From Newcastle Beaches to Running Audible Europe with Matthew Gain

James Lawrence: Today I am here with Matthew Gain. Matthew is currently based in Berlin and he's head of Audible Europe. Matt has been at Audible for the past six years and before the current role, was head of Audible Australia and New Zealand, and then moved into the role of head of Audible APAC, Japan and India. Prior to joining Audible, Matt was at Edelman Australia for almost six years, where he worked his way through the ranks to become the chief operating officer of Edelman Australia. I think that's where we first kind of cross paths. Matt has developed and led programs for brands such as Samsung, Telstra, KFC, Microsoft, PayPal, Commonwealth Bank, News, Santa Fe, amongst others. Matt, you've gone from being an account executive level in agency land in Sydney to running a major multinational enterprise. Welcome to the pod. 

Matthew Gain: Thanks for having me. 

James Lawrence: That was a sheepish laugh. This is the first question which - I had this one in my head for ever since you agreed to come onto the pod - how does a kid go from beaches of Newcastle to running Audible Europe? 

Matthew Gain: I think a little bit of luck, I think a little bit of being in the right spot at the right time. I think also an ambition to always be comfortable, to be outside of my comfort zone, that's maybe the positive way of putting it. The alternate flip of that is that I like shiny things and so always like a new adventure, and I think ultimately a lot of hard work as well, though I love what I do and always have across all of the things I do. So I don't always see it as hard work and it doesn't feel like hard work. But I think there is a certain element of hard work in there as well. 

James Lawrence: How did it start professionally? I've obviously known you for a while and stalked your LinkedIn profile professionally.

Matthew Gain: Yeah, I went to the University of Newcastle and I grew up in Newcastle and I went to the University of Newcastle and the vast majority of my mates went to University in Newcastle. I think that that was just what you did in Newcastle. Not everybody stayed there, but the vast majority of people stayed in Newcastle. And it's a great place, but I guess ever even entertained the option of going away for university. But by the time I finished, it was really clear to me that I wanted to work in PR in Sydney because I saw that as the biggest opportunity or the biggest stage to do that in Australia. And so it was never a question that I would go to Sydney after university. And so I guess that was always the view, and I guess I've always just been chasing the next biggest place. I think I'm always interested to see where the decisions are made. So when you're in Sydney, when you're in Newcastle, you're like, the decisions for Australia from a business sense, are made in Sydney. Let's go to Sydney. And then you start realising, okay, Australia in the global mix isn't that big. And so where do I go to? Where are the decisions made that the people in Australia, where are the decisions above them made? And that's often in Singapore or Tokyo or places like that. So I ended up in Tokyo, and then where are the decisions that are made there? I guess I'm always just ambitious for where's the next opportunity and where's the biggest opportunity to influence things? And that's always what's driven me. 

James Lawrence: Those early roles, without getting to too much detail on them, but what were the ones- those stepping stones, the things that taught you, this is good, this is bad; I want to move here in my career?

Matthew Gain: There was a moment early in my career when I was working at Ogilvy PR, and at the time they had a video games account called Vivendi Universal Games, and they had some really great studios, including Blizzard, which is like a major studio now, I think, part of that activision. And so at that time, the PR industry is dominated with women and not trying to be stereotypical, but back in those days there wasn't as many women playing video games and definitely no women in the agency that were playing video games. And I used to play video games a bit as a kid and they were like, oh wow, maybe you can work on this account. And I got an enormous amount of leeway because no one really knew the subject area. And I was dealing with a lot of young journalists that were kind of around about my age and I had, you know, a lot of freedom to do whatever was going to be best for that client. 

Matthew Gain: And working with these journalists and a lot of that was like hanging out with these young journalists, I could take them away, we'd go out drinking and do a lot of really fun stuff. And I think that that was a real stepping stone because it allowed me to advance quickly because there was no one on top of me stopping my ideas. They didn't know whether the idea was good. And I was able to and I'm not suggesting I made everything, did everything right - there was lots of mistakes made - but I was allowed to make those mistakes. I was allowed to make a lot of mistakes and learned super quickly. And so I think that that was a real breakthrough for me. And went on to then work on the Xbox business. We won the Xbox business at work and then got to go work in the UK on the Xbox business and so on and so forth. So I think working video games at an early age and being able to make lots of mistakes without too much control was really lucky for me. 

James Lawrence: How do you reflecting back - what's the right balance between, because it feels like you've kind of mentioned happy to take risks, being outside of your comfort zone, even early on, we've gone from Sydney, we're in London. More recently, you've gone Sydney to Japan, you're now in Berlin. What's the balance of sticking in a role, moving through an organisation, versus taking that leap and moving outside? How do you weigh up the pros and the cons? 

Matthew Gain: That's a really great question. And I've been pretty fortunate in my career that there hasn't been too many short dent. So I've kind of worked at places; I worked in my first role for, I think it was about almost five years, and then I went to the UK and worked in a couple of different roles there, but it was all centered around Microsoft and so I worked there for maybe two and a half years. And then there was a short stint at an agency called Weber Shanwick, which I didn't stick at and and I learned a lot from that and happy to talk about that if it's helpful as well. And I cut and run too early, I think, there, but I had a great opportunity to go to Edelman, which I spent about, I think it was about six years there. And now I've been with Audible, which is an Amazon business, for more than six years, six and a half years now. And so I've been really fortunate, I think, to be able to stick at those places. 

Matthew Gain: And I think there comes a point where after maybe two or three years you start to understand how the machine of an organisation works and are able to network around it. I think that that can help. Advance within a business, however, I think there is a point also where you can be at a company for too long and that might impact your ability to earn as much as sometimes moving roles. You can make more money, and I think you've just got to be balancing that, the benefits of sticking with somewhere versus the benefits of short term benefits of, oh, maybe I can get a little bit more money here, ten grand extra, or something like that. But you got to balance short term versus long term. And in my career I've been pretty lacking and fortunate that a lot of my career I've had pretty longer roles, but through those companies I've been able to move around and change things up. And Audible has been a great example of that. I ran Australia, then we moved and worked across Asia, and now I'm in Europe. So there's three different roles but still at the same company. And so you get the benefits of the networking, you get the benefits of understanding how the machine works, but still get the diversity of new opportunities.

James Lawrence: I think you kind of touched on it there, which is it's such a balance of sticking it out in the company, progressing, learning, developing. I'll often say it to younger members of my team more generally. Don't take that next step for a $10K pay increase. Like think long term. What's going to set you up for success? That might be at Rocket, it might be elsewhere, but you kind of touched on signs that you might actually be at an organisation for too long. What would be some of those kinds of examples?

Matthew Gain: I've been fortunate to not be at bad organisations, and I think there are probably a lot of bad organisations out there. And I don't think you should stick at a bad organisation that doesn't align with, you know, your beliefs or isn't isn't giving you the chances or are not believing in you. I've been very fortunate to always be in companies where the, you know, the bosses believed in me and gave me lots of opportunities. And so the signs of maybe when you've been at a company for too long, I remember sometimes you can carry a lot of baggage around in a company because companies change, and you end up holding on to resentment. And I think when you're at the point where you're like, this is just going to fail as well, maybe it's just kind of like maybe the problem is not the company anymore. It's you. You're just dragging too much baggage around. And so I think that if you feel you're not believing in where the company is and you're only there because of what the company used to be like two years ago or three years ago or four years ago, maybe, I think you've got a question. Is it likely the company is going to be like the company it was three or four years ago? Or has the company evolved and you haven't evolved with it, and maybe it's not the right place for you anymore? 

James Lawrence: I think it feels like you're staying because you're comfortable, not because you believe in the mission anymore. 

Matthew Gain: Yeah, maybe. Do you know what? Comfortable is fine, if that's what you want to do. I'm a person that likes to be out of my comfort zone. Some people don't, and I think that that's totally fine as well. But I think you've got to be happy ultimately. And if you're not or you don't feel like you're advancing, maybe it's time to go somewhere else, and that's okay. Not everyone needs to stay at the same company forever. That's fine.

James Lawrence: I do want to dig into the current role, but I think the audience for the pod are marketers in Australia, and I think your period at Edelman is really interesting. You didn't come in totally as a junior. I think you'd already done a lot of that work at other agencies, but you came into it definitely not leading the business, and by the time you left, you were the COO of Edelman, Australia. And just, I think, observations from that period around what the best performing, best performers in that organisation were doing, how they were moving their career through any kind of learnings or observations that might be useful for listeners. 

Matthew Gain: I think that I was at Edelman at a really amazing time. At the time, the CEO in Australia was Michelle Hutton. She's still with Edelman. She went and got some really great global roles and is now focused on Asia Pac as a region and is back in Sydney. At the time we came into an agency that was a little bit stale, I guess, is what I would say. And Michelle brought an amazing network of people together, both staff within the organisation. Maybe besides myself, she hired me, but maybe that was the exception. But she hired some really great people that she had worked with in the past that knew that they just were excellent at work, but were just genuinely good people. We had a great culture, and that business through the period I was there, just took off like a rocket. And there's nothing like a growing business and a fast growing business to build culture. It's so much easier to build a positive culture when things are moving forward and moving forward at a pace. And I give full credit to Michelle for bringing that orchestration of people together, not only on the internal, but she had a great network, and we were able to build some fantastic clients as well.

Matthew Gain: And then there was just a whole lot of great, hard work. And it was it was hard work. We spent a lot of hours on it, and we did a lot of really clever things and good things. What I noticed from that time about what made people great was a willingness to humbleness and just good people, because people that can work with each other, people that are willing to disagree in a constructive way with each other, but also who are willing to be wrong, so they're willing to be like, hey, James, I disagree with you on this. But then also willing to hear, hey, Matt, your idea is not that good. And here's what I think. So being flexible in that approach and then people that were just willing to work hard, I think wanted to work hard and were willing to put in the time, that's what made success. And I think that it was people that owned what they wanted to do, they were on board with the mission. They were really good people that were open to new ideas, were willing to challenge and fight for their ideas, but didn't think they were the smartest people in the room. And people that wanted to work hard to drive that ownership. 

James Lawrence: I'm a big sports fan and you kind of look at coaches or managers that go into a sport team that kind of has none of the foundations. They're taking a job because it's a head coach role. And they end up lasting half a season or a season and they go. And I kind of look at it the same way when speaking to people or giving advice on roles where it's go into an organisation that is moving in the right direction, and the rising tide lifts, all shifts kind of shift kind of thing. And you kind of touched on it there. You're kind of saying that nothing builds culture like success and growth, which I think is true. Other symptoms or signs if you're looking at joining an organisation? Because it feels that you haven't jumped around that much, you've mentioned luck at the beginning. I think you're probably doing yourself a disservice, but you've managed to jump onto the back of organisations moving in the right direction that have then given you progress, have allowed you to take the next leap. Like, what made you go into Edelman? What made you take the leap into the Audible/Amazon ecosystem. 

Matthew Gain: Yeah, it's a good one. I mean, I'm really clear on the Audible and Amazon ecosystem. The Edelman thing; the reason I was really keen to go there is at the time, I think still to this day, they were really pushing forward on digital as an area, whereas a lot of the traditional PR agencies weren't as advanced. I knew that was going to be the future. Well, I didn't know, I thought at the time, and it turns out that it was right. I mean, it wasn't that tricky to work it out. It's not like I was a rocket scientist, but I could see that they were pushing really hard into digital and they were the leaders in there. And so the combination of good people; I knew of Michelle's reputation and the fellow who hired me at the time, his name is Alan Vandermolin. He doesn't work for Edelman anymore. I think he's the chief communications officer for SC Johnson in the US. He's just super high energy guy. He hired me. I met with Michelle very early in the recruitment process, and she seemed great. And I just believed in the mission. So from a global perspective, that was working. And then I believed in the company and the people in there seemed good. 

Matthew Gain: When it comes to the decision to move to Audible, I had a very tight agenda. I wanted to work for One Of the Fangs, and I wasn't all that fast on what sort of role it was going to be, and I anticipated I'd be moving into a marketing role. I wanted to get out of PR because I felt restricted. The ideas I had at the time, I felt restricted in that regard and to have more control. So I was looking at marketing roles and I wanted to work at One of the Fangs because I just at that time, you could see the growth and was a big believer in the potential of global media businesses. And so the role at Audible came up and I was a subscriber at the time and there wasn't that many subscribers in Australia at the time. And so I think there's always a little bit of luck that the brand wasn't that well known in Australia. And they had this country manager role, which sounds like a fancy title, and it is, but at the time, the business was very small. It was a country manager of four or five people and for a brand that was unknown in the Australian landscape. But I liked the product. It was part of Amazon, which was fit into my Fang criteria. It was a global media business and they were willing to take a chance on me to not only get out of PR, but to take on a broad managerial role. And so that ticked all the boxes for me, and I haven't looked back. 

James Lawrence: Let's maybe just talk about that journey. Like what's? How long in Australia? Kind of where did the business go to? And to where? And then into Asia and now into Europe. Just fascinated to hear about the journey. 

Matthew Gain: Yeah, I mean, first and foremost, I think - and a lot of people that work in marketing or PR, we're kind of like - how did you get out of PR or how did you get out of marketing into a general manager type role? And I was asking around about that to people, would you hire me for an in house role, or would you hire me for this? And everyone kept coming back saying, no, look, Matt, you've worked it, and these were friends. I was just asking advice. 

James Lawrence: Would you hire good man, good friend? 

Matthew Gain: No, I remember really specifically one guy who I ended up working with at Audible, Chris Gross. He worked with us. He was based up in Japan for a little while, and he said to me, Matt, I wouldn't hire you because you work at an agency. And agency people just, you don't focus on things long term. You're just in and out on projects. And I went home and thought about that for a long time. Let's make it dramatic. I woke up in the middle of the night and I was like, no, you're wrong. I'm not in and out of projects. I'm on this long term business building journey. And the long term project I'm on is Edelman. And I've been working really hard to build that business for the last six years. It's not like I haven't been in and out of things. The clients and the projects, sure, we've been in and out of, but we've been really consistent about building this brand and this business. And so that was really a real epiphany moment, because that allowed me because I think that that is the prejudice, and that's the advice I would give to any agency people, is that you're not in and out on short term projects. You actually focus on the business that is your agency. And I was able to, through the interview process at Audible, highlight that. And highlight that I did have a lot of business experience. I had a lot of general management experience. 

Matthew Gain: And Audible is a subscription business. And I was able to parlay the fact that a PR agency is a little bit like a subscription business. You have retained clients and you need to be doing work to bring new ones in, but you want to be working hard not to lose customers as well. So it kind of is a subscription business. And that was an effective means to convince the people that were hiring at Audible that I had the skills. And not only was I a PR guy, but I was a business manager and that's how we transitioned. So I think that that was the biggest thing for me. And that's the advice I would give to any people that are in agency that want to get out. I think that there are so many opportunities for people, there are so many great general managers that work in agencies all over the country. And my advice is, don't assume you can't get out of that into a general management agency marketers all around Australia.

James Lawrence: You can listen to that except for anyone that works at Rocket, which is that's ridiculous. (Laughs). Matt just talking. That's good. I think that's actually really interesting. And yeah, that's it, isn't it? Like the PR is the widget, right? But the actual business is that on Monday you could have been selling a different marketing service or any kind of professional service that you wanted to. 

Matthew Gain: Yeah. And thinking about how do we market that business, how do we grow that business was what I did all of the time. And how do we create an employer brand that brings the great talent in? And so, without a doubt, there was a lot of thinking about and consulting on doing PR. But a lot of the focus from when you lead a business is about growing the business, not doing the PR so much. And that's what I was able to convince the people at Audible about. And I was nervous, I won't lie. When I came into for my first day, I was like, oh, my gosh, am I going to be able to do this? And it was fine. It was fine. As long as you can ask nice questions, as long as you can ask questions, as long as you can educate yourself on data and how you use data to make decisions quickly. I think anyone can run a business that has been from agency land.

James Lawrence: And so I guess the journey so from Audible, Australia, to you were in Tokyo, weren't you? Based in Tokyo. 

Matthew Gain: Yeah, I was just lucky. I started Audible in about three months. After I started, my boss, Stuart Sayers, left to go work at Cochlear. I think he's the CFO there now as well. And he ran Asia. And they didn't give me his job immediately, but the business gave me a few chances. They're like, hey, can you go and help us? We're about to launch in India. Can you go and do some work there? And I said yes. And then they're like, well, we've got a few challenges in Japan. Can you go and help there? I was like, yes. And so I always jumped at any opportunity to try the new things. And again, I gave that example of the video game. We didn't know what the answers were for India. And we didn't know what the answers were for Japan. And so I was given a lot of leeway, and we made some mistakes, but we've done some really great stuff as well. 

Matthew Gain: The move to Japan was; I was running Asia Pac from Australia, and in was doing great. Australia was doing great, and Japan wasn't. I remember Japan is a very different place to Australia. Japan is a very different place from anywhere else, really. And I would always be hearing decisions that the team were making, and I'd be like, that seems like a dumb decision. Why are they doing it like that? And then I'd get on a plane and go up there. I used to spend a week, a month in Japan, and I'd get there, and I'd be like, this seems dumb. And they'd be like, yeah, but we're doing it because of this. And you'd be like, oh, okay. All right. Yeah, that's annoying. And even though that solution seems dumb, maybe it's the best in this weird situation and really building that bridge. 

Matthew Gain: And I remember saying to my boss, Chris Cooper at the time, who actually he's an American, but he works for an ASX listed company now, Catapult. It's a tech business. And I have a few people that worked at Audible there. And he's still in the US. And I said to Chris, I can't run this team in Japan from Australia via video conference. I need to go there. I was denied about that for a long time because he wasn't sure. He's like, yeah, Japan's a bit small in the region. Australia is the big focus. And then I finally convinced him and then got up there and started managing the team. And then COVID Hit, we all went home, and I managed the team by video conference in Tokyo. But just being there, and I always say that it's really difficult to understand a different culture when you're not living that culture every single day. And just being in Japan helped me so much. I understood so much more. I understood what the landscape was like, where they got their groceries from, what media looked like, what their life was like. And it just opens up. 

Matthew Gain: And I'm not suggesting I understand Japanese life at all, but just even a slight fragment allowed me to be a great interpreter. Between the US headquarters and Japan. And just that little bit of knowledge about what worked and didn't work in Japan was enough. And to play that interpreter role so I could explain to the Americans why the Japanese were making these suggestions, I could explain back to the Japanese why the Americans were pushing on this, that, or the other. And we turned that business around. It's our fastest growing marketplace now. And it was super exciting. I learned tons, made lots of mistakes, made more cultural taboos and problems, I think, than I even recognise, because…

James Lawrence: Japan always tell you. 

Matthew Gain: But it was fantastic. So that was how I moved from Japan. I was running the region, but not in the region. I'm an Australian. I knew Australia. I didn't need to be in Australia to understand Australia. And we had a great team in Australia. And so that's why and then how.

James Lawrence: Did the role and I presume that logically, Europe is a bigger market, a bigger concern, is that right? Hence that that role being the next step. And how did that role manifest itself? 

Matthew Gain: I think that we had a very long tenured leader here in Europe, super great guy, Nils Ruttenberg. And he had led the business in Germany and then it expanded it across the other European regions for, I don't know exactly the years, I want to say maybe or maybe even 16 years. So very long time. And it was time for him to step out of the business. He wanted to do some different things. And so the opportunity came up and I was in Japan. We'd got some runs on the board there. And so the business asked me to come here and we wanted to change things and shake things up a little bit here around how we were doing. We'd been so successful here in Europe, but what had got us to that point wasn't going to get us to the next. So we needed to make some changes. And the business, I think, recognised that I was up for challenge and was able to make change in teams. And so that's why I'm here now. 

James Lawrence: I guess, what's going on? How's the business going? Without obviously going into anything we can't talk about.

Matthew Gain: Of course; the Audible business is in a massive boom at the moment, and the whole audio space is a real big area. And so, for those that may or may not know, audible is its own way, Amazon, but it's a separate entity and so it has its own culture, its own feel, and we really are run as a separate business. We have ridden that wave, I think, of, you know, the podcast revival and and we make a lot of podcasts and so we've really, really ridden that wave up. We've also ridden the wave of people are busy and people are looking at new ways to consume content as they move away from linear media to on demand. And so I think that we've been able to drive that up in the book space as well. And I always talk about my own experience when it comes to books, that there's a lot of people out there that love reading books and may even buy books, but just don't get through them because they don't have time. 

Matthew Gain: Yeah, really good at buying books. Come into my bedroom, look at my bedside table, look really smart. None of them are finished. And Audible just allowed me to consume content in different ways, open up moments for book reading that I didn't even think I had when I was driving, when I'm running, when I'm working out, when I'm cooking at home or doing the housework. I'm not alone in that. We're all busy. And I think that we've been able to ride that wave and it's been hugely successful. And so here in Europe, what we are doing, we have a really established business here in Germany and we have a huge number of customers here that love the business. It's a really well known brand and we are building our business in France, Italy and Spain. They're newer marketplaces and we're on a really steep growth curve there around how do we build an entertainment industry around spoken word audio? So how do we work with great creators? How do we make great podcasts, how do we make great audiobooks? How do we work with authors to really do some great work there? But then also how do we bring the customer base along with us and get the same benefits that the Germans have experienced for a long time? Germany has a long tradition of audiobooks and then in all the English marketplaces as well, Australia, the US, and what have you. How do we bring those same benefits that those customers are having to France, Italy and Spain is the big opportunity for us here and that's where I spend a lot of my time.

James Lawrence: Let's kind of, kind of bring it back to marketing, to the 99% of the people listening to the pod based in Australia. You've worked with lots of big brands in Australia. You've worked in Asia, you've worked in Europe. What are the commonalities like, what is good marketing? And I know it's a really broad question, but I guess the themes, the traits of marketing teams that are doing great stuff that you've observed, 

Matthew Gain: Do you know what? I've worked across so many different places, like Australia, India, Japan, Europe. They're all pretty radically different. But when you really start breaking things down, customers behave pretty similar in all of those markets, particularly across the digital marketing landscape. And I think my observation is and I think that this is why I would encourage people to try and work in other places is that we sometimes overemphasise the radical differences between our marketplaces. And by having a data led approach, I think you can start to see that what a customer does in Spain in terms of their search behavior and how you can move a person down the funnel from awareness to conversion is pretty similar in all of those locations. And I've learned that through looking, going super deep on the data. The other thing I've learned is that there's a gap between sometimes research and data. What people say they do and what they do are sometimes different. I always much more highly rate the user data as opposed to the declared data. And so that's, I guess, the advice I would give to anybody around marketing in Australia, but also as potentially as an opportunity for Australians to go and work overseas is follow the user data, and that will give you the answers. And the user data, more often than not, is less different across marketplaces or different locations.

James Lawrence: You've obviously hired lots of marketers in your time, either directly or indirectly as a leader in a business. What are you looking for in hiring good marketers? 

Matthew Gain: I hire people, not people that have certain skills. And so I'm always looking the things that I value the most in people I hire is examples of deep ownership so that someone that's owned something, driven something, and felt deep responsibility for it, a certain humility as well. I like people that will admit their stakes, and none of us are successful well, not none of us, but the vast majority of us aren't successful on our own. And so I want people that are team players to work with. The way we hire at Audible and more generally across Amazon is we ask experience based questions. So rather than saying, hey, James, can you tell me about how you set up a Google advertising campaign? We would ask - because you can look that up on the web and give the answers right - we might ask a question like, hey, James, can you tell me about a time when you had to make a decision when a campaign wasn't right and you had to make a decision quickly without all of the data. You only had 70% of the data you wanted. Talk to me about what that scenario was, what you did, and what the outcome was. When I'm hiring people, I want to hear stories because it's in the stories that you can really tell. You can't make up on the fly a story like that. And so that's how you find a good employee or not. So I want examples of stories that drive towards ownership, humility, show that they're able to work in a team environment and can learn from mistakes and learn from the data as well.

James Lawrence: We're getting towards the close. Just before we started recording, you kind of gave Steve Jobs quotes about kind of his journey and looking back and tying it all together, you've achieved so much in not a ridiculous amount of time, really. Like it hasn't been - still got a long way to go. But you're a young Australian marketer in agency land or in house in Sydney or Melbourne or Newcastle or wherever it might be. What would be your advice looking back on your career if you wanted to not necessarily be head of Audible in Europe, but heavy hitting CMO somewhere, or running a big business somewhere, or crushing it in London or New York. 

Matthew Gain: Yeah, I think the Steve Jobs quote is that you can only join the dots when you look backwards. You can't always look forward. I think that he gave a reference that, when he was at university, he wanted to spend time in calligraphy class because he just liked it. And that learnings lent forward to a design sensibility across Apple products. I think what I would say is do the things you're interested in rather than the things that you think are going to make you money or that you're going to be able to progress the furthest. And that's such simple advice and advice given everywhere there, but if you're not interested in it, you're not going to work as hard and it's going to be more of a chore. And none of my jobs have felt like a chore. I've worked really hard. Don't ever shy away from that. And that's a core belief of mine to work hard, but I wouldn't want it any other way. I don't see it as a slog. 

Matthew Gain: I think the other thing I would say is be brave and get out of your comfort zone. Like, if you're in Newcastle, maybe take the job in Sydney, and if you want to advance. I guess, what I'd say; not everyone is super ambitious and that's totally fine, but if you want to move fast, you've got to constantly be out of your comfort zone, because that's where the learning happens, that's where the mistakes happen. And you learn so much more from mistakes than than if you're not making mistakes, you're just doing things you already know how to do. Typically, if you look at; I've got children, and when you look at kids, they're making mistakes all of the time, particularly when they're young. And that's how you learn, that's how you learn the most. And so get out of your comfort zone, make lots of mistakes and learn quickly. And that's how you progress. Quickly, at least.

James Lawrence: That’s it. I think when you were kind of talking about making mistakes and being out of your comfort zone and leading into the stuff you love doing, not the stuff you find hard, it was kind of thoughts that I was thinking, these are things I want to impart on my kids. They might be things that are said, but they're true, right. It's hard to get out of bed and hard to work those extra hours if you're not really passionate about it. 

Matthew Gain: And yeah, absolutely. 

James Lawrence: When you challenge yourself and when you do things you don't think you're capable of, makes more hard things possible. So, Matt, thanks so much for coming on the pod and sharing your journey.

Matthew Gain: That's really kind. Yeah, it's really, really kind. I don't see the journey as all that extraordinary, but I've loved what I've done. So thank you for your kind words.