Episode Transcript
Adam OLeary (00:01.205)
Hello and welcome to this episode of Simple Wins. I am so excited to have you here. Today I have with me Matt Aiken and I gotta tell you, if you feel burnt out, if you feel that your business is just at a point, you've grown it so much, where you're starting to be at the point where you're starting to be stressed out, it's causing family issues or whatever that might be, then this episode is for you. And the reason for this is because Matt is an owner and CFO of Keymaster Games.
an innovative board game publishing company and an executive coach at Path for Growth, a face-based business helping impact-driven leaders step into what they were created to be. Matt is passionate about faith, leadership, and the art of asking questions. So Matt, so excited to have you here, really looking forward to this.
Matt Aiken (00:51.662)
Thanks Adam, it's been pleasure to be on the podcast.
Adam OLeary (00:54.163)
Absolutely. So let's actually start off and I'm curious for you to just tell me how did you get into this in the first place? How did you get into the coaching side of things?
Matt Aiken (01:03.118)
Yeah, well, mean, like you said before, I'm passionate about helping leaders when they've kind of grown their business beyond their ability to sustain it. was a co-owner in and I was the president of, leader of this board game company. We had scaled from $150,000 up to $4.5 million in two years. And man, were like the big problems of the past were not even on our radar anymore, right? We were dealing with.
huge customers. We were dealing with this in the midst of COVID and shipping crisis and man I was kind of at my wits end. I was stressed, my family was suffering for it. I have a wife and four kids. They were subsidizing the cost of my stress and my lack of stability in my role.
And so I actually, in that role, said, I need a coach. I need someone outside of my day-to-day context that can help me get clear, who can help me extract from me some decisions that needed to be made. And then also help me with some tools for delegation, for vision casting and stuff like that. I coincided with Path for Growth as a customer. I spent some time as a customer of them and they reached a point in my business where I had the opportunity. We had built structure. We had built stability.
I had the opportunity to go and do what my coach had done for me for others while handing off that president leader role to one of my business partners and so two and a half years ago made that decision and and I've been you know enjoying the training and journey and opportunity to help dozens of business owners get stability in not only their personal lives but also in their businesses.
Adam OLeary (02:38.441)
That's awesome. And I'm going to be curious to kind of go through that story with you. So how did you actually grow that company in the first place?
Matt Aiken (02:45.602)
Yeah, so we make a physical good. We make board games. And we started.
brute strapping, right? We said, OK, hey, we have an idea. I've got talents and friends who are illustrators and designers. Let's put it on Kickstarter. So we went down the crowdfunding route, right? We had a couple of successful projects, but not a lot to show for it. when the P &L was at the end of the year, we were like, we don't have that many. We don't have that much left that we were scraping together. And so that's when I really coincided with the business is the original founder and my second partner had gone through
Kickstarter campaigns, they're like, think we're onto something. We think there's a market here. We think that we have something new and different to offer to the board game space. We just need someone to help grow a business. And so that's when I came along and we started getting serious about, what are we about? Who's our ideal customer? What are our opportunities? What is our ideal customer buying right now? What is missing from the market? And we just started executing on, OK, let's try a new and different game in this price point with this
theme and ultimately we stumbled upon a game called Parks. It's about hiking in the US National Parks. Brought it on Kickstarter. It raised a half million dollars. We earned another half million on the back end. Barnes & Noble picked it up. Target wanted it, right? It's just we started snowballing through the success of a single product and built a pipeline of, okay, we're gonna get people in the door with this product and then we're gonna have an entire backlog catalog.
to support it and that coincided with COVID and people staying at home and playing board games. So we got lucky for sure to some extent. But yeah, mix of right products at the right time and using that as a funnel to grow a brand.
Adam OLeary (04:31.967)
That's awesome. And what would you say would be the biggest challenge that you faced, especially as you hit that four million mark?
Matt Aiken (04:37.356)
Yeah, biggest challenge would have been.
role clarity and alignment. So role clarity, hey, what is my job? What are the outcomes that I'm responsible for? What is your job? What is your job? And then are we aligned within our areas of responsibility, the outcomes that we are responsible to the company? Are we all marching in the same direction, right? So many companies, they have a meeting. Everybody goes, yes, we're aligned. And then what happens is they scatter. They scatter, right? They're like, I'm going this way. You're going this way. It's like, well, we're not aligned. We're not marching in a straight line.
And we do not have the alignment that the clarity created. And so early on, think it was making sure clear expectations are set. We didn't have that. were kind of early on, you're doing what needs to be done. But as you grow, you can't keep doing that. What got you here won't get you there. And so the biggest thing I'd say would prioritize real clarity, alignment, and then accountability, think, is a sub-bullet of that, holding people accountable to the expectations that are clearly set.
Adam OLeary (05:39.083)
when you say holding people accountable, what were those expectations? Like how did you define a job role?
Matt Aiken (05:43.694)
Yeah.
Well, so accountability is, in my space, in my industry, is a bit of a non-starter word for some people. They're like, no, no, accountability, that's not for me. But what are we really talking about? We're just talking about giving an account for something. And so if I'm accountable to profitability as the CEO of the company, then what does accountability look like? Well, it looks like giving account for what profitability looked like last year. Where did it come from? How did it align with expectations? There's that word again.
As a CFO, as an accountant by trade, expectations I think are really clear when you think about things like a budget or a forecast or projection. We said that top line was going to be X, gross margin was going to be Y, and then overhead was going to be Z. How did that actually happen? Did we get there? Did we miss? we hit it, but in a different way. What are we doing? We're holding ourselves accountable by giving an account for what we said.
we wanted to accomplish. It's the same thing for people's roles. We use a tool, I coach a tool called Success Statements. It's just a one sentence phrase that describes what winning looks like. And every role, project, or meeting has three to five success statements. So at the end of this podcast, you know what winning looks like. We've had recorded content, it aligned with the brand, and Adam and Matt had a great connection, right? Success Statements. Well, at the end of this
If you don't sit down and go...
Matt Aiken (07:19.182)
How did it go relative to my expectations, relative to what we said the outcomes wanted to be? Well, then you're not holding yourself accountable to the standard of what your business wants. so, yeah, expectations are, this is what I want. This is the outcome, not how, but the outcome that I want. And then relative to that, at the end, you say, if we started with the end in mind, right, Stephen Covey? you start with the end in mind, well, what do you have to do? You have to end with the end in mind. At the end, you say, did we meet expectations?
Adam OLeary (07:50.092)
Absolutely and that is something I found is very important setting the expectations each and every single time that I get off of a podcast off of a sales call off of a client call whatever it is that's something I actually started implementing last year and it is been a game changer for sure and I guess for you what would you say would be a simple win that somebody can go ahead and implement today to really set themselves up nicely because especially if somebody's burnt out I mean it's really
Matt Aiken (08:07.598)
Good for you.
Adam OLeary (08:20.045)
hard to feel like there can be a simple win because one of the frustrations that you especially have as you start growing is I would love to go ahead and say delegate or hire somebody and just say okay you know what let's take this time off but the flip side is if I go ahead and I start spending time over here I don't have time to deliver for the clients over here so it's almost like Robin Peter to pay Paul right that's what it almost feels like so what would you say would be a simple win that a business owner could use that's in that situation
Matt Aiken (08:48.076)
Yeah. A great principle that we operate off, opera as coaches is, if you want to get your business in order, start by getting yourself in order.
I've never met a business that's thriving, that's growing with a unhealthy, burnt out, not sleeping, toxic leader. Now, you can sustain that for a little while, but the organizations that I admire and respect, they know how to play the long game. And so what does that take? It takes a leader who is at least experiencing or pursuing some level of health. So if you want to get your business in order, start by getting yourself in order. What does that look like? What's the quick win? Well, I would say schedule an hour to yourself to audit what
What does the company expect from me? What are the outcomes that I'm responsible for? Right? And the way you do that, write down every single thing you think you do on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly basis. Write them all down, and then look at them, and answer the question for each one. If I were to hire a president, a CEO, a leader to do my role, the leadership CEO president role, would I pay them to do this task?
and you go through and you cross off from the list everything you wouldn't pay a CEO and president other than yourself, right, to do. And then start saying, okay, great, now I have the list of things that I shouldn't be paying myself to do, right?
audit that, get clear on then what are the things that remain, turn those into success statements, right? Short one sentence phrase of finance. The company is profitable and growing. Cool. That's an outcome you're responsible for. Get those four to six buckets and then just red, yellow, green. Red, this is not true. Yellow, this is somewhat true. Green, this is true. And then get yourself right. You've given yourself now a picture of what clarity looks like for your role and start holding yourself accountable to it on a weekly basis. Is this true?
Matt Aiken (10:41.148)
somewhat true, not true.
Adam OLeary (10:43.627)
I love that. That is such a good use of time. That is such a good use of time. Really, really good advice there, Matt, because I mean, especially as I even look at this and I've looked at my own stuff, what happens, it's almost like scope creep, but it's like instead of like going ahead and doing agency work or something like that, it's like scope creep inside of your company, right? Because there's new things that start popping up and you don't even realize that you're doing it. It's just, it's just happening. It's not, it's not like, I can go automate this. It's like, it just came.
And then all of a sudden you start doing it on a repeat so the fact that you're saying just to go cut each of those and say okay What would a CEO actually be paid for and it's really it's true. It's a hundred percent true And I'm gonna be fascinating in your take here. I guess in the the business growth Stage of a company. What would you say is like the biggest?
Fluff piece that is out there right now. What would you say is like the biggest piece of garbage? That everybody says that's not true when it comes to really being able to get yourself out of the company and To really allow your company to start growing bigger
Matt Aiken (11:52.066)
Yeah. Man, you go on LinkedIn right now and you type in coach, right? You can find anything and everything, an embodiment coach, a life coach, a sales coach. And there's various degrees of fluff and or value in those services. But there's kind of all one thing in common, I would say.
they would all say, pay me money to give you advice. Like that's too many people's experience with coaching. And so it's like the biggest thing that I would say in my industry, I think is a load of hooey, paying someone for advice. got
I don't think the best answer for you Adam and your business is found in me. I think it's found in you. And so I would say the thing that I would encourage people to do, man, there's there's YouTube videos for advice. There's podcasts. There's podcasts for advice. Right. What do you need? You need someone to ask you great questions. The quality of your answers can never exceed the quality of your questions. And so, you know, in my industry, everyone's going to say, I've got the best advice or I've got that. I've got that thing that if you just implement this, everything
gets better and the reality is is like there's some good advice out there but I think the best advice the best answers are the questions we answer ourselves and so in my space it's like hey find it find a time for reflection find a time for asking yourself those questions asking how did this go evaluating your experience or finding a consultant or a coach who's really going to say like hey I'm extracting from you what you need
you're the person who has the most context on your business and your life, I'm gonna extract from you what you know to be the answer that's probably just a little too uncomfortable for you to land on yourself.
Adam OLeary (13:40.925)
I love that. And if you could snap your fingers and give all of your clients one result by December, what would that result be?
Matt Aiken (13:47.97)
Yeah. I think this is the result that I got and that I see the most relief from leaders. I would snap my fingers and every single one of my clients would have a leadership team.
that shares in, shares the burden of growth and health of your business so that growth and health is not something that's only in the backpack of the leader, founder, CEO. But you have a leadership team that is sharing in the ownership of health and growth and they can answer three questions. Why does the organization exist? What does it stand for and where is it going? If you can get one, two, three leaders in the next 12 months who share
share your health and growth with you and know what's your mission, what are your values and the vision for where the company is going. Man, it's up and to the right from there.
Adam OLeary (14:43.091)
love that. Matt, where can people go to learn more about you?
Matt Aiken (14:45.548)
Yeah, you can check us out at pathforgrowth.com or we've got a podcast ourselves on all of the favorite, all your favorite Spotify, YouTube, all those things. So if you more information, pathforgrowth.com.
Adam OLeary (14:56.331)
That's awesome. Matt, thank you so much for being here. Really enjoyed this episode.
Matt Aiken (14:59.63)
Yeah, thanks, Adam. It was a ton of fun. I so appreciate it.
Adam OLeary (15:02.794)
Absolutely. Well, thank you all for listening. I had such a good time on this episode and seriously make sure to go give Matt a view. Go click on the link in the description because he is incredible. I've been talking to him all before this episode and seriously, what a nice guy he is. So awesome everyone. Thank you so much for joining. I will see you on the next episode.
