How To Grow and Scale a Business in Any Industry with Matt Pridemore

My guest today is Matt Pridemore. Matt is skilled in negotiation, operations management, coaching, retail, sales, and franchise building. Matt has a furniture business, and he was awarded 2021 Top 40 Under Forty Furniture Executive by Home Furniture Business. He purchased his first retail furniture store in 2016 from his parents and currently owns and operates 13 stores across Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. Recently, Matt started the Franchise Builder podcast, and he is writing a book to help people understand how to go into business using franchises.

We begin the episode with Matt sharing his background story. Matt shares that his parents had one store for 35 years. They did a phenomenal job with it, but they worked all day long inside the store, which discouraged Matt from pursuing it. He was in a professional baseball career, but he got injured in 2009 and had to resign. After going back home, he started to double his parent's business using the skills that he had learned in his career. Matt worked for them for five years, moving from a store manager to a regional manager and later buying his first store (his parent's store) in 2016. A few months later, he started scaling, he bought a second store, and within six months, he had his third location. Today, Matt has created a system of adding a new store every four to five months, and now he’s in his 13th store in the southeast.

We then talk about practices that Matt uses that works well in hiring. He attributes his success to his regional manager role because when he was a store manager, he only had one location, and he did things his way. He was the smartest guy in the room every day and always on the front line. As a regional manager, he worked with store managers as part of his team, and he couldn’t be in every store every time. So in listening to them, Matt realized that they had so many great ideas, and hearing them out ensured they were on the same page at all times. According to Matt, this gave rise to culture, and he had to make sure everybody who came on his team understood that culture was going to be a big driver. Culture beats strategy, and in building a thriving culture, communication is key. So, if you’re a leader, you’re in charge of the people in your team, and you have to create a two-way communication to ensure you’re moving in the same direction.

Next, we talk about How Matt does his interviews. Matt shares that he often involves his high-level employees, including his store managers. He has three people who know him very well, and he leads his company with them, and they have a hand in every interview. Store managers are also part of the program, especially when hiring people to work in warehouse delivery, sales, or customer service at the store level. According to Matt, involving his employees in interviews and allowing them to duplicate what they do, ask questions, and share their ideas is a big part of scaling. He also believes that consistent training is key to building a successful team, and they have training systems in place to ensure they stay on top of this.

Lastly, we talk about Matt’s end goal for his business. Matt shares that when he first got into the business, the end goal was to sell the stores off to people who had added value to his company. However, his goals started evolving and changing as he realized that most of his employees didn’t want to be business owners. Most of them want to be part of the leadership team rather than buying a franchise store. Now, his focus is to keep scaling, training, and growing his business to build a culture of success. To Matt, business, in general, is infinite, and his end goal now is to give value back to the people who are adding value to his company.

Make sure you don’t miss another amazing episode of the Just Start Real Estate Podcast with Matt Pridemore and get valuable information on how to grow and scale your business to the next level!

Notable Quotes:

“Make sure everybody in your team understands your vision, beliefs, values, and the way you do things early on when hiring.”