The Power of Self-Belief with Curtis Matsko of Portland Leather Goods

Ethan Peyton: Hey, everybody, and welcome to the Startup Savant podcast. I'm your host, Ethan, and this is a show about the stories, challenges, and triumphs of fast-scaling startups and the founders who run them. Our guest on the show today is Curtis Matsko, founder and CEO of Portland Leather Goods. Portland Leather Goods started as just a scrap of leather and a conversation between Curtis and his girlfriend. This year, they're on pace to sell more than $ million of leather shoes, accessories, and mostly leather bags. In those seven years, Curtis and a team became a top  Etsy store. They built an online community with more than members. And they've grown the PLG team to more than  employees. So we've got a lot to talk about today. And I think we're going to have a ton of fun. But let me quickly remind everyone to subscribe to the podcast. And if you're watching on YouTube, please give this episode a thumbs up. All right, let's get straight into it with Curtis. Happy to have you on the show. How are you doing today?

Curtis Matsko: doing really well, but I want to come back and tell everybody they just they didn't all subscribe. So everybody this is a good podcast for good sake take five seconds and subscribe. Come on, Ethan's good at this stuff.

Ethan Peyton: Yeah, just five seconds, come on. Thank you for that, thank you. All right, so since we're here to have some fun, I'm gonna give you a choice right off the bat. We're going crazy from the beginning. I'm gonna give you the choice between two stories. The first story is that you told me that you know where my hometown is and that's insane. So we got a story behind that. And then the second story has something to do with Zen monasteries in Calvin and Hobbes. So I'm gonna give you a choice there.

Curtis Matsko: Wow, those are two of my favorites. I told you that I knew where you were from and you're north of Columbia, Missouri. Everyone knows this if they know Missouri, that the University of Missouri has the number one journalism school in the world.

Ethan Peyton: That's correct.

Curtis Matsko: Okay, so I was dating a young lady and I convinced her to go to the number one journalism school for her graduate degree and I went out there and was living with her in Columbia. And what her job was in the evening back in was she ran the world's first online daily newspaper which was actually done by Columbia University. So at three in the morning she was in there typing away taking the AP wires and turning it into HTML.

to have for their amazing journalism school, this daily newspaper. And I used to sit there saying, people should sell things on this internet. And she was one of those, no, that's against netiquette. You don't sell things. This is for academic. This is for information. So I took ,  and wrote one of the world's first internet marketing books and started up a big internet company that crashed in , . If you're a business owner,

Ethan Peyton: Ha ha ha.

Curtis Matsko: Don't be afraid of crashing something. I lost tens of millions of dollars in the big crash, but I learned a lot during that first thing. And so that led into Portland Leather Goods. And we started this in a garage with a little scrap of leather, as I say. And I told my girlfriend at the time to quit her job. She said, what am I gonna do if I quit my job? And I said, I forgot to tell you, I'm an internet marketing expert. And she said, no way, no, you're not. I'm like, well, I haven't done it for years, but.

I was actually a pioneer in this. I think I could do this. She said, how are we going to come up with, what are we gonna sell? And I'm like, I don't know. I'll take this leather and we'll make a journal. But we started opposite of the internet. We went to art festivals. We had put everything in a, I mentioned to you earlier, it was a van. It was a suburban, a big white suburban. You shove everything in there. You drive to an event, you sit on the street and people come along and you point to your item and said, would you like to buy this? And

There is such, if you're a startup company, I'm gonna tell you, there's a lot more similarities between selling on the street and selling on the internet than you believe. If you can master one and you can apply it to the other, you can understand how they work together. If you can't sell it at an art festival, you can't sell online. And I believe that in my heart. There's marketing and sales and there's basic things you need to do. And once you master them, you can scale. And we did, we started doing these art festivals, Ethan.

and we'd do three, four, $, in a weekend, which seemed like it was pretty good. But the thing is when you have a leather journal and a little kid picks it up and they say that they love it, I have a big heart and I would say, oh, please take this. Like I started this journal company because when I was in fifth grade, I wanted a leather journal because I read the Lord of the Rings and I wanted a journal. And my parents gave me a pink diary.

Ethan Peyton: Close enough. Ha ha ha.

Curtis Matsko: that was plastic that had a little lock on it. Like, no, I want like a leather journal like Bilbo had, right? So when I see a kid with one, I would give it to them. And I would talk to people and everybody buys a leather journal because it means something. It's a graduation. I'm writing my grandfather's story. He's , right? They all mean something. So I just started giving things away because it seems so important to them. The next year we'd come back, we'd do that art festival. We had lines of people. We'd do , .

,. They would bring their friends. They would, and so we did an art festival where we did over $, in a weekend. That's crazy. We had to drive back every night. We were five hours away from Portland. Every night after we would drive all night long to get more product to bring it back because we didn't have enough, right? And we learned because of that how to be successful on the internet. So we went into Etsy and we blew up. We became a top  all time seller within a year.

Ethan Peyton: It's awesome.

Curtis Matsko: And then we moved off of Etsy, we started up our Shopify store, and now we're one of the top  Shopify stores in the world. So we've just scaled up. It all started in Columbia, Missouri, as I was sitting at three o'clock in the morning telling my girlfriend, you should sell things on this internet thing. And her telling me I was an idiot.

Ethan Peyton: Ha ha ha.

Ethan Peyton: Well, an idiot or not, things work. So you're doing it, and we're stoked you're doing it. So give us a little bit of primer. Besides just those leather notebooks, what is Portland Leather Goods?

Curtis Matsko: So we started something very simple. I loved real leather. As I said, I wanted that journal. And when you go into a store to try to buy a leather journal or something, you can't tell if it's leather or not. It's made in China. And it's either fake leather or real. But the way that it just doesn't look right. It doesn't look like Indiana Jones carries everything in a leather journal. And it looks beautiful and old. So that's what we started with. And then I started. I bought an old sewing machine. And I sewed our first leather tote bags.

Ethan Peyton: Mm-hmm.

Curtis Matsko: And it was all about the simplicity in the leather. It had to be the best leather. And we were buying from a place called Oregon Leather. And pretty soon there was a store downtown. They're like, you're taking, soon as the leather would come in, we were taking it out the back door because we were buying so much so quickly. And they're like, you're taking all of our good leather. So we started working in Leon, Mexico, which has over  tanneries here in Leon, Mexico. They use all US hides. They bring them down here and they just make these

beautiful, what you think of when you think of leather. So the way that I've looked at it is, how can you make something simple that people want that looks and feels and smells like leather, right? So the leather tote bag, we've sold so many. We have now , five-star reviews, which is just crazy. But we sell mostly women's products and they're simple, beautiful leather bags and...

The price is shocking, right? Because remember I told you this earlier, I was broke when I started this company. So my friends were broke, right? It's weird how that happens, broke people hang out, so they couldn't afford it. So I'm like, how much for a leather bag? And they're like, that must cost too much. That's like $. I'm like, no, I'll make it for you and I'll sell it to you for like  bucks. And they couldn't believe it. I'm like, wow, there's a market for something that is so great.

Ethan Peyton: Yeah.

Curtis Matsko: that everyone can afford. So that really is where we are. A lot of people use that as a cliche. Oh yes, we're the greatest quality of, blah, no, we are. We still, when you open up the box, when you buy it, you're shocked. You cannot, you feel like you stole it from us, right? That's the key thing that I've had since the garage is can we just make this better? And then we hired amazing employees, Ethan. And what Portland Leather is, is just a bunch of artists.

and who like to make really neat stuff. And, you know, we hire poets and writers and English Lit majors more than we hire anybody else. If you say you studied English Lit, I'm like, okay, I like you already. So that's a really good thing.

Ethan Peyton: All right. That's an awesome backstory. And I feel like we could fill this entire podcast with just backstory and just things that you've done and all that good stuff. But we can't do that, obviously. We're a business show. Yeah, we've got to talk to the entrepreneurs out there. But there is one more story that I want to get. And let's go back to that Zen monastery. Can you tell me?

Curtis Matsko: Yes.

Curtis Matsko: Of course, now we're here to help out the people, Ethan.

Ethan Peyton: What the heck was going on at this point?

Curtis Matsko: So, everyone says, how the hell did you end up in a Zen monastery  miles from Portland, Oregon? And I was in Utah, and then I was in Montana visiting my folks, and everything was telling me I needed to go to a Zen monastery. And I was online, and three different things that day said, this is the Zen monastery you need to go. And I literally put some stuff in my car and said, bye. I drove to Oregon, which I'd never been to at that time.

Ethan Peyton: Mm-hmm.

Curtis Matsko: drove up, basically knocked on the door of the monastery and said, hey, I'd like to spend the winter here. And there's eight Buddhist monks and they said, uh, how about one night? Why getting up at . in the morning, meditating eight hours a day, noble silence, not talking  of the  hours and see if you could make it one night. And I loved it. And I did the next day and the next, and then the next week and then the next week.

Ethan Peyton: Ha!

Curtis Matsko: So it was a winter on top of a mountain, literally on top of a mountain with eight Buddhist monks. And it was the most amazing time of my life. I would get up at . in the morning, they have the bells go off and you know you have a little bit of time before the two hour morning meditation. I would go down, they would very nicely make some coffee for me. So I would have some coffee and read Calvin and Hobbes. And there is nothing more magical.

than being on top of a mountain in quiet before the sun rises, meditating eight hours a day and reading Calvin and Hobbes and saying, this is genius. I hope my brain is always this clear and I can remember this. And it was a magical time. I would literally spend sometimes in meditation trying to think of a joke because you can only speak for a small period of time. And I would try to...

Ethan Peyton: Hehehe

Curtis Matsko: come up with something clever enough to make the monks laugh. And my best friend, Rue, up there, was a monk, and I knew if I said a joke, he would go like this.

I knew I killed it. I knew that I absolutely loved that particular joke. But it's life changing. It is something that I always look back on and I'm not the person I am today if I had not spent that.

Ethan Peyton: So what's the big change? What did you go in there as that was different when you came out?

Curtis Matsko: The understanding that even if you're a Buddhist monk, you're a person, and that we have basic tendencies amongst ourselves that you cannot get rid of, that there are no great people, we all go through the same things. It's how you react and how you deal with the stress in your life and how you make decisions. You don't just get caught up in a rat race. One of my favorite times was they needed to build an outside building onto part of the monastery. So they had this big tractor come up in the morning, and beautiful, the fog's coming in.

a goal that is you can and all the monks are standing out there is this big tractor you know the big ones with a big arm comes in like this and it's muddy because it's Oregon right and the guys trying to move the dirt and the monks are looking and the guy turned off his and he was like having some trouble with the mud and he turns to the monks and said I'm sorry sometimes this thing just likes to sit and spin and one of the monks said don't we all

Ethan Peyton: Oh yeah.

Ethan Peyton: Ha ha.

Curtis Matsko: And I remember thinking, even if you look at these amazing monks, who are just the most amazing, kind, gracious people, they know that our brain likes to spin. They know that the natural tendency is to get caught up into things. And that you can never fix things, but the practice of coming back from time to time and looking at things and saying, who am I? What am I doing? Why did I make this decision? That analysis subtly changes, makes you a little bit better each day.

and makes you a little bit better in this world, and all of a sudden your life ends up being a lot better than it was when you weren't doing that. So those are all important things in my life. I don't speak about it that much. I'm glad that somehow you got that little note to bring that up because I really don't talk about that time as magical as it was. I don't generally talk about it that much.

Ethan Peyton: Well, you know, usually when somebody spends eight months in their adult life doing something that is so antithetical to what they do in their every day, it causes some sort of change. And usually those changes are strong insights and learnings about yourself that you can take into your quote unquote new life. And hell yeah, why not talk about those things? That's the most interesting stuff in the world to me.

Curtis Matsko: Any changes you do. Yeah, and I'm but I'm one of those people like I'm usually the energy change idea and everything like that was a whoa a slowdown thing and but Yeah, I believe her that you need to shake things up on a day-to-day basis. Don't get caught in routines Just don't do it and like you asked me where I'm actually in, Leo, Mexico right now And one of the reasons is my life is better down here. I'm a better person

Ethan Peyton: Mm-hmm.

Curtis Matsko: I deal, I just, I like life down here better. The people are kinder, everything about it. And when people say, what's your routine here in Mexico? And I tell them, they say, what's your routine when you're in Portland or when you're in Austin or you're someplace else? I'm like, wow, sounds like a lot healthier, better routine that I have down here. And it just makes me a better, healthier, more interesting person and life's better. And so I love it down here.

Ethan Peyton: Now, is that the location or is that the kind of place that you have down there? Is it the people that you're around? Is it just the culture?

Curtis Matsko: It's culture. It's the culture of people. I grew up in Montana. And you know, I've lived in a lot of Missoula, Montana, which is an amazing, wonderful, great city. I've been all over the world. And Portland's wonderful. But there's still a, you talk to a friend and you say, hey, we should hang out. And they're like, oh yeah. In a couple of weeks I have on Thursday, I have a couple of hours. Maybe we should meet for coffee.

A couple weeks ago on a Thursday night, I said, let's have a karaoke party at my house. We invited  people. All  showed up within  hour notice and stayed until four in the morning. You can't get your friends to come over or meet you for coffee. And everyone will show up for anything, for anything. And that's an amazing thing in this world, right? I think we miss out on that. We missed out on that in the pandemic.

Ethan Peyton: Hehehehe

Ethan Peyton: That's awesome.

Curtis Matsko: We miss out on that in life that you show up for people. Hey, somebody's getting married, you show up. Someone's child is having a christening, you show up. Someone's moving, you show up. It's something as, especially as my company's become more successful as I went through life, it's like, yeah, well, that's their life, that's not mine. No, our lives are more closely identified down here. If I sit home for a weekend and watch football all weekend long in Montana,

or in Austin or in Portland, no one calls. They know I'm watching football. Down here, I'll get a call in the morning, the afternoon, the evening saying, hey, I haven't heard from you. I think you might be sitting home alone. Do you wanna go to lunch? Hey, we have people coming over tonight. Would you like to come along? We know you're sitting at home alone. That's different. There is a cultural difference that I absolutely adore about being here that makes me a better person. And there's a lot of sunlight.

There's not a lot of sunlight all year long in Portland, Oregon, and that helps too. But my personality, you wake up in the morning, there's sunlight, it's midday, and I'm just dealing with natural light in here. It's astonishing, it's literally wonderful.

Ethan Peyton: Oh yeah.

Ethan Peyton: Yeah, for folks that aren't watching the video of this, if you're just getting the podcast, you should definitely go check out the YouTube video of this because, yeah, the place that Curtis is in is beautiful and I'm gonna have to go check out Leon because I've recently been to Mexico in the last year into Mexico City and it was beautiful. I need to spend more time down there. It's awesome.

Curtis Matsko: This was a soccer player's house and I walked in and I'm not sure if you saw that there's a  foot tree In the middle of this thing and you walk in the front door and you see this tree. Hey, there's Mariana everybody and I said this is magical and It's cozy and it's wonderful and there's light coming from every direction and Me being better makes me better as a person but in my company

Ethan Peyton: Ha ha ha.

Curtis Matsko: I'm a better, more calm, more kind, more optimistic person. If you're gonna be in business, if you're a startup, if you're learning from any of this, learn that you better be optimistic because no one else around you is going to be as optimistic as you are. Something about sunlight helps that out.

Ethan Peyton: Heck yeah, we're going to come back to that optimism here in a little bit, because I think that it's incredibly important. And I think something else that it seems like what you're doing is you're optimizing for quality of life, not necessarily for maximizing profits or business or whatever. And it doesn't seem to make a huge difference because you're getting these outsized business returns anyway, but it seems like you're just living a better life where you are.

Curtis Matsko: I live a really good life and it's not just about being here. I live a pretty good life in Portland, but not as good as this, okay? Or in Austin or in other places. But I will say this, when it was just me and my girlfriend and we hired a young lady named Anna, $ an hour,  hours a week, she's now the COO of our company, right? And the reason I hired her is she mentioned, she mentioned Charles Bukowski, the poet, and Tom Waits, the musician in her cover letter. And I called her up and I said, you're hired.

Ethan Peyton: Go, Anna, go.

Ethan Peyton: Hahaha

Curtis Matsko: I feel like that if you if you love that I love you and she's now is the CEO of all of our companies Right and even was that we took the time to say we like these people we like what we're doing and we like our customers There's something magical there, right? We're not selling something crappy to crappy people We're not selling to people we don't like the people who like our products are the people we like and there's something magical about

Here is me running this, but here's my employees, and then here's our customer base, and all together, these are the people I'd like to be with in this world. They're interesting, they're intelligent, they're wonderful. Why not surround yourself with the best people? And I used to think it didn't matter. Oh, I can change this, or it doesn't matter where I'm at. It does, it matters where you're at, it matters who you surround yourself with. If you're running a company that's selling great stuff to great people, things can get a lot more fun.

Life just becomes easier. Not easy. Life is never easy. There's all ups and downs. I've lost people this year. There's always tragedies happening. It's never easy, but it becomes easier and I'm more grateful and enjoyable about what goes on now than I ever have.

Ethan Peyton: All right, so we started this conversation talking about the beginning of this company, that it was just a scrap of leather and a conversation with your girlfriend. How do you go from that and create a company that sells such a simple product to $ million in just a couple of years? How do you go from nothing to massive so quickly?

Curtis Matsko: Yeah, and I want everyone to understand, even though I have a history in e-commerce and I had a lot of things, not only was it scrap of leather, I was broke. I literally had zero dollars. So I had to watch every single dollar at that time, okay? How do you go from that? I believe that number one is I am an unflinching optimist.

Number one, I just believe it's going to work out because you have to make decisions in this world to move forward before you have the rational proof that it's going to work out. I almost believe, hey, if you're a Harry Potter fan, which I am, you better believe in a little bit of magic because you're making decisions and taking chances, not gambles, you just go forward and say, I would always tell people, don't worry, it will work out and they're like, how? And I'm like, I can't explain, but I know.

Ethan Peyton: Mm-hmm.

Curtis Matsko: with good people and a good idea, if we do the right things, we will be clever enough to come out. So I'm an unflinching optimist. The second thing is I'm a marketer, okay? I am not someone who was in my garage who made a leather journal and said, I am gonna sell this to the world. I'm a marketing guy who's the youngest of four boys. What I mean by that is, I always wanted people to like me. I was the class clown. I was class personality.

I was smaller than my brothers, so I had to try to be more clever. So I would go to an art festival and I would see people at art festivals trying to sell their product. And if people didn't buy it, those artists would say, those people are dumb, they don't understand my work. And if someone didn't buy mine, I would say, hey, I would take two chairs out when I would sit in the tent and I would have the people sit down next to me. And I would say, hey, can you tell me how we can make this better?

What would make this something that you would want to buy? And I would continue to work with them and work with their products, and that next week I would create what they wanted. So I worked with the actual people.

Ethan Peyton: Did I lose camera here? Hang on just one second, sorry about that. Nope, I could hear you, thank you. Apparently the camera battery died, it's being swapped right now. Thank you very much for that by the way. I don't know, yeah, well no, we're gonna blame me on this one. I think turn it off and then on. Here, I'll walk over.

Curtis Matsko: You did. You could hear me go a little more.

Curtis Matsko: Can we blame Kayla again?

Curtis Matsko: Ha ha ha!

Curtis Matsko: Who's that guy?

Ethan Peyton: Let's see here. Nobody's sitting there now.

Ethan Peyton: All right, can you still hear me? OK, can you see me again? Sweet, I don't know how that happened. But we're going to just pretend it didn't happen. So I'm going to put you back where I had you up here. There you go. All right, so thank you. All right, so let's see. Where did you finish up there? I apologize.

Curtis Matsko: I can. You're good. Yeah, I can.

Curtis Matsko: You were, I kind of went a little faulty. You might want to cut that out. You asked me about how I went from nothing to this next level.

Ethan Peyton: OK, gotcha. All right, I remember. OK, so tell me about those conversations that you were having when you brought up those two chairs. I'm assuming you were sitting in one, the customer was sitting in the other. What did that conversation look like? And for people who aren't selling at art fairs, how can they kind of get that same level of interaction with their customers so that they can improve their product?

Curtis Matsko: That's a great question. It's so interesting. I had my chief marketing officer Maverick is down here visiting me. We were talking about this the other day and Yesterday we had a hundred and eighteen thousand people in our online store And he said what would it be like and what would you make your physical store or let's say you're tented an art festival Like if you know a hundred eighteen thousand people were coming in, right?

Ethan Peyton: Mm-hmm.

Curtis Matsko: You would not just set it up and say, this is it, I am stuck. The first thing I learned is when people would sit down next to me, I would talk about anything but our product. I would talk about them and their life and what are they doing. They will naturally tell you what they're looking for, but I would talk about them. I would never first start talking about our product ever. Then they would literally tell more about their life and then tell me what they really wanted that product for, not a response.

Ethan Peyton: Interesting.

Curtis Matsko: And some people would sit there for a half hour or two hours and talk to me. And the more I talked to that person, other people would come and join the conversation. So we'd get eight or nine people talking about this product. And P.T. Barnum said, nothing draws a crowd like a crowd. So people aren't leaving my tent. So everyone's walking by saying, there's , ,  people in this one. There's no one in the rest. What's going on? And they would all come and hang out. And all of a sudden they would tell me,

Ethan Peyton: Mm-hmm.

Curtis Matsko: What I'd really like is if you could put a stamp brand down here at the bottom that had my son like Star Wars. So I got a Darth Vader thing and I would brand those in. Oh, I want this. My son is gonna go on an adventure. So I'd create up a brand, a metal brand, and then I would brand the leather with that brand and say, and then you'd have it. And then you would watch them. I'm a Tolkien guy as I mentioned to you. So not all those who wanted are lost. I created that one up and I put it on there and.

This would be perfect for my son who's going here, right? Does that make sense? This bag is not big enough for it. I need it for this. Would that fit my laptop? And you watch them because these are the real customers. If you do a lot of e-commerce, you go on there and you look and you say, yeah, we had , people and here's how many went to the cart. Here's how your clothes are like. Those are all people. Those are all people who for some reason came there. What were they thinking? What did they see and what did they want?

And if you cannot empathize with those people and understand that you're providing something for them, not just, I have a website, buy from me dummy, then you've lost the art of what business is. You've lost the art of marketing and its connection with people. It is absolutely connection. You cannot connect, you can't be a marketer. If you can't connect, you can't be a really successful business person. You know, I grew up in, you know, in the eighties with all those bad eighties movies with.

and businesses this and this and this and the corporate and the ties and everything. That's not business. Business is understanding how you connect and provide something for somebody. That's how you truly become successful. Not by going to business school, but as I say by reading poetry. I know that sounds weird. Or reading Harry Potter. That'll teach you as much as anything.

Ethan Peyton: Well, I like that business school better than regular business school. There's less tests. That's for sure.

Curtis Matsko: I did take an accounting class for one period. I went into the business building. I did not feel comfortable. I sat in the room and at the end of it, I walked up with my ad drop slip and I said, please remove me from this class. And he said, we haven't talked about anything. And I'm like, yeah, I'm like, I know. I gave you an hour and you literally said nothing. I'm not giving you a semester of my life.

Ethan Peyton: Yes.

Ethan Peyton: Right, you gave me enough, I know. All right, so with those conversations, you have kind of found a way to scale those conversations, and that's with the Facebook group, the Portland Leather Goods Insiders Facebook group. Tell us a little bit about what's going on in that group.

Curtis Matsko: Ethan, you wouldn't believe it. Have you joined it yet?

Ethan Peyton: I did, yep.

Curtis Matsko: It's mind blowing. You have , people doing thousands of posts and comments a day that know more about my company than I do. They're on the site every day looking. They'll find glitches in the site before we do. They buy our products. But they became a community and I can't take credit for it. I can just say they came together. There are stories where one of my favorite stories is a woman posted.

Ethan Peyton: Hehehe

Curtis Matsko: said, I just bought this new leather bag today because I got laid off. And my heart said, no, don't, don't spend your money. And she said, I bought this because I wanna have pride when I walk into my new job. And I'm like, oh my heart, like somebody contact her and give her this bag, right? A week later, she posted said, I got a job paying twice as much in my chosen line. I bought another bag.

Ethan Peyton: Oh. Ha.

Curtis Matsko: for my sister because she has a bad job, these bags could change her life. You can't write that in marketing. You can't do that. There was a woman who ended up being in Portland for a day for business. And so she said, I'm coming to be there. And a bunch of people in the group said, contact her, said, when you come to town, please come, we'll meet for lunch, we'll go, we'll show you the store, we'll show you around. And she sends, puts pictures up.

Ethan Peyton: No.

Curtis Matsko: of the six of them having lunch all coming together and relating to each other. You can't buy that. That's nothing to do with us. Yes, we have a great product. And yeah, we have good customer service. And I really do have a big heart. I'm a big hearted guy, okay? But I didn't create this. These amazing people. Our customers are more interesting than we. We've had people in Wisconsin, let's say, or I know one was in Wisconsin, where she got ill. She was older and she's like.

I saved up my money, I bought this bag, but I'm sick, and I can't even make it to the hospital. People in this group picked her up and took her to the hospital. Come on, man, you can't do that. You cannot replicate that. So I can take no credit that the fact that there are better people who use the facility and the vessel we created to create something much better than we could imagine. I can't, I'm a great imagination. I can't imagine how good people are.

Ethan Peyton: Oh man, that's so cool.

Curtis Matsko: But we talked about this season, I said, you gotta be optimistic, you gotta be kind in this world, and things will magically work out. And if you're not, guess what? You get what you also want in that way, and if you think everything is gonna go wrong, that world will make that happen too. People are good, they need the avenues.

Ethan Peyton: Yes, people are good. I completely agree with you. Now, I know you said you can't take any credit for this group and what it's turned into and how people are within the group. But I think that we can maybe give you a little credit. And if you don't want it, that's fine. But I'm going to give you a little bit of credit for creating the culture that created this group. And I'd like to know your thoughts on how you create the culture that your business sits within.

Curtis Matsko: I talk mostly, I learned that if I tried to be the leader that people thought I was, that it was bad. Meaning, if I'm like, hello, I'm just checking in to see how you're doing, right? I scared the hell out of people. When I was myself and said, things are gonna work out, I like you, I trust you, don't worry about it, try it, be yourself, laugh, have fun.

Ethan Peyton: Hehehe

Curtis Matsko: Get sunlight, turn on music, bring your dogs to work. Let's create something great, I believe in you. When I did that, the great people rose to the top and other people drifted away. Cause not everyone's gonna fit in every culture. Does that make sense? I made mistakes, we all do. But like that team that runs that, they all have dog names of two different dogs that come to work for us. Like Nala Josie is one, Nala is one dog. And this is a real person who was, we did a group interview.

There was four people in the interview, one of them, she was there. She was crazy. Everyone else was answering standard things and she was had energy and she was talking. But I said, when everyone left, I'm like, that girl has something amazing about her, right? She now runs that whole thing and she'll sit there seven days a week on her couch and answer every message that somebody has, right? Because this is her life and what she's become and she loves it. And they create things that I'm creative.

I could never come up with the energy and the juice that these people do. I had an old friend of mine that used to work for an old company of mine. Said, my daughter's moving to Portland. And I said, well, you better have her call me up. And I met with her, I gave her a big hug. I've known her since she was two. And she's like, I'm just worried, like, you know, my dad worked for you. Like, I'm gonna be working for you, is that okay? And she came in, purple hair, the most kind person you've ever met in your life, and she will invest.

so much into that one person who posted to make sure that person is understood. And I always say, take time off, stop, go home. Don't do this, you are working too much. Those are the people you want, the people that get the joy in doing what they're going to do. And did I surround myself with a bunch of people like that? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I just, I'm really good at that.

Ethan Peyton: So how, so you've done this. You've hired these people around you, but at some point in time, I'm assuming you're not doing % of the hires for the company still, is that correct?

Curtis Matsko: I've sat through over , interviews.

Ethan Peyton: So you still are doing all of the hiring for your company?

Curtis Matsko: Any major one and a lot of these folks, all the major people, major one, I hire them. Now Anna, who, remember I told you about the young lady, that came in and worked in the garage with me, one of the two of us has to be in every final interview. Everyone. Yeah.

Ethan Peyton: Mm-hmm.

Ethan Peyton: Oh, cool. Okay, well that answers my next question of how do you make sure that once it is beyond you, once you are unable to sit through all of these, I'm sure, thousands and thousands and thousands of interviews, how do you continue moving or continue getting that same quality or type of person and it sounds like it's either you or...

you or someone else and maybe if it gets another % bigger, you add another person and that's how it goes.

Curtis Matsko: Yeah, I simplified that, and so let me give you a real answer on that one. The people directly underneath me are pretty phenomenal. Okay? And they've had three, four, five, six years of working with me and seeing what it is about me that's made this work. And I've got a billion flaws, my friend. I mean, you go, let's line them up, okay? I'm a long-term recovering alcoholic,  years, right? And I'll tell you, if you'd known me  years ago, you would have just pity me.

Ethan Peyton: Mm-hmm.

Ethan Peyton: Hehehehe

Curtis Matsko: That's the absolute truth. I have a lot of flaws, but to stay sober, I had to be very, I had to change who I was. I had to just be a better person. So I had to surround myself with better people. So the people that work underneath me, I admire all of them for different reasons. Because of their life, the mothers that they are, the families that they raise, the kindness that they have. And once they match my energy and ideas with their kindness.

It creates a culture that they can now spot that person that only I would have spotted, right? They can see it. It's not about the resume. It's not about the bullshit answers that they all give because they all give you the resume answer. The thing about me is I will say something to make them have to say something about themselves. And you learn who they are. And my people realize, I wanna surround my, Chris lives a good life because he surrounds himself with the best people.

Ethan Peyton: Mm-hmm.

Curtis Matsko: Don't the people I want working underneath me to be the best people? I have flipped the switch. I have flipped the script. That's what I wanted to say. When you come and you sit with an interview review with me, number one thing I say is the odds are against you. You're probably not gonna make it. And then I say, if you had the chance to work for our company and I was gonna pay you half of what you really want, you should take it.

Ethan Peyton: Hehehe

Curtis Matsko: because one year working in this company, you will be a different person. So don't talk about pay, don't talk about this, determine are you good enough that you wanna get better and work with amazing people and change your fricking life. Because if you're not, if you're looking for a job, then get out of here. If you're looking for something that's going to change your life, well then why don't you come and join our amazing people and then be willing to be challenged and be kind and be smart and be proactive. And once you say that,

Their mind switches to, wait, I do want to work here. Why? Because I want to be better. I want to work with that group. They're not interviewing us, do I want this job? We're saying, can you become the person you need to be to be part of this? You're gonna be working that , community, the insiders, who are better people than you are, better people than I am, right? So are you a good enough person that I'm gonna entrust that you can write the email message or talk to that person?

Ethan Peyton: Hehehehehe

Curtis Matsko: You better be good. And once you have that, you get the best. And that's who we have.

Ethan Peyton: All right, I have a quote here from you. And there's a couple things going on. And I want to talk about a few of them. The quote is, and actually this is from the company profile that folks can find over at Startupsavant.com slash podcast. The quote is, self-fund, work your ass off, don't take on business partners, and be unique. There's four things going on there. And work your ass off and be unique. Those are two.

Curtis Matsko: Uh oh.

Ethan Peyton: fairly commonly stated things. But there's two more there, self-fund and don't take on business partners, that I think might fly in the face of common business advice. Can you tell me a little bit about those two things?

Curtis Matsko: Yeah, as we all know, the number one...

Curtis Matsko: The problem that people make is having the wrong business partner. And their lives are going to go rough and rocky and ready. And I've been through things before in businesses, as everyone has. Everyone who's had a partner in a business has horror stories about what happened, right? Either you're too similar or you're too different. They have a life, something's changed. And that can be the rock. What I chose to do is say, I'm going to be the rock of this thing, okay? I am going to take it. If you are along with me, you're going to be better off, okay?

And the young lady who started at $ an hour in my garage, who is now the COO, I am promising you, her life is unimaginable from the person who worked with me that first year. And she says, whenever she says, hey, maybe I should have some equity, maybe I should be involved in this, maybe I should do this, maybe I should, I say, I'm gonna give you the life that you've always dreamed of. But.

I'm going to know that my instincts are right on some of these things, and I'm gonna make the hard decisions. Because a big group of people, even two people sometimes, they can give you their honest opinion, but I'm a believer of controlling your own destiny. And if I do it the right way, everyone around me, all of the people who fought me on that are now saying, thank you. Thank you so much, because now everybody has risen to that next level.

When you're in the beginning, you gotta fight so many things, your self doubt.

long nights, all this. You need people to talk to. You need people to support you. But that person doesn't need to be legally attached to you. You don't want your bank accounts. You don't want your life, your decisions. You don't want to be locked in. You don't want to be caged and you want to be trapped. If you want to scale to the moon, you want to be able to do that. If you want to take some time off, you want to do that. If you want to take six months and say, let's take the company backward so that we can move it sideways and we become better.

Ethan Peyton: Mm-hmm.

Curtis Matsko: You don't have to spend a year trying to convince your partner who has to pay their mortgage that that's something you need to do. You have to be around the right people. They don't have to be on the line and they don't have to be your business partner. And I'm going to tell you, I have roles of people who serve as business partners. Here's someone who does the finances. Here's someone who does this. And they believe in me and I believe in them. And they're much better off as our company grows and grows and grows than they could ever have dreamed they were going to be.

Legally, they're not attached to it. And I just don't believe you want to limit your success because of the potential of somebody else. I just don't believe.

Ethan Peyton: That's an awesome answer. And I think that there's a lot to say about the agility.

Curtis Matsko: Because it sounds a little, as I say it, it sounds a little selfish, but I know it's right. I know I've proven it day in and day out and you're in and you're out, it's right. If you can lead the ship, you're the captain. You don't say, uh-oh, the ship's gonna hit an iceberg. Hey everybody, let's have a meeting, let's get together and determine what we want to do. You say, the rough decisions are late at night when you're saying, we have to do this, we have to.

You can't, you don't have three months to convince everybody in your company that's the right decision. I'm gonna take the hit. Everybody, we're going to do this. And three months later, when it's all worked out, they say, thank you for making that. Sometimes they'll say, thanks for making that decision. I didn't want to. I know it's the right thing, but I didn't want the repercussions of what's going to come down. There's hard decisions. If you wanna succeed, it's not the obvious path. It's the hard decisions, the hard conversations you have to make.

If you have hard conversations and hard decisions, you can have an easier life. If you always take the easiest route and try to get consensus, you're screwed. It's gonna be a rough time. And I just, I'm a believer in that. So one of them was, don't get a business partner. What was the other? Oh, self-fund.

Ethan Peyton: So fun.

Curtis Matsko: I told you the story of I was broke. I mean, I had zero dollars. So when I would go out to sell a journal at an art festival or a street fell or something, I was gonna be eaten on that, right? You learn how to hedge your margins. What's your, you know, there's like, hey, I've talked to CEOs. He doesn't know what the price of his products are. You know, you made them, you paid for it. You have to make this or you're going to lose money. That teaches us some fundamental things about what your business does.

Ethan Peyton: Mm-hmm.

Ethan Peyton: Mm-hmm.

Curtis Matsko: that you cannot learn from the hire side. I have to look down right now, but I've also had the experience of making every piece myself, fixing a sewing machine that was broken, shipping the products out, taking the wagon and pulling it down to the post office to mail out your Christmas shipments, right? Cleaning up, knocking down the wall and doing all the construction work. I did all of that, because I didn't have the money to have somebody else do it. That created a big foundation.

of understanding that I would never have had if I didn't do it. Self-fund, don't give away money you don't have yet. You're giving away, maybe if I'm successful, you're giving away profits that you don't even have yet. It's gonna change the way you run your business. It's gonna change the way you make your decisions. Learn how to make money off of no money. And then when you have money, you can really make a.

Ethan Peyton: I think that's excellent advice. And since we're in the headspace of giving advice, I'm going to ask you the question that I ask everybody, and that is, what is your number one piece of advice for early stage entrepreneurs?

Curtis Matsko: I remember doing this very, very clearly. And I was overwhelmed, right? You've got to, you think your mind's running and racing and everything. And so I would tell my girlfriend, sometimes I'm down in the garage, got the TV on, you know, watching Stargate, you know? No one would watch Stargate other than it's just something that season after season that just keeps going so you can work while you're doing this. And while I'm down there, she's like, are you really working? Are you getting anything done?

And I made a goal to myself. I would come up with three things every day and write it on this little chalkboard. I said, I'm gonna accomplish these three things today. I'm gonna go to the bank and I'm gonna set up this account. I'm gonna make sure this is done. I'm gonna write that particular thing. Just three things, okay? But they had to be done. It had to be done, right? Well, by the end of the week, you've done . If you do seven days a week, which I was doing, you've done . At the end of the month, you've done  things. You've done , things at the end of one year.

Some people start a business and they're always coming up with their color schemes or this or my website or anything and you look back and it feels like they haven't done anything and the reason is they haven't done anything. They've been playing in their brain and they got nothing accomplished. Just do three things a day. Do a thousand things this year and I guarantee you, you will be way farther ahead than you were. So that was my thing. Three things each day. Write them down.

Don't make some of them difficult. Make one kind of hard and make one kind of fun and oh, this is one thing I've been putting off. Don't prioritize the hard things at the top. That will screw you every time. Just great things. Start proving to yourself and to your brain and to your heart and your confidence that you can actually do it. And people say, Curtis, where do you get the confidence? My girlfriend always says, you have no right to be as confident as you are. You are way more confident. You're not as good as you think you are, but you're confident.

Ethan Peyton: Hehehehe

Curtis Matsko: That's because I just steady, steady accomplish things every day. So you can't throw doubt in me. I've done all the steps. I am confident it will work out. I have done this every day, this and this and this. And I know that when you do that work, it adds up. So if I have the number one advice, do three things, write them down, non-negotiable, do them today. And then you just get in the habit of doing that. And you don't feel like I should be doing four, five or six. That's fine. Just as long as there's three things and you're gonna kill it.

Ethan Peyton: Awesome advice. Awesome, thank you. This is off the record real quick. Do you want to talk about the ranch project, or would you rather me ask what's next for Portland Leather Goods?

Curtis Matsko: No, we don't need to do the ranch. The ranch project is a busy thing. It sounds, I'd rather not talk about that right now. We're dealing with the states and ranchers and we're trying to bring in hides. It sounds like a little glorification of what we do. I don't need to do that, right?

Ethan Peyton: Okay.

Ethan Peyton: All right, cool, that's fine. And then if I asked, what's next for Portland Leather Goods, do you have a good answer for that? All right, cool, so I'm going to jump back into that. All right, what is next for Portland Leather Goods?

Curtis Matsko: You betcha.

Curtis Matsko: Oh wow, it's funny because I'm actually, if you're on the cast here, this is my assistant Mariana right here. Hi everyone. And over here is a guy named Maverick. And his real name is McCoy and he is my chief marketing officer, okay? And he started a little over five years ago, right, Mav? Yep, five and a half. He was a wedding photographer. And he walked in and got a job part-time, said, hey, I wanna work for this company, very little pay.

And I was actually interviewing somebody else at the time. And I said, sit down, we'll interview both of you at the same time. And at the end, I ended up hiring this guy and brilliant. You just knew it. I'm a marketing guy and he's a genius. Any company in the world would be thrilled to have him run all of their stuff. And what he's saying is we're not near the top. We're not even near the top of this thing, right? We cannot make enough product. We will run out again. We'll do  and  million and we will be short.

our main products will be out of next year. So what he says is, we're gonna scale again next year. And we're gonna go next year. And even though we sell so many bags, you can go through an airport and not see one yet, right? It's hard to believe that we sell that many things and you don't see one in the Dallas airport. Or you see one or two. So we like to double every year. We may not double next year because we're living a pretty good life, but we'll grow , , , %.

Curtis Matsko: The community that we talked about, that will grow. And the customer service, the amazing people we hired, they're gonna grow. And we're gonna be the same dumb Portland artists is running a company, being nice to people, making a real simple product. And we'll continue to get more and more of those made and given to the people until people say, we've had enough of these. And we're not near that place at this point.

Ethan Peyton: Hehehehe

Ethan Peyton: Uh oh, did you lose them too? Mm-hmm. Uh oh.

Ethan Peyton: All right, I lost you for just half a second there, but the camera's doing it on your side, so I got you, and I think that was a good answer. So we're just gonna move forward, thank you. All right, so you bring up Maverick, he's actually a quote machine too. In my research, I found a quote that says, the quote is, books will be written about people who got afraid and people who got bold. And I think that was talking about when you guys were heading into some changes you made in the pandemic. And...

Curtis Matsko: You're a clothe machine, man! Alright!

Curtis Matsko: Oh, wow. Yeah, that's great. But if anybody, Ethan, if people make it this far in the podcast, this is one of those times where in retrospect, everyone says, well, that's the obvious decision. Right. But at the time, that's not true. That's not true. Pandemic came and Oregon said, everyone go home. Now we made every single thing in our Portland workshop. Right.  artisans send them all home. Right. So we have we go down to our warehouse of some stuff we had pre-made.

Ethan Peyton: That's an awesome, awesome quote.

Ethan Peyton: Mm-hmm.

Curtis Matsko: And we're like, well, we can sell this stuff for a month and then we're out of business. That's it. We had a few people who would sew, would come in and what some people were doing, remember back to this time, every week or every month, businesses were saying, maybe in a month this will change, right? Can I hold out for a month? And he said, books will be written about people. And I'm gonna change it up. I don't know exactly what it was, but basically people got afraid.

Ethan Peyton: Mm-hmm.

Ethan Peyton: Hehehehe

Curtis Matsko: or people who said this is the time to act and change the world. And I put a couple masks on and I flew down to Leon, Mexico where we were buying our leather and some people couldn't even get a flight into Leon because flights were so much canceled, right? I flew to Guadalajara, a guy named Fabian on his birthday came and picked me up, drove me into Leon. We had to set up bank accounts for banks that were closed, right? We had to sign contracts in a different country that you couldn't get official lawyers to work.

Ethan Peyton: Mm-hmm.

Curtis Matsko: We had to hire people and get electricians to set things up. We set up a little place called The Studio with five machines. The good news is all the artisans for all the shoe companies, the best artisans in the world at making shoes and bags, were all laid off. So we said, hey, we're gonna have this beautiful room and light, we're gonna treat you well, and we're gonna have fun and pay for your healthcare and have a doctor and all these things and be nice. And all of a sudden there were lines of people wanting to come.

Ethan Peyton: Mm-hmm.

Curtis Matsko: So we grew from five to  people, to , to one building, , square meters. That's , square foot, filled up. So we did Studio , and then Studio , then Studio , then , , , , then , then Asceti's, which is a big warehouse. We're the largest leather bag maker in North America. And we did it in three years. Because Maverick said, don't be afraid. Yeah, it's gonna be hard. No one else is doing it.

No one else is dumb enough to do this. Get on a plane and go down and expand. And now everyone says, of course you did that. No, people were telling me not to. That guy over there said, you're an idiot if you don't do it. Surround yourself with people who are not only smart, but are opinionated. And that guy's opinionated and I love it. Ha ha.

Ethan Peyton: Yes, we gotta find our Anna, we gotta find our Maverick, and then we can just make things work. All right, this has been a ton of fun. Curtis, thank you so much for coming on the show. One last question, where can people go to connect with you online, and how can our listeners support Portland Leathergoods?

Curtis Matsko: Well, the Portland Leather Goods thing is easy. Just go to, type in Portland and leather into Google or Portland Leather Goods or PortlandLeather.com or PortlandLeatherGoods.com. That's great, go take a look and, you know, what we found out is if somebody buys even something small, they come back and they buy again and again and again. And I'm gonna warn everybody right now, I'm gonna warn you. We're really good at this. So if you go on and buy a little wallet, you're gonna start swearing at me after a year of when you own  of our.

Ethan Peyton: Ha ha ha.

Curtis Matsko: It happens, it happens all the time. So be very, very careful before you buy from us, okay? Because we're really, really good at this, okay?

Ethan Peyton: Well, if every time I buy a product, my salary doubles because I got a better job, I mean, hey, that's  products is a pretty good.

Curtis Matsko: There you go, the magic of that one. For me, three, four months ago, you couldn't find me on the internet. You could type in Curtis Matsukawa and nothing came up because I did nothing. Nothing Instagram, no, I mean, I did not exist. And finally I was helping some people start their own companies. And they were, after years and months, they kept coming back and saying, my life's changed, you should be helping people. And I'm like, that's not my, there's already a lot of people out there telling you what to do, right? I don't need to do that. But.

Ethan Peyton: Mm-hmm.

Curtis Matsko: I think that I do have a message and some experiences that can help people. And so because I told you I'm a long-term recovering alcoholic and they say it's your duty to help other people, like don't be selfish. You will help yourself by helping other people. I said, I went on to LinkedIn and I started doing some things. And so if you wanna go to LinkedIn and type in Curtis Matsko, I do little videos each day about life. It's not what you'd expect, but it will give you little nuggets of what happens day to day in a business.

what I think day to day, because business is not what's the best piece of advice you've ever heard. It's not it. It's what you do on a day to day basis and what your thoughts are and how you dealt with that. It's all of those things and those standards you do day to day. So go on to LinkedIn, type in Curtis Matsko and you might see a silly guy in some colorful shirt sitting in Mexico telling you about his business. And maybe something I say will help.

Ethan Peyton: All right, folks, well, thank you for joining us and listening into this conversation. You can find the links and everything else that we talked about over on the show notes at startupsavant.com slash podcast. Curtis, thank you so much for coming on the show. This has been a really, really interesting conversation.

Curtis Matsko: Well, it's generally interesting. Hopefully it was helpful too. Thanks, Ethan.