Ep. #881 - Full Scale, 4 Years Later

00:00:00

Andrew Morgans

What’s up, Hustlers? Welcome back. This is Andrew Morgans, Founder of Marknology. here as today’s host of Startup Hustle, covering all things e-Commerce and Amazon entrepreneurship. But today’s special guest, before I make an introduction, is the founder of a show. I think you can imagine who’s going to be on today and who I’m talking about. We’re going to be celebrating Full Scale’s four-year anniversary. Before we do that, a shoutout to our sponsor for today’s episode, fullscale dot IO, for helping you build a software team quickly and affordably. Matt, you’re everywhere in this, from the founder of Startup Hustle to the founder of Full Scale. What brought us here today? I’m super excited to be the host for today’s episode and talk about the four years I’ve got here. So, welcome to your own show.

00:49:00

Matt DeCoursey

Thanks, man, I actually think this is the first time I’ve been the guest.

00:55:00

Andrew Morgans

Okay, Watson, no one’s interviewed you at all. Okay, I feel very special.

01:00:00

Matt DeCoursey

I’ve talked about a lot of this stuff but there hasn’t, you know, Matt and I started Startup Hustle four and a half years ago and Full Scale four years ago but I don’t think that we’ve talked both a lot on the show but I don’t think I’ve ever been the actual guest.

01:18:00

Andrew Morgans

Well, cool. I gotta do the talking.

01:20:00

Matt DeCoursey

Yeah, I felt weird.

01:21:00

Andrew Morgans

No, I like it I mean…

01:23:00

Matt DeCoursey

The intro for me. This is what it’s like. This is it I. could get used to this.

01:28:00

Andrew Morgans

Well. When do you think that we connected? Do you know? How many years has it been? 3, 4, 5?

01:35:00

Matt DeCoursey

Probably, four-ish. Okay, because I think we had probably just started the podcast because you were one of the probably, in the first fifty. Yes, because, I remember you specifically before we even had the shittier studio of the many studios we’ve had because you were one of the people that got to kind of hover around the blue Yeti mic where, you’re like, hang on. Let’s all get close enough. We can smell each other’s breath.

02:00:00

Andrew Morgans

I like that old studio. I’m a little old-school. Was brought on regularly as a guest. We call it the Amazon update.

02:08:00

Matt DeCoursey

Yeah. You were just on once and it was just an episode.

02:18:00

Andrew Morgans

and then we turned it into the Amazon update and here I am today.

02:20:00

Matt DeCoursey

So we stuck with it.

02:22:00

Andrew Morgans

I just have a way of making people be friends with me so I’ve pulled some levers. But, I want to be serious today because I think there are a lot of our listeners that do care about your backstory and they want to understand how Full Scale and Startup Hustle tie in together. And maybe, we can just bring some of those pieces together for our listeners. So, I think we should start out the show, typical of my show. I’ll start out by trying to get to know the founder in the backstory before we jump into more of that. But for everybody else listening, let’s get into more of the details. What is your backstory? When did you become an entrepreneur? Did you always want to be on a podcast? You always want to be an entrepreneur. Where do you start?

03:05:00

Matt DeCoursey

I was born an entrepreneur. Honestly, if you ask me, I’ve had a lot of people ask me that question over the years and I can’t ever remember a time I wasn’t doing entrepreneur stuff. I mean as early as I can remember, just little things, lemonade stands. My parents lived near a golf course and we used to go fish golf balls out of the pond and drag them up to the tee box and sit there until the course marshal would come to throw us off. I painted curbs in high school, you know, the addresses, the white box or we make a couple of hundred bucks a day doing that.

03:40:00

Andrew Morgans

Smart. I haven’t heard that one.

03:42:00

Matt DeCoursey

Yeah, just did it. I was always doing stuff to hustle and it just always felt natural to do it. You know I tried having a, quote, a real job. For a while, I think many of the people that listen to the show regularly know I worked in the music industry for almost a decade.

04:01:00

Andrew Morgans

So let’s talk about that. Everyone has a backstory. I think what brings founders together is a lot of us don’t the same exact challenges but a lot of similar ones. I know some of your family histories. We’re here in KCK, maybe we’ll talk about that in a little bit. How does it tie in? Was it you watching your dad run his business? Was it an older brother? Was it wanting to buy things that had you hustling? Or, what was it about entrepreneurship or having your own money and figuring out your own way to get it that drove you?

04:32:00

Matt DeCoursey

So, my dad didn’t run a business. You mentioned Kansas City Kansas. My great-great-grandfather started a dairy so they sold milk and ice cream. They didn’t own cows. They bought the milk from the farmers and did a lot of stuff. They were here in Kansas City one hundred and twenty years ago. Here specifically, where our office in this area, where the office of the Startup Hustle studio is now in Kansas City Kansas. That business got passed down to my grandfather but he sold it in the early 60s.

05:03:00

Andrew Morgans

Okay.

05:06:00

You know my dad. He was an attorney but on his own. He worked for himself.

05:11:00

Andrew Morgans

Okay.

05:12:00

Matt DeCoursey

Which is entrepreneurial in nature. I think, anytime you rely on yourself for all your income, you don’t get a paycheck that’s signed by someone else, you’re an entrepreneur.

05:21:00

Andrew Morgans

I agree.

05:22:00

Matt DeCoursey

There’s a difference between being a founder and being an entrepreneur, as well. We’ve talked about that on our show. Is a franchise owner an entrepreneur? Yes, but they’re different than a founder.

05:30:00

Andrew Morgans

Yeah.

05:32:00

Matt DeCoursey

So, anytime you’re a founder and you’re doing something, it doesn’t have an owner’s manual with it.

05:36:00

Andrew Morgans

I would agree. I think some people might think that’s an entrepreneur but, no. I would agree there is a difference because, with the franchise, you’re still creating something. You have a little bit of a playbook. You still have to manage people, you still have to deal with the area that you’re in and all those challenges that come up with being a business owner. Being a founder truly is something different. It’s creating something from nothing.

06:04:00

Matt DeCoursey

I always did some smaller things, like you mentioned, curb painting and stuff like that. A lot of people fumbled around looking for the thing that was going to be the thing.

06:17:00

Andrew Morgans

When did your music career come in?

06:20:00

Matt DeCoursey

I was in my mid-20s and I was just trying to honestly grow up a little bit and make some money. I got a job at a piano store, of all places. I had people tell me like how are you going to make any money selling pianos? I said I don’t know but the dude working at the store is driving a Beamer. So, someone’s doing all right. And, pianos are expensive.

06:36:00

Andrew Morgans

Yes.

06:38:00

Matt DeCoursey

I got a commission that pays well. It wasn’t high volume. It was boring as hell, dude. In a piano store, sometimes you’ll sit there all day and not one person comes. I knew I needed to do something different. I ended up driving across Womanton, North Carolina at the time. I drove across the city and worked at an actual music store that sold all the stuff. A year later, I was the zone manager so I was in charge of one-fourth of the 15 stores. So, a section of a store, like a zone. That company ended up getting sued and going out of business. It’s a whole other story.

07:20:00

Andrew Morgans

While you were there?

07:21:00

Matt DeCoursey

Yeah. You can see in the writing that I got an offer to move to Washington, DC, and open a chain of Yamaha piano stores for a husband and wife that owned a bunch of other piano stores. On the eastern shore of Virginia, I went up and did two years which straddled the housing crisis. I had one good year and one miserable year. I really just honestly hated it. I did not like sitting in a retail store. I did not like doing any of it.

07:51:00

Andrew Morgans

Waiting on people to come in. I think that’s the thing with sales. What I love about e-commerce is that there’s an unlimited amount to being able to reach customers I don’t have to be physically there.

08:03:00

Matt DeCoursey

well, there is now.

08:04:00

Andrew Morgans

Yeah.

08:05:00

Matt DeCoursey

Now in 2008, the internet was still just passing dial-up for a lot of people. Not all businesses had a website. I’ve always been a very busy salesperson. You know like activity breed sales.

08:20:00

Matt DeCoursey

You sitting in a store, just feeling like you’re robbing away. So I reached out to some people I knew at the Roland Corporation. A lot of people know Roland, the world’s largest maker of electronic musical instruments. I managed to get myself a job there as a District Manager for over 13 states. Now that was interesting because at that point, I had dropped out of four colleges and that was a job you needed an MBA to get. You can imagine the finagle I had to go through to just even get that position.

08:51:00

Andrew Morgans

Yeah, well, you leveraged the piano store to the Yamaha store to Roland.

08:56:00

Matt DeCoursey

They wanted people that could sell, people that would hustle across 13 states, which by the way, is excruciating. I did that for about two years and I was just like you know what? this isn’t it, either. I went back to school for the fifth time. I actually lived in Indianapolis then and was still trying to figure out what I was gonna do when I grew up. I’m like 30 at this point. I wrote a letter to the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University, which at the time was one of the top ten business schools. I didn’t think I’d get it because of shitty grades. I was never a good student but I told him what I’ve done professionally and I ended up getting that equipment job. A year later, I’m running out of money. I’m trying to figure something out and that’s when I started the first business that I wrote in the Million dollar bedroom about.

09:50:00

Andrew Morgans

Here we go.

09:51:00

Matt DeCoursey

Buying and selling concert tickets and man, that starts off. Read the book. It’s a good story. I funded that business using my poker buddy’s credit cards.

10:15:00

Matt DeCoursey

It was nine months into that, that I hired my first employee.

10:19:00

Andrew Morgans

and yeah, exactly.

10:19:00

Matt DeCoursey

I had been trying to. We weren’t just buying and selling tickets. We’re also building websites that acted as marketplaces so you know back once again, this is like you know 2009 at this point and there’s not like things weren’t very sophisticated on the internet still and I was trying to build a website that built itself. It was like an advanced affiliate model. I needed it to make new pages based on changes in database tables. Anytime you’re looking at events. There are hundreds of new ones announced every day and there are hundreds that just occurred so you got to build a trying to build a program that took down the old events and you know. Basically redirected the old pages and created new ones. hired a local guy to do it. There wasn’t any like now that’s not high technology but then it was so you know along the way I had hired a local guy and he was making some progress but so essentially I’m trying to make a thing that just generates pages. And it would make like 5 original pages and then it would just get stuck on the sixth one and make it for like 80000 pages and then you have to go in and like clear the whole server out

11:30:00

Andrew Morgans

just to get 5 pages again

11:31:00

Matt DeCoursey

or whatever and he was stuck for like two months and he said he said Matt you need a php developer so cool. Let’s go find 1 said no, you’re not gonna find 1 in the United States I said why not well no one grew up here doing that so I got on I got online and I just started looking and and you know trying to figure out where I could find a php developer and I came up with India or the Philippines. The 2 best options now I don’t know anybody from India but I have had my parents had a filipino family that owned a cleaning service that had cleaned our house for 20 years Del Rivera hi dell so I called him up I said hey dell it’s Matt Deorsi he said hey Matt what’s up. And I said I need to hire some computer programmers and he said Matt you know I clean houses right? and I said yeah I do but I also know you’re from the Philippines where do I need to do do I need to go to Manila and of course that’s like the only city that americans know in the Philippines he said no, you need to go to Sabu and I said never heard of it. Which is the same reaction I get now when I tell people we have an office in Sabu but he describes sabu cityi as the silicon valley of the Philippines

12:40:00

Andrew Morgans

and this was like what year?

12:41:00

Matt DeCoursey

2009.okay, you know and I’m still a student at that point. So I’m doing this I’m doing school and like doing all this stuff and. And I don’t know shit about technology at this point

12:52:00

Andrew Morgans

I was going to ask like were you kind of like learning development yourself or it was like always like I have an idea I’m going to hire a developer to help me.

12:59:00

Matt DeCoursey

Do it you I was never going to be a programmer because I knew people that were programmers and I just don’t it’s not my personality type. Yeah like. People require a special degree of patience and attention to detail that I do not possess I would if I was a programmer there would just be a stack of broken laptops in the corner.

13:17:00

Andrew Morgans

Yeah.

13:18:00

Matt DeCoursey

from frustration I don’t know how they do it I mean kudos to all you highly technical people that can. Somehow quickly figure out that you’re missing a semicolon on line 1500

13:28:00

Andrew Morgans

if anyone’s listening to my podcast I’m pretty sure I’ve said that same line. Yeah I went to I got I have a computer science degree in networking insec security. But during that time there wasn’t that many classes so you all took languages I think I had like 5 languages under my belt.Um, java c plus plus c sharp whatever you take at park university ah we were writing code like for a k crafts game as tests on paper it was horror and know I was like probably a little bit after that right?

13:56:00

Matt DeCoursey

So the crazy thing is is none of that’s even valid now

13:59:00

Andrew Morgans

I hated it? Yeah I felt like I was doing stuff from like 10 years before you know. Um, so school for me was not ah ah, a pleasurable thing. It was like you know oh my god this is I t I’m going to kill myself.

14:11:00

Matt DeCoursey

Um, yeah I was just trying to figure out I mean I I like how to Google what php even and

14:15:00

Andrew Morgans

so can we get that? Okay so I interrupted but let’s

14:16:00

Matt DeCoursey

hang up but hang on because this is a good part. So this dude stuck. And put so I figure out. Okay, so I’m going to take dell’s advice I put an ad in the newspaper and another one on an online site in the Philippines and I got flooded I got like a hundred replies like a whole bunch I don’t even know what the number was I I went back and looked when I wrote the book I don’t know I can’t tell you right off him. But. So but there was 1 guy named Rico that I started having an email thread with and I told him what the problem what I was trying to build and what the problem was I hadn’t even spoke to this guy or anything you know okay to give me some context Skype had come out like six months prior to this? so like that I mean that was like. High technology right? but I hadn’t talked to this guy. So I told him what the problem was and and he sent me back a little snippet of code and he said try this so I sent it over to the other to the local programmer and. Like 2 hours later I got an email back with the subject line and all caps it fucking worked so this dude in suboo literally without even speaking to me during this job interview and sent me what looked like a couple lines of gibberish solved the problem and what it was is as when the. When the server’s making pages over and over again. It basically needed to have like another mechanism that cleared the cache because it was trying to make them too fast. So it just get stuck and it would keep making the same page. It was basically like wiping it. It was almost like like you would get with a gun. You know like a semi-automatic gun where the slide comes back the shell flies out and it loads another

15:54:00

Andrew Morgans

reset reset reset.

15:54:00

Matt DeCoursey

Yeah so it did that but I mean so I was like shit. So I hired this guy who quickly outpaced the local guy and then replaced him. And you know we ended up building what we called the Apc the automatic page creator that was the first thing that I made a million bucks on so and and by the way I haven’t ever talked about those things I’ll say I was saving it for your episode Andrew.

16:19:00

Andrew Morgans

I was like I haven’t heard this I want the details of it so

16:21:00

Matt DeCoursey

that was revolutionary at the time and like now that wouldn’t even be high technology but that was pretty cutting nutch and innovative at the time and we kept building it and then we had to find other ways to market. It. So I kept hiring other people in the Philippines to kind of do what we would call virtual assistant kind of stuff. Were posting job ads online but I ended up having 8 to 10 employees and in suboo for several years and some of them never quit working for me. some of them later became gigabooks employees. and still worked there but it wasn’t until four years ago we started full scale.

16:59:00

Andrew Morgans

Okay so I have a question here um might be jumping around for you. But I think there’s a good one at the March get together the company recognized a 10 Year awardee

17:08:00

Matt DeCoursey

yeah ah was one of the

17:10:00

Andrew Morgans

we just said we were 4 years yeah Yeah okay so one of the original

17:13:00

Matt DeCoursey

and’s actually the second tier we actually had another lady that had 12 years and she retired she did well enough working for me and she’s my age. She’s retired.

17:25:00

Andrew Morgans

I love that?

17:26:00

Matt DeCoursey

Yeah, she’s still on the board she’s on the board of directors of full scale.

17:29:00

Andrew Morgans

Um, so it’s crazy. You know, thinking about just how you grew up. You know we’re from here. Um, you know around Indianapolis different places and like the key to your your first million is you know someone? you don’t know or you didn’t know at the time

17:46:00

Matt DeCoursey

the other side other side of the world.

17:47:00

Andrew Morgans

Yeah, and I love I love that about that about what we do. Um and there’s a girl that works on a lot of my web stuff that I had posted 3 or 4 times for some help on Instagram and was trying to pay people to help me. It was like some kind of code thing a plugin I was working with it was actually Amazon to Shopify. Amazon fulfilling for shopify orders and I was just having some issues and um, she fixed it and wouldn’t charge me and said hey that one’s on the house I just want to work with you. Yeah, you know and that gets me every time so that’s a key for anyone else kind of like kind of like

18:18:00

Matt DeCoursey

the dude in the interview you know fixing it just say hey you know this works and.

18:23:00

Andrew Morgans

Exactly like that

18:24:00

Matt DeCoursey

and you know here’s the thing is there was you know, just kind of so we don’t end up talking for a whole hour about you know we’re talking about full scale because full scale is to me is the greatest part of my entrepreneur story and it all started after I wrote a book about. Million dollar bedroom which I thought was a pretty damn good story so that that whole story is that that that business we started in the bedroom in the extra bedroom my home all I have is a credit card with an $8000 limit.And I turned that into $30000000 of revenue over the next eight years and and the foundational elements of everything that we do today. Everything that that yeah became gigabook that later became full scale and actually in the Philippines full scale is actually gigabook incorporated. because it started. It didn’t even we didn’t so you know so the the business that started in the million dollar bed and we talked about looking for that good idea I didn’t have it I stumbled into it. It was an accident and full scale was kind of an accident too because really what I was trying to do is I left the ticket business at the end of 2016 my wife and I had done well with it and I just wanted to do something different. It was a bold move and I told my wife I said I’m going to reinvent myself I wrote 2 books and didn’t make any money for a year which was painful and you know just. Yeah I was trying to figure some stuff out and Matt Watson because I interviewed him for a million dollar bedroom and I had this idea so Matt was having this problem at Stackify where he couldn’t find enough developers or keep them and I said you know what? maybe if we built him a team. And marked it up just enough so gigabook wouldn’t have a burn rate then a little bit a tiny little tiny bit of funding would get gigabook off and running and that’s exactly how we started Matt bought half of gigabook and that’s what we used some of that money for. Now it was yeah I think a good entrepreneur listens for echoes and they listen for you know they look for opportunity so we had started this podcast and we’re talking about sabu and what we’re doing and our peers just kind of magically started appearing saying hey. I got the same problem. What do I need to do to get some of these people and where is it. It’s it’s siboo subbu and so you know it was 4 so technically on some levels full scale is a little bit older than 4 years it’s June four four years ago says 2018 and but it it had the giga gigabook was that first few months so we brought on beta client 1 we started with the gigabook model that went about two months and it’s like you know what? there’s an opportunity here to snap a couple people in we already had the office. We had all that stuff going on beta client one next month beta client 2 and then it was June four years ago we have a client 3

21:24.00

Andrew Morgans

We had an idea.

21:26:00

Matt DeCoursey

And there’s a funny story with that too because you know I like to fuck with Watson a little bit every now and then I talk to listenersers they’re like are you always mean to him I’m like I’m never mean to that. It’s all he asks for it. So with that I I took Matt out to lunch I I went. Said hey man I need to take you out to lunch today man I got to talk to you about some stuff. I kind of just left it like that and like walked away we went to lunch

21:50:00

Andrew Morgans

I’m thinking I’m getting broken up with that’s

21:52:00

Matt DeCoursey

yeah, my oh my god kind of wondering what was up and so I sat down and we at Charleston’s and and we’re sitting there talking I said now. So I don’t think I should spend any more of my time working on gigabook and he looked right back at he said dude I just bought half the company so that was the gotcha moment but I was like well no, there’s some good news here and I laid out the whole thing with full scale I said there’s a huge opportunity. Neither one of us. When we so when we became business partners at at gigabook had any idea how bad the talent shortage was so at the time there was about 250000 open programming jobs in the us and I was like shit I don’t think we’re ever going to fill these. Like I did the math I did all this market research I like was looking up like how many computer science students. There were like how much this was going to take to and I was like I don’t think we can ever fill this gap and not only have we not filled it. It’s gotten wider. so now there’s anywhere between 750000 so here. We are we start full scale 3 beta clients we fast forward 1 year from then we had a hundred employees.

23:06:00

Andrew Morgans

Yep I was here for that by the way.

23:08:00

Matt DeCoursey

man I gotta tell you what that was wild. Like there was times I looked at Matt and you know I mean let’s talk about Watson I mean that dude’s done some stuff you know, right?

23:14:00

Andrew Morgans

and and what I can say for all of us that. Ah I mean I’ve been here as a part of it at least like as a mentee first and you know now I’m on the startup hustle as a host but um, just watching you know you and Matt. Everyone went through personal things we had ah the pandemic happen right? and we had a so tsunami right?

23:33:00

Matt DeCoursey

typhoon typhoon was just recently yeah,

23:36:00

Andrew Morgans

just recently but just like some serious things in those 4 years out

23:39:00

Matt DeCoursey

went Matt went through marital changes and got married has another kid now and you know when without the. You know the pandemic was was pretty wild and you know let’s let’s back up even the year before that so here we are with a hundred employees and you know we’re trying to figure this out and and you look at you know from the outside looking in it looks like we just had this smooth growth pattern but it was like. It was it on many days. It felt more like a teenager learning how to drive a car. It’s like you know gas break gas break gas break and you know so halfway through the the timeline you know, right? when covid started which is about half of the timeline of the company at this point. We were finally about to become profitable. We had put a couple million bucks in and you know it’s time to get that back and and really half things going and all of a sudden covid comes and oh man we lost 35% of our revenue and six weeks so we you talk about like the. Gut punch of and you know at this point like I mean I’m pretty all in at this point I’m pretty close to it and you just talk about like the whole feeling of you know that had been a really long 2 years and for those of you that want to be an entrepreneur and. You’re not married or you don’t have ah a partner or whatever kids see I didn’t I had you know I didn’t before that but I had I have a wife I have kids and like you got to justify like the insanity on some days. so that was it was really a kind of a devastating feeling to have that occur. We thought we were talking to an investor about making a investment that fell apart and like all of it so you know we had to had to figure out a way to cobble together. The next thing that we ended up getting that revenue back. It took about five months but all that empty space on the graph where it dipped was you know we’re already a couple million bucks into this at this point and they might as well just put another million on there. Yeah, it’s about what that cost and but honestly covid probably did it not probably it did full scale. A huge favor. It did a couple things at the time the business was so reliant on a real estate footprint because everyone came to the office every day and here’s the thing is like in the Philippines which is realistically so parts of it are very first world and parts of it are very third so it’s kind of a second world. Kind of thing but it’s really expensive real estate and there’s a lot going on and you know like I don’t know like if you look at if I hire 20 new people I got to give them developer grade laptops and extra monitor a whole bunch of stuff I’m looking at a couple grand to seat. So if I’m going to hire 20 new people. I got $40000 forty Fifty k in costs before they show up and earn a dollar and then I got to hope I got to find a client and the contracts and all that so you know I really went all in at that point I had been building the full scale management platform. A little bit and it was really just an employee database. It was really just so could show people a profile.

26:50:00

Andrew Morgans

It’s really cool for anyone that hasn’t seen it like it’s it’s it’s actually you just called it. The full scale management. You know, but it’s actually a really cool system. Did you work on that during the slump is that like you because you had

27:01:00

Matt DeCoursey

I started building it nine months in to the into the into the company  you know that’s just kind of the way I do things like there’s there was nothing so there aren’t very many companies that do what full scale does and’s let’s talk about that for a second. So at full scale. We’re in the business of building long-term teams. Yeah, like we don’t do short-term contracts. We don’t do hourly work. These are not freelancers. They are our full-time employees that essentially become our clients full-time employees. Yeah, so there’s no real. There wasn’t there’s not a platform to manage all that you could cobble like 6 or 7 together. But it was still. Not great and the but the the full scale platform which is now really sophisticated and honestly is like what’s driving our growth right now and what will make our growth exponential in the coming years. So wait till the fifth year episode. I’m expecting for 3 or 4 times more employees in the next year. Well but I can I couldn’t we couldn’t do it until the platform came along so the platform at the time started as like an employee database and it just kind of kept growing and growing and growing. The problem was is in a cash strap business. You have a hard time dedicating your resources to things like that. So back to that team. Driving team start stop, start stop, start stop. So you know we built the platform often with excess capacity like people that were in between projects which is the wrong way to do it because it’s like a rotating cast. Um, and just it wasn’t until the pandemic hit and I realized I was like okay so the company that we knew the way we knew it was probably not going to exist again. And yeah, here’s the thing I still pay for all that office real estate.

26:47:00

Andrew Morgans

Go make a skate park.

28:49:00

Matt DeCoursey

Well we have enough space because I literally have 2 floors of a high-rise building and an I t park like Twenty Thousand Square feet yeah you got room for about 350 people and that’s crazy. Yeah now I do still pay for that. But I’m okay with that because we just went heavy into managing the platform. So the platform has has 3 main faces. There’s management and then we have to deal with applicants and then we have to deal with our employees and then we also have clients so excuse me, it’s 4 4 phase. And you know so our clients will sign up at fullscale io and we’ve built something that you can answer like 2 minutes worth of questions and the platform will now match you up with available service providers with that. We also merged Gigabook to the full scale platform. So our prospects and clients can make appointments. It’s all self-service in that regard and with the update we launched today. It is almost full self-service and they can request contracts. They can manage their whole team. It has daily reports weekly reports. Ah really everything, and that’s in the client that’s in just in the client side now here’s the thing is the clients don’t give us contracts unless we have people that can perform the work. So we’re a premium service provider. We only like we need 30 applicants on average to find the 1 person we want to hire so in the last two months and we’re recording this a little earlier than the four year birthday. But we’ve had over 900 applicants each of the last two months we also use Gigabook there to streamline and automate everything. So you know an applicant will sign up and we’ve created 48 of our own certifications that we’ve now given to hundreds if not thousands of people so we know the benchmark for what’s good and what’s not. So if they get a specific score the system now moves them along and streamlines and puts them with the right kind of interviewer all of that and that’s the big thing that’s made the difference because even until recently it was still take us a couple weeks to get through a interview and we can now do it in three days.

30:58:00

Andrew Morgans

And you have to have a person to do the interviews and like. You know,

30:59:00

Matt DeCoursey

you have to establish your guidelines and time you get people involved their opinions kind of can swing the data. You could have a great person but maybe the interviewer doesn’t like that person for any reason. So yeah, we’ve but we’ve been able to really establish like what we want and and when it comes to hiring developers and dude we’re laser sharp like I honestly I was talking to our COO I said, name the last bad hire. We made it was like two and a half years ago d I mean it’s like we’ve gotten that exact with it and that’s why we’re growing so our clients that. So we we also only work with a specific type of client and we’re looking for like really challenging stuff because if you want to get the best people they don’t want to come and do boring shit all day.

31:46:00

Andrew Morgans

Yeah, they want work on cool projects challenge and they want to work around other really smart people. Can speak to my team on that in regards of just the projects they’re working on. You know if they’re working on ah brand a product that’s just boring. You know I see that and if they’re working on something cool. They light up about it. You know?

31:58:00

Matt DeCoursey

Yeah, so you know with that we had a very disruptive approach to Cebu which had some antiquated Hiring and business practices and we just throw in a match on that I just got back from him. There’s no doubt that full scale is the top place for technologists to work in Cebu. We’re expanding our footprint at Manila and Davao now. But I mean our competitors are telling. People that are leaving them to come work with us. They’re like we can’t compete just go go.

32:29:00

Andrew Morgans

So there’s something that I just found out recently that you you probably already know but obviously Amazon has some kind of training facility in the Philippines ah for staff. Um, and this is what I found out from another agency owner that’s in the Philippines. Okay, so they ah Seller candy uses ah filipinos in their agency to hire them out and um, but Amazon has a corporate training center there. Well they train they train them and then they leave to the private sector. Ah basically to go work for these private agencies that are working in the Amazon space because they get treated way better. Better quality of life higher pay. Um, so there’s a lot of companies out there developing talent um to compete with on on all sides of the industry which I didn’t know that was happening from Amazon Corporate I thought there was just certain agencies.

33:16:00

Matt DeCoursey

Our hiring model was only getting people that had that kind of experience and now ah you know I think you saw you? well you shared my posts. So. We are now operating on all sides of the spectrum I just made a deal with 6 different universities to line up the top 3 now they have like 5000 computer science students there you know which is like 10 times more than the state of Kansas probably is right now. And those those students in that top elite group like we’re bringing them in. We’re gonna we’re gonna train them even more and we’re gonna set them loose I mean that’s that’s a couple hundred kids. Give scholarships internships. You know it’s like certain things. It’s like I don’t know there’s some of these solutions are are painfully simple but not apparent. So I was talking to the dean of the University Of Suboo which by the way the university of Cebu’s mascot is the webmaster. yes, that’s ah I’ll have my University Of Suboo Webmasters basketball jersey okay yeah custom making that for me I believe and if you’re listening university of subu I wasn’t kidding about wanting that honorary degree. I’m gonna finally graduate from college I think that give me an honorary degree. Maybe I’ll get you one too. But with that you know I said what’s the biggest challenge you need to solve and she said Matt. It’s almost impossible to survive computer science when you don’t have a computer so you look at like and I’m such a big advocate of leaving a positive footprint where you’re out like dude I literally so we decommission our laptops after 4 years because our our agreement with our clients is modern cutting edge equipment. And it’s also a big recruitment draw. So I’m going to just literally be cycling hundreds of computers through these schools that are treasures for them. And for us just like sitting in a server room right now and you know just try I don’t know like whether they work for us or somewhere else or whatever like I mean take it.

35:15:00

Andrew Morgans

One of the um, the greatest entrepreneur stories I’ve ever heard comes from my own personal life. Um I grew up in Africa I was in Congo there’s a guy named feli kobboza and um, he was just a great friend. Honestly, an angel to my family in like real physical saved our life situations and um. He started with he was standing outside of a copy shop copy shop like copier like paper copies and he would get people off the street Kshas is 12000000 people so it’s like a New York in regards the amount of people. Um and for ten francs which was congolese franks at the time he would make a copy for people for whatever they need and he was out there hustling. Um, from there. He went to internet cafes at the time so this was like 2001 and he was using floppy disk and internet and getting people like a few minutes at a time on the internet to send a resume or something in Kinshasa and now he owns hotels and these internet cafes. He’s involved in the universities there. And um I just know firsthand like what a 10 year old computer like the value that some of this old equipment still has there. It’s literally um, everything from here ends up in one of these countries you know and and the ability to have a computer. He literally changed his daughters here in university so went from absolute. Maybe 99% unemployment in that city to you know sending his daughter to to university here with an old computer

36:36:00

Matt DeCoursey

in the Philippines then some of the neighborhoods they have these booths that are computer booths and you put a peso in it a philipine which is about ¢2 and that gives you 5 minutes. It’s like coinop and I mean it’s really foreign for like what I think about. But yeah I’m looking for it I want to outfit a couple computer science labs and whatever

37:02:00

Andrew Morgans

that’s legacy. That’s cool.

37:03:00

Matt DeCoursey

Yeah, yeah, and that’s the thing is’s like if you can make a difference then and you got to do it in a way that. I’m not doing that with an expectation of return. I’m positive it’ll probably generate one.

37:13:00

Andrew Morgans

It’s investment. It’s nurturing.

37:15:00

Matt DeCoursey

Yeah so I mean like I said you look at there’s so much shit that businesses like I look at the last businesses that I’ve owned and I didn’t know this because it had to move it afterward like all the crap. Just kind of end up with or stockpile and you know

37:31:00

Andrew Morgans

moving into this building.

37:32:00

Matt DeCoursey

There’s way. Yeah there’s ways to find that you utilize the excess capacity at your business and really make a difference.

37:39:00

Andrew Morgans

Okay, so we’re rounding out.

37:41:00

Matt DeCoursey

Do we have to do our ad reads so we don’t get in trouble?

37:42:00

Andrew Morgans

Yeah, well I have the founder of full scale on here. So I think about how silly that was I was thinking about how silly that was but but honestly as as a um, you know lover of startup Hustle as a host on it as a beneficiary of startup Hustle’s reach. We wouldn’t be here without full scale. So sure you know thank you to full scale team if anyone’s listening to this episode for all the work behind the scenes. Um, let’s round it out with like you know a couple more questions about full scale just like you know some factual stuff like what was the typhoon like but you know that was one of the questions I wanted to bring up was just like what was going through that typhoon I think we had a pandemic here. Through the pandemic then there’s a typhoon.

38:21:00

Matt DeCoursey

So so you talk about it felt like I was going into covid again.

38:28:00

Andrew Morgans

what a mental challenge

38:28:00

Matt DeCoursey

So, December of 2021. What this is what Andrew’s talking about. Typhoons hit the Philippines all the time and by the way go to the startup Hustle Youtube channel we made a video about this and I documented a lot of it along the way. It’s pretty powerful stuff, man, because you know we we got some real time footage in there and some real time reactions. So it’s not uncommon for typhoons at the Philippines. In fact, when I was just there. There was a typhoon out and sea just rained a lot and most of the time even when they’re mildly strong. It’s just inconvenient a day or 2 this one just kind of spun in the sea and then made landfall like pretty much bullseyed Cebu and it was a category 5 strength hurricane when it hit land which is powerful I’m talking like triple Digit mile per hour winds and stuff like that and honestly I wasn’t really prepared for it. I reached out the next day when you know our COO called me he said dude this looks bad and the next day our our development manager’s named Nax. He went down to the office just to see if it was there and like working and he hit me up on slack and I said how bad is it and he said it’s terrible I said tell me how terrible he said I haven’t seen this in 20 years and I said shit now this is on a Friday and I told him I said dude you need to immediately assume and prepare for the fact that everybody that works at full scale is probably going to show up at the office on Monday morning. Go get his find water. All of it I mean anything you can and he did exactly that he spent the next two days driving in every possible direction any which where he could just to find like. Keep um, we get a lot of employees so like a couple hundred people show up and you need to give all 3 do you have 600 bottles of water downstairs because you probably don’t I don’t have them up here. So go find these things because here’s the thing is the whole infrastructure was out so power was out which the power runs the pumps that drives the water which dude I have a new appreciation for how fucked we all are without electricity. Yep because you can’t use your credit card. You can’t use the store. You can’t do anything and so then ah you couple that with the internet infrastructure being down and now you’re really in bad shape. So, ure as shit I mean tons of our employees showed up Monday morning now here’s the thing is that’s not about trying to do work. They weren’t going to the office to do work. They were seeking refuge. Yeah, so we had a ton of people that just their lives were devastated. You know their houses were ruined a lot of people were trapped in their neighborhoods because they were out. Wherever they were at big trees and things fall and you got to wait to clear the road. you can’t drive out of it or anything so it’s completely devastated. So the first matter at hand is okay, is everyone safe. So we began the process and throughout that whole first weekend I was really I mean like every 15 minutes I was pretty much calling our COO and we we learned a lot from COVID we learned a hell of a lot about contingency planning. So obviously the first thing is is everybody okay, like you. Yeah, not even thinking about work or anything like that that you’ll come back to that later. On top of this too we had a shitload of clients that know their teams at fall scale pretty well and they’re asking are they alive? You know and like you have to tell people like I don’t know yet. Think about that. Yeah, it’s heavy shit, man. Yeah, it’s also like a week before Christmas so like we’re we’re going bumps even talking.

42:08:00

Andrew Morgans

Well we’re going through that you know like I grew up in a war zone in Congo so me personally as a friend like I just really relate to that that chaos that’s happening and you know the more the poorer you are. In some ways like

42:18:00

Matt DeCoursey

the more you’re devastated.

42:19:00

Andrew Morgans

Yeah, the less help you get a must house and the walls around your compound and you know and you got 10 roofs and it’s just hard for a lot of people to understand you know,

42:30:00

Matt DeCoursey

but so we had to start try to start counting. Everyone. So obviously the people that are showing up the office was the fastest way to do that. But that’s only about half. Because the other half of people. We’re all distributed. We’ve been working remote.

42:41:00

Andrew Morgans

How are you guys staying in contact if the power was out?

42:43:00

Matt DeCoursey

They came to the office. So the office didn’t lose power. It can lose internet and it has backups for that and that’s part of how they deal with that so it was prepared. So we were welcoming everybody to come in because they you know like charge your phone so you can try to make a call and let someone else know you’re okay. You know we let everyone know like first we’re gonna we’re gonna take care of stuff. You know like don’t worry about the work side of things. Um. But yeah, so we had about half about half of our employees showed up which here’s another thing too at the time there was covid restrictions so we had to deal with that.

43:17:00

Andrew Morgans

Did you have any clients that that didn’t respond well to like being put on pause?

43:24:00

Matt DeCoursey

or no no I mean in honestly if we had I might have told him to fuck off.

43:26:00

Andrew Morgans

Of course, I just didn’t know what what? like yeah you know all the practical applications of that act like

43:30:00

Matt DeCoursey

I was so I was so overwhelmed with the outpouring of support that we had. So, the very first thing we did that Friday was I sent $40,000 US over. And I told them to go get the money and figure out how to go get it now. There was lines at the banks that were ours and another thing too is like you don’t usually just carry 40 grand around in a bag anywhere. So but the reason for that is we knew that the ATMs would be down. we if we just put money in your bank account. You wouldn’t be able to access it. Yeah, we wanted to distribute. Some funds immediately to everyone which we were immediately doing on Monday to the best of my knowledge we were the first company that was really distributing storm relief at the same time we were. We did a fundraiser for Startup Hustle through the Startup Hustle chat we auctioned some things off like some of the. You know the Full Scale Suite tickets, I’m like I don’t need these. You know, raised about 25 grand there and Full Scale clients put in about the same awesome. So we came up with about. We had 3 different rounds of storm relief that we were able to distribute to in cash to our to our employees that made a big impact.So you know and also just like things like procuring water and stuff like that, letting people even if they weren’t working at the office all day they could come by and get a couple bottles of water because that’s tough to get You know, just overall just caring deal with it now. The hardest part was we got so we got 5 4 or five days into this and we at this point so people could come to the office and we could use the internet there so we could do you know Zoom calls with them and they said we found 70% of our employees and they were like happy about that. I was like guys,

45:13:00
Andrew Morgans

Where’s the other thirty?

45:14:00

Matt DeCoursey

Where’s the other 30%? Because at the time we had 220 employees so 30%, that’s a lot of people, man. So we were still continuing to pull people and do stuff like that we had to relocate like 5 families which we paid for. Like we had one of our employees and this wife they had a five month old baby and they were in a house with no roof I put them in a 4 star hotel you know because I couldn’t get an airbnb or anything else because it was just really tough and we really we did have to relocate several people. Um, but yeah, it was tough, man, so we managed to kind of like

45:50:00
Andrew Morgans

In a way bringing the team in hindsight, not in hindsight, but you know, down the road a little bit I’m sure it was definitely for your team to see you guys step up in a way like that.

46:01:00

Matt DeCoursey

You know we got pretty good reviews from that. We do ask our employees to you know we just did an employee satisfaction survey and you know I mean it was you know without without all the folks at Full Scale in Cebu like I mean I’m not successful. I need them, I work for them. Not the other way around and you know it’s ah. So that was tough and you know it was a lot of work. It was a lot of it was a lot of coordination. You know, needing to exercise empathy and understanding in a lot of different cases and you know our clients really stepped up and you know honestly that whether the timing at that being around Christmas sucked. It also played to our advantage because a lot of people already had time scheduled off and our clients weren’t going to be in the office. So as shitty as the Christmas timing was, it was also kind of beneficial to the overall situation because there was just a Ah, less of a

46:47:00

Andrew Morgans

spirit of giving, less demand on new stuff.

47:01:00

Matt DeCoursey

It was more so that like I mean just like a lot of lot of our clients just kind of shut stuff down like that. Especially that last week before like between Christmas and New year so you know we had you know, not that. That made the overall situation any better but I got to say like and I cried when I was just over there recently. I was just emotional about I I just have so much respect for how tough everyone there is. I mean dude, if the roof blew off my house I mean, man. You know but I mean they get right back in and fix it and you know like.

47:38:00

Andrew Morgans

there’s nothing to cry. You just have to get to work like you know, yeah literally like fight or flight you know

47:42:00

Matt DeCoursey

and that’s exactly what they did and you know we were basically back at full speed a couple weeks later and you know where we had fringe cases and stuff like that we took care of it. You know those weren’t loans like we took just took care of it. You know and like I said it was disruptive and yeah, my wife asked me about that and you know I I don’t know I just kind of went into like old experienced mode and I look back at it and I told her I said I think I’ll look back at that when I retire as like one of my better moments as a manager and a leader.

48:20:00
Andrew Morgans

Yeah I think this maybe a little silly, there’s a Jake Cole song, ah a newer one on his last album.

48:27:00

Matt DeCoursey

Are you going to sing it?

48:28:00

Andrew Morgans

Nah. But he talks about he talks about you know, ah preparing in the summer for those moments that happen those tough ones and it’s like it’s you know you said you you went back to your like your experience from the past and lean on those moments but what he’s talking about is just like you gotta do the work. Learning this stuff ahead of time you learning this stuff in the off season. So when like you know it like

48:47:00

Matt DeCoursey

it was a contingency planning. It’s like Patrick mahomes stepping up to the line knowing he’s got 5 possible audibles like you had to. We had to create 6 plans that were detailed and deep knowing that 5 of them aren’t going to be used or maybe pieces are there and that. The the big part of that exercise that matters is when a moment comes and you need to make an important decision having already discussed it or thought about it at all can change the way you make that decision when you need to in real time.

49:17:00

Andrew Morgans

Yep I think I’ve always thought about that with drunk driving like like. I’m not gonna make the decision once I’m drunk I’m making a decision when I’m sober not to drive drunk. You know so that whenever I get there, it’s ah my decision’s already made up, right? and ah, it’s a metaphor but like I think we can all relate to that. It’s like no,

49:34:00

Matt DeCoursey

you don’t you gotta sit down and talk about every possible outcome that can occur and how and the cause and effect relationship on all of that. And you know and including things that aren’t comfortable to talk about like we we had to literally sit and talk about like what are we going to do if we have 5 employees that died.

49:52:00

Andrew Morgans

Yeah and you feel guilty like running your shower a little long when when you’re literally dealing with water. Like getting the team water to drink maybe a bottle or 2 a day right?

50:00:00

Matt DeCoursey

You would have loved my approach I was like I mean I was literally like telling our employees because the hotels have like water filtration systems I said go find a place that will sell us water as much as we need and they’re like well it could be. Just much I’m like I don’t care how much it costs water just go get it. You know and like they got that sorted out pretty quickly. But you know this’s mess.

50:23:00

Andrew Morgans

Okay typhoon, we’re going to put ah put a bookmark in that like when you close up the episode and I think what’s more fitting than the founders freestyle of course. So you know what’s what’s some advice you’d give we’ve talked about full skill There’s so much more we could talk about maybe we’ll talk about again part 2 like on a birthday. Um, but what’s some advice you’d give for people 4 years in like you know, um, incredible. What’s been accomplished and you know maybe even four plus. Ah but what’s some advice. What’s it. You you choose but something to share with people that are um, you know, starting up a new idea or looking to scale or overcome some big challenges like a typhoon.

50:59:00

Matt DeCoursey

I think that for us it’s the understanding that the people at your business are your biggest asset. For us,we have a microscopic chur rate like people rarely if ever quit at full scale and that’s because we listen to who they are and what they experienced and didn’t like at other places and what we can do to make the company better and sometimes you get ah you hear a lot and you’re like. That’s not we can’t do that. Yeah, you know you can’t do it every time but you know what’s important and you find ways to answer and I think as long as you talk to the people like we’re so transparent you know after every time I leave the Philippines I always ask the management to talk to the employees and they say things like. I can’t believe the CEO came and talked to me that long and and when I hear that the first thought in my head is where did you work before? you know I think it’s about I think the people that make the vision happen with you need to know what the vision is and. And I think that it’s really important that your folks that the people that work at your business know that you care about them as people and not they’re not just like a sprocket. you know so I mean that’s been a big thing for us and you know overall I think that. Really in the end you have to figure out a problems worth solving. Ten years ago, I chased shiny things in every direction and you’ve heard me talk about this off air a lot like I’m just trying to be aces at like 1 or 2 things and that’s it. I’m a huge advocate of that right now I get people that that. Growth stuff out in and around my world all the time you could do this, you could do that. How about you, you know people like why don’t you have virtual assistants or or accountants or whatever. This is not what we do. We help people build software teams and we do it quickly and affordably and and it’s and is this management platform that we built. So we expect 400 employees by the end of the year that’s our conservative number expect that’s a double in 2023 maybe more I don’t know the platform has made our reach global and it’s pretty crazy.

53:13:00

Andrew Morgans

what kind of revenue are we talking about is that something we can share on air here?

53:16.10

Matt DeCoursey

I mean like right now? Like I mean like ten million a year ish and it’s expensive to run our business too like that’s the thing is like I’d love I want like we find we we just content I mean that’s with our employee base now I mean so it doubles you know as the people double. We have a lot of like we hit the point where we don’t. Because of the platform we don’t need to hire 6 people to do you know we have 2 people that could do things because we just did digital transformation

53:45.00

Andrew Morgans

I mean I’m I’m definitely the long game entrepreneur in regards I like to build stuff right in quality and if I am not if it’s not just like I’m trying to get to an exit or I’m trying to get to this endpoint. It’s just about building it right?

53:57:00

Matt DeCoursey

You know so I don’t even think of people ask me, they’re like do you have an exit strategy? No I’m just trying to lik

54:03:00

Andrew Morgans

Build the best thing ever.

54:04:00

Matt DeCoursey

Yeah, just do what we do and provide value and and build a good. Ah, build a good company as if we’ve done that the words got out and the best people are coming to find us. Yeah as clients and as employees and it’s getting easier and easier to do it. But it’s so hard. You know like and it’s I mean honestly when we’re talking I’ve saw advisors and a lot of other things because we’re starting to get noticed. there’s not a whole lot of people that are doing what we’re doing at the scale that we’re doing and with the trajectory. So I don’t know like people like well do you want to try to take this public I don’t know I mean I don’t know what’s my benefit in that. What’s our benefit as a company I mean I’ll ask the employees so you know like are you trying to sell the company. I don’t really think about that you know like I mean I’m forty six years old I’m not going to do this forever. But. You know, like the main. My main priority is that you know I I don’t know I I wouldn’t ever do anything that was like the double cross. You know I wouldn’t never put the company or the people in it because once again without the folks and everyone works at full scale like I’m at the bottom of the rung. And in my world, the CEO, I work for everybody else. It’s my job to find any and every way to make them as successful and happy as possible.

55:19:00

Andrew Morgans

We should make that a micro clip.

55:21:00

Matt DeCoursey

Maybe. But it’s true man. It’s true. So and there’s I don’t know there’s a lot I feel like I’m just getting started when we’re just getting started on this.

55:31:00

Andrew Morgans

Well Startup Hustle listeners I hope you enjoyed ah getting a little behind the scenes of fullscale. But yeah, even more so mad de coey and in his story. Um there’s so much more here I’ve been I’ve been around I’ve been a minte I’ve been a colleague I’ve been you know a podcast host here the last four or five years watching him and Matt.Um, you know, build full scale and you know we’ve we’ve actually ah partnered up in a building together. So we’re on a couple of floors here on the KC K-side and and revitalizing the KCK downtown area is one of our long-term projects together as well. So have been here for the ride and it’s it’s been one. That’s ah. A ton of fun. A lot of ups a lot of downs. But I think that’s what makes us um, love this stuff. You know and that’s why we love sharing it with you guys. So won’t be the last time. Ah, we know we have Matt on here but hope you guys enjoyed and in a shout out. It’s weird say in the sponsors spot but shoutout to fullscale io helping you build software teams quickly and affordably. Ah, even here for our founder of full scale Matt we’ll see you next time. Hustlers see you

56:33:00

Matt DeCoursey

bye.