Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Matty Lansdown. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Matty, appreciate you joining us today. Getting that first client is always an exciting milestone. Can you talk to us about how you got your first customer who wasn’t a friend, family, or acquaintance? 

Having grown up as a country kid in a working class Australian family, the idea that I’d ever be in business was hard to fathom in itself so naturally it took a while for my belief systems to catch up before I made any real moves in the business space.

I started out working fulltime in my job as a hospital scientist and given I didn’t have any capital to back me I built it as a side hustle beginning with my podcast which I release every single Wednesday. I didn’t know anything about marketing or nurturing clients through to a sale which all contributed to the first sale being a shock!

So with my podcast ticking along, and me promoting myself through Instagram and Facebook I was hoping someone would knock on the door to purchase my help. I was using the ‘build it and they will come’ thinking, which I know now is a totally outdated idea, especially on the internet, but in this instance it unfolded perfectly.. at least for client number 1.

I opened my LinkedIn account one day (a channel I wasn’t particularly putting myself out on) and discovered an unopened inbox message from a few days ago.

It was a message from a corporate executive who was also a podcast listener. He has so many kind things to say about my first 40 podcast episodes and said he wanted to know if I work with clients. Which I nervously replied that yes, I do.

This then proceeded to my first ever sales call, which was a nerve-wracked event. I had never asked anyone for this amount of money… for my blue-collar upbringing I couldn’t believe that I was about to ask someone for what worked out to be about $97 an hour – at the time, this felt like A LOT of money.

The conversation, fortunately, went perfectly and when I came to the price piece, I totally faked my confidence (as I didn’t believe anyone would pay for this or me)… there was a short pause before he said “The sounds perfect Matty, let’s do it”. I was legitimately ecstatic and ran around my house in excitement!!

I got off the phone and sent the signup link that I had created that same day (with the idea of attempting to manifest the outcome) and low and behold the money came through and I made not only my first dollar, but my first $800.

Here we are, 4 years later and the first $50 lives on the front of my fridge.

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

I’m a scientist, nutritionist and an emotional eating coach that supports women to get control of their emotional eating so they can finally feel good in their own skin.

How did I get to the point of running a business that does this?

It was much a shock to me as it was to you.

I grew up in a country Australian, blue collar, hard work ethic type home and when I was young I used to go to work with my Mum who was a nurse and so in my formative years I spend a lot of time around elderly, unwell and dying people. It was in this early phase that I developed an appreciation for medicine and the healthcare industry, constantly fascinated by doctors and scientists and all the work that they do to help people.

And so after spending my youth very much as an athlete, I moved to the city to pursue my study and research in the field of science. During my university study I was fortunate enough to love with the Strength and Conditioning Coaches of the Geelong Cats (an elite Aussie football team) – this was the real beginning of me connecting food and physical health together as one. Like many people are taught by parents and teachers, food is for people like me and nutrition is only for professional athletes, so when the penny dropped that food directly impacts the start of the body it was like someone turned the lights on.

From here I then worked at a nutritional epigenetics company alongside dieticians and nutritionists, customizing diets for elite athletes which furthered my awareness of the relationship with food and the state of the body.

Once this 12-month contract finished up, I moved to the largest and most impactful part of my career as part of a cancer research team at a major Melbourne Hospital. Not long after starting the new job, I decided to really start learning about cancer and discovered that on the World Health Organisation website, on the cancer page, in sentence one it said, ’90-95% of cancers are caused by diet, lifestyle and tobacco’. Gob-smacked and confused I asked my professor why the hospital was not a nutrition and diet facility to which he laughed at me.

But why? Why were we prescribing drugs if food and lifestyle decisions was the cause?

This triggered a curiosity in me that lead me down the rabbit hole, one that western medicine might prefer you didn’t find, learning about the history or medicine and the evolution and domination of pharmaceutical companies.

Along that journey I found plenty of research that confirmed this to be true, linking obesity and diet-associated issues to a handful of the modern diseases. I knew that not only from the research but also from walking around the hospital every day for 7 years. It was blatantly clear most people had an issue with their diet.

With everything I learned and discovered whilst still working within the system, I felt compelled to spread this information far and wide, that the conventional disease model was wrong and answers were everywhere and so I started what is now one of Australia’s most popular health podcasts called, ‘How To NOT Get Sick And Die’ which I publish every single Wednesday.

This journey led me to becoming a nutritionist to solve this problem and being lucky enough to speak in multiple countries about food and nutrition… only to discover that irrelevant of the country or audience I spoke to the reality was that everyone really did know what to eat, and they also knew what wasn’t considered healthy.

Unpeeling the next layer of the onion I wondered, if they already know what to eat then the real question to solving everyone’s health problems is ‘why don’t they do it?’ and this is exactly what I do today. I help people answer the question, ‘Why can’t I stick to a diet?’, or ‘why can’t I do whats good for me?’.

Once we discover the answer to these questions, only then can we begin building a body and a life that resembles health as deep down there within us there are questions that need to be answered and parts that need love, attention and healing… from there we can introduce the right food & nutrition and come at the problem from a mind, soul, body perspective rather than pretending that the physical plain is the only realm of operation for humans.

If just the physical worked, the first diet plan or get-well routine would have worked. So with me, we go much deeper to get control of that emotional eating to finally feel good in your own skin.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

I think the reality of the holisitc health, mindset and general wellness space is that it contains a lot of people that are running social media profiles, podcasts and businesses off the back of their own experience with themselves, which is of course fantastic – the more people showing that looking after your holistic health works the better.

However, the advantage for myself is that I came from conventional science education and worked within the mainstream hospital system which gave me 2 advantages, the first being that I understood things on a more granular level that the average wellness guru, and the second is that I had seen how this impacted many other people through loads of data but also simply walking through the hospital each day and being in many meetings about patients.

Couple that with a confident, extroverted personality that I was blessed to have and it provides a fortunate and fruitful combination. Shout out to the parents for scultping me this way!

What’s been the best source of new clients for you?

Committing to a content plan and social media stream early on is what allowed me to grow my business beyond just a side hustle.

Initially, I was trying to be everywhere, posting on every platform and it burnt me out to the point I now strongly dislike social media posting. The other side of that is it is many hours of work for very little return, in most instances.

In one of my burnt-out phases a mentor suggested I pick one and go all in and all other social media would be down the priority list. He said, ‘ what are you really good at? Decide that, and then pick the most relevant platform’.

And so with my resources at the time, podcasting made the most sense. I committed to release 100 episodes and the reassess. It was such great advice because since day one, 4 years ago, I haven’t missed a single Wednesday and it is now one of the most downloaded health podcasts in Australia, which fortunately translates into being my biggest source of new clients.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.mattylansdown.com
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mattylansdown/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCztErJj0TNFzFl2dK7uHDSw
• Other: How To Not Get Sick And Die podcast Apple Podcast: https://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast/how-to-not-get-sick-and-die/id1450212088 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2FTMqWqzD89wyFMHUudbX9