The Reinventor's Mindset - Episode 6

Ashton Jones in conversation with Mat Keeley Co-founder & Former CEO, Grow
 

Ashton: Welcome to the Reinventor's Mindset, insights about transformation with leaders who've done it from the inside. I'm Ashton Jones and I'm writing Bold Water, a book about transformation. Today I'm speaking with Mat Keeley, co-founder of Grow, the startup that landed Vanguard as a client and signed a strategic agreement with the ASX. Before Mat did something most founders never do: he handed the keys to someone else and walked away.

Mat and I first connected when Grow was still a scrappy startup with beer taps in the garage. Welcome, Mat. Let's dive in.

So I understand you're a farm boy, fifth generation. Can you tell me a little bit about what that was like growing up, and how you actually ended up in financial planning?

Mat: It's been a big part of my life and still is. It's a fifth generation farm, my brother runs it now, my dad still goes to work every day, I think he's 77 or 78. It's in a little rural place called Lake Cargelligo, out near Griffith in the middle of New South Wales, a sheep and wheat farm. Everything from early childhood through to how I look at business today was shaped by my time there.

Ashton: Tell me a little bit about your dad.

Mat: It was really beautiful as a kid. Work was your backyard. Shearing was always done in school holidays. There were many times you learned to drive when your feet couldn't even touch the ground. I remember feeding sheep, dad would be on the back and I'd be driving, feet not touching the pedals, and then I'd have to climb out.

My dad was a huge influence, and so was my mum. I'd put them more as coaches. They were always trying to educate you and help you understand context. I think that really played a big part in how I still look at the world today and certainly look at business.

Ashton: Hearing you talk takes me back to my own childhood. Not a lot of people know this about me, but my dad had a small business, a factory up in Brookvale in Sydney. I used to drive the forklifts before my feet could touch the ground as well. I remember really fondly being on the factory floor, even as a little tacker. These days in white collar work you're not working with your hands anymore, and I think there's something nice about going back and experiencing that every now and again.

Mat: Also, you realise how things turn up on our plate, how food arrives, how packages arrive, what actual process they go through. There are real humans who have to do that work. And I know we're heading into a robotics world, but it was very special. I think everyone's got their own childhood story that shaped them positively or negatively. We all carry our inner child with us as we get older.

Ashton: Tell me about the journey into financial planning. I understand that's where you started the first chapter of your career, and you came into superannuation from that background. What did that angle let you see that maybe insiders had stopped noticing?

Mat: It actually goes back a little earlier. I always dreamt that I'd be a footballer and a farmer. I didn't even finish my exams at school, I just thought it was irrelevant. I'd never go to university. I'd go and play football. I tried to do that and it was a great part of that chapter out of school.

Then I went back to university with the intention of learning business. The farm at that point was going through a millennial drought, it wasn't the right time to go home. I studied commerce and economics. During that time, I was having a debate and this woman absolutely demolished me in a governance and business relations debate. Afterwards she said: would you like to work in tech? My background certainly wasn't in tech, so I started doing data entry for a large American company that did contracts for critical infrastructure, the Department of Immigration, the Australian Electoral Commission, those sorts of organisations.

At the same time, I was still coaching football in Canberra. One of my players said to me: you should be a financial planner, you'd be really good at that. I told him I'd rather be a used car salesman. But he convinced me. He said: come and do a bit with me. I'm an auditor turned accountant. I don't sell products, I solve problems.

I took a couple of weeks leave and went and worked with him. And for some crazy reason I left the tech world that paid me really well and went back to earning about $55,000 a year as what they call a paraplanner.

I spent ten years doing that and became a certified financial planner. That journey unlocked a deep respect for the end consumer. When you look at it through that lens and then go down to the superannuation industry, you very quickly realise that those two and a half million members, or four million members, are real people at the end who are relying on that organisation to give them a dignified retirement. That really resonated with me, at the moment I could change the lives of 30 or 40 people. Imagine if you could do that for 10 million.

Ashton: I remember the first time we met, Mat, it wasn't long after you'd founded Grow. I think it was an ASFA emerging leaders panel. You were talking about the ambition for almost a map for the industry: a map for financial advisors, a map for superannuation funds, a map for members. Can you tell me about the pivots you made, because you pivoted from financial planning into a new chapter?

Mat: I was running a business I'd built called Sherpa Wealth. I love hiking. I was hiking in Patagonia with an American woman and she kept saying my Aussie accent sounded like Sherpa, not Sherpa. So that stuck.

From my financial planning days, what I saw was that you discussed money planning and advice with someone and solved complexities for them. I tried to take that into how we thought about the broader superannuation and wealth management world. I looked at Google Maps, if you've ever used the old Gregory's maps, think about the simplicity of Google Maps. It's one screen. If you miss the turn, if you go the wrong way, it's smart enough to reroute. It's very personalised. I thought: how could you achieve that for all of these funds? But rather than drive your own ego to do it, how could you partner with like minded institutions to solve it?

We went down that path and thought we were onto a great thing. But one of the greatest lessons of entrepreneurship is: don't have a solution running around looking for problems.

On that journey, we were trying to be our own B2C superannuation fund. And the pain we were having with the backend infrastructure that drives all of this, people don't realise what sits behind a super fund or a fund manager or any of these financial institutions. The legacy that's there was built before you and I were born, and it genuinely never anticipated that you'd even have an app on your phone, let alone that we'd be in an AI world today.

That led us to saying: the problem is far bigger than just the consumer experience. The consumer experience is a derivative of what sits underneath, very much like your health, both mental and physical.

Ashton: What listening to that pivot reminds me of is there's been a lot of focus historically in the industry on how you can nudge members towards better outcomes. But before you can nudge people, you kind of need to get rid of the sludge.

Mat: Totally. When I was attempting to be a professional athlete, it was very clear that what you do today will determine your future self, and not tomorrow. You won't go to the gym today and see results tomorrow. We love immediate hits. However, that repeatable process can take you to a whole new world in the future.

When you apply that to technology and assets: if you get the foundational elements right, the stuff that comes after is actually the easy stuff. But usually people start there. It's a little bit like when you hear people say, I need to be inspired. I couldn't disagree more. Just take action. Through action you'll get motivated, and through motivation you'll become inspired. And with that inspiration you'll take more action, you'll become more motivated, it's just a beautiful flywheel.

Ashton: When I'm teaching at university, the first thing I always teach is: commit before you're capable. In the act of doing, you will become the thing you want to become. You can't plan your way towards an identity change. You have to act towards that outcome, even if you don't feel comfortable.

Ashton: Walk me through the first time you went and pitched to Vanguard. A $10 trillion manager, a startup walks in the room, talk me through that.

Mat: The Vanguard one is a really close one to my heart. As a financial adviser, Vanguard and Dimensional were two institutions that I put a lot of clients' money into. Fast forward many years later and all of a sudden you're sitting in their office and you're like: this is pretty cool.

Long story short, I had this idea that Vanguard should buy our super fund. I navigated my way around to find out who the right person was to meet. I won't say his name, but he'll know, and he's now a very good friend of mine. We sat in a café in Melbourne, he'd never met me. I said: look, you should buy our fund. Imagine what Vanguard could do with it. And I was also trying to sell him the backend infrastructure. He said: we will never be a fund.

We had a lovely chat about the industry and the world, and that was it. I came back to Sydney thinking: well, Vanguard's gone, no interest there. About four months later he phoned me. He said: Vanguard respects confidentiality, that's very important to us. We are now going to enter the superannuation market, and we would like to offer you a place in our tender. Just for context: this is the largest fund manager in the world saying there are five companies globally we're going to invite. You're one of them. At that stage we were about 30 people, and every other institution was worth somewhere between a minimum of $3 billion. So I thought we were obviously red hot favourites.

It was a really interesting journey to win them. Ultimately, they transformed me as a leader. They pushed our organisation to places we could never have pushed ourselves. But in return, they were willing to not kill us. Imagine the biggest gorilla coming at you, they've got risks, compliance, operations, processes. We had none of that. We were a scrappy startup. And it was just a beautiful thing to watch their leadership team know how to work with a small business to get the best out of them without risking their own business and reputation, to get to an outcome that they knew, without us, they couldn't reach.

I've learned a lot from that interaction about working with small businesses, how they grew as individuals and how reflective they were.

Ashton: You were a sports player and a sports coach. What did sport teach you about leadership?

Mat: The parallels in sport are so beautiful when you think about business.

What sport teaches you first and foremost is that you have a collective of people with all different skill sets, who all have a job to do. If they do that job individually, that gets you to a point. If they do it as a team, one plus one does not equal two.

I was very fortunate to have some incredible coaches. I'll never forget one example. We were doing a video session and one of our wingers scored in the corner and did a big celebration, they always get the glory. The coach wound the tape back about 30 seconds. There was one of our forwards, no thrills, no glamour. He got a really fast play the ball, moved a whole bunch of players, his technique was fantastic. And because of that, 30 seconds later we scored the try.

The coach said: never celebrate like that unless you go back and thank the person who's the real reason you scored. He said: if you want to do that in the future, we don't have people like you in our team.

That has always resonated with me about building teams, there is something remarkable when people in a team really respect what the other person can bring. A small team of A plus players can do incredible things.

Ashton: What you just shared reminded me, last week I was in New Zealand speaking at some conferences and I had the opportunity to visit the leading hospital network there and see behind the scenes. Their principle was: it doesn't matter if you're a doctor bringing in a million dollars of revenue a year, if you didn't respect the team, didn't respect the nursing staff, if you talked down to others, you're out. In sport you hear a lot about the no dickheads policy. I think there's a lot to be said for relentlessly high standards in terms of the quality of the people in your organisation.

Mat: One of my first jobs at university was as a woodsman, but I started as a cleaner, so I resonate very much with hospitals. It's very raw, it's real.

As you were talking about that, I think the other thing a lot of people underestimate, and I certainly got this wrong, is that when you're scaling a business and hiring really fast, you're just trying to get things in because you need to get the work done. What I learned, however, is that A players want to be around A players. And there's nothing more agitating to a really capable person than being surrounded by people who aren't at their level.

I learned over time that I am better off slowing down hiring and getting A plus players around A plus players than hitting my hiring targets with a squad that looks the right size but isn't the right quality. And people end up feeling they'd actually be better off doing it on their own.

Ashton: A lot of people right now are thinking about the next step in their careers and lives. There's a lot of disruption going on economically in Australia and globally. I wondered if you could share with me what it took for you to back yourself the way you did at different moments in your career, and what it takes to build in a world you weren't born into.

Mat: I was 28 and it was my second stint in the US playing football. I landed in Florida and went to a game. An older guy in his 70s, red baseball hat, comes up to me and says: I'm a huge fan, I'd love to take you to lunch. I said: mate, I'll take you to lunch if you're a fan. So I took him to this cheap diner, I didn't have much money, and bought him lunch. He said he was an Aussie, had had a couple of companies in Canada, now lives in Florida. That's about me, he said.

I went back and told the owner of the football club what I'd met. He said: you know who he is? He's got companies on the NASDAQ. His name's actually on the back of your jersey.

So I called him back. We went for lunch again, and he sat there and said: imagine you're my age, in your 70s, reading a book. You get to chapter four, it's a good book. Would you keep reading the book, mate, or would you just go, this book just keeps telling the same story?

I realised very quickly he was talking about me. I never forgot that. I started to think about things in chapters. I used to talk to my team about certain chapters being closed, we were this little scrappy startup, we had to grow up to the next phase, and then the next phase. And it helped people think that way.

For me, when I left Grow, I was very fortunate. My wife and two kids and I went to New Zealand and travelled around for about five months. I started to think: what is that next chapter if I was 70, reading backwards? I want to give back. I love agriculture, healthcare, finance, where can I play? But I want to get my health in shape first. There's no point being, as they say, the richest man in the graveyard.

I feel like I got the kick in the teeth at 38. And I have never felt so free as I do now. But I've also never felt as ambitious about what I want to do. I feel like I've been given a second chance, and that's pretty energising. But I don't want to preach my own autobiography, everyone is on their own journey. It's not a race. Not everybody has the same ambitions as me, and that's okay. We all have our flaws, and I've been focusing on being proud of my imperfections.

Ashton: I want to stay with identity for a moment, if that's okay, because it's a topic a lot of people are sitting with right now. People spend big chunks of their lives at work and strongly associate their identity with their role and employer. Then moments happen where they realise: maybe my identity is not that thing.

This is a hard question, but how would you describe your identity?

Mat: I have learnt to shift my identity from being achievement based to being someone who will apply processes and systems and trust those systems to get to an outcome.

I had two really unattractive things about me: I was so driven to get to certain outcomes, and I was so hard on myself when things didn't work out. You see that a lot in high performance athletes, it eats them up and gives them a lot of fuel, but it's not a sustaining way to be.

I've learned from exercise, I don't worry about running a marathon. We'll just follow the process and you'll be able to run a marathon. I'd like to spend more time with my kids. Okay, we'll have more structure around how you do that, and you'll do it, and your kids will love you more. The same in business.

That has then given me a lot of thought about identity. I had someone I really admire say to me: there are four things, family, friends, fitness, and community. They'd never met anyone in their life who was the best at all four. Plenty of people are so good at one: the best friend because they're always available, or someone who's all family but no time for work, or someone who's all work. I certainly don't think I've got a perfect balance across all four, but I've found that systems and processes have helped me get to an identity I certainly wouldn't have reached if I'd stayed on the path I was on.

Ashton: I've got shivers listening to you because it mirrors so much of my own journey. There's a real beauty in acknowledging your flaws but not beating yourself up about them. And the dark side of high achievement is something a lot of people benefit from hearing stories like yours, because you really do have to be kind to yourself when you're continually pushing yourself, continually trying to achieve.

Mat: There's a book called Mindset by Carol Dweck, and it made me look hard at certain inner child beliefs. It's quite fascinating when you can sit in a business room and become deeply curious, or trust yourself to go into any scenario. I had a gentleman I worked with many years ago who used to have written on his computer, in a little white slip: be careful of your thoughts, because your thoughts become reality.

Ashton: What are you up to now?

Mat: It's just incredibly energising to not get ahead of your skis, to not think that because you've done something a couple of times, it's going to be easier this time. There is something just incredible about bringing together small teams and working with great organisations.

I'm doing a bit of building, a number of advisory things, and getting exposure to different businesses. With that exposure, you can take ideas from totally different industries and apply them, and even start to move talent across organisations. That's one thing I've been really focusing on since I left.

As a builder, I have never experienced anything like this AI phase. I can't get enough of it.

Ashton: Can you tell me a bit more about that? I grew up reading science fiction and it's almost like everything I've been dreaming about for 30 years has now arrived, the opportunity and the complexity of it.

Mat: There are probably two things for me. The first: when you're building now with AI, it's never been so easy and it's never been so hard. It's easy to build things. But consumer and enterprise expectations of what good looks like have now totally shifted.

The second thing: the fundamentals have not changed. Whenever you talk to someone or you're trying to sell them something, you must save them money, you must help them make more money, and you must save them time. If you can do all three, you're incredibly valuable. If you can do one, they'll definitely have a conversation with you.

But the reality is, when you're building and you get past a certain stage, it becomes about risk, how much risk is a large organisation willing to take? When you can lean into that, it gets really exciting. I think what AI is capable of doing, from removing the need for people to do transformation projects the way I've done for many years, through to fundamentally transforming consumer experiences, through to saving people time, it's a remarkable space to be in.

But it's still back to basics. I get concerned when I see people doing things that sound great but I just don't know how they're ever going to grow into those profiles they're promoting.

Ashton: How do you think about creating a moat, creating something that can outlast the current technology zeitgeist?

Mat: I have always enjoyed things that are very complex and idiosyncratic to a certain business stream. And I've always tried to do unattractive things, go after the areas others find too hard or too complex.

When you think about wealth management, there are trillions of dollars sitting in that market. People leave school, go to work for 40 years, and you can make a big difference in their lives. For me, when I think about moats right now: how can you really deeply understand the problem you're solving for the end consumer, work back to that organisation, and then let them use your technology with the least friction possible? And once you're in, how can you keep adding value to their world?

Businesses like superannuation, insurance, healthcare, aged care, you do have to know the world you're playing in. The people on the other side are smart, they've been doing it for a long time, they have a lot of scar tissue, they've had a lot of salespeople walk in. You're going to be doing very well to roll in and copy someone else's platform.

Ashton: In a world of increasing technology use, how can you use it to make the experience more human? And to do that, you need to actually deeply understand the human.

You've moved quite fast from one thing to the next. What rituals or practices do you use to make sure you're capturing the learnings and lessons from different experiences when you're moving so quickly?

Mat: I'm a big believer in self reflection and writing things down. There's something beautiful about writing with a pen and being forced to actually think.

Every year, I will go away. I love running. I recently came back from attempting the Never Never track in Tasmania. I'll go away with no reception, no internet, no phone. It usually takes me a number of days, sometimes over a week, of complete isolation in the bush.

From there I reflect. I'll usually spend a certain number of days just thinking about the year that was. Once I've got that out of my system, I'll think about what I want to get done in the next year. Then I move into: what are the systems and processes that need to happen for that to come about? I put down what these big hairy ambitious things are, and then I get really laser focused on the system. And then every quarter I'll usually go for a run and camp overnight and reflect on that.

Sometimes you're over, sometimes you're under, and it's okay to change things. But I find that keeps me pretty square. It's also an easy way for me to catch myself quickly: you are really fit in business at the moment, you're killing it, but family wise, you're just not doing a good enough job.

I'm pretty fortunate from a partner perspective, we're really aligned that family is really important to us, and that squares me back.

Hey, you can have all the money in the world. I still remember going to a meeting as a junior kid in tech, and we sat down with a very well known politician in Canberra. They just broke down in tears in front of my boss and said: look at me. My son turned 21 on the weekend and didn't invite me to the party. This person is someone everyone would consider a success. And I remember after that thinking: I never want to be like that.

Ashton: Mat, what do people misunderstand about how you got here?

Mat: I think the part people might misunderstand is just that, I get such a kick out of seeing other people do well. And I can't describe it. There are people who WhatsApp me, and if you look back at our messages, it's just what they're up to, what they're doing. It can be anything from training for something through to their business. There's no commercial outcome. We're not even best friends from school or anything. I just get a massive kick.

I think it can look from the outside like you're on this aggressive journey. The reality is you're actually more trying to help people be a better version of themselves. Even though at the time some of those people would say: you pushed me really, really hard. I wanted to tell you to get stuffed. But they got to a better place because of that.

Ashton: I'm going to ask you about Patagonia, you've mentioned a few times the role that nature plays, its restorative quality, in the way you've described it. What role has being in nature, travel and new experiences played in your life in terms of either restoration or transformation?

Mat: It's certainly not a hard rule in my family, but it felt implied: you go to school, get a trade or a degree, and then you must travel, for a certain window. I always took it as a year.

I tried to push football, then ended up at university. I'd been on football tours overseas before, but it was probably at about 26 that I call my quarter life crisis. I landed in Buenos Aires, spent four or five months travelling all the way through South America, then ended up in the US playing football, then Europe backpacking.

From that travel, I really enjoy getting out in nature. There's just nothing better than having no technology and just wandering, letting the mind disconnect. It's like a detox, it takes me a certain number of days before I really truly come down from it. And then the purity that comes off the back of that.

I don't think I've ever spoken to anyone who hasn't described how after a walk, after time out in nature, it has given them a perspective on something they couldn't access before.

Ashton: That's why I love swimming so much, as someone who couldn't swim until he was 34, finally getting in the water and losing yourself a little bit. I think it's so restorative and so transformative. Like you, it took me a little bit to let go of the device on trips. But by the time I got to Patagonia, I'd fully let go, being fully immersed in nature and not having anything but the present moment.

Ashton: Before we wrap up, I'm going to ask you the question I ask all my guests. It's about childhood beliefs. Is there any childhood belief you had, either about yourself or about life, that you had to let go of to become who you are today?

Mat: One of my beliefs was that I was really good at certain things, like sport, for example. I could go into any sporting environment and be pretty confident. But there were certain academic areas where I just wasn't gifted. A good example is my schooling, I didn't even go to my final exams. I just left. I thought: I'll never use this stuff.

That was something I had to learn to get through. And it's fascinating now, people who have worked with me will see me in meetings when someone says something and I'll push it to the point where I ask: no, but what does that actually mean? People can use acronyms and sound really smart. And I learned that I could just learn. There's nothing I couldn't learn. That stuff can be learned. And once you overcome that, it gets really exciting, because you start leaning into things.

You also realise that a lot of people are almost like robots, sounding really smart. A big thing for me was overcoming that confidence barrier around what I thought was intelligence. And then, because I'd worked so hard on communication, on coaching and on other areas, grit, passion, when you blend those two together, you get to a pretty great outcome.

I certainly had a fixed mindset on certain areas of my academic capability. I went on to do Intro to Economics in Canberra, where I just scraped through with 51% because I'd never done economics at school, and I ended up getting Dean's Awards at the end of university.

That's a great example: you had no idea, you didn't believe it, and you come out the other side. And I think that's been a huge thing to overcome from childhood.

Ashton: It's a wonderful note to end on, because I say this all the time: transformation is a learnable skill. Mat, thank you so much. It's been an absolute pleasure. This has been the Reinventor's Mindset.

Mat: That's right, any of that can be learned.