SFN227: How to Grow Your Investments & Leverage Your Time - with Matt Bodnar

Matt Bodnar is a partner at early stage investment firm Fresh Hospitality, who are on a mission to help entrepreneurs grow by providing financial and intellectual capital to growing businesses in the food service value chain. He’s also the creator and host of The Science of Success podcast, which is focused on improving decision-making and understanding psychology.

Matt’s work earned him a spot on the Forbes “30 Under 30”, called a “Rising Restaurateur Star” by the National Restaurant Association, and labeled a “Strategy Pro” by Restaurant Hospitality Magazine.

 

In This Interview I Ask:

• 1:50 - How did Matt get started in the restaurant industry, and doing what he does now?
• 5:10 - Why restaurants?
• 9:20 - When it comes to sifting through decisions, how many deals does Matt look at before investing in one? What is he looking for, and how does he know when one is going to be a winner?
• 17:00 - How does Matt leverage his time?
• 25:50 - What are the highest impact things that Matt does? Where does his time go on a day-to-day basis?

 

Value Added Investors

There are two fundamental investment strategies:

1. The discovery of value
2. The creation of value

Fresh Hospitality doesn’t invest in companies hoping to discover a gem that increases in value – they go in every single day to add as much value to that investment as possible.

They do still want to invest in companies with a lot of potential, so they heavily consider the Founder and how the brand is positioned in the marketplace.

 

Investing in Systems, Processes, and Technology

Restaurants are a fairly complex and low-margin business, so you have to have really good systems and processes in place. Fresh Hospitality specializes in implementing effective systems and process to add value to their investments, and that’s one of the keys to their success in the industry.

• A private technology company does all of their in-house IT and developed a proprietary SaaS platform to run all of their businesses, with custom analytics.
• The invest in an accounting company specializing in restaurants.

The result is complete visibility in operations and minute control over costs.

 

How High Achievers Learn to Leverage Time

At some point, there’s a hard limit on the amount of time you can work. Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and other high achievers are more high leverage in how they use their time than most other people.

They can produce exponentially larger results than most people, in the same amount of time… but how?

• They focus on improving their decision-making ability. This is one of the best possible investments you can make with your time because the knowledge never becomes less valuable.
• They continue to focus on learning information that doesn’t change over time (or changes very slowly), and the compounding benefits create exponential shifts in how they view the world.

 

If you want to start leveraging your time more effectively, head over to successpodcast.com/better to pick up Matt’s “4 Steps to Making Better Decisions” guide.

Resources

• Learn more about Matt at MattBodnar.com
• Listen to The Science of Success at SuccessPodcast.com
• “4 Steps to Making Better Decisions”