Lessons from launching 500+ businesses
Jordan Raynor sits down with Matt Wallace, Co-founder of ONOW Myanmar, to talk about what the Lord taught him after having to flee Myanmar after the country’s military coup, why he believes there’s no difference between spiritual and work conversations, and the #1 piece of advice he would give to aspiring entrepreneurs.
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[00:00:04] JR: Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Call to Mastery. I’m Jordan Raynor. This is a podcast for Christians who want to do their most exceptional work for the glory of God and the good of others. Each week, I host a conversation with a Christian who’s pursuing world-class mastery of their craft. We talk about their path to mastery, their daily habits and how the gospel of Jesus Christ influences their work.
Guys, today’s episode is excellent. We’re talking with my new friend, Matt Wallace. He’s the co-founder and executive director of Opportunities NOW or ONOW, a social enterprise that has helped Myanmar’s impoverished young people launch and grow more than $500 businesses. Matt’s a world class entrepreneur and leader. He received the 2019 Alumni Humanitarian Award for the University of Illinois. Trust me, very well deserved as this episode will prove.
Matt and I recently sat down. We talked about what he learned during the military coup in Myanmar that forced him and most of his team out of the country. We talked about why he believes there’s no difference between spiritual and work conversations. We talked about the number one piece of advice Matt would give to aspiring entrepreneurs. As I said in the podcast, this is one of the best pieces of advice I’ve heard on the podcast for founders. I want to make sure, if you’re entrepreneurial at all, that you hear it. Please enjoy this terrific episode with my new friend, Matt Wallace.
[INTERVIEW]
[00:01:53] JR: Hey, Matt. Welcome to the podcast. Thanks for doing this.
[00:01:56] MW: Hey! Thanks so much, Jordan. Thanks for having me. It’s great to be here.
[00:02:00] JR: Yeah, at 6:30 AM your time. Nonetheless, I love it. All right. First things first, what is ONOW?
[00:02:09] MW: ONOW, Opportunities NOW is the long form, but we call it ONOW. ONOW is essentially an incubator, a business incubator. We help young women, typically migrants in Myanmar launch their own businesses. We connect them to the funding that they need to launch, we help them do the market research, we walk them through the process of actually getting off the ground and we coach them for a couple of years. We’re a business incubator.
[00:02:35] JR: I love it. That’s easy to understand. For those of us who have never been to Myanmar, tell us about the country and the people just to help us establish some context here.
[00:02:46] MW: Yeah. I would say, the first context that many of your listeners may be familiar with is the fact that there is a coup happening right now in the country, a military coup right now. That is typically in the news now and then here in the West, in the states, but it’s big news for me, and my family and my teammates. Myanmar has a history of military dictatorship. It was a dictatorship from about the mid-50s all the way up until the year 2011. Then they had this really important political opening that took place, where suddenly, people gained access to markets for the first time, they gained access to freedoms, like freedom of the press and freedom to gather for the first time. Had really strong 10 years of economic growth and this kind of new experience of liberation and realizing what was like to experience the freedoms that we kind of take for granted in the West.
It’s a Buddhist country, about 85% Buddhist but incredibly diverse. The official number is 135 different people groups in the country, different ethnic groups. So very diverse and it’s not a small country, it’s 53 million people. The size of Texas, land mass wise, so it’s a big country that we often don’t think about, but it sits right at these crosshairs of China with a billion and a half people, India with a billion and a half people. The rest of Southeast Asia with about a billion people. It sits right in the middle of half of the world. It’s an important piece of land.
[00:04:10] JR: Yeah. I read an article about you. You went to college planning on studying politics. Actually, similar story to mine. I entered Florida State as poli sci major. I’m really curious how you ended up founding Opportunities NOW. What’s the story there?
[00:04:28] MW: Well, I can spend a lot of time on. I want to spend every moment on it, right? But I went to school at the University of Illinois. I’m an Illinois grad. I actually grew up on the farms of Southern Illinois, South Eastern Illinois. My dad, he spent a lot of time in the farm and I ride on a tractor with him and all of these kind of really fun things about growing up in the cornfields of Illinois.
[00:04:47] JR: Quintessential Illinois farm boy story, yeah.
[00:04:50] MW: Exactly, right. I went to the Springfield campus of the University of Illinois, intent on getting into state politics. If you know anything about Illinois, state politics can be a little bit messy in the state.
[00:05:03] JR: That’s a kind word, yeah.
[00:05:05] MW: Right. A number of our past governors are in prison, I think today still.
[00:05:09] JR: I think you guys might hold a record for number of governors in prison, yeah.
[00:05:13] MW: That’s right. I grew actually very disillusioned with state politics in the middle of the University. It didn’t take me long, maybe a semester to say, “I’m going all the way to the other side of the spectrum of politics and I went all the way up to international politics, especially Southeast Asia. The other side of the world, completely different type of politics and just really grew interested in Southeast Asia and what was happening in the region. As soon as I graduated, a week later I married my wife. Her name is Heather, she’s amazing. She said, yeah, we’ll move to Asia. This will be great. So we moved. We had just past our one-year anniversary when we moved to Southeast Asia.
We went as English teachers into Myanmar. I hated teaching English, that was not for me. But I really grew interested in helping some of my friends who are running small businesses to understand how to do it effectively and understand their market and begin to look at diversifying their product lines. That’s just very natural conversation with some friends led into what became opportunities now eventually. There is one key issue that we saw and is that a lot of our friends were looking to leave the country of Myanmar and to go to other countries to look for work. They were getting into and some problems they were getting into issues where their passport was being confiscated and they were essentially being forced into labor that they were interested in. We wanted to say, “You don’t have to do that. You can stay here. We can help you and you can launch your own businesses.” That became ONOW. A friend of mine and I started it and that was 10 years ago.
[00:06:42] JR: Let’s go onto present day. You already mentioned the coup. ONOW has had a pretty dramatic 12 months. Tell us about the events that unfolded in Myanmar, that impact that’s had on you, and your family and this organization.
[00:06:57] MW: Well, I’ll start 12 months ago with the beginning of the pandemic. We have this wing of what we do that specially utilizes technology, digital technology to help us support people across all of Myanmar. It’s a big country. We’re only in one city. We didn’t want to be limited to the city, so we turned the technology to be able to serve business owners across the whole country. That ability, that capability to use technology made us a hot commodity as probably the jargon term. But a lot of people wanted to use our technology.
While everyone else was kind of shutting down for the pandemic, while everyone else was finding themselves out of work, or finding that their services weren’t that essential, we were finding the opposite and we were growing very quickly. Throughout the pandemic, we grew by leaps and bounds. We doubled in staffing size. We went from serving about 350 business owners to serving 16,000 business owners.
[00:07:51] JR: Wow!
[00:07:51] MW: It was a really big year for us and we were able to help a lot of business owners survive the pandemic. Things were in amazing shape, all the way up through February 1st. Then on February 1st, the coup happened and that was far more, I would say traumatic than the pandemic ever proved to be to Myanmar. That was true for our business and tens of thousands of other businesses as well. That really kind of turned everything upside down for us.
[00:08:19] JR: What’s going on now with the organization? It’s February 1, 2021. We’re recording this in early May of 2021. What are the last few months looked like for you guys?
[00:08:32] MW: Yeah, February was just a mess and it was followed by two more months of just a mess. It has really been very chaotic for these three months. In many cases, concern for the safety of our team is the primary top of our mind. I was on the ground in February when the coup happened, me, and my family and my teammate, Johnny, we were all in the ground for one month after the coup and finally had to make the decision to leave just because of a couple of factors. One of them being the safety of our families, the other of it being the fact that the banking system just wasn’t working and there was a financial — a major financial crisis ongoing that was putting our families at risk. So we had made the decision to leave. We made it back to the states, thankfully through some — it was difficult to get flights, it wass difficult to make the arrangements in the middle of a pandemic as well. I remember looking in February, I actually did a Google search, leading a company through a coup and a pandemic. There’s nothing on that.
[00:09:28] JR: Right. There’s no playbook.
[00:09:31] MW: There is nothing on that. But our team thankfully is safe right now. 75% of the team actually fled the City of Yangon, so 35 or so people left by the time we got to March with their families. We’ve been able to stay in touch with them at least by phone. A number of our staff are still connected to the Internet, so I have regular calls with them and we continue to stay connected. But it has been very difficult to continue to do any kind of meaningful work throughout this. And for good reason, because people, they want to be part of this movement that is trying to keep their country from falling back into decades of political darkness. We want to provide useful work, but also, we don’t want to force people to work in the middle of a really difficult time.
[00:10:13] JR: Yeah, in a really transformative time for that country. I’m curious what the Lord’s been teaching you personally throughout the last year. I mean, I’m sure the list of those things is endless, but what comes to mind first when I ask that question?
[00:10:28] MW: I would say, Colossians 1 comes to mind. I have really been thankful for that section of chapter that says that Jesus holds all things together in the middle of just insanity for the last year on multiple levels all around the world and for this thing to happen right in front of our eyes, it happened to us in Myanmar. That whole hope that kind of comes from that very strong preeminence of Christ piece, that’s been really powerful for us. It’s really what’s carried for me, what’s carried me through. It’s just that trying to have that trust in the midst of everything really shaking underneath us. I’m a big fan of that part of Colossians.
[00:11:06] JR: It’s a pretty big promise. It’s a pretty big deal. The world is in chaos, yet we know that our that our Lord is sovereign and that he’s working. As Paul says elsewhere in Romans 8:28, “All things for our good and his glory.” Even the things that we would never call good, we were never call coup is good. Hey, Matt, back track a little bit to the founding of the organization. I’m curious if there is a connection for you between your faith and your passion for the gospel and kind of the why behind founding Opportunities NOW. Is there a link there for you?
[00:11:45] MW: Yeah, definitely. I’m a big N.T. Wright fan. I’ve only become a big N.T. Wright fan —
[00:11:50] JR: Oh my gosh! We’re best friends.
[00:11:51] MW: — in the last three years or so. My colleague, Johnny, is a huge N.T. Wright fan. He got me onto the book, Surprised by Hope three or four years ago. I was thankful to find that I was already kind of tracking with this theology a little bit. It’s amazing to be on the same podcast that N.T. Wright was on.
[00:12:07] JR: Yeah, there you go. Add that to your bio, right?
[00:12:09] MW: That’s amazing. But you know, he talks about how the job of the church is, in Surprised by Hope, he talks about how the job of the church is evangelism, which I take to essentially mean, it’s our job to say how great it is to live in the kingdom and to be part of building the kingdom. The job of the church is justice and the job of the church is art. I think when I look at the issues around us in Myanmar and I had the conversations with my friends, and colleagues, we wanted to do something that spoke especially to the justice question, but also be the evangelism question, which at its core again is saying, it can be better to live in God’s kingdom and here are some very tangible ways that God’s kingdom is better.
Yes, it definitely had a — my faith definitely was a big part of what we did and why we did it. Just seeing the hurt and the need around us. Jesus, the first thing he said when he started his ministry was about the oppressed. That was a big driver for me. That was back — I moved to Myanmar in 2008. It was still a military dictatorship in 2008, so that was a big part of our early work, was seeing the oppression around us and giving people kind of the tools they need to maybe respond defiantly a little bit to the oppression that was really holding them down for decades.
[00:13:25] JR: I’m curious. I love the way that you defined evangelism. It’s sharing what’s different about the Kingdom of Christ versus the kingdoms — I mean, you have a front-row seat to the broken kingdoms of this world. I’m curious as you’ve shared that contrast with the people of Myanmar, what are the aspects of the kingdom of Christ that really stand out to them, that are winsome to them? What’s winsome about the Kingdom of God?
[00:13:53] MW: I think one of the biggest differences they see in being part of — for instance, part of our organization, where we are really adamant about the diversity of the country being a strength, being a good thing. Typically, in a country that’s this diverse, that has as many ethnic conflicts as they do have, this is actually a strength of the country. If they come into a place like ONOW and they work alongside people who are not like them, they begin to actually see that there’s a lot of value in these other people who have been mistrusted for generations.
One very tangible thing that we see, that we know is true in God’s kingdom is that people of all different ethnicities and backgrounds can really come together and love each other well and be close friends and teammates. We really stress the culture, we really stress the importance of coming together to achieve a mission, our vision together. We talk about it from the moment they come in to the organization that they’re going to be a part of a diverse company. That’s a really important thing to see happening. In the church, in Myanmar, it’s divided by ethnicities. In business, it’s divided by ethnicities. We’re just going to be a very tangible place where that isn’t true, that isn’t the case.
You get people from the city, you get people from rural areas working for us, you get people who are economic upper class and people who are in their very first jobs coming from the farm, literally the farm and just starting to learn skills. We’re a where people really have a chance to explore paths that they never would have before. I think that’s a key piece of — when God who’s creative creates us, he puts that capacity inside of us as well. It’s part of having his image in us, and that’s the kind of thing we want to communicate to people, who for decades have not imagine that that was an option for them. It’s an important part of working for us.
[00:15:42] JR: That’s really, really well said. I’m curious, I’ve talked a little bit about this, maybe a lot about this in the podcast before. But I think there are lot of people who would look at the work that you guys are doing in Myanmar and say, “Hey, Matt. That’s awesome.” You guys have helped 16,000 businesses flourish more than they were before. But it doesn’t really matter for eternity, unless you have an opportunity to explicitly share the gospel with words. I don’t know that they would say that explicitly. But I think that’s the undertone of a lot of people in the church. How would you respond to that?
[00:16:17] MW: Well, I think that’s so sad. We have a God that’s incredibly big and incredibly active across all space and time. To me, that really assumes that God is not moving in the day-to-day work of his people. That’s just not true. I really find it incredibly intriguing the idea that the things that we build now today can be part of eternity and are part of eternity in God’s kingdom. I’m really thankful that the organization we built has a lot of problems and has had a lot of failures. But I’m so confident that Christ will take what we built, especially the relationships we’ve build and purify them and turn them into lasting eternal things for his kingdom. Starting from now for all eternity.
I think we a lot of times think eternity is something that we’re going to get to later on, but we’re already living in eternity. I think it’s a very shortsighted perspective to say that the good things we do on behalf of God’s creation and God’s people to doubt the eternity, the eternal nature of that is really narrowminded and shortsighted. I feel there’s so much more to gain from having the broad perspective the God’s working right now in the works of his people and not just later on. It’s also narrow to say that the only thing that matters to God is the spirit. God created this earth, he created people, he created the physical. I think it’s really hard to say that God doesn’t care about those things, the whole thing. He cares about all of it.
[00:17:51] JR: Yeah. I was writing a devotional yesterday on just Genesis 1 through 3. Trying to unpack 10 things we can learn about how God works through those opening chapters of scripture. One thing that jumps off the page and has for me for a long time is what God called very good, what God called good in the first five days and very good on day six, is the material world. If you look at the church today and what we talk about, you wouldn’t believe that we actually believe that’s true. We still have this spiritual material divide that Gnostics really push for centuries, like we’re still dealing with the consequence of this.
I’m curious, for you applying this to your work, what does it mean to you, like day-to-day practically. How does this hope of the renewal of all things, all material things, on a new earth, what impact does that have on how you do your work now?
[00:18:52] MW: To me, it means that I’m making the most of all the conversations I have throughout the day. It means, when I’m talking to my finance administrator about our decision on what property we might have to purchase, or what loan we’re going to give out to a business owner, or what inventory we need to purchase. Those things actually are important conversations. They’re important decisions that we’re making because they impact eternity, they impact the people around me for eternity.
Every one of those little conversations is a building block in this relationship, this multiple year relationship that I’m a part of. Typically, it’s those long deep relationships that actually result in people coming to understand the kingdom and understanding what it is to follow Jesus. I just think every one of those conversations is important. There isn’t a time for spiritual conversations and a time for business conversations. They’re all together. They’re all wrapped up together. It’s part of the same conversation I’m having ongoing with my co-directors or one of my staff members. They’re part of a very long series of conversations that God uses to call people to himself.
[00:19:58] JR: That’s really good. I was talking with somebody yesterday. I was doing a Q&A. Somebody brought up a good point. It that’s true, which I believe it is. Doesn’t that lead us to more carefully consider how long we are staying parked at one place professionally, right? Like we’re living in this day and age, you and I roughly the same age, Matt, where this is my story. Jumping from one thing to the next every 18 months, not staying anywhere long enough to really build deep relationships. You spent 10 years in the same place. I got to imagine, you have a different perspective on this and what time can do in terms of building depth into relationships. Can you talk a little bit about that?
[00:20:43] MW: Yeah. I mean, I think our generation has to hear this, that really great things come when you give them four, or five, or 12 years or 20 years. We do as a generation jump from one thing to another. All of that a lot of times is about building our career, and expanding our resume, or our CV and getting really great personal development opportunities. I think that’s reasonable, honorable and it’s a reason our whole generation has done it. But also, it can be incredibly fruitful to stay in the same place with the same people for extended amounts of time.
One thing I noticed, I live in Myanmar, I’ve lived in Myanmar. I moved there in 2008. I’ve lived there and I come back to the states regularly. One thing I’ve noticed is there are less and less people out together with others. I’m not just talking about in the pandemic for the last year. Obviously, this is a different kind of situation, but it isn’t brand-new. We were already moving in that direction as a society and it feels to me like we really benefit if we consider our relationships intentionally and purposefully and over the course of the long haul. It’s just incredibly impactful to develop deep and lasting relationships.
[00:21:53] JR: Can you tell a story, obviously without using names of — just make this practical for us. What does that look like for you? Can you think of somebody within the organization that’s like, “Oh, yeah. Over the course of five years, I saw this person go from X to Y.” It’s only because of that, just discipline over time and the Lord working.
[00:22:12] MW: Yeah, for sure. I have someone who’s worked with this for eight years. I’ve been in the country for a long time. I have relationships at this point that are a decade-long. One of them was heading into a marriage decision and we were able to work through a book together and actually have conversations about what it is to be married. And myself, I was all of seven years married at that point when we started having the conversation. I considered myself an expert, which I am definitely not an expert about marriage. But I was able to build on a few years of relationship to start to talk about what it is to submit ourselves to each other and build a long and lasting, the foundations of a long and lasting marriage. Fr them to see how that’s actually related to what God sees in his church in his pride.
Those are conversations that I was able to have because of years spent in conversation. It’s just another building block and an ongoing conversation that I’m still having. I don’t know if there’s an end, right? We talked about from point A to point B or point X to point Z, that’s just — it doesn’t exactly work like that. There’s not an end point. There’s not a finish line or a line to get someone across. It is an ongoing conversation where we’re becoming more and more like Jesus. I’ve got a bunch of those examples. That’s one very tangible one, with the book study included.
[00:23:34] JR: Well said, I love that.
[00:23:35] MW: That was The Meaning of Marriage, Tim Keller that we went over.
[00:23:37] JR: I figured it was. I was going to ask, but I love it. You’re talking N.T., you’re talking Keller. Man, you’re always welcome here at the Call to Mastery. You guys are working on solving this massive problem, really a poverty and economic opportunity in Myanmar, which is a very poor country. You guys have had this great impact, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s only a dent, right? I think all of us can say that about our work. We will all look back at our work and realize that we have died with unfinished symphonies as Karl Renner said, right? How does the biblical narrative give you hope in the face of that reality?
[00:24:14] MW: That’s a great question. Some of it I think goes back to what traditionally we think that we have to be the one who plants the seed, and waters the seed, and harvest the seed. If we haven’t done the whole thing, then we’re a failure. Some of it goes back to thinking that we are actually responsible for reaching people completely, when actually, across the ark of history, it’s amazing to me to see that God uses all of his people. He asks all of his people to come alongside him and what he’s already doing to bring his kingdom. That to me is actually — it took me a while to get there, but it’s actually free. It means that I’m not responsible for anything other than obedience. I’m not responsible for anything other than expecting that God is doing something and it’s just really an honor to be a part of it. If you realize that you’re called into something much bigger than yourself, it’s such a cool thing to be a part of.
As a business leader, I’m actually — like this is one of my jobs to tell the story to my team of what our team is accomplishing and they’re playing important roles in it, but it’s not as if any single one person that’s all rezoning within a single one person. If you would put yourself entirely into it, it’s incredibly rewarding. But if you find times when you’re just down and not able to really work at your best, it didn’t bring the whole enterprise down. I feel like that’s just really, it is a little bit of a switch in perspective, but it’s a really freeing perspective to realize that whatever we try to do, its beneficial, but it doesn’t all depend on me. That’s pretty freeing.
[00:25:54] JR: It’s recognizing that God alone produces results. We are ones of billions of actors in this grand kingdom building drama that he alone is orchestrating. We just get to be a part of it. Ironically, that’s the biggest story for work. I think, especially the millennial Gen Z kind of narrative of work is, “Okay. My parents didn’t think work was important, work was just a meaningless means to an end. But for me as a millennial, work is the ultimate thing. Like what I say I do is the core of my worth, the core of my identity.” On the surface, that looks like a really big story for work, until you lose your job in a pandemic or until your venture fails. Now, the story that you built around your life crumbles. The epic story of work is being one of billions of actors in building for the kingdom.
Matt., you guys have had an incredible impact, no doubt you’re an exceptional business leader, founder. You guys have helped kids, young people launch more than 500 businesses. What do you feel like you guys have really gotten right as an organization in order to have that type of impact?
[00:27:10] MW: Yeah. We’ve gotten the team right. We’ve got in the sense that our real job is to care for our people that are working alongside with us in this vision. We’ve gotten some technology right and we’ve definitely helped a lot of business owners launch their businesses and do a lot of amazing things. But we have a team of nearly 50 people who are so bought in to a shared vision for their country and for helping underserved business owners. There’s really a tight community, a tight family that’s very diverse. We have 12 languages spoken in our office in multiple different people groups. That’s an amazing accomplishment in a place that has traditionally and historically faced a lot of strife as far as ethnic matters are concerned.
I think that’s an amazing accomplishment and I think it comes from having — we’re weird, we’re foreigners working in Myanmar company and that means we’re a little bit strange. But they’ve come along for the ride and have benefited from it, but also really are looking to pour into other people around them. The new staff member that comes in is welcomed in and cared for, and immediately made to feel member of the team. Not by me, but by a lot of our staff members that have been with us for two, and four, and five years and twelve years. I mean, I think that’s just — that’s a really amazing thing to watch, it really.
As a leader, I am a person who wants to work with others. I am an entrepreneur and there’s this idea that entrepreneurs are solo, but that was never the case with us. We went into it as a team and I have a great founding team and we have a strong — definitely a strong senior leadership team, but we also have great managers and great staff members who all feel like they’re at the table together. That’s a really incredible thing to be a part of.
[00:29:00] JR: As a leader of an organization like this. How do you look for that X factor of just whether or not somebody’s going to be all in on the mission and not just look at skillset and like, “Can they do the job?” What are the indicators to you throughout the hiring process of like, “Oh, yeah. This person is all in and they’re excited about what we specifically are doing”?
[00:29:22] MW: Yeah. We definitely like to hire green people. We like to hire people in their first job. We’re actually 50% migrant. 50% of our people come from another village, a small village to the city. Yangon is not small. Yangon is seven million people. When they come to the city to find their first job, they’re bright eyed and not really sure what’s about to happen. We love to hire that type of person, to give them a chance to learn, and shine and grow. That definitely takes patience, because they’re honestly not going to be very productive for a little while. We’ve just had to be okay with that and accept it because that sometimes, that’s our aim and that’s what we love to do. But also, the budget constraints sometimes require that.
I think we’re looking for, number one, a young person who’s come to the city. That’s a huge step. They’re already kind of setting themselves apart from some of their peers. But then number two, are they ready and willing to join in with a group of people without — sure we have job descriptions, we definitely have job descriptions. But there’s a lot of blur between those descriptions and they need to be okay with exploring different options and being willing to try some things out until they find where they really are going to place professionally.
It’s an art. I wouldn’t say there’s not a science to hiring people effectively, but we’re looking for green people and they usually respond to our willingness to invest in them with dedication and commitment to the team, but also some longevity. That’s a strange thing to find in this market, so we’ve been really thankful for the way that we’ve been able to hire. God’s brought us some really amazing people.
[00:30:58] JR: If you can convince people that you’re serious about investing in them, and coaching them and developing them, you can recruit some pretty extraordinary people. Because everybody says they invest in their people, and they develop their people, but very few people do and do it well. Yeah, it’s interesting. Hey, I’m curious. You guys have launched 500 businesses out of this incubator, what sort of businesses are we talking about? Can you give us some examples?
[00:31:21] MW: Yeah. They’re definitely small. Micro small, very small businesses. Usually, they’re starting with anywhere from $500 to $2000, so we’re not talking about major investments in general. On average, they have one to two employees, so they are not necessarily alone, but they’re not big either. But we do have some that have 10 to 15 employees, so there are some larger ones. About 60% of them would be trade businesses, so they may launch a small grocery store on the corner to serve a neighborhood that doesn’t have a grocery store nearby. 30% of them are going to be service type businesses, so they may have a beauty salon that they open or a barbershop. They may do motorcycle repair or they do like a transportation, a distribution or a delivery service.
Then maybe 10% of them are going to be what we call micro-manufacturing businesses. They may purchase 10 sewing machines and set up right next to a factory and do some of the small accessory sewing that’s necessary for T-shirts of for tennis shoes and those kinds of things. It’s pretty amazing to see a 26-year-old young woman employing 10 people on a bunch of sewing machines. That’s pretty incredible to see that happen. In an economy like this, you’re always going to see an ag business where usually it will be some kind of a vegetable trading or fish trading or processing. We had one especially that was an eel farm. That was a very strange experience to write a business plan for eels, which like to escape.
[00:32:55] JR: That’s amazing. I would have loved to receive that business plan. So we got a lot of entrepreneurs, aspiring entrepreneurs listening, so big question for you. You guys have helped to launch 500 businesses from eel farms, to sewing businesses, like all across the board. What’s the best advice you can give to somebody listening about bringing their idea to life and building a sustainable business around it?
[00:33:21] MW: I think the thing we learned the most is that it’s gradual until everything happens. It can take a long time, a lot of iteration. In one case, we do a lot of technology development. We’ve been working on iterating our technology for the last five years and it wasn’t really until a year ago that we cracked how to do it. Then once you figure out how to do it, a ton of growth happens. I think you have to be willing to stick it out for a while to achieve some gradual results, testing the market and constantly watching if people are really tapping to what you’re looking for, constantly tweaking. Then watch out, because when it takes off, you may not be ready for it. I think I would say to an entrepreneur, “Take your time for a little while, constantly iterate, test the market a little bit at a time and be ready. Because when the rocket goes off, you may be surprised a little bit.”
[00:34:15] JR: I want to underscore this for everybody listening, because I think this is some of the best advice that’s ever been shared on the podcast for entrepreneurs. I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately actually. Like a lot entrepreneurs or aspiring doctors expect that the hockey-stick growth curve. XYZ axes, you got your line going way up into the right. They think that that curve starts immediately. But more often than not, it doesn’t. The curve, the line is very, very steady for the first couple of months, quarter, sometimes years. But then everything happens, right? There’s that inflection point, there’s that tipping point, and then thing starts to grow.
But the lesson, regardless of whether you’re an entrepreneur or not, it’s something we talk a lot about in the podcast. It’s just discipline over time. Discipline over time, faithfulness to craft, sticking with something long enough to get great at it in order to see that inflection point. That’s just rare. Matt, like I got to imagine, that’s one of the hardest parts of your job, is convincing these founders and say, “Hey! Stick with it for another quarter. Stick with it for six months.” What advice do you give to people on the ground there in Myanmar, of like, how do you convince them to stick with this thing.
[00:35:33] MW: Yeah. I think helping them understand that sometimes success and failure is external to them. I want to help them have their internals right. I want to make sure they have good systems internally that they’ve taken every step they can to make sure that their company is set up to handle growth or even to trigger growth. But sometimes the market just takes a long time, sometimes the market isn’t there yet, sometimes you haven’t quite found it. As long as they have good systems internally, it gives them a better chance to take off of. That’s the reality of businesses. It’s a risky investment, because a lot of times, we don’t fully understand those intricacies of the market. If I have them constantly iterating on their internal systems and making sure that internally that they’re doing the best they can to set their company up for success, then they can really meet the opportunity when it shows up.
Some failures just external to the company. It had nothing to do with the decision you made. It had nothing to do with your business, your product or your market. It just happened. I think helping entrepreneurs understand and learn from that helps them to iterate, it helps them to recalibrate, it helps them be ready for when the market does come around. Yeah, it’s time, and attention, and dedication, and patience and failure and all of those things wrapped up into what a business actually — when a business actually succeeds. A lot of times you see all those things happening prior to it. So helping them understand the internals are important, but it’s not everything. Some steps, you can’t control.
[00:37:04] JR: Yeah. It’s a really good case study of what I talk about in Call to Create, this idea of trust, hustle and rest. We are called the hustle and in the context of a venture, it’s getting those internal systems right, like doing everything to the product, and customer relations and whatever, operationally to get the thing really sound. And just trusting the Lord to work out everything externally, market conditions, political conditions, economic conditions, whatever. That you have zero control over. That is so crucial for venture, kind of finding its footing. That’s a really good case study.
Hey, Matt. I’m curious, we talked a little bit about daily habits and routines on the podcast. When you’re back in Myanmar, what do a typical day look like for you, for the moment you woke up to the moment you went to bed.
[00:37:56] MW: I was really fortunate to have a kind of normal day over the last three or four years. As our team grew, my role started to look old traditional, I shifted from being the typical start-up founder that had to do everything, to being a lot more focused on partnerships, and strategy and making sure the organization is running well. I would wake up in the morning. I would jump on my motorbike because you’re in Asia, you get to have a motorbike.
[00:38:24] JR: Exactly. Awesome.
[00:38:25] MW: I would take the motorbike to the office, usually passing through a section of a factory zone. I live in a factory zone where literally, every morning, thousands of young women cross the street from the north to the south where all the factories are and I would ride my motorcycle kind of right through that into the office, work the day and a lot of conversations. My favorite part about our office is, our office culture is that it’s a very collaborative environment, so I get to create with people as I do the normal boring stuff that a managing director has to do. I also got to work closely with the creatives in our team.
Then at the end of the day, I come home on my motorbike, heading back the other way and all these thousands of women cross the street again back home from the factory work. So it’s a daily reminder of the women that we’re actually working with and targeting to help them launch their own businesses. Back home, we’ve got a little yard. My boys and I throw a baseball, we’ll play a game of badminton, we’ll hang out around the neighborhood. Some of our neighbors, there are few young people around so our kids get to play with them. It’s just a fun, in the middle of Asia, somewhat of a normal life at this point. You might even recognize it similar to some lives in the US, except the motorbike and the people crossing the street in groups.
[00:39:39] JR: That motorbike is a culture shock. In Asia, seeing all these motorbikes on the road, I love it. All right. Three questions we wrap up every conversation with. Number one, which books do you tend to recommend or gift most frequently to others?
[00:39:52] MW: Yeah. I am an avid reader. I read a lot of things an I also have a lot of range. I read things that are in my wheelhouse and I read a lot of things that are not in my wheelhouse. Actually, the one I’m recommending most often is a liturgy book. I sometimes, especially in the midst of this coup find myself lacking in words. Thanks to pray. Thanks to thinking ways to process what we’re going through. Right now, I’m recommending the book Every Moment Holy quite a bit. It’s by a guy named Doug McKelvey, just an amazing set of liturgies for any activity, for any moment in life, every moment holy.
The other one, the classic one I like to refer people to is called Engaging the Powers bv an author called, Walter Wink. Engaging the Powers, the sense that there are bigger forces than the people around us. The way to counter those dominant forces is really self-sacrificing, humility and to give ourselves on behalf of the people around us. I think we see that in Jesus, and his model quite a bit. Of course, Surprised by Hope N.T. Wright. Of course, it has to be on that list.
[00:40:59] JR: So glad you mentioned that. It’s one of the ones I give away. The most that I re-read frequently. All right, Matt, who would you most like to hear in this podcast talking about how the gospel shapes their work?
[00:41:11] MW: It’s really interesting. I was trying to think about this. I’ve been trying to think about this question and I feel like it doesn’t really — maybe you’ll be surprised to hear it. I am a big St. Louis Cardinal fan and one guy that I follow, his name is Adam Wainwright, he’s a pitcher for the Cardinals. He’s been a pitcher for the Cardinals for a long time, most of my adult life. I would just love to hear how he talks about faith, and work and how he maintains his high level of competitiveness, but also loves the people around him really effectively. Adam Wainwright, he’s a famous guy. I don’t know Adam, so if you can get him on the podcast, that’d be awesome.
[00:41:49] JR: Yeah, that’s a good answer. I like that a lot. I’m sure our producers can track Adam down. They’re really good at that. All right, hey. One thing from today’s conversation that you want to reiterate, that you want to highlight before we sign off. What is that one thing you want to underscore before we leave?
[00:42:06] MW: I talked about technology and we talked about the importance of really investing in people over time. I don’t think we’ve really dealt with the issue of bringing capitalism into reaching people and the danger of that. It’s very dangerous to consider our job with people, similar to efficiency, to consider the relationships around us being more efficient. The idea of a factory being very effective or efficient, or business being very effective or efficient, it gets really dangerous when you start to think about people the same way. I think never trade off touch, never trade off longevity and relationships for just trying to get a quick win with somebody. That’s really dangerous and I think we’re called to love people over time and put in the hard work of loving people over time. I think God honors that and that impacts the kingdom. That’s what I would reiterate or at least add a little stress to.
[00:43:02] JR: I know. It’s really, really well said. People with crown jewel of creation and it could be very easy in the day-to-day grind of work when we’re trying to optimize our schedules, and optimize processes to try to optimize people and make relationships really efficient. But we’re called the love sacrificially in over a long period of time. It was Jesus model and the gospel. Hey, Matt. I have thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. I just want to commend you for the exceptional redemptive work you have done to Myanmar. Lord willing will continue to do for a really long time. Thank you for loving the least of these through the ministry of excellence and for just following the call to mastery and your pursuit of mastery as a leader in such a sacrificial way.
Hey, guys. You can learn more about opportunities now at ONOW.org, really easy to remember ONOW.org. Matt, thanks again for joining us.
[00:44:01] MW: Well, Jordan, thanks so much. It’s been a lot of fun. I appreciate the time.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
[00:44:05] JR: Love that episode. It’s one I’m definitely going to go back and listen to it myself. I hope you guys enjoyed it. Hey, if you are enjoying the Call to Mastery, make sure you subscribe wherever you listen to podcast, Apple Podcast, Spotify, wherever, so that you never miss an episode in the future. If you’re already subscribed, do me a huge favor. Go to Apple Podcast on your phone, on iTunes on your desktop and go rate the podcast on a one-to-five-star scale. Hopefully, towards the upper end of that spectrum, but wherever you deem fair. You guys would be shock at how important those ratings are, to helping new people find this content, find these episodes. Please do me a huge favor and go do that right now.
Guys, thank you so much for tuning in to the Call to Mastery. I’ll see you next week.
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