Mondays with Matt

When Work is Your Passion, Work Feels Like Play You spend a lot of life at work. If you're an entrepreneur, unless you plan to fail, you will spend more than most people at it.  Don't do something you hate. Don't blindly do something you think you love.  As you practice something, you tend to love it over time. You will not know unless you expose yourself to different things and pursue them with s...

Core values serve as guiding principles that help individuals and organizations make decisions aligned with their highest ideals. They are incredibly important, and should not be posted on the wall and forgotten, but known by all and followed by all. Core values must be reflected in the company culture, hiring process, and leadership.  Why Core Values Matter: Core values define the highest ideals...

Be a person of action and officially start your business today with these easy steps:  File articles of organization Obtain an EIN Open a business bank account Starting a Business: 3 Steps to Do Today Matt and Chris Reynolds discuss the essential steps to starting a business, emphasizing the importance of taking action and not just acquiring knowledge. They outline the three primary steps to offic...

Starting a business feels risky, overwhelming, and downright scary—but it doesn't have to be. In this episode of the *Build Your Business Podcast*, brothers Matt and Chris Reynolds draw on nearly 40 years of combined experience to reveal how they went from fear to freedom in their entrepreneurial journeys.  Discover practical steps to balance your day job while building your dream business. Learn...

You are responsible for the financial health of your business, so you must have a good handle on your business's finances. This includes understanding basic business metrics that matters, using leading indicators, and ensuring a profitable business. We walk you through mastering financial management for business owners.   Have a Good Handle on Your Business's Finances   You must understand, in rea...

Matt and Chris discuss the merits of bootstrapping a business versus seeking external funding. Why You Should Bootstrap Your Business: 3 Levers to Pull A business owner has 3 levers to pull to push the gas pedal: time, effort, and money (or capital). Early on, you need to maximize time and effort and use the company's revenue to build the budget. This is what bootstrapping is. You are going to hav...

Not everyone is cut out to be an entrepreneur, but you might be. If you're a great technician and want to start a business, you will have to become a good manager and owner to run a successful business.   Passion Project or Potential Business: Master Your Craft Matt and Chris stress that in order to run a successful business, you have to learn how to manage and own that business. First things firs...

Essential Tools for Productivity: Time Saving Products, Services, & Hacks For both Matt and Chris, noise-cancelling headphones help them focus, at home or on the road, and get important and urgent work done efficiently. Matt loves the Jabra elites Chris loves Sony's over ear headphones Too many look myopically to save money, when they eat up too much time (which loses them money) and have things d...

Building a compelling Founder Brand rooted in authenticity and storytelling can help entrepreneurs attract clients and grow their businesses. Follow these actionable strategies for overcoming fear, creating consistent content, and shifting focus from price to value to stand out in a crowded market. The Concept of Founder Branding People connect with people, not brands. A founder's personal story s...

Focusing solely on price can lower the value you receive, cost you money, and harm your business. As a business owner pricing your services, you do not want to be on the low-end of the available prices.   In this episode of the Build Your Business podcast, Matt and Chris Reynolds dive into why focusing solely on price can ultimately harm your business. They illustrate how prioritizing value over c...

10x your productivity with these 6 non-negotiables. Building these habits into your daily routine increases your output & effectiveness. 10x Your Productivity Habit #1: Work When Everyone Else Sleeps Working when everyone else sleeps gives you an edge over your competitors and gives you time to knock out urgent work and complete deep work without interruption. For Matt and Chris, the best time is...

Choose Hard Things: The Transforming Power of Fitness Cody had been an overweight youth but decided to begin to take his health and fitness seriously. When he wedded his nascent health and fitness journey with a passion for learning as he changed his major in college, he never looked back and pursued a career as a strength and nutrition coach. Cody found that by simply doing hard things regularly...

Moving Your Personal Training Clients Online: Online Coaching Business Model Successfully transitioning your clients from in-person to online makes a ton of sense for your quality of life and business model as a strength coach. The biggest value of in-person training comes primarily during those initial sessions, when often drastic technique changes need to be made and you develop a relationship g...

Time Audit: Why It Matters – Know Where Your Time is Going You are your biggest time waster. You may feel that others (e.g. your boss, kids, etc.) waste most of your time, but a couple things in response to this notion of your. One, you cannot fully control these things. Two, insofar as you can control them, it often comes with how you react to them, approach them, or major life overhauls (e.g. ch...

Don't Be Lazy: You Can Do More Most people do not do enough. The evidence for this is all the time people waste performing non-important, unurgent tasks such as watching TikTok, doom-scrolling through Twitter, or binge-watching Netflix. Do not build walls around your time that should not exist. "It's unhealthy to work on the weekend" or "I deserve to not work on the weekend" can be the difference...

Pick Your Battles: Cool, Calm, Collected Someone in the All In conference Matt, Niki, Andrew, & Josh recently attended said "that's below my line." What does this mean? It means certain things should be below "your line" that stirs up your anger. Of course, anger is an emotion, and emotions arise sometimes whether you want them to or not. That being said, you should avoid outrage culture, and if y...

Client to Coach: Fitness to Strength Barbell Logic has identified a somewhat typical progression among a cohort of its clientele. These folks go from fan to strength client to Academy client to coach using TurnKey Coach. Micaela Bickel followed this path. She began more in the fitness space, programming circuits and endurance. Barbells were sprinkled in. Despite her skepticism and fears, training...

Burnout: Definition & Identification This is a state of emotional, physical, and mental exhaustion. It comes from doing too much for too long, especially too many urgent things. Some people have performed some great feats of endurance in their lives, but they often focus on the important, not the urgent. You will experience a lack of desire to work, even with things that used to motivated and exci...

When to Break the Rules: Increase Speed & Decrease Costs In many industries and organizations, there are general guidelines, rules, or ways of doing things. You may learn, early on, that generally, for example, employees should have one manager only or that you should never divide your forces in the face of a larger force. Great victories and advantages, however, lie in consciously not following t...

Leverage Education: Put Insights Into Action As a Content Consumer You almost certainly consume content in some form. Free or cheap content abounds: podcasts, social media, YouTube, reels, articles, books, audiobooks. You should be consuming and encountering meaningful, challenging, useful content. You should constantly be learning. That being said, too many people do not put lessons learn into ac...

Strength Training at West Point: Simple, Hard, Effective Greg Hess is an instructor and athletic trainer at West Point. In this role, he has a host of responsibilities, including immediate treatment of injuries, overseeing mandatory physical training of all cadets during their cadet basic training, and leading an elective course on compound barbell lifts. Really, what he is doing, in his roles, is...

Not All Metrics Are Created Equal: TTIs & KPIs Two main categories of metrics exist to help measure progress toward strategic goals and gauge the health of the company: targets to improve (TTIs) and key performance indicators (KPIs). TTIs are your top set of metrics, which have to directly impact your strategic priorities. Your strategic priorities need to align with your tenets and core values. I...

Struggling to Identify Your Core Values!? Matt has heard that, despite his discuss on developing and defining your core values , and its importance, many are still struggling on how to actually get this done. Matt was working with leadership at Barbell Logic years back on a business trip, and he and the team identified that they needed to work to identify 5-year strategic priorities. They had extr...

Prioritize Thinking: The Importance of Thinking Taking time out to think matters. Why? As Matt has discussed in recent podcasts, and his his upcoming book Undoing Urgency, we need to set up habits and systems in our life that help us actually spend time with the most important things in our life. How do we spend time with these most important things? Thinking helps ideas arise, whether they be thi...

When to Embrace Urgency: The Occasional, Short-Term Galvanizing Power of Urgency Woah, I thought we were about Undoing Urgency!? Well, typically, yes. This is one of those rules that serves you well most of the time. You want to avoid useless or counterproductive urgency. If you fail to get out of the knife fight of the urgent, you cannot take care of the artillery battle of the important. Let's d...