We recently connected with Matti Korhonen and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Matti, thanks for joining us today. Alright, so we’d love to hear about how you got your first client or customer. What’s the story?

I had my first sports training camp in Florida at the age of 20 back in 2005. I wanted to have a camp not only for goalies but for all athletes. The cost for 3 day camp was 100 dollars and the location was a local water front park. Camp was basically a one couple hour training session in the morning.

The first questions was, how do I get anyone to come to the camp or even anyone to know about it?

I ordered a few hundred post card size flyers and used rubber bands to attach them to mail boxes. I used the rubber bands because I found out that it is very illegal to open someone’s mail box without authorisation. So, I and my girlfriend at the time put up flyers all over upscale neighbourhoods. On a one house there was a guy watering his lawn and we handed the flyer to him. He said that his niece Tyler from up North is visiting Florida and it would be good activity for him to do since he doesn’t have any friends there to hang out.

Three weeks later it was me and Tyler doing drills that would help him to become better soccer player and basketball player which were the sports he played in high school. It would be nice to know what is going on in Tyler’s life now.

This experience changed my life. I’m still doing camps where people all over the world come to train with me. Now I do only goalies but as writing this, I’m thinking that maybe I should expand back to all athletes and then hire trainers that have versatile experiences from different sports.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I used to be a volunteer goalie coach at goalie camps in Minneosta to exchange my coaching to free ice time. Where ever I played there were usually need for goalie coaching so I started to do some private lessons and eventually was running a local goalie clinic.

Now I’m one of the most followed goalie coaches on social media (IG/YouTube: @goalieforce) and have thousands of people visiting my website every month (Website: www.MattiKorhonen.com).

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

Being originally from Finland I had to unlearn: “You have to be an experienced licensed expert, and studied the subject before you can it.”

Finnish society is very regulated and we behave that way too. For example, when you are crossing a street and there is red light people will wait for the light to turn green even if there are no cars coming in the middle of the night. All foreigners have a hard time understanding this but it shows how rule-oriented the average Finnish person is.

In the U.S. I have learned that if you want something, just go after it and figure out what you’ll need on the way. That was an incredibly valuable lesson for corporate life and even more valuable for entrepreneurship. Because of this attitude I was able to triple my salary in one year, go from trainee to stock-listed company’s manager really fast and to start multiple businesses even though many of them didn’t make a past the first version of the website.

Why this was so critical to my career? Nobody cares about your grades, they care what you can actually do.

My advice to anyone still in school: Get yourself into a company where you’ll learn an actual skill or just start doing it yourself (e.g. graphic design) that you can use to make money as an entrepreneur or in the corporate.

Have you ever had to pivot?

I have seen many sides of work life to find out that what we are taught is a half lie. I have lived pro ice hockey life, corporate life, aentrepreneur life and also been unemployed. Based on my experience this is what I noticed:

– The grades don’t matter after the first job (only time I have been asked for school grades is when I applied to Accenture).

– What you’ll learn in school gives a good understanding about things that might be out there but what you actually do and need in the job is very different.

– In Finland entrepreneurship is the same as being unemployed because going back to corporate is always seen as a failure.

– If you don’t stay 3-5 years in one job you are seen as a job hopper who doesn’t stay anywhere. It is never the fault of the corporate, boss, environment, layoffs or pandemic.

– If you have not studied the subject in school it means you don’t know what you want in life and can’t be good at it.

– The most surprising discovery has been that corporate life and being an entrepreneur is like on going school project in high school and sometimes I’d compare it even to middle school. Think about those smart ones, quiet ones, lazy ones, nice ones, jerks, etc. You’ll end up dealing with all of those types in work life too so it is critical that you like the job (aka daily process) and that you like the closest people you work with and your closest boss. If you don’t like what you do and don’t like people you have to deal with on a daily basis most likely your life will be fairly miserable most of the time.

– I have pivoted my entrepreneurship and corporate career multiple times because in ice hockey I got used to change. When one door closes many more open.

MOST IMPORTANT LESSON: If you want to change something in your current situation, you’ll have to create room for new. In order to do so you’ll have to let go of the current/past, even when the future is uncertain. Imagine a glass full of water. Before you can pour juice into it, you have to pour some of the water out.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.mattikorhonen.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/goalieforce
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/goalieforce