2X eCommerce Podcast

Kunle Campbell (00:00.94)
Hey, Matt, welcome to the 2x E-commerce podcast.

Matt Putra - Eightx (00:04.265)
Thank you so much for having me, Quinlan.

Kunle Campbell (00:05.934)
Brilliant. It's been what? We're in 2025 now. And I think the last time we properly got to catch up was in 2022 over one of those commerce Excel conferences, I guess. And it was all virtual. So how are you? How are you, my friend? How's it going?

Matt Putra - Eightx (00:16.125)
Yeah, yeah, that's right, that's right.

Matt Putra - Eightx (00:23.431)
I'm good. It's been ups and downs past year. Well, past two years, but, we're feeling really good now. Yeah.

Kunle Campbell (00:29.59)
Okay, amazing, amazing. So most people may not have sort of heard or know you, some may, some may not. Do you want to give a quick intro as to what you do and what ATX is all about?

Matt Putra - Eightx (00:44.745)
You got it. So I'm a, I'm a fractional CFO, right? I was, I was a CFO and a senior partner in a private equity group. And then a friend of mine in the e-commerce asked for some help with their business. So I helped him and his wife and then their friend asked for help and that friend asked for help. And anyway, that was way more fun than corporate. So I left this private equity group. I left my senior partnership. Um, and I started working as fractional CFO, probably for e-commerce companies. And so since

2020 is when I left that full time. I've now worked with 60 brands in the UK, US, Canada and Australia. I work with e-commerce and CPG companies. Basically, the owners have a vision and my job is to make sure they have the resources it takes to get to where they wanna go. And a lot of people wanna exit and so helping them through that process, helping them kind of deal with their acquirer. We usually have a broker as well, but we help them kind of manage.

all the different ups and downs of getting from where they are now to where they want to go.

Kunle Campbell (01:47.062)
Okay, makes sense. if I, for instance, wanted to sell my business, this goal to sell my business in the next two years, I bring you in and you get that financial engineering in place so that I'm at the best valuation possible for that exit in the two year horizon. So we're really maximizing that a bit down and you know, the seller discretionary income.

Matt Putra - Eightx (01:54.045)
Mm-hmm.

Matt Putra - Eightx (02:05.181)
Yes. Exactly.

Exactly. And it's good that you mentioned two years. That's probably the best amount of time to bring me in or my company in before you exit. One year is okay, two years better, because then we can do things like we can increase your valuation by adding operational items as well. Do all your teams meet weekly? Does everybody understand the plan, the vision? If that's true, you actually can get more sort of points in your valuation.

Kunle Campbell (02:39.256)
Hmm. Hmm. So you, you, you touched based on the fact that you work across three, three major Geos, which is Canada, United States and England. What's a, what's a nuance of businesses across the board? How do you adjust when you're speaking to a Canadian e-commerce team versus a UK or are you one in the same? What, what I'm just curious, right?

Matt Putra - Eightx (03:02.997)
No, no, it's not the same. would say that Canadians and people in the UK are a bit more conservative and, and even in the UK, a bit more conservative than in Canada. it's probably, you know, a bit of a stereotype that people in the USA are gunslingers and they're cavalier, but, and they are not in a, in a, you know, in a worrisome way or anything, but I say people in the US are.

just ready to go all the time. If an idea sounds good, if it looks good, they're ready to go. People in Canada and the UK typically want to make sure they understand all the ins and outs and nothing wrong with that, just a bit different. But it does, we mean, it's a tailor our approach a little bit. Yeah.

Kunle Campbell (03:49.452)
Interesting, interesting. then how you were speaking earlier, you're like the head count of your of your of eight X, which is the agency name, the fractional, you know, I'm see CFO agency name is grown. Where have you made these hires? How have you gone to tell us that growth trajectory to 24 members?

Matt Putra - Eightx (03:58.323)
Yeah. Yeah.

Matt Putra - Eightx (04:04.093)
Yeah.

Matt Putra - Eightx (04:09.523)
Great question. Yeah. When we met, probably I had three or four of us and now we have 24 people. we have been hiring the best we can find from anywhere in the world that they are right now. We have probably 10 people in the Philippines, maybe a bit more. We have four people in Argentina. We have one guy in Australia. have three of us in Canada and I don't know what that adds up to, but, but we're all over the place.

Kunle Campbell (04:38.638)
Hmm.

Matt Putra - Eightx (04:39.069)
we, we use workable for hiring, but a lot of my best highways were made through recruiters and or referrals. and now we're starting to figure out how to hire through like a platform software effectively, but that's been, that's been a growth journey since day one.

Kunle Campbell (04:58.414)
Super impressive. so what kind of businesses do you work with? And besides building for exits, what are what are the objectives to founders come to you guys for, for help?

Matt Putra - Eightx (05:12.701)
Yeah. Sure. I mean, so what kind of businesses? I mean, we're talking e-commerce. We work with a number of verticals in e-commerce. We don't really choose really, but we have beauty. have kids, apparel, health, supplements, like a number of different things, even sort of cleaning products. And we also work with CPG businesses. Again, the same different verticals. And we're starting to work with a bit of clean tech and green tech as well. I find that really interesting. People doing better for the world.

Kunle Campbell (05:28.075)
Mm-hmm. OK.

Matt Putra - Eightx (05:43.013)
and, and I would say like size of businesses anywhere from 2 million to a hundred million now. So we have a couple of clients that are around a hundred million a year in us dollar revenue and presents its own challenges when you work with people that big, but it's been really great. and you know, again, most people want to exit at some point and the other time people come to us typically is when there's an issue. So, you know, maybe they're.

They've been growing and they've been managing it all really well now. And as they're continuing to grow, they're starting to, you know, there's more confusion. They're not sure what the right next step is. There's confusion about like, where do they go next? Where do they invest their money? What part of the business are they investing money in? Some people are running low on cash and freaking out and they call us and we help them solve that. And some people are again, really sort of, you know, they...

thinking early about problems. So they come to us, they go, we want to exit in two to four years. Let's work together now to make sure that we understand how to do this the best. So that happens as well. And people that everything's A-okay, they don't need us. Of course, right? Usually not, no.

Kunle Campbell (06:48.556)
Mm-hmm.

Kunle Campbell (06:58.292)
So it's just down to efficiency, know, just getting that efficiency in place. What separates a, so I'm assuming everybody's profitable, right? Just on that baseline. So what separates a good, say $5 million in revenue business from a great $100 million in revenue business? And just assuming that there's profitability on both sides, from a financial

Matt Putra - Eightx (07:09.554)
No.

Kunle Campbell (07:27.884)
point of view, what is the difference?

Matt Putra - Eightx (07:32.233)
Good question. bigger companies have figured out, pardon me, how to delegate decision-making to other people than the owners. Of course. mean, that's, you know, if you look at a $5 million company, typically the owners are involved in almost everything. And that's just how growth happens. But to go from there to a hundred million, there's a lot of steps along the way. One of them though is,

product market fit, right? Like at a hundred million, you have product market fit. People love you. They love what you have. You don't need to have many products to get to a hundred million, but you do need to, your audience needs to love what you do. And in terms of running the business, people like to think that the bigger guys have it all figured out. They don't. We don't. Everybody's figuring it out. But the diff, one of the differences is that the CEOs,

or the owners of those businesses have figured out how to hire and find very smart people and let them do their thing. That's one of the big ones. It's just how do you get that talent and how do you let them do their thing? That would be the biggest thing that I would notice as a difference, right? Yeah.

Kunle Campbell (08:50.014)
So people supported by our Zoom, very strong systems, very robust systems.

Matt Putra - Eightx (08:56.583)
Sometimes not, honestly, sometimes not, yes. I would say not all cases. Obviously there are, like you can't just get to 100 million without systems, right? You have systems, but it doesn't feel like they're robust always. And maybe that's the difference. Maybe they are more robust than the $5 million company. They probably have to be, right? But it doesn't feel like it's all under control. It really doesn't. Yeah, I think you're right.

Kunle Campbell (08:57.942)
Ready? Okay.

Kunle Campbell (09:06.595)
Mm-hmm.

Kunle Campbell (09:18.851)
Mm-hmm.

Matt Putra - Eightx (09:26.057)
the by necessity, the systems have to be better, of course, because you're selling multiple orders magnitude more. But it doesn't feel like it. It still feels like you're putting up fires. It still feels like you're running around with a chicken with your head cut off. It still feels like people don't know what you really want from them. Yeah, but the big difference is that, you know, when I worked with there's an 80 million dollar company I work with. They had a team of five executives, including myself.

They let us do our thing. They let us do what we thought was best for the company in our departments and our verticals. And it worked really, really well, yeah. And they held us accountable, right?

Matt Putra - Eightx (10:10.962)
are you muted?

Kunle Campbell (10:13.422)
Yeah, sorry, I'll just fix that. I've just fixed that. And we'll edit this out. Speaking of accountability. How what how do you hold people accountable, particularly when they're high performing a high performing, you know,

Matt Putra - Eightx (10:34.537)
I have a really good question. The best answer I have to that is using scorecards. And when I say scorecard, I don't mean that you just, you know, pick any number of things that you can measure. I don't mean you let them pick all their own things. But when I talk about scorecards, I mean for each department or team, there are five to 15 things that are the most important things for them. And they measure them weekly with weekly targets.

And if you do that, and if you then review them and the all teams, so what you do is you start with an executive team one. So you get your executives together and use this very simple thought experiment. But you get them to pick five to 15 things that they care about. And it's things like cash balance could be on time fulfillment, but whatever the 15 things are, where if you were on an island with no wifi or cell service and you got a letter with the scorecard.

you could decide effectively, do you go back home to help or do you just stay on the island because everything's okay, right? If everything's green, it's great. If things are red, you have to go home and help. And if you choose those effectively at the executive level, it's easy then to roll them through every other team. So let's say the executive team has one, the marketing team might have ones that match some of those or support some of those. The operations team would have supportive metrics. And so everybody will know a scorecard and you measure these things weekly.

Kunle Campbell (11:38.424)
Hmm.

Matt Putra - Eightx (12:03.849)
and they're red or they're green. Nothing else, no yellow, no nothing. They're red or they're green. And so let's say customer NPS is on the executive scorecard. And let's say our target is 8.2 out of 10. If it's above or at 8.2, the thing is green, we don't talk about it. If it's below 8.2, we talk about it. Somebody has to solve the problem. And if you do that with five different things for the executive team and every team,

Typically, you can let them do their thing and you'll know when things go red because your system will flag things as red and they're supposed to automatically solve them, but if they don't, you'll see it on their scorecard. You know what mean? So that is first and foremost, the best way to get accountability throughout your teams.

Kunle Campbell (12:50.786)
How does it compare to a dashboard? Because the dashboards have numbers. They're also metrics in a dashboard for each department.

Matt Putra - Eightx (12:54.739)
Great question.

Matt Putra - Eightx (13:03.741)
That's a good question because most people have dashboards first. Everyone that I work with, most people have dashboards first. The thing about dashboards is this. You have pie charts, you have trend lines, you have bar charts, but there's, most people can't look at a dashboard and know what to do and know what's wrong. Only the very best and brightest people in your company can look at a dashboard and know what's wrong. And sometimes that's only the owners. Because,

There's nothing to you that says, fix me or something's wrong, right? There's no flashing red lights on a scorecard. There's flashing red lights. It's very, very, very simple. Anybody at any level in your business can use a scorecard. Only the best and brightest in your company can use a dashboard effectively because they'll understand the pie chart looked like this last month. It looks like this, this month, something's wrong. But if you don't know that context or that nuance, you don't know if anything's wrong or the trend line.

The trend lines doing this, it dipped. Well, do we talk about it, do we not? Someone's gotta know contextually, does that signal a problem? Does it not? Is it seasonal? Is it not? What does it mean? And if you have to ask all those questions of a chart, only the best people can use it and it loses its effectiveness for keeping people accountable. On a scorecard, it's red or it's green. If it's red,

the owner of that number must jump up and down and solve it or tell the executive team or their own team, hey, something's wrong with my number. I don't know what's wrong. I need help fixing it. You love to hear stuff like that. And as an executive or even the owner of a business, you know, you don't use scorecards to kind of beat people up with them. But if someone's metrics are red consecutively weeks in a row and they can't fix it, it could signify a people problem as well.

Kunle Campbell (14:44.034)
Yeah.

Matt Putra - Eightx (15:00.499)
So there's a lot of uses for a scorecard where they are my favorite tool to get people accountable.

Kunle Campbell (15:07.266)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And what I've picked up is the simplicity for not just the stakeholder, but the operator who's sitting there, which means that you could potentially manage different e-commerce teams. Just imagine if you have multiple brands and multiple teams, you can essentially every Monday or whenever you have those calls, the weekly accountability calls.

The meetings are just much more efficient, in my opinion, if you have a green and red lights system in there.

Matt Putra - Eightx (15:37.609)
completely.

Matt Putra - Eightx (15:42.913)
I have, it's revolutionized how I run my own business. It has revolutionized other people's businesses that we work with as well. People just know what's expected and they know when there's a problem and they know when they have to talk to somebody about something. And it just makes it so easy. And the only thing then is like, have you picked the right numbers? That can be harder to do, but as long as you're willing to evolve over time, that will solve itself. Cause ideally, right?

Kunle Campbell (16:01.421)
Okay.

Kunle Campbell (16:05.678)
Mm.

Matt Putra - Eightx (16:12.583)
If everything is green, the business should feel like a dream to run. And if things are red, ideally if something's red, it predicts a problem two to four weeks away, right? Sometimes it's a live problem, fine. But if you can, you know, begin to query the numbers. So this one turned red and we had a problem right now. What would have turned red two weeks ago that signified this problem? And if you can ask those questions.

Get your place with Scorch and where it predicts problems. You're laughing.

Kunle Campbell (16:44.846)
Amazing, super interesting. So just to recap what you said, and please correct me if I made any mistake. On your scorecard, you'd have at least five metrics for operations, finance, marketing. Any other categories? How would you categorize them? That's 15 metrics I'm counting now.

Matt Putra - Eightx (16:52.541)
No, of course.

Matt Putra - Eightx (17:08.041)
you

Kunle Campbell (17:14.356)
Would you, are there any other categories I've missed?

Matt Putra - Eightx (17:14.461)
Yeah. I would say start with all the major functions of your business. marketing, finance, sales, ops, start there. If you have a business that has other major things going on, add something for that. If there's a team to do something that team should have a scorecard. Start with the top and work your way down. So if you're the owner,

Kunle Campbell (17:28.28)
Okay.

Matt Putra - Eightx (17:43.547)
and you meet with people every week, that's your executive team, make one for that team. If those people have a team, make one for each of their teams. If there's teams below that level, make one for the one of those teams. Every sort of manager should have a scorecard for their people. So anybody that's managing a group of people should have a scorecard for that group of people. And it would roll up all the way through. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Kunle Campbell (18:04.386)
Yeah. It makes sense to cascades. Okay. Okay. And looking at it from again, just using the size, a what does a scorecard system look like for a $5 million in revenue e-commerce business versus wondering 50 to 100 million? How, what complexities come into play or

Would that system for scorecarding system for five million sort of carry them through as a scale 10x over a period of time?

Matt Putra - Eightx (18:42.801)
Yeah, so the crazy thing about this is that the scorecard systems are essentially the same. The bigger company, there's more automated numbers. There's probably different types of numbers, but it's the same system. At five million, you might have three. You might have a executive level scorecard. You might have a marketing one and an operations, let's say for five million, that would be enough. If you do like, if people are doing sales, you'd have a sales one.

Kunle Campbell (18:48.951)
nothing.

Matt Putra - Eightx (19:11.815)
And each one would have five to 15 things on it, right? And at the $100 million one, you're gonna have executive, marketing, sales, operations, IT. You'll have customer service. You'll have fulfillment. You'll have logistics. You'll have, what else would we have? Obviously finance one. You'll have, you might have one for brand. You might have one for retail, wholesale. So there's just more scorecards, more of them.

and sub ones below those. You might have one for product development, R &D, things like that. So there's more scorecards, but it's the same system, the exact same system. And that's why this is a beautiful thing. Because then everybody in the whole organization can know, like everybody has a number that they have to manage, at least one, right? And maybe in a bigger company where you have like 200 people, not every single person has a metric, probably not. But in a five million dollar company, everybody has a metric.

Kunle Campbell (20:02.828)
Yep.

Matt Putra - Eightx (20:12.329)
So that changes as well.

Kunle Campbell (20:14.966)
So who owns the scorecards? I know you said, you know, every manager would own it, but who ensures that the scorecard system is robust enough for accountability? Is it the COO, CFO?

Matt Putra - Eightx (20:34.409)
Yeah, great question. So, you know, person number one, CEO has to be on board. Founder has to be on board. If they're on board, someone else can do all the work and it's not that hard. CFO or COO or both of them. If you have a COO, typically that person would be the one that owns the scorecards throughout the organization. The reason why is because typically they are more people people than a CFO would be.

They're better at getting buy-in and change management and all that stuff. But if you don't have a COO, your CFO or even a fractional CFO can own these things for all your different teams. You know, very short meetings, getting everybody on board. It's a few workshops. It's super easy. And you get a VA just to fill it all in. So yeah, but somebody at the executive level would own the initiative and own the sort of system. And the CEO just has to like sort of sponsor it and be okay with it. But yeah, yeah.

either one of those three people.

Kunle Campbell (21:32.546)
Yeah, it's a good point you just made with regards to the VA filling it because you know, garbage in, garbage out. So what systems do you have in place to get in the most accurate numbers on time for accounts?

Matt Putra - Eightx (21:47.305)
Yes, great question. Everybody goes, well, where do I get all the numbers from? Keep it simple. Do not automate first. Get a VA, get them to find, know, and for each metric, you can record a video of you filling in the whole scorecard yourself. And then you link the video with the top of the scorecard so the VA can do the same thing over and over and over, right? Make it really easy. And for each scorecard, again, use Loom, record a video of you filling it all in one or two times.

then your VA has an SOP done. Then just get a VA to do it. Start simple. I tell you, this is where everybody gets tripped up. They want to go, I want a super metrics or I'm going to use Looker or I'm going to pull data from Tableau or whatever, whatever. Don't. Just get a VA or an admin person to put this in for you every week, once a week. Start there. When you do that, then you run this process for four weeks, let's say.

as this process evolves, especially if you're doing this for the first time, you will change metrics, you'll add new ones, then maybe after two months, start automating some of it if you want to. But the biggest lesson I have there is I work with a very large company and I said, you guys need scorecards. I said, great, let's do it. And I said, great, what are the metrics you want? And I did a workshop with their executive team of 10 people and we got 30 metrics or so.

Kunle Campbell (22:58.67)
Okay.

Matt Putra - Eightx (23:15.613)
And they said, cool, now we're to have a data science team put it all in. Two months later, it wasn't done. And I said, fucking stop with data science team. Excuse my language. Get your VAs or admin team to do this by themselves. No more data science team. And the scorecard was done the next week. Right? Cause you just introduce complexity. Keep it simple. Just have an admin do it. When the admin is whatever, too busy or.

Kunle Campbell (23:33.485)
Yeah.

Matt Putra - Eightx (23:42.973)
when you've loved the scorecard, then have your data science team pick them off one by one, but just get the numbers in. Because the faster you get it done, the faster everybody spots problems. You begin to predict better, you catch problems faster. There's a client of mine where they lost probably 300 grand revenue because their fulfillment center went to shit. Basically, the fulfillment center had a problem that no one foresaw and stopped fulfilling.

Kunle Campbell (24:04.526)
Mm.

Matt Putra - Eightx (24:11.315)
and it took them two weeks to notice, one week to fly there, one week to fix it. But if they have a scorecard, they'd see it in the same week where fulfillment dropped off, fly there faster, fix it faster. They cost themselves 150 grand by not having a scorecard.

Kunle Campbell (24:25.528)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Now I see the, you know, the reason why you had so many categories for like the $50 million company versus the 5 million, because they're essentially units of the business. you know, fulfillment is fulfillment now and you, it has to have metrics to, to, work by which, you know, which sort of score, which scores it literally, which scores it. So

Matt Putra - Eightx (24:36.189)
Yeah. Yeah.

Matt Putra - Eightx (24:51.101)
Yeah, totally.

Kunle Campbell (24:52.312)
This podcast is video first now. we're on YouTube and Spotify has actually started allowing us to publish videos. So for those people who are watching this, do you have like a quick example? I'm a visual person. I understand the green light, green and red thing, but it'd be fantastic to do that. And I'll share.

Matt Putra - Eightx (24:56.489)
Cool.

Matt Putra - Eightx (25:13.649)
Sure.

Kunle Campbell (25:16.818)
I'll probably share a screenshot of this in the show notes, but yeah, it would be fantastic if you could sort of share your screen and then let's see what a scorecard looks like.

Matt Putra - Eightx (25:18.93)
Of course.

Matt Putra - Eightx (25:22.537)
Yeah.

Matt Putra - Eightx (25:27.325)
I will too.

Pulling it up now. Can you see this okay?

Kunle Campbell (25:34.734)
Yes, so I can see a spreadsheet which has the first column is all metrics. So you have executive and then marketing as categories. You have an owner. It's huge. So these are the dates, weekly dates, because I can see 13, 20th of December, 27th. So this is weekly. OK.

Matt Putra - Eightx (25:43.081)
And how's the size for you?

Matt Putra - Eightx (25:49.617)
Okay, great.

Matt Putra - Eightx (25:57.897)
Yeah, weekly. So again, scorecards are weekly because if you wait for your monthly financials, you're actually getting them two weeks, one week if you're awesome, but two to three weeks if you're bigger after the month is over. So you've already lost the month. So get a scorecard. I would do scorecards before you do, before you do like financials and Pancy reports, do those first. But anyway, so this would be an executive level one.

Kunle Campbell (26:19.118)
financials.

Matt Putra - Eightx (26:26.701)
for a smaller company, because if it's a bigger company, you wouldn't have that kind of marketing one here. you have your, what are the metrics are in the first column, who owns them on the second column? So you can see that you own a few of these actually. I own some, John owns some. And the next column over tells you, do you want this number to be more or less than your target? So yeah, so this target in column E, so let's say we look at cash balance, right?

Kunle Campbell (26:31.82)
Mm-hmm.

Kunle Campbell (26:41.816)
Mm-hmm.

Kunle Campbell (26:48.014)
okay, so it's a Q, so it's greater or lesser.

Matt Putra - Eightx (26:56.169)
We want $265,000 US as our minimum cash balance. So the greater, right? And what the greater or lesser does is it tells it when to go red or yellow or red or green. So if I change this to this one, it goes the other way around. So you want it to be greater than this number. There's the cash conversion cycle one here. 90 days, we want it to be less than 90 days. So this flags now when it's over 90 days.

Kunle Campbell (27:00.43)
the target, okay.

Kunle Campbell (27:06.861)
Mmm.

Kunle Campbell (27:10.946)
Okay.

Kunle Campbell (27:15.917)
Okay.

Kunle Campbell (27:21.74)
Hmm. Hmm.

Matt Putra - Eightx (27:24.489)
So the way that this works is on your weekly meeting, if all you do is this, give me a very simple icebreaker, always do an icebreaker, always check in personally. If you don't do that, that means get corporate and boring and terrible. Always do something nice, right? And then you go, scorecard. And you just go to the week that you're on this one and you go green, green, red. Okay, Matt, why is that cash flow red? And I'll go, here's why it's red. go, how are you getting it back to green? Does not get it back to green. How are you going make sure it doesn't go red again?

Kunle Campbell (27:52.962)
Okay.

Matt Putra - Eightx (27:54.377)
This is how I'm gonna make sure it doesn't go red again. Cool. And then we go, okay, green. Okay, Gabby, contribution margin per order. What happened? Why is it red? How are you making it go green? How are you gonna make sure it doesn't go red again in the future? Cool, great. And you yours, couldn't they, you might say, guys, I'm trying to figure this out, but I don't know what happened and I need some help. And honestly, if someone tells you that, that's gold because you want transparency, you want honesty.

You want people to put their hands up when they have a problem. And so if you say to them, look, I'm not sure what's going on. Then we go, let's root cause this together. And then you do a root cause analysis. You figured out and you move on and you go green. Cool. Green. Cool. My NCAC not, not great this week. Yeah. Yeah. I have a blended CAC and I have NCAC and new customer acquisition costs. And so that one's red. And so we got to go, well, what happened there, John? You know, and goes, I don't know. So then we do a root cause together.

Kunle Campbell (28:34.478)
Mm.

Kunle Campbell (28:39.704)
Cock landed.

Matt Putra - Eightx (28:52.777)
And then we go, great, AOV, you know, what happened here? And he goes, this is what happened, what I'm going to do, blah, blah, blah. And anyway, from there, you just document the to-dos. So what these people have agreed on to fix these numbers, we have a separate page where you say that we'll keep lists of to-dos, but you know, Matt is going to call the bank. Matt's going to call the wholesaler to get the money faster, whatever. know, all those to-dos.

Kunle Campbell (29:04.974)
Hmm.

Kunle Campbell (29:19.992)
Okay.

Matt Putra - Eightx (29:21.959)
by the end of the next seven days, those to-dos should already be done and then this thing should be back to green. If it's not, talk about it again. But if they're all green next week, you go, green, green, green, green, everybody's green, great, done, meeting over, move quickly. Yeah, so simple.

Kunle Campbell (29:39.702)
Yeah. It is so simple, but highly effective because the accountability cycles are weekly. So to the audience, to anyone listening or watching this, this is what you have to do in 2025. You have to start scorecarding in 2025. It's, it's, yeah, it's a game changer. It's a literal game changer. So glad to have you on. Yeah. So, so glad.

Matt Putra - Eightx (29:48.093)
Yes.

Matt Putra - Eightx (30:09.469)
And we've been running workshops for, get these set up for people. And so, you know, for your audience, Kunle, if I'm happy to run, you know, a couple ones for at no cost for your audience, if you'd like. so I don't know if I can give you a link, like it would be adex.co slash scorecard, but I can give you a link for your audience to click on. And I'll do, I can't do everybody because it's actually, it's like multiple hours and multiple days of work.

Kunle Campbell (30:17.998)
Mm-hmm.

Kunle Campbell (30:30.603)
Okay. Please do.

Kunle Campbell (30:37.824)
Okay, is this a one to one or one to many to an audience?

Matt Putra - Eightx (30:39.017)
But I'll do. There's an interesting question. I could do it as a one to many, but I was I was initially offering one to one, whatever you think, to be honest. but yeah, I could do like two of them at no cost. Yeah, I'll give you a link. Yeah.

Kunle Campbell (30:48.12)
Okay. Okay. Okay.

Kunle Campbell (30:55.082)
phenomenal. Thank you. will will share I'll share the link. I'll share the link in the show notes. So so I'm to everybody listening. You can get Matt one to one essentially building out what your scorecard should look like for free. Fantastic. Thanks. I didn't see that one coming.

Matt Putra - Eightx (30:58.665)
Yeah.

Matt Putra - Eightx (31:10.441)
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's awesome. Yeah. We've done a number of these workshops and people really like them. And then they walk out of them with the executive one and any of their departments get done. All of them get done. Yeah. Cool. Yeah.

Kunle Campbell (31:18.168)
Okay.

Kunle Campbell (31:24.65)
Okay. Okay. Appreciate it. Nice, nice one. Okay. So let's jump right in. in regards to the outlook for 2025, what should operators and founders just be cognizant of to be more efficient?

Matt Putra - Eightx (31:46.109)
Yeah.

think the name of the game for 2025 is squeezing more ROI from every area of the business. you know, obviously we're talking about scorecards, scorecards will help with that. But I would say another thing people could be doing is going, how do I get more from what I have? Or, yeah, and that's, I think to me, that feels like one of the big questions for this year. We've been working with doing some AI automation and stuff and.

Kunle Campbell (32:01.07)
Mm-hmm.

Matt Putra - Eightx (32:18.451)
people should be looking at how do they get more from what they already have. Don't add more headcount. If you're gonna get the tool, it should multiply many times over what the cost of the tool would be. But I think, you and I both intimately know that banks are not very here for you right now in this. They haven't been since 2022 and they're still not really there for you. And so essentially people should consider that they're on their own in their business.

Kunle Campbell (32:37.442)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Matt Putra - Eightx (32:47.145)
They're not gonna get bailed out by a bank and they're not gonna get bailed out by a lender. So your business has to get more for what it has. If you're not profitable, you have to get profitable. If you are profitable, you have to stay profitable and scale profitably. And so how do you get more from the people, from the tools, from the assets you already have? Obviously, AI is a big part of that. Everybody should be looking at AI. People should be playing with it every single day.

you should be picking off small use cases and making agents to do those like all the time. Somebody on your team should be thinking about AI all the time right now because you can get more. can get more. instead of hiring a sales coach for my team members, I built them a custom agent and this agent acts like an e-commerce owner and they text it and it responds.

Kunle Campbell (33:27.576)
Yeah.

Kunle Campbell (33:37.101)
Hmm.

Matt Putra - Eightx (33:43.783)
And if they ask for information too fast, it says, sorry, we've got our conversation over. And then another agent will coach them on that conversation. Right. So I could have hired a sales coach, but I just built an agent, an AI agent for this. So everybody should be looking at making agents for very specific use cases. I don't know when we'll see agents do a lot of things broadly, but right now make a specific use case, make an agent for it. It's way easier than you'd think.

You can use make.com, Zapier. You can get your AI key from ChatGBT. is so, it is quite easy to do these things. AI generated creative. You should be talking to the AI all the time. You know, again, get more out of the same, you know, assets and resources that you have today. I think that's the name of the game for 2025.

Kunle Campbell (34:40.92)
That's a fantastic point you made about AI agents. Very, very, yeah. Very important, very important. Where would you start? Like, so on a blank canvas, I'm assuming some people, where's the first place to get the best bang for your buck? I've used AI in certain things I'm doing and it's a game changer, but for an operator, where should they sort of start?

Matt Putra - Eightx (34:43.933)
Thanks

Matt Putra - Eightx (34:47.859)
Yeah.

Matt Putra - Eightx (34:52.467)
Sorry. Quickly. Yeah.

Kunle Campbell (35:09.984)
start an AI agent right away.

Matt Putra - Eightx (35:11.645)
For e-commerce, I would suggest customer service. There are people who've already made really good ones. You can probably buy the blueprint for them. People can build you one for three to 5K anyway. We actually have built some for 3K, you know, again, that's where I'd start. can look at make.com. You can...

Kunle Campbell (35:17.602)
Okay.

Matt Putra - Eightx (35:41.139)
probably find someone's blueprint and buy it. You can probably hire somebody from Upwork to make it for you. But again, you can pipe all this, all your reviews and you can, gorgeous, and all these different things can be connected to this agent. And that's the first place that I would start. There's a company called Deward Jeans. Yeah, Deward Jeans, D-U-E-R. They're doing mid-eight figures, I believe. And they have two customer service people because of AI.

Kunle Campbell (36:00.44)
to a.

Matt Putra - Eightx (36:11.561)
And there are brands that are drastically reducing their customer service head count because of AI. That's probably the easiest place to start. From there, one more use case would be...

maybe creative, I don't know how to do that myself, but people are using AI creative and to generate multiple creatives at the same time with multiple angles.

Kunle Campbell (36:28.514)
Yeah. Yeah.

Kunle Campbell (36:39.714)
Yeah. I mean, you can even with, you can even use normal creatives, right? But you could, you could have like 50 variations of the hook with AI and plug it into, because if, like an ad is working, you know, could it work more efficiently with better hooks? And that could be AI generated fairly quickly and very decently.

Matt Putra - Eightx (36:51.665)
Yes, yes, yes, yes.

Matt Putra - Eightx (37:00.593)
Yes, yes. You could, here's one. So you could go, you could have an agent that receives your reviews and it analyzes reviews and it tells you when there's a trend or it goes, or good reviews, it goes, here's a hook based on this good review. And it just does this automatically. It does it all day, every day. Whenever a review is received, it looks at that review plus others and goes, here's a trend or.

Kunle Campbell (37:17.368)
Mm-hmm.

Matt Putra - Eightx (37:29.971)
Based on this review, here's the three hooks you could use for an ad. That's a very, very simple one.

Kunle Campbell (37:32.738)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, the beauty of it is like, if you could then get the AI to monitor if it's been actioned or not, you could scorecard it, you know, you could scorecard that. So you understand.

Matt Putra - Eightx (37:42.729)
Correct. Yeah.

Well, the AI could go, here's the review, drop it into Asana, your project management and do something about it. Or it could go in Gorgias. Yeah, you can even have, probably I think, look at Gorgias and go, is there a trend of things not getting done? Or what are the types of things that are not getting done? Or what's the lag? And there's so many things you could do. But I would say people should start with a very specific use case. I started with something very specific, my first agent.

was a sales thing. I got a script from a business owner named Dan Martell actually for their sales scripting. And I told the agent, hey, here's the best way to do this. Please coach my team. And we did it. Like hyper specific, right?

Kunle Campbell (38:34.988)
So this agent was listening in to calls with your team?

Matt Putra - Eightx (38:37.641)
No, no, you have to talk to it. Like you have to chat it on, on SMS or on like on a, you have to type it, type to it. I don't know how to make a voice one personally. I have people on my team who know how to do that. don't have to do it. but yeah, you just make, you go to chat, QBT, you get an enterprise thing and you go create a custom agent. And then there's a screen that pops up where you can tell the agent what to do. So goes, Hey, what do want me to do? I want you to, I want you to be a sales coach. It goes great.

Kunle Campbell (38:41.997)
Okay.

Kunle Campbell (38:46.456)
Mm-hmm.

Kunle Campbell (38:50.296)
Okay.

Kunle Campbell (38:58.135)
Mm-hmm.

Matt Putra - Eightx (39:08.189)
You know, how should I think about that? You you tell it, think about it this way. And then you can say, should I have any files? Give it this file. This is a file on how somebody should communicate with a potential lead. You know, I want you to act like that lead. They go, great. And it took me a couple hours of like talking to it to figure this out and tuning it. But now my person can go, can pretend that this is a lead on LinkedIn and DM the lead. And if they do it right, they get a phone number.

Kunle Campbell (39:35.342)
Mm-hmm.

Matt Putra - Eightx (39:37.885)
And if they don't do it right, the lead goes, I'm sorry, conversation over. Yeah. So hyper.

Kunle Campbell (39:42.102)
Okay. Okay. So it's literally training itself. Training literally.

Matt Putra - Eightx (39:46.771)
Sales training, literally sales training, very specific use case. But again, I'm not like an AI expert. But again, if you start specific, just start with something hyper specific. When you do that, you'll go, shit, I could do that and that. And you will then just do more stuff, but start with something easier. Start with something specific. Start with something you need right now, right? Yeah.

Kunle Campbell (39:53.966)
Yeah. What's the starting point?

Kunle Campbell (40:13.122)
Matt, it's just wrapping up. It's been a fascinating conversation. And I'm glad this is happening at the start of the year. And for people who want to find out more about scorecarding, will link to link you provide me to the one on one. Really, really appreciate your time on the pod. And you know, best luck in 2025.

Matt Putra - Eightx (40:33.021)
Yeah. Yeah.

Matt Putra - Eightx (40:39.369)
Thank you so much.

Matt Putra - Eightx (40:43.165)
This was awesome, Kynly. Thank you so much for having me.

Kunle Campbell (40:46.36)
Brilliant, thank you.