We were lucky to catch up with Matt Lambert recently and have shared our conversation below.

Matt, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What do you think matters most in terms of achieving success?

To be successful, I believe it takes just 4 things. 1. You need to be willing to do the things that others aren’t. It differentiates yourself in the marketplace and there is tremendous value in learning how to find and solve the problems of others.

2. Maintaining a beginner’s mindset. When you approach all situations, no matter your experience, with the mindset of someone trying for the first time, you are able to question everything, identify patterns, and observe inefficiencies that you may have missed when building your base knowledge.

3. Be a life long learner. Because the world around us is constantly changing, there is always room for improvement and optimization. The greater the breadth of knowledge you retain, the easier it is for you to visualize strategies to pivot around obstacles in your path.

4. And the biggest one, understanding that failure is never due to a lack of resources, its due to a lack or resourcefulness. Instead of looking at your lack of resources as a limiting factor to your success, break it down into answers for the following questions and then execute. Is this absolutely necessary to reach your goal, or are there alternatives? What are the actionable steps needed to acquire the resource? How can your current resources be leveraged?

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Even though I’ve built and manage a successful Digital Marketing company, I had no direct professional experience in marketing before hand. My background is actually in chemical research; I hold a B.S. in both Chemistry and Biochemistry/ molecular biology. My entrepreneurial journey started 3 months after graduating from college when the start-up biotech company I was working for was on the verge of bankruptcy. At first, I felt defeated and went back to a PCA job working nights that I had in college until I could find another “big boy job.” My student loan repayment grace period was ending in 3 months, and was putting the pressure on to make a change quick. I worked my situation backward from understanding that the resource I needed was money, but I didn’t know how to make any other than a traditional job. Classically trained scientists are taught nothing about making money, but I was very confident in my research skills, so I started from scratch and began reading books on finance and business and consuming every piece of business related content I could find on YouTube. I stumbled upon the idea of a traveling iPhone repair and flipping business and I ran with it! I bootstrapped some start-up capital by flipping a few Pokemon cards on ebay that I found at a garage sale for 25 cents, and ended up doing over $20,000 in sales for my phone business in less than 8 months. I then rolled the profits from my phone business to by my first duplex, where I lived for free in one side while the tenant’s rent covered the entire mortgage and then some. I was bit hard by the entrepreneurial bug, and there was no stopping there.

From that experience I quickly learned that there is far more variables that impact the success of a business than I had originally thought; Legal structure, tax efficiency, digital marketing, branding, etc. I thought back to one of the books I had read that said the people who got rich during the gold rush were the ones selling the shovels rather than doing the digging, and I wanted to position myself as the one selling the tools needed to build a successful business. That’s one of the big reasons I co-founded the digital marketing agency Building the Dream Duluth. The other reason is that the business community on YouTube did so much for me in my first venture that I wanted to be that resource to promote and grow local businesses in the Twin Ports community.

At Building the Dream Duluth, we offer Web development, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and Social media management, with the emphasis on our SEO services. What sets us apart from the rest of the competition is our value first strategy. We educate and inspire the local community through interviews with local entrepreneurs and business professionals that we share on our social platforms and podcast. Our content focuses on highlighting the people behind the business or position by sharing their struggles, successes, and the paths they took on their professional journey.

The name of our business comes from that fact that we are focused on providing services to grow local businesses and share the stories of those in the professional community that are in the trenches day after day working to “build their dream”. There are so many internet gurus talking about entrepreneurship and “living the dream” from their Lambo, and we wanted to encourage and educate budding entrepreneurs with stories from the authentic men and women building their business for their own reasons and not just chasing clout.

Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?

There are so many resources that significantly shaped my entrepreneurial mindset, but here is a condensed list my favorites:

Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki opened my mind to the idea of assets vs. liabilities, the power of good debt, and how they impact building wealth.

How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie and Never Split the Difference by Christopher Voss taught me how to effectively communicate with others and use technical strategies to negotiate like my life depended on it.

Your Next Five Moves: Master the Art of Business Strategy by Patrick Bet-David taught me how to grow my business by making decisions for the future instead of the here and now, and focusing on hiring and retaining the best talent.

How’d you meet your business partner?

I met my business partner Alex at an after hours casual networking group that a friend of mine from high school had started. The rest of the group were established business professionals and entrepreneurs, and I had just started my phone repair business. I knew this was my chance to learn from people who were doing exactly what I wanted to do, but there wasn’t a whole lot of one on one time where I could ask the deep questions I wanted answers to about what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur. After a few weeks of meeting with the group, I felt comfortable enough to ask the group if we could add a little structure to the beginning of the night before the drinks were pouring and share about our business and weekly successes, Everyone other than Alex and I were apprehensive of the idea, since the rest of the group were already members of structured groups like BNI that met while Alex and I were still at our day jobs. This was the their time to relax in the company of like minded individuals.

After that meet up, Alex had reached out and asked if I was serious about wanting to learn about entrepreneurship in this way. We both shared the same sentiment that if we couldn’t be available to join the BNIs of the community, why not take matters into our own hands. So we decided to build an audience on social platforms where we can interview local entrepreneurs and business professionals on video to not only get answers to our own questions, but share those answers with the rest of the side hustlers out there that are looking for real answers but don’t have the time to join networking groups. After we grew a great social following and had a few interviews under our belt, we realized that all of the people we talked with had the same issue of online presence. From then on, Alex and I both knew that there was great market fit to help our local business community and other small businesses with digital marketing services.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://buildingthedreamduluth.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/buildingthedream_duluth/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BuildingtheDreamDuluth
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-lambert-duluth-mn
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCJ2eGELLMEnL6Rn0O1kC8Q
• Other: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/building-the-dream-duluth/id1454989905 Google Business Profile: https://g.page/BuildingtheDreamDuluth