First, CLICK HERE, and listen to this short yet powerful quote from Warren Buffet.

Oddly enough, this quote found me twice on the same day.  The second time is when it really hit and I realized why I saw it.  

It was the universe speaking to me due to my meeting earlier that day.    

I met with a restaurant owner and friend yesterday about his recent business struggles. I could tell he was beaten up and on his last leg, at least he thinks he is. Our conversation wasn’t about me coming up with some miracle marketing plan that would lift his sales and profits and fix his issues. It was about focus, mindset, and picking a lane.  

As we spoke, my mind started to pull up memories from last Summer. In April 2023, I had a plan to grow this division’s sales and profits rapidly; the problem was that it only grew our sales. The plan was flawed, and so was my focus.  In late August, at the peak of the sales growth, I stared at RED numbers so big I had no idea what to do.  I also thought, “WHY ME?”  Why am I going through this, I did my job.  I’ve hustled my ass off, why is this thing going so wrong. 

The graph below shows the growth of one of our company’s divisions.  This chart shows only sales, not profit, which is why I’m telling you this story.  Had profit been on here, we’d be WAY below the $0 line and barely peeking above it a few times this year.  

You see, while all of this is going on, I’m also seeing others who have grown in similar fashions, yet also hit homeuns with their profits too. I’m studying how just a few years earlier, Alex Hormozi grew from $100,000 per month to $1 million per month in a year, growth that dwarfs this.  Knowing where I was at the time and what he did sitting in the back of my head had me thinking I was a failure.  That I had royally F’d up!  And I’d be lying if I didn’t say there was anger and resentment like I was owed this.  

But in the midst of the nights in August and September, when I would wake up at 2 am, work for a few hours, and then fall asleep again, it hit me.  This was the price of admission.  This was my tuition to success.  I could fold up and fail, or I could tackle this problem head-on.

But more importantly, I had to realize that this was a MATT PLAPP PROBLEM.  No one else was to blame.  

During this time, I learned two important lessons.

1st – I was passing the buck.  I was trying to hire for a weakness and then ignore it completely.  

That weakness, in this case, was finance. I had found a part-time CFO and threw him the reins, thinking all my problems would disappear. Unfortunately, this was in the middle of a heavy travel schedule, and I tend to take my eye off the ball of things like this and instead go deep into thinking and dreaming, AKA  my “DEEP WORK.”  As I got back into the office and realized the problems, I blamed him when, in fact, I should have blamed myself.  I had not educated myself enough on what I’d hired him for to properly work with him.    

Back in 2020, when I had the idea to build a restaurant marketing software, a friend gave me this exact advice.  He told me to buy an existing company, not to build one.  WHY?  His reasons were solid; he said, “Matt, you don’t know software coding, and if you try to manage a team of software engineers, they will bleed you dry, and you won’t be able to get your project to the finish line.  But if you buy an existing working product, you can work with that team to build into it what it’s missing. “

And here I was in 2023, amid a massive spike in sales, let a SIX FIGURE loss every month for five months in a row.  

What did I do? I dug in, improved myself in that area of expertise, and fixed the problem. But more importantly, I accepted the fact that it was a fix that wasn’t going to happen in a few months but likely 10-12 months.  

2nd—The next lesson was to focus. When this happened, I was trying to be everything to everyone. I had too many balls in the air, and I wasn’t leaning on the great leadership teams, I was doing too much at an average level instead of one thing at a high level.  

So yesterday, as I was talking with this restaurant owner, I reflected on this time and told him about my journey. I told him what I saw in him was what I saw in me last summer. He’s trying to run two restaurants, doing too much, and not focusing 100% of his attention on the problem at hand.  I told him he needed to ignore everything and dig into this ONE problem with everything he had at a very high level.  

And then that night, as I scrolled through my phone, the universe spoke to me.  The Warren Buffet clip came across my screen, and it HIT HARD!

“A billion dollar lesson is slow success builds character, and fast success builds ego in a man.”

Warren is spot on.  The lessons I’ve learned in the past year are priceless. Do I wish I had the $500,000 or so back from last Summer? Yes.  

But honestly, NO!  

Had my plan last year skyrocketed our company and loaded the bank account with massive profits, it would have caused more problems than good.  It would have stunted my growth and made me a worse leader.  Probably the most significant win from this was my digging into studying the legends of our time and learning about their journeys.  Reading the book Shoe Dog by Phil Knight and seeing how he built Nike and his trials and tribulations made me realize it’s all part of the game. 

So to my friend from that call, this blog was for you.  

You looked in the mirror and identified the problem, you were honest with yourself and you asked for help.  All three of those things are tough, but the signs of a true leader. 

You didn’t know I was in the exact spot last year, but you found out. And I hope you see that my success today is 100% a product of my failures last year.  

You can do this, and you will. In the process, you’ll build an even stronger leader!

MP

P.S. Thank you for reminding me of my journey.  Conversations like that reinforce our lessons from the past, which many of us forget.