Rai Cornell 0:02
Welcome to the Soar Podcast! The place for creative entrepreneurs with limitless dreams and unconventional stories, who want to build healthier, happier, more profitable, self employed businesses. I’m your host, Rai Hyde Cornell, get ready to soar! Welcome to the Soar Podcast. On today’s episode, we have Matt Shoup. Matt, tell us about what it is you do and what your businesses are one of many.

Matt Shoup 0:33
Thanks for having me. Rai, thanks for having me on the show, you know, I hang out in the business space a lot. So I, what I do simply is I wake up, I get to enjoy coffee with wonderful inspiring business owners and business leaders and just help them make their life leadership and business better. And I do so in lots of different ways. So I write books, I facilitate leadership retreats in Spain, as well as work one on one and one on group with business owners and business leaders. And that’s really just been a culmination of a lot of the lessons I’ve learned and stories that I have, from my last 20 years of being kind of a crazy serial entrepreneur.

Rai Cornell 1:12
I love this term serial entrepreneur, I absolutely love it because anybody who’s listening to this and who hears that term, serial entrepreneur, if you are one of those, you know what that feels like. It’s like this compulsion to start new things. You’re the starter, you’re the doer, you’re the idea machine, and you’re the one who brings things from this abstract mental place into the real world. What has been your history of being a serial entrepreneur, how’d you get here?

Matt Shoup 1:42
I always back up to my childhood. So I grew up in northern New Jersey and the kind of the deal of the day there was I come to school, and I’d have 20 news stories to share and 10 new ideas, and I was bouncing all over the place. And they’re like, you’re supposed to be here doing school, like sit down and shut up and do math. So they’d give me a bunch of math. And I’m like, that’s easy, boom, boom, boom, fit, like finish the math, I was really brilliant in math. And I was just super creative. So I always found myself just telling stories, and very just being very active. But that wasn’t-nobody grabbed a hold of me in school, right and said, Oh, this guy, he’s got entrepreneurial tendencies. They really labeled me as a troublemaker, because they couldn’t keep me busy in school. So I was in the principal’s office a lot and getting kicked out of school. And that’s okay, that was just kind of the name of the game back then. And then another big part of my growing up was I got bullied a lot growing up. So, I was a very easy target for bullies. And that was a big part of my life. I was very just scared to go out into the world. Not very confident in anything because it’s like, okay, I’m doing great in school. You’re not keeping me busy enough in school. So now I’m the troublemaker I guess. So what do I do? Okay, I guess I’ll lean into that. And lean into that group of peers where we are getting in trouble. And then I’m just getting like thumped and beaten up in every different corner of the playground every day. And then we move from northern New Jersey to Colorado, to Loveland, Colorado. And I remember, I’m 10 years old. It’s that summer transition between fourth and fifth grade. And back then compact discs were the new rage, right? So everybody’s got the CD players and the boom boxes. And I went and asked my parents for, I think it was $200 for a boombox. And they said, nope, you know, you make $4 a week cutting grass. So that’s about a year, if you want to buy your own boombox, we’re not gonna buy it for you. And they just said, Hey, if you can find a way to make your own money, and you can walk to the table with $200, then we’ll drive you over and buy it.

Rai Cornell 3:44
Challenge accepted.

Matt Shoup 3:45
Right there, yeah, like that! That was the moment for me where I’m like, Hold on it. You just told me if I want something, and then I can make a plan and take action. So I just grabbed a lawnmower and I started knocking on doors in my neighborhood at 10 years old. And yeah, I made a couple thousand dollars. And I said hold on a minute, like that just totally one add my perspective, just on my confidence, my ability to have some purpose – at 10 years old, but it really gave me a rooting and like, Hey, I’m a business guy. I think I’m onto something. So that gift of gab, that storytelling that hey, I can go kind of play by and make my own rules, and make money and get what I want, which was a boombox, that all came together. And I just really leaned into that. So, you know, my childhood was trying to get through school as quickly as possible. So I could go out and find ways to make money. And that took me to where I am today. You know, this is 32 years later, looking back on this story.

Rai Cornell 4:45
And it’s so funny that you know, when you were younger, you had this entrepreneurial spirit. I shouldn’t say this is funny, but I should say it’s ironic because our society tries to tell us “No, this is the way you need to be, this is the path you need to go on.” For me it was go to college, get a job with the government or some kind of, you know, official entity, and then buy the house and have the kids and you know, do all of that. And even from a young age, I was like, I don’t know something about this, like I was good at school, but I was always being pulled in a different direction. And how I made my money was freelancing, and hustling, and side gigs, and all of that. And nowadays, I feel like maybe it’s just the world that you and I exist in. But I feel like entrepreneurs are looked up to and admired and how do you do that? And so it’s like, what do we need to change in our education system in the way we raise children who have this entrepreneurial streak from a very young age?

Matt Shoup 5:50
Yeah, I agree with everything you say, because it was very much, you know, back in the day, the elementary, the New Jersey days, and then even, you know, moving out here to Colorado middle and high school, it was that there was no track of, hey, you have an idea and you want to launch something, and you know, go find an investor or launch a product like there was none of that it was sit down, shut up, do your work, get your grades, get your GPA, oh, SATs are coming up, you got to take those college prep, and then they’re asking you in like eighth grade, what you want to do, when you’re 18 going to college, like your brains not even fully developed. If you’re a male till you’re what 25. And they’re asking you what you want to do and spend all this money on. So I just, I felt this pressure to conform. And I did in particular way. So I got through the school, school was easy for me. And then at the end of high school, it was what college do I want to go to but the coolest thing that happened in college, I’m a huge promoter, but not really, of college. And I’ll kind of break that down a little bit is my 2 degrees that I have, you wouldn’t guess what they are. Unless you really dug deep into my bio, nobody would really guess I don’t think that they’re out there.

Rai Cornell 7:01
What are they? I’m curious.

Matt Shoup 7:02
It’s Spanish Languages and Literature. And then it’s Child Development and Family Studies, so much passion for kids and helping kids and teaching kids. And I get to do that now. But it wasn’t really because of any capacity from the degree that I learned. So as I’m going through college, and you know, getting the degrees, you can get the job, I got approached by a college painting company. And from my early lawn mowing days, which turned into snow shoveling and hustling, candy bars at school, the hustle, entrepreneurial stuff, I just worked hourly jobs in middle and high school. So I worked my way into leadership positions. In those jobs on like running a sandwich shop or a shoe store for the for the guy that owns it, or the guy that runs it, but these college painters swoop in and they go hey, how would you love to learn about sales and marketing and leadership and business with our money. And the worst thing that happens is you work really hard and you’re gonna make a minimum, you know, $3,000 over the spring and summer. They said, What are you going to do otherwise, you’re going to wait tables, deliver pizzas, and I think the guy even said work at a shoe store. And I’m like, oh, man, that’s that’s my, that’s my path for the summer. So I signed up with these guys. They’re a national company and they teach college students interested in business, how to go out and run a residential paint contracting business. And I actually got to do it in Loveland, which was the community that I had known and grown up in for the last at that point, it was, you know, 12 years that I had lived there.

Rai Cornell 8:31
That’s so cool. And we need more of that, we need more of this mentorship of that young generation, instead of kind of putting the lid on them and saying, no, no, quiet down. Like, let’s calm and contain your energy. Instead, we need to nurture that because they’re the ones who are going to come up with the next great innovations that are going to change the world.

Matt Shoup 8:49
It is, we have a jiu jitsu studio. So one of my passions. It’s Brazilian jiu jitsu and I run the kids program at our gym. And one of the kids they brought him there because he was getting in tons and tons of trouble at school. So I pulled him aside one day and, you know, he came in he was really upset that he got kicked out of school again today. And I said, Well, what what are you doing? Well, they didn’t like that I had traded two pairs of Jordans for a BMX bike, and the tablesaw I’m like, what do you what are you talking about? And then I go Hold on a minute, like this kid is hustling and bartering and trading. I said, Well, what were you supposed to be doing? Well, we’re supposed to be working on the planets, Sir, you know, some planet science project. And he’s hustling Jordans on the playground, you know, and I go, Well, I go, how the deal go, and he kind of looks at me and he goes, What do you mean? Like, did you profit? He goes, Oh, yeah, it was a way better trade. For me. That was for the other kid. He goes, I you know, I won that engagement. So I just saw this kid’s competitiveness and his drive and his think outside the box. He’s not going to fit in or conform to the school. And the cool thing is, you know, for the short time that I had a chance to be an influence in his life and be there he’s got other people that are really I’m helping him lean into that. And that’s what I think if I would have had that at an earlier age, that story might have progressed a little bit sooner. Yeah, no, but I’m glad I had the pushback, too, just because it, it did help me show that, you know, not everybody is meant for the track that everybody tells them that they think they should be on and that’s okay.

Exactly. And not only is that natural, entrepreneurial, spark, misunderstood, but I think also the serial part, that’s also misunderstood. A lot of people think, Oh, well, if you don’t stick with something for 20 years, then you must have ADHD, and you can’t focus on something, you can’t commit to something. But really, some of us are meant to be the starters, the idea people, the ones to bring everybody together, build the infrastructure, make it healthy, and then send it on its way to do good in the world, and then go start something else like that. So how do you look at that serial aspect of I don’t want to say hopping from one thing to another, but being okay with building something and letting it go and moving on and building something and letting it go?

I think that everybody, one of the things that I love to do so one of the big leadership focuses that I have, it’s personality styles and behavior styles, and everybody’s wired a certain way. So you’ve got those really, really early innovators, the idea people there, they’re looking 10 years ahead, I remember in 2015, I’ll share an example. We were doing a business strategy planning for the next three to five years, hey, what’s coming down the pipe? What are some things that maybe we don’t see yet that we should start thinking about, and this is in relation to painting, so residential paint contracting, and residential roofing contracting, and this is 2015, I said, you know, we should look at getting our drone pilot license at least one of us and purchasing a drone to do roof inspections. We started getting into real estate at that point. So hate just like real estate photography. And people looked at me like this is my own team. So this is where I am on the spectrum. I’m 10 years out. Now we need to look at drones and like, what are your crazy that’s like spate we’re gonna put them next to the spaceships. And I say, and here we are, right, here we are in 2022/23. There’s, you know, there’s drones everywhere, flying around taking photos. So I think that’s important to a understand how you’re wired. And don’t try to be something else. I am totally a launcher, I tell people, I launch. And I wouldn’t even say build to the best degree rocket ships, I just I have an idea. I put the energy, the resources, the time commitment behind it, share the vision, and then boom, and then we get going. But I need people that are maintainers that are really good with structure, operations, and just those things to keep it going. We have a company right now that we’re we’re selling, it’s gonna go live on the market, like probably next week. And it’s just it’s at a point to where my business partner and I, we’ve done what we’re good at, we’ve done in taking the business to the furthest we’re gonna take it. And it’s a disservice to not sell it. But it’s hard. For me, it’s hard to let those things go because, I am at least I’m emotionally attached to my businesses. You know, there’s people involved in those. There’s people that you serve, there’s people that you provide your service to, that work with you on your team. So I think when I first started talking with a couple, we’re letting we’re letting it down. It’s like, No, you’re you’re doing a good thing for it.

Rai Cornell 13:32
Exactly. And that’s the thing is we do get so attached to the things that we build. But some people like you said, some people are the ones who they’re very structured and I’m one of those people who I’m very structured, very routine, I can create systems and I can make things better. But a lot of people also struggle with the blank page, starting something new, that takes a lot of energy and inertia to get that off of the ground. And I think one of the things that a lot of people struggle with in this handoff period of okay, I have the idea, I want to build it up. And then I want to either bring people in to make it better or grow it or I want to sell it is this idea of perfectionism. And I want to dig into this because I know this is one of the things that you talk to people about quite a bit. We’re gonna take a super short commercial break and dig into that when we get back. Hey, Rai here, ever wish this whole creative self employment thing was easier? Like wouldn’t it be nice if there was, I don’t know, a step by step guide for building a successful freelance business? You know where I’m going with this right? That guide does exist. Back in the day when I first started out hustling and side gigging. I wish I had a roadmap to fast track my way to self employed success. So I made one for you. No matter where you are in business, I guarantee you this guide can help you get to the next stage faster, and the next and the next! Whether you’re still deciding if ditching the W2 is right for you or if you’re struggling with your pricing, business formation, client acquisition sales, or even health insurance, this guide has everything you need. Get your free copy of The Complete Guide to Building a Successful Freelance Business at chironconsulting.us/guide.

We’re back with Matt Shoup. So Matt talked to me about this idea of anti perfectionism and this thing that so many people get hung up on, especially in the entrepreneurial world when everybody’s looking at you, and they’re looking at your new idea, and they’re judging it against the other new ideas that are out there, especially in this highly saturated startup culture. What’s your take on perfectionism?

Matt Shoup 15:52
-Is you’re never gonna be perfect. And I’ll share the story. So I wrote my second book it just released in January of this year, it’s titled painted baby, just a phenomenal story. I had spent seven years working on the book and I will tell you that six of those seven, the reality behind that curtain is it was just it was a lot of fear to launch, it was a lot of like, fear of judgment, are people going to receive the message, believe in the message like, do I even believe in myself, right? I struggle in battle with that I think a lot of entrepreneurs do. And we’ve finally committed, I’m like, okay, 2022, I’m going all in, we’re finishing this book, it’s gonna be amazing. And then you just you get to the end, it’s like, should I groove back through it? Should I read back through it an 18th time. I’m in the studio doing the audible app, should we go back through that line 17 on page two. So we do that one more time. I don’t know if it was good enough. And it’s like, you know what, it’s just, there’s gotta be a point when you just go.

But with that being said, like nothing, nothing’s ever going to be perfect. There’s always going to be-there’ll be a typo, there’ll be something that you missed, they’ll always be something that can be better. So I’m really a proponent of just focus on being better and making your content, your message, your approach, better every time. But don’t worry about it being perfect, because we get, we get this paralysis where we sit back, and then we don’t launch and we miss opportunities. And we miss, you know, this is even just in a day to day sales. I was just on the phone today, like I’ve been, I’ve been doing this 30 years, right, and this is coming straight out of my mouth. I’m on the phone before I jump on this podcast with you and I’m speaking to he’s a great friend. We’ve done a bunch of business together. And I’m out right now looking for sponsorship for writing a child’s book, I’m actually writing a child’s anti bullying book. And I’m like, I don’t, I don’t want to pitch him because I don’t quite have the landing page ready, and it’s not out there. And I just I needed to just override myself and say, Hey, can I tell you about this and why this would be so awesome to have you partner with us on it’s gonna get this message to more kids and parents that need to hear it, then he didn’t care that it was buttoned up or not. He’s like, hey, yeah, just send me a couple sentences, I’ll show it to the team. And I’m all in. So I think we’re our own worst enemies many times. And a lot of that comes from earlier, you know, experiences, traumatic experiences, or just general experiences where you’re never good enough or something’s never good enough. And then that carries into business. So you just got to keep an eye on that.

Rai Cornell 18:25
And I would argue that-I work in the marketing world where AI and computer learning and all of that is really big right now. And it’s big everywhere but I feel like it’s dominating the marketing market. And I feel like there is a lack of humanity in everything that we’re doing online and in our messaging and our marketing. And if you commit to this, anti perfectionism, you know, get it done, done is better than perfect. And you’re still committed to making it better, you’re still committed to learning from the experience, but you’re okay, with having little flaws and flub ups out there, then that actually makes you more human and allows people to see that oh, it’s okay to make mistakes and still have a successful business or be a leader.

Matt Shoup 19:19
It is because the painting the picture of perfection that really prevents true connection with other people that we serve and that’s really that’s the premise of my book painted baby, so back in 2008 we were painting a house we had a paint sprayer explode. It was a one and a million kind of accident and another one and a million layer of that is standing behind my painter that had the paint sprayer explode was the homeowner and her nine month old baby so paint sprayer explodes we paint a baby like that is a bad day at the office right? Really that day at the office and we made it right, so that tested hey, does this company have integrity? honesty are they going to do the right thing? And we did. Three years later, I’m getting ready to close one of the biggest business deals of my life. And I’m sitting here, and I’m pitching the shiny marketing brochure, look at these great reviews, look how amazing we are. And I’ve worked with this customer before, but he wasn’t happy that he said that this is a huge project, I want to know about a time that you screwed something up and what you did about it. And I was just literally hit the brakes. I said, Hold on a minute, you don’t do this in sales, you don’t do this in marketing, right? You’re in marketing, you don’t go lead with an imperfection. So he and I kind of go back and forth a little bit. And I shared the painted baby story with him. And he signed the contract. He said, You’re the kind of guy that I want to do business with. And it really came down to two things, because you’re being brave and vulnerable enough to share when you’re not perfect. That means I know that you’re human, and you shared what you did in that imperfection to make things right.

So that day in 2011, I go, Hey, we’re on to something here. So we spent the next couple of years really working that just into, I wouldn’t even call it our sales model, but just our human conversations that we have with people. And it really sets a different kind of expectation with the people we serve. And they go, yeah, you’re, you’re human. And I think as business owners, you see other successful business owners and when you can share your failures and your screw ups. And that’s why I’m so passionate about that, like I literally just 40 minutes ago, almost didn’t share something really important because I was so worried about judgment or that it wasn’t perfect. And I still deal with this 30 years later. And yeah, it’s interesting to see the humanity stepping away from business. And it’s going to be interesting to see if and how that continues and what that looks like.

Rai Cornell 21:47
Exactly. So many companies, they only put their best foot forward, they only spotlight their glowing testimonials and their five star reviews. But the thing is, everybody has five star reviews, everybody has good testimonials. And when people are shopping for a product or a service, those things they don’t carry as much weight as businesses think that they do. But what actually gets a lot of attention, and kind of putting my marketing hat on here for a second is when somebody has a bad Google review, they have a 1 star or a 2 star, oh my god, like the world’s gonna end We had a one or two star review, No, how you handle it because you’re allowed to respond to those negative reviews on Google respond to it. And actually, when customers see that another customer had a bad experience, and then that company responded very positively of how can we make this right, we want to take care of you, we’re so sorry that we messed up, we own that we messed up, and we will do whatever it takes to make this right for you so you don’t have buyer’s remorse. That is what carries the weight. Because everybody makes mistakes. Every company makes mistakes. Everyone has had a bad customer service situation. It’s how it was handled that really matters. And people want to work with people that they know, they’re not going to get screwed over when something bad happens, not if.

Matt Shoup 23:10
We’ve had and seen in all of the businesses that we have, because we have a different online presence for different businesses. But hey, you know, we were really, we thought that two star was really funny because we could tell and you can tell a lot about the reviewer that writes that review because you know, 5% of 3% of people are crazy. You’re never gonna make them happy. You know, I was listening to your episode, I think it’s the last episode of season two, where, you know, how do you work with clients that are just trying to control you like you can never make them happy. And you can see that in their response. But then, yet 95% of a not perfect review is that you screwed up and you missed an expectation. And it’s just simple ownership. Hey, you know what, we did not show up our best that day. And we’re sorry. And we understand your frustration. And here’s what we’re doing or did to make it right, and please let us know if we can do anything else. And that just it drops people’s guard because there is a lot of guard out there because there’s all this perfectionism and not even so much the AI but it’s like man, that landing page, that click funnel, that website, that thing was so smooth, it was so slick. It was so shiny. And then your human brain goes that there’s gotta be something like there’s got to be something behind that perfection. And then it comes out and the expectation was set that that wasn’t going to happen.

Rai Cornell 24:18
So rather than committing to being perfect and obsessing and fretting over that, instead commit to being better than you were yesterday, whatever form that takes. And you have already given us so much advice and words of wisdom in this episode. But when we were talking earlier, you said that you have advice for your 20 year old self. What is that advice?

Matt Shoup 25:02
So I wrote a blog about this, this actually started as just a blog, just started tracking some ideas one day and I talked about this a lot is, I would say the top three things is to just remember that things take time, when I was younger, was very driven, you know, I had a lot of motivation and drive behind why I wanted to be successful. And not all of it was healthy, right? So I’ll come come back to that and more of the advice, but things take time, we live in this instant culture where you see the results on social media, or wherever you see it of a company that’s been working for 30-40 years, for generations. And they finally had some success, and you just think in your brain, that’s going to happen overnight. And I had a certain degree of pretty quick success in my business, and I thought, okay, that’s gonna keep going and multiplying, and it doesn’t, you’re going to face challenges, and you just need to be ready for those challenges and just be patient. The other thing that I would say is that profit is absolutely important for a business. It is the lifeblood of the business, you need profit to be operational to be sustainable but I will share that when you put profit over people. And you forget about the people, people are the ones that generate that profits. So we are very big here with pouring into people. Understand that, you know, this person, they’re not a cog in a wheel, or a production of a widget of a unit or a metric on a p&l, yeah, to look at that stuff. But like, these are people with lives and with stories, and to the degree, here’s just what I think leadership iswhen my story and your story come together, like we’re doing on this podcast, and we’re gonna make other people’s stories better together. That’s just what leadership is. And that’s my definition of it. So to the degree, you can get really clear on your story, and where you’ve come from, and where you are, where your strengths are, where your weaknesses are, and you can work on getting better and do that just very openly and publicly as a leader, you’re going to attract other people that want that. And that’s going to be one of the critical foundations of growing a big business. The other thing that I would say, and it’s kind of an unfortunate reality, I’m not fatalistic at all, I’m not, I’m not a negative thinker, it’s just the reality of things is when you start to acquire and have some success, you know, everybody at the beginning, Oh, that’s great, you’re starting the business, go for it, I can’t wait to see you be successful, and then you hit a certain level of success, you’re gonna have people that continue to inspire you, and push you. And then you’re gonna have some people that get a little bit jealous by, maybe because they were shooting for a similar level of success, and they didn’t get it. And you will, as an entrepreneur, just be ready for this. Even if you’re solopreneur, working out of the house, whatever that is, or you have a team, there is going to be judgment, there will be people that do not like you, there will be people that have things to say they have feedback, right? Or input doesn’t mean that their feedback or input matters, or that you have to listen to it.

Rai Cornell 28:13
Exactly. And the so many people, especially in our Facebook, right in front of your face, tiktok right in front of your face, Instagram, right in front of your face world, we all look outside of ourselves for validation and direction. And when you do that, how many people are in this world? What is it like 8 billion or something ridiculous like that, you’re gonna get 8 billion opinions, some are gonna be good, some are gonna be bad, you’re gonna drive yourself crazy, trying to factor all of those opinions into your decision making. So there’s no point in looking outside of yourself, you have to look within yourself. And really, if you aren’t going to seek outside opinions and validation, go to the people who know you best, and who have your best interests at heart. Because the people that don’t know you online who are commenting and liking or not liking your content. Those are not the people who have your best interests at heart. They don’t know you.

Matt Shoup 29:05
As I as I wrote painted baby, there’s a chapter in that. And I refer, I think this is probably the chapter I refer most people to in the book, and I didn’t plan on it being this way. But it’s chapter nine. And it’s titled feedback matters, but not all of it. And it literally says, like, here’s why and how you’re going to see certain kinds of feedback. And there’s, there’s five questions to filter that feedback that you get, because everybody has an opinion, and everybody’s entitled to it, right? I’m gonna think what I’m going to think about your podcast, your business, this new restaurant, whatever. And we live in a world where you can get online and type about it with no accountability with total and an anonymous, I can’t say anonymity, I can’t say that word. But you know what I’m saying but like, I can sit here behind the screen and just blast somebody and totally ruin their day and it’s sad, but it’s just, it’s out there. So you’ve got to, you’ve got to remember that but one of the big things as to, you know, I don’t know how much you talk about faith or belief in a higher power on your podcast, but I follow Jesus, like, that’s, that’s who I decide to follow, and it’s a huge part of my life. And I was just in Kenya for two weeks, with my son with a group called Restoration Project. And they focus on helping men restore from just traumatic experiences that they’ve gone through, right? because every everybody does. And they really focus on building deeper relationships between fathers and kids. And they basically said, If you don’t know, and you don’t realize that you are fully and truly loved by God, and you don’t 100% with absolute certainty, believe that and know that and feel that you are going to go to other things, and there’s a million other things you can go to, to find that validation, that acceptance, that love. And like, I think back to my story. You know, when I was a kid or getting bullied, I’m like, Man, I can’t fight. Like, I can’t stand up for myself, I’m kind of a goofy looking kid, I’ve got head gear and super easy target. But business for me, like, that was some validation, that was some love. And that was some acceptance. And I leaned into that. So it was a big part of my story. But I would say at different parts of my journey that became kind of an idol. And something I focus too much on, there’s a, you know, I still, I’d say struggle a little bit with us today as my self worth and net worth are not directly related, and they shouldn’t be. And I would venture to guess that there’s probably some listeners listening to this that may struggle with with that, you know, I can find that sometimes when the numbers are better. Maybe I’m in a little bit better mood, right? or think more of myself. So just remember, as you’re hearing all this feedback, and whatever people have to say is just remember, like you are truly loved. And when you can be in that space, you’ll be able to more easily discern who’s who’s got something to say, and if it’s for your best interest or not.

Rai Cornell 32:10
And I love that even though you’re on the surface, what you’re helping people with is business and leadership. You’re so human centric. And that’s really what it all comes down to. And there’s one last thing that I want to ask you about on our on our episode today, before we wrap up, which is you said the phrase earlier, it’s important to pour into people. And you have this coffee business that even though it looks like it’s about coffee, it’s really about pouring into people. Tell us about that.

Matt Shoup 32:39
So when I was 20, I decided I was going to minor in Spanish, because Spanish came easy to me. And again, I’m just working my way through school, Spanish Professor Maria Del Mar, every day, at the end of a Spanish culture class. She’s like, you need to go to my beautiful country of Spain. And there’s history, there’s art, there’s culture, I’m like, sounds kind of boring. She goes, there’s women, there’s party, there’s dancing. I’m like “Sign me up!” She appealed. Yes, she had all the all the fun. So I go over to Spain, I literally dropped everything I’m doing, I go over there, fall in love with the country, the people, the coffee, the food, like everything about it. And I come back, I meet my wife right after that, fall in love with Emily. And we ended up settling down here in United States. But I said, Hey, I’m going to keep going back to Spain. And every time I’d go back, I’d bring a little bit of the American culture over there and vice versa. So every time I come back from Spain, I bring coffee, and I share it with people. And it got to a point in gosh, 2018, where I was bringing so much back. I had to start shipping it back. And then we got a little coffee machine. So we have an office and we’re you know, hey, somebody comes Do you want a coffee, you want a Spanish coffee? and I just tell them about this experience I had in Spain, and it all stopped during COVID. I couldn’t get the coffee shipped. Everything was shut down. And I said you know, there’s got to be an easier way then, like the beans aren’t from Spain. They’re from Kenya, Guatemala, and wherever you make coffee. So we actually locally sourced beans from Kenya, they get shipped over here from a farm. And we bag them here and we created something called Cafe Sevilla. So it’s basically a way to show love to others, share coffee with them. So anybody that comes in our building, we always offer them a cup of coffee and it’s totally free. And we get to share a little bit of the culture, a little bit of the story, and just my heart and my passion for for people and for travel. And then if they want, they can leave a tip. Somebody actually three years ago said, you know, I want to pay for this somehow he said it’s not for sale. I don’t want to start a coffee shop, believe me. And he goes well, I’m just gonna throw $20 in this cup. So he throws money in this cup and I go boom like light bulb. I said, Hey, you know if anybody wants to tip it goes straight to the scholarships. So we’ve sent 19 students to Spain. through an endowment, we started at Colorado State University. And it all kind of comes down to this is if somebody puts $100 into the scholarship, it kicks off 5% forever. So you might think, Oh, I give 100 and what’s what’s $5 gonna do for a student in 2023? That’s spending a semester in Spain? Well, a couple of things like that student could go have a cup of coffee with somebody that becomes their spouse, they can have a cup of coffee with somebody that becomes a lifelong friend. It could be a potential employment opportunity, a business venture, and I’ve seen that happen. I mean, I look at where I am today. Sitting here was really the initial conversation over a cup of coffee about an idea or who knows what. So a little bit goes a long way. And that’s just been kind of a fun passion project to grow, and the coffee is amazing. Like, I can’t wait till you try it.

Rai Cornell 35:58
Yeah, can’t wait too!

Matt Shoup 36:00
It’s really good coffee.

Rai Cornell 36:02
Thank you so much for sharing your story, Matt. I mean, you have so many gems of wisdom. And it all comes full circle, right? I mean, you’re talking about sharing a cup of coffee with someone and that might be the start of your next entrepreneurial adventure. So if people want to learn more about you and learn more from you, where can they check you out?

Matt Shoup 36:21
Everything’s on my website, mattshoup.com.

Rai Cornell 36:25
Perfect. And we will put the link to that in the show notes. Thank you so much for being here.

Matt Shoup 36:30
Thank you.

Rai Cornell 36:44
Hey, Rai here again, thanks for listening. If you’ve liked this episode, please subscribe and rate us in your favorite podcasting platform. Want to be a guest on the show or know someone who has an amazing story of entrepreneurship? Apply on our website at chironconsulting.us/podcast.