve got to delegate this because you can’t just sit here my question on that. Do you have children? I know you mentioned you’re married? I am but I do not have kids.

Richard Matthews
So my this this might sound like a strange recommendation. have kids?

Unknown Speaker
That don’t fix that one.

Richard Matthews
So and here’s, here’s what I mean by that. All right. So the because I used to do the same thing. And I was like, I could just work a little bit more, I could work a little bit longer, I could get a little bit more done. Right. And you realize a lot of those things, aren’t they? They’re there they’ve ever seen that little, that little thing was like you got urgent and important. Yep. Right. And, like, all these things are urgent, but they’re not important. And when you have, at least for me, you know, becoming a dad changes you. And you get you get to this point where like, the things that I want to do, like everything in my life is geared towards, like, how can I spend more time playing and doing cool things with my kids, while they’re growing up is you realize I don’t have a lot of time, right? My oldest son’s 11 already, I’m like, I’ve only got like seven years before this kid’s gonna move out and go on his own. And you know, I got to cram a whole lot of life into the next seven years. So when it comes down to it, the the actual, like science behind it is something I talk about all the time on our podcast, and when I get on to other guests podcast is the idea that creativity thrives with, with restrictions, right, it thrives with boundaries. And early in my entrepreneurial career, I say early just because, you know, it was like five or six years ago, but it was really like halfway through cuz I’ve only been doing this for 10 or 11 years now. Yeah. Is the I had this thought that I was like, I want to work less but getting more done. Right. And already, that’s a better question, then, you know, can I just work more? So you know, ask yourself better questions. It’s the type of type of boundary but the other thing that that came out of that is like, what what if I started making restrictions, what if instead of working until I was out of breath during the day, like what if I restricted myself to working eight hours a day, right? And instead of seven days a week, what if I restricted it to five days a week? And eventually that became, what if I didn’t work on Fridays to what if I only work four days, four hours a week or a day, right? And like, my average day now is four hours a day, four days a week, and my business is five or six times bigger than it was five years ago. It’s awesome, right? And that’s what that does is you realize that like, I was just reading one of my friends on Facebook this morning, he’s got a big booth. And he’s like, just because I work less than you doesn’t mean that I don’t outwork you. Right, right. And because you realize that, like, hey, when you start putting the restrictions on it, what happens is you start focusing on the things that are only in the important category. That’s right, and delegating everything else. And for me, having the kids was a motivation to make sure that I was only spending time on stuff that isn’t important. So if I did have to tell my kids No, I can’t play right now. I was like, because I’m working on something important for my business, not because I’m trying to get to inbox zero, which is meaningless, right?

Unknown Speaker
Yeah. Yep.

Richard Matthews
So I don’t know if that helps at all. But that’s, that’s one of the things that helped me.

Alex Sanfilippo
100% man like, and like when I say I haven’t, like figured this one out quite yet. It’s because I’m implementing different disciplines along the way. And that’s like, what’s what’s helping me. So I don’t chase Inbox Zero very often, but it’s because I have that timer set. But if I turn off that timer, I’ll be in there until late at night. But it’s true. You know, even in the corporate jobs, like we know that 40 hours a week has been proven to get more productivity out of a employee than if they work 50 or 60. They can do more with less time because they learn they know they have to prioritize. Everyone understands like, okay, these are the things that my bosses told me have to get done. If I tell if he tells me I’ve got 40 hours to do it, or 60 I can get it done in 40. Most people can they kind of avoid the rest of it. So I mean, I learned that with my my staff and in corporate. And yeah, but this is one of those things it like is a constant battle. And it’s all comes down to self discipline for me, because there’s not a lot of results that come from it. It’s just, I’m addicted to that productivity. Like it seems like fun to me. But it’s one that I again, I’m learning to continue to overcome and working on frameworks to be able to figure out how to do that. But what you shared is definitely super helpful.

Richard Matthews
Yeah, that’s a, it’s my, my, my thing I tell everyone is like, if you want to get more productive, start putting restrictions on what you are allowing yourself to do for work. Because it does a couple of things for you. One, you get the benefit of more time to spend stuff on spend on stuff that you actually enjoy, that isn’t work. And I tell people all the time, you have to give yourself permission to play. Because for whatever reason, culturally, in America, at least we think that in order to do and when we do good work, we get to reward ourselves with recreation, instead of realizing that like recreation and rest are required in order to show up and do good work. Yeah. And anyways, it gives you more time to actually get into that self care and, and, and, you know, give yourself permission to play and enjoy life a little bit, because then you can show up and kick ass when you need to.

Alex Sanfilippo
That’s right. 100% man.

Richard Matthews
So, okay, so my next question for you is about your common enemy. Right? And every superhero has an arch nemesis, it’s the thing that they constantly have to do battle with in their world. In the world of business, it takes a lot of forms. But generally, we like to put it in the context of your clients, right? So for the clients, you have for pod, pod. Wow, I’m gonna mess this up, pod pod. pod match. There we go. Yeah, match. So and it’s a mindset, or it’s a flaw that you sort of run into regularly that you’re like banging your head against the wall going, like, Why do I always have to deal with this with our clients? And if you had your magic wand, and every new client you can take on you just pat them on the head not have to deal with that anymore? What would you say your arch nemesis is for pod match?

Alex Sanfilippo
Yeah, so right now, because we are still very early phase, I mean, this idea, like I had the idea for it on March 10 2020. So when we’re recording this, it’s it’s less than a year old still. And so we’re kind of figuring out like, Where are those things are like, what’s the problems? what’s what’s the solutions that are needed? I’d say the biggest issue right now is finding the really the right people to join, that don’t have 100 questions, and I have no problem answering questions. But some people, they want to jump on a call. And at first I was like, Oh, great. someone’s interested, I’ll jump on a call. When I start doing the math, these calls are 20 minutes apiece, and they want to talk about it for 20 minutes before they want to sign up. And it’s a free membership. I could spend my whole day talking to a handful people they’re gonna sign up and not one of them convert to a paying client. And and I want to get to know the right people, the people that I feel like and learn from, but I can’t jump on a call with everybody. So I think if there was a way to, and this is something that I have to do my messaging to really clarify it to have some sort of like video series or something like that can be like, hey, can’t jump on a call right now. But here’s something that really explains it really well. I know that that would be super helpful. And and yeah, I mean, I have a desire to get on a call with every single person who wants to use it, but it’s just not realistic. Like, I’ll use every moment of my life doing that with very little result, but it’s how to really come up against that. And it’s very common, like, Oh, this sounds great. Alex love to jump on a call. And you know, how do I respond in a nice way and say no, you know, like, because I have to if I’m going to help the other members and onboard more people and continue you know, adding that value and being a service your service as

Richard Matthews
a network. Your service has a network effect, right? Yeah, the more people you get on it, the better it is for everyone. Exactly. 100% man.

Alex Sanfilippo
Yeah, yeah. How’d you get that point without having to jump on the random call? So right now that enemy is the common response to people being very well by it, like, oh, Alex would love to jump on a call. And that’s kind of what I’m facing right now.

Richard Matthews
So it almost seems to me that like, you need to have like two forms of messaging, right for, for the podcast guests and for the podcast hosts, because we have a different set of problems. And you’ll have to hit those problems, you know, differently. I don’t exactly know where you should go with that. But anyways, that’s just like in my head, because I do both like guesting on podcasts and, and as a host. And like, for me, as a host, like the couple of things and I like, just by the way, when I pulled up your thing on pod, pod match to bring you on here, genius, like I want all of my guests to come through and give me a link like that. Because like, I’ll, when I asked for people for like, hey, their information, let’s get like your photo, and your bio, and all those things on it. Like, I will get sometimes three or four page long BIOS, and I’m like, right, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t introduce you with a four page bio. Like, I don’t have to, I don’t have to, I don’t have time to read it at all, and then pick out the good stuff, I need you to do that. Like that’s where it’s at. So like I love I love the way, you know, yours popped up and it had like, nice short bio on it, but I can introduce you, things like that. So like hosts have a different set of problems than guests do. Right? And guests are probably gonna be more along the lines of like learning how to know, what is my story that I’m going to tell, that’s interesting enough that podcast guests or podcast hosts want to bring me on and talk to, you know, talk to their audience. And not everyone knows how to do that, right? I’ve had, we’ve done 150 episodes now on our podcast, and I would say probably about 70% of them are pretty solid, but we run into about 30% of the guests that like they don’t actually know their story real well. So it’s hard to hard to pull it out of them. And the better you get as an interviewer The, the easier that becomes where you want to help help a guest through that. But the guests like yourself who really know your story and really know what you’re talking about. Those are the guests that are a pleasure to have on. Right. And I think from from a service standpoint, as someone who’s looking to bring guests on, if I could go to your service, and more and more of one of the people that I get on through your service. Have that like nailed down, that would just make me happy in every way.

Alex Sanfilippo
Yeah, no, I hear you, man. 100%. Yeah, that makes so much sense really, because like finding the people that can really hone their craft and know what they’re doing is it can be tough, but kind of providing a framework for it definitely helps out right being like, Hey, this is what people are probably going to ask you or what questions would you want them to ask you? And that’s part of the, you know, onboarding with with pod match. It’s really helpful for people and it adds a lot of value to them, and to the people that are interested in booking them or they’re being booked by?

Richard Matthews
Yeah, absolutely. Cool. So the flip side, then of your common enemy is your driving force, right? So just like Spider Man, if I save New York or Batman, I save Gotham or Google fights to index and categorize all the world’s information. What is it that you are fighting for? With pod match?

Alex Sanfilippo
Yeah, so you mentioned like the network effect effect is obviously the the end goal, if you will, but it all kind of started from a place of I noticed that there was a need in this industry. And like I said, I had that problem. And I start with my my own podcast, it’s tough to find people who would be guests. On the flip side, there’s people who have great stories that they want, they want to share that they have a new book out that they’re excited about, like how can they get that out there in this world. And for me, that’s what we’re protecting. We want to make sure that great interviews happen because so many people are starting to listen to podcasts more than ever before listening as well. We want to make sure that good quality content is getting out there. You know, we talked about those people that actually have like the story that they that they know they want to share, like we’re finding those people and getting them in front of a podcast host where then people were a few 100 people, maybe we’re listening to it, but it’s helping change a life. And so for me, it’s just really making this system streamlined, so that people can get on there and just focus on the interview and just crush it have like the right people that fit the show and the vision of it right so the world can hear some great content. I know that’s like a huge kind of broad vision. But Richard man that’s that’s what I’m here doing.

Richard Matthews
So thing that just popped into my head while you were saying that is something that I’ve been terrible at, that I wish I had been doing a better job at is as an interviewee right as the host of his show. One of the things that I think actually probably goes both ways is having some sort of a review system that was like at the end of the interview was like Hey, what’s it like being interviewed by Richard on the hero show? And on the flip side of that, what’s it like having Richard as a guest on your show? Just for like social proof stuff that you can start using and sending in when you’re like looking to book guests or get on people on your show? That’d be that’d be a cool thing to to figure out mostly because I want it and I haven’t ever figured out how to get it like actually turned it into a thing for my own. My own that in the process. Actually.

Alex Sanfilippo
We built that into it. It’s at the end of the the process. It asked the guest how to host it and host other guests did they give us opportunities for reviews and stuff like that? So we’ve kind of built In little bit, not quite to the level you’re saying yet, but we are going to get there. Yeah, that’s

Richard Matthews
cool. You guys are not even a year old yet. So I imagine, you know, a couple years down the line, you guys will be a top notch service in the, in the in the podcast space. So it’d be super cool to see how it goes down. So I want to talk about something more practical, you know, like day to day work style stuff. And I call this your heroes tool belt. And it’s just like, every superhero has their tool belt, they don’t with awesome gadgets, like batter rings, or web slingers, or laser eyes, or whatever it is, I’m talking about the top one or two tools you use every day in your business that you couldn’t live without, right? It could be anything from your notepad to your calendar, to your marketing tool, something you use for your product delivery, you know, could be the beach that you go to, to sit down and listen to the crashing waves like you talk right something that you just think is essential to getting your job done on a on a daily basis today.

Alex Sanfilippo
Yeah, so the first one I mentioned is some form of daily journal is really important. It helps me a lot. I like ones that have like, it’s more like a day planner. So has it have some sort of calendar in it as well, like, Yes, I use a digital calendar. I’m not like, you know, living in the dark ages or anything like that. But I reproduce everything on an actual like piece of paper as well. So right now I’m using the intention journal by Brandon Turner, bigger pockets guy and it’s maybe kind of catered towards real estate investing, but it works great. I’ve used Brendon Burchard, high performance calendar, or maybe it was journal or something like that. But I like to switch him up a little bit to kind of just again, keep my flow. I keep my calendar on there. But it helps me really determine what I’m going to do that day. That’s the that’s the point of these things. They’re they’re focused on intentionality. So it helps me understand, okay, this is the task that I have to get done today. And that’s just that’s so important. You know, I think to Keller Williams, he talks about the one thing, right, they have him and Jay papasan have that book, the one thing like what is the one thing that if I do it today, I will get closer to my end goal tomorrow. And these journals really helped me do that. So that’s the number one thing that I mean, I walk I mean, it’s literally, I don’t have hardly anything and reach me right now. Like it’s right here right next to me, like, I’ve got it always ready to go. And I’d say Aside from that, the tool that I’ve been really using with with my business partner, to keep us on track with pod match and keep it growing in a healthy way is we use Trello. And we really enjoy that just from keeping our tasks organized, keeping our chats in one place, you can build individual cards. So it’s like everything’s like a little project in there. That’s really helped us stay organized. Like I think about trying to do what I’m doing without that it’d be really tough to to have the same level of progress and productivity, meaningful work getting done if I didn’t have that tool. So those are my two things. The journal and Trello are two things I’m using right now.

Richard Matthews
Yeah, we we run our whole business on Trello. I have a I have a I have a training on Trello. I’ll send you which is all about the language of business systems.

Unknown Speaker
Yes, yes.

Richard Matthews
It’s called it’s called push button process. But it really should be called How to make really your badge or something like that.

Alex Sanfilippo
Whatever you’re calling it, just send it to me, I want it Alright, Richard.

Richard Matthews
But, you know, if you if you learn to think through business systems properly, right, and actually get the language, right, because a lot of people use the word system and process and workflow interchangeably, without ever having really solid definitions for what they are. So I teach I teach people all the time, it’s one of the things I do sort of like on the side because like, my my life and like my life’s work as systems, right, that’s how I operate. So is how to have a really solid language for systems because if you know how to speak about systems, then when you get into something that helps you manage systems like Trello, that’s what it is, it’s a system management, right Work Project Management is then you can make Trello be a, like Trello is already pretty good. But when when you really understand how a system flows together, you can, you can, you can really make it sing, right. And, you know, it doesn’t matter if it’s Trello or not, it could be Trello or Asana or any of the project manager systems out there. If you understand the foundational language of like how a system works and how it flows, and what things go into it, you can do some really, really awesome stuff. And you know, for us, like we, we we manage our entire podcast business scalably in a way that like I don’t even have to touch it, it just does everything on its own Trello because of that kind of stuff. So

Alex Sanfilippo
yeah, I want to see what you’ve worked up there, man,

Richard Matthews
you’ve got more experience than I do. But I’m already thankful for the tool. So I’m excited to learn more about it. Absolutely. Trello is super cool. I I don’t know what we would do without it. And and I’m there the the the journaling thing, however, I have this problem in my life that if I take it from my head and I write it onto a piece of paper, it like legitimately is gone. Like I can’t like it’s just forever gone. Like I’m the kind of person like once it’s on paper, it doesn’t exist anymore. I have had to in the past be like Hey, what happened to that check that was written to me because it was on a piece of paper and I threw it in the garbage next man don’t go well with me. So like, like, I don’t even handle cash because like when we get cash, I give it to my wife because I’m like, I will lose this.

Alex Sanfilippo
Yeah, I do the same thing. Actually, yeah, that that one, that one. I give it away a lot. He’s like, dude, you gotta stop giving away money. I’m like, I just don’t know what to do with it. Like when I, I like the digital money, right? Like,

Richard Matthews
that makes sense. So like, all of my calendars and all of my like, even if I’m doing like, you know, going through the thing of like, Hey, I know what my, my next things are I have to do it all on my phone because my phone is gonna ding me. Right. The next thing is, and my calendar, like if I wrote it down and put it on the on the thing there, it’s never gonna ding me and I’m never gonna remember to look at it through. So it’s never worked for me. But it does work for a lot of people. My wife’s that way. Hers, however, I guarantee you is way prettier than yours because she spends an obscene amount of time putting stickers and decorating and coloring all sorts of doodles and whatnot. Because apparently that’s a thing, right? I know, mine, I

Alex Sanfilippo
have chicken scratch handwriting. And it’s all in black ink. And there’s no pictures or designs, but maybe I need to step it up a little bit. I

Richard Matthews
don’t know. I mean, like, like, there’s like a whole thing. There’s like bullet journaling. If you look at bullet journaling on YouTube, like there’s people that are like really into it. And they like, every month like calendar thing is like a work of art. My wife is like that. And I’m like, she’s like you don’t understand if it’s pretty than I actually get all this stuff done. If it’s not pretty, then I don’t and I’m like, don’t get it. But I’m glad it works for you. Because she runs her house like a boss. So

Alex Sanfilippo
nice. You know, it goes back to me talking about like one of those things I’m trying to overcome is being addicted to productivity, which partially isn’t isn’t always bad, right? That doesn’t sound productive to me. I’d rather just quickly write it down and check it off. As soon as it’s done, right. Like, that’s, that’s what I look at. But hey, our minds all work differently. And it’s cool that works for her, I could probably maybe take a note or two from that and learn something.

Richard Matthews
Yep. And it cracks me up. Because every month or so she does at the beginning of every week, she sits down and like plans out the whole week because, you know, we got four kids and three of them are in homeschool. And you know, she runs the house and like manages our travel and does all sorts of stuff. So she’s got a lot of stuff to do. And you know, to run our house, especially when we travel and do all this all the things we do. So if it works for her, and it keeps it running. I was like if I had to replace all the things that my wife does, it would cost me like 300 grand a year and employees. So imagine. Speaking of heroic tools, I want to take a few minutes to tell you about a tool we built that powers the hero show, and is now this show’s primary sponsor. Hey there fellow podcaster. Having a weekly audio and video show on all the major online networks that builds your brand creates fame and drive sales for your business doesn’t have to be hard. I know it feels that way. Because you’ve tried managing your show internally and realize how resource intensive it can be. You felt the pain of pouring eight to 10 hours of work into just getting one hour of content published and promoted all over the place. You see the drain on your resources, but you do it anyways because you know how powerful it is that you’ve probably even tried some of those automated solutions and ended up with stuff that makes your brand look cheesy and cheap. That’s not helping grow your business. Don’t give up though. The struggle ends now introducing push button podcasts a done for you service that will help you get your show out every single week without you lifting a finger. After you’ve pushed that stop record button. We handle everything else uploading, editing, transcribing, writing, research graphics, publication and promotion, all done by real humans who know understand and care about your brand, almost as much as you do. And powered by our own proprietary technology, our team will let you get back to doing what you love. While we handle the rest. Check us out at push button podcast.com Ford slash hero for 10% off the lifetime of your service with us and see the power of having an audio and video podcast growing and driving micro celebrity status and business in your niche without you having to lift more than a finger to push that stop record button. Again, that’s push button podcast.com forward slash hero See you there. You’re listening to the heroes show, unlocking the power of influence and success. So my next question for you then is about your your your own personal heroes, right? So every hero has their mentors, right? Frodo had Gandalf. Luke had Obi Wan Robert Kiyosaki had his rich dad. Um, Spider Man even had his Uncle Ben. Right. So who were some of your heroes? Were they real life mentors, speakers or authors? Maybe peers who are a couple years ahead of you, and how important were they what you’ve accomplished so far in your business?

Alex Sanfilippo
Yeah, so I’ve got I’ve got more than I can mention. So I’ll go with like a few that that really helped me along the way. One in indirect one was Brendan Bouchard, has really been helpful for me. He has a book called high performance habits. And it really spoke to me like he’s an indirect mentor. I’ve never met him, never talked to him. But he had this book that really helped me figure out some pieces that I was missing, like, as a hero, right. And the main thing I pulled from his book was the habit of courage, and stepping out and overcoming fear. It was things I had never really thought about. And I had gotten complacent in my life over the years. And he was the person who really helped me figure that out. So Brendon Burchard, would be definitely one of them. And then I’ve got some, some local like some hometown heroes, if you will, some people that have been in my life, one of which is my dad, he’s always been an entrepreneur. And he’s just brilliant. Like he is an engineer mind he can step into like almost any kind of business unless it’s all digital, like it’s all digitally doesn’t quite get it but there’s like a product or a service you’re providing he can walk in and within minutes Figure out like an entire new way to do things that is usually a lot better than the way it’s getting done. He’s just always had that mind. So I’ve always really appreciated him. And I’ve got a couple friends that are in a mastermind of mine mentioned two of them, Andy and Paul. And those two guys have just really done so well in their space. One of them is in the flipping homes side of things. And they have like a TV show now and stuff like that. And I met him when he had none of that. And the other guy, he’s in the education field, and he’s helped rewrite the way that Florida handles education, which is incredible to just see what these two guys have achieved, they’ve always pushed me just to do better. And help me find that that genius, if you will, within me, and those are some people that have really helped me along the way have been mentors and just kind of guide me along the way.

Richard Matthews
Yeah, I love that you’re a couple of buddies, I always refer to that people like that. It’s like your, your running mates. Yeah, you may not be running the same race, but you’re both running together, moving forward. And it’s the type of fellowship that I like, I don’t know, personally, like how entrepreneurs can survive without those people, right? The ones who are who are running their own race, doing their own thing, but just getting to watch and see them, massage their excellence, so to speak, right and become better versions of myself is always, you know, inspiring and helps you move forward. And, you know, I got a good friend like that, that, you know, like literally everything I do, I always bring it to him and be like, Hey, what do you think of this? Just because I know after he’s taken a look at it, it’s gonna be better. Right? And, you know, so I think I think those people are super important.

Alex Sanfilippo
Yeah, they’ve been really like, they’re honest, I’ve given them permission to be honest to me as well, like, and I have some bad ideas. Like we’re all here’s the thing. entrepreneurs in general, have far more bad ideas and good ideas. You just need someone to tell you so you don’t do anything with it. Right? Like, I’ve definitely been, it’s been true for me, right? And they’ll be like, hey, Alex, like, you might want to develop that idea with more. And usually I’m like, yeah, this is a terrible idea. What am I doing here, you know, but like those people, they have that freedom in my life, and I’ve had it in their lives as well. And I always kind of go back to this Helen Keller, Helen Keller, quote, alone, we can do so little. But together, we can do so much. And I’ve always thought that’s just really beautiful. Like you’re saying, if we’re not necessarily running the same race, we’re still building each other up encouraging each other. And we get more done when we’re around those type of people. So we do our best to even during like, the whole season of COVID to still meet together to get together. And to just have these conversations that builds us up and helps us carry our business and our craft forward.

Richard Matthews
Yeah, so your conversation ideas reminded me of a thing that that always cracks me up is in ancient Greece, whenever they had big, like political ideas and, you know, business ideas that they were going on one of the the habits that the Greek people were in, back in the day was you had to, you had to be able to talk through your idea. And it had to make sense both when you were sober and when you were drunk. Like, those cracks me up, because it’s like, it’s like, you’re you have to take your ideas like and they have to they have to pass muster. Yeah, in both in both areas in order for them to be worthy of like taking on to the next stage. Because you know, we have a lot of bad ideas. And I was I don’t I don’t know if that works or not. But you know, we all still talk about ancient Greece. So maybe maybe it was a good thought.

Alex Sanfilippo
Now I’m picturing like, with these guys, next time I meet with them, like, we’ll all be sober and share ideas, and then we’ll all get wasted at some restaurant and share our terror like our terrible ideas or whatever they might be. And then we’ll get kicked out. I don’t know if it still works, Richard, I’m not sure.

Richard Matthews
Yeah, I have no idea. But I figure I figure if you’re all you know, you have a couple of drinks, or I don’t know, a happy brownie or something and you come up with great ideas. It’s a great idea, then, and then it’s still a great idea when you’re sober, then maybe you got something. Okay,

Alex Sanfilippo
I like it, we’re gonna give it a shot, maybe.

Richard Matthews
Awesome. So I want to talk about one last thing here, which is your guiding principles. And you know, one of the things that makes heroes heroic is that they live by a code. You know, for instance, Batman ever kills his enemies, he only ever brings them to Arkham Asylum. So as we wrap up the interview and talk about top one, maybe two principles that you use regularly in your life, maybe something you wish you knew when you first got started as an entrepreneur? Yeah,

Alex Sanfilippo
the first thing is to always operate from a place of integrity. That’s my number one core value in life is to have integrity in everything I do. Which means don’t take the shortcuts that you shouldn’t take. Just because you can do something a lot quicker doesn’t mean it’s the right way to do things. So I make sure that everything I do comes from a place of absolute integrity above the bar, I believe the only thing that any of us own is the good name that we have. And as soon as you damage that, that’s it. So I want to make sure that Alex sanfilippo is known as somebody who operates at the highest caliber, the highest standard, a place of integrity, no duplicity in my life at all. And I’ve really kind of allowed that to just be everything. And I’ll mention the second one because it’s really close with it. It’s to to be humble, to walk in a place of humility to serve others with my time with my life. It can’t be about me, on my board by me of something that’s written that says, Seek to be a person of value, not a person of profit. And as I make profit, and yes, I need profit. But ultimately, that’s not what drives me. What drives me is from a place of humility to serve those around me. And those are really my two core values. Me personally, and I carry those into business because I just found that they’ve they’ve served me well. They’ve helped me really add value to the world around me. And ultimately, as an entrepreneur, that’s my job right is to make the world a better place. And those are the things that have helped me do that.

Richard Matthews
Yeah, you you mentioned earlier, you were a Christian. So you’ll probably appreciate this. One of the things that I’ve always pointed people to is, you know, Jesus talks. And I can’t remember exactly where I think it’s like Matthew 25. But he’s talking about how the world works, right. And one of the things he says is, give first, and then you’ll receive, right and it’s a lot of people think it’s, it’s an, it’s an admonition, like, Hey, this is what you shouldn’t do. And it’s not an admonition, what it is, is like, Hey, I built the world. And these are the rules that you play by. Right. So if you want to succeed, playing this game, this is how it works. Right. And that’s what I think most of the Sermon on the Mount is, is not an admission of this is what you should do, but like, like, Hey, I built this game. Right? Yeah. And if you want to, if you want to play the game, by the rules that’ll help you win, like these are the ones you play by. And so the whole learning to give first and to give value first is, it’s not a this is what you should do. It’s like, Hey, this is the best option, you have to build the biggest and most impactful business that you can, is right learn how to give first, like learn how to come to whatever you’re doing from that place of service.

Alex Sanfilippo
100% Man, I couldn’t say that any better.

Richard Matthews
And the other the other thought I had on that was the the integrity thing you mentioned. And so the purpose of this show, for me, has always been this, we have this a mismatch culture, where for whatever reason, entrepreneurs are always held up as a villain. And it’s always really bothered me, because really, entrepreneurs are not villains. I mean, certainly there are in the realm of entrepreneurs, people who are, but entrepreneurship is far more often it’s people who are looking to give and to serve and to bring value. And I tell people all the time, it’s like, hey, everything you touch in your life today was at some point handled by an entrepreneur, like literally all of it, because if if it exists, an entrepreneur made it. Right. And and so the the one of the things that I think, has just blown me away from doing this show, as long as I’ve been doing it is how often the I asked that question. And the answer is integrity. Right? Like, I could probably do a five minute montage of just different guests, really, their first thing that comes to their mind is integrity, right? Or some form of integrity, honesty, that kind of stuff. And it, it just, it always solidifies for me. Like, it’s, that’s the way it is, right? entrepreneurs are our heroes, right? They’re unsung heroes. And so anyways, I just wanted to point that out.

Alex Sanfilippo
Ya know, and I appreciate you mentioned that, because I didn’t realize it, that’d be so high up on so many people’s lists. But again, that’s why you’re doing this show. And I’ve heard you share that before that you’re doing this to really uncover like, the true heart behind an entrepreneur, right? Like what we really are. And we ultimately we are servants of the world like, and everything that we use at one point was was created to serve people like even Amazon, which now gets like a lot of hate from a lot of people. Like one of my brothers hates Amazon’s like, I hate it. Like you use it. He’s like, Yeah, dude, super convenient. I’m like, they built that to help you. Like, I know, you say you hate them. It’s because they’re huge. But because they did a really good job solving a problem. And they still did it have that customer obsession, right? That is what drives them. And I just think that it’s great what you’re doing here, like I love this show, because that reason, it reminds me that like, I’m a hero, I’m not a villain, even though we sometimes get a bad rap. And I just think it’s a few of us out there that maybe there’s always a bad apple or to write. But what you’re doing here is, is adding a lot of value. And it’s cool to hear that there’s others on the show that are saying the same thing.

Richard Matthews
Yeah, it’s it’s super cool. And you know, just it’s one of those things that like you really understand it, like even with big businesses, like you know, with Amazon, Amazon’s huge. But like, they have trigger words like if you know, we’ve had several clients that work on Amazon, I got one of my businesses, it’s on Amazon. And if if we go in and say, Hey, like, we’re having this problem, and you need to fix it, then we don’t get a response back. But if we say, hey, there’s this problem, and it’s causing your customers to have this issue. Can you help us fix it? So your customers aren’t having an issue anymore?

Alex Sanfilippo
We get responses really quick, I’m sure. Right. Art, man, good job.

Richard Matthews
Right. And it comes back to that same thing of like, they understand who they’re here to serve. Right. And, you know, they’re here that you know, big businesses, small businesses, entrepreneurship at its core, in a capitalist society. Entrepreneurship is about serving others first. Yeah. So what is that man? Like?

Alex Sanfilippo
No, I think that’s, I love that man, that you just brought that all all back together. And I think it’s really smart. The way that you’ve learned how to contact Amazon. It’s all based on the words you use, right? It’s all in the words, right? It

Richard Matthews
comes back to learning. You know, that’s, that’s, that’s pretty much standard operating procedure for anyone is like, learn how to figure out what it is that they want. And that’s like you mentioned your superhero, right? Your skill is learning how to see what the other person wants out of life, what the problem is and learning how to speak to that. And, you know, that’s, that’s really, you know, if you’re listening to this, that’s the secret of life. Learning how to see, see the other person’s problems and then present whatever the solutions are in a way that, you know they want. They want that. That outcome.

Alex Sanfilippo
Yeah, man, you just gave up the secret to life on the hero show. Richard Matthews, everybody here is I want to give applause I know that comes out sounding terrible, so I’m not going to do it.

Richard Matthews
So that’s basically a wrap on our interview. Alex, I do have one last thing I do on every show. And you if you’ve listened a few times, you probably know, it’s called the hero’s challenge. And I do this basically, it is a way for me to get access to stories I might not otherwise be able to find on my own through a service like pod match, because I’m looking for people who aren’t out there, you know, trying to tell their story. So the question is simple. Do you have someone in your life in your network that you think has a cool entrepreneurial story? Who are they first names are fine, and why do you think they should come share their story with us here on the hero show?

Alex Sanfilippo
Yeah, one person immediately comes to mind when you ask the question, his name is Jared gray bill. And he has just come up through a lot of opposition throughout his life, in his entrepreneurial journey, and he’s very successful now and done extremely well. And I think that his mind is so much so much bigger than even what he’s doing today. So I can’t wait to see where he goes. But his journey is fascinating, because a lot of us can relate to it. And the kind of the struggles along the way, when you hear them, it’s like, oh, I could see myself in that. So Jared gravy will be the guide recommend, because I just think that it would be I would love to hear that episode. Let’s

Richard Matthews
put it that way. Awesome. We’ll we’ll reach out afterwards to see if we can get him on the show with an introduction or something. So thank you for that. And you know, in comic books, there’s always the crowd at the end who are cheering on the acts of heroism and saying thank you for tuning in to the hero for their work. So as we close are analogous to that I want to find out where people can find you if they’re interested in, in working with you, where can they light up the bat signal, so to speak, and say, Hey, you know what, I need your help, Alex? And more importantly, who were the right types of people to reach out and maybe be a good fit for your service?

Alex Sanfilippo
Yeah, so you know, I mentioned being that that solutions guy, right, like I can find it kind of find the problem and identify it and build something off of it. That’s really what I’m good. I’m a strategy guy through and through at the end of the day, in everything I do is at creating a brand.com that’s a my podcast, also my website, you can even find pod match through there. But you can also just book a 15 minute call with me. And I do that with a lot of people that are my listeners just to kind of go over things. Or when people hear me on a podcast like yours, Richard, they’ll kind of book the time be like, hey, had a question on something you’re talking about? Can we kind of go over a little more. So I love to add that value to people and help them out. So it’s all like creating a brand.com. With that said, I mean, what you’re doing here with the hero show is awesome. Like I encourage the listeners to hang here and hang with what Richard’s doing, because this is like a super good podcast, and you’re great interviewer, I can tell that you’ve been on both sides of the mic. It definitely shows with your experience here. But thanks again for having me, man, I really, I really appreciate it.

Richard Matthews
Awesome. Thank you for that, and do look forward to having you on in the future. So thank you very much again, for coming on Alex, really appreciate your time as well. So any final words of wisdom for hit this stop record button?

Alex Sanfilippo
Yeah, I’ll give one more thing. And this is something that I really love to tell other entrepreneurs, is to remember that you have greatness and creativity within yourself. You have greatness and creativity within yourself. I think sometimes we hear stories from entrepreneurs that have like changed the world or done some amazing feat or did the impossible, right. And we look at ourselves and say I don’t I don’t have whatever that is. But it’s just not true. You have greatness and creativity yourself. As creative beings. We’re all made to create, and we find that that hero is within us, that genius within us and we begin pouring that out into the world, we are doing a service for others. So I want to encourage you once again, that you’ve got this greatness, you have this creativity and you can do something amazing that can change the world, or at least somebody’s life. And if it changes one life, I believe what we’re doing is completely worth it.

Richard Matthews
Yeah, and the whole the whole thing about being I call it like creativity, the ability to create is a spark of divinity. Right. And you mentioned being a creative being and you know, the the story in Genesis is that we were created from dust and then God Himself breathed life into us. Yeah, right. That’s, that’s the spark of divinity that you’re talking about there. And with that comes that ability to create to be the kind of person who has, has has greatness inside of you. And it’s not something that’s like, like, you may not have figured it out yet or discovered it but it’s there.

Alex Sanfilippo
It is. Yeah, it is, man. You’re absolutely right. And I think that that’s the one thing I want listeners to really take away from this is that they’ve got something that only they can do, and to their job to do it. Right.

Richard Matthews
Absolutely. So again, thank you so much for coming in today, Alex, really appreciate your time.

Alex Sanfilippo
Yeah, Richard, I appreciate me. This was a blast. Thank you.