Curtis Matsco: 0:00

When I started in 2015-16, I looked online. There were five great real leather bag companies in the US and I'm like, wow, I want to be like these guys All five bankrupt. And what I found out was their problem is they had enough success from 2005 or 2008 or 2010 to 2017. And then, when things got rough, they tried to do more and more of the same thing. They would say it's been so successful. We have a 10 year history of success. Why wouldn't we do more of that?

Curtis Matsco: 0:31

Because it's not working because you're you're going bankrupt because you have a bunch of loans that you cannot pay off because you are not profitable. That's how you know, but they can't justify that in their minds. They're like this is what our customers want. We have to do this Time to move on.

Trevor Crump: 0:51

Yo, what's going on everybody? Welcome to the Unstoppable Marketer Podcast. With me, as always, is my co-host, mark Goldhart. Mark, how are you doing today?

Mark Goldhart: 1:00

I'm doing great, I'm well, I'm excited, especially for this guest.

Trevor Crump: 1:06

I know it's been a minute since we've had a guest. We've been kind of going just solo, diving really deep into tactics and tactics lately, and so not that we're not going to do that today potentially, but I'm really excited for our guest, yeah me too. Let's introduce him. We've got Curtis from Portland Leather Goods on the podcast with us today. Portland Leather Goods, just FYI is the big he just said this line before we started talking the biggest leather bag company in the world.

Curtis Matsco: 1:36

Yes, Not even close. Fastest, what I said is the fastest growing leather bag. Sorry, sorry.

Trevor Crump: 1:41

Fastest growing. That is what I meant. I said that in my head. But the largest manufacturer in North America.

Curtis Matsco: 1:48

Yeah, we have a place called the Studio, and we named it that because it seems like a small name. But then it grew, grew, grew. We're the largest leather bag manufacturer in North America.

Trevor Crump: 1:58

Incredible man. Well, thank you for joining. We really appreciate it. We were just talking. I found you on LinkedIn. Thank you for joining. We really appreciate it. We were just talking. I found you on LinkedIn. You've kind of been more active as of pretty recent. I feel like maybe within the last 12 months or are you just showing up in my feed?

Curtis Matsco: 2:17

No, no, no, you couldn't find me 12 months ago. Not anything, it's nothing like no pictures of me.

Trevor Crump: 2:22

So what inspired you? To start creating content?

Curtis Matsco: 2:28

You know, we had some people we were going to do some videos for I can't even remember what and we got all the fancy gear and had someone try to shoot some stuff for us and it was just a failure. But in one of the breaks my assistant, Mariana, sat down next to me as they're trying to get the cameras and the speakers Right, and after the three hours, the five minutes of us just talking to each other was magical. So I just set my MacBook down and set it in my house in the morning. She sits up in the window next to me and we just talked and all of a sudden we just got thousands and thousands of people saying I love your videos. It's authentic, it's real and you know, we grew from a garage to where we are today in eight years and there's a lot of breakthroughs, there's a lot of changes you had to do and what I found out is, when I told my story like the true story of how things really worked, it really struck with some people.

Curtis Matsco: 3:25

I'm not here to tell the story that everybody's going to catch on to. I'm going to tell the story of what it really takes to build a brand Because, yes, I own the largest leather bag manufacturer in North America. I do not really consider myself a manufacturer. I'm a marketer. I'm an online direct marketer and I created these products to sell. And I could hire a manufacturing to do it, but I would pay different margins, have different speed, have different logistics Everything would be. I created this because it makes marketing more effective Totally.

Curtis Matsco: 3:55

But everything I do is from a marketing mindset. I'm almost unstoppable in terms of marketing.

Trevor Crump: 4:00

I love it. I dig it Unstoppable. There's no pun intended, okay. So let's jump into the story a little bit. Tell us a little bit how you got started in this space. Like what? What started the whole thing?

Curtis Matsco: 4:14

I was doing a lot of yoga with a young lady in 2015, 2016, in Portland, Oregon. She had a really bad job and I wanted to hang out with her more. So I said hey, why don't you quit your job? She's like I can't quit my job. You know, it's just got graduated college, got her first job. It sucked. And she said what will I do if I quit my job? And I said oh, I have never told you I'm a marketing genius. No, you're not. You're obviously the laziest man I've ever met. You don't even have a job. And I said no, no, no. And I made I went handmade a little leather journal and I said this is what we're going to sell. We can grow this to 100 million. And she's like she was just stupid enough to quit her job. And we started at art festivals and we literally went from 5,000 to 10,000 to 20 in a weekend, to some weekends we were doing 40,000 in a weekend. Jeez.

Mark Goldhart: 5:08

And then we went on in Etsy.

Curtis Matsco: 5:11

In 18 months we became a top 10 all time seller.

Trevor Crump: 5:15

Wow, and what year was that with Etsy Two?

Curtis Matsco: 5:19

16, 17. Okay, and then we went on Shopify and I remember our first year on Shopify getting off of Etsy. On Black Friday we did one sale, and this last Black Friday we did a sale with an average order value of $123 every three seconds. Jeez.

Trevor Crump: 5:40

Congrats.

Curtis Matsco: 5:42

Yeah.

Mark Goldhart: 5:43

Wild congrats. So yeah, wild. So. So at first it was just etsy arts festivals, farmers markets, all around the portland area yeah, yeah, and you know, not really farmers markets and that's a little marketing thing.

Curtis Matsco: 5:56

You'd be in a marketing guy. You got to go where people want to buy and have money. It's not just where people are, but going to an art festival, they were in a different mindset of buying, and then people are selling. But going to an art festival, they were in a different mindset of buying, and then people are selling paintings next to you for $1,000. So when you're selling something for $30, $40, $100, they just load it up. Does that make sense?

Curtis Matsco: 6:14

So it really matters, just like in marketing online. Where are you and who's your audience? 100%, that's so important. You can't go to a state fair just because they're 50,000 people and expect to sell what we were selling. They want garbage there. They don't want to spend the money. They spent the money to get in An art festival. I'm telling you, oh, it's beautiful. You sit in a park. You got your little white thing pretty. People walk by, they all look good, they're all drinking wine in a good mood. You sit in a lawn chair and people just hand you cash all day. I'm telling you, that was beautiful. Still, one of my favorite things we've ever done in this company is just sit on a beautiful fall day and have people come and hand us money, Just raking cash huh.

Curtis Matsco: 6:53

I loved it, just absolutely loved it. How cool Then I loved Etsy, then I loved Shopify, then I loved each step. If you don't love each step, you're screwed Totally, but if you don't move on from every step, you're also screwed.

Mark Goldhart: 7:04

You know I love that you actually sold directly to customers at one point. I think a lot of e-commerce brands have never sold their product directly to a person before. I'd love to hear what you think you learned through that process of selling directly to somebody face to face that helped translate over into the digital world.

Curtis Matsco: 7:23

Yeah, that is a really great question. Thank you. There is nothing like being in. I'm a competitive person, I'm a marketing guy, right, and I've spent all this time making these beautiful handmade leather products. And then people would walk into the tent and the first thing is it's just like e-commerce Where's the traffic flow?

Curtis Matsco: 7:40

We were different than everybody else at these art festivals. Some people had a permanent setup that looked identical every time. I would set mine up and after one hour of a three-day festival, I would see where the sun was, where people are going, where's the traffic, and I would switch the whole booth, break it down and set it back up, and then I would do it again and again until by noon, the right flow of people were coming in. They were staying here's where they're buying. That's where they first caught their attention. What's getting them in, what's keeping them in, where's the line, everything like that. So I looked at it and then I also face to face, if someone said I love this and they walked out and they didn't buy it, I said what the hell am I doing wrong?

Trevor Crump: 8:19

Right.

Curtis Matsco: 8:20

That is an insult, right? You can't do that online. You just see a number come in so you can actually ask the people what is it? What is it that you didn't like? What is it? So?

Curtis Matsco: 8:31

The price is that this you know, I would create gimmicks just to see if they would work. Sure, I would take a uh, these small journals we did, and I'd say one for 40, two for 60, three for 50. You're like what? That makes no sense. And I'm like, oh well, guess I got the honor of the deal and we're lines of people that's hauling up. We just have stacks and stacks and stacks. Because what happens when you do that? You need to make a lot more of those leather journals, right? So now you have to do a production up. Now you have to sell more. You have to. Selling to people in person is critical. It's the same thing you do online. But we can have a million people come through our, our site. You know we get three, four million a month and at that point they just become a number. Sure, you talk to one person and it it hits you as a different thing. So I think it was very critical for our growth.

Curtis Matsco: 9:27

It's also what I knew at that particular time, but it also told me a product had to be better. That's part of it. Here's the stupid thing. I made it. I'm an idiot. I don't know how to make things, so I had to get people who are better at it than me. I had to become the marketing mind and people who are better had to make it. I knew that because I was putting together journals in my garage and I hired this young lady part time and I would make a stack like this tall, and hers was like five times taller and better.

Curtis Matsco: 9:56

And I'm like wait, maybe my specialty is not making handmade journals, maybe it's selling them Totally, maybe it's going on to Etsy, maybe it's Shopify. Maybe it's selling them, maybe it's going on to Etsy, maybe it's Shopify, maybe it's the scaling, Maybe it's the full thing. We do everything. We actually buy the hides from the US, pay for them to bring them to go to the taproom. We control this thing from beginning to end. Right, yeah, we manufacture them, we send them, we do the customer service, we have in-house marketing, we have our own photographer studio, we do our own videos. We do everything right, and that way we just make a little bit of money on each one and become more efficient. We can move faster because it's all in-house and we just grow from there. But I want everyone to understand we're a marketing company. Marketing first.

Trevor Crump: 10:39

That's it. Why do you think that's? I've heard you say this before, you've said it a couple of times. Why do you think that's? I've heard you say this before, you've said it a couple times. Why do you think that's a very important thing for everybody who's listening to this to understand?

Curtis Matsco: 10:49

I was in Tulum last week and I was talking to a young lady who has a $2 million company and she's a designer. She got into business because she designs jewelry, right. And now she's seven years in and she's built, built it to me, but she's having trouble scaling to the next thing. And she's like, yeah, next year when I'm designing, and I'm like, get out of the designing mindset. Do you own this company? Are you the head of this? Yes, then get out of designing. Why? Because she's designing the next thing she thinks is really pretty.

Curtis Matsco: 11:22

I said do you have a best-selling product? Yes, well, on your website, you damn well. I said do you have a best-selling product? Yes, well, on your website, you damn well. Better, put that first, because you have two types of buyers on any website. You have a first-time buyer and you have the return buyer, right. So stop showing your new customers where the real gold is and getting the new customer in the system. Your newest stuff. It's unproven. You have no algorithm. You have no proof that that's going to work. There's a great one. I know Ben at True Classic, and I'm going to tell you True Classic has not changed their front page in five years, why they A, b tested the crap out of that thing. It works and anyone could say maybe we should make it look fresh. And he can say why. Our previous customers already know who we are and they're going to go right through to what they want. But the new customers? That's the best proven way to get a new customer totally and and it's.

Trevor Crump: 12:15

And it's not just not only have they tested it, but it's, they're pushing. Uh, they're pushing their hero product, right, they're pushing, they're pushing their act. We call them hero products or acquisition products. You know, I've heard people call them CAC products. Whatever you want, right we?

Curtis Matsco: 12:30

call them heroes.

Trevor Crump: 12:30

Yeah, yeah, heroes, heroes, kind of the thing that we generally call it. So what were some of your hero products in like those early stages that helped you? Because you have to acquire customers to get returning customers right. So especially in those early days, post right, you start out in the journal space as that acquisition product. How did your hero product grow in that journey to make sure that you were always acquiring new customers?

Curtis Matsco: 13:07

That was something that you look back and you know I'm not a smart person sometimes which just really helps me be successful, because when I look back, I only see my successes. But I was looking at old pictures of us back in 2016 and 17 and all these waves of mistakes I made kept coming through and I'm like, oh man, we had some really dumb ideas, right. So we made a journal and I was like, how do you add on to it? Well, we could personalize it. Right. So we could personalize the letters or their name on it. Ok, so that has to be handmade per order. Ok, we could put a different high heat stamp on it to say a different saying they could do. When you open it up, we could print something different on the inside. So it's all taking that minor thing and spreading it out.

Curtis Matsco: 13:47

And I remember taking our first leather tote and I remember saying how many leather totes did we sell this week? And it was like 18. I'm like, maybe that could be our hero product, of course. Of course it's better than the journal space, for goodness sakes, right. But it took me a year to figure that out and I kept going wider and wider, spending all my times coming up with machines to personalize and do this. All of a sudden, we started selling 50 and 100, you know, and what you see behind me and if they listen to audio they can't see this but what you see behind me is something that has the ability to make 100,000 products a week in leather goods.

Curtis Matsco: 14:25

Right, you can't get there by doing personalized journals. That's all people sitting there doing that and it's a smaller market. Right, the handbag market is much bigger, but I thought at the first that that's what it was, so you can continue to evolve. Now that we know our data, we know we have specialties of what our hero product is. It's got to be a certain price because you want to get that first time customers. You also need to track the LTV, meaning some products will get you a lot longer LTV than others. They like it more. It leads to that second purchase where the gold is. Now we buy traffic at a profit, meaning our first customer is profitable.

Trevor Crump: 15:08

Congrats.

Curtis Matsco: 15:09

But I know that they're much more likely to spend a lot more long term if they buy these two and not these two. So if it comes down to this one's a little more different to do our ad spend and everything that we're doing. I'll take the time and effort to work on those ad sets because I wanted to buy certain things. Now, after they're in the mix, you got to come up with new things to keep your audience engaged. Our formula is 50% on a day-to-day basis new customer, 50% returning customer, and so by the end of the month we look at that. So we know we need an extra 900,000 customers next year. That's what our goal in scaling is going to be, and then our current customers will continue to buy and to even that out.

Mark Goldhart: 15:54

Okay, I want to dive in just a little bit into this evolution from journals to bags. And the reason why is because I think a lot of people you already identified this a lot of business owners get stuck in that transition, right Like they have the initial product and it's doing okay, or good even, but not great, and they're trying to find what's the next step, what's the evolution? So, from your marketing mind, you were doing these journals. How did you say, hey, let's do a tote. Was it a tote just because, hey, we're doing leather stuff, let's do a tote? Was it a tote just because, hey, we're doing leather?

Curtis Matsco: 16:26

stuff. Let's make a leather tote. Yeah, I had a leather hide. I literally didn't know what I was doing and I just cut the panels like equidistant, shoved them together, figured out how to sew it together, turned it upside down, did a few things. I'm like, oh, that's kind of nice, took it out there and it sold like, oh, that's nice. But then when you're on etsy and you're on, you're going online, you need to evolve. I still spent 90 of my time on how do I make the current product better and get more people to buy and only 10 on the additional things. And that was fine because it got us to where we are, but it delayed our. It delayed our evolution probably by a year.

Mark Goldhart: 17:02

Okay I bought a lot of expensive.

Curtis Matsco: 17:04

I hired a lot of employees with those heat machines to write up the letters and to put the personalization. And then I'd say we don't really want to do this. And people say but people love the personalization, yeah, but the other 200 million people who are potential customers don't even know it exists. If we take it off and we just offer the bag itself, we can become much more efficient. Now it seems like a it's the obvious decision. Now, it was not obvious at the time.

Mark Goldhart: 17:34

No decision is ever obvious at the time well, because it was your biggest product at the time, right?

Curtis Matsco: 17:39

it's how you're bringing in all of your money. Well, not all of your money.

Trevor Crump: 17:43

not only that, but it's also like the handbag space is a daunting yes, the total addressable market is bigger, but it's also more competitive.

Curtis Matsco: 17:55

Yeah, the TAM space is huge 78 billion, right, okay. But a lot of this is, you know, by the luxury brands that do what they do, and I mean there's really nobody between us and that billion dollar mark, right, there's Capri Holdings, there's Tapestry, there's the big ones that everybody knows, and then there's us and we're growing into that space. We have to become who we are to a better degree to start competing against them. But I told you guys this before we started. We talked for about 10 minutes before we started up and I wanted to tell you, when I started in 2015, 16, I looked online. There were five great, real leather bag companies in the US and I'm like, wow, I want to be like these guys. All five bankrupt. All five bankrupt Three of their CEOs.

Curtis Matsco: 18:46

I've always been very, very kind to them. I was always offering advice if I could give it to them. They have called me up in the last three years and said, hey, can you help us out financially? Can you take up? They all went bankrupt and what I found out was their problem is they had enough success from 2005 or 2008 or 2010 to 2017.

Curtis Matsco: 19:09

And then, when things got rough, they tried to do more and more of the same thing. They would say it's been so successful. We have a 10 year history of success. Why wouldn't we do more of that Totally? Because it's not working, because you're going bankrupt, because you have a bunch of loans that you cannot pay off, because you are not profitable. That's how you know, but they can't justify that in their minds. You're like this is what our customers want. We have to do this time to move on. Dude, I was uh, I was in tulum last week with Mariota and a bunch of people and we met this guy named Timotei, and this guy is a 23-year-old genius. He lives in Dubai, he is millions and millions on TikTok, he runs the world's most successful TikTok agency and he was sharing some stats with me. Gen Z right now changes their identity every 30 days.

Trevor Crump: 20:03

What.

Curtis Matsco: 20:09

Gen.

Mark Goldhart: 20:09

Z changes their identity every 30 days. What gen z changes their identity every 30 days?

Curtis Matsco: 20:12

define identity for us. He started showing us all of these different themselves, what they do, what they like, what they do, the stanley they're carrying no I need a different I want to carry something else.

Curtis Matsco: 20:24

No, I want to. They're so evolutionary. They're hit with so much information in constant times. They're not someone like me who said I like wearing this shirt. 10 years later, you're still wearing that shirt. They change brands, have to be adaptable at a hodgepodge to capture them. They can't just say this is who we are. The point of that is, people evolve very, very quickly because you know that information, news, everything has changed so quickly. How can you look back to 2012 and say this worked, we're smart. We want to pour more sauce onto this. The world is different. The world is different than it was in 2000,.

Curtis Matsco: 21:03

For goodness sakes, you guys get to see this behind me, that this is part of our manufacturing here. This didn't exist six months ago. This building did not exist. This was all created up and put in here in the last six months. So we had no manufacturing in mexico. When covet hit, we came down with 10, 9 990 dollars, because you can't bring $10,000 down when everything was shut down. The banks were shut down, the government was shut down and we set up our manufacturing with masks on to try to get something going. And the changes we've made in the last four years is because we weren't locked into our Portland identity. That we're going to make Because Portland was shut down for a year and a half you couldn't make make it, we'd be out of business.

Trevor Crump: 21:46

A hundred percent.

Curtis Matsco: 21:46

Yeah.

Trevor Crump: 21:47

And it was one of the cities that was a little bit more shut down than most. Right, I love what you're saying. We talk about this all the time. Have you ever, do you? Do you know who Marty Neumeier is? I don't.

Trevor Crump: 22:06

Marty Neumeier is, uh, he, he was kind of like deemed as old school branding genius, like Mad Men style days, I think. He like went to Silicon Valley and got Atari as his client because he told Atari Apple was one of his clients or something like that. He just kind of like lied his way into these really big jobs. Anyway, he wrote a book called Zag and he introduces a chart it's a quadrant, ok, and there's four quadrants. And he introduces a chart it's a quadrant, okay, and there's four quadrants. And on the y-axis is good, so the further you go up, the better it is. And on the x-axis I'm saying that right, right, yeah, x-axis is different.

Trevor Crump: 22:39

And he says most people sit at the top Q1, which is good but not different, which is a death sentence, which is what you're talking about with these other five manufacturers that you were, you at the time you were looking and admiring so dearly. They stuck too long in this, in this quadrant number one, where, in reality, where you really want to be. I mean, you don't want to be down in quadrant three, which is not good, not different, obviously, and you don't want to be over in this not good, but different section, because because nobody wants that but you want to be up in Q2, which is good and different. And I don't think that people think about the different section enough. All of us are just thinking, good, and there is such a, there is such a um, what the word I'm looking for? There's, uh, there's a lot of risk in looking at your competitors and admiring them, because what do you do when you look at your competitors? You start to do the things that they're doing. Can I, can I bring up an example about that?

Mark Goldhart: 23:41

please, please. This is a little bit of a far-out example, but I like to go camping a lot, curtis.

Curtis Matsco: 23:49

You live in Utah, man. Of course it's beautiful.

Mark Goldhart: 23:51

We love as a family I got three little kids we love sitting out looking at the stars, and the thought I always have looking at stars is like you're looking at snapshots from millions of years ago of the stars. You're not looking at the star as it is right now. You're looking at the star as it was, from the distance. It took the light to travel to the earth. That's the problem.

Mark Goldhart: 24:11

When you're analyzing and looking at competitors is like you're looking at a delayed image of what you think that competitor is or isn't so. So you have to develop your own path and, like we talk about this with our clients and people we consult all the time. You can't just take these templates from Twitter profiles and implement them onto your business. You have to understand the first principles of operation and of marketing and and pave your own path with the first principles. So for you, how did you get out of that mindset of hey, I want to be like these guys to no, no, like this is our pathway. This is how I operate off of my principles, off of our values as a company, instead of trying to operate off of what you're seeing is that delayed image from a competitor.

Curtis Matsco: 25:01

I would say it's because I'm narrow-minded and I'm cocky and I'm selfish and I didn't want to look at somebody else and what they were doing. That's part of it. And then some of them just seemed unreasonable. I remember there's this one company and they were like we're giving 5% of all proceeds to this children's organization and my people was like we should give away 5% of everything we're doing that organization. And my people was like we should give away 5% of everything we're doing. That would sound great. And I literally had all our employees telling me to do that. And the reason I didn't do it is because I couldn't afford to give away 5% to charity, right? Well, I found out a year later that I almost bankrupted them. That was the first nail in the coffin, because they didn't do the math. Does that actually get us new customer acquisition or retention? No, it sounded good. And somebody came up with them. We decided to do it, right. Well, I was too cocky and and narrow minded. So I'm like, no, we're going to be who we are. It wasn't me looking out and seeing them. I started doing that. It was my, my people, totally, from the creatives to the photographers, to everybody else.

Curtis Matsco: 26:04

I'm going to tell you the most crazy thing that we did that literally broke the market open. We hired models that smiled. It's the hardest thing to do when you go to modeling agencies, because you look at all their things and all the girls are like they're like a girl, like a girl standing in a lobby and she's pissed off. Her boyfriend hasn't picked her up yet. They all have that look on their face Like I'm sure this model can smile, not naturally. We wanted to be the approachable brand, right, so we had to start with some of our own employees or people we knew and teach them how. It's easier to teach someone how to model who has a beautiful smile than teaching a model how to smile. So it's a small little thing, but nobody else did that.

Curtis Matsco: 26:52

Everyone else thought, oh, let's do a long video that shows the morning sun and you come up in a Range Rover and you lay the leather out and you hand cut it like this Boring yes, that was really big in 2017 and everybody was pitching, doing that and I said no, no, no, let's put it in the people's hands, let's let them smile, let's be aspirational, but this is the person at the party that you want to walk in at the party because they're going to make everyone feel comfortable. You're going to like them. You're going to always say, hey, I want that person to come to the party. They're nice, they're going to make everyone feel comfortable, you're going to like them. You're going to always say, hey, I want that person to come to the party. They're nice, they're a good person. Don't ask the bitchy girl. We don't want her. That's not aspirational. That seems like a crazy thing at the time, but it worked and none of the other customers were doing that.

Mark Goldhart: 27:37

Do you know what I love about?

Curtis Matsco: 27:38

that though is.

Mark Goldhart: 27:39

It goes back to this example of competitors, because do you know why models look the way they do?

Mark Goldhart: 27:44

because everyone else, somebody started it that way well, no, it's for a very specific purpose, like the models that we're referring to started because of the runways, because of the way that they photograph but move with the clothes hanging on them. So there's a there's a certain kind of aesthetic that these clothing designers wanted, but somehow that same aesthetic was applied into the bagging space and into every other space. But it wasn't because of a reason, it was just like oh, they're doing that, so we're going to use those those are the supermodels and think about this.

Curtis Matsco: 28:16

your photographers are lower and the models are told not to walk out and make eye contact with everybody. They're supposed to look off in the distance or look down and not look anyone in the eye, right? So the photographer is taking this aspirational picture of this person. See them staring off like this or like this, so that's what we perceive as luxury. It's the runway of them not looking in your eyes or looking down on you, right?

Curtis Matsco: 28:41

I'm just like, yeah, that kind of sucks. You know I don't want to be looked down on you. Yep Right, I'm just like, yeah, it kind of sucks. You know I don't want to be looked down on. I'm from Montana. I'm just a dumb kid Like I. I want people to be nice. I want to hang around with people that I like. I love that. I hired the nicest models who would smile and I'm telling you that's gold, just gold.

Trevor Crump: 29:00

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Trevor Crump: 29:53

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Curtis Matsco: 30:57

$150 million yeah $150,000,.

Trevor Crump: 31:00

Yeah, $150 million. Yep. So nine figures. Tell me what were the things. Let's start low. 150 million. Yeah, $150,000. Yeah, 150 million. Yep. So nine figures, tell. Tell me what. What were, what were the things? Let's start low. Let's start at this seven figure mark, cause that's such a massive milestone. What was the thing that got you from that just six figure to seven figure mark, and then let's go seven to eight.

Curtis Matsco: 31:18

I'm going to say one. You may or may never have heard Physical restrictions. So I was in my garage doing art festivals, right, and we had to decide between this space, which was very small, or 2,000 square feet. It was a pole dancing studio. It was all purple and had mirrors on it right, but it was too big for us. We went with the bigger space on it. Right, but it was too big for us. We went with the bigger space.

Curtis Matsco: 31:48

If we had taken the smaller one, we would be the hardest working $2 million company in the world right now. Right, because we happened to go into a building that was 25,000 square feet. So when we needed more space, we just offered more for the thing and knocked the wall down next to us, right? So physical restrictions will limit your brain in seeing things in a different route, right, it just does. We know that from leone.

Curtis Matsco: 32:10

We were in these big 10 000 square foot warehouses, right, and we had studio one and then studio two, three, four, five, six, but they were all kind of. Just once we moved into our one facility, all of a sudden, your brain thinks in a different way. You cannot sit here and look at these lines without seeing them as a video game now, about seeing timing, about seeing where the market. It just all comes together in your mind and if you physically restrict yourself, so be in the space you're going to be in, not where you are at right now. Right, does that make sense? So I truly we would have screwed ourselves on that one.

Mark Goldhart: 32:47

It's kind of like the physical version of parkinson's law right yeah like you'll fill the space, that's around you yeah, so if you don't have that physical space, like you won't fill it out, in a way it doesn't help you. Your brain will start thinking I gotta fill this space, space out somehow, isn't?

Trevor Crump: 33:03

that how it is with goldfish, too, or something like that. Like if you put a goldfish in like a small versus like a bigger tank, they will grow. You'll also justify it.

Curtis Matsco: 33:12

You'll justify it. It's like, well, we just need to be more efficient. Well, it doesn't have to be that, because you have to, because of your space, it really limits people down. Your brain justifies where you are. Amazing, I think that's a really big one, and we almost screwed ourselves a million times. Like I look back and I'm like, how did we make it through this maze? Because there was a lot of things that wanted to knock us out of business. So I think that's number one. Number two is there's a book called what Got you here Won't Get you there, and I'm going to tell you about that book. I've never read it and I don't need to, because I learned from the title. Everything, the damn thing needs to say Everything that got me right here is not going to get us to the next level. Right, whether that's people or processes, or systems or structures or the marketing. None of that is good enough. Yes, you have to focus on what you're doing today. At the same time, you need to be figuring out what you're going to do next, and that has to be a brain obsession.

Curtis Matsco: 34:09

I'm going to tell you another thing that I would highly suggest to anybody who is the CEO, the founder of running a business, know the numbers in your head. Every time I ask an employee in their area what numbers are in, they said let me check my computer. I literally want to scream. Why is it so important? Because if you know the numbers or the problems in your head 20 hours a day, your brain will be solving those problems. If you don't know the numbers, you have to look at the computer, which then changes your brain chemistry when you look at your computer, right, and then for that one minute you're trying to analyze it. To make it I'll know our numbers so that when I'm walking around'll see something, say wait, something's not right there, that's not right. Maybe we could change this.

Curtis Matsco: 34:49

I wake up in the morning and I'm like it's just like my linkedin. Now I wake up every morning. There's 50 new people who have wanted to be on there, right, you know who have connected with me, what happens with me. I wake up in the morning and there's 12 new realizations my brain solved at night. I'm like I got to get Mariana, we got to do this and this and this and this and this and that constant move forward. Know things in your head, know the problems, know your numbers so that you can come up with solutions on that second and on that meeting. Meetings will not solve your problems Totally. You seeing something and saying I get it, we could do it differently. Then you call the meeting and you implement it. I know this doesn't seem like it is not your regular d to c type stuff, but that's how it actually works. If you want to.

Trevor Crump: 35:36

It's so spot on. I I mean some of the best financial advice like just personal financial advice I ever received was just look at your bank account. If you don't look at your bank account every day, then you're not going to see those little charges that are coming through that you're like what, why am I? I don't need that. I'm never looking at that. You know you're not seeing where your money's moving. And if you don't respect your money your money, won't respect you yeah, I'll pay for dinner.

Curtis Matsco: 35:59

Don't, I'll do this. I can buy this. If you don't realize, the next day you would see like ah damn, I took a little dip there. I probably should have just had a frickin hot dog Right.

Trevor Crump: 36:07

Yeah, yeah, a hundred percent.

Curtis Matsco: 36:09

That's true. I don't care how many hundreds of millions you get, it's the same thing. Know your numbers, look at it.

Trevor Crump: 36:24

We like to hold on to our successes of our past, but you have to hold on to the right lessons of the past?

Curtis Matsco: 36:26

yeah for sure. Move to those next things. So I don't want to get rid of the things that that have worked well and it's hard. I'm telling you, when we got to a million, I was still doing art festivals to pay the bills for the building as we grew the etsy company. Does that make any sense? Then everyone's like we just need to go all into Shopify and completely got off. I'm like no, no, no, Etsy's still bringing in 4 million bucks a year. We're not just giving that up right now, Right. But then at one time you're just like I'm shutting that pipeline down and it was like how could you turn off of that money?

Curtis Matsco: 36:59

Because I knew in my heart that wasn't where it was at. It was that next level. So it's letting go of the past to move on to the future. Most people want to keep everything from the past and have the future. You can't do it. You cannot do it. You have to break through ceilings at all times. So sometimes I get passionate. I talk like a little harsh to people you know and for all the people who buy from us and all the people who know Port and Leather. I am a very kind and a loving person. Everyone knows that about me. But when it comes down to business, sometimes I get mad at people for continuing to make stupid mistakes. I just want them to be better. I just want them to understand that they need to win this game. They need to win it for them and their family and their friends and their employees. I am responsible for making hard decisions that are going to piss some people off, but in the long run it's going to grow our company. Right? I don't like those things. Right, it's funny.

Mark Goldhart: 37:56

Everyone wants to watch a sports documentary and they love the intensity that somebody brings right, but then in their own life they don't want any kind of that intensity. They just want rainbows and sunshine and lollipops. And then it's like, oh, michael Jordan is so great, I love Michael Jordan. It's like, well, there's a reason why Michael Jordan was like that. He wasn't exactly a nice guy all the time.

Curtis Matsco: 38:15

Yeah, there's a great. The Georgia football coach did a great thing on the three problems, the three downsides of leadership, and basically it was you're going to make decisions that hurt people you love Right, you're going to. You're going to have to make decisions where you cannot explain to people what the reason you did that for, but you still have to make that decision, right. Like there is certain things in leadership that are not your standard, hold hands, everybody's gonna be okay. I biggest breakthrough I ever did with all my employees was this If an employee is not working out, I used to think I'm the worst guy in the world. We're a great company and I have to let this person go. What I realized, realized if they're not working out, they will be happier someplace else not just mentally saying that, but knowing it because I bump into them two years later and I think, oh shit, they're going to be angry at me.

Curtis Matsco: 39:14

I let this person go and they give me a hug and say thank you, my much better job. I have making more money doing something that they were meant for right, because we're not the perfect fit for everybody. I think I pulled my brain at first, thinking, well, I got to tell myself they'll be better off. Now I know for a fact. I literally just had an employee. I love this employee. He was fantastic. He was wonderful. He wasn't right for where we were going next. So I literally said I'm going to pay you for six months. I will take you to all of these conventions. You're amazing. I will help you get a new job.

Curtis Matsco: 39:49

He got a job at a small little company running a whole side of their e-commerce called Nike, and I saw him about four months ago and my friends bumped into him like, yeah, they work out every morning, he's glowing, he's happy, he's like and he thanks me. He didn't thank me when we sat down and I told it's gonna happen, but I said I love and I trust you, dude, you're gonna kill it someplace else. And he is. But that two months of uncertainty was hard on him and his heart and his family was hard on me. But that's what the good things in life are they're a little bit hard and a little bit uncomfortable. Then you look back and say I'm sure glad I did that.

Mark Goldhart: 40:26

Yeah Well, I love this topic, right? Because, going back to your three points, it's all about evolution, right, you're changing. How do you change the next step, whether it's through physical constraints, whether it's through mindset, whatever it is. And I love your story because you're really just a little microcosm example of changing, like Curtis, I mean, I don't know if you, you care, but how old are you? 59. Okay, so you're 59 years old I. The reason why I want to bring that up is because of the, the old saying, right, the old, uh, saying that old dogs can't learn new tricks. Saying that old dogs can't learn new tricks. Okay, you've created an e-commerce business in your 40s, late 40s, and grew it into one of the best e-commerce businesses in your 50s.

Mark Goldhart: 41:12

Fastest growing e-commerce, Fastest growing e-commerce business in your 50s and everyone thinks this is like a young guy's game. The young people. You're not the typical story of a, D to c success okay.

Curtis Matsco: 41:25

Well, I'm gonna tell you a non-standard one. I had a few years of drinking where I literally did nothing in my life except lay around and be worthless. So when you're really bad for like, what happens is mentally when you stop drinking, you go back to the age that you were mentally when you started to drink heavy.

Trevor Crump: 41:43

Right Does that make any sense.

Curtis Matsco: 41:48

So like 10 years, I don't remember, so I still conceive myself as being a lot younger.

Trevor Crump: 41:52

So that's one of those blessings that I am. Right now You're 40. Exactly.

Curtis Matsco: 41:57

And I'm literally surrounded with 90 percent of my top 100 people are between the ages of 25 and 36, right. So I've got this young energy all the way around me all the time and I've got more energy. I've got more things than they do, but I'm able to see pattern recognition from my life to realize what I need to do to move on to the next area. So yeah, I had a big offer to sell the company. I'm like why am I? Why would I do that? I want to run this company for 10 and 20 years.

Mark Goldhart: 42:31

Awesome. So what's your advice, though, to younger people? Cause we see young business owners, young marketers, get stuck a lot and they don't know how to move on to the next thing. Like you said, the book what gets you here isn't what will, or what got you here won't get you there. Yeah, yeah. How do you help people have that mindset?

Trevor Crump: 42:48

I'm really curious. I like I want to know this too, because we this is like the conversation we're having with people people all of the time, and I've recognized it. I feel like we tend to have this conversation significantly more with millennials and and what you brought up around Gen Z makes sense because Gen Z is changing their identity, most likely because of how integrated they are into social media and the different trends and things that are happening on social media. But yeah, I'm super curious about this.

Curtis Matsco: 43:15

You know, if you look at news on a certain subject and it says came in two days or three days ago, you're like how dare they feed me this old crap Crap in my newsfeed? I want to know what happened three minutes ago. Right, you go on to reels and stories and anything. It's immediate and it's fast. And it's fast, it's the fast changing. So, as we know, everybody has changed down in the way that time is conceived. So that's just the way that things go.

Curtis Matsco: 43:44

Young people have an anxious energy that they need to succeed right away, because they've seen enough stories of somebody doing an overnight success that they're looking for the overnight success. And I get that. I kind of felt that way when I was that age. But now it's worse because they're being told that by every influence that gets them hurry the hell up, you're behind, right? I love a quote by Bill Gates. I didn't know it was Bill Gates when I heard it, but I love this. He said we overestimate what we can do in a year. We underestimate what we could do in 10. Because if someone told me 10 years ago hey, you want to have a 200, 300, 400 million dollar company in 10 years, I'm like damn straight. If they had then told me all I had to go through to get there, I might not have been so thrilled about it Totally.

Curtis Matsco: 44:40

Because I look back and I'm like that hey, hey, I'm 59 and I have a lot of energy, but I'm not doing that stuff again?

Curtis Matsco: 44:47

Yeah, I am not. I used to break down all the walls of the building. I used to do the construction. I used to clean it. I sat and scraped up old paint off of the floor all night long. So when the people came in, everything was cleaned up so they could do that. I did everything Not anymore. I'm smarter at looking at it this way Am I glad I did it? Of course I am so young it this way? Am I glad I did it? Of course I am so young. Folks, there is a balance in this world of learning. You can only do it by repetition and pattern recognition of when you hold on and when do you let go. Most people do the worst thing. They half and half it. Let's say you have a somebody's got a girlfriend or a boyfriend. It's not working out out. What do you want to do? It's like, well, we're not really going to break up.

Curtis Matsco: 45:32

But I'm not going to move on. I'm just going to kind of wait in this limbo state to see what happens. Most people do their businesses the same way. I'll wait for the next thing to come up here. No, because your mind is still solving the problems of that past. You've got to let it go right. Or you've got to let it go right, yeah, or you got to put more fire under that. You've got to change it. But over time you have to realize, hey, this is not, there is.

Curtis Matsco: 45:59

I'd be a very big journal maker right now if I didn't want to move on yeah so there's just lots of things that go along with that yeah, okay, yeah, for sure yeah, I. That doesn't answer a question, it just says judgment. Everybody, life experience gives you judgment of when to do something.

Mark Goldhart: 46:16

That's the hard truth. Though it's a principle, yeah, Like you can't teach someone a template and say walk this road. It's like you're going to have to make hard decisions along the way.

Trevor Crump: 46:23

Yeah, I mean it never. And I think I think the point of podcasts like this or books or whatever is necessary because everybody does things differently. I don't think it's necessarily to have an answer of hey, this is how you change. The principle is you have to change. The principle is you have to do things different. The principle is what got you there isn't going to get you there, and something tells me, if I ask that question, hey, what brought you from eight figures to nine figures? You're going to say something very similar that has to do with change and evolving. Um, I'm sure you might have a tactic or whatever, but my guess is like that's, that's the ethos of this podcast episode. Right?

Curtis Matsco: 47:05

I was at a big party and, uh, everybody knew who I was. Uh, and they were all younger entrepreneurs. And as they got drunker and drunker, they started like hedging me off and finally this guy got me in a corner. He's like what's the secret, man? What's the secret? And I'm like the key is you have to make a hundred decisions, maybe a thousand, between one million and 10 million in sales, right, and half are going to suck. But you make them and you move on and you cut that as soon as you can. There's a number of things Is it how you hire the people? Is it your marketing? Is it the structure? Is it product efficiency? Is it your website? Is it your AB testing? There's a million things and each one of those needs to be addressed. But what I do as the CEO and as a visionary and the person that runs this company is I go to the biggest fire and say we're not going to have a meeting about this, we are not going to put a study about this, we're going to stay right here and we're going to solve this right now. And if it's on the line, I'll be in the line. If it's in marketing, I'll be in the marketing. If it's photography, I'll be doing that right.

Curtis Matsco: 48:14

What's your biggest problem? Solve one a week. For a year you got 52 of your biggest problems solved. And guess what Small ones will do that? Go to the big problems and solve it right now. This is the meeting. This is the time to do it. Solve it now. Don't put a committee. Don't sit around and study. Don't say in three weeks, come with proposals, jump in, figure it out. Doing it now is better than doing it later.

Trevor Crump: 48:39

I love it, dude. I don't, I don't, like. I'm sure there's a thousand more questions, but to me this episode has gone in such a cool direction, yeah.

Mark Goldhart: 48:51

It's given me a given me a lot to think about. Like one thing that keeps going around I'm ruminating right now about is someone who's listening to this might take some of his advice as contradictory, right, like he talked a lot about it in the beginning, right, curtis? About the Pareto principle. Basically, like hey, you're usually going to find like 20% of your effort is Mac, is really 80% of all of your profit, but then there comes a point from the journals to the tote that you're just going to have to make a hard decision. And there's no, there's no answer that we can give you other than, yeah, you're going to have to make a hard decision. You have a marketing tactic that you're using right now that's working really well. Guess what? It's not going to work for the next six months. So you're going to have to make a hard decision through testing and through some failure. It's just how fast can you learn through failure? Yeah, and that's really the secret.

Trevor Crump: 49:41

And and a hard decision is when to let it go Right, like he said. Hey, we're making $4 million at these pop-ups, in these art gallery shows, but there's more potential on the Etsy side of things. So at what point do you kibosh? At what point do you get rid of that?

Mark Goldhart: 50:02

And there's no reward without risk. Like people would just want the rewards without taking risks, and those risks are the decisions, right, curtis.

Curtis Matsco: 50:10

Yeah, and you really thank you for starting something in my brain. I remember when the person was helping me at say, my second in command at the time said we need to get everyone in here. We're all in just one space making things in that little 2,000 square foot. It's like we need to raise everyone's paid to $14 an hour, which I was like we, we can't afford that. She's like look at all this money, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I showed her the books and everything. She's like oh crap. I said I'll tell you what to do. If we can make this amount, then I'll give everybody the raise. And she's like what's the best way to do that? I said, instead of selling, uh, 30 totes a week, let's sell 30 totes a day. And she told everybody. And so they took better pictures, they focused on this, they re, we rewrote the listings, we adjusted our pricing strategy.

Curtis Matsco: 50:59

All of a sudden, within like three weeks, we're selling a 10 times the amount of totes. And all of a sudden we found something with the same people, with the same people and the smallest motivator of hey, here's what it is, here's reality, this is what we need to do. And then then it breaks you right like I didn't, this wasn't genius. Then, all of a sudden, I'm like wait a second. Uh, that's a lot more money, a lot easier. Let's just pour the gas on that fire and let's see where it goes. You know it's a ride. It's a ride to do something for as long as we've done it and to grow the way that we do and see the people come and go and keep the great ones on. But it is judgments every day on people, on process, on product, on the future, on the past, on your financials. And I don't want to make this complex because we're smart people listening to this thing, but they can do it.

Curtis Matsco: 51:56

Here's the thing I will beat out a smart, disciplined person every day, every single day. And the reason I will is I'm obsessed, I'm at this thing, my brain is working on this at all times. Right, so you can be smart and disciplined and I'll say that's great, but I am going to figure out what is going to work. There's just no way around that. I put. They say don't put your identity in your company, because if something goes wrong wrong with the company your identity's screwed. Does that make sense? Tough, I've already done it. I'm always too late. The company blows up. I don't know who I'm gonna be. I'll be one of those people in salt lake that you guys were talking about earlier.

Mark Goldhart: 52:38

You can wave to me from the side of the, on the side of the street hey, but on the flip coin you have not made the company a reflection of your identity, right? It seems like you've built a company very specifically to serve a certain group of people and it's not necessarily you yeah, 98% women.

Curtis Matsco: 52:58

Uh, yeah, that's, that's one of the things, but I'll tell you and I you know this thing just evolved into this, but I'm going to tell you this anyhow, if I was going to tell you one secret to my success and the company's success is hiring men and hiring women is different.

Trevor Crump: 53:17

okay, and here's what men, this is a hot take, everybody this is a hot take. Yeah, I like it men are overconfident.

Curtis Matsco: 53:24

In my marketing team, people this one's spending 10, 20, 30 million a in marketing. They're guys at the top right Because they're unafraid to waste a million dollars of my money. Women would never do that. They're too freaking rational and they care too much. So what I do is I get the overconfident people and then I teach them how to subdue themselves at times to make rational choices people and then I teach them how to subdue themselves at times to make rational choices.

Curtis Matsco: 53:53

Then you get a woman who is 10 times better than the guys, but they don't quite know it yet. They think in a little bit and you give them the space to grow. They're going to do all the work. They're going to make sure all the bills are paid. They're going to make sure the designs are there. They're going to make sure the timeline of that new release is done, that the photography lines up with this, lines up with the web. They're going to do all that work right.

Curtis Matsco: 54:14

So you take the people who might be lacking the confidence a little bit, but have the skills and you raise them. You take these overconfident jerk guys and you say hey, hey, hey, settle down a little bit, but I need their overconfidence to surge you forward. Right, but you also need the women, which is probably 20 of my top 25 people, all women who literally my favorite story is a young lady I hired and three weeks in we were at a coffee shop and I said I have some news for you and she said not another raise, you've already given me three raises in three weeks. And I said that's because you don't said not another raise, you've already given me three raises in three weeks. And I said that's because you don't understand how great you are. You don't get it yet and I'm going to throw money at you and tell you how great you are until you get it.

Curtis Matsco: 55:03

She until a couple weeks ago, when now she moved to the side to do something else. She ran all of the things that you see here and when I found her, she was making $6 an hour, 20, uh, uh, $6 an hour, 20 hours a week. That was her total job. And now she ran all of our Mexico operations, including legal, financial, production, logistics and design.

Trevor Crump: 55:22

Incredible Dude. That's awesome. What a cool story. I think that's a great way to end, to cap it out yeah, yeah, this has been awesome. Curtis dude, you have given some some really good gems here. Uh, where can people find portland leather goods?

Curtis Matsco: 55:38

well, uh, I'm sure they're smart enough to type that name into any computer, but I'm going to warn you right now if you do, we're really good at our job and we're going to track you down and you're just going to see us following you around for the next year. So there's no privacy when it comes to port and leather goods me personally.

Curtis Matsco: 55:58

Uh, the only thing I do is linkedin. So curtis, matzko, go on to linkedin, and mariana and I decided we're going to post every day next year. We're not selling anything. I just found that you tell the right people the right words, it can change their lives. I've had the people come back to me after six months and a year and say thank you.

Trevor Crump: 56:17

So that's what we're doing. Hey, linkedin is good, but I think you need to get on TikTok. I think you got to, I'm telling you right now.

Trevor Crump: 56:25

Well, there's a hot take Mariana, we need to be on that TikTok machine. I'm telling you right, LinkedIn's good, but it's just like there's more action and there's more really cool things and lives. I think you can change on TikTok. I know that sounds interesting, but I post on TikTok, Instagram and LinkedIn those are like my three places and I get so much more feedback on TikTok of people coming to me like thank you so much, this is so awesome. How can I work with you? Tiktok is by far the number one platform for me, by far.

Curtis Matsco: 56:59

I'm a little bit older and slower and not very clever. That's why it works, man.

Trevor Crump: 57:05

That's why it works for you. It's like you may not be as the stereotypical person they might think that you might see there.

Mark Goldhart: 57:11

What are you talking about? You're scared of hanging with the kids, Curtis.

Trevor Crump: 57:13

You're 49, not 59. Remember.

Curtis Matsco: 57:17

Exactly, and that's safely saying. I only drank for 10 years I might be younger, who knows? Hey guys, it was an absolute pleasure. I say no to most podcasts For some reason. I told Mariana Trevor when you contacted me. I'm like, I like this guy. I follow him on TikTok. I want to be on that show.

Trevor Crump: 57:39

Amazing. Thank you so much. Have an awesome day and good luck throughout the rest of the year. Okay, thank you guys. All right, we'll see you later. Thank you so much for listening to the Unstoppable Marketer podcast. Please go rate and subscribe the podcast, whether it's good or bad. We want to hear from you because we always want to make this podcast better. If you want to get in touch with me or give me any direct feedback, please go follow me and get in touch with me. I am at the Trevor Crump on both Instagram and TikTok. Thank you, and we will see you next week.