Tony Zayas 0:06
Hey everybody, welcome. It’s Tony Zayas back with another episode of the tech founders show. We got a couple more this year before we go on a little bit of a break, and then we’ll be back in the new year. But with that, I wanted to introduce today’s guest, we’re going to be talking to Matt Gallant. He’s the CEO and co founder of TRIBEOS. The TRIBEOS helps advertisers and publishers run secure and fraud free campaigns online. So with that, Hey, Matt, how you doing?

Matt Gallant 0:37
Good. Tony. Good to be here.

Tony Zayas 0:38
Yeah. Awesome. Great to have you here. So go ahead. And I you know, I read the brief descriptor. But tell us a little bit about TRIBEOS. So what you guys are doing over there?

Matt Gallant 0:48
Yes, sir. Building adtech in 2013, t started off because we wanted accurate tracking, we were spending millions a year on digital ads, and Google Analytics wasn’t cutting the cake. In my opinion, even back then cookies were a problem. Of course, cookies have become a real big problem the last year or so. But even back then we were losing like 15 20% of the data. There was a lot of things that I wanted to do, I couldn’t do a Google Analytics. So the first thing we build is a platform called Gold lantern, which allows us to accurately track advertising. And you know, when you’re spending a lot of money on digital ads, you need great attribution. And there’s a lot of things like, what’s your return on adspend over time. And can you track cross domain sales, just a lot of functionality that I really cared about. So started with that. And then by 2017, I met my co founder, partner, James Wallace, and he had been building ad fraud detection tools. So we decided to take that to the next level, and combine that into a platform that allows advertisers to see ad fraud and eliminate it progressively over time. So it’s a combination of the tracking, and the ad fraud detection. So for most, most people are not aware. But ad fraud is the second most profitable crime in the world, after drug trafficking. And it’s probably ad advertised probably the most corrupt industry in the world. Like I think there’s probably more honesty in drug trafficking, then there is an advertising I know that sounds crazy. But when we tested 10,000 different websites, the fraud level that we detected was 93%. So now that doesn’t mean that it’s 93% a cross the board, this was 10,000 different websites where you could buy display ads, I think, you know, the the big platforms like Google, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and so on. They’ve got real people. So there’s a lot less fraud based on what we’ve seen. I’m not saying there isn’t any. But as soon as you go outside of those websites, the fraud level is shocking it, we did not expect things to be that bad. So

Tony Zayas 3:09
How just to share a little bit with our audience how does the fraud manifest like what’s going on in these ad networks?

Matt Gallant 3:18
I’m a little cautious to share how it’s done. Because it’s so easy, but I’ll share it anyways. Imagine you want it to become a ad fraudster, it’s as simple as using tools and technologies to build a say 1000s of websites, which is not that hard to do. There’s a lot of tools and with AI now you can really crank the automation of that side building pretty easily. You build those sites. The second thing you need to do is get bots. So some people can build bots, some people, there’s people that sell bots, so either build or buy, you send the bots, your website. And that’s pretty much it. At that point. You’ve got impressions. And then what they do is they plug into to network so we tested 12 there when we tested those 10,000 different sites. We tried 12 different networks. So we couldn’t find a single network that wasn’t epidemic levels of fraud. So I get these websites just plug in it they sell that they sell their trash they sell their their fraud, and then these networks resell it. And again the reason it’s so corrupt in the novel’s no one’s talking about it because no one’s really tracking this. The tools the technologies that have been built to track this are there’s there’s some decent solutions that track some of it. But unless you’re plugged in directly, like we were you there’s a lot of fraud you can’t see. So the short answer is no one really cares. They’re making so much money from it, including the agencies including the network. Suppose the website owners. So that’s really the the situation.

Tony Zayas 5:05
So where did you and your co founder, where’d you guys come up with this idea to solve this, obviously large scale problem?

Matt Gallant 5:16
We just hate fraud. You know, I have been an entrepreneur for 25 years. I think entrepreneurs are the people that make the world a better place. We create values that enhances people’s lives. And it just drives me crazy. And he drives my co founder crazy that entrepreneurs get robbed like that. At the end of the day, if you launch a business, if you have a new, great product, and you go on and spend money in advertising, and you lose your shirt, a lot of people will stop advertising, they’ll stop scaling. You know, again, I’ve spent well into the eight figures on advertising, I’ve no doubt been robbed for seven figures plus. So yeah, it’s just it’s just a personal frustration. And it’s something that I think if it was solved, advertising would be a lot more effective. And they’d be a lot more entrepreneurs bringing their thoughts into the world.

Tony Zayas 6:11
So was this a kind of an intentional move to you knew this was something that you wanted to eventually get into and address?

Matt Gallant 6:23
Yeah, well, like, Well, we started building the tracking, I started learning about ad fraud back then I had no idea how bad it was, I just knew that it existed. And part of the solution for the tracking was our thinking back then is if we have accurate tracking, at least we can stop advertising where we’re losing money. We didn’t have any ad fraud detection, but at least we could see, okay, here we’re getting a positive return on adspend. And there were not so we were advertising a lot on the Google Display Network. And we were able to at least eliminate websites that had poor performance. But the problem was, you’d have to spend like 100 or $200. Before you would know, if the website performed. With our ad fraud detection, we can spend $2 or less between a buck 50 and $2. And know if the website was trash. So it’s literally 100 times more efficient in terms of detecting if a website was good enough.

Tony Zayas 7:28
So how long is the has your solution been around now?

Matt Gallant 7:33
We started running, we went live beginning of 2020. So that’s where we went live. And that’s when we tested a 10,000 different websites. And we’re shocked by the results.

Tony Zayas 7:48
So what did that, you know, original product? What did that look like? And how is it since evolved and change?

Matt Gallant 7:56
Well, yeah, we’re still looking for honest publishers, that the thing that I never thought would be the problem. So I’m going to shift bit a bit to bizdev mode, we have $125 million in signed letters of intent from advertisers. I’ve been an advertising for a long time. So the demand from advertisers for this solution has been the easiest thing I’ve ever sold in my life by longshot. However, the challenge and it continues to be the challenge is finding websites with real people. So we’re continuing to look for that we do have a SaaS product for the tracking solution. So that is a SaaS product, we have some customers for that product. But ultimately, we really want to bring this new level of transparency and honesty to advertising. So until you know, and we were being complicit in the crime was was never an option. You know, obviously, we could have done that and just sold trash to people. But until we find good on as publishers that have legitimate human beings on their website, or a high percentage of it, we’re not going to sell advertising. So currently, we’re looking we’re continuing to test websites. And we’re selling our SaaS product which is the tracking

Tony Zayas 9:24
super interesting what is the you know, what is how does your product figure out what sites are fraudulent like like how what you know, if you can dive into that a little bit and turn and love them packet here, kind of how it works?

Matt Gallant 9:41
Yeah, it’s it’s a multi-tiered approach. So the first thing we do is we preemptively score websites based on a bunch of variables. So just looking at the age of the website and a bunch of other things we can more or less predict if there’s a chance it’s good, or there’s a high probability it’s fraud. We also have human reviewers that will look at the websites, and usually can visually assess if there’s a chance this is a real legitimate website, or there’s very little chance. So right right there, that’s the first filtering. But on the fraud level. So fraud starts on the impression level. So just to break down how advertising works, the first tier is called the opportunity level. That’s where all the impressions live. So you have all these opportunities to bid or not bid on an impression, we can eliminate about 25 plus percent of fraud that we know based off their IPs, we have massive blacklist of IPs. So that that’s the first fraud tier, and it’s about 25% of the of the opportunities right away. We know that the traffic’s coming from data centers and from other blacklisted IPs. Once we decide to bid on an impression, then we can detect a whole new level of fraud, because we’re going to interact with that bot or that human being. And there’s a lot of tricks that the bots will try to do, they’ll generate, for example, the impression on one server, and then magically, the click happens on another server, or there’s changes on, there’s a lot of things we can see on the impression level that when we’re connected, we can see that and that’s a key point, we need to be connected to the network, or connected to the website in order to detect that that tier the level of fraud. So that’s the next level. And then the last level is post click. So you generated an image, you bought an impression or 1000s of impressions, usually, you’ll get a point one to 1%, click through rate, meaning the the bot or the human clicks the ads. And then once they click, we can monitor their behavior. So there’s a lot of algorithms we built that clearly identify unnatural behavior. I would say to summarize the overall approach, it’s constantly looking for unnatural behavior, whether it’s how the website’s built, whether it’s obviously the the IP, or the potential opportunity, on the impression or post click. So that’s how we detected 93% on the 10,000 websites. Because not any one of these approaches is perfect. Again, there’s there’s 25%. On the first level, it’s about a third on the second, and about a third on the third tier, which is the post click fraud detection. So each each tier identifies certain bad behavior. And that’s how we score it.

Tony Zayas 13:01
Is there some sort of like machine learning going on?

Matt Gallant 13:05
Yeah, our CTO is has a PhD in machine learning. So that’s, that’s where and to be frank, the bot behavior has not been that sophisticated, where we’ve even needed to rely on that. If our solution would take hold, we do we do expect in project that the BOD builders would start to build more sophisticated behavior to try to make it look more natural. Yeah, but currently, they’ve been very primitive.

Tony Zayas 13:38
I was gonna ask about that, because, you know, we’ve talked like some people in the cybersecurity space and, you know, you know, the criminals, typically, they get more sophisticated and based on what’s put in place around, but it sounds like this is somewhat of a territory that’s been left, you know, kind of wide open for the people who are building bots and, you know, running these these fraud rings. So I was gonna ask about the level of sophistication. Is there someone other game of cat and mouse or that’s, that’s not there yet, and, but you guys are prepared for it?

Matt Gallant 14:13
Exactly. We’ve identified 93% of all impressions, opportunities in clicks as fraud. The other 7% Maybe was more sophisticated, like we we don’t know, how sophisticated the 7% was. We don’t know exactly what percentage of that was human beings. So that’s, that’s part of the challenge, you know. And I think one of the things that is making this more difficult is that Apple, for example, with all of the changes they’ve made in the name of privacy, which in my opinion, it’s really in the name of selling drone advertising, which is nothing wrong with that. But the point is that as the office gets some of these elements, it it makes it more difficult, for us, they’re hiding certain things. So yeah, that’s part of the challenge, again, for app. And that’s a challenge for all advertisers that want to track things as an example right? But including Facebook. So excited what we’ve seen so far, it’s been unsophisticated. But I do you expect that, as that fraud detection and awareness spreads, that they are going to get more sophisticated, that it just makes sense. They’re making so much money doing this, that they’re just going to keep creating solutions to work around the fraud detection.

Tony Zayas 15:32
Pretty crazy. So what is the competitive landscape look like, with competing solutions and alternatives to what we’re trying to less offers?

Matt Gallant 15:42
Yeah, so our game plan was an is to build an advertising platform that, again, just outperforms other solutions, is specifically in the display space, meaning again, you know, we’re not going to be able to advertise on Google or Facebook or Instagram. Those are, those are closed platforms. But as soon as you leave that, there’s an incredible space and, you know, millions and millions of websites that sell advertising. So this was the first hybrid of fraud detection built in an advertising platform, there’s a lot of advertising networks that you can go and buy. And we, again, we tested a dozen of them, it was rotten to the core. So buyer, beware. And then there are standalone ad fraud solutions. And what I can say is that unless that they’re plugged in directly into the networks, which I don’t know, any that are the they will miss the majority of the fraud. So they are detecting some of it, and which is some some is better than nothing. And I have used some of these solutions. So they do work to a certain degree. But the challenge is, you know, they’re not necessarily stopping the fraud, they’re just detecting it, what we were doing, again, starting from the blacklist on is we would at least shave a quarter of it right away, and then be able to identify, again, a far greater percentage, if you read ad fraud projection reports, they’re saying is between 12 and 18%, not 93. So that tells you right away the difference, I think, in ad fraud detection between TRIBEOS and some of these other people. And again, it’s just not feasible to detect all the fraud unless you’re plugged in directly into the website, or the network, which we were.

Tony Zayas 17:40
So where is it being reported that lower number that what percent?

Matt Gallant 17:47
Yeah, if you if you just start Googling around, and you start looking at the research, those are their projected numbers. And when we were building the tech, that’s, you know, we were reading at 12 to 18%. I expected it to be higher, but I never expected it to be as high as what we found. So yeah, I mean, just google ad fraud research, and you’ll see those numbers being thrown around.

Tony Zayas 18:12
It’s interesting. Um, so tell me a little bit about the team. You know, what does the team look like? Have you guys grown over time?

Matt Gallant 18:23
Yes, our team, I was blessed to meet our CTO, Dino Keko. He’s probably the most brilliant coder I’ve ever hired. I’ve hired a lot of them over the years. And he’s the, he’s a professor at the birch University in Sarajevo. And he teaches coding, and he’s the guy with a PhD in machine learning. So our competitive advantage on the team building side on the tech side has been that we have been able to cherry pick all the best students from the Birch University and cut our development bill by probably 85 to 90% compared to American talent, and they’re phenomenal, they got a great work ethic. So he’s the hub on the tech side. And we can scale relatively easy on that side. Again, my background is marketing. So I’m, I also played a role of CMO and we have some people in operation so it’s a relatively lean team. We have once we start finding good pockets of publishers to scale to we’ll be able to scale quick and grow the team but you’re currently we’re just trying to keep things lean and mean.

Tony Zayas 19:34
Yeah, that’s great. So you said this was you know, easiest sale for you to make, you know, and your career told me more about that like was that by design, you guys targeted a space that is you thought was so ripe for the picking and you’re developing something because you had knowledge of the advertising space, you know, what, what challenges existed? And you you know, you were able to bring a solution. It was just really needed? How did you get to that point? Or do you know evolve a little bit over time?

Matt Gallant 20:06
Well, digital marketers always want more traffic. You know, that’s that’s how they primarily grow the revenue, there’s only two ways really to grow revenue for a digital business a you either grow traffic or increase conversions or increase ARV right average order value. So traffic is usually where they focus on the most. So think in general, it’s easy to sell traffic. But our offer, our positioning was so unique with the ad fraud detection, and all the tracking and all the tools that were that are built into the platform that you we never, to be honest, I never expected it to be that easy. I thought, hey, this is appealing to me, this, this is what I want, this is what I want. But sometimes you build things you want, and the market doesn’t want it. But in this case, the advertiser, we’re just excited. I think advertisers, they know that they’re being screwed one way or another. It’s not just the fraud that they’re being screwed with. But I think in general, there’s a high level of distrust in the advertising space, whether it’s towards Google or Facebook, or whoever. And the idea that would be fraud detection was very appealing. So that’s it was a perfect message to market match, I think.

Tony Zayas 21:32
Along way, man, have you had any mentors? And I see that you have you have a nice group of advisors, you know, on your website, actually, some of those people I’m familiar with effectually, you know, cross paths with them and events in Vegas. Now like silver, David Bullock, Dean Jackson, there’s one other Jesse elder knows. Yeah. So just curious, like, how do you leverage that network? And And beyond that, you know, in being a founder of a business, something that’s cutting edge, you’re staying at the forefront of things? Who do you turn to and Leon?

Matt Gallant 22:08
Yeah, one guy that’s not there, who’s a very good friend of mine. And for anybody building software, I think it’s mandatory to pay attention to him his YouTube channels, arguably the most valuable YouTube channel in the SaaS space, and his name is Dan Martell. Dan and I are from the same city of Canada, which smokey New Brunswick, so be good friends. He’s been a mentor, again, not not an advisor for tribe, but good friend. And, you know, we stay in touch and talk on a regular basis. And, you know, his his wisdom around certain things is just been invaluable. So, yeah, you want to leverage people that have very strong genius and expertise around your biggest problems. And you want to spend the most time on that, I think that’s the key. So for example, I don’t necessarily need that many marketing mentors, but there’s a lot of other things that I need help with. And I try to spend the most time working with mentors that can help me become more aware of my flat spots, or help crush my naivity or ignorance as fast as possible. I think that’s a real valuable mentor. It’s really getting you from ignorance to aware and saving you years and potentially fatal mistakes as far as the business side goes. So yeah, it’s been great. Again, it’s been relatively easy to build this this board of advisory, because they’re also excited about the potential and division. So

Tony Zayas 23:46
it’s great. You mentioned that you guys believe you said, you have a product that’s, you know, tracking and attribution focused, I would love to hear your thoughts on kind of where we’re going. In that space. I feel like, I feel like not as much as realized in that space as what it feels like, should be at this point in time, like where we’re at, you know, I think into 2022. But we’d love to hear your thoughts on that.

Matt Gallant 24:15
On what specifically just on attributes label,

Tony Zayas 24:17
yeah, you know, or, you know, running campaigns, tracking, attribution, those types of things. Yeah.

Matt Gallant 24:25
One thing I’ll start with is I’ve realized that I’m in a small minority of advertisers that really, really care about this. That being said, the pool is growing. I think most advertisers, if overall, they’re profitable, it’s good enough for them. They’re happy, just keep advertising. And to me, you’re leaving so much money on the table by not accurately seeing which ads are working which ad groups which campaigns and making the proper adjustments, either scaling things that are really working well, and potentially, to x and 5x and 10x and traffic from those and eliminating the bad stuff. So it’s the way I look at attribution is in the sell go lanterns Bill, you want to be able to go from a 30,000 foot view, which is the channels, and then be able to go down to the ground and see every single asset that’s working, like the ads, the links, the YouTube videos, etc, etc, etc. And just just going out to the 30,000 foot view, and being able to see which channels are working is one of the most valuable insights from a CMO perspective, from a marketing perspective. I’ll give you an example. So I’m also the Co Founder of bio optimizers. We’re well to the eight figures a year in revenue, and we sell supplements and different health products. In 2017, we ran one test on a podcast. And I was analyzing the numbers a few months later, and I looked at the return on adspend. And I was shocked, it was one of the highest performing return on adspend. We had done so the next year, and we haven’t stopped scaling since we’ve just been scaling podcast advertising. And, again, it’s one of those things that without gold lantern without accurate attribution, specifically, the attribution over time. So one of the unique functions we’ve built, which I’ve never seen anywhere else, is we track the ROI over time. So we see, okay, say zero, day one, what’s the return on adspend, you know, seven days later, 14 30 days, two months, three months, and so on, and so forth. And if you look at it from an investor perspective, if I’m breaking even, let’s say within 30 days, 60 days, unless I’m doubling my money, after four months, I’m tripling in after six months, that’s a great investment. And with most ad platforms, all you would see is that you’re bleeding. And you would probably stop those campaigns. So again, to me, the attribution of which channels working, how does it perform over time. And then, of course, you can do all the micro optimization on the ad level. And learn, I give some more examples. One of the functions we built is tagging. So it was just looking at a tagging report last Friday, and we’ve been tagging emails, so every email might have four or five different tags, we tag, the length of the email, the actual grade level of the email, who wrote the email, the type of email, and we can start seeing very powerful patterns, that then we can double down on, for example, we saw with the on the shadow of a doubt that if the copy the text is between grade three, in grade four, that the value percent goes up significantly, we saw which type of email performed best, we saw that shorter emails performed a lot better than medium length or long. So those are the kinds of insights that allow you to systematically improve your your marketing, where you spend money, and every little micro optimization you can do and all these things compound, you know, again, that’s how you’re able to scale advertising. Sometimes the difference between breakeven and highly scalable is just those little things. I’ve experienced that many, many times. So that’s why I’m such a fan of attribution and accurate tracking, and all the things we’ve built into it.

Tony Zayas 28:52
That’s awesome. Yeah, super interesting stuff as a marketer, that stuff saw, super interesting to me. And, and to that point, it’s all you know, the compounding effect of, you know, picking up on those different little changes that can be made. It’s pretty cool. So that’s awesome. So what is the what is the future business looked like was what’s on store, you know, what’s in store for the next 12 months let’s say?

Matt Gallant 29:18
Yeah, you know, at this point, again, we’re one relook, we’re continuing to hunt for good publishers on that front. On the gold lantern side. As we’re onboarding clients, we always try to build whatever custom reporting that they want. We have all the data in the database. So for us at this point, like I’ve built a lot of things that I use that I want, but we’re super customer centric. And it’s always interesting to to work with a new client and ask them well, what’s important to you? Like, what do you want? What kind of reports were what columns what data do you want us to put together with There’s a new visual chart or some new columns that we don’t that we didn’t add in the reports. So I think it’s just continuing to build a product. I think one key advice. I’ve got to two key pieces of advice for everyone listening. One is you commit to the Lean startup approach. I, we overbuilt and I’m responsible for that, I think I overbuilt things, and waited too long to launch. I think if we had launched earlier, I’m talking specifically on the tracking side, and, and gotten more customer feedback, we would have, we’d be much further ahead than we are now I think I was building things in a vacuum based on what I wanted. And that was a key mistake. So, you know, I’m the master of creep, you know, I’ll keep adding more and more features and functionalities and a lot of that stuff. Most people don’t care. And that’s very problematic. Something I also learned from, from Dan, and this was like, a lightbulb moment for me, is people use apps with one single intent almost all the time. So one of the mistakes that I’ve made, is trying to build like, four or five apps and try to put them into one system, like the ultimate all in one. Yeah, people don’t think that way. And as soon as he said that accent was one of those, of course moments. If you think about just social media in general, people go to Facebook to connect with people right to socialize, to comment to interact with their, their friends, people go to Instagram for eye candy, you know, it was an eye candy platform is how it started. Of course, it’s evolved a bit. But that’s people don’t really go there to connect as much right? People go to Twitter to share thoughts. That’s it. They don’t go there to suffer eye candy. It’s not for socializing. Again, look at Tiktok Tiktok to build an entertainment platform, they’ve built the tools and the functionality to make it easy for people to feel entertaining. And to appear entertaining, whether they’re entertaining or not is up for debate. But that’s how those platforms have scale, you know, they built with one single intent. They took over that mindshare of, you know, that that purpose, and they’ve dominated so clubhouse did the same thing with interactive audio. And of course, you know, sometimes these features will be ripped off by other platforms, but they rarely take off. Right? They rarely take off. Usually, even if Twitter or Instagram, or Facebook steal a new type of feature. The player that has solely focused on that will usually remain the king of that space. So I think those are some key things that some key mistakes I’ve made and can help someone avoid those be great.

Tony Zayas 33:15
It’s all really good stuff. And that makes a lot of sense that you know, really focused on plan, you know, kind of a singular focus, and each of those, so really great advice there. Matt, I’m gonna ask you one last question. Before we do that. Tell our viewers where they can learn more about TRIBEOIS and you and other things you might have going on?

Matt Gallant 33:38
Yeah, we`re at TRIBEOS.IO, so T R I B E O S . I O. You’ll learn more about our solutions there. And you reach out to us if you’re interested in good accurate tracking using gold lantern, or some ad fraud pre traffic. Personally, I’ve got a blog that I haven’t updated in a few years, but there’s a lot of great content, there’s a MattGallant.tv. I’ve got an 82 page book on productivity that I just give away for free so and then if anybody’s interested in optimizing their health, you can search bi optimizers, B I optimizers dot com. They are one of the fastest growing health and supplement companies on the planet. So yeah, it’s been great. I’ve been in that space for a long time. And we continue to build, I would say best in class solutions for people that want to optimize your health.

Tony Zayas 34:32
That’s awesome. Yeah, encourage everyone to go check all that out. All of it sounds very interesting, exciting stuff. Matt, the last question we always like to ask this is if you’re able to go back in time, and I know you’ve had a couple of businesses now. But let’s say your first kind of go go at you know, being a founder. If you’re able to go sit down, have coffee with yourself. Right at that beginning. What’s the one piece of advice you’d share?

Matt Gallant 35:02
Yeah, I’m pretty clear on that question. I would tell myself, get an integrator. That took me a while that took me like a decade to figure out. There’s a great book called rocket fuel. And there’s a, there’s two quizzes you can do that are free. If you just search for rocket fuel quiz, you’ll find them. And the framework of rocket fuel is you have people that are visionaries, which are obviously strategist, people that have big picture ideas. And then you’ve got integrators, you know, coordinators for to just make sense, simple CEOs, a visionary, typically a CEO, COOs and integrator. And I struggled and suffered for about a decade trying to do integrator things. And then a friend of mine sent me messages, like, why are you doing that? Stop doing that. And that was the first light bulb moment and I started hiring integrators. And like, at this point, I would not even start a project. Unless I have an integrator like it doesn’t it doesn’t make sense. So figuring out who you are, what your strengths are a big fan of predictive index, which is a more accurate version of dis, Colby Strength Finders, probably the best caliper corpse got a good test. When you do these tests, you get to figure out, okay, these are my natural strengths. This is really who I am. And then also, these are my weaknesses, my flat spots, my shortcomings, whatever you want to call them. And I think as an entrepreneur, as a founder, you need to be hyper aware of where you’re weak, hyper aware of where you’re naturally strong. And just double down on your strengths. And make sure that you’ve got people in your team that can take care of your weaknesses. That’s a cool thing about business, you can’t really do that in your personal life as much in your relationships. But in business, we can always hire people that have shrikes, where we’re weak. And that’s the biggest thing. I think it’s still like that today, as we build teams. Today, the main thing that we do is just build teams and make sure that the team is it’s got the right mix of strikes and personalities. And we use these tools to make sure we’ve got the right blend, because if you just throw a bunch of integrators in a room, you’ll come back and they’ll still be planning and nothing will really happen. We’ll just be, you know, trying to figure out the perfect plan, so to speak. And if it’s just a bunch of visionaries in a room, they’ll just be a million big ideas and products and strategies and nobody to build them. So you really need the blend. And just that framework alone is phenomenal. So that’d be my one key advice.

Tony Zayas 37:52
So I take it you guys are an EOS company. Yes.

Matt Gallant 37:56
Yeah, that was a game changer. Like, you know that the awareness of it started and then five and a half years ago, we started using traction. Now we’ve we’ve we’re starting to progressively shift the scaling up because like by optimizers, will go 25 million this year in revenue. So things have changed, you know, the next 70 employees. So this at this level. We still use a lot of attraction tools. But we’re starting to shift more to skilling up tools and yeah, I think an EOS is was the biggest game changer. So it’s it’s that visionary integrator framework. And of course, traction is fundamental to that. So yeah, Gino Whitman’s book is a must read, and a must integrate, I’d say from day one, even if you’re a one person show. Use the tools, you know, build a good VTL and it helps you focus so much more stay on track as you grow and scale. So

Tony Zayas 38:58
it’s awesome. Matt, thank you so much. This has been fantastic. We appreciate your time spent here. It was great having you. And we will be back. We’ll be back in a taken a couple weeks off here. We’ll be back the last week of November for our last show here of the year. Until then, guys, we will see you next time. Thanks again, Matt. Take care and it’s great having you.

Matt Gallant 39:22
Thanks, Tony.

Tony Zayas 39:23
Awesome.