The Steve Jobs of Leather: Growing a DTC Brand to $150M With Curtis Matsko

Curtis Matsko is the Founder and CEO of Portland Leather Goods, a DTC high-quality leather goods company. He built the brand out of his garage, scaling it from zero to over $100 million in yearly revenue. As a serial entrepreneur and digital marketing expert, Curtis has worked in design production, marketing, and customer service.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

[3:29] How Curtis Matsko started Portland Leather Goods and declared himself an e-commerce genius
[9:21] Curtis talks about creating Craigslist ads to acquire talent for his business
[18:38] The roadblocks to scaling from $10 to $100 million
[26:50] Curtis’ anecdote for navigating personal and professional growth and decision-making
[32:04] How to ensure your talent base scales with your business
[38:03] Advice for aligning candidates with their ideal roles
[41:30] Why Curtis controls production in his business
[49:42] Building a solid customer retention system
[58:03] What is the difference between LTV and CAC products?
[1:05:46] How Curtis’ childhood impacted his identity and business approach

In this episode…

When scaling your business, it’s essential to recognize that what got you from zero to $10 million won’t get you from $10 to $100 million. Significant revenue jumps entail higher costs and larger operations, so relying on your previous successes will only hinder you. How can you break through the glass ceilings of growth?

As a self-proclaimed e-commerce genius, Curtis Matsko launched his brand out of his garage and scaled it to $150 million. He maintains that steady growth begins with in-house production to create high-quality products that drive sales and foster customer loyalty. As your customer base grows, you can build products that generate customer lifetime value and acquire new customers. Another aspect of profitable growth involves building a team that can grow with your business. This requires hiring candidates whose personal and professional goals align with desired positions by conducting thorough interviews that emphasize key personality traits and experiences.

In today’s episode of the Up Arrow Podcast, William Harris welcomes Curtis Matsko, the Founder and CEO of Portland Leather Goods, to talk about creating a foundation for profitable long-term growth. Curtis explains how to build a solid customer retention cycle, how he created Craigslist ads to acquire talent, and how overcoming alcohol addiction influenced his growth and decision-making mindset.

Resources mentioned in this episode

Quotable Moments

"Not knowing what else is going around me has helped us because we're not trying to follow anybody else."
"You need your brain to catch up with how good you are. You're better than you know, and you're limiting your own self."
"What got you here won't get you there. Your successes are actually the things holding you back."
"The best marketing we have is our bag in someone's hands; that's it."
"There is a balance in the world between being confident and humble and cocky. You have to be able to balance that at all times."

Action Steps

Focus on product quality: Invest in creating a product that genuinely delights customers when they receive it. A superior product drives initial sales and fosters customer loyalty and word-of-mouth referrals, addressing the challenge of retention and reducing reliance on constant new customer acquisition.
Embrace operational control: Consider bringing key aspects of production and logistics in-house to maintain high standards and improve margins. This strategy can create a competitive moat, allowing for more flexibility and control over product quality and customer experience while mitigating risks associated with outsourcing.
Cultivate a growth mindset in your team: Encourage your team to continuously improve and adapt by setting clear expectations that their current skills are a foundation for future growth. This approach ensures your team evolves alongside the company, fostering innovation and resilience.
Leverage customer insights for product development: Use direct feedback and data from your current customers to inform product development and marketing strategies. This aligns your offerings with customer needs and preferences, turning satisfied customers into repeat buyers and brand advocates.
Nurture a positive company culture: Build a culture of kindness and authenticity, which can enhance employee satisfaction and customer loyalty. A supportive and genuine environment encourages employees to give their best effort, while authentic customer interactions can transform buyers into lifelong brand supporters.

Sponsor for this episode

This episode is brought to you by Elumynt. Elumynt is a performance-driven e-commerce marketing agency focused on finding the best opportunities for you to grow and scale your business.

Our paid search, social, and programmatic services have proven to increase traffic and ROAS, allowing you to make more money efficiently.

To learn more, visit www.elumynt.com.

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:03

Welcome to the Up Arrow Podcast with William Harris, featuring top business leaders sharing strategies and resources to get to the next level. Now let's get started with the show.

William Harris 0:16

Hey everyone. I'm William Harris. I'm the founder and CEO of Elumynt and the host of the Up Arrow Podcast, where I feature the best minds in e-commerce. Help you scale from 10 million to 100 100 million and beyond as you up arrow your business and your personal life. Joining me today is Curtis Matsko, the founder of Portland Leather Goods. He's built this from a garage to a $100 million company. He's tackled every area of the business, from design production, from marketing to customer service, all while surrounding himself with the best people in the world. Curtis, welcome, well,

Curtis Matsko 0:44

welcome the best minds, and I'm in there. I appreciate you

William Harris 0:47

are, yeah, excited to have you here, and I have to thank Matt Bertulli, he's the one from operators podcast, the one who sent you over to me. So thank you, Matt. Yeah, not a problem. Matt's a great guy, yeah, and you were, you were on their podcast. And I watched that one. It was very good, but you're in your own little leather bubble, because I think, if I remember correctly, you were like, Yeah, I hadn't heard of it before. And it's, it's, it's a legit podcast in the space, though,

Curtis Matsko 1:12

yeah, I had never heard of Operators Podcast. I had never heard, you know, I a question I always get is, people always say, like, can you tell me about your competitors? Can you tell me about this? Can you tell me this? And I'm like, No, I can't tell you any of this stuff. Like, I have been so busy building this company, and I think that not knowing what else is going around me has helped us, because we're not trying totally else. We're not listening to anybody's advice. We're not listening going to the latest trends. Like, we're just got our heads down and we're just banging this thing out. And, you know, you poke your head up every now and then and look around and say, wow, there's a world out there. But, yeah, no. Operation podcast, very good podcast. And the great thing about it is, is you've got four guys that are working in companies that are 100 million plus, right? And so when you're a company like us. That is, you know, well over that amount, you want to talk to people at your level, not people back at 20 million, because it's easy to see where you were, but it's harder to see where you're going. Everyone says they know where you're going. You don't like every day. It's hard decision. It's so true about so many things in life. You look at the 80s and say, well, obviously, Microsoft, obviously have, obviously this. It wasn't obvious at the time. Yeah, they're all hard decisions. So, well, wow, that's a lot of rambling about the question about the operators podcast, they are very good. There's a lot of good podcasts out there. Yeah,

William Harris 2:40

yeah, for sure. No, that's good. If you can't tell already, this is gonna be a good conversation with Curtis. I do wanna announce our sponsor, then we're gonna dig right into it. This episode is brought to you by Elumynt. Elumynt is an award winning advertising agency optimizing e-commerce campaigns around profit. In fact, we've helped 13 of our customers get acquired, with the largest one selling for nearly 800,000,001 that ipoed. You can learn more on our website@Elumynt.com, spelled E, l, u, m, y, N t.com, that said, on to the good stuff. I'm referring to you as the Steve Jobs of leather. And people will understand why I make that reference, because I'll make it clear later. But we're talking about growing a decent brand, the 100 50 million with Curtis Matsko. And the first question I have is the easy one. I just want to know, like, what is Portland Leather Goods, and why did you start us? We can give some context to it before we dig into, like, the deeper stuff.

Curtis Matsko 3:29

You know, it started in Portland in a garage, kind of, like, if you want to go with the Steve Jobs metaphor and continue to go that, go, Sure, and it's basically, uh, I always tell the story that I was 18, young lady, she had a really bad job, and I said, quit your job. And she said, Well, what will I do if I quit my job? And I'm like, I'm an e-commerce genius. I've never told you this. It's like, No, you're not like, you don't even work. You like, just do yoga and you read and you walk around like you're just like, a lazy guy. I'm like, no, no, we can do this. Quit your job. And she did. And then she said, Okay, what are we going to sell? And I'm like, oh crap, I gotta figure out what that is. I made. I spent like, a week designing a little leather journal. And I said, we're gonna do leather goods. And she's like, Oh, crap, I'm in trouble now, like, right? I just, I literally just quit my job, really, that's what we're going to do. And we started in the garage. Went to our festivals, and went from like, $1,000 on a weekend to five to eight to 10 to 20 to $40,000 in some weekends. You know, we're literally just like we'd run back to the car to shove the cash into the car and come back. We couldn't carry any more of it. And we were in Boise one time, and we hired some kids that worked at the local coffee shop. I said, get a bunch of coffee. Drive eight hours back to Portland, fill up a van and bring because we're. Money and add a product like our house is unlocked, so just go and fill and they did it. They drove all night and came back. I hand out a bunch of money, and we did an extra 10,000 sales because they did that amazing. So we started very slow, just in cash. Well, not slow. We grew fast. Went on to Etsy, and within a year, we became a top 10 all time selling company. Went on to Shopify, and then grew until the pandemic. And we just grow every year, just leaps and bounds and leaps and bounds. And what we did right is by accident, is I controlled the product because I wanted it to be better. We didn't go to China because every we got the absolute best leather. We made simple products where the leather shone through. And we found out, when people get in their hands, they're like, Wait, this doesn't feel like the leather. I'm told is leather. When you go into a shop and you buy an expensive bag, they say it's leather. Why does that crap feel like plastic? This smells like leather. Gets better after a year. So we lucked out with the product, and then with my Ecomm knowledge, and then with our push just to grow and grow and grow and grow get better people. It's just like, every year I'm going to be absolutely honest with you. People say, Did you know your company was going to grow like this? And I probably 50% of the time, I'm like, Yeah, of course, I did no clue. Like, literally every year we're just hoping to be better than the year

William Harris 6:25

before. One of the things that I like though about that and you called out, so I want to say this real quick, because you called out the idea of this moat, and we're going to talk a lot about that. That's a big part that I want to get into. But you called out this idea of how your you knew that you were an E comm genius, right? You're like, you're telling your girlfriend at the time. You're like, the time, you're like, I'm an Ecomm genius. But it reminds me a lot about, like, a statue, and it was like, Michael Arden low or somebody would say, it's like, well, you have to, you have to just bring that out of it, but it's there. It's already there. You just don't see it, but I see it, and I know that it's there. And so it's like, you have to bring that out. But I want to ask, are you joking when you said that? Or like, you probably really said it, but like, did you really know in your heart you're like, No, I really am. I'm an ecom genius. And, like, I know that this, this angel is in this statue here. Yeah,

Curtis Matsko 7:09

I try not to lie, even to my ever to myself. I think 50% of the time I believed it, and 50% of the time I was unsure. And I know it's pretentious when you're at an art festival and selling things out of an old van to say, I'm going to turn this into $100 million company, you sound crazy. Did I believe it half the time? Yes, if you can't see that, you cannot get totally you've got to believe it at least some part of the time. You can have your doubts, yeah, but you have to some of the time say, Yes, we can do this. I know we can do this. And the reason I thought we could do it is because other people have grown companies to be big. And I don't think that I'm just so much more brilliant than other people, but I know that they're not smarter than me. Does that? I mean, does that make any sense? I'm like, I am not a genius, but neither are the people that make that work. So what is it? What is the trick? What are the little things they do every day that builds and builds and builds and builds that make something successful? And I knew that I didn't have discipline, but I had obsession, and that is, you know, I'm not the discipline kid, but I'm the one who just is thinking about it all the times and says, I will beat you out of sheer will, because I make this and that that's addictive to the people around me. It's a little shocking at first, but when they see my energy, when I go away for a week from wherever I'm in I'm in Portland or Austin or Mexico, everyone says the energy just changes when you're here. Things just get done because I walk in and I see it, I'm like, let's change them. They say when I'm like, right now. Like, right now. Let's get it better. So I had the optimism, I had the energy, I had some of the confidence, but not too much, just just enough confidence to somehow magically make it work.

William Harris 9:07

I love it. One of the early days, things you told me about that you guys were doing was this Craigslist ad with a one page cover letter. You couldn't write it. You couldn't get the interview. What was, what was going on with this Craigslist thing?

Curtis Matsko 9:21

It's so funny. I just saw a podcast with our CMO, our chief marketing officer, and they're like, how did you start in this business? He said, I read the I read the craziest ad on Craigslist. He's like, Curtis used to like, write these wacky just completely different than everything else ads. And then I made them have a page that they had to write about themselves to even get an interview, because most people wouldn't write it, or they would show if they could write. And I believe that writing and understanding concepts is very important in this world. So we became very female heavy in our company to start with, and that was. Because they were good writers, they were disciplined, and when they spoke, the voice that they spoke with was, I love the idea of your company. I want to be part of this team. Guys are jerks. They're like, I'm the greatest thing you've ever seen. I just stopped or to hire me. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, I don't like that. I like the nice, awesome team players. So number one, they got in the door for the interview. And so more percentage of very smart, educated, good writing women got employed. And then what I found out is they were just this massive ball of potential. Because I believe this. I believe it. Most things, women are better doing it than guys are, but I believe guys are overconfident, so guys are all and the women don't have that. So I'm like, hey, just hop on to my confidence and you help me do this work, and together, we'll be this perfect team. And that worked out really, really well for us. You know, as I'm talking about, my chief marketing officer, they actually said, so how did you get started now you're running this huge company. You do all the marketing, like you've been with one company your whole career. And he said, Curtis, trust me, I interviewed. He hired me. And they said, What about your college education. He said I was second in my high school class because I was home school with my brother, who was smart. He never went to college, he never went to high school, but he had a chip on his shoulder and he was smart. And I said, Dude, you can do it. And now, well, he's the most confident guy in the world. He's got that I gotta prove something with confidence. That's a perfect mix. And he's a great guy. There's something really big about admiring the people that you work with. Yeah, that's a really important thing. You know, the energy in the room, the feeling that you get,

William Harris 11:56

I want to call out for those listening, that a big part of what you're saying that I hear is this incredible ability, from a leadership perspective, to see the talent and develop that talent. And I think that you see this for a lot of successful businesses where, yeah, you can hire really good talent, but if you can't develop, see the talent and develop it, you'll still end up just being maybe overpaying for some of the same people that are being recruited by everybody else.

Curtis Matsko 12:24

Yes, I don't want them to come with bad habits of thinking that what worked someplace else is going to work with us. Because I'm going to do this differently. I'm going to do it faster. I'm going to do it off of gut instincts. I'm going to do it by people who are powerful enough to tell me their opinion, and I'm going to see people. One of my favorite stories is an employee of a young lady that we hired, and she was working 20 hours a week in a tannery here in Mexico. Okay? She was making $6 an hour. And I was in a room, and all of these tannery people, like 12 guys, they're all these big tannery guys, and you're sitting around the table, and they were kept showing us this leather. And I noticed everything they said was a sales pitch, oh, this is the greatest leather. And there's a girl sitting in the back corner who would go, or her eyes would go like this. And after the meeting, I said, who put this together? And like, Oh, that girl back there. And I realized she was the only smart one who was honest. So a couple months later, we called up when we had no business in Mexico. We did not have this all we have down here. And I said, Who is that person? They're like, well, she quit to start up her own little bag company, right? We called her up, flew down, met with her, and I said, you're going to run this, this stuff down here. And she's like, I've never done this before. And I said, Congratulations. No one's done it for the first time. And I remember very clearly her third month, we were driving in, we own Mexico. We pulled off to a coffee shop, and she went up and got some juice. She came and sat down. I said, I have a surprise. And she got upset. She's like, No, you're gonna give me another raise? I said, Yes, she's like you've given me three raises in three months. Stop giving me raises. Why would you give me a raise? And I said, because you need your brain to catch up with how good you are. You're better than you know, and you're limiting your own self. And now there was a point where she ran over 1000 employees, 25 different locations, millions of products, and she ran this entire operation, procedure, right? Because I saw the potential, and then I kept saying, with really talented people, all you have to say is you can do it. I trust you because they're self motivated, and they can do that if you have to try to change their whole personality and motivate them every day. I don't I've got a lot of energy. I got enough energy motivated myself. I don't need to motivate you. You need to do some of that on your own, right. You need to have some will to push forward. Mm. Hmm,

William Harris 15:00

limiting beliefs is a big thing that gets in the way of a lot of people's success, and we think about it oftentimes from the individual success. So the individual is unsuccessful because of their own limiting beliefs. But as a leader, when you can recognize that that's true for human nature in general, that there's a lot of limiting beliefs that are holding people back from success, then you have the ability to impact an entire team of people and help them to break through these these ceilings, through very interesting ideas like giving them three races in three months, or whatever the time frame was there, that's huge, and that unlocks a significant amount of potential, because now you're not just eliminating your limiting beliefs, but an entire team's limiting beliefs. That's wise. I like that.

Curtis Matsko 15:39

Well, one of the reasons that I do the podcast is I'm hoping there's one person that I say something and they say I understand that. And I think an important thing that I really like to tell people is, I have doubts, mistakes, flaws, problems. I all of all of the crap that everybody's got. It all like that. That's all me, but somehow I'd have enough work arounds and gumption or something to overcome all of those particular things. So I I have limited beliefs all the time. It doesn't appear that I do, because right now, I'm very far ahead of most people, probability wise, and how big my company is and how well I do, I'm way ahead of most people, right? So it's like, wow, you didn't have the No, I had to break through that glass ceiling, that Willy Wonka factory ceiling every six months because my beliefs were six months or a year out. And people like, Wow, you're really optimistic. But then as we got closer, I did breakthrough it again and again and again. So you talked about what you do, how do you get from 110, 20 million, and how do you get over 100 million? There is a lot of jump in, there's a lot of breaking, of beliefs that you have to do. It's a completely different game. I know for a fact I could set up a company today and buy in one year, I would be doing 10 or 20 million. I know that because I set up a shoe company and we did 35 million in 16 months, right? So I know I can do that. Can I take it to 250 to 500 million to a billion? When I think about it, I have the limiting beliefs. I say, am I the one to do that? I still have it. Now, my people believe in me now, more than I believe in myself, they're the ones who say, of course you can. And I'm like, oh yes, of course I can. But do I have my doubts? Of course. So I'm hoping when I talk to on these podcasts, that I'm telling somebody, you're going to have nights of worries. You're going to have indecision. You're going to worrying if laying this person off or firing this person or hiring the right one, is this the right thing? Yeah, all of that crap still real. You just gotta work through that. And then all of a sudden, it's five years later, and you look back and say, Yeah, wow, I can't believe where we've come. But it doesn't mean it's not a slog. It doesn't mean the people who are successful figured it out. It means they just kept on swimming, kept on swimming.

William Harris 18:16

So you have broken through a lot of glass ceilings that you just called it like every six months it was a new one. What are? What are a couple of the big ones that stand out to you when you're in that growth from 10 million to 100 million that you're like, these are some of the roadblocks that you're going to come up against as a business and as a founder. You're going to need to break through this, this or this belief or tactic, or whatever that might be.

Curtis Matsko 18:38

You know, I see it in a lot. I've talked to a lot of leather companies. Of the five leather goods companies that when I started, I looked around, said, wow, these are these are companies I'd like to be like, I think four are completely out of business, and the other one is basically bankrupt. It's still running, but I still know how. I know their finances and I know their employees, and I can't believe they're still running. So what happened? Number one, you have to understand this concept. What Got You Here Won't Get You There. What got you to 10 million? You're like, wow, I know what I'm doing. I got from zero to 10 million. All the things you learned are, what's going to hold you back from getting to 50 million if you lean on your successes and what got you there, you're going to say, just more of the say, I did this to 10 million. I need to do five times more than that. Five times more work will not get you because inefficiency in the system will eat you up. Inefficiencies, it is now more expensive to get a person more expensive to hire more managers more it's everything's more inefficient. You have to think of big jumps. So your successes are actually the things holding you back. And as I called and talked to these other companies, and they said, Well, I was in business for 12 years. I 15 years we were. So good at this, I can't believe we went bankrupt. And I heard it when they said it, I knew what got them, their successes they were leaning on, was what was holding them back. It would meant they couldn't change because they thought they had it, right? So that's a big one. One of the glass ceilings is what got you there. Is actually the thing that's going to anchor you and hold you back. Hey, every one of you that was really great athlete in high school. Hey, what got you to be the cool kid when you're a junior outside linebacker? That's the thing that's going to mess you up. When you're 28 you're not cool anymore, right? Don't lean on that. It's something completely different. That's a big one. Is what got us here won't get us there. That's number one. Number two. Before

William Harris 20:45

you go on to number two, I want to dig into that one. So let's say that you acknowledge that. So step one, right? Like, like a rehab program. Step one is acknowledging you have a problem. The problem is you're relying on what got you here. Yes. How do you figure out what's next then? So if you're like, Okay, well, I let's say that a business says, Yeah, great, I got it. What's got me here? Well, what now? How do you figure out what those things are?

Curtis Matsko 21:09

I love the recovery analogy. I'm a, I'm an 11 and a half year recovering alcoholic. So I'll tell you what happens. There's a lot of introspection in those first, you know, days and then months. And after your first month, you're like, I got it, I got it figured out. No, you know, a year, you're like, wow. And then a year, I know what I'm doing. No, you don't you. You evolve and you and you change. So I love that recovery thing that it takes a lot more time than you think. You have to always be looking back and be understanding, analyzing that your success came despite your failures, despite your weaknesses. How do you always work on what your limitations are? That's a really big one. The second thing is stop hanging out with all the companies that make 1 million, if you're a million dollar company, because you're all doing the same thing, you're all telling everybody to say, Look at somebody who's doing 50 because they'll break your mind. They'll say, you don't have enough physical space. And they're like, Well, you don't understand, I own this building, and we get really good rent. And blah, blah, blah. There were probably four times in our company that the physical restrictions that we had, which we thought was enough space, almost destroyed our company when we left the garage too small. One time we almost moved into a space three times bigger, or one that was more expensive, which was 10% of a very large building. And we they said, What are three of us going to do in 2000 square feet? That's too much space. If we had went to the smaller space, we would still be a little local Portland company making journals and selling them on the street. We would because the physical restrictions would have held us back. We chose it. We ended up going from 2000 square foot in that building to knocking down Wall after wall after wall and owning the building of 25,000 square foot and now we use over 600,000 square feet. So yes, think about the physical restrictions that you put on yourself, right? But when you're talking to your friends who are doing the same, you're all in the same boat. Your mindset is thinking the same. I thought about buying my building, right? And so we own a big building in Portland that we've outgrown years ago, but that was a big step in buying a building. I've never bought a big commercial building, right? I talked to a couple that was retiring there. There's these two women, they had this big building downtown, and they were retiring. And I said, Can I go to lunch with you? And they said, Yes, we're out there. And I said, Tell me about your building. Tell me about your business. And they're like, funny enough. 20 years ago, we asked somebody to lunch. He was a big real estate guy, and he said, Buy your building. And they said, We don't have enough money. And he said, You never have enough money to buy the building. It's always a stretch to do something, but they bought it, ended up owning the building, and by the time they did it, they sold the building and retired off of what it had grown to, right? But they couldn't afford it at the time. So I remember sitting with all of my people saying, Should we buy this building? And they say, No, we don't have the money. And I said, wisely, you never have the money right, because I had talked to somebody who had already retired, who had talked to somebody who had already retired, somebody better than what you were, because we get comfort in the people who are like us. When you talk to people who are like you, they give you answers. That are comfortable to you. So if you're doing a million and they're doing a million, you pat each other on the back and say, Good job. Oh yeah, you built yours from zero. Look at those people only making 50,000 a year, right? But you're still locked into it. You have to think bigger at all times. So I was just speaking at a conference in San Diego, and my chief marketing officer said, Hey, there's 500 DTC brands here. Yeah. He said, we're one of the top three biggest. He said, What are we going to learn from these guys? We need to be in different rooms. We don't need to be talking to rooms of people who are smaller than us. We need to be talked to by people who are bigger. But it was comfortable. I liked being the cool kid, you know, in San Diego, and everybody coming up and saying, you're awesome, right? But that's not what you want to be. You want to be the crappy house on the good street. You want to be the weakest kid on the good football team that ever that you're forced to get better, right? So, yeah, you're asking really great, William. The reason I was on this podcast is I watch yourself and you're so good at asking good questions.

William Harris 26:07

You're, I appreciate that. You're You're good at answering good questions. How do you, how do you, how do you wrestle between survivor bias in a situation like this? So for every story that you have of somebody saying you never have enough money by the building. You've got another person that's saying, I bought the building and I did the money didn't come how do you how do you wrestle between those two of those, like, what do you think stopped somebody from saying, Great, I went ahead and did this, but this was a foolish decision, versus this is the right decision, and you'd need to do it.

Curtis Matsko 26:40

It comes back to that confidence thing, and I'm gonna, I'll tell you a personal story, and maybe this will if, if 1000 people watch this, one or two people is gonna, this is gonna hit. I was, I didn't have a drink of alcohol until I was 24 I don't like food, I didn't like the smell. I just never did it. First time I ever drank blackout. And everyone said I was hysterical, right? I was an alcoholic before I had my first drink. I am predisposition, okay, so I was a very bad alcoholic when I tried to get sober. I remember was the first weekend. I'm sitting in a group of 50 people, and this brilliant, brilliant man, David said, Look at the person on your right. In a year, they'll be in jail. Look at the person on your left in a year, they'll be dead. He said, I've done this enough that maybe two or three of you will actually make it in in 10 years from now. And I looked around and I said, Who are the other two people that are going to make it, because I know I'm going to make it. I know now I was as bad as you get. I want you to understand this for everything in you. I would if you had seen me, you would have started crying. I was like I was going to die, right? But I knew that I'd been given something that for somehow, I was going to do whatever it took to win. Okay, that feeling looking back as I've seen my friends, relapse, relapse, die, and I've watched that same thing that he predicted happened. That happens in business, too, but something inside of me says I can be that. What I can be I don't have to be the greatest or the elite. I just have to be obsessed. This is what I want, and this is what I'm going to do. And mistakes aren't going to beat me. Mistakes are going to be feedback that I use to get to the next step. And I have done that again and again and again in my own life, in my spirituality, in my recovery, in business, in my relationships, all of that stuff builds so you it's weird. There's a balance in the world between being confident and humble and cocky. You have to be able to balance that at all times. I

William Harris 28:56

want to call out one thing, because you brought it up, and this is good, one of the things that I share with any young person that I end up getting connected with in some way is that I don't know of any anecdotal stories personally, of anybody that says alcohol changed my life for the better, maybe, if you started the company, sure, but like for the most part, there's not a lot of people that can say consuming alcohol has made their life better. And so that is just to your point. I would say, you know, use that with a grain of salt. I understand sometimes you're young and you want to do things, but there's not a lot of good stories out there, a lot of stories to the country of that

Curtis Matsko 29:32

I'm gonna, I'm gonna offend a lot of people here, because I was with Mariana, my personal assistants, like he's gonna got it now, yeah, guns and alcohol, dude, they're never part of a good story. They're never part of a good story. They're always part of the OH CRAP stories, right? They're always part of that. And so I am in no way saying I know my brain is different. I am an absolute alcoholic that if I. Have a drink, I will die. Okay, so the beautiful thing, it always scares some people, if you are alcoholics out there, the alcoholism gets worse whether you drink or not. So if I had a drink today, after 11 and a half years, I wouldn't go back to where I was. I would be worse. I would immediately be caught up in that because I'm getting worse every day, because it would actually be more powerful. And I've seen the people, you go 10 years, you have a drink, and they're dead in two years, right? It happens all the time. So I know without a doubt that I had given this blessed life, and I just It cannot happen. The same thing is, in this company, it cannot fail. It cannot fail. There are 1000 people, probably 10,000 people, that rely on what we do to get paid, their families and their mortgages and the food that they buy relies on our company, let alone the millions of customers that we have who are amazing. Our customers are amazing. And that comes down to there are hard decisions I have to make, and there are hard conversations I have to make, and when I have that in my heart, and there's someone who's not working out, I can say I like you as a person. I think you're wonderful. You cannot continue to work here, because my responsibility is to everybody in this ecosystem to put us to that next level. You deserve to be at a place that you fit, that you can be successful. I know for a fact that that is not here. Those are always crappy decisions. We've always had those. You've had those, and you worry for days about them, and for a couple days after, you're still going to worry about it, then you look back and say, Oh my gosh. Why did I wait so long? Yeah, so definitely, for everybody, it's all the same. It's like for our customers, who are amazing people. I need to be better. I need to grow. I need to be a better CEO. I need to be better at all the things so we can provide things better for them. So that's what

William Harris 31:51

we were talking about, too. Before I interrupted you, you were getting into number two. We were talking about, okay, glass ceilings that you have to break through. And one was, what got you from here isn't gonna get you there. And you there. And you were about to get into number two. And I said, Wait, what was number 10? Number

Curtis Matsko 32:04

two was going to be some of the the talent that you have is going to be limited. You know, of all the people that we hired, we started hiring in Portland, people who would hand make journals, right? Some of those people are running logistics for us, right? Some were coos, and some couldn't make it to the next level. They didn't have the x the growth mindset. They said that they did. They said, I love change. No, they didn't. They wanted to come in and do this job and to grow a company, it has to change at all times. And some of the people that you care about are are were there for that time in your life? They're not there for the next those are different people. They've gotta want that growth in that mindset. So not only what got you here is the people have got to be upgraded in a way. And what I've recently realized, if they're not driven, if they don't if they're not driven, they cannot grow to that level. They have to have some drive inside of them. And some of that could just be a chip on their shoulder, somebody telling them you're not good enough because you didn't go to college. One of that could be you're not good enough because you're a woman. Some of that could be like me. I'm the youngest of four boys, right? All my brothers were bigger, stronger and dumber than me, and I had to prove to them that I could win, right? So what is that thing that motivates you? And you can learn that in somebody very soon. Do they have it? So once you get the motivation, then do they have the competency and the ability to change get better. And some people just don't want it. They want to be part of a system. There were people that we had who I care greatly about, who a job would come up as a manager, and there I want to be the manager. Okay, then you have to, man, I don't want to manage people, but I want to be that position, because that's the natural step of what I should be doing. And I'm like, yeah, that you have to hire, you have to fire, you have to lead, you have to tell them, you have to manage if you want to be a manager. They wanted to move up, but they didn't want to do the task of the thing that has when you move up, and that's difficult, because these are people who came in. You like them. You hired them. They grew because you like them. You you want them to be but if they don't have that capacity, you are doing them a favor by helping them find a job someplace else. I've got a great example. He might watch this. Okay, we've got a guy that was working for us recently, and the way we had constructed, he was Mr. Do everything. And I said, Dude, I love you. You're I have no place for you. That area is getting completely shut down. You don't have the experience on the marketing side. You're overpaid. I don't know what to do. I will help you get a new job. Okay, oh, man, took him to some events, introduced him to people. He's a charming guy. He got a job running a division of a very well known shoe company in Portland, Oregon, literally traveling now, meeting all the college coaches that he loves and doing everything he's only been there two months, and he's right me saying, oh my gosh, thank you so much for helping me get to this next stage. But when I had that conversation that first day, he was pissed. He's like, How dare you tell me I'm not the person, and what I was doing was seen. You are more than that, right? And it's going to be hard getting you there, and it's going to be uncomfortable for a couple months. But he was uncomfortable, he was kind, he was optimistic, he was respectful of me, and he got the job, and now he's killing it, and now he's writes me and says, How happy is. Those are those are camels. Those are not easy things to do, as you know, they're

William Harris 36:04

not. And the number, though, of times where I've seen this true, I think I was even just talking to somebody on Sunday about this, if I remember correctly, where they had to let somebody go, and it was the best thing for that person who they let go as well. I hear this over and over and over again, because by you continuing to keep them in a position that's not right for them, that's unfair to them. Not only is it unfair to everybody else on your team, it's unfair to that person as well. Put them in a spot where they can grow

Curtis Matsko 36:29

in the first time you think that way, you you think you're, you're fooling yourself like I'm just saying that to feel better about letting this earth set off. But once you've experienced it like we have, you know for a fact, they're, they're the people you bump into three years later on the street. You're like, oh crap, they're gonna look at me bad, right? They're gonna and they come up and give you a hug and say, Thank you. Oh my gosh. You wouldn't believe I have a family now. I haven't this. I've got this great job. You taught me this, and then you gave me the freedom to go get something else, you know. But you have to have those experiences to truly know in your heart that I am doing the favor for them, not just because they're not working out right.

William Harris 37:10

So you talked about how you're going to have to level up the talent, right? And one of the things that I think a lot of founders can get into in this situation is, well, let's just say, putting, putting myself in those shoes, you're like, Well, I haven't run a $500 million company yet before. So what do I know about hiring for the position of this position that I've never worked at before? How do I hire the right person for that position that I don't even necessarily know? What are the tips? And I want to, I want to call it too. You told me you've done like, 500,000 interviews. You interview everybody at the company, and so I

Curtis Matsko 37:42

think that's an interesting 5000 interview, or whatever it was,

William Harris 37:47

but the idea being that it's like, how do you, how do you make sure that you're interviewing to hire the right people in a situation like this? Are you, are you leaning on, you know, mentors, or how are you leveling up your interview skills to make sure you're putting the right people in those positions? People in those positions.

Curtis Matsko 38:03

An interview with me will be the weirdest interview you've ever had. They will say, have you seen my resume? And I'll say, Why the hell would I want to look at your resume? I've got you here. Why would I want to read about something you did 10 years ago when I literally have you right here? And I'll give them two chances when they get into the cliched answers of, well, I believe in blah, blah, blah, You're boring me. You're here with me. Tell me something, and I will throw questions to learn something about them. Our CFO young lady, we hired her when she was 25 when she left, everyone said, wow, she is smart, she's beautiful, she's charming. That's so odd for an accountant. And I said, No, she is driven. I said, Did you hear that thing about her? Her grandma, she will never let up. And they're like, Oh, yeah. And she's now moved into our CFO. She's astonishing. Everybody in the world wants her now, and I look back, they're like, yeah, she was so awesome and charming. I'm like, no, no, no. She will work 1820 hour days. She will not miss the deadline. She will over accomplish. And it's something I caught in that interview, because I didn't ask her boring freaking questions. That's number one. The next thing that you have to understand is hiring them is not enough. You need to let them know you are not good enough to be the person who's going to be in your position one year from now. You need to be getting better every day, every week and every month. I'm not a good enough CEO for the size we're going to put up 10 new retail stores this year and 20 more next year. I don't know how to run 30 new retail stores. I don't know what's it I don't know this stuff, but I will, because that's my responsibility, that I have to be better to make sure that the head of our retail knows how to do that, hires the right people and give our culture to these people. So. What I tell people, and what I believe, is, get the raw material, get the get that freshman in college. I'm using another sports metaphor that has the talent, and maybe their freshman year, they're a little bit like, I'm not sure if they're going to make it, but you know, when they're a junior, they're going to be and when they're a senior, they're going to be, what, what it makes you because you grow them into that position, and you tell them you are not good enough right now for what you need to be next year, but you will, and you can be, and they will drive themselves to get there. And then you just get out of their way, give them a little bit of guidance. And then they blow your mind. They Tom

William Harris 40:41

Brady story right there. I love that. I want to dig into the moat that you've created, because you say you've done something that I'd say is not controversial, but it's different from a lot of others in the DTC space, which is you've brought, like everything in house. You control production, and you talked about a little bit about this, because it helps the product get better. But this is why I refer to you as the Steve Jobs of leather. And the reason is because I remember the story about Steve Jobs, where he would, he would, you know, not harass people or whatever, but it's like, no, the corner on that window is not the right degree of radius that I want. It's like, I mean, he was very involved in this and things that maybe they would say, like, why are you that involved in it? But it obviously made Apple what it is today. And I think that there's a need for that, and you have that why there's

Curtis Matsko 41:30

a great story of Steve Jobs, of, I think a couple doors down was, maybe it was Larry Ellison, or somebody from somebody really well known. And he said Steve was so obsessed that he would say, No, Steve, I'm not coming to watch Toy Story again. Because he's like, no, no, we changed a couple things. He goes. He showed it to me 30 times and I couldn't see the difference. He's like, no. Look at the action of the arm, look at the color. Look at the changes that you made, because he was obsessed with making things better. We started making in Portland because I started making the first product, and then I tried to get other people to make it, and they didn't do it as good as I thought they should do it. So we hired people in Portland. And then when COVID came, we moved down to Leon, Mexico, where all the best artisans and leather in the world are at, and they had all been laid off because they worked. They make all the very fancy boots, leather boots that everybody in the world is sought after. And we hired these amazing people down here, and then we were dealing with leather, and we found out the tanneries weren't using the best raw materials, so we started buying the best raw materials of hides from the US and paying for the trucks to come and delivering them to the tannery door. And then as it goes through and goes out the other door, we pick them up and bring them into our storage. And then it goes to our inspection and our cutting and our matching and these are our stitching lines that are right behind me, and to our quality control into our settings, which is a central distribution unit. We do the customer service, we do the we do it all because every time I tried to hire someone, all they did was piss me off at how they didn't take it seriously, and they didn't do it good enough. And so part of my bad personality there of me saying, that's not good enough. We can do this better. It comes out to means we make, we save a little bit of money because we have the profitability of manufacturing, and we don't pay the tariffs from a China and we make a little bit on the leather by bringing the trucks in, right? Because they used to make a little bit. Because we do that, we do it all, and all of a sudden our margins are a point where people say, your stuff must not be good quality because you're selling it for such a low price. And I say it's such a low price because I've gained a little bit of a percent for everything we do, and I can deliver everything to people. Because I remember when I did the art festivals, the people who I liked the most were the broke college kids, right? They would come in and they would take a look at the leather Journal, the they're like, I love this. This means so much. And I remember being broke in college, right? And I would like, Okay, I will give that to you for $10 and it's like a $50 you can't do that. And I'm like, Yes, I can, because I want you to have it. I don't want the rich idiot that comes in who says I don't know like that you pay you pay more, but all the people I really liked were the people who loved the product, and to this day, we sell to people who are very wealthy, but the people I love and respect are the nurses and the and the teachers who say, this means a lot to me. You. I want to give them a good price. So in order to do that, I have to control all the aspects of this company. So did I create a little bit of a moat by owning our own manufacturing and our own customer service and all of this stuff? Yes, I did it because of my flawed personality, but it ended up being something very powerful, where we could deliver a better product, and people at a better price, which, Hey, crazy enough that seems to help let you scale. When they get something in the mail and they love it and they want to buy more, oh my gosh. There's your key to retention, and there's your key to beating the DTC system, right?

William Harris 45:36

So it is a moat, and like you said, you said a little bit of Mo. It's a it's a good moat. It makes it very hard for others to be able to enter in your space and compete with you, like, on quality and price and time and flexibility. I know one of the things you mentioned is, if you've got a new idea, you can do it now, like, you don't have to wait and like, but I would say some people would push back, and potentially, I'd say especially like VC investors, pe groups, things like that. You talk to a lot of people like that, they say focus. And if you take your eye off of like this singular focus of what's the thing that you're good at, that it can become a distraction. How? How do you wrestle around the distractions of now operations and logistics, as opposed to just fully investing in just the product or something like that,

Curtis Matsko 46:21

I view the world. I was in college a long time. I view the world in semesters, right? You got from like September 1 till Christmas break. You got from January 2 till, you know, April, May, and then you got your summer, right? It's, I view it in semesters. And I view this company in the exact same way. So I need a big project every four months. You know, for me, it's not continuing do the same thing. I had to learn how to set up manufacturing. I had to learn how to how to set up we have along each one of these lines is a big computer screen on the side that shows all the data that shows exactly where every product is throughout our entire lines. We didn't have that last year. We had to create that and implement that because I needed to know exactly where, because my marketing people are saying, When will that meadow Metro bag be here? And I need to be able to say, in 13 days, don't take it off the website. Just put it 14 days till it can be delivered, right? So you need those numbers to make your system better. So I need a big project. And I'm going to be honest with you, William, I'm really worried because I don't have a big project for next semester in January, everything's running so well that I'm driving poor Marian and everybody crazy. Because I'm like, What can I do? I'm going to Tulum to some goal setting conference next week just to figure out what I want to do next January. Because I got one of those big calendars that shows my whole year on my wall, and too much of it's empty. And I'm like, the one thing that I learned you talk about Steve Jobs, I'm glad we can bring this back around. If Steve Jobs had continued to run Apple, they would not have been as successful as they are. I believe that not a lot of pros who said they were because Tim Cook came in and what did he do? He was operations. He didn't say, let's make the iPhone better every month. He said, How do I make 1 billion of these identical where the glass is good, where it's perfect, and we can distribute it on time to all of the people? Steve would have kept playing with things and breaking things. Tim Cook said, Let's have the trains run on time. Well, I'm a Steve Jobs. I'm a break it type of guy, right? My job right now, now that we have everything running, is, don't break anything. But I'm like, Well, that's what I'm really good at. I'm the youngest child. I'm very good at mucking things up and breaking it so I need to come up with something that allows our company to continue to grow why I built something up on the side at the same time,

William Harris 49:05

I like that. That's a good way to look at it. Something else that I think has been good for you, that you've talked about, is the quality of the product, but from a different perspective, from a retention perspective, and when you think about growing businesses, a lot of time gets spent on acquisition. The acquisition is only good if people end up sticking around, otherwise it ends up eating into your potential growth, because you've got as much mini customers turning out the back end as you do pulling people in the front end. Um, what other advice do you have for how to build truly good retention as a brand? Because I think it's something that you've unlocked very

Curtis Matsko 49:42

well. I like to think, sometimes I like to pretend I'm humble, but then sometimes I think I'm just a darn genius. You know? I'm just saying, but really, we lucked out by making a really good product, and that takes care of a lot of it, right? You need to wow them when they open up your product. You. When they get it, our smells like leather, and they they they got a doubt. When you order something online, when you get the box, you're excited, but you're a little bit worried that it's not as good as it look like online, right? The number one thing in retention is it's gotta be better, and then it's gotta feel better when they start using it, right? So that was part of the thing about dealing with real leather, which is that pain in the butt to do, right? It sucks dealing with real everything has to be done by hand. Everything is different. But that's number one. Number two is just sheer kindness. I learned this at the Art Festival. I would give things away to people I liked, not before they bought. After they would buy. I would say, I'm going to give you a gift, and I would give them something else, or they wouldn't give me the card, and I would say, No, you're not paying. I like you. Okay? Those people would bring people back the next day, or the next year, we would go back to the same art festival, and all of a sudden, their friends and family and cousins had 50 people saying they she's been showing this all year. She loves and respects you so much. She you gave this to her. It means so much, and then we would make so much money off of that kindness. It was crazy. I didn't do it to be manipulative. I did it because I'm sitting in a lawn chair. It's a beautiful spring day. A nice person's telling me they love the product that I made. I want you to have it right. But that kindness grows and it grows and it grows. We have people who come in every week to our stores in Portland who are very proud to say, I met Curtis 910, years ago, at an art festival, and I still comp with people every week because he was kind

William Harris 51:48

to me. That's you didn't do this to be manipulative, and I like that. It's just kindness. But if I was going to deconstruct why that is so effective, and at least one of the things that I want to make sure that I call out is you weren't giving away the product for free. You said you call this out to people until after they bought it. And one of the biggest reasons, I think that's important is because if you're given something for free without having invested anything, the likelihood of that bag actually being loved and cherished and used just doesn't exist, right? Like it said, it's gonna sit in the back of a car, but once they already like it, and they say, I'm willing to spend my own money on this. And then you hit them with that. Now that just amplifies that significantly, and

Curtis Matsko 52:27

it's so illogical, because if they're not having decided to buy it, you say, I'm going to give it to you. Well, it costs you. What that product? Let's say it's a journal that cost me $10 to make. I was going to sell it for 40. Okay, let's just say that. But when they say, Here's 40, and you take the $40 and you put it back in the journal and hand it back to them, you didn't do $10 you gave them 40. You It's illogical, because you gave them back more. And my girlfriend would say, I don't understand this. You, you never do it before, you always do it afterward. I'm like, well, that's genuine. That genuine? You can't fake authenticity. You can't fake not to the multitudes, not to do Ave. We know that there are politicians and people and marketing in the world who can say and not think, repeat things at a time that people start to believe and say, Oh, they must really need that bullcrap. There are authentic people in the world doing authentic things, and there's something deeper. You feel it, you know, it. You can't fake that stuff. So what made me into this? I'm going to, we're going to bring this back again, recovery, you know, alcohol recovery, you meet people that you love that end up dying. You genuinely get to see people at their best and their worst, and you still give them a hug and say, You're awesome. I love you. I hope you can do this. Please do the things you need to. You can't fake that. You can't get calls at one in the morning and drive over to your friend who is freaking out. Try to help them out. You gotta be there for people. That is the same thing in growing a company. And I am not perfect. I am sure you could talk to a lot of people who say he walked by me and he didn't even say hello, plus probably worried that I had to lay somebody I thought that day, or I had not eaten, or something had happened, right? But the one thing you cannot fake in me is I mean everything that I say, and once you understand that, and you work with me over a period of time, you I have employees who will live and die by that they are like, Yeah, I'm not going someplace else. I believe in this company because I believe in Curtis. I know that because I've heard them say it. They believe that they're like, Curtis will not let me down, and their faith means I can't let them down, right? I gotta be better. Better. I've got to continue to get better every week and every month and every year, so that next year we're even better than we are. Yeah, on the retention

William Harris 55:07

side, you talked

Curtis Matsko 55:08

about how, back to the retention.

William Harris 55:09

I forgot about that one. No, because it was good. So because, and I like this, and I don't want to lose this. You talked about how, like, really, you said you lucked into a good product, but he didn't look into it. Was a really good product. It reminds me of something actually, a couple weeks ago, I had on the show Clayton Christopher, who started Waterloo, the sparkling beverage company, you know, took that to nine figures. He started Sweet Leaf Tea. Took that to nine figures, multiple nine figure brands. And the thing that he reiterated over and over again on like, these multiple brands, was liquid ellipse, he said it has to just taste better. It doesn't matter if it's healthier, doesn't matter. Like, you want those things, right? Like, that's the part of it, but if it doesn't taste better, if it's not better product, it's not going to work. And so I like what you're saying, where it's like, there is no shortcut to this. It has to be better.

Curtis Matsko 55:59

I love that, because people who try to get into the industry now want to compete against me. They're like, What can I say to make people like our product more than them? Ours is organically deep forest, forest by is this all of this stuff? And it was like, Yeah, I can say a lot of this stuff. Oh, it's made it a gold star tannery that believes in water. And happen we take bottles and we compress them and, and I'm like, Yeah, well, our leather is just awesome. Yeah, right. Like they have to say that, because they gotta come in with an in, they've gotta take something to beat out the current competition, rather than, wow, that's just really good. And he's saying, Yeah, I love that. Does the liquid touching the lips? Does it taste good when you get that? Do you realize that this is a great product? You don't say, I love this leather bag. It's organically blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, or whatever the hell it is. I have people all the time say, why don't we say all that? And I'm like, we don't have to. We don't have to. This is the best, best market we have. Is our bag in someone's hands. That's it. That's it. We spend 10s of millions of dollars on meta and Google. We get more traffic and buyers from someone's friend telling them they love our bag than we do off of Google, yeah? So we know that because we do the test team,

William Harris 57:29

just to say, how on that, right? Yeah, right, yep, yep. So okay, something else sticking with product for a little bit that I really appreciated. You and Sean were talking about this on the operators podcast. I believe it was Sean that you were talking about. Talking about with this. It was LTV products versus CAC products, right? Is the way that he worded this. And there are some products that you're going to use to acquire new customers, and some that are more designed for your current customers. Break this down a little bit more like, what are LTV cat versus CAC products.

Curtis Matsko 58:03

Okay, that's, uh, well, that's really deep. We have really deep mathematical discussions around this. Okay, okay, we try to run a system where about 50, it's not about 50, it's 50% of our revenue and purchases come from a new customer, and 50 are our current customer. Why? Because if we put out very small amounts, like, for every dollar that we spend in to our current customers who already own from us, we'll get like, $42 back. Right? So it's so little to do that, then it's almost free. On the other side, we have products that we know, and they have certain golden things about it. Usually they're under $100 they're $99 or less, something about that peak thing that lets them feel comfortable and getting that okay, so it's a, it's a wide ranging one. It's a, it's a color that is very basic. It's usually our middle browns are what sell the best. Now, after they own for a while, they start going into colors, but until they do that, so we have a circle bag of mini and Metro. We have certain ones that do that. Okay? By putting the money into those ads, we know that we're profitable for first purchase. Okay, so if our average order is $120 we know that if they buy that, we're going to spend 45 $50 plus the bag, plus everything, we're going to be profitable, but we're only going to be about 8% profitable on that first purchase, but the second we know our LTV is all the other products that after they own the first one they want to buy, when they buy that one, it's 52% profitable. So when you have 50% over here and 50% over here, you say, Yes, I could break even doing this because my life. I value is going to make me this money back. Now, I don't want to do that. I want to be profitable. On that first one, I had a gentleman who had a leather company, and he he sold it, you know, to, you know, for a couple million dollars, and got out. Now he's trying to get back in. And he said, Curtis, should I get investors for this new company. Do or do I try to bootstrap it? And I said, Dude, you better be profitable enough that you don't need investors. Why would you sell part of your company to investors before you've made any money, you're selling something that doesn't exist. When you learn how to be profitable on first purchase, when you get that good. The rest of it is the scalability and the way to grow. If you have to play games, I need money to do this, and then I'll become profitable later. You are behind the ball. You are reading too many books about SaaS companies that need to scale to a billion, right? You are not running a day to day company. We had a situation with a bank, and I won't say their names, they are the most evil, worst people in the entire world. I literally said that on LinkedIn one time, and they had their lawyers. I said their name, and they sent me. I was currently banking with them. They sent me a lawsuit. Told me to retract it. Neither attorney fees for me saying their bank sucks, and they do suck, by the way, okay, they had promised us 15 millions in a line of credit for over a year. We had done full audits. We had eight people from their company in and a week later, the CEO came out and said, Now we're we're worried about banking right now. And they literally canceled, not what they were going to give us, but our loans and all of our things. They said we want to run back now if no Wow, in a week, in a week, they started seizing our sales going into the accounts to pay off stuff that is that small in our thing. And I said right there in them, I will never let anyone else get in a position that they can take our company out of business, right? So I will not let alone with a cheesy bank with a W and an F in their name, come out there and say, Hey, here's what we can do. We need to be profitable enough and lean enough and good enough that the money we make consistently runs us, and no one from the outside can come in and make a decision on the company that we run. Right? Does that make sense? So we have got to be so what is that first product that we have to do? We have to get 800,000 new customers next year. That's what we're going to get in 2025 we're gonna get 800,000 we're gonna get the same amount of money on return customers. So we do what called I call it hero products. And a hero product is something I can put an ad set out on Google, meta, Pinterest, something that is going to bring in, that is going to cost me for new customer acquisition, plus the shipping, plus the cost of goods, plus the Shopify fees and our all of our things, and we're still going to make a small amount of profit. Usually, around 8% is what we're looking for. That is a hero product. And we want to be able to put 1000 10,000 20,000 a day toward that product, and they come in, then all the other stuff is we have to have the new fun colors and the new things that our return customers buy. Because, as I say, for every dollar we spend on marketing, there, we get 42 back. Yeah. So now there's a little bit trick there, because they would have bought without that dollar. Does that make sense? Many of them would have done that. So you can't really run the math director. Once you get into math with me, I can get pretty deep, real about sorry about that, William, that

William Harris 1:03:43

might be one of those ones that you and I love getting into math. So we could talk about this. I'll have to show you some of the formulas that I've written as well. Probably don't have time for the day, but I love the approach that you have with this, of figuring out where do you want to be in terms of making sure you have enough returning customers. Because I feel like we do spend a lot of time on acquisition and not enough time on the returning customers. The other thing I was going to call out, though, is, I think you found your project. You were said you didn't know what your project was going to be here coming up, you're you're going to start a bank. That's your new thing.

Curtis Matsko 1:04:15

Um, yes, yes, I actually, I've got three new ideas for next for next year, and Mariana and I are working on them. I had my first I sleep really well. I had my first sleepless night in like, a month, last night because I was so worried and excited about a new project that I think that we're going to do next year. And it's great Mariana. Is it exciting? She said very much. So yes, it is. But now I'm like, oh, gosh, this is like, that drives the energy I get to do something completely different that no one expects that. They'll look back and say, of course, that son of a bitch did this.

William Harris 1:04:53

Right? Yep. Oh, that's good, Curtis. I want to dig into a little bit about who is Curtis Matsco then as well. Well, you mentioned that you are the youngest of four, and, you know, I'm the oldest of three, so I was the flip side of you and my mom. And you talked about how you like to break things. My mom would say something along the lines of, you know, I knew William was going to do the right thing. I knew that, you know, if I needed something like, what was the crap? She said, if I needed something done quickly, William would get it done. He'd do it. He's a very efficient if I needed something done very meticulously, the middle child, Michael, that was the one that I'd go to. And if I needed something destroyed, Josh should go the youngest, right? Yeah. And in fairness, like, he was very good at, like, being able to, let's say, demolition, if we were, you know, redoing something on the house or whatever, it's like, boy, he could knock that stuff out. Um, how do you think your childhood has impacted you and made you who you are in

Curtis Matsko 1:05:46

every possible way? Sure. So there is actually, I wish I could remember the words. There's something called the Darwinian niche, something, something. And it basically says that when the first child is born, they usually their evolution has taught them that they need to be fed and cared for by their family, right? So they're usually the good boy. They're usually say, Hi, I'm going to be the good boy, and I'll do this. Mom and dad will give me attention. When the next one's born, they have to choose a different niche, because they can't be a better boy, right? Cuz the good boys already taken. So in your family, they chose the I'm going to be meticulous, not the good boy, but I'm going to follow through in discipline. And then when the as you have more kids, the last one says, well, to hell with the system. I'm going to throw the system away. I'm going to come up with a new way of getting things done. So that's who I am. How do I get the attention? How do I do this? How it's already, already been done. My brothers have already done it. I'm just the youngest of the mats. Go boys, right? So how do you stand out? You stand out in some way. How do you do something different, more clever? That comes about in business. It's not this is how business is done. It's I need to get to this goal. How do I get to this goal? I think the youngest in the class clown that gets you there. I was the class clown. I was class personality in high school, right? I was that person, and I learned how to gain that attention. What do you learn from the childhood when you gain attention? You're a class clown. Number one, you learn that if you do something funny and right, you get attention. Number two, if you try something and you fail, you're not going to die. You just keep trying until they the class finally laughs again. Does that make sense? That's the same thing in business. If you try something that works, you're a genius. If you try something that fails, oh, well, I got five more ideas that I can now try until I can get that so you overcome these obstacles a little bit more we I was an athlete in Montana, just like my brother. So I was smaller, I was thinner, I wasn't as strong. So you just learn to fight. You learn to get hit. You learn how to figure out how to do that. That is a beautiful, beautiful thing when it comes to business. Are you competitive? If you're on the ninth hole or the 18th hole and you get up there, do you believe? Yeah, they beat me the last three holes. But I know I'm going to win this hole, because I have to win this that is a beautiful competitive gift that I have. You give me the darts, you give me the pool cue, you give me a business and I will win when it matters the most. That's all childhood, right? And you're not the one who always won. You're always the one who had to try to win. You had to fight to win, you had to believe in yourself. You had to work harder than everybody else. So that's who I was. Another side of who I was is my teacher in fifth grade read me the Lord of the Rings. Mm, sat there and read it, and I was blown away. I went home, I told my parents to buy it for Christmas. And every year for the next 20 years, I read The Hobbit, the fellowship, the two towers, Return of the King. I read this book into reading it got me into wanting a leather journal, which is one of the reasons I started this company. Up right the Red Book of West March, I learned that there is a beauty in understanding something deeply meaning. Nerds like things. A lot of people like, oh, he likes to do this. Yes, I like to really know something very, very deeply. So the ability to learn a lot about that science fiction, fantasy that I did in fifth and sixth and seventh grade comes really good when you want to learn about retention marketing, or you want to learn about this, or you want to learn about this, because you could sit down and you could say, I'm going to take the next 15 days and I'm going to get better than anybody in understanding this, right? I'm going to go deep and up down, and then I'm going to be fluid in the knowledge that I've gained. Creativity comes from lots of knowledge over time, and fluidity between all the knowledge that you have not being too structured. How do you grab from different places? That comes from reading? As a child, I was the athlete, who was the nerd, who read the Lord of the Rings, who was the class clown, was also the a student was also this, right? None of those things were the winners with the women. Okay, if that makes sense, my friend Mark, big on all the women. But those were the things that when you put them together later in life, you could really use to grow to become a person who says, I can do this. I can fly to Mexico. I can set up the large leather bag manufacturing without knowing anything about leather bag manufacturing, and run the most efficient, best, cleanest, best paid, most awesome leather bag in all of North America on a whim and a bet, just because I thought I could do that all of our childhoods have, that all of us have something from our childhood that we have lived on. And you take the good and the other you let it go. I mean this, I know we've talked a long time, and I'm going to tell you this, the one or two people out there, if you are repeat, repeating some a bad story about yourself, I never want you to say that again. As I said, I was out, oh, recovery. I had this woman who I loved dearly, and for the first five years of your recovery, she would always say, first thing she'd say is, I'm from New York, and we grew up talented, we're mean, and I have an attitude, and I'm fine with that, right? Mm, hmm. And she just repeated the story of who she was every time before then she said, I have changed in knowing this. And one time I said, Nicole, I love you. I never want to hear that again. Everyone already knows who you were. You keep repeating that I have left the city and I bumped into her three years later, and she's like a yoga teacher. She's kind and she's sweet. It would never enter her mind to say that's who I was, because she left that behind her. She said who I was the parts that do not serve me. I'm not going to repeat every single day, I'm going to repeat the things that are are good about myself. And do I think that I was a nerd, and I love the Lord of the Rings, that I was competitive, that I was those are all things that I think serve me, and I love telling those stories. Do you want to know the bad stories about my childhood? I forgot about it so long I forgot what they are when my brothers say not everything about your childhood was perfect, and I'm like, Really, I forgot all that stuff. I only took the good and I moved on. And I love my childhood. I love my friends, and I love growing up in Montana.

William Harris 1:12:33

I love that. I love the way that you even shaped, you know, identity around changing that that's who you were. It's not who you are, yeah? And I think there was a football player, and I don't remember his name. My wife sent me the video that I really appreciated, but he was miked up, and so you could hear what he was saying to everybody. He's out there, like, singing Jingle Bells and stuff like that. He's like, Oh, good hit. Good hit. Yeah, oh, jingle bells, right? He's just out there having a good time. And you're like, that's the kind of you're reminding my girls of this. It's like, that's the kind of attitude you have to have. They love volleyball, right? So on the volleyball court, it's very easy be like, oh, you know, I missed that server, I did this. And it's like, no, no, that's fine. But instead of saying, like, I missed that service, I'm gonna get that next one, right. And it's like, change the way that you're talking not just to you know others, but change the way you talk to yourself, yes, and that can change so much about the trajectory that you're going to have as well.

Curtis Matsko 1:13:26

It's a beautifully said, and it's we always blame this is how people talk to me, and so they said this about me. So I started believing it's true. We take what we say about ourselves 100 times more seriously, so we start with ourselves, and what do we say about ourselves, and they've taken the lead athletes and they said the second after a miss or after a point, how do they do it? It's like, oh, I can't believe you're stupid. I can't believe you missed that open shot. You're over. You may be an okay tennis player. You will lose to the person who says, Don't do that one again. I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to be and you take that next one, our negative thoughts are seven times by evolution, more powerful than our positive so you better be doing seven times more positive than you are negative. And that's a that's a little mind trick. I spent a year a witch in a Zen monastery, and I remember saying to the head monk one time, I'm like, but aren't you just tricking your mind? He said, Yes, our minds are all broken. You have to trick your mind to make your mind better. So it's okay to use tricks. Just get rid of the bad out of there, and you become a new person when you don't need the tricks anymore, right? But one of those things is, when you talk about singing Jingle Bells, when you talk about your kids and everything, we start to adapt to people around us. If the first thing you see when somebody walks in the door and you say how you're doing, they're like, oh boy, I'll tell you. And they tell you something. A negative you don't want to see that person. You see him coming and you want to run if you see the person coming in, and you know they're having a bad day, but you say, how are you doing? And they give you a big hug and say, life is wonderful. You're like, I want that person around in the good times, the median times and the bad times. That is a true friend. That's who I want to have, yeah,

William Harris 1:15:21

and I tell my girls, this has to be out loud, like, don't just say it in your head. I need to hear you because you need to say it out loud because your your ears need to hear you say it as well. Um, well, putting it into

Curtis Matsko 1:15:31

words and verbalization, sorry, I don't know. Go for it actually changes the spot in your brain. It changes where it's at the brain. Okay, by saying it out loud, you have to turn it into the verbal so it changes the spot. It becomes more permanent. It's why Catholics have confession. The priest could sit there and not even listen to you, right? And you're saying, I didn't do this. I feel bad about that. If you had just kept it inside, it wasn't good by you saying it. It was the change in saying it again in AA, you have to say all the things you've done wrong in your life. The other person can sit there and not even listen, but by you saying it out loud, you are changing where in your brain it is now being functioned, and then it takes that guilt away from it and lets you move on with your life. Yeah,

William Harris 1:16:17

I love it. I love that you brought that up too, because I think that there is something special about like just confession in general, of being able to just once you call it out, it's almost always a sense of relief over you that you thought was fearful, and then you're relieved. But even taking the Bible metaphor a little bit more with this too, where the Bible even says, Okay, I'm gonna give you a new name, like you were known as Saul, the guy who killed Christians. You're gonna be Paul now you're here right at half of the New Testament, right? It's like changing the name, changing your identity. That's who you were. But there's a lot of power in being able to change who you will be. Yeah,

Curtis Matsko 1:16:52

there's a great one. I just did a LinkedIn video with Mariana, and I was talking about this. There's a beautiful cartoon. It has a caterpillar talking to a butterfly, and the caterpillar says to the butterfly, you've changed man, and the butterfly says, you're supposed to, we're all supposed to change my name. High school was hurt, C, u, r t, but no one ever called me that. They called me by my last name Matsko. Why? I had three older brothers, right? So I'm just little Mexico, that's right. So when I went to college, and I went from everyone knowing who I was to no one knowing who I was, so they said, What's your name? And I'm like, Curt. I'm like, why I don't like that? That doesn't sound right. So I changed my name to Curtis, and I said, Wait, I don't have to be the little brother of the person that was in high school. I'm now the kid in college that's doing this. My mother say, Why did you change your name? And I said, because I changed. I'm Curtis. That's who I am. I can be who the hell I want to be beautiful. And there is a there's a lot of power in in understanding when you change good you're supposed to we're supposed to evolve. Going back to what I said, How do you hire the best employees? You tell them you're not good enough now, but you will be. You're good enough for right now, but next year, when we're a better and bigger company, get ready for that. Prepare for that journey. Then they get addicted to getting better. Pretty amazing. Curtis,

William Harris 1:18:24

it has been absolutely amazing talking to you today. I feel like we've shared some really deeply personal stuff that was really good, and then some incredibly practical business stuff. I love getting into your mind and the fact that you you have a story or an analogy to literally anything that I can ask, and that's very impressive. If people wanted to follow you and learn more from you, what's the best way for them to connect?

Curtis Matsko 1:18:48

You know, just my name, Curtis Matsko, which you see in the title, which I'm sure you're going to put it in there. I'm on LinkedIn, and I put out posts probably five times a week, and I put out little videos, and people ask me, I had a guy write to me and said, you've already made it. What are you on LinkedIn for? And I said, Because someday I'm going to say something that's going to help somebody, right? And by me putting it into writing each day or making a video, I remember it a little bit better, and it makes me just a little bit better. I'm not on all the things I don't do the Twitters and I don't do this. There's an Instagram that occasionally, once a month, Mariana will make me put up the pictures. I'm a LinkedIn guy, and that's how you can communicate with

William Harris 1:19:32

That's great. Well, again, thank you so much for sharing your knowledge, sharing your time, your wisdom, with us today. It's been a

Curtis Matsko 1:19:37

lot of fun talking to you. Hey, William, it's fantastic. Thank you so much.

William Harris 1:19:40

Thanks everyone for listening. Have a great rest of your day.

Outro 1:19:44

Thanks for listening to the Up Arrow Podcast with William Harris. We'll see you again next time, and be sure to click Subscribe to get future episodes.

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