When starting a business, it’s tempting to want to grow as fast as possible. You want to see a return on your investment of time and money, after all. But too much growth too fast can actually sabotage the long-term viability of your company, says Matt Inglot.

Matt, founder of web development and lead gen company Tilted Pixel, has a different way, one which starts with creating a clear business model that informs all your decisions and creates sustainable growth. 

He shares the hard lesson he learned in his own business that inspired his approach and guides his client work, as well as the strategy he uses to ensure he can focus on serving clients well rather than constantly generating new leads.

Tune in to find out…

• Why cutting clients will actually boost your bottom-line
• The wrong way to conduct client/customer relationships
• Ways to wow your clients so they hire you repeatedly – providing years of steady income
• Creating an effective plan for working with freelancers
• The downside of hiring cheap help that most don’t realize until they’ve done it themselves

Listen now…

Mentioned in this episode:

• www.tiltedpixel.com
• freelancetransformation.com

Transcript

Doug Hall: Hi, everybody. This is Doug Hall, your host of the Doug Hall’s Go for Growth Podcast. And today I’m really excited to have Matt Inglot with us. He’s based in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, and is the founder and CEO of Tilted Pixel, which is a website development and lead gen company, and an experienced podcast guest. And so I’m looking forward to sharing insights from Matt’s experience in building up his business. And everybody welcome Matt to our show today. Matt, thank you for being here.

Matt Inglot: Thanks so much for having me, Doug.

Doug: I always like to start with an origin story. So take us back to the beginning. You made that fateful decision to be an entrepreneur and start a business. How’d that go? How’d that happen? What was your original reason for starting a business?

Tilted Pixel Origins

Matt: Yeah, it’s a super-sexy reason. I needed money, quite frankly. I started all the way back in college, or I guess, technically university because I’m in Canada, and we call it University. But I had basically just started out on my own. Like, I was living on my own, I was putting myself through school on my own, because, you know, my parents couldn’t afford me to just put me through school. And I was actually lucky enough to be working for a pretty cool startup company, which was basically allowing me to fund my way through school. 

And basically a few months into that position, I walked into their offices one day, and the lights were kind of dark, and the mood was kind of sober. And there weren’t very many people there. So it was kind of odd. But you know, whatever, I walked over to my cubicle, sat down, try to log into my computer, and my password didn’t work. So I went to see my manager, and long story short, they had run out of money, and they had laid off a lot of their staff. And then if you fast forward, they would go bankrupt pretty soon after that. 

So basically, suddenly, I got a really yeah, they had no more funding or anything. So yeah, I learned a very harsh lesson very early on that startups don’t always succeed. And, you know, they obviously had huge plans and cool technology. And that happened. So now I needed money. And so I had a choice, do I go and I, you know, try to get a part-time job flipping burgers or something? Or do I try to do something else that I know. 

And I kind of sorta knew how to build websites. So I started telling people that I build websites. And next thing you know I actually had my first client for the princely sum of $300. And then, from there, the next client was a little bit more. And then my university hired me to build a whole student management system for their business courses. And, you know, out of those very cash-strapped and very tumultuous beginnings, I found that I actually had a business on my hands.

Doug: Was that a business that was a job? Or was, you know, you have to deliver everything then? Was it yourself? And you know, me, myself and I, was that your staff?

Matt: Ooh, that’s a good question. Because I think I did. I was simultaneously very smart and not so smart at all at the beginning. Because I didn’t want to build a business that was me delivering everything. So even in the very first website project, I got a friend of mine to do some of the design work. And I gave him $100 of that. And I did the programming, and I kept my 200. 

Doug: Okay, so there you go. Your first gig employer, right? 

Matt: Yeah, exactly. First delegation. It was pretty cool. And I kind of held on to that mantra of building up a team. So from that perspective, I was actually doing a lot of things, right, even though I was doing like most of the programming. But at the same time, that mantra kind of got away from me because I thought when you were starting a business that Your goal should be to grow as quickly as possible. I mean, I grew up in Waterloo. It’s a startup hub. So that’s kind of the mantra, right? Grow, grow, grow. 

So I started trying to grow while still going to school. And without actually really having a solid business model in place. I just had that mantra if you grow fast enough, everything else will get figured out. That probably sounds familiar. Doesn’t always work. So next, you know, I was still in school, I had an office space, I had full-time employees. And I woke up one day and realized that it’s all falling apart around my ears because even though I was doing a good job of kind of keeping things afloat, and hiring people, and just trying to make this thing happen. 

I hadn’t done a good job of figuring out who my ideal clients for who I could really help, how I could actually find them consistently and repeatedly. And finally, you know, dwindling bank account forced me to grow up a little bit and figure all this stuff out and basically, almost restart the business. Because, you know, my original young self hadn’t bothered to put the foundation in place.

Doug: How bad did it get?

Matt: It got bad. I one point I was in the hole about 40 grand. Again, this was like my mid-20s. That’s a scary amount of money.

Doug: That was a lot of money then.

Matt: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. You know, I was still like, I still had roommates. I was still you know, I was living very cheap. So that was just an astronomical amount of money. And I had signed like a five-year office lease, and you know, my team was falling apart. I had like, two key people leave because you know, the whole thing was just falling apart. And it’s not like I could have afforded to pay that much longer anyway. So maybe that worked out. 

The company was falling apart and consequently, I was falling apart mentally. I had just gotten myself in over my head. But what saved me was that it forced me to slow down and say, Okay, well, I either have to figure out how bankruptcy for a corporation works, or I have to figure out if there’s a way to salvage this. I did something that I should have done ages ago was actually sit down, really look through the financials, really step myself through the business model, and see if there’s a business there. 

And it turns out there was, and if I had basically cut out all the clients that weren’t the right fit for us, and we should have never taken on in the first place and all the infrastructure around serving them, then suddenly I actually had a terrific little business that I could then grow again a little bit more wisely. 

Doug: So how, what did it look like to pull yourself out of that nosedive? 

Matt: It happened really quickly and slowly at the same time. I managed to find another company to take over my office lease. And I basically retreated and just cut everything to bare bones and started trying to find better clients. And so the next potential client I had that seemed like a good fit, I basically doubled our prices. And they said yes. Fantastic. And I did a lot more of the work myself so that, you know, our finances could recover and everything. And two years later, I had a very different business, relying mostly on freelancers. 

And not having an office anymore. And to this day I don’t really want to ever have an office again, because I realized I don’t actually enjoy having to come into work, so to speak. And suddenly, the business was taking off and actually building an amazing life for me. So I went from like making no money and losing money to actually having like a six-figure income over like, I think, like a two-year period of recovery. And that was pretty wild.

Doug: That’s pretty cool. So tell us about your, turn the attention now, and thanks for the story, but tell us about what you’ve figured out in Tilted Pixel. What does the ideal client look like? How can we learn from what you went through there? Tell us practically what you do, and then kind of conceptually, what can we learn from that?

When it Comes to Clients, it’s Quality Over Quantity

Matt: Yeah, absolutely. So I guess the question comes down to is, why the heck are we losing money in the first place? And the problem was that basically, I was, I thought we were a web development company. And I thought our job was to build websites. So if someone came to us and they were interested in a website,  you know, we do the typical thing, quote them all those features and functionality. And it, I didn’t spend too much time really thinking about who that client was, what they were actually trying to accomplish and so on. 

So I found myself stuck in the same spot that a lot of web development companies get stuck in where we’re building like these, like two to $5,000 websites. Now, you have to realize that the process, the sales process for selling a two to $5,000 website was like foolishly complicated. You know, we had to, like meet with a prospective client, probably a couple of times, put together a custom proposal, probably chat with them afterward. And I could easily burn up like 10 to 20 hours of my time pursuing potential client of that size. So if you do a little bit of quick math in your head, you realize how quickly that becomes unsustainable. 

And I haven’t even got into actually delivering that website, which was a whole other story. But then when I actually started digging into my business, I realized that every once in a while we had gotten a very different type of client. Their needs were generally more complicated. But most importantly, they had very different motives for building their website. They didn’t just want to be online and make sure customers could find them. They had a real tangible, important critical business result that they were trying to achieve, like getting more sales. 

Maybe their business was actually an online business where people could buy their products or services online, or it was a business that heavily relied on getting leads from the internet to then contact them so that then they could have a sales conversation. And those clients were different in a couple ways. One is they stood to gain a lot more from their website. So they were way, way, way more happy to invest in it and invest properly, and didn’t nickel and dime you and so on. But because the website was also such a critical part of their business, they wanted to continue to grow it. 

Once they started getting success of it, they didn’t want to just walk away and say, Hey, mission accomplished. They wanted to keep expanding it. Expanding the functionality, expanding the ways we could reach their ideal clients and all of that good stuff. So instead of it being a one and done project, it became a continuous recurring relationship. So you could start off with a project that was maybe 20 grand, which already is way more than five grand. But over the course of four or five years now this is actually like a six-figure client relationship, where they’ve spent 100 or $200,000 with us. 

Because we’re able to continue to work together and help them find their perfect clients, help them build the web presence that gets those clients to them. And so suddenly, if I put in all the effort and time into that sales conversation and win that client, they’re worth way more money to me than just like the five grand one-offs. So suddenly, I didn’t have to win very many clients to start building a very profitable business.

Doug: Makes perfect sense. And the pivot point there is you found people where the website was really revenue-generating for them, not just a nice marketing expense.

Matt: Yeah. And obviously, I mean, I think this applies for any business, especially any service business. We all can help a ton of people with our skills, that’s true. But if we really want to build a business that’s profitable, that has room to grow, room to feed us, room to just be a great business that doesn’t stress us out, then we got to find the people that can actually benefit a ton from our services, and who we can provide those benefits for. And it’s the intersection of those two things, that creates a very different type of client. 

And it creates a scenario where you don’t have to wake up every day wondering where your next money is going to come from, where your next clients going to come from. Because now you have a stable of these high-value clients that continue working with you. And then you actually can devote your time and attention to finding a few more perfect clients or, you know, if you have those ambitions maybe a lot more perfect clients. And you can build your business around making sure that every time you close a sale that actually propels you forward.

Doug: What if any sort of little tricks or tips do you have in terms of helping folks sort through that process of getting to their ideal client, description or definition?

Identifying and Landing Your Ideal Clients

Matt: Yeah, absolutely. So it is a bit of a process. It is something that actually coach people through as well. But the way I look at it is, if you’re a smaller business, you know, you’re not like a fortune 500 company or something like that, then the business and the business owner are basically linked. 

You know, even if you’re being smart about it, building a team, not doing all the work yourself, the business is ultimately owned by someone, you, and your reason for running this business becomes very, very important. So most of us don’t start a business to be stressed out and miserable. Most of us started a business because we feel that it can allow us to reach certain goals in our lives. 

Like for example, for me, a big goal is freedom. And that’s what I also realized early on is sitting in a cubicle made me insanely miserable. I basically go crazy. So I don’t really think I’m fit for employment. So starting a business made perfect sense. So if we’re thinking about who our perfect clients are, we got to really think about what kind of business we want to build. What’s important to us, first of all. So for me, it was important to have flexible work hours, to not have tight deadlines. One of the things I absolutely despise doing is being told on Monday that I have a deadline this Friday, right? 

Because then suddenly, I have to work late and do all these crazy things, or I have to make other people work late and do all these crazy things in order to meet that deadline. So, you know, you basically go through and you really think about what kind of business you want to run. What every day should look like, what kind of people you want to deal with, and so on. And so that’s kind of step one. And that’s very important because most people never think about any of that stuff. And then they get themselves into trouble. The second thing you want to think about is what kind of problems you can solve for people. 

And then what kind of problems are actually valuable for them. So there’s a lot of different exercises that you can do. But a great way to find this out is to basically go out and talk to people, you know, who are business owners or managers or so on, and find out what they’re struggling with, and what’s important to them. What’s keeping them up at night? And you have enough of those conversations and you start putting patterns together. Hey, wait a minute, Jenny is struggling with so and so, and that’s actually something that is in my wheelhouse. And I know how it can be fixed or how you know, whatever needs to be done to fix it. 

So what you want to do is you want to have enough of these conversations to start thinking about, okay, what kind of people have or what kind of problems do people have consistently that I know how to solve, or that I can build a team to solve? And you take those problems, and you then intersect them with, what am I actually going to enjoy building a business around solving? And again, that second part is so important and oftentimes gets missed. 

And that’s how people end up running businesses that are insanely successful and make them insanely miserable. So that’s really the formula is it’s something that you’re capable of solving for somebody, and you’re capable of doing that over and over and you’re capable of finding that type of person over and over. And that you’re going to enjoy building a business around solving. And again, that doesn’t have to mean that you’re the technician and you do all the work, but you enjoy building a business that solves that problem. 

And if you can do that, then you’re at a much better starting point. And I think most people that start businesses are. And you know, then you just iterate and you know, see what’s working, what’s not, modify who these ideal clients are. And you’re on your way to growth. You’re on your way to running a business that you enjoy running.

Doug: It’s a great formula. Thanks for that. That’s noteworthy. So once you work through that, those steps, talk to us about your experience on scaling. Have you scaled up scaled down? Obviously, you had to scale down early on when you ran out of money. But since then, since you stabilized the business and found a better business model, what have you learned about scaling? 

And what’s smart for you? I mean, you’re in an essentially technical professional services world. You’re delivering through a service of really smart people. So what do you find challenging? What do you find successful in scaling with contractors, employees or a combination of both?

Hiring Cheap Help Isn’t Always Practical

Matt: Sure. Well, first of all, I found scale for the sake of scale isn’t necessarily a good idea. This goes back to what are the motivations for running your business in the first place. And I found that when I was simply trying to grow as quickly as possible for the sake of adhering to the mantra of Waterloo, which is to grow as quickly as possible, I was miserable. I was miserable, and I was making very expensive mistakes. So grow for the sake of growth is not a particularly great idea. There should be something more pressing and more driving behind it. So I did grow my business a little bit more after, you know, everything kind of fell apart. 

But I grew it a lot more deliberately. So now it’s a team of mostly freelancers. So I got a couple of people on payroll as well. And for a long time, it reached a certain point that I was frankly happy with. And my goal wasn’t to add people to it. My goal was to add revenue, and more importantly, profit. So scaling up to higher-value clients, and basically getting more out of the existing team versus just adding people. And there’s a few things I discovered along the way that really worked well for me is finding the right people. I mean, it’s so cliche, but like I mentioned, like I rely mostly on a team of freelancers, but they’re pretty darn good freelancers. 

When I started out, I kind of bought into this whole idea of offshoring. And, you know, if you can pay someone like $10 an hour and then charge $100 an hour, everything’s going to be great. What I learned instead was that if you’re, the more junior level the person, the more you’re going to have to spend time training them and mentoring them and investing in them to get them to where you want to be. And who and when you’re starting out, especially who ends up taking on that task, well, inevitably, it becomes you, until you get to the point where it could be someone else, right? 

So suddenly, I was spending a lot of my time instead of finding clients and thinking about how to grow the business and all that stuff. I was spending time like basically trying to mentor people and help them do the kind of work that we needed to do. So that $10 an hour actually ended up being like supremely expensive, because it was taking away a resource that was even more valuable than money, which was founder time. Every hour I spent like asking someone to redo this or, you know, redo that I wasn’t getting anything else done. 

So my approach changed to now I hire people that are better at it than I am. It’s hard for me, for example, to critique our designs because our designer does a much better job than I ever could. And he has ideas that I never would have had. And he’s a lot more expensive as a result. Much, much more expensive. But that has paid off many times over because then I’m able to focus on the things that I’m good at. And I’m also able to find much better clients because I’m able to deliver much better results through my team. 

So basically, over time, even though like headcount hasn’t really grown, what we can accomplish for people and what they can pay us to accomplish, it has grown. And that’s been a lot more interesting to me. And the only way I can see myself like trying to scale to like crazy, crazy big, or trying to build a crazy big company again, would be if I actually have like a specific reason to do it. I have a service that a lot of people want that I can provide to a lot of people, and I can accomplish something better in my life as a result of growing that business.

Doug: So you caught my ear there. You’ve gotten better, but not by growing headcount, but by being more effective. So what levers have you and your team been able to pull to get to this next level of effectiveness, efficiency, quality, whatever it is? And what allowed you to improve?

Matt: 80% of it has basically been our conversation about clients, and specifically getting better at finding clients that we can deliver bigger results for, right? So basically, it is the word leverage, like where can our skills be leveraged the most in a client’s business? And over time, I discovered actually, a lot of that is online business. We’ve helped a lot of online businesses grow their businesses, because you know, over 15 years that happened, speed a niche that myself and my team have gotten very good at understanding, and understanding the levers that we can pull for them. 

So when you start doing something over and over, and you start being able to see over and over what has worked for other clients, it becomes much easier to go to a new client and with a lot of confidence, say, hey, if we do XYZ for you, there’s a very good chance you’re going to be making a lot more money tomorrow than you are today. And that’s ultimately to me, like the most beautiful value proposition that you can deliver to most businesses is Hey, you work with us, and you’re going to make several times what you’re paying us, right? 

If I give, if you if I tell you that you can give me $1, and I’ll give you $3 tomorrow, the only thing that’s standing in your way, is whether you believe that I can do it or not. So if I can prove to you that I can do it for you, then I mean, you would literally have to be crazy not to do it, right? So that’s been 80% of it. The other 20% of it has been getting better at actually creating those results. 

It does you no good at finding those clients if you can’t actually create those results for them. And it’s so simple. It’s got nothing to do with how many people you have or whatever else you can come up with. It’s about how can we deliver more value to clients? And the more value we can deliver to them, the more money comes back to us.

Doug: Simple formula, right?

Matt: Yeah, absolutely. But so effective. And so oftentimes completely missed, because as entrepreneurs, our temptation isn’t to figure out how to serve people, it’s how do we build the thing that we think is cool, and that we think people will like. And there’s a very important difference there.

Doug: Right. Or just like you said before, just that growth for the sake of growth, you’re just chasing revenue.  Given that you’ve advanced to this level, what do you envision as your next level? What’s your, what’s sort of, in your mind as to how you take this kind of a firm, Tilted Pixel and sort of get it to the next level? What’s that look like?

What’s the Next Step for Tilted Pixel?

Matt: Yeah, so for me next level is turning one of several dials. Obviously, more profit is excellent. And every year I’m definitely pursuing that. But another dial that I want to turn is it simultaneously is how can I do that, while either working less or working the same amount that I’m working now. So again, I’m very freedom-driven. I’m very driven by the idea that the business is here to build a certain life for me. So what I really want to do is we’ve got a couple of new services in the works. And I want to make those services available to a lot of businesses, but do it in a way that is scalable, without necessarily having me in the gears all over the place. 

And there’s a few pieces to that formula. So you know, I’d say we’ve done a lot of things right. But one of the things that we could still really work on is to productize our services better. So it’s less highly custom for each client, and more solving the same problem over and over and over again for clients in a way where we’re following the same formula over again. And again, we’ve got a cool new service and the works that aims to do exactly that. And then, you know, if you have that built out it becomes easier to scale in a way that doesn’t necessarily take over your life.

Doug: Right, right. That’s keeping, go back to your, one of your original statements when we started was decide what you want, decide how you want to build your business so that it serves you.

Matt: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, otherwise, for honestly, like the amount of stress and just life that running a business can take up, you know, if it’s not actually serving a real purpose in your life, then I can’t in honest sincerity say that it’s worth it, right? So running a business for the sake of running it is not necessarily ideal.

Doug: No, that’s right. So come back on the podcast when you’re ready to launch that productized I service. That sounds really fascinating. So keep us in mind there. 

Matt: Yeah, absolutely. Hopefully, that’ll be a very interesting conversation. It’s like how does a stubborn entrepreneur that doesn’t want to work more hours scale up? You can make that the next show title.

Doug: I love that. That’s a great, that’s a podcast in itself. So if you were to distill all this into sort of like the number one thing that you either most often say, or you would say if you’re standing in front of a group of business builders? People already own their business, already have it, what’s the, what’s sort of the top piece of advice that comes to your mind?

Matt: Go through your business and figure out who you’re actually delivering the most value to, and figure out is there a way where you can A, increase that value that you’re delivering, and B, is there a way that you can niche your business and focus down more, so that you can focus on helping those people that you can deliver the most value to, right? Because there’s probably, especially if you’ve never done this before, there’s probably an 80/20 win hiding there in your business, similar to how it was for me, where you’re probably offering a lot of services or serving a lot of clients that, you know, maybe help pay the bills and so on, but aren’t really moving your business forward. 

And if you cut that out, and you focus just on who you can serve the best, I mean, you’re doing everybody a favor, because overall, you can deliver a lot more value to the world. And as a result, you’re going to get a lot more value back. And quite frankly, in the form of higher fees. Because again, if you know you can give someone $1, or if they can give you $1 and you can give them $3 back, that’s wonderful. And if there’s someone else that you can give $4 back to instead, then focus on them and figure out how you can give them $5 back instead.

Doug: That is a wonderful nugget. That’s a great parting thought. Tell us how to find out more information about you and Tilted Pixel.

Matt: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the website’s tiltedpixel.com. Again, we do a lot of stuff with online business owners, and we do some really cool things with lead generation as well. And then if you want more kind of meta-discussion on my agency, and finding clients and everything else, then I also have freelancetransformation.com where I share more about what I’ve learned running this type of business, as well as interviewing other people that have done the same.

Doug: Two great resources. That’s great, man. Thank you for sharing that. So it’s been terrific talking to you. Thanks for the nuggets and tips and your story. And folks, check out Matt’s websites. And thank you and I expect you to come I’m back when you’re ready to launch that product. So I look forward to talking to you again.

Matt: Sounds good. I’m excited and thanks again for having me on.