August 12, 2026 – HeyTony SEO Matt Diamante and Family Office Founder Ken Polk

00:04 Intro 1: In the AM, radio network, broadcasting from AM and FM stations around the country. Welcome to the Small Business Administration Award-winning School for Startups Radio, while we talk all things small business and entrepreneurship. Now, here is your host, the guy that believes anyone can be a successful entrepreneur, because entrepreneurship is not about creativity, risk or passion, Jim Beach.

00:19 Jim Beach: Hello, everyone. Welcome to another exciting edition of School for Startups Radio. Got a great show for you today. Thank you so much for being with us. Two amazing stories today, and I learn a lot in both interviews. I’m really excited to share both of them. First up, we have Matt Diamante. He is the founder and owner of SEO agency HeyTony. HeyTony. HeyTony. I love the name because you remember it. HeyTony. And we learn the story of the name.

00:45 Jim Beach: He has an amazing SEO agency, 21 people, so very impressive, and I can’t wait for you to meet Matt. After that. Ken Polk will be with us to talk about family practice and family offices.

00:56 Jim Beach: For those of you who don’t know a family offices when you get really, really rich, you become a billionaire, you hire a full-time team to take care of all of your stuff, the yacht details, making sure that there is caviar at the cabin this weekend, making sure your taxes are taken care of, all of those sort of things, family offices, and the great big families that you’ve heard of, and 1000000s of thousands, not 1000000s, 1000s of families you’ve never heard of have these family offices.

01:24 Jim Beach: I’ve had run ins with 3 or 4 family offices in my life, not through me and my family, of course, but through some of the friends that I have. I think in the interview, I talk about one of my friends getting, I think it was $75000000 or his 25th birthday or something like that. And I, you know, just I’m blown away by how it has affected his life.

01:47 Jim Beach: So anyway, very excited to learn about family offices and how it can be a goal of hours. Thank you so much for being with us. We’ll get started in just a second.

01:57 Program Bumper: Bye, bye, bye.

01:58 Jim Beach: We are back, and again. Thank you so very, very much for being with us. I’m very excited to introduce another amazing entrepreneur to the show. Please welcome Matt Diamante. He is the founder of HeyTony, which is a Google search engine optimization, SEO, company. He’s had about 15 years of experience in the space. He’s taught some 30,000 people how to be SEO competent. He has a new book out called Get Found.

02:21 Jim Beach: The No-Fluff Guide to Ranking Higher and Becoming Your Customer’s First Choice. It has right at 655 star ratings on that Amazon thing. Which is very impressive. That’s a lot for a non-fiction book. Matt, welcome to the show. How you doing?

02:35 Matt Diamante: Thank you for having me. What an intro. Holy.

02:38 Jim Beach: Hey, we do it anytime you go into a new room. When you go into the bathroom, we’ll introduce you like that. You go into your bedroom at night, I will add world renowned lover. Matt Diamante in the bedroom. Whatever I need to help you out, man.

02:53 Matt Diamante: Yeah, absolutely.

02:54 Jim Beach: Congratulations on the success. First question has to be. Hey, Tony, where’d that come from?

02:59 Matt Diamante: Okay, so when I was trying to come up with a name for my agency, This is back in like 2017, 2018. Um, and like I accidentally started an agency, by the way, where I just had too much work, hired an employee, and I was like, we should make this legit. So when I was trying to come up with a name for the agency. I didn’t want it to be like marketing or Diamante digital or something like that.

03:24 Matt Diamante: Um, so I was racking my brain with like, you know, what can I name this thing? And I thought back to a time where I was walking to lunch in Toronto and I overheard these 2 construction workers talking and the one that goes, hey, Tony, you always know how to put a smile on my face. And I just thought, what a genuine expression of emotion from somebody you wouldn’t expect.

03:46 Matt Diamante: Like, these guys are like the muscular, like manly men, like, you know, they, their only emotion is anger, basically, and I was like, that’s the kind of feeling I want to have, uh, with anybody the business touches, like, let’s be transparent, let’s make each other happy. Let’s all put smiles on each other’s faces.

04:05 Jim Beach: Hey, do you walk around the office going, hey, Tony? Like that?

04:08 Matt Diamante: Well, we actually don’t even have an office. We’re completely remote.

04:12 Jim Beach: Oh, of course.

04:13 Matt Diamante: Yeah.

04:13 Jim Beach: Well, then do you leave voice messages with you? Certainly your uh, message. Wait message should be me just going, hey, Tony, a whole bunch of times.

04:22 Matt Diamante: Yeah, hey, Tony, Tony, Tony. Um, no, it’s funny because people on the team, um, they make, though, like, vibe code something or, like, make documents for the agency, and, uh, the one guy vibe quoted something called Ask Tony. And it’s an internal resource for like all of our, you know, all of our documents, all of our training over tutorials. So if somebody’s like, how do I do this?

04:44 Matt Diamante: They go in there, they’re talking to AI, and it actually will reference videos, and they called to ask Tony, and even made a picture, uh, like it’s an animated version of me, and it says, Matt, on the shirt, then it’s crossed out. It says Tony. It’s so good.

05:00 Jim Beach: I love it. And I love that the team is doing things like that with each other.

05:04 Matt Diamante: Oh yeah, you have to. Like, it’s really hard working remotely. Like we’re all in Ontario. Um, but it’s we we see each other twice a year.

05:14 Jim Beach: And are they? Around Ontario or how close and how far are people?

05:18 Matt Diamante: Oh, it goes all the way from, I don’t know if you know Ontario well.

05:22 Jim Beach: Oh, not at all.

05:24 Matt Diamante: Okay, so if you were driving from the person who lived the farthest away, like the too farthest, it’s probably like a 7 hour drive.

05:31 Jim Beach: Okay. We have these things called miles in kilometers. Those are also useful.

05:35 Matt Diamante: Yeah. It’s probably like 600 700 kilometers.

05:38 Jim Beach: Okay, so a long way away. Within that sense.

05:40 Matt Diamante: Yeah.

05:41 Jim Beach: All right. Did you hire them that way as well?

05:44 Matt Diamante: Yeah, um, this was like, this really started happening like right after COVID. People didn’t want to go back to the office and honestly, I was like, why do we even need an office? Like I don’t want to leave the house every day. I don’t know about you, but I’m like, let’s make that a perk of the job.

06:03 Jim Beach: Sounds good to me. I like it. All right. Let’s define what you do 1st and then we’ll come back to some of the other threads that we have out there. What kind of stuff do you do?

06:15 Matt Diamante: Um, so we help businesses show up higher on Google and we do that through what we call search engine optimization or SEO, but, you know, when my parents ask me for like a 1000000th time, what do you do for work? I say, I help businesses show up higher on Google.

06:31 Jim Beach: Okay. And I don’t mean to be negative, but that’s it, right? You focus on that. You also don’t do web design or marketing or Facebook public. No, I like that.

06:41 Matt Diamante: We used to do a lot of like website design, Facebook ads, Instagram ads, all this kind of stuff and we really, um, niche down into SEO because we could repeat the process, um, and really scale it up that way by having, you know, these systems in place where a client comes in. It’s, they go through the same machine basically every single time.

07:02 Jim Beach: Well, I love the niche. There’s riches in the niches, Matt, that makes a ton of sense. So, yeah. Okay, how big is the team now?

07:10 Matt Diamante: Uh, we’re at 21, 22 people?

07:11 Jim Beach: Wow. Very impressive.

07:12 Matt Diamante: Yeah. It’s actually, it’s kind of crazy and every month when the payroll comes out, I’m like, 0 no. Like, it’s worth, it’s worth paying, but it’s like, that’s a lot of money to pay out every single month.

07:25 Jim Beach: It sure is. All right. Uh, what’s going on in SEO these days? Are we on Panda or Penguin or what’s going on?

07:32 Matt Diamante: Uh, I don’t even know the names of the updates anymore because they do that frequently. Do they?

07:37 Matt Diamante: I think for the for the big like algorithm updates maybe, but like for the, I don’t, I don’t 100% know what they’re doing and that might make me sound like I don’t know what I’m talking about, but, um, we, every time a Google update comes out, we’re on top of it, we have to make sure our clients aren’t freaking out about something. Um, so we know all the intricacies of it.

08:00 Matt Diamante: But what’s really happening right now is AI mode is taking over, right? Like Google’s pushing AI, Microsoft has their Copilot, there’s ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, all this kind of stuff. And what’s really interesting with search is that in the last, I don’t know, 2 years or 3 years since chat GPT really, you know, exploded. Um, people have been trying to game ChatGPT. How do I get recommended there?

08:23 Matt Diamante: And With that in mind, it’s kind of, they’re looking at different things on Google. Uh, what’s really interesting was search, uh, that’s happening now in 2026 and moving forward is everybody’s using, uh, like, I don’t want to say everybody, I mean, like consumers are using regular people are using AI to find answers to their questions and they’re looking for help in some kind of way.

08:44 Matt Diamante: So a lot of people think of SEO as gaming an algorithm or showing up in the blue links or whatever that might be, but I want people to start reframing how they think about SEO where they’re not gaming the algorithm. They’re trying to be genuinely helpful to people.

09:00 Matt Diamante: So, what you need to do in that instance is make sure that you’re showcasing your expertise and your experience, uh, in your specific field, and showcase that you are actually the expert, and that’s what AI loves because AI can only reference content that exists. And if everybody else is saying the exact same thing, reworded differently, or phrase differently. That’s not really helpful.

09:21 Matt Diamante: So if you come out with, hey, I know how to take care of your pest problem in Saint Catherine’s, Ontario. Um, you know, the specific type of bug. Here’s the spray that we use that isn’t harmful to dogs or pets or cats or the possum that lives in your backyard, whatever. Um, you can get a lot more specific and showcase that like you are the expert locally. And that is getting eaten up by AI. AI loves that stuff.

09:47 Matt Diamante: Um, and additionally, how do you do that? Q and A’s? Um, it’s kind of like Q and A’s, but I, so I do this thing with my uh, membership every Monday and we have basically what I call a work session and I’m going to pull up the prompt and I’m going to read the prompt to you because this will explain everything. Um, hold on. Scroll. Okay, so the prompt is, I’m running a blog post answering this question.

10:11 Matt Diamante: Then you pasting a question that you’ve heard a customer ask or you find a question that people are asking online. Um, now you’re going to get ChatGPT to interview you. So you’re going to say, actually, anything you need to know, the answer to in order to write a blog post that is truly helpful and unique. It should include my expertise, experience, case studies, examples of payments, et cetera. Keep it limited to 10 questions.

10:36 Matt Diamante: I’ll send them one at a time and I like use voice mode. So I say, I’ll be using voice mode to answer them. Give me time to breathe as well before going to the next question. So now you’re getting AI to extract the information out of you and create a blog post for you.

10:55 Matt Diamante: And we’re not talking about keyword research and keyword density or word count, like we’re not talking about anything like that because it doesn’t really matter in this purpose. We’re just trying to get your expertise up.

11:05 Jim Beach: Okay, that makes a lot of sense. You know, I can’t get our voice to work with AI or with Claude or with ChatGPT. The microphone works sometimes, but not with those particular apps. I don’t know what it is.

11:18 Matt Diamante: Yeah, I mean, ChatGPT is the best at doing, like, voice-to-text, like transcription, and actually having a conversation with you. Claude’s all right with it, but sometimes it misses stuff or it just does, like, transcriptions and it doesn’t get necessarily all your digressions or the feel of what you’re trying to say.

11:36 Jim Beach: All right, which one’s the best? What do you use for particular what?

11:40 Matt Diamante: Um, so Claude is really great at writing content. Um, it’s just, it sounds a lot more polish. It sounds like it’s in your voice. It’s also really great at, um, Oh my god, what was I going to say?

11:52 Matt Diamante: Like, if you upload a spreadsheet of like 1000s of bros, you can be like, give me insights on this or like adjust this spreadsheet to do X, Y, and Z, and it’ll remake a whole spreadsheet for you that used to take you like a week to do. Now it’s in like 5 minutes. It’s done. It’s perfect. Obviously, still review it, all that kind of stuff. Um, and Claude Code.

12:14 Matt Diamante: Oh my God, don’t even get me started on Claude Code. Um, I have built so many apps. I’ve like changed the way that we work internally with the business with the agency. Um, And just made things way, way, way quicker and automated, but kind of automated some of the tasks. Um, and then I would say ChatGPT is, like, the best at voice transcription. Um, they are really quick with their responses and their image generation.

12:38 Matt Diamante: Oh my god, it’s 2nd to none. It’s so good.

12:42 Jim Beach: So you haven’t said anything except Claude. You’re voting Claude for everything.

12:45 Matt Diamante: Oh, no, sorry, ChatGPT is the transcription, the voice to audio and the images.

12:50 Jim Beach: Okay. Ah, yeah. And What about their personalities? Do you agree that ChatGPT is politer than Claude, and Claude sometimes seems like Elon’s talking himself?

12:58 Matt Diamante: Um, I feel like Claude, at a certain point will tell me to go to bed and not to worry about things for the rest of the day. Um, I’ve never had that with ChatGPT though.

13:09 Jim Beach: Claude will tell you it’s time to go to bed.

13:11 Matt Diamante: Yeah, it’ll like, it knows the time of your computer or whatever. I’d be like, listen, it’s late. The files that you submitted, like they say the timestamps, like you just created these, it’s late. Like, don’t worry about this. You’ve done enough tonight, go to bed, and then you can kind of push back, but it’ll eventually be like, okay, well, you know, that’s enough.

13:33 Jim Beach: Is it just trying to get users off so that it can have your, uh, bandwidth issues?

13:39 Matt Diamante: I don’t think so. Um, it’s really interesting. Like, I was talking to somebody and they were telling me that, you know how when you’re using AI, it’s always like, would you like me to look into that more for you or would you like me to put a graph or do whatever? And it always asks you a question like to follow up at the end?

14:00 Matt Diamante: And all you have to do is type yes or no or yeah, let’s explore that. Um, and there, there, this person was basically saying, that is, the AI company is trying to get you to use up your token so that you have to buy more. And I found out very interesting.

14:15 Jim Beach: Yeah, because now I’m like, I don’t need to know what my projection of the business is going to be over the next 10 years if X, Y, and Z has. I don’t need to know that, right? It’s just, it’s all made up anyways. Very insightful. All right. Hey, Tony. How’d you get started? What was the impetus? Walk us through the entrepreneurial birthing, Matt?

14:37 Matt Diamante: Oh my god. I like, I’ve never had a real job. I’ll just say that, um, like I delivered like papers as a kid and, you know, I did roots with my uncle growing up. Um, I was in a band. I worked at, there’s a place in Canada called Tim Hortons. I not sure if you’ve heard of it.

14:56 Jim Beach: Of course.

14:57 Matt Diamante: Yeah, Joe Tim Horton, right? Yeah, I think that is my most legitimate job. Yeah.

15:01 Jim Beach: I wrote a book about Canadian and a lot of it happens in 10 Hortons. And the joke is that half of the people in Canada were born in the park. I mean, conceived in the parking lot of Temport. Right?

15:14 Matt Diamante: Yeah. Um, so I worked there from, I was like 18 till 19 or something and that is the most real job I’ve ever had. Um, I did some like, uh, like internships, I like agencies and stuff, but it was always like 34 months, whatever it was.

15:29 Matt Diamante: Um, but yeah, I, so I accidentally started the agency, um, I, apparently I was good enough and I was doing it long enough that people were like, hey, can you run our Google ads? I was like, sure, yep, I’ll figure that out. Can you do our SEO? Can you do our Facebook ad? So it was kind of doing a little bit of everything.

15:50 Matt Diamante: And we’re even working with like YouTubers like coming up with thumbnails and titles for the videos and topics and scripts and blog posts and doing all this kind of stuff. And I was like, okay, well, I’m working 14 hours a day. I’m taking calls at 1030 at night. Like I need to hire somebody to help me with this because I just don’t have the time and the bandwidth.

16:12 Matt Diamante: And um, I hired the 1st person, then maybe about 6 months, 7 months later, hired another person, and it kind of just went crazy. Like not immediately, but, um, so in 2023 at the beginning, sorry, at the beginning, yeah, beginning of 2023, we had a team of 4 people. And Um, at that point, like we’re we’re doing all right, like we were making money.

16:33 Matt Diamante: Um, we had clients, we were doing all that kind of stuff, but everything kind of really exploded when I started posting on social media. And my, I, I had read a book called, uh, the one thing by, um, my god, Gary Keller and J. Papasan, and, um, a book called Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook by Gary Vaynerchuk. And basically, what Gary V’s book was saying is social media is free.

16:56 Matt Diamante: Like, if you’re not posting on social media, you’re an idiot. Like you could grow a massive following. This is the best time to be a business owner because the algorithms are just pushing content out for new people every single time you post. Um, so it’s like posts every single day.

17:13 Matt Diamante: And then the book, the one thing, is like, what’s one thing that you can do, uh, every single day that will help you achieve your one year, 5 year, or 10 year goal? Right? What’s like incrementally, what’s one thing you can do? I was like, I’m going to post on social media every day. So I did that for about 3 months and nothing really happened, so I doubled down or tripled down and started posting 3 times a day.

17:37 Jim Beach: Uh, like posting. Interrupt you? What were you posting? Give us a detail. Pictures of you running in the field.

17:44 Matt Diamante: Yeah, no, I was posting SEO tips and I don’t know how much you know about SEO, but. There’s a limited amount of things that you can talk about, so I did get creative, especially when I was going from once a day to 3 times a day, like in those 1st 3 months, I talked about everything that you could possibly talk about when it came to SEO.

18:06 Matt Diamante: So I was like, now I need to do this 3 times a day. I know what I’m going to do. The 1st 3 months I maybe had like a 100 followers. The next 3 months when I was posting 3 times a day. I got to play like 1500 followers, which I was like, you know, that’s pretty good.

18:25 Jim Beach: That’s not bad.

18:26 Matt Diamante: Um, and I was almost ready to give up after that because I’m like, I posted 600 videos this year already and I have like nothing to show for it. No work, no business, no anything. And then I just thought, well, these guys have to do it every single day for a year. See how that goes. And I was like, I’m going to prove these guys right or I’m going to prove these guys wrong.

18:50 Matt Diamante: And so about a week after I had that kind of self-talk with myself. Um, I had a video hit a 1000000 views and then I went from 1500 to 15,000 followers. And then the next week another video had a 1000000 views. Um, and by the end of 2023, I had like 100,000 followers on Instagram. Um, and now, you know, we’re in 2026. I’m sitting at almost 400,000 followers on Instagram alone.

19:15 Matt Diamante: And that complete, yeah, that catapulted the business, you know, in the last 3 years went from 3 or 4 people to 22.

19:22 Jim Beach: And is that all of the marketing that you do?

19:24 Matt Diamante: Yeah.

19:26 Jim Beach: And what, give me a tip. Give me one of the tips.

19:29 Matt Diamante: I mean, I already gave you a sweet prompt that we use. Um, but another tip is Google won’t rank you, uh, rank your website for a term or for a keyword that you don’t have on your site. So let’s say you’re a plumber and you’re like, well, we do a lot of, um, water heater installations, but you don’t have a page on your website about water heater installations. Right? So you need to have that page.

19:54 Matt Diamante: That like, it sounds so basic and so obvious, but you’d be surprised. I look at a lot of websites every single day and some people are like, why aren’t I ranking? I’m like, well, you don’t, you don’t talk about this on your site. How do you expect to rank? Works.

20:11 Jim Beach: All right, that is a good tip. It is kind of obvious, but it is the obvious thing that I failed to do so much. All right, back to the entrepreneurial story. So you blow up. With a 1000000 views and your followers are kicking, but it’s the end of year two, um, what happened that business just started coming in?

20:30 Matt Diamante: Yeah, I mean, at 1st it was a little bit rocky because I was doing like all the sales calls and emails and all that stuff myself. Um, and then I hired somebody to basically run the day to day of the business, um, Clarissa, and now that was Clarissa’s job to talk to all these people, not necessarily do the calls of still doing the sales calls. Um, and then it wasn’t till uh, 2025 that I hired a salesperson.

20:56 Jim Beach: Excellent. How did you train them? I mean, you’d do, uh, you doing all of the sales in the beginning, I think, is the number one or 2 thing an entrepreneur can do because you’re talking to the customer and learning what they want. So was there a lot to transfer to the salesperson, was that a difficult process?

21:14 Matt Diamante: Um, Yes and no, like when you hire a salesperson, you want to hire somebody who’s like easy to talk to, somebody’s going to listen, somebody who’s going to mirror back, what your issues are, or your fears, or your beliefs, anything like that. And like I realized during this process, like, I’m not a good salesperson. Like, I’m really good, like, I can talk to you about SEO all day.

21:37 Matt Diamante: I can tell you what’s wrong, all this kind of stuff, but I’m not the guy who’s gonna close the deal.

21:43 Jim Beach: I bet you, I don’t know. Obviously, you are because you made it long enough to hire that person, right? You know, people want the honest thing, you know, Matt, we like integrity and honesty and, you know, we don’t want someone who’s pretending to know SEO. We want someone who knows SEO and it drips out of them. Right?

22:02 Matt Diamante: Yeah, well. So the thing is, like, I developed such a trust with people by posting every single thing. I was always in their feed. I was always giving them tips.

22:11 Matt Diamante: So showing them like results in case studies and how to do this stuff themselves that, like, sometimes they wanted to work with us and they would book a call, but then other times they would just want to get on a, they would book a call just so that they could have me audit their website and talk to them.

22:31 Matt Diamante: And because I’m like, a quote unquote public facing person now, um, I can’t be a dick and be like, well, I’m not going to do this work for free. Right? So I’d have to, like, do all this additional, you know, basically consulting for free.

22:45 Jim Beach: Right.

22:45 Matt Diamante: But now when they get on with like my sales guy, um, they’re not expecting him to do consulting.

22:51 Jim Beach: That’s right. That’s a good point. That’s a great point. So how’d you come up with pricing? How do you determine pricing today? Especially what are you fresh? It’s so hard.

23:01 Matt Diamante: Yeah, I mean, our pricing has changed over the years. Like, it used to be like 1500 bucks a month, uh, kind of thing, and now we’re sitting at about 3000 US a month, and our service offerings have changed, like, we cut out a lot of the SEO stuff that people say you need to do. That doesn’t actually work, which sometimes it’s, you know, convincing clients like, we don’t need to do all this other shit.

23:26 Matt Diamante: That’s what gets you 20% of the results. And takes 80% of our time. Here’s the 20% of the time that gets you 80% of the results. And um, so our pricing has changed quite a bit over the years. But it’s really like, you just make it up and if people pay it, then you’re like, okay, I guess this is good. And if a lot of people pay it, then you’re like, maybe I’ll charge a little bit more.

23:50 Jim Beach: Yep So how often would you raise prices after every deal? Go up?

23:55 Matt Diamante: No, no, no. Like if we were sitting like, if we were growing rapidly, then it’s like, all right, let’s add another 500 bucks and see if people are going to bite on that. And if people keep fighting on that, it’s like, cool, let’s wait a couple months, maybe 6 months, if it looks good to us, then we can raise the price a little bit more.

24:16 Jim Beach: All right. And what kind of hierarchy do you have at the company now? Do you have a firm replacement if you call in sick for a month?

24:25 Matt Diamante: Uh, yeah. Like my days now are not like running the agency or anything like that. Like the agency runs without any clients, like, but calls without me, they talk to somebody without me, the contracts they pay. They, you know, roll into the team. They get assigned their SEO specialists that works on their account, like all that stuff is pretty much a machine at this point. And my days are creating content. That’s it.

24:49 Jim Beach: How much do you spend managing and being the hey, Tony boss guy?

24:53 Matt Diamante: Uh, Zero.

24:54 Jim Beach: Wow.

24:54 Matt Diamante: Um, so yeah, actually my wife has been with me on this journey the entire time and uh, last year. But yeah, well, watch what we were talking and I was like, you should just run the company because I hate doing this stuff and you’re really good at running like running a company and running a business. Um, so she, she took that over and it’s been absolutely a game changer.

25:18 Jim Beach: And did you have to raise money along the way or are you still the only owner?

25:23 Matt Diamante: Uh, nope, the only owner.

25:24 Jim Beach: I want to get a Lamborghini wheel, dude. Monday, Monday Must be Monday It’s my little toy. I have to use it every once in a while.

25:31 Matt Diamante: Yeah, that’s great.

25:33 Jim Beach: Well, Matt, it’s amazingly impressive what you’ve done and I love it. What’s your pricing strategy? Do you charge up front? Do you do pay on performance? What’s the price strategy that you think is best?

25:45 Matt Diamante: All right, well, let me tell you this. As an entrepreneur, and I’m sure any entrepreneur is listening to this. We hate chasing invoices, right? You do the work, then you send the invoice and somebody’s like, well, you know, do this really worth the money? And then you’re like, you have to prove yourself again? Or they’re like, yeah. You know, checks in the mail kind of thing never comes.

26:07 Matt Diamante: So if you want to work with us, you got to pay up front. We charge all of our clients before we even start doing the work because I’m like, if that doesn’t come in, then I don’t know if you’re serious, how can you be serious about working with us?

26:23 Jim Beach: Makes a lot of sense. How do we get a touch follow online, all that, please? Get a copy of the book.

26:30 Matt Diamante: Uh, you can just Google Matt Diamante or HeyTony. All the stuff will come up, and if you want the book, it’s called Get Found. You can type in Get Found book, Get Found HeyTony, Get Found Matt Diamante. It’ll come out.

26:43 Jim Beach: How many tips are in the book?

26:45 Matt Diamante: Oh, the entire book is like a massive tip.

26:48 Jim Beach: Just like, 100, like 100s?

26:50 Matt Diamante: Hundreds.

26:50 Jim Beach: Okay. Well, all those posts you did would be easy to turn it into a book, I think.

26:56 Matt Diamante: That’s actually like where I started. Um, I did a series called Understanding SEO, and it was like, here’s what the title tag is here, because my description is, all this stuff, and the 1st iteration of the book was so bad. It was like 20 or 30 pages. I was like this is a pamphlet. Um, so I had to add a whole bunch of stuff, make it more story based.

27:19 Matt Diamante: So it actually resonated with people and it wasn’t just like, here’s a technical SEO manual. Um, this is more like, you can listen to this, you can read it. Um, you can understand truly the impact SEO can have on a business what to do, and that you can, in fact, do it yourself, and you don’t need to pay an agency 1000s of dollars to do this for you.

27:39 Jim Beach: Matt, Diamante, hey, Tony is the business, Matt, you get A plus’s great job with the interview. Great job with the business. Amazingly impressed and we’d love to have you back. Great job.

27:50 Matt Diamante: Hell yeah.

27:51 Jim Beach: Yeah, we will be right back.

Intro 2

27:53 Guest Montage Voice: Well, that’s a.. That’s a wonderful…

27:57 Guest Montage Voice: Oh, my gosh, I love the opportunity to do this.

28:02 Guest Montage Voice: Thank you, Jim.

28:04 Guest Montage Voice: Wow, that’s a great one.

28:06 Guest Montage Voice: You know, that is a phenomenal question.

28:11 Guest Montage Voice: That’s a great question.

28:12 Guest Montage Voice: And I don’t have a great answer.

28:16 Guest Montage Voice: That’s a great question.

28:18 Guest Montage Voice: Oh, that is such a loaded question.

28:22 Guest Montage Voice: Yeah, that’s actually a really good question.

28:25 Announcer: School for Startups Radio.

28:28 Jim Beach: We are back, and again, thank you so very much for being with us. You know, your goal as an entrepreneur is to set up your family for generations to come and to have what’s called a family office where your family is run like a business. You hire people to come in and run the family and then you’re a trillionaire. And so we’re very excited to welcome someone to the show who’s going to teach us about this.

28:58 Jim Beach: Please welcome Ken Polk to the show. When he was 25, he started a family office advisory. It’s called Arlington Family Offices. Since then, they’ve grown to 17 billion dollars in assets under stewardship. They managed right at a 100 companies. I’m sorry, 100 families. And he has also published 2 books along the way. I’m excited to learn about his newest one called Built on Purpose: Applying the Three Laws of Purpose to Business, Living, and Giving.

29:27 Jim Beach: And Ken lives in Alabama. So I will do everything I can not to tease him, but from Georgia. It’s almost impossible for me not to do that. Again, welcome to the show. How you doing?

29:40 Ken Polk: Yeah, doing great, Jim. Thank you. App appreciate the introduction.

29:44 Jim Beach: So at 25, you started a family advisory. I didn’t know what a family office was when I was 25. How’d you even know about the industry and have the cojones to think you could do something in that space?

29:59 Ken Polk: Yeah, so at 25, I always tell people that I really was just super naive. And so it had really nothing to do with how smart I was or how good I was, but at 25, I really just saw something very simple.

30:15 Ken Polk: I got my investment license in college where I went before I even graduated with an accounting degree and from there I went to Deloitte for a couple years, but I saw something that was does not, it didn’t make sense to me. I was in tax. I had my investment license and I really liked the financial planning, but those 3 things back in 1998. There was no one doing them together. It made no sense to me.

30:46 Ken Polk: You would get in your car and go to each of those practices and waste a lot of time and then they wouldn’t talk to each other.

30:55 Jim Beach: What were they? [unclear] What were not put together? [unclear] I’m sorry, what were the three things that they didn’t do together? Well? Investments?

31:04 Ken Polk: Taxes and financial planning. So, and today it’s it’s done a lot together. People do those things jointly, meaning in one company, a single company. So take a hospital. If you have a hospital, you go to the hospital, there’s radiology, you can see a surgeon, you can see your doctor. It’s all there. The difference was is nobody was doing that in the financial world. It was all separate.

31:30 Ken Polk: You would go see your financial planner, then you would get in the car and you would go see your tax preparer. Then you would go, see, you’re investment person. And to me, especially for families of wealth, it was already complex enough.

31:46 Ken Polk: And so that was the very simple idea that back in 1998 that I didn’t even know it was a family office at the time, which is part of my story, about a year in, I call, call Jay Hughes. Jay Hughes is, I call him the godfather of the family office world. So he had studied these 10 families for 10 years, the largest families in the world. And they had family offices.

32:13 Ken Polk: And so when I called him a year in cold called and he gave me 15 minutes. And so I say it’s the 15 minutes to change Arlington. In those 15 minutes, he literally told me, Ken, you’re talking about a family office and I said, what’s that?

32:31 Ken Polk: And he explained to me what I was doing and really what a family office ultimately does, is it takes all the complexities in one in-house, in one location, and just coordinates them in a quarterback role. So it’s really no more complex than that in what a family office does. But then there’s this added piece that over time is important to build out, and that is adding meaning into the money.

33:00 Ken Polk: And so if you don’t add meaning into the money, then it’s meaningless. And that’s where the family part comes in. As we all know, that can be complex part of the puzzle as families continue to grow in number and then access.

33:16 Jim Beach: All right, very interesting. So I went to college and when I was 24 or so, I was invited to a birthday party. One of my friends was turning 25 and he got, I think, $72 million that day. His family, uh, owns one of the largest retail brands in the United States and there’s cities named after his family, the middle of Ohio and things like that. You can figure it out if you want to.

33:43 Jim Beach: Uh, and there were family office people there that day.

33:47 Jim Beach: And we always teased him because once one week a year he had to go to family office week, which was they would go to Costa Rica or something for the week and rent out an entire hotel for just the family and everyone when the family would come and praise at the footsteps of granddaddy who made all of the money and then they’d all leave the week with a check in their pocket.

34:15 Jim Beach: And so that was my 1st exposure to a family office, kid. How warped is that?

34:21 Ken Polk: Yeah, so that is, um, it happens that way, but also, I always tell family, if you’ve seen one family office, you’ve seen one family office. They all have the DNA and the makeup of the leaders within it, just like a business, just like an organization. But there are families that do that. They, uh, and I know one family, they were on Arlington’s advisory board and they had 400 members in their family office.

34:49 Ken Polk: So they actually had to rent out places in order to have these annual meetings. But interestingly, in these families wouldn’t understand over time is those meetings become less and less about money and more about the meaning in the history of the family and what the family has done. Uh, because the stories are that glue that keeps that family together. So the stories are the glue.

35:14 Ken Polk: That is the, that’s what they do a lot at those bigger uh, larger groups.

35:20 Jim Beach: All right, so we know 2 families, and we know that they both had offices. The Rockefellers, who remain wealthy and important, and the Vanderbilt, who are now, let’s see, their most important member is the white-haired guy on CNN. Who’s that? His name?

35:37 Ken Polk: Yeah, I know who you’re talking about, but I forgot his name.

35:42 Jim Beach: Yes. They’re down to him. Why were the Rockefellers so very good at maintaining their wealth over centuries, not over century, over one century, over multiple generations, while so many other families depleted the wealth. The Rockefellers are wealthier now. Why? What’d they do differently, kid?

36:00 Ken Polk: So I will tell you that there are a lot of things that will encourage the success of a family. We know that and we could talk about that. There are a few things too that will crumble a family trying to to have longevity.

36:14 Ken Polk: But I will tell you that someone in the Rockefeller family created a way for them to become the rising generation, for them to become entrepreneurs again, for them to have a system so they could perpetuate the capital and have that entrepreneurial spirit. So if you looked at those 2 families in the story. One became spenders and one that continued to have certain generation branches of creators. And I believe that is the key. And I’m actually seeing that more.

36:45 Ken Polk: We have a lot of families that are in the 3rd 4th generation. And I always tell them, hey, you can be the creator. If you had the gift of vision and creation, now you’re just showing up on a different base. You showed up on 3rd base.

37:03 Jim Beach: That’s great. Fantastic. Let’s take it from there and propel it forward.

37:09 Ken Polk: And I think which, when you see underneath these family offices, you’ll sense that there was just this, this system that encourage entrepreneurialism over dependency and entitlement.

37:18 Jim Beach: I know another family from here in Atlanta and their weekly retreat every year as at one of their, uh, Ritz Carlton’s, they own Ritz Carlton franchises across the Caribbean. And that family, in the last decade has disintegrated the 2nd generation, no, wait, the 3rd generation is suing the 2nd generation because the 2nd generation Ken, and the audacity to live and not die and give the money to the 3rd generation.

37:46 Jim Beach: And then 2nd generation mom and dad, the matriarch patriarch got divorced in their 80s and divided the family down the center and things like that. What percent of the family self-destruct, do you think? What percent end up Rockefeller managed? How much of it’s messed up over sex?

38:04 Ken Polk: Yeah, so I will tell you this: the number one reason why families fail is actually because of cynicism. It’s really, and so we, we can all, we could actually go on a rapid trail on that, but it, it is the one thing in families that I see that really puts an end to the collective purpose.

38:25 Ken Polk: And then the other thing is, is like what’s really hard for families is joint decision making, and joint decision making, when you have an unfortunate divorce in a family, it like makes it really hard to make joint decisions.

38:41 Ken Polk: But I will tell you that, and I call them the 3 laws of preservation, that actually there are 3 laws that I’ve seen in families over the last 27 years, is that if they just don’t break these laws, they have the ability to really create longevity, and if they can just walk systematically through these with exercises and planning, and not the money, if you focus on the money, it’s not going to, it’s not going to work.

39:10 Ken Polk: But if you focus on a framework where you have these 3 laws that you just don’t break, then I think that is the most powerful way for a family to be able to move forward for the for the long term.

39:26 Jim Beach: Do we have those 3 laws?

39:29 Ken Polk: Yeah, so the 1st one is, and it’s very intuitive, but it is so powerful and that your footprint is your blueprint for your legacy. Your footprint is your blueprint for your legacy. And everybody talks about legacy. I want to leave a legacy. And I say, sir, ma’am, that sounds great, but your character, your footprint, is your blueprint for that. Make no mistake.

39:53 Ken Polk: Like wherever you are, whether you need to get better, or you’re not where you want to be, or you are when you want to be, it is a very, um, it’s a sobering process, right, to sit down and write a letter to your future self to write write your obituary, to write a, a farewell letter, but the reality is, is that is your legacy when you’re gone, is your footprint, is your blueprint. So once we walk through that.

40:23 Ken Polk: The 2nd law is a family’s collective purpose, well determine its longevity, a family’s purpose, collective purpose will determine its longevity. And so the 1st one’s legacy, the 2nd one’s longevity, and all families want to last. But how do you last? How do you do it? It’s a collective purpose. How do you create that collective purpose?

40:45 Ken Polk: The values, the internal giftings that you, all the families, how do you do that together in a process that you then can carry forward and create that longevity? So that’s the second law. And then the 3rd law really is the one that I think is missed a lot, but it really is the one that actually asked, and you actually started with it. You said the Rockefellers and the Vanderbilts. So you can apply this in our conversation.

41:16 Ken Polk: The 3rd law. Is the method and means, the method and means by which you accumulate your wealth will determine your family’s lineage. And lineage is DNA. When you’re gone. All the pieces, your method and means will determine your lineage, how you do it. It’s so important on how you do it, the systems you put in place, the things you leave behind.

41:37 Ken Polk: So that 3rd law is the one where it’s just the really practical everyday systems and doing it and encouraging behaviors in a family.

41:47 Jim Beach: All right. How’d you get your 1st customer at 25, how’d you convince billionaires to even listen to you?

41:54 Ken Polk: Yeah. So I, uh, really, I tell people this too. It’s like, I can’t believe they actually gave me some of their money, but what I did do is that I said, here’s my vision, just give me a little. And watch me a little, if I do get in a little, I’ll come back and ask you for more. And literally, that was my whole sales fit. Here’s my vision. And I really did.

42:23 Ken Polk: I said, I knew they needed someone that would serve their generations and someone that would build a firm that would build their generations. And so that’s what I said to them when I was 25 and a few of them trusted me and really kind of the rest is history. But the one thing I did do is I’ve made good on a promise.

42:46 Ken Polk: Our firm now is 70 people, we have 7 owners, and we’ve set the firm up in a perpetual purpose trust, so it can’t be sold, so we can serve those families for the long term.

43:00 Jim Beach: Very impressive, Ken. I love it. I love it. All right, let’s talk about the book. Give us some of the idea of what you’re trying to teach us: Built on Purpose, Applying the Three Laws of Purpose to Business, Living, and Giving. It comes out in September, but it is already available or purchase on that Amazon thing. Tell us about it.

43:25 Ken Polk: Yeah, so you can pre-order it now, but what it is, is that after the 1st book that was really the spirit of wealth preservation, This one was really a deep dive into 3 laws of purpose. And so, and what was, what was really interesting to me is nobody had ever defined purpose that I could find. Purpose is a big word, right? We tell it to our kids, we tell it to ourselves.

43:52 Ken Polk: We talk about it in business, but what is purpose? And what if there were three laws of purpose? And that’s why it’s so hard to get your arms around it, and it’s a journey you go on.

44:06 Ken Polk: So, I believe that in business and family, in giving even, that there are these purpose laws that if you infiltrate them into your business, just like you do your family, just like you do your giving, that you really have this opportunity to do incredible things. And so I really took those 3 laws and especially on the business side.

44:30 Ken Polk: So if you’re a business owner, I believe there are six stages of every business, from survivability to sustainability. The first one’s survivability, and everybody who’s an entrepreneur knows what I’m talking about. Cash is oxygen, and you’re just trying to survive. All the way to sustainability is: how do I take this business and the spirit of the organization over a long period of time, and it stays and lasts past the founder and the people that are there?

44:59 Ken Polk: So what in doing that, it actually takes those laws and and kind of goes through a journey in business. It goes through a journey on how you do it in your family and then it goes through a journey on how to do it and you’re giving.

45:16 Ken Polk: And then the 3 laws, I can hit those real quick because I think this would be interesting. To anyone who’s listening is the 1st law of purpose and again, the 1st one is like the spirit of wealth preservation. This one’s pretty self-evident, is your wiring points the way. So you’re gifting, you’re wiring points the way. And by the way, this law demands your honesty is like, honestly, what am I gifted in? What am I really good at?

45:47 Ken Polk: Not what somebody else is good at? What you were uniquely gifted with? So that’s the 1st law of purpose. And then the 2nd law of purpose is where it gets harder. And if you kind of think about a chart going up to the up to the right. This is the 2nd bullet point, the 2nd law. And that is, is that, Purpose goes from, it goes from personal fulfillment to community enrichment.

46:15 Ken Polk: The 2nd law of purpose goes from personal fulfillment. It’s all about me. To community enrichment. That’s we. It goes to we. And then that one demands your ego. That, that law of purpose just is, you can’t be all about you. You’ll never get to the next stage of purpose if it’s just all about you. That’s in a family. That’s in anything, right? It really is.

46:40 Ken Polk: And then the 3rd law is the most challenging and it’s the one that when people see it, they’re like, oh, I’ve got some. I’ve got some thinking to do, I’ve got something more to do, which I, hey, by the way, in all these areas, I personally have a lot of growth to do. But the 3rd law, is you plant others harvest. You plant other harvest.

47:06 Ken Polk: And that one demands your courage because you got to, the purpose was never meant to be totally fulfilled while you were living. So you have to plant things that you’re leaving for the future. You plant others harvest. So that’s just a little taste of what is in the 1st chapters and then it goes into how do you apply that in your business very practically in your family, very practically, and then, um, in your giving very practically.

47:35 Jim Beach: All right, very, very, very good. What happens when the family purpose is divided? You know, I, I really want to invest in Republican anti-abortion politics and the sister really wants to invest in, uh, you know, transgender rights and, uh, are the bylaws going to prevent anything like that? What happens if there’s division in the future?

47:57 Ken Polk: Yeah, so I would break that down into there’s the, there’s these financial pieces and then there’s these values piece. And what we have encouraged families to do, and this is going to be like a, this is a different way of thinking, which I believe is in the future, if people will just kind of let this sit inside of them, is that when we do values and gift tests and families come up with their mottos.

48:27 Ken Polk: The key is, is that that can’t be just the 1st generations. The 1st generation has to do it, then they have to do it with the next generation. Their kids. Then their kids need to go do it themselves. And then their kids do it with their kids, et cetera. It’s the only way it works. You cannot force values on generations. And doesn’t that?

48:50 Ken Polk: I mean, it makes common sense, but we so often try to say, hey, we’re by the 4th generation, the parrots are strangers. So how in the world, even with great stories, are they going to connect all those dots? So in that bucket, it is super important that you teach the generations to do it themselves. By the way, just a little side note, the definition of family is 2 people of non-blood.

49:19 Ken Polk: It’s a, but that one’s it for you, with, with, so family is, is 2 people of non-blood. So it’s like, you’re integrating these new families all the time and everyone needs to have the newness to it as you pass down on these values and they do it themselves. On the financial side, totally different. So this is just the reality on the financial side. We do see a lot of families that say, listen. The money was created.

49:50 Ken Polk: Yes, I’m a steward, but the money was created and my beliefs and my values are going to dictate what money is paid out of this trust. And I always tell them, that’s up to you. It’s your money. Um, even though you’re a steward, yeah, you did creating, you were, you used your wirings, you created it, and the key is, is like, okay, well, then it, and I’ve seen that.

50:16 Ken Polk: Some people say, hey, this is, we’re not getting to anything but this. Okay, sounds great. So we do try to separate those two. Does that make sense? The values in the, in the, in passing down and then the money’s totally a separate bucket.

50:33 Jim Beach: Okay. What about if the trust is set up for all family members born of my loins, right? In a couple generations, you want to get rid of 2 or 3 of the loins, you know? You got some black sheep in there you want to get rid of. Or things like that possible or does the bylaws prevent it and make it impossible to make changes? Does it depend on the family agreement bylaws?

51:01 Ken Polk: Yep. So it is very, very tough to change trust. To change trust beneficiaries is what it’s called. The people that are receiving the benefit. It is very hard to change once you have drafted it and the grantor has decided what the rules are. So once you decide the rules. You can’t, it’s very hard to take them back. There are things that people do. It’s called decanting.

51:27 Ken Polk: They dismantle some of those things, but at the end of the day, it is basically illegal to take someone who you would call a black sheep if it’s written in. You can’t just take it away from them. It’s just the way it works. That’s why you have to be so careful about the systems that you put in there in the spirit of the money coming out.

51:52 Jim Beach: Very well said. I have a situation. I have people I want to get out of the trust and oh, good grief. Just paying the lawyer every month to tell me no, you know?

52:04 Ken Polk: That’s right. That’s right. You have to chase it back to the person who set it up and said, why’d you do this if they’re still alive? And yeah.

52:16 Jim Beach: So your clients don’t mind that you’re based in Alabama?

52:20 Ken Polk: Yeah, so our offices are in Birmingham.

52:22 Jim Beach: Nashville also is too, right?

52:24 Ken Polk: Yeah, so what we always tell families is our families are from all over, and we really tell them the location of our offices is relative. We just have smaller offices for our purpose.

52:37 Jim Beach: Yeah.

52:37 Ken Polk: It’s relative.

52:38 Jim Beach: Yeah. Ken, you’ve done an amazing job. Fantastic. And this is an incredible story and well done. A plus is, how do we find out more? Follow you online, all that, please.

52:50 Ken Polk: So if you go to Arlington.com, you can actually kind of see what we’re about and the best way to learn about Arlington, it really is the book in the 1st book specifically and the 2nd one, really, I meant to tell it for stories for our team, for our generations, my family, and so it’s really a way to learn more about Arlington and what we’re about and how we think.

53:17 Jim Beach: Fantastic. Thank you so much for being with us and we’d love to have you back. Thanks a lot.

53:24 Ken Polk: Yep. Thank you.

53:25 Jim Beach: You’re out of time for today, but you know what that means? We’ll be back tomorrow. Be safe. Take care, and go make a million dollars. [unclear closing phrase] Out of time. Bye now.