Episode 247 – Vince Shorb

Richard Matthews: [00:00:00] Every iconic hero

has a superpower

whether that’s their fancy flying suit

they made by their genius intellect

or the ability to call down thunder

from the sky or super strength

in the real world

heroes have what I call a zone of genius

which is either a skill

that they were born with

or a skill that they develop

over the course of their career

that really helps energize

all their other skills, right?

It’s the thing that sets you apart

lets you help your clients

slay their villains and go on top

of their own journeys

and the way I like to frame it

for my guests is if you look at

all the skills that you develop

over the course of your career

there’s probably a common thread

that ties all of those skills together

what do you think your superpower is

that’s allowed you to build

this financial educators council

into what it is today?

Vince Shorb: And I was thinking about that

I’m like yeah

what superpower is it?

What do I have?

And I think really it came down

to I always had the end goal in mind

even when I started this organization

I always had an end goal

of really making impact

on people’s financial capabilities

And I had an end goal

of really impacting the masses.

So even though our companies

went through many iterations

different channels

different strategies

on how to get there

[00:01:00] that end goals remain the same

yet through that process

I was flexible in able to adapt

with those changes

and through those changes

I was able to prioritize

the most important task

to get us to that end goal

now did I always follow the best path?

No, but you know

I think just having that end target

in mind was very helpful.

And I think with any superhero

there’s always an end target

that they have in mind and

and they’re ruthlessly

dedicated to achieving those goals.

And this is my life passion, right?

I’m not gonna be out of this industry

this is what I’m gonna continue

to work on until my last breath

I love it

I think that’s the way

I can make a difference in the world

and so that would be my superpower

not as exciting as flying

but I think for me as this leader

Richard Matthews: But more practical.

​

Richard Matthews: [00:02:00] Hello and welcome back to The Hero Show. My name is Richard Matthews and today I have the pleasure of having Vince Shorb on the line. Vince, are you there?

Vince Shorb: I am Richard. Good to meet you.

Richard Matthews: Awesome. Glad to have you here. And I guess before we get too far into all the interview stuff, I always like to find out where are you calling in from?

Vince Shorb: Dallas, Texas. I moved from California a few years ago, three, four years ago. Taxes are better. [00:03:00] Nice area. I love it out here. I do miss the beach.

Richard Matthews: Yeah. Yeah. We are currently in California, ’cause that’s where I grew up. We’re visiting family for the holidays which, our audience, they know we travel full time, so we’re always tell ’em where we’re at, when we’re at, when we do these episodes. We’re still in California. But yeah, Texas was one of our favorite places we visited in the U.S and then we actually got stuck in Florida during Covid.

So we’re actually now Florida residents for our stuff. Same kind of thing. I remember the first time we did our taxes in Florida and they were like, would you like to do your state taxes? I was like, yes, please. And they were like, you’re done. It’s zero. And I’m like, oh, that’s nice. Coming from California.

Vince Shorb: Not a bad place to be stuck weather wise or tax.

Richard Matthews: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So what I wanna do before we get into this is do just a brief introduction of who you are. So I got your bio here. I’m gonna read that for our audience. Then we’ll dive in and start talking about your story. So Vince Shorb is the CEO of National Financial Educators Council founded the company in 2006 to deliver financial education and coaching services that help people work towards greater financial strength.

Today, the NFEC supports individuals and organizations that want [00:04:00] to bring financial wellness programs to their community by providing the tools, training, and processes to help them build and scale these initiatives. So what I wanna find out from you is what are you guys known for? What is your business like? Who do you serve? What do you do for them?

Vince Shorb: Yeah, we’re really known for bringing programming, quality programming into local communities and with a focus on outcome results, right? You can teach a lot of subjects. You can, if we look at all subjects in high school, you can teach it, but can you apply what you learn? The beauty with personal finance, we can actually apply and track in the outcomes of these students.

So our focus is really making a change, positive change in people’s lives through financial education, empowering them economically so that they can live that life so they can have time with their family so they can enjoy those other things in life. And that’s a real interesting thing about money.

It’s really a basis of all of our core human needs and a lot of our goals and dreams in the future. So we think it’s something that needs to be prioritized [00:05:00] in people’s lives and getting that education. And we work with local people that are passionate about sharing this, right? That have a, that wish they were taught about money in school that just wish they learned some lessons before they made mistakes.

And also people that did well financially that wanna share their knowledge with others in their community. So we provide them, as you said, the training resources and support to do so in their local communities.

Richard Matthews: So I really love that because, I have I’ve started getting into the business community when I was young, 13 years old when I started my first business and got shut down by the government ’cause you can’t have a business at 13 apparently. But like they don’t teach you any of the things that you need to know about business or finance or personal finance at all in school.

You don’t learn how to do taxes. You don’t how to learn to open a bank account. You don’t learn how to write a check. Not that people write checks anymore, but when back in, when I was in high school, I had to write a check for things. You didn’t teach you how to do any of those things.

They don’t teach you how to like actually distribute your own finances so you can, I follow a system now called “Profit First” by Mike McCallis in our business. And a lot of the same concepts can be applied to your own personal life too. [00:06:00] And man, if I had known those kind of things 20 years ago not only would my business probably be bigger but our bank accounts would probably be bigger. And there’s just so much that like I had to learn by trial and error that it would be significantly useful for our communities. And, you know, I’m generally thinking like my own children, right?

And I know I can teach them, I can teach them ’cause I’ve been through that school of hard knocks, right but not everyone has that same sort of like set of resources to be able to teach their kids. So being able to provide that for community is really cool.

Vince Shorb: True. Yeah. And it’s amazing that students graduate without the ability to get a job. They don’t have a resume done. They don’t have interview skills. They don’t even have connections to local jobs. They graduate without the basic money management systems in place. They don’t have a calendar of financial events.

They have nothing to that nature. They graduate with no knowledge. Most students never receive a financial education in elementary, high school or college. The ones that do get less than 20 hours, imagine trying speaking a foreign language after 20 hours or doing anything after 20 [00:07:00] hours of education. Not enough.

And they just go out like it sounds like you may have done. I know I did. I made some early mistakes. Now I was always focused on money. I had early businesses. I had a lizard selling and frog selling business that got shut down in elementary school. So I feel you there. For me, I felt the whole time in my school, I was in the back of class reading investment books, reading entrepreneurship books, because I knew what they were teaching me was not relevant.

I was never gonna use advanced chemistry. I had no interest. I was never gonna use that advanced mathematics. I had no interest. Foreign language. It’s like I knew I was never gonna be speaking to going, needing to really speak it because I had the idea on where technology was gonna take us.

I felt, just that schooling was a waste of my time. And I talked to a lot of youth today. They feel the same way. And I just feel a school should be a place where students are getting the skills to be self-sufficient in contributing members of society as opposed to having random knowledge that they’ll never you need in their life for the most part.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, absolutely. And I [00:08:00] feel you on the whole feeling like it was useless ’cause I was, I caught the entrepreneurial bug young, right? I was nine years old when I started reading “Rich Dad, Poor Dad”. And by the time I was 13, I was like, I wanted, I started a candy wholesaling business.

I convinced my dad to like, take me to this big box store and buy the candy and, at, and then wholesale it or, wholesale prices and then sell at retail. And I remember, in the financial world, the first lesson that I learned. Was, the difference between profit and revenue and margin and like any, your profits and all that kind of stuff.

And I remember it was one of those things that’s I convinced my dad to gimme a $50 loan at a, like a 10% simple interest. So I owed him $55 back. And then I sold all my candy and I made a hundred bucks. And so then I gave my dad 55 and I had to restock my inventory with the 45 I had left. And then I had $0.

And I was like, I don’t understand what happened here. Like, how did I end up with $0 even though I had this whole thing going. And so I had I had to go sit down in Barnes and Noble and reading a book about, financial education, trying to figure out what profit and revenue and margin and stuff was.

And so like I learned those [00:09:00] lessons early and young, the hard way. It would be nice to actually teach our children these things so they are prepared for going into the world.

Vince Shorb: And that’s such a valuable lesson. Look, it stuck with you many years later. I don’t know your age, but it stuck with you many years later, right? A lot of the lessons you think back to a math class, you don’t remember it, but that because it’s experiential, you had some risk involved, you had some excitement involved.

There’s project-based learning techniques that, and strategies we can use with our used to, almost duplicate what you went through. Maybe in a safer, more secure setting, where there’s, they’re not taking that risk, but they’re still going through that process. I think always a little risk early on is a good thing to feel, so you know what, get used to that feeling.

But there’s ways to duplicate what you went through and ensure our kids are leaving with that. If we look at kids today, they’re very entrepreneurial. They have dreams of being influencers and athletes and all these things that are, more on the entrepreneurship side, which is great.

Now I think they should maybe have some other plans in place as well, but yeah, [00:10:00] backup plans and so forth. But even if you’re not that influencer star, there’s other things you could do. Edit podcasts, do get into that type of business. So there’s opportunities for them to be in the space they love and surrounding the people they love that they wanna be a pro athlete, which a lot of 20 plus percent of youth have that dream and vision.

They wanna be that. There’s other things they can do. There’s ticket sales. There’s working somewhere on the field. There’s personal trainers and therapists, but they’re not exposed to those professions. They’re just exposed to really, if we look at what schooling is, it’s math, it’s science, it’s social studies, and english.

That’s it. So the professions they’re exposed to are very limited when there’s so many opportunities to stay. There’s so much information. There’s so many creative ways we can teach and letting kids follow their own entrepreneurial path or career path while they’re in school.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, it’s so true. My uh, I’m 38, by the way. I got four kids. My youngest one is 14. He’s the same age I was when I was trying to learn all this stuff. And he’s because we homeschool and we have [00:11:00] access to some of the things that, like a lot of kids don’t, they don’t have access to kind of stuff that you teach,

he’s written two novels. He’s in the process of writing his an online course on how to leverage AI for things. And so he’s trying to save up money so he can buy an Apple Vision Pro. and like, so he’s learning, a lot of these things young. And I have for the longest time, always wanted to figure out how do you take the kind of stuff that, like that as an entrepreneur that I can teach my son that. How do you teach that at scale to all of our youth?

All right. The middle school, high school kids. College, the young adults who need that. So they don’t have to go through the same sort of, I don’t know, struggles that like you and I probably went through, and it’s one of the things that I’ve, always been fascinated with by our human species is that we always take whatever we had and the next generation, we try to start them where we ended.

Vince Shorb: Yeah. Yeah.

Richard Matthews: This is one of those areas that we’ve never, like throughout human history ever really had good financial education for our youth. And it’s really excites me that you’re doing that what you’re doing at the scale you’re doing it at. Because you said you [00:12:00] have like how many states and people do you have teaching this now?

Vince Shorb: Over 6,000 people in every state and in 70 countries. And we’re starting our state chapters which is really focused on building hubs of our local contacts to really just provide them, every state’s different. They have different needs. They have different socio-economic statuses. One street over is doing good, the next street over is not doing good.

So it really takes a local presence to best understand them. And to your point, there are ways to teach and give students freedom to learn. And I think that’s a, big problem with schools is I did a video. Here a few weeks ago, it was comparing my report card from 1991. And mind you, the first website came online on August 1991.

So a few months after I graduated, which is interesting, and I compared it with one of our members of our youth advisory board. He graduated last year. I went through line by line. He took exactly the same classes I did with, he was a little smarter in math and science, but I maybe could have done it, but he’s [00:13:00] excelled there.

But the same classes were available and it’s just sad. Like Ai’s around, Chat GPT’s around, social media’s around the world’s completely changed. Yet school is stuck our focus really advancing this economic empowerment agenda so that people graduate with the skills that you need for modern society and your son’s very fortunate to have that freedom to explore, to write novels to think about developing Ai training course.

That’s awesome. And I think that’s you’re demonstrating what we can duplicate in schools.

Richard Matthews: Yeah that’s, it is so true. You gave me chills when you said that because, I’m an employer and I assume you’re an employer as well. One of the things that, like over the course of the last year, my employment strategies changed because of the advent of AI where you know that some of the stuff that’s happening, depending on the roles in our company, like there’s our writer roles, for instance.

If you don’t know how to leverage ChatGPT to even help you do basic things like make sure that our grammar is always a hundred percent correct. ’cause you can, now we have word calculators right there. It was like, [00:14:00] you have to have these skills to be marketable as an employee today, a year ago you didn’t.

And that changed really fast and it’s not going to slow down anytime soon. And so the fact that you have students that graduated last year that are taking the same classes that you and I took 30 years ago, it means that like they’re not learning the marketable skills they need to have to succeed into today’s economy.

And that’s financial education. It’s technological education, it’s just all across the board. So yeah, that’s cool.

I know I don’t usually ask this early in the interview, but how can other people who are interested in this help you grow and do what you’re doing? Is this something that can educators reach out to you and you guys can help set them up with those kinda stuff? What does that actually look like?

Vince Shorb: Yeah, really anybody that has a passion for wanting to really promote financial education in their community. We work with so we work a lot with nonprofits, colleges, public schools, even private schools entrepreneurs, A lot of entrepreneurs in our program that wanna build a model in their community and earn [00:15:00] revenue.

We work with financial service people that are looking to build relationships with clients. So the beauty is, on a daily basis, I’ll talk to people from 10 different industries, right? They all share one common goal, maybe some different nuances as far as how they’re gonna fund in the revenue models and how they’re gonna promote it in their community.

But the end goal is the same. How do we improve people’s financial capabilities so they can live a better life, right? And enjoy those things and serve the community. So that is interesting. So anybody that has an interest, feel free to reach out to us. I know you’ll put the website up or reach out to me personally on LinkedIn and I’m happy to help.

But really we don’t have any barriers. We serve people from high schools. I remember one of our first young ladies from high school she was volunteering at a homeless shelter and she saw all the parents had a lot of services that were helping them. I think it was through a Salvation Army or similar.

They had a lot of services for them, but the kids didn’t. So she went through the training and she actually put together a program for the youth so that they can [00:16:00] get a sense of hope and get the lessons early so that they’re not repeating that cycle that their family’s going through. So really all ages and we have retirees that are just, Hey, this is my, they’ve served in financial services for 30 years now.

This is the way they give back. So it really doesn’t matter if it’s an enterprise they’re trying to build or just a passion project, we wanna support them.

Richard Matthews: Awesome. I love what you’re up to. So what I wanna actually dive into then is how you got here, right? So on this show we talk about your origin story. Every good comic book hero has an origin story. It’s a thing that made them into the hero they are today, and we wanna hear that. Were you born a hero or did you get bit by a radioactive spider that made you wanna start a financial education services business?

Or did you start in a job and eventually move to become an entrepreneur? Basically, how did you get here?

Vince Shorb: Yeah. You know, After five years living in the cave, no, I’m just kidding. But I had a, fortunate with my upbringing. You know, I had parents that were focused on finances, grandparents, and they all had different skill sets, right? My one side of my family is more frugal, tight with money and really watch everything.

My other side of my family was those [00:17:00] risk takers, entrepreneurs and investors. So I had a good balance going in and they instilled in me an interest in money at an early age, early businesses, early investments in real estate, while I was still a teenager, and I had some early successes. But what I loved most during that time was people asking me, Hey, how’d you buy that home?

I wanted to do the same. Help me out. I was doing their budgets, I was doing their plans, I was helping them. I was working with them. I really enjoyed that process. I lacked some basic knowledge though, and I made some dumb mistakes. I think a little overconfidence as well, right? Early successes. You got this ego, young man, I’m out there, gonna take on the world, so I made some investments with some credit card money that I that I fronted and that didn’t turn out too well.

So, I got in the hole, had to dig myself out. I went through a lot of the struggles that people faced today, which looking back, it was a really good learning moment for me. And took me a few years to dig out of that. And I really wanted to get into financial services to help people avoid what I went through.

And also, I wanted to get back into talking with people because I really enjoyed talking [00:18:00] about finances. After about 15 years in a variety of spaces. I left that field because I felt a lot of what I was doing was putting a bandaid on people’s real financial issues. So the behavior side the confidence side, the ability for them to make decisions in alignment with their longer term goals.

And so I started the National Financial Educators Council back in 2006. It was another name. It had National Youth Financial Educators Council, because we’re simply focused on youth at that time. But now we serve all ages from all socioeconomic statuses, and our mission stays the same. Now. When we started, we were boots on the ground.

Doing financial education programs, leading those programs. I was doing speaking tours. We held many big events. And with a thousand plus persons in attendance, Celebrity, sports stars like Wilmer, Valderrama, John Sally, other people that came out to these. And with that big campaign, we had a lot of people asking us for help.

Hey, [00:19:00] help us develop our program. Can we use your materials? Can you help us with this aspect of a program

Richard Matthews: Yeah.

Vince Shorb: So our model slowly shifted after about 2009, 2010, about three, four years after we started, simply because I was living on the road. I was like, how am I gonna reach all these people in cities?

We couldn’t scale at the speed that I really wanted. And we started training other educators and coaches to fulfill some of those things. So there was less flights and that really took off and takes us to where we are today with having those educators and coaches in all these cities. So if there’s a local event or somebody needs local support, there’s somebody that doesn’t have to get and fly 2000 miles to them.

It’s typically a short car ride to that venue, which helps everybody. It reduces the cost for the clients, and it provides those local people some connections. And that really takes us to where we are today and in the next few years. We’re gonna continue with that model and building out these states, our goal in the next three to five years to have every state built out with our state hubs.

So we have [00:20:00] representation in each state and that’s where we see this growing.

Richard Matthews: That’s really awesome. I love that story. And the thing that pops into my head is, one of the reasons why we started this podcast, the Hero Show, is specifically because for whatever reason, culturally, entrepreneurs are always held up as villains, right? If you watch any movie or reading any TV show or look online, any social media stuff, it’s always like the stories that make it anywhere are always the negative stories, which they do exist.

There are, of course, there’s evil in every category, but the overwhelming majority of entrepreneurship is people like you and people like me who are like, there’s a problem we can solve, right? And we can fix that and make it better. And you’re looking at, like, when you’re looking at scaling and growing and building a profitable business here, that profitable business is going to change the world for the better.

And I love that. I love that. I love that you have the appetite for the growth and the scale to build something that is going to make a shift culturally. To have an impact on that.

Vince Shorb: Yeah. Yeah, social impacts at our root, we’re actually a certified B corporation which [00:21:00] showcases, hey, we have to meet high standards for social impact, for how we treat our workers, how we’re impacting the environment and really looking at a business holistically. Now, fortunately, our business is rooted in helping people, so that’s a much easier but it did a lot.

Going through that process really helped us with the processes and procedures of operating our business, the how we treat our workers, our hiring practice, and how we’re really elevating them and empowering them within the organization to help them grow. And so that’s been a good process for us to really reinforce our social impact, not just from a third-party need, but also internally in our partners and who we serve.

That’s a, for anybody thinking about, Hey, I have a social impact organization. I really want to take it to the next level. I think that B Corp certification is a good thing to explore for brand enhancement and also, it helped again with us establishing the processes and procedures to manage our company effectively.

Richard Matthews: That’s wonderful. Yeah. I know we’ve talked to a couple of certified B Corporations on the podcast before, and it wasn’t something I even heard of [00:22:00] until the first time we had a guest on. And ’cause it’s not an actual what do you call it? A government like entity. It’s a certification that goes on top of your existing entity.

Is that right?

Vince Shorb: Yeah, so you have to be a recognized public benefit corporation by the IRS once you have that. Then you have to meet the standards of the B Corporation. Really, anybody can get recognized as from the IRS as a benefit corporation. If you have a mission statement and other basic things.

It’s the B Corp certification that’s really putting you through the grind. It was a couple year process on making sure that, everything is cohesive with their values on how they treat workers and the social impact aspects. So it is it’s not for the faint hearted. But again, if you’re looking for structure on your business, that’s a social impact business.

It is

Richard Matthews: helpful.

That’s really cool. So I wanna talk then about your superpowers, right? Every iconic hero has a superpower, whether that’s their fancy flying suit they made by their genius intellect, or the ability to call down thunder from the sky or super strength. In the real world, heroes have what I call a zone of genius, which is either a skill that they were born with, [00:23:00] or a skill that they develop over the course of their career that really helps energize all their other skills, right?

It’s the thing that sets you apart, lets you help your clients slay their villains and go on top of their own journeys. And the way I like to frame it for my guests is if you look at all the skills that you develop over the course of your career, there’s probably a common thread that ties all of those skills together.

And with that sort of framing, what do you think your superpower is that’s allowed you to build this financial educators council into what it is today?

Vince Shorb: Yeah. I’ve heard your question on another few other podcasts. Great show by the way. And I was thinking about that. I’m like, yeah what superpower is it? What do I have? And I think really it came down to I always had the end goal in mind. Even when I started this organization, I always had an end goal of really making impact on people’s financial capabilities.

And I had an end goal of really impacting the masses. So even though our companies went through many iterations, different channels, different strategies on how to get there, that end goals remain the same. Yet through that process, I was flexible in able to adapt with [00:24:00] those changes. And through those changes, I was able to prioritize the most important task to get us to that end goal.

Now, did I always follow the best path? No. But I think just having that end target in mind was very helpful. And I think with any superhero, there’s always an end target that they have in mind and, they’re, ruthlessly dedicated to achieving those goals. And this is my life passion, right?

I’m not gonna be out of this industry. This is what I’m gonna continue to work on until my last breath. I love it. I think that’s the way I can make a difference in the world. And so that would be my superpower. Not as exciting as flying, but for me as this leader

Richard Matthews: But more practical. I

Vince Shorb: It’s to have.

Richard Matthews: one of, One of the things that popped in my head while you were saying that was just the idea that and maybe you’ve heard this before, it’s a path thing, but that your goals are carved into stone, but your plans are drawn in sand. And so like, hey, the goal to make this impact, like that’s not gonna change.

We carved that into stone, how we get there. It might change today or tomorrow or, and we mentioned earlier in the [00:25:00] call AI didn’t exist in 2022, not in any real, like marketable way. And yet today it’s, if you’re not considering any of your business, you’re probably getting left behind.

So you have to change plans with the way the world changes. and I imagine you’ve been doing this since 2006, your business has seen the advent of, the smartphone and the advent of the mobile internet and the advent of AI and the advent of everyone’s connected to to the internet all the time.

Like none of that happened early on. And you guys have been through a pandemic and a recession and all sorts of things. So I imagine growing a business through all those things has changed your plans dramatically from, year to year.

Vince Shorb: Definitely. Yeah. And I think the ability to, adapt and the other thing, I think that’s, it was important to us is making sure that, hey, our risk management was in place That during those times, right? And we had strategies, Hey, fall back, plan one, fall back, plan two sometimes we were doing fall back plan four, but again if you could fall back without being crushed there’s no loss, right?

And I consider that a win. I don’t mind falling back a little bit. Hey it’s [00:26:00] all, even though I’m dead I’m. I wanna say I’m the most patient man in the world, right? But I understand, hey, when there’s things major upheavals in the industry or changes like covid and things that, hey, you have to refer to a fallback position, get strong.

And then really again, spring forward hard. So yeah,

Richard Matthews: and it.

Vince Shorb: Good history of what happened over the last few decades.

Richard Matthews: Yeah. And if you’re looking at like, how does that super power actually come out in your business? You’re talking like, Hey, our goal is not gonna change. And that’s how you’re approaching this is it doesn’t change, but like, you have the ability to adapt and to work into the marketplace and re strategize and rebuild what you’re gonna do and continue on towards the goal, right?

And that’s a really important, especially if you’re running a company with a big audacious goal, right? A lot of entrepreneurs, for better or for worse, they’re like, I have this thing that I’m working on that is useful for me and it’s valuable to my community.

What you’re talking about, it’s on a bigger scale, right? I was like I want to have an impact in every community in the US and in countries all over the world, and change the way financial education is done on like a species [00:27:00] level. It’s just, it’s a higher level goal than a lot of small businesses, right?

Where it’s not that there’s anything wrong with, small business. It’s a different goal. So you have to have that kind of that, I don’t even know what you would call that superpower that grit to no matter what happens, we’re gonna continue going towards this goal.

Vince Shorb: Yeah. Yeah. No, that is a good point. I like your, the primary goals written in, stone, but the plan is written in sand. I like that saying quite a bit.

Richard Matthews: Absolutely. So I wanna talk about the flip side then. Every superpower, if you turn the coin over, has the fatal flaw, right? Just like every Superman has a kryptonite or wonder woman can’t remove her bracelets of victory without going mad. You probably had something that you’ve held you back in your business something that you struggled with.

For me, I struggled with perfectionism for a long time. Also struggled with not having good, what would you call it? Like self-care. So I had let my clients walk all over me and didn’t have good boundaries with my time. So I’d work 14 hours a day and not sleep at night. Not a good way to grow a business, by the way, in case anyone’s wondering.

But I think more important than what the flaw is how have you worked to overcome it so you could continue on towards that goal.

Vince Shorb: Yeah. I think my flaws still continues to be overworking, but I don’t mind it. But I take on a lot more [00:28:00] than I probably should. I should probably outsource more than I do to my team. They’re very quality team, great people. But I always like to have the final say and final review.

I still feel more comfortable that way. It still does hold me back, but, I have a great COO now, he’s been with us for 14 years. He’s taken a lot of that off. So I’ve shed probably 80% of that to other people, but there’s still 20% I need to be involved in, need to see the processes where it’s at.

I like to be updated regularly with where things are at in the scale in the, goal. But I would say if my couple year goal is to get myself out of the operations of the business. Trevor’s handling, again, 80 plus percent now, which is great. And so I can just focus on the brain making the pr, the outreach, the relationships, those things, the traveling, those things that go along with running a company.

So that’s my end goal. And we have a great team that has been here a [00:29:00] while. I have five core people. We have 14 people in the team. We scale to a couple hundred contractors when we’re building out custom projects. But we have five core executives that I can really rely on now which is a good feeling.

If I go back 10 years ago, it wasn’t like that. It was a three man show, a decade ago, and everybody was doing 50 different roles, and trying to keep things organized. And now it’s much more dispersed, where each person has very clear and distinguished roles. And again, the B Corp helped us do that, but also going through our accreditation was very helpful.

It was a three-year process to get accredited. But through that process it really helped me having, processes and procedures where other people are responsible for task in a very clear review process. So I don’t always have to review, but there is a second set of eyes that goes on it, and it’s all process eyes within a system we use.

So I know it’s done right? I see the report. Okay, great. It’s been checked [00:30:00] off by two people. Wonderful. So I think, my next two years I’m gonna still try to work out of that last 15 ish percent. So I can really focus on what I enjoy doing. Getting out there, talking to people pressing palms working with bigger clients, helping them solve big challenges and working in these communities as well.

I do miss, getting in front of the youth and connecting with them, so I’m looking forward to getting back to that role, which is, take me back to the beginning when we started, that was my role at the very beginning. So I’m looking back to going to some of those areas that I really enjoyed.

Richard Matthews: I love that. One of the things that like, we’re a lot younger company but same kind of like rules in place that we’re trying to build. I got a couple of things that like I’m working on. So one of ’em, I call the bus rule that like if I get hit by a bus, the business continues, right?

Which is if you are doing everything, that’s not gonna happen. My business doesn’t pass that yet, but hopefully at some point it will. And then the other one, that’s really been sticking out to me is something that I’ve started to focus on a lot is to, not just for me, but for everyone on my team to do only that, which only you can do, [00:31:00] right?

And so you build systems, you build processes, you build your hiring, you build your SOPs, you build everything in place so that each person in their role is doing things that are at their highest and best use, right? And so for me as CEO of the company, highest and best use for me is going to be my face, my voice showing up with people, right?

Doing things like this, going on the podcasts, getting on stages, you know what you call it? Pressing palms, right? Shaking hands, this kind of stuff that, like when you do those things, they have the highest impact on the business. And getting everything else ruthlessly off of your plate, right?

And into the hands of people who for them it’s their highest and best use to do those things, right? And when you start building thinking about your company that way, you end up being able to grow a much larger company and have a much larger impact than if you try to keep everything yourself.

Vince Shorb: Agreed. No, I like where you’re at in your stage and it seems like you reached out at an earlier stage than we did, so congratulations.

Richard Matthews: Yeah. I, we still have a lot of work to do. I still got a lot of things on my plate, but, at least I have our path forward. I know we’re working on, and I’m currently [00:32:00] training my COO right now and she’s coming up and and starting to take a lot of those things off of my plate and build things and man, I just got off a call with her right before we got on this call.

I told you I was like two minutes late to this interview. It’s ’cause we were talking about operational stuff and she had a whole set of things. It’s Hey, we went and did all of these things and started to improve this process and here’s what I think. I’m like so good. It’s so good to not be the only one who’s looking at how do I make this better?

How do I achieve our mission at a higher degree? And it’s wonderful when you have other people who are bought into the same mission for your company.

Vince Shorb: That you trust and that are doing good results. Trevor started working with us as an intern. He was in grad school and he started from the ground up and, he knew the company inside and out. He’s just, super organized, meticulous with how he makes notes, and, he makes these detailed charts where I can easily see the flow.

So he understands not only the company, but he understands how I like to see things too, which is very valuable. In the training with him, it was more, Hey, I need to see it [00:33:00] this way. And he got to understand me as well, which makes, life super simple. So I’m glad you’re having a good operations director there as well.

I think you’ll enjoy when you’re seeing, things that you used to have to do off your plate.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, it’ll be super good. I’m excited for that kind of growth. And it’s one of those things that I’ve just realized as we’ve started to hit, like the I always refer to businesses as like the stages of your business. Like you got baby business and you got a toddler business and you got a young child business.

You got like a teenage, a preteen and teen and then like an adult business. Adult has been like, you can leave for a few weeks and come back. And the business is not only just running, but like maybe even running better than when you were there. Like that’s, you did a good job raising them into an adult business.

We’re like solidly, like my business is probably like an eight or 9-year-old. Like they can make their own lunch, but if I left them there for two weeks, they’d burn the house down. That’s where we’re at.

Vince Shorb: I gotcha. Gotcha. That’s great though. But hey, you got a path for growth and it seems like you’re doing the right things. And I think it’s always, with parenting and with business, it’s always, Hey, when do you give added responsibility? How much time do you need to have that, those [00:34:00] conversations, how much control over what they’re doing do you need?

So it’s always a learning process. But I enjoy that as well. I enjoy seeing the company grow as if it was a child.

Richard Matthews: Yeah. I was like, it was one of those things we were just having on our discussion this morning is as the people who are building the business, it’s it feels like your baby, right? It’s you’re helping to raise it and turn it into a responsible member of society that’s capable of growing and adding value and those kind of things.

I wanna talk then about common enemy. So your common enemy is your arch nemesis, right? And so your arch nemesis, every comic book hero has their arch nemesis, and it’s the thing they constantly have to fight against in their world.

And in the world of business, we like to put in the context of your clients, your customers, people that actually come to you. And it’s a mindset. It’s a flaw that they have, that you have to fight to overcome so that you can actually get them the results that they came to you for in the first place.

And I imagine with your business, it could be anything from the communities that you’re working in and helping to get them to the point where they’re actually understand the value of this kind of education or maybe the educators that you’re bringing in and teaching or maybe even the people that you’re actually [00:35:00] teaching themselves.

’cause you have a several different sort of like categories of, people that you’re serving. So I’ll let you choose, but where do you think your arch nemesis. or maybe even.

Vince Shorb: Yeah. From a industry perspective, I think our nemesis is status quo. When financial education really has been taught through lecture and PowerPoint, right? Lecture, PowerPoint. That’s how it’s been taught. That’s how the majority are still teaching today, and we’re really trying to battle against that because very few people prefer learning in that manner, right?

You have a handful, 10, 20% that type of lecture as their primary learning source, but that neglects 80% of the classroom and there’s better ways to teach. So we’ve been really an advocate for following research-based education principles and bringing that into the classroom or workshops or Facebook lives.

However, people are teaching personal finance or however they’re working with their individual coaching clients. There’s better ways that we can deliver instruction, and yet the majority out there are just [00:36:00] PowerPointing and lecturing. So I think that’s a big thing with the industry. We’ve combated that by writing the only standards for financial education instructors, standards for coaches several white papers that outline.

Research-based education methodologies that they can bring into the classrooms to enhance learning, to enhance outcomes, and to get people to actually apply what they’ve learned. So from an industry perspective, I would say that is one of the things we’re battling from a external perspective, I think it’s a status quo within schools, right?

I think we have a huge opportunity. so I, I, you know, when I wake up, I’m like, how do I get this into schools? I think that would be the biggest opportunity to serve people on a mass scale. And really I’m going subject by subject through and showcasing the value of financial education versus other subject matter they’re teaching the high school.

For example, Algebra. Less than 10% of people will [00:37:00] use algebra when they’re out in their career. Yet all students need to take it, right? Geometry, same thing. Science, the same thing. So there’s about 7% STEM-related fields out there.

So if you’re gonna be a scientist, engineer, math, you need those, right? But the vast majority do not. So I’m going subject by subject through tackling that to try to make room for personal finance education. So if we go with a superhero route, if it’s a eight-leg spider, I’m trying to chop off leg by leg to get that thing down, it doesn’t make some teachers too happy.

But again, I always tell people, Hey, I love the teachers. It’s a subject matter you’re teaching, but you can be retrained to teach subject matter that’s gonna be more beneficial to students. And really, most teachers I talk to. Math, Science, they understand. They know, Hey, you’re not gonna use this.

I had a great chemistry teacher in high school, Mr. Birch, great guy. He knew I was never gonna need it. He kinda let me do my own thing with using my notes for tests and always kicked me outta the classroom. But he was good guys. I know you won’t need this. And we had [00:38:00] conversations.

But he was like, you just gotta get through this to get your diploma. We’re tackling the internal nemesis via setting standards and showcasing our outcome compared to other classes. And we’re tackling that external school nemesis, really just trying to chop ’em down at the roots and make a plea based on what’s best for the kids.

How do we want the future of our kids to turn out and really attacking each subject matter to find more room for personal finance in schools.

Richard Matthews: Yeah it’s interesting because we’re homeschooled our kids and so we, we put them through the STEM curriculum because it’s required by law that they take that my high school student takes Algebra, like if he doesn’t take algebra, like we can lose our child kind of thing, which is interesting to me.

And.

Vince Shorb: Yeah. Very scary.

Richard Matthews: Despite the fact that we know it’s not a useful skill, it is required by law that they have to do those things. And so one of the things that we’ve started doing just as homeschool teachers is looking at what are the useful skills you can get out of [00:39:00] these trainings, right? Because we have to take them still.

’cause you haven’t won yet. You haven’t won with your mission, you’re working on it. But so we like, okay, when you’re learning Algebra, you’re not learning Algebra per se, right? You are learning Algebra. But what you’re learning is you’re learning the brain pathways for problem solving, right?

And you’re learning the ability to build and understand how formulas work, right? And which are useful skills. So what we’re looking for as homeschool parents is where do we find the skills that will apply in other areas that you can learn while you’re learning this subject while you’re forced to learn this subject that you probably won’t use in your career, right?

And for myself growing up, the teachers who were the best, that I still remember their names and remember their lectures today taught that way. They talk those if you’re going to go through chemistry, if you’re going to go through English class, the things that you need to learn how to do are, it’s not that you’re reading Catcher in the Rye, right?

It’s not that you’re reading, of Mice and men. It’s are you learning how to understand how to tell a story, right? Because telling a story is a really valuable skill, right? And so my 10th grade teacher spent a lot of time breaking down like the story elements and teaching us how to [00:40:00] tell and create stories.

And was just using his curriculum as a way to do that. He’s ’cause this is the skill. The skill is not, you read Catcher in the Rye, right? Or that you know how to do build an algebraic formula. It’s like the backside of those kind of things. And to your end, you could teach all of those things, but also teach skills that they would be like, would actually be useful, right?

Like personal finance.

Vince Shorb: Yeah. Yeah. And the thing is with a lot of the skill sets, now your kids are different ’cause they’re getting personal attention and that focus, right? So we can really help them on an individual level, their interests, Hey, here’s how that applies to AI. So it can be very relevant to them.

And the big claim of education is this far transfer of knowledge. So the critical thinking skills you build in math would transfer to another area. Unless you’re getting that pathway connected for them through an excellent teacher, which most aren’t, they’re missing that in fact, far transfer of knowledge rarely ever works.

And far transfer of knowledge being, say I’m taking a critical thinking skill set I developed in [00:41:00] math and applying it toward a business plan or a financial plan. Most will never make that connection even near transfer of learning where it’s within the subject matter. You gain a skill in math and you apply it to the next level.

That works, but that far transfer of learning, it’s very rare. But the key thing to make sure to get better results from that far transfer of learning is personal attention and application within that student’s interest. So what you’re doing at home is awesome. It just is very difficult to replicate in a school setting unless you have a very excellent teacher that understands hey, I’m not just teaching toward the test.

And that’s the big thing we see in school. It’s, Hey, you gotta pass this test, take the exam, make me look good.

Richard Matthews: Right? That’s built for schools. The teachers are incentivized on it. The students are incentivized on it, and the financial incentive for the schools are, if you test better, you get more money. So we’ve built that incentive structure in. So here’s a more, ethereal question for you.

Do you think the school system as it is survives this generation?

Vince Shorb: I hope [00:42:00] not the way it is. We’ve been teaching the same subjects. We have another thing on report cards. We pulled up report cards for the last hundred years, right? Again, just like my 1991 versus 2023 report card was the same. You go back a hundred years, same thing. Now there was religion classes, home ec, and other things that were in there that aren’t in today’s curriculum, but the core curriculum’s the same.

I really think, a lot of what schooling is, it’s a signaling, you’re signaling to the workforce that you can follow directions, you can stand up, sit down, obey bells and buzzers, and do the coursework. So it’s a signaling thing as opposed to training people that are going to be real value adds to the organization.

We’re still training workers. And with the advent of AI automation, look at the trucking industry with the self-driving trucks, right? There’s gonna be a major upheaval. One of the largest industries out there, riders. Everybody’s gonna be impacted quite significantly in the next 10, 20 years.

And they already have been already. [00:43:00] So the school system, if there’s not a massive change in the school system, I feel very sorry for this next generation. They’re not gonna have the skills to survive the modern workforce, or if they do, they’re gonna be, wage slaves and work at this low end of the income spectrum unless they apply themselves and get knowledge in specific areas that can benefit them.

And I’m worried for them. But I also am encouraged because today’s youth have access to so much information. Back in my day, not to age myself again, I had the library the Dewey Decimal system. I love when Barnes and Noble came out. I spent a ton of time at Barnes and Noble.

It’s much easier to find updated books, and now I can look, if I want to learn how to do, you know, let’s say a, a pay-per-click marketing, I can go watch, 20 hours of tutorials for free, have at least a decent handle. Go hire a contractor on Upwork or some site, have them help me shape it up.

But I have the knowledge enough to ask good questions and review their work. So there’s so much information out [00:44:00] there and I think, every kid should graduate excited to learn, and today kids graduate with, oh, thank God that’s over, right? I don’t have to do this anymore. And, learning can be fun if it applies.

I remember, I used to snowboard quite a bit. And I’d watch these kids up. I lived up in Tahoe for a year, and I’d watch these kids on the lift. They’d be watching YouTube, watching their videos and learning tricks. And they’d go do it on, on the, so, oh, I messed this up. And they’d have their friend video and they would, repeat and try to fix what they did it.

Richard Matthews: So cool.

Vince Shorb: They’re learning. I’m like, this is yeah, it was so cool. Exactly. So I think today’s youth have a lot of opportunities, but we need to excite them with learning and give some freedom in schools too. It’s not just, Hey, Math, Science, English, Social Studies. It is, hey, giving them pathways to pick up those skillsets.

Hey, if we wanna teach ’em critical thinking skills, it doesn’t need to be through Math. There’s other ways we can learn critical thinking skills. Maybe it’s developing a long-term financial plan, right? They’re thinking they’re, applying things they [00:45:00] learned. There’s a million ways they can learn critical thinking, but instead it’s Math.

So giving them more freedom to learn the pathway. So if they have a person interested in AI, I want to start that type of business, there’s a path for them. And with modern technology and the way we can facilitate classrooms, it’s very possible. And I think, it wouldn’t require much in the way of funding more than what they’re getting almost a trillion dollars annually already.

Richard Matthews: Apply those resources the correct way.

Vince Shorb: Yeah, exactly. Correct application, things would’ve to change as far as like college admission standards, standardized testing other things of that nature. But I think that

Richard Matthews: Yeah. Our,

Vince Shorb: I think it’s doable and,

Richard Matthews: yeah our school system is not prepared for the world that we’re putting students into right now. And so what’s interesting to me is if you see the Covid was a great sort of kick in the pants for everyone, but post-COVID, homeschool rates are going through the roof.

And I think part of that is not because we they had to homeschool for a year or two. And then a lot of people realize oh, it’s not actually as hard as I thought it would be. It, there’s [00:46:00] so much access to information nowadays that just as a simple example, my son. I said mentioned he’s 14.

He’s really interested in animation and art. And my sister-in-Law is a phenomenal artist. And she’s got 20 years of training and she’s been like, turned down offers from Disney kind of thing. And she through all of the training in art from, she went to college courses for 20 years in art and she’s I learned nothing.

From any of those things, nothing that would actually applicable to my career as an artist. And my son, who’s 14, was like, we got on and got a training course from Aaron Blaze. And for those of you who don’t know who Aaron Blaze is one of Disney’s most famous animators, right?

And so he was the animator for Nala and Lion King, and he was the animator for Raja in Aladdin. And he was the lead animator and the producer for the entire movie of Brother Bear, right? And so he’s a world famous, very talented artist, and he is also a very talented educator.

And you can access his training where he’s got 750 hours of [00:47:00] training on like how to do art from everything you ever wanted to know on a store called Creature Art Teacher for $200 a year. And it’s the kind of thing that, like I put my son through, he’s going through his first couple of lessons with him.

And to see his art skills go from like here to here in one hour with one of the world’s best, animators is like just immediate. And it’s like the kind of thing that like, you and I could never have had that kind of training at his age. You couldn’t have accessed one of the best artists in the world and train directly with him.

But today, your kids can. And it’s not just art, that’s just a category, right? But it’s like that everywhere where if you do just a little bit of effort, right? And as a homeschool teacher, you can put your kids in front of the best in every category, ’cause they’re available and it’s not that expensive.

And to your point, if our schools are not taking advantage of that, right? They’re not taking advantage of the best in financial education or art education or, anything at all. It’s still the same thing that we’re teaching a hundred years ago, right? To your report card point.

And [00:48:00] they’re not actually like teaching our kids the way that they want to learn, right? Because my kids, all of them, all four, I got four kids, they’re all super excited about their schooling and what they’re doing and what they’re playing within learning because they’re getting to do those kind of things.

They’re getting to play in the areas that they’re really interested in and learning the skills that go along with those. And, it’s the kind of thing like, sure, we’re lucky because we have the entrepreneurship and the ability to homeschool. Not everyone does. That’s what the public school system is for.

And like your point here is we’re gonna use financial education as like the key that unlocks the door to bettering the education system on a whole.

Vince Shorb: Yeah. And I’m open to other categories as well. Now, I have a financial education company, so there’s a vested interest in getting that in. But a part of financial education means the income side, so the career and entrepreneurship side. So we’re not just money management. So that career, when I say financial education, I’m talking about career exploration, developing relevant skills in areas you’re passionate about.

Knowing how to interview, having a resume, getting early internship jobs. All [00:49:00] these things could be done. We have a safe, secure setting in schools and giving them the freedom to follow pathways. Even if every kid in the class wants a different job, they can research the requirements to get that job, start to build their resume on that job, see what volunteer opportunities would apply to that job.

We can get them doing project-based learning activities where even though every kid might have a different career path, the teacher can grade them on the same scale. So there is ways to measure and track outcomes.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, absolutely. So you’re talking about like actually using school to build marketable, like valuable members of society, like for today’s society, not for the agrarian age.

Vince Shorb: Exactly. And allow them to follow their passions. If you’re doing what you love, I’m doing what I love. A lot of people don’t have the luxury and aren’t as blessed as we are, just in that sense. And I think a lot of people get trapped in careers because they’ve, invested a lot of time into that.

Had a friend that was a lawyer, right? And he went through college all those years, passed the bar, and he got into practice for a few years. He’s you know what? I really don’t like this. So he spent [00:50:00] all this money and he left the space. He’s in financial services now, but his focus was on that, and he didn’t align it with his passion or I think he aligned it with his passion on the TV lawyer right in front arguing big cases.

But he didn’t realize a lot of it was behind the books reading. He is if I have to read another law document, I’m gonna jump off the roof. But, he readjusted and replant, but that cost him a decade of his life, and I want kids to have that early exposure because we’re asking them, you’re 18, 17, 18 years old, pick a career to go to college now.

Invest a hundred grand. You’re going to do this

Richard Matthews: your life that you can’t get back.

Vince Shorb: Yeah. Yeah. So I think, there’s a path. We need to have training wheels and then they can ride the two wheelers, right? Right now we’re throwing them out in the world without any relevant I remember when my dad taught me to drive, right?

He didn’t just say, Hey, here’s the keys to the car, go on the freeway. He took me to a wide open parking lot, put on the gas, slowly put back on the brake, turn off on and off the car. Very safe, secure. But I still [00:51:00] remember when we first started turning, getting, 10 feet from a light post.

Your hands get sweaty, you get tense. And we’re not doing that with money. We’re not doing that with career. There’s no segue to the real world. It’s Hey, you’re 18 on your own, paying your own bills. Now you gotta figure stuff out. Or even worse

Richard Matthews: Congratulations.

Vince Shorb: think is kids that, yeah. And we see kids now living at home till 30, 35, 40.

And it’s putting off any adulthood, which I think just ruins lives. That’s a life of desperation. If you’re living with your mom at that age. It’s a life of desperation for many. And I think it’s personal responsibility that age, but also, hey, we can help people avoid those situations.

Richard Matthews: Yeah. And I know one of the things that we do, like my kids were super interested in farming. They went through a phase where animals are the coolest thing in the world. So we, maybe when we start farming, do all those things. So we like volunteer, right? Go volunteer at a goat farm.

And you realize that part of having a farm is struggling shit, right? Like it’s just part of the job, right? So to the end same. And every job has their analogous [00:52:00] of troubling shit. Whatever that is, there’s the parts of the job that you’re like, oh, I don’t like that.

Sure. You also get to pet animals all day, but also you have to shovel their shit. And so as a lawyer, sure you get to argue the big cases, but also you have to do all the minutiae of, managing the clients and managing the all the data and everything that goes into the running the Lock Rear.

So what you’re talking about is like actually getting to play in these fields and play is, I think, an important part of that is they’re young, they’ve got a safety net they can play in these areas and see what do I actually like? Where do I actually okay with the good and the bad of these careers, right?

’cause you realize all have those things and so you’re advocating for teaching that way and actually getting people prepared ahead of time so they don’t spend 10 years and a hundred thousand dollars on a career that they’re like, you know what? I actually don’t like this.

Vince Shorb: Yeah. And you know, kids aren’t exposed to a lot of profession. I’m sure being an entrepreneur, your children are exposed to the entrepreneurship side, which is great. But you look at most average kids, they’re not exposed to any careers. And I’m a big believer in local areas that we promote, take kids to work day and things [00:53:00] in communities.

That’s part of our financial education, what we do. Just gives them an internal insight. Seeing, oh, there’s so many different roles within the company. Even if it’s a finance company, oh, you have HR, you have this, you have that, you have sales, you have people that do these different functions and when you see kids go through that first time, they’re like, oh, what do you do?

You have, there’s an interest there. Now they may say, I don’t want that job, but it’s good. I think it’s as good to eliminate some things you don’t wanna do as it is to find some things that you are interested in. So I think some simple things like that. Or there’s some exposure to careers or having guest speakers and talking about all these little things that can be done.

Just open people’s eyes up at an early age before they’re so in deep and so committed into years and years of schooling.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, absolutely. So I’m gonna shift gears a little bit and talk about something really practical and that I call this our hero’s tool belt. And just like every superhero has their tool belt with awesome gadgets, like their web slingers or their batarangs or, giant laser eyes and spinning hammers and that kind of stuff.

Talk about a tool that you couldn’t live without to run your business the way that you run it now, [00:54:00] right? It could be anything but your notepad, your calendar, something that you use for marketing tools. Something you used to actually do the delivery of your services in the community.

Just an essential tool to getting your job done today. Especially with the big audacious mission that you guys have.

Vince Shorb: Yeah. Mine’s may not seem too techy, but it’s Excel. We organize everything on Google Sheets. Google Docs. Even our entire plan and how our operations is run is lined out. Now it’s a 500, 600 page document, but the Excel spreadsheet breaks it down. Hey. Is it sales related? Is it customer service related?

Is it so forth? I can go on there, see all the emails and sequences. So it’s just basically an organization system of all the different systems and processes we have in place. So if we need the email or if we need a, what to say to client or process on how we handle certain things, it doesn’t have to come to me.

Anybody can look that up and it’s organized in a way that they can easily find it. Again, the Excel may not sound too sexy, but there is, we use a teamwork for management [00:55:00] of contractors, clients and so forth. We use a CRM for sales. We use, our operations manual and process procedure systems.

But that simple Excel document. That links to everything. It’s like a table of contents that is, is our holy grail there. That’s my key tool. and, uh, it’s like, wonder Woman’s lasso. That’s what we have here.

Richard Matthews: I, I actually I’m a little jealous of that. We’re in the process of trying to figure out, like we’ve got a lot of documentation put together and a lot of things, and I’m like, I need to figure out how we can put like your Excel spreadsheet together that like talks through like here’s all what the systems are and where they’re all at and how.

’cause regardless of how much I would like everything to live in the same system, they don’t, right. There’s sales systems are over here and product delivery stuff is over here and customer service stuff is over here and payroll stuff is over here. They all live in their own separate little silos.

And so it’d be nice to have a single source of Hey, this is where all the things you can come to and find all of it.

Vince Shorb: Yeah, we built out everything first. And so we, we were organized, right? With the manual operations manual, all these systems built out. [00:56:00] Everything had is the auto responders, et cetera, webinar, things, all that. But until we had that final simple piece Google sheets on that shareable with all the team, that was what brought everything together.

Now it’s okay, I’ll just go to Google Sheets. It’s not like, where do I go to find it? Go to Google Sheets. Okay, it’s in the navigation quick now to the sales area. Okay here’s where they’re at in the stage. Okay. Initial nurturing stage. Okay. Email. What emails do we send there?

And we have, six, 700 autoresponder different systems. So it’s critical at this stage and it’s easy to find.

Richard Matthews: That’s wonderful. I’m jealous. I wanna see it. Just, I was like, I need to build something similar for myself.

Vince Shorb: Yeah, it, you know, the secret that we did, we just built it in order that we’re serving people. So almost like timeline order. And that was really what made it very usable for us. So we put everything in a timeline order from initial contact from marketing and before contact, through initial contact, through ongoing, through client services.

And that timeline [00:57:00] order made it super simple because we just say, Hey, this is something we’re trying to address, where would it be in this timeline? And that just makes the navigation very simple. And that’s just what we use. There’s many other ways to do it. But that was the next level of, Hey, now we have this all on a spreadsheet, how do we make it usable?

And that was that last piece that was helpful.

Richard Matthews: That’s wonderful. So I love that. That’s a fairly for people who are listening being able to build a map out like that, I can see how valuable that would be. Just ’cause like of where our stage of business is. That’s gonna be something we need to put together sooner rather than later, or it’s gonna be all over the place.

So that’s good to know.

Vince Shorb: Yeah, I wish, and that’s a great idea too, because we waited till after things were built out and then we had to go back through. So yeah, if you can even start just, even as if it’s ugly or whatever it’s gonna be very helpful. And then it can always be beautified improved, tweaked, but at least you’re having some structure early.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, absolutely.

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Richard Matthews: So I wanna talk then about your own personal heroes, right? Every hero has their mentors, just like Frodo had Gandalf or Luke had Obi-Wan or Robert Kiyosaki had his rich Dad or even Spider-Man had his Uncle Ben, who were some of your heroes?

Were they real-life mentors, speakers, authors, peers who are a couple years ahead of you, and how important were they to what you’ve accomplished so far on your journey building this company?

Vince Shorb: You know, I think it always starts with family. I have really fortunate how that, so I really look at all my family members being very blessed there and all contributing to me in a very significant way in the business world early on. You may know of Brendon Burchard. [01:00:00] I actually was in Brendan’s first workshop.

There’s about 20 people there. Now he’s training, working with Tony Robbins, the Dalai Lamas and big name Oprah Winfrey’s and stuff like that. But when I met him, he was 20 people. I hired him as a personal coach early on. He actually helped to shape a lot of the company and how it is today with ideas.

As far as our first big events, he was very instrumental there. He was doing this big top event I wanted. He said, Hey, that will put you on the map. And so we did our Money X Live event. Again, having celebrities and sports cars out, put us on the map with our Educator training. So he understood I was traveling all over the place.

He said, Hey, you need to duplicate yourself. So he was very instrumental in that. He also wrote curriculum based off his leadership Workbook series. And he was very instrumental in getting us to do curriculum. I never want to be really involved in that. That wasn’t really where we were going early on.

But he said, Hey, it’s important to be able to duplicate and have these teachers deliver what you need to in a [01:01:00] cohesive way where there’s set standards and set outcomes, and you can measure that. So early on, he was a big shaper of the company. I still give him a lot of credit for, his help today with our overall model.

And just helping me take steps maybe I wasn’t, didn’t feel prepared for at that time. And highlighting, Hey you are ready for this, right? You have this infrastructure. You have already done these things, now it’s time to step up your game. So it was a kick in the butt for me as well.

So yeah, I would say he had the biggest influence on this company from early on, and we’re still implementing what he taught me personally today.

Richard Matthews: That’s really cool. And yeah I’ve been through some of his trainings. He’s an excellent educator himself. And yeah. I’m glad, to hear that you’re, you have been positively impacted by, your own personal heroes. I know. I always look at the people in my life that I look up to and I’m like, man.

This guy’s a hero in my life and realize that, like they probably don’t even know that I hold them up as a hero. And then there’s probably people on the other side that look up to me and man, he’s a hero [01:02:00] in my life. It’s always just a good reminder to me that we should continue to act in a way that we are worthy of that hero status that people put on us.

So I got one more question for you, and it’s your guiding principles, right? One of the things that makes heroes heroic is that they live by a code, right? For instance, Batman ever kills his enemies. He only ever puts ’em in Arkham Asylum. So as we wrap the interview, I wanna talk about maybe one or two principles that you live your life by you run your business by, maybe something you wish you knew when you first started your business way back in 2006.

Vince Shorb: Yeah I think really it’s the focus on, hey, the impact we’re making, right? There’s a lot of ways to measure success on business side which is great. It’s important to us, but I think, hey the real impact I wanna see is on how it’s changing lives. I think one of the I still go back to a story.

I had an experience I had about 16 years ago when I was first doing very low paid gigs. And I think this might’ve even been a volunteer gig at a local high school in Huntington Beach. And I ran into a young lady from Target a few years after, and she said, Hey, you may not remember me. You taught a [01:03:00] class here, and I wanna let you know, as soon as I was eligible, I started the company’s savings plan.

I, It was like a hundred bucks a month. Something like that. I forget what she said. But I’m just thinking to, you know, I was really touched then, but I started to think on the way home, I’m like, you know what? How will that impact her life long-term, if that simple thing I taught in that class will impact her life, what will it be in the future?

So, I really my guiding principles, Hey, how can I plant those seeds so that people can, start to form these positive habits early and really benefit from them. So I’m really focused on, hey, how do I really improve people’s lives from that economic empowerment and financial standpoint.

But I understand too that it’ll have a spillover effect into relationships, health, emotional state, and those other things. So, but I, stories like that continue to keep me inspired continue to drive me. And yeah, that’s really, I think my main motivator when I get up is, Hey, how do I make this, where I would feel good that knowing, hey, every kid in the [01:04:00] U.S.

Is getting this type of education before they’re making their own financial decisions, before they’re making the common mistakes, messing up their credit, getting in debt, mismanaging their money, not saving early. How do I reach every kid? So that’s not happening. Again, it’s a long-term goal.

My patience is not the best. But that’s what drives me on a daily basis.

Richard Matthews: I love that. And I know one of the things that I thought about while you were talking, there was the story that comes back and you realize that Hey, the work that I’m doing is impacting people, but not only is it impacting people, like they’re taking actions in their life that are changing them.

And I know one of the things I always think about in our business is those kind of stories inspired me to always make our service or our product better, right? Because if people are going to take action on it, we need to make sure that the stuff that we’re giving them is the best it can be.

And it sounds like you’re in that same world where like when people, if people are gonna do this, if they’re gonna put a hundred dollars away, every month I can impact them. So how do I make that impact the best impact it could possibly be? It sounds like you’re well [01:05:00] on the way to to making that sort of thing a reality for lots of kids.

Vince Shorb: Yeah, it’s hopeful. And, we all make our impact our own way. I mean, People listen to your show regularly are picking up, business skills, money skills as well. But also, hey, what’s the mental state to operate as a entrepreneur, as even if they’re in a career. There’s a lot of ways to educate people today.

And I consider really anybody out there spreading information that can be that seed, right? And I hope that people got a seed of information that will help them here today. But I think really, that we’re driven by the same mission. Hey, how do we get people this knowledge to people so it enhances their lives?

So it’s always nice being on shows like this, and especially your

Richard Matthews: show.

Awesome. Thank you. So I think that’s a great place to end our interview. I do have one more question that I always wrap our interviews with. I call it the Heroes Challenge. And it’s a simple challenge where it helps us to find stories that we might not get access to on our own. The question is simple.

Do you have someone in your life or 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 [01:06:00] with us here on the Heroes Show? First person that comes to mind for you.

Vince Shorb: Yeah, I have a few people. Claudia Martin is our community outreach director. She came here with a few hundred dollars to her name to learn English through Miami. This is 20 years ago. And she left her law degree back in Brazil. She’s really developed as a leader here.

She started her own business helping empower people when they come over to the country, but also from the diet and health perspective as well. She’s a value add. She’s been with our organization for five years, but I love her story just because you come with $200, you’re working at, almost slave shop conditions long hours made it through that and is living the American dream today.

She has bought a home here recently renovating it and doing some exciting things. It’s just nice to see that, hey, in America dreams do come true. And we have so much opportunity here as a country and it’s great to see when people take advantage of that and enhance and embrace the American dream [01:07:00] and work hard to get that.

Richard Matthews: Absolutely. I love that. And we’ll reach out maybe and we can get her uh, come on the show and share her story. That’d be really cool. But for the wrap up on the interview, we always do, the send off in comic books, there’s always the crowd of people who are cheering and clapping for the acts of heroism.

So as we close, we wanna know where can people find you if they want your help, right? Where can they light up the bat signal and say, Hey, I’ve got a community of people that we could help this with financial education. I think more importantly than where is who are the people that should reach out?

Who are the types of people that should actually come to you and ask for that assistance? And I’m gonna ask you another question that I don’t usually ask, but is it possible to get access to your curriculum for homeschool educators like myself?

Vince Shorb: Definitely I’ll send you the material for kids and teens so that you’ll have that there. One of my favorites is a chore activity you can do with them as well as teach them savings, spending, and so forth. They can reach out to me at LinkedIn Vince Shorb. S-H-O-R-B, really, if you’re passionate about bringing financial education into your community, serving as a coach in your community, just really wanting [01:08:00] to enhance the financial wellness of members in your surrounding area, not just in your community.

You know, Community could be your Facebook groups and, conducting it via webinars, streams and so forth. Connect with me via LinkedIn. Additionally we have a website, obviously today, FinancialEducatorsCouncil.org, you can go there, reach out to us as well. We do live training calls every day that are complimentary.

In addition, we have a great customer support. You can reach out through the contact or live chat or give us a call and we’re happy to serve you.

Richard Matthews: Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on today, Vince. I really appreciate getting to hear your story and getting to hear your mission and just to see what it is you guys are up to. I think it’s a, an incredibly valuable thing that you are, putting out into the world. And I hope you win as much as possible in the world that you’re playing in.

So again, thank you for that. And do you have any final words of wisdom for my audience before I hit this stop record button?

Vince Shorb: No. I appreciate the time here and I think, hey, if you have that big picture in mind, just keep focus on that big picture. Work the plan and be resilient. Things don’t always go your way. [01:09:00] That resiliency will go a long way and set aside time each day toward that big plan. I don’t care if you have three jobs, four jobs or whatever, even if it’s 10 minutes a week, please don’t give up on that dream.

Richard Matthews: Absolutely. Thank you,

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