Matt Gray

Alright... I got a confession to make. I am more of an artist than an entrepreneur. I'm not actually that obsessed with systems for system sake. Systems are something I create so that I can get the freedom to get out of the shit that I hate and focus on the kind of stuff I love. My inner soul, right? Is an artist. Someone that loves free time and space to think, to scheme, to plot. Really to build, too. Now I talk to founders all too often. In their heart of hearts, right? They're an artist. Just like me. But somewhere along the way, you know, they built an offer, they grew a team. They're making money now, and they're kind of larping as a CEO. But when they actually go and take some time to reflect, right? They get some space from their business, they realize in some way, shape, or form, they're kind of losing themselves. And I think there's so many of us, right, that at the end of the day, we just want to be creative, right? We want to build great products with customers that we genuinely love. We want those products to be sold to a, you know, smaller group of amazing humans that really value what we do and will pay us great prices to do those things. So we can run, you know, a really like lean, beautiful, cash-flowing, lifestyle business. Yeah, live vibrant lives, make an impact, and have fun. These days, I've been insanely obsessed with, you know, just cranking on CloudCode. Building dashboards across our entire team. Really going and making sure that the whole company infrastructure layer is, you know, tight. Going and building a new product called Henzo, which allows people to go and generate a really pristine LinkedIn content based on the exact formats and everything I've learned growing my LinkedIn to over 900,000 followers, all organically without paid ads. Lots going on there, right? But that all comes from an inner artist in me. It's not that inherently, you know, I love the business business side of things, right? Or the operations side of things, you know? The systems side of me is how I feel is like a necessity to get out of operations which really I kind of hate. I think it's this combination of being an artist with an autonomous engine around us. By artist, I mean someone that every day gets paid to do the kind of shit you love. I think that's when you're like really leaning into your own creativity. My belief in any business, right, is that, you know, there's a lot of things that have limits. Your cash flows maybe limited initially, your resources maybe limited, your people are limited. One thing that's limitless, though, is your creativity. You know, at any given moment, you could make a YouTube video that's so creative, it blows up and changes the trajectory of your business. At any given moment, you could make a newsletter that's so powerful that it completely transforms the trajectory of your business. At any given moment, you could architect a funnel, right, that's so good that it changes the trajectory of your business. And so that all comes down to you leaning into that core artistry. When I think about building organic content funnels around my business, going from social to our founderOS.com/apply page to the video there, to then the emails that people get, the flow they get in, all of that to me is like a work of art. And when I'm able to pull and push my artistry kind of into those projects, that's when I've gotten the greatest returns in life. Now, that's the artist side of it. But the other side is this autonomous engine. Something I'm passionate about, right, is really going and running a lean team, a highly cash-flowing business that's generating over 50% plus margins. Making sure that my business is strictly A-players and really having it be this like lean, mean machine. Somewhere along the way, I think in entrepreneurship so many folks have just been led astray, right? Running bloated teams, you know, getting lost in a web of confusion, overwhelm, night after night, wondering like, 'What the hell am I even doing? How did my business end up like this?' You know, I'm just here to say like, 'There's definitely a better way.' Because I was just like that. I'll be honest, like, even these days, I find at some points, you know, I think it's kind of the default state of where your business is always by nature kind of pulling itself, right? It's kind of pulling itself to chaos. Pulling itself to entropy, right? And you constantly have to kind of be conscious of that, to make sure that it stays on the path that's kind of like your true north. True north for people, I think, that are as part of this channel, right? Is, you know, a business, um, that's systemized, is a small lean team of weapons, a business that actually fires you up, is, you know, working with customers you actually love and saying no to ones that are not a good fit. I think true north is being able to charge proper prices so you can have healthy margins and be able to also build a brand and build like, you know, your business as this kind of work of art. And true north, I think, is being able to build amazing content around your business so that leads are coming organically. Um, you don't need to go and get on some ads treadmill. Um, you don't need to just rely on referrals or wonder where your next leads are coming from. You know, you've got a powerful organic social media machine owning your distribution, so that you really control your destiny as a founder. You know, I'll be real with you, right? I think that every business as it grows, right? You end up scaling up, you end up kind of going through these stages of expansion. Building out new product lines, right? And often times you're going and adding new team members. And then, before you know it, there's like a few stragglers. I know I'm speaking with like my COO Dom and Diego on my team, and, you know, you can kind of tell on the team the kind of people that are like one of us, right? The kind of people that care a lot, right? They go above and beyond, they have an all-in mentality, um, they obsess over quality. They really, um, want to pursue like elevated design and are product-obsessed. And then, you know, every time, you know, you're maybe building a company of like 16, 17 people, offtimes here and there like one or two folks come along and you're like, 'Oh, man, not the best of hires,' right? Not someone that's actually in the game. What I'm passionate about on that side is overall like having a lean team of like say 12 or so folks, and then having an autonomous engine that's built across the company, so that by default, right? We're automating roles versus hiring new people. More than ever, right? It's, you know, kind of viewing hiring as a failure and finding areas that you can just automate these aspects. Having an automated organic content funnel. Having automated emails around your business. Having automated follow-ups after sales calls. Having automated ways of grading your sales team to make sure that folks are staying on track, and if they're not, being able to remove them and having automated hiring funnels to bring on new folks. You know, having automated ways of going and discovering the best kind of content that you should make. Having automated ways of tracking your financials, tracking the growth across the business, getting dashboards served up to you so that you can, you know, really go and double down on the patterns across, you know, finance, ops, content, marketing that are going to keep pushing you forward and doing less of the stuff that's not working, you know, versus trying to scramble in your business and really just kind of burn out. It's this kind of artist plus autonomous engine that I think's the winner. Now, when you have an autonomous engine in place, right? This is where I think you get the peace of mind to then, you know, kind of is a flywheel back to the artistry. You're able to rely on things, you're not dealing with a bunch of bullshit constantly. And so because of that, you're able to relax, right? And it's from that state of relaxation, from that state of calm, that you're then able to go and be your most creative self. You know, I know for an example, right? If I'm about to go and film some videos, and that morning, I'm dealing with some fire for some reason. Oh, my lord. You know, my ability to go and articulate myself in a video, I'm screwed, right? Because my mind is just scrambled. On the other side, you know, when my business is, you know, running nicely, when things are going the way they should be going, when, you know, pieces are automated, and I'm not dealing with some random crazy texts from someone on the team. You know, I'm able to lock in, to focus, and do what I do best: making exceptional content, going and building the business, serving founders, publishing the book, you name it. I think it's those two pieces, right? That we're all really after, right? And the artistry comes from knowing your zone of genius and the kind of stuff that you should be most focused on, and getting the rest of it automated or delegated to core weapons on your team. And the autonomous engine comes from really zooming out from your business for a second and thinking about your business as more of a machine. This machine is there to serve you, right? It's not there to be run by you, and then simultaneously run you into the ground. When I go and I think about this, offtimes, the best tactic I have for building that autonomous engine is honestly getting a few core people on your team in a room, getting a whiteboard, looking at your business from a bit of a bird's eye view across sales, inquiry, onboarding, awareness, finance, ops, renewal and going and thinking about the different components in all of these areas and who needs to own which parts. Who's responsible, who needs to be accountable, who needs to be consulted with certain decisions, and who just needs to be informed. Who's going to be the different systems owners for the different pieces of your business. And across this machine now, which parts can you go and automate, so that it doesn't even need any human involvement. And these days, with tools like CloudCode hooked up with, you know, Vercel, and your HubSpot or whatever CRM you're using, you know, you're really limitless in terms of what you can automate. I have ambitious goals of, you know, building this founder infrastructure layer, being able to give the whole side of our business that is automated to founders to help them grow their own autonomous engines, because I think this is the future. This is what I'm most focused on helping founders with these days. Um, I think that, you know, if this is something that's interesting to you, this is exactly what we help people with in founderOS, giving you that founder infrastructure layer so that you can be an artist with a beautiful autonomous engine. And so if that's interesting to you, you want us to go and build your social media machine, your engine, to go and drive your content through to leads, should go and check out founderOS via the link in the description. We'd love to just book a call, see how we can help you. When you get this right, right? You're moving from just someone that's an operator in your business, right? Getting sucked into all the business bullshit to being able to be more of an architect. I know that was my core theme this year inside the business, right? Is like really architecting the kind of business that I love, the life that I love, and helping others do the same. So hope that resonates. Thanks so much for watching. Sure to like and subscribe, and I'll see you in the next one.

Most founders are still creating content like creators when you need to be posting content like an architect. Because a founder-led business needs content that behaves like a sales team, a trust engine, and a customer journey all at once. It's a hard balance to find, I get it. Which is exactly why I built the Content GPS, which does it for you. It has 180+ components mapped across 7 core stages. And today, it runs the social media engine behind my 3 million followers and a business doing over $14 million a year led by organic content. First things first is: we've really got seven core components to a content GPS. We have traffic, right? Actually going and generating traffic on platforms like YouTube, Instagram, X, and LinkedIn. When I'm going and helping founders, I think it's important that you think about: are you more of a writing-first founder and thereby going on platforms like X and LinkedIn? Or are you more of a video-first founder, and in that case, you may go and choose platforms like YouTube and Instagram? And so then when it comes to leads then, okay, the big thing here obviously is we want to be driving people to an email list. You're going to convert around 37 times better via your email list than social media. And most founders aren't even thinking about really owning that audience. Now, the best way by far that I've ever found to go and capture people from my audience and convert these people is contextual lead magnets. So, here you can see my lead magnets and opt-in pages. What I've gone and done here is that, basically, over the last four years building my personal brand, I think about creating topics around like my Ikigai, or helping people get more of their time back, my personal board meeting, and I've gone and synthesized some of these things that I just naturally do daily, and basically have given it all away, okay? And what I'm doing there is essentially going and taking the given systems—so let's just say it's something like this Perfect Day assignment, or something like my, you know, CEO Time Leverage Audit. What I go and do is put this behind a landing page, right? And so every single lead magnet gets a landing page. In this case, it's 'How to run a content system that actually works,' right? People enter their name, their email, right, their phone number, and then in exchange for that, they're going to go and get this free thing. Now, that allows me to then go and market to these people off of social media in a more intimate, rich way, like email or like text. And in exchange, they go and they get the actual lead magnet itself. So, in this case, it's simply just a Google Doc. The cool thing here for you, right, is don't overcomplicate lead magnets, right? They don't need to be some fancy PDF or some insane tool. If you're just getting going, just start with a simple Google Doc around your expertise, giving away something that you think would be really valuable to your audience. That's kind of that lead magnet piece. The next piece here is then conversion, okay? The big piece with conversion, right, is nailing your nurture sequence. When someone goes and gets that lead magnet, they're added to an email list, and over nine days, they're going to get five educational emails and five FOMO emails driving folks to, in this case, his Wealth OS, which is his kind of educational program he's building around his wealth management firm. Now, on the sales side, the most important thing here that I think a lot of people screw up is really the most valuable page in the whole sequence, which is your version of this founderos.com/apply page. Typically what you have is all of your social media, right, directing to core lead magnets, and then you're driving people to some sort of link. And so what you want to have is a page like this, right? I call it the apply page. And the winning page here has a bold headline that allows people to understand exactly what you do. In our case at Founder OS, it's helping people build a social media machine for them. We work one-on-one with you to install the exact systems behind my $15 million personal brand and drive, you know, its, you know, growth, right? And then we have a video sales letter here that gives people a sense of what we do, what it's all about, the kind of people that we've worked with, and then allow people to go and book their brand strategy call. This then leads people to a brief 10-question application, and this is a smart router that then routes the right people to the right product. And so we're only getting on calls with folks that make sense for what we've got going on, and the rest of folks will just get sent to an offer that's right for them. Now, the offer, right? This is one of your most high-leverage aspects of the whole GPS, and this is obviously where you're going to actually make money. And so when in doubt, if you're not really hitting your profit goals in your business, and you're finding that, you know, your close rate is below 20%, chances are you probably need to take a look at that offer and go and dial it up a bit. From there, it's your delivery end. Most businesses, after they've nailed the offer, the next area that they break is their delivery. Now, systems then are what kind of bring it all together, right? And here, the big thing is that we want to make sure that if you're building this, right, you have time to actually build the business. You know, I really talk about in my content all the time the difference between creators and CEOs. Right? Creators go and make money from just making content off the backs of ads. But that's not like you, and that certainly isn't me. And so what we need to be focused on is having the right systems around us so that we can go and, you know, hit it and quit it with content, right? And be able to do, you know, a bunch of videos, a bunch of content over a couple days, and then have two months back to then focus on the business. And so when it comes to your platform strategy there, okay, the big thing here is then going and translating that GPS to the core platforms you're on. So let me show you how I think about this for, say, LinkedIn. On LinkedIn, I've grown my audience here to over 908,000 followers, all organically over the last few years, okay? And across every single piece of content here on this page—you know, we'll click into any one of these—you'll see that it's always a banger hook to go and stop the scroll, okay? Which you can see here: 'Steve Jobs once said, the most powerful person in the world is the storyteller.' Then there's long-form value here, and you can see this is all easily scannable. And so we always have these value-dense images as well on LinkedIn, and then making sure everything, right, in terms of the CTA, is contextual to what's above. So obviously I'm talking about storytelling in this post, and I'm giving people a storytelling growth assessment. Now, similar here on YouTube, right? The flow here is we can pick any given post here—you know, I just put up this one here, which is 'If I wanted to build a personal brand in 2026, I'd do this.' It's about a 17-minute video. In minute 4 roughly, and minute 12, we're driving people down to the link in the description to get a lead magnet to help them go and scale their personal brand, okay? And so again, the lead magnets are always contextual to the piece of content. And then you can see I'm also driving people to go and work with me, which leads people to that core apply page I was going over earlier, right? So we're driving all traffic, once people are nurtured, to this core apply page: headline, VSL, and then the application link. If you're looking at what this looks like across my whole business for a second, okay, this is what, you know, Founder OS looks like in a nutshell, right? So, I drive traffic across platforms like YouTube, Instagram, X, and LinkedIn. I have my email sequences, email courses, and lead magnets, like I just showed you. Now, all of those different nurture sources then lead people to our different monetization opportunities. Our core product is called Founder OS Velocity. That's where we go and build your social media machine for you. Over the course of 60 days, we deliver over 50 assets to help you with all the core infrastructure behind building an amazing, profitable personal brand, as well as your company brand, things like your landing pages, lead magnets, content machine, conversion assets, you know, all the stuff that I've gone over here is what we build for founders for them in just 60 days. Just showing you kind of how I look at this stuff. And so here, we can see that we've done just that for James here, okay? We've gone and shown, you know, LinkedIn, YouTube, his newsletter, and podcast, and then all the different formats we're going to be doing inside of that. When I think about the formats that really are working best for me right now that I think you should look out for your own market, number one are screenshares, right? Going into showing behind the scenes, just like I'm doing with you right now, on what you actually do. The second type is going and showing yourself with clients actually helping them. I've done this with folks like Ali Abdaal, Blake Roka, so many others, right, on these whiteboard sessions that I've become known for. The last type is really just having some fun and having like a wildcard category, right? Not everything needs to be, you know, so rigid. And I've done this with things like vlogs I've done snowboarding in Japan to this video over here, 'You'd be richer if you relax' that I filmed in the Dolomites randomly, right? And so, I think a mix of your own kind of personal narrative, vlog, like fun stuff, some stuff showing you with clients, and then some screenshare stuff is what's going to really work on platforms like YouTube these days. Now, on the newsletter side, the best thing to do there is just make sure you're publishing once a week. When it comes then to the content pillars, okay, I think too many people get caught up in their content pillars trying to perfect this. At the end of the day, you want to just get into the details pretty fast. So here for James, right, we modeled out, you know, really making sure that he's speaking about things like wealth, tax strategy, his own story, and then his unique method. But I think it's important to quickly get into the details, and let me show you what I mean by that. I like to use a platform called 1of10 as an example, right? And inside of 1of10, when I'm thinking about my own YouTube videos, right, I have a bunch of bookmarks in here. I have bookmarks for my ideas, and I have bookmarks for thumbnails. And so if we go into my different ideas here, I can go and sort these via, you know, what have gotten the most views, and here I can see a ton of different YouTube videos, right? Around the kind of stuff that I think these title patterns in these is pretty interesting for how I could package my own content. The number one way to go and just break from all the noise and boring shit in those industries is to package your content, your business, your brand, in an innovative way looking at the best outliers that exist out there. And that's exactly what platforms like 1of10 help with. So from there, right, when we think about CTAs, right? Some folks are saying like, 'Well, what the hell, we're only doing lead magnets here, we're never actually talking about our business?' Here's the deal: I want you to be able to build a brand online without selling your soul. And if you're constantly just going and telling people, you know, 'Buy my thing, buy my thing,' you just end up sounding like some salesy piece of shit, right? And so what we want to do is be insanely generous with people, and about 60% of the time, we want to be driving people to these amazing lead magnets that provide a lot of value, right, and show a ton of goodwill. Then about 20% of the time, right, we can go and just make direct offers to people, right, actually just going and selling your thing. And then 20% of the time, it could be, you know, driving people on Instagram, as an example, to things like DM triggers, right? So in this case, it's things like, you know, 'DM me tax and I'm going to send you an optimization guide.' From there, inside of Instagram or LinkedIn, when people have gone and DM'd you for that given lead magnet, you can then engage in a conversation with them, or have a setter on your team engaging in conversations, and if that person seems like they're in the market for what you do, and seem like they're in the buying pocket, going and setting them to your sales team to close up that deal. So, the content waterfall. So many of you guys come to me because you want to learn how to go and turn your pillar piece of content into 22 other formats. These days, some of the best ways to do this, right, are using your YouTube videos, right? So, YouTube videos can easily go and become things like YouTube shorts just by going and cutting the best moments. You know, inside of a YouTube video, typically you will go through, say, three to five different sort of parts of a value structure, and any one of those pieces could easily be cut, right, and become a standalone video. Now, you have all this content mapped out, right? The big thing now is getting your content calendar going. So here you can see, this is me going and actually working with James to go and show him exactly how I'd think about his posting schedule going forward, okay? Number one here is I want to make sure that James is posting one YouTube video a week. On LinkedIn, we want to be posting every single day at 8:00 AM EST because I've seen in the morning, in your given market, being the best time to post on the platform. From there, one podcast is released every week, which is really just taking that YouTube video and then uploading it to Spotify and to Apple Music. And then, he's got a couple IG posts going out per week because, you know, honestly, just being on LinkedIn and YouTube for now is enough. We're just doing a little bit on Instagram with some of those content waterfall cut-downs, keeping to a content strategy that feels sustainable, right? And not trying to do too much at once and then, you know, just having them give up. From there, you know, I've gone and generated a bunch of proven hooks across all of these different content categories, right? Now, when you're going and coming up with hooks for your content, the best place to come up with hooks is by using a core survey you can go and send to your customers, right? Ask them what's their biggest goals, what are their biggest challenges, and what do they most want your help with. Inevitably, content like any product is there to go and serve people, and there's no better people to serve than the folks that are already paying you money. And so that's exactly what I did here. I generated over 32 proven hooks across each of these categories: wealth architecture, tax strategy, the Mitchell method, and the builder story to make sure that James is essentially almost drowning in great content to create. There's no reason when you're building content online for you to be wondering what your next content ideas should be. That is the content GPS, which is in Founder OS, one of the core pieces that we go and install inside of founder's businesses for them. I'm talking about going and getting on a one-to-one call with a founder right when they join. From there, we go and turn out their brand positioning, get their content machine built, we go and get your VSL and your conversion assets all in place, and then from there, it's really going and implementing this, not just in your business with you, but making sure your entire team is leveraged as well. And so, if that's interesting to you, you should definitely go and check out Founder OS. You can go and find a link in the description here. Go and check it out, book a call with my team. Much love. If you liked this video, you would love this next video on how to go and craft your brand positioning. I'll see you over there, be sure to like and subscribe, and let's win together.