Before you were a successful entrepreneur, you were a Navy SEAL. How did your time in the military help you transition into the business world? The military is an amazing organization that gives incredible opportunities for service members to lead, to be accountable for their actions and to ultimately be part of something that is bigger than themselves. No matter what your military occupational specialty (MOS) was in the military, it can prepare you for a life as an entrepreneur. The military drills key principals in our head, which are honor, integrity, doing the right thing and doing more with less to name a few. These are obviously the same pillars that Zach Steinbock and I use as our foundation for MATBOCK and all of our subordinates. What kind of items can be found on MATBOCK (shop: www.matbock.com)? We have everything from auto-focus night vision goggle accessories to medical litters to waterproof bags. We work hard not to pigeonhole ourselves into one category and focus more on pyramid shifting technologies. What is the hardest thing in running an e-shop that you have found? While we sell our products on www. matbock.com, the vast majority of revenue comes from government contracts and orders from our distributors
36
(through their contract vehicles). We have had other companies in our portfolio, which were 100% e-commerce business, so trying to take those lessons and apply them to matbock.com didn’t always translate and vice versa. All that being said, the hardest part about e-commerce is how fast technology is changing and how “immediate” everyone wants things to happen; from browsing to product arriving, they want it to happen at lightspeed.
“The only way to get 20 years of experience is putting in 20 years of work”. What type of people do you like to hire at MATBOCK? Loyal. We feel that if they are loyal to the brand, this means that they are also enjoying what they are doing and this means more to us than just having people in seats to do a job. How has COVID-19 impacted your activity? Being that we are working directly with these military units and their buyers, our best way to show them our products is face-to-face, but quickly after we saw that was going to be a challenge we started doing a weekly live stream and scheduling almost daily video meetings with these units. Every Monday we host a live stream to showcase one of our products, which we call MATBOCK Monday. This has allowed us to keep scaling without being in direct contact with our end customers. This has impacted us greatly because we are on pace to see a 200% growth from last year and finding skilled industrial sewers has been difficult for us and our contract
ENTREPRENEUR MINDSET FALL 2020
@dougellin
S
ean Matson is the co-founder (alongside his friend Zach Steinbock) and CEO of MATBOCK, a company that is run by retired Navy SEALS and whose staff are also former US Military Veterans; Sean himself was a Navy SEAL for just over 13 years! The company creates and develops products that fill a need in the real world, whether it’s hunting, camping, hiking, for law enforcement or for soldiers while at war. They work closely with the US Military and have been contracted to create products for them that use new technologies to make whatever products lighter, better and more versatile.
c19-certified.com
WARRIORS
