Millionaire Interview: Matthew Tuttle – Founder and Chief Investment Officer of Tuttle Wealth Management, LLC and Author of How Harvard and Yale Beat the Market

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Matthew Tuttle – Founder and Chief Investment Officer of Tuttle Wealth Management, LLC and Author of How Harvard and Yale Beat the Market

In this interview we have Matthew Tuttle the founder, CEO, and Chief Investment Officer of Tuttle Wealth Management, LLC. He is a frequent guest on Fox Business News, BusinessWeek TV and is the author of How Harvard and Yale Beat the Market (an Amazon bestseller) and Financial Secrets of my Wealthy Grandparents. We talk about if budgets are really necessary, differentiating your business, and being better than your competition. He also says don’t listen to CNBC, or the news and take the advice about the stock market!

Check out Matthewtuttle.com to find out more from Matthew.

Thanks so much for listening! If you like these interviews subscribe via iTunes.

Any questions or comments on the podcast let me know!

Transcript:

Welcome to the Eventual Millionaire Podcast. I'm Jaime Tardy and today we have Matthew Tuttle on the show. He's the founder, chief executive officer and chief investment officer of Tuttle Wealth Management, LLC. He's a frequent guest on Fox Business News and BusinessWeek TV and is the author of How Harvard and Yale Beat the Market which is an Amazon best seller and Financial Secrets of My Wealthy Grandparents. He has a wealth of experience and I'm really excited to have him on today. Thank you so much for being here, Matthew.

MATTHEW TUTTLE: Thanks for having me.

JAIME TARDY: Excellent. So first off, it sounds like the founder and of course chief investment officer of a wealth management company really has sort of the best of both worlds. I mean you've got a great company that generates revenue and the best investment advice you can find. So I'd love to know how do you handle your own investments.

MATTHEW TUTTLE: I handle my own investments the same way we advise clients and it's a lot different than the typical advice that's out there that you can see on CNBC or in the Wall Street Journal or that the brokerage firms and the other financial advisors running around are going to be pushing and it's not that those groups are out there trying to do anything bad, it's not their fault, it's just the way the industry is structured. We're big believers in being tactical with your money meaning being in harmony with the trend of the market and when the markets are going up then you want to be in a model going up and when they start to turn down you want to get out before bad turns into really bad and so we were able to protect investors' money in 2002. We were able to protect investors' money in 2008 as well as my own personal money.

JAIME TARDY: That sounds perfect. But exactly how do you do that? Everyone I'm sure would want to know the answer to that.

MATTHEW TUTTLE: Yes, in some ways it's real easy and in some ways it's unbelievably difficult. The easy part is markets move through identifiable trends. The market will be going up, up and up and then it will turn and it will start to head down. As long as you can take your emotions out of the equation, take your ego out of the equation then it's not that hard to look at the market and identify the trends. For example, we're talking on a day where the market just went down beyond a half percent or so and we're down about four percent for the month but we've been going up since September. We've been in a large uptrend and when you're in an uptrend like that you have corrections like we've had.

Some of the market is still in an uptrend, we're still in it. That's the easy part. The hard part is taking your emotions out of the equation and going to cash and being willing to go to cash for a long time. We've had periods when we've sat in cash for 12, 14 months and for individual investors, what I find is a lot of times they would rather lose money than do nothing because there are four emotions that drive investors that you've got to get out of your head if you want to be successful and they're fear, greed, ignorance and then the last one is boredom. They feel like they've got to be doing something when a lot of times sitting in cash is the right decision.

JAIME TARDY: How do you know when it's the right decision to sit with cash? I mean 12 to 14 months is a long period of time.

MATTHEW TUTTLE: You don't. The market tells you. For example, and I'm not talking about market timing, but in October '07 that's when the market hits its high. We didn't get out at the top. I'd love to get out at the top but we didn't do that. But then you have a market hits its high and then it starts to decline. So we would look at that and say, "All right, I can't predict what it's going to do but I know it was in an uptrend, now it has started to decline." So before it was making higher highs and higher lows, not it's making lower lows and lower highs.

I don't know if it's going to keep doing that but because of that, the risk of being in the market right now outweighs the potential awards so we're going to go into cash and we're going to sit and we're going to wait and the market is going to tell us if that's the right decision or not. If the market turns back up and starts to rally, it was the wrong decision so we'll get back in. If the market keeps heading down, we keep sitting and sitting and sitting.

Then in March '09 the market hits bottom and started to rally. We would look at that and say the exact opposite. It was in a massive downtrend, lower highs, lower lows. Now it's starting to make higher highs and higher lows again. Again, they could turn back around a crash but we're going to start getting back in now because the risk of being in the market at this point isn't as large as the potential awards. So we start scaling back in. So the market will tell you, again, if you can tune out CNBC and the Wall Street Journal and that stuff, the market will tell you when you should be in cash and when you should not be in cash.

JAIME TARDY: Okay. So what would you say to sort of the average investor who maybe even wants to do it on their own who really has been told buy and hold and keep it for a long period of time and that way you don't have to worry about the market's volatility over time you'll make up a return?

MATTHEW TUTTLE: That's a great question. What we ask the average investor is do you want the same results that the average investor gets? And study after study shows the average investor gets very mediocre investment results because they're following that advice. On the surface, it sounds good. Buy in whole, diversify. From 1982 to 1999 you would have made money pretty much every year. Yeah, you would have gotten crushed in 2002 and 2008 but the argument is that those are just anomalies, don't worry about it.

If you have been in the market for ten years you wouldn't have made any money but you wouldn't have lost anything either. So a long-term investor doesn't matter and none of that stuff makes any sense. 1982 to 1999 was one of the biggest boom markets we've ever seen. I could have had monkeys throwing darts at the Wall Street Journal, astrology, whatever you want, I would have made money every year. I would have looked like a genius. 2002 and 2008 were not flukes. They're not anomalies. When brokers and financial advisors try to tell you something is an anomaly, that means I don't understand what the heck just happened to your money so I need to say something that sounds smart so this was an anomaly.

But as far back as you want to look in history, we're going to see bubbles that burst and another bubble forms that will burst. So in the ?90s it was the Internet stocks. In the 2000s it was real estate. There will be another bubble, another bubble, another bubble, another bubble. So to me, an investment strategy that makes you money in an up market along with everything else and then you can sit all back in a bear market makes no sense. And the idea that not making any money over ten years is a good thing, that's ridiculous. No matter what age you are. It's ten years of your investment life you never get back.

The opportunity cost of that is huge especially if you're trying to put together a portfolio to get to a million dollars, ten years you can get a long way towards that. So the average investor, if they wanted to do it themselves, they can do it themselves with simple things. For example, if I just choose the 200 day moving average. So I looked at 200 days of prices for an index like the Standard and Poor's 500 and if we're going to set a rule that whenever it was above the average of the past 200 days that I would buy and whenever it slipped below I would sell, I would beat the market. I would have been out of the market in January '08 and I would have come back in in May or June '09. I would have avoided all the losses of 2008.

I would have had to give up a couple of the gains in 2009 but not a lot. I would have gotten in for most of them. That's something anybody who has rudimentary math skills and access to the internet can figure out on their own. So there are things like that that someone should do on their own and what we tell people, don't read the Wall Street Journal, watch CNBC, talk to the Merrill Lynches of the world and the brokers and think that you're going to get any better than the results that the average investor gets which are mediocre. You got to do something different.

JAIME TARDY: Okay, so tell me, what are the mediocre returns that everyone is getting and what are you guys getting because we need proof that this strategy actually works.

MATTHEW TUTTLE: Well, the average investor no matter what study you look at, just doesn't really do very well with their money and anyone in an index fund the past ten years really hasn't done anything. We make money year end, year out. Our worst portfolio in 2008 was down something like 2 percent and in 2002 we made money so tactical strategies work. Tactical strategies beat the market not by necessarily being up 40 percent when the market is up 30 but by not losing a ton of money when the market goes down. That's the key really to making money in the market is avoid the large loss.

Making money in an up market is easy. Anybody can do it. We'll get emails every once in awhile or calls from clients when the market is going up saying, "Hey I just wanted to tell you your guys are doing a great job here." Said, "No we're not." This is easy. I can do this with two hands tied behind my back. Call me up when the market is down, all your friends are losing money and you're not. That's when we're doing a good job and that's the key. That's what people need to avoid is the 2002 and the 2008 type of event. You can't avoid fluctuations like what happened today. But 2002 and 2008 were easily avoidable if you knew what to do.

JAIME TARDY: How do you know the difference between something like today and a real downturn?

MATTHEW TUTTLE: Well, today is one day. So one day is really meaningless but if today turns into more and more and more, at some point, and you've got to have some set of rules for when you're going to get in and when you're going to get out. Something like the 200 day moving average for example. We use a lot of more sophisticated analysis and I mean it's not just me. I've got an investment policy committee with two guys who are rocket scientists on it. One guy actually is a rocket scientist and a bunch of other degrees and another guy is smart enough to be.

And we've got rules and things we're looking at every single day but anything that happens in a day typically, a week, that's just noise. But if that keeps going and going and going, then at some point, whatever rules you've got for knowing when to get out are going to trigger and you're going to get out. But one day is just one day.

JAIME TARDY: Okay, excellent advice. What do you help clients and customers with for basics of personal finance because my audience really has a goal to be a millionaire and a lot of the times it's glossed over as far as the basics of personal finance. We just go we need to make more, we need to make more but that's not always the cause because of course if you spend more than you make it doesn't actually matter how much you make. So what do you think about the basics of personal finance?

MATTHEW TUTTLE: I think a lot of what people are told in personal finance is unfortunately very flawed. A lot of the advice is poor. A lot of money is usually directed to expensive kind of insurance and annuity products by people who look and say, "Well my money is in your pocket so I need to get it." So a lot of people aren't getting very good advice. Really at the end of the day and this might fly in the face of what some of your listeners are thinking, I'm not a big fan of budgets.

I'm not a big fan of trying to impose that discipline on someone who just can't do it. I also find a lot of times spouses vehemently disagree when it comes to budgeting. What I am much more a fan of is let's save as much as you can and if you're saving as much as you can, as long as you're not going into debt, then I don't necessarily care where you're spending your money. So I like to, when people are just starting out, I'd like to start off, it's kind of like the idea of boiling a frog. You dump a frog in boiling water it's going to jump out.

So if I go to someone who is not saving anything and say, "I need you to start putting away 20 percent of your income every year," it's not going to happen. So I like to start slow. All right, this month let's put away, let's get it in 1 percent. Then next month we're going to bump it up to 2. Then we're going to bump it up to 3 and we're going to slowly get you used to living on less and less and less and get to a point where you're saving as much as you possibly can.

Then again, as long as you're not going into debt, I don't care where you spend the money. The other thing and the other exercise we'll sometimes go through with people is will say, "Well Matt, I can't afford to save anything." We'll have those people track their expenses because what happens and it happens to me also, I'll go to the bank machine on Monday, take out a 100 bucks. By Friday I've got 10. You ask me where I spent the money and I have no idea. So we tell people, look, you tell me you don't have enough money to save, track your spending for a week and tell me what you spent the money on and then tell me there's not a whole bunch of stuff in there that you just didn't need.

And so we want to cut your salary and have you save as much as possible. As far as kind of getting to that millionaire level and accumulating as much as possible I think that's the most important component people need to understand.

JAIME TARDY: I agree completely as far as you need to save. You need to actually save some money in order to become a millionaire. Who knew, right?

MATTHEW TUTTLE: Yes, either that or win the lottery.

JAIME TARDY: Yes, yes. I don't play the lottery. So I have a question though because you say track expenses and I mean I paid $70,000 in debt and we tracked expenses and we did all that stuff so I know sort of the drill but tracking expenses sounds very similar because if you sort of are spending a lot of money and you don't realize it, it's sort of like a budget though isn't it to get yourself weaned off of those habits or are you just saying save and that way they'll just have to figure it out as they go?

MATTHEW TUTTLE: Yes. Don't get me wrong, I have no problem with budgeting for people who are inclined to do it, can do it and aren't going to cheat and spouses are going to agree. What I don't want to do is have people put together this thing, get this false sense of wow now we're all set but they're going to blow it, they're going to cheat or I'm going to cause a huge fight because one spouse thinks this should be on the budget and another spouse thinks this should be.

I had this once, I remember this couple where the husband was really into budgeting and I've got this budget and it's great and it works wonderful. This is awesome and you know his wife is just kind of nodding her head. Then I'm talking to her separately and she's ready to kill the guy. She's said, "I can't stand this budget. All his stuff is stuff that's okay and anything I want it's not in the budget." She's just ready to strangle him. I mean if you can budget, fine.

If you're not predisposed to that, what I still think tracking where the money goes is just more proof to the person who says, "You know Matt I'm living paycheck to paycheck, I can't afford to save." Well prove it. Prove that there's nothing and every single thing you're spending money on is stuff you need ? rent, the utilities and there's just nothing that's something you don't need. Very rarely is there no money somebody can save.

JAIME TARDY: I agree 100 percent. So let's switch gears a little bit. How did you actually start as an entrepreneur?

MATTHEW TUTTLE: Well, I didn't realize I was entrepreneurial until I got really my second job, my first real job out of college. I used to work for a division of a major bank and I was real good at what I did and ended up really moving up quickly and the bank gave me most of the high profile clients to work with but then they had a problem. Everyone else in my department, I was a young kid in my 20's, everyone else was in their 40's and 50's, so I had a junior title and they had senior titles but they couldn't have a guy with a junior title working with their top clients so they knew they had to promote me so what they did is they promoted everybody else, created a whole new level, gave everybody a raise just so they could promote me and not make them mad.

That was one thing that bothered me. The other thing that bothered me was that I got so good at my job I would come in at 8:30 in the morning and by 11:00 I'd be done with everything I needed to do and I'd sit there all day with nothing to do. It just drove me crazy. I realized or was starting to realize I want to be in my own business. I want the incentive if I've got nothing to do to go out and do more. I started talking to my bosses and was saying, "You know, look, can I go out and cross sell some of your services and earn some sort of commission off that?" They were like, "No, we're not set up for that."

I mean can I help you get new clients? Can I do something? I'm bored. "No, no, no just handle your clients." I was like all right this is ridiculous. I got to do my own thing. So I started with baby steps. I went to work with a couple of brokerage firms where essentially you're on your own but you're under an umbrella and just thought the way they were set up was wrong. They are only concerned about their own profit and not clients.

So I went to work for a couple of insurance companies, same problem. Finally, in 2003, a good friend of mine gave me a how to book on setting up your own registered investment advisory firm. I had known it was possible but didn't realize that it was not as expensive and not as cumbersome as I thought. I read through the book and I'm the guy when I see something that makes sense, I make the decision to do it right then and there. When I was done with the book I said I'm doing it. So in 2003 we formed our firm and we've been growing ever since.

JAIME TARDY: Wow, so did you just start off just as you? You were the sole proprietor of it?

MATTHEW TUTTLE: Well, when I started off it was just me. Then I hired a virtual assistant who worked for me and a whole bunch of other people. She was out in Ohio and then we just kept growing and growing and growing and ended up needing real assistants and now we're 15, 16, 17 people, I lose track, we keep hiring people all the time.

JAIME TARDY: That's excellent. So how many issues have you run into? I mean you've been doing this for a long time. What sort of obstacles and failures have you run into trying to grow this business?

MATTHEW TUTTLE: I think some of the key obstacles are finding the right partners whose strengths and weaknesses meld the best with mine. That's not easy. I found that now but it took me awhile to do it and had some sits and starts there. Finding good employees because a lot of times people will seem good and sound good and maybe they're not. I think at the very beginning understanding some of the things that we're now very successful doing, I kind of had the feeling you know what, all the people in my industry they're salespeople. They don't have any financial knowledge. They've come from different places where they've been successful at sales.

I've got an MBA in finance. I've been doing this since the eighth grade when I started investing money. My phone should ring off the hook and realizing pretty quickly it's not. Then maybe I got to go out and figure out how to drum up some business here.

JAIME TARDY: So how did you do that especially starting out?

MATTHEW TUTTLE: I think it comes down to a couple of real key things that apply no matter what business you're in. Number one is you've got to differentiate yourself. I don't mean just slight hey I'm up here I'm a little bit different. I mean serious substantial differentiation where someone who's not in your business would say okay I see what that guy does is totally different than what the other people do because what I found and really in any industry that's worth being in, or anything that's worth doing, there will be competition.

Financial services, I mean there is tons of people in financial services. So what I realize is we had to do things differently than everybody else to be able to compete. Number two is be able to do stuff differently but have an edge. Do it better than everybody else out there. So it's one thing to do it differently but you've got to figure out how can we do it better? I think those are the two real critical success factors that luckily I learned fairly early on and have been perfecting and continued to perfect ever since.

JAIME TARDY: So exactly how did you do that and what's the process that you used in order to do that in your own company?

MATTHEW TUTTLE: Well, it's really not, number one not drinking the Kool-aid. I saw first hand when I was at the brokerage firms and the insurance companies that I didn't believe what was being taught and I was lucky. In business school we did a project where because normally when they come to you with this portfolio, you should have 30 percent here, 20 percent here, 30 percent there, most financial advisors don't know where those numbers come from. They're punching into a black box.

We in business school actually had to create the black box and when you do that it's like you know you work in the kitchen of a restaurant, you never want to eat there again. So I knew all the problems of conventional investment philosophies. I saw working at brokerage firms and insurance companies the big problems with how they delivered financial planning. So right after that I said all right I want to do things totally and completely differently and sought out some of the best experts out there, people to work with, best ideas, constant studying, reading, talking to people to formulate philosophies on tactical asset allocation and our planning philosophy that we call a business plan for life that are substantially different than what anybody else out there is doing.

I firmly believe substantially better than what anyone's doing and nine times out of ten when we talk to a perspective client, they agree with us on that.

JAIME TARDY: So when you first started, you said you learned sort of this stuff at the beginning, I'm sure it has sort of been a process that's evolved and evolved but was this pretty much what you started with? I know if you go on your website it has all the tactical advice. Like you said, the business plan for life. Is that what you sort of started with way back when?

MATTHEW TUTTLE: Components of it. We keep innovating, keep getting better, new ideas. When we bring new people in if they've got something to add and it makes sense we integrate it. We don't want to just stop. We're constantly looking at what we're doing, ripping it apart, seeing if there is a better way to do it. Constantly looking at what's out there in the industry to see number one what everybody else is doing to again make sure we're staying different and number two, see if there is anyone else out there who is doing something that really, really does seem good and we'll copy it and try to make it better.

Some of our best ideas have come from things other people are doing that I'll look at and say, "All right, I like what they're doing there, how can I take it and how can I make it even better than what they're doing?" So we do a lot of that and we'll continue to do that for as long as we're around.

JAIME TARDY: So do you, it's funny, I talked about sort of failure. In those times when you're looking for ways to improve your business, do you have any stories about how things didn't work out very well for you?

MATTHEW TUTTLE: Yes, I mean not in the substance but we certainly made mistakes in hiring. We brought in at one point a group of four or five people and within a couple of months had to get rid of all of them. Our bad, we hadn't had our training program down to the level we wanted to and our screening process wasn't as good as I think it should have. So we learn from that. We brought in another crop of people and we continue to bring in new people and we continue to improve that process so that same mistake doesn't happen again because that set us back.

We brought in some people who we were expecting to really take on some big projects and when it turned out they couldn't, that set our plans back for a few months. So we kind of made the decision to not have that happen again.

JAIME TARDY: So what advice do you have for a small business owner who is just starting with hiring? What should they do first? What should they do best? How would they know whether or not they're a bad employee or not?

MATTHEW TUTTLE: You don't know. That's what I found. You don't know until someone actually comes in and starts working with you because all those people we got rid of when I talked to them I felt wow these guys are great. Then they come in and they're not self-motivated. Everything we do is so different. Somebody has got to be coachable. Yes, I know you were successful over there doing it that way but you come here you do it our way because our way works.

People give lip service to that and then come in and do it their own way. So it's really, we found it's really hard to know. It becomes a numbers game. For us, everyone who comes in is on commission so it's not, it's a hit as far as our time and effort and energy put into someone, but it doesn't cost us money luckily. But it's tough. I mean we continue to work on it and we continue to try to tweak it and we continue to try to get better.

JAIME TARDY: And you mentioned training programs. Would you suggest trying, especially a small business it's kind of hard to get a training program up and going before they hire some people. But what have you run into in trying to create a training process?

MATTHEW TUTTLE: It's really trying to create structure. That's a big part of it. It's having the structure in place where its step by step by step. Here's what you go to do then this, then this, then this, then this but then there's also go to be constant feedback in talking to someone and going through it. Giving people quantifiable hope with they're going to end up kind of getting to that next level. All that's got to be as structured as possible and in the beginning it wasn't. In the beginning it was seat of our pants and we learned from that and we continue to build our structure.

We've got a training manual that is a working document that we continue to add to and we've got it up on a website accessible to everybody with the idea that look anyone go online and add stuff to our training manual. So we just had one of our guys today come across a whole new situation. So I said to him, "Look, here's what I want you to do. Number one, get it done and number two, document everything you're doing" and we're adding this to the training manual.

JAIME TARDY: That's a really good point because what I was going to ask about is time. I mean you as the busy business owner a lot of the times they don't have the time to actually be creating the training or having other people create training and you oversee it but having it open to everybody to actually create on the fly, they're the ones doing it, they're the ones that are going to do the best job writing it down. That sounds like a great piece of advice.

MATTHEW TUTTLE: Yes, in the beginning to just get it started I obviously had to spend the time. But I knew that it was worth my while to do and luckily one thing I can do is write and write pretty quickly. You have to if you've written two books.

JAIME TARDY: Definitely. So let's talk about your books then because I know you have two books specifically and I love the one about the grandparents. How did that come about?

MATTHEW TUTTLE: That one came about, a couple of different things. I come from a family of writers. My mother has written a bunch of books so I think it's in my blood. I used to do a lot of teaching and speaking on personal finance issues and I found most of the time the people who would come to my talks would be retired people because they're the most concerned about their money. I always had people asking me, "You know, Matt, is there a good book for us? For retired people?" because every book out there that I ever saw was people like my age which is save as much as you can in your 401k and all this.

These people they're not in the saving mode anymore and the more I thought about it, the more I thought you know what? There isn't a book out there for you guys. So I said, I've always known I had a book in me and there's no book out there. Now there are but back then there weren't, for people who are already retired so I'm going to write it. So I proceeded to write my first book and learned a lot about writing books and getting books published from that one.

JAIME TARDY: Excellent. So what sort of resources did you turn to because it sounds like you do a lot of research? When you don't know something you go out and you research it. You learned how to write a whole book. You figure things out as you go. So what resources have you turned to or what have you read or done to help in your process of learning as much as you have?

MATTHEW TUTTLE: Getting your hands on everything in your industry. So my industry has got about five or six different trade journals. I get them all, read them all. There's some more advanced journals. I get those. I read those. When new books come out that are interesting I read those. Now there are all these blogs are out there. I've got a list of about 20 blogs that I'll look at whenever I can look at and I want to constantly be seeing new things, reading things and talking to my team because now my investment policy committee, I mean I've got some of the who's who of investing and tactical asset allocation available to me so a day like today I spent an hour with each of them just talking through the market and just getting their take and their feel and what they're seeing and who they're talking too. That's a great resource as well.

JAIME TARDY: Great. Well it's funny because you said you started investing back when you were like in the eighth grade. Did you always know that you'd be a millionaire or not even a millionaire but successful?

MATTHEW TUTTLE: Yes. That was something and I don't know how old you are so I don't know if you remember the show Family Ties.

JAIME TARDY: Oh, yeah, I do.

MATTHEW TUTTLE: Alex Keaton. That's what I always and my parents always thought of me like Alex and I always kind of, I identified with him on that show and so yes. I always knew that I would be successful at doing something. I knew I was not wired even back then for the corporate grind and 9 to 5 and that type of thing.

JAIME TARDY: So how did your mindset change then? So starting out then you knew that you wanted, you were going to be successful. Did you always just have that belief and you were able to sort of charge through knowing that that was possible or did you have a lot of growth in your mindset and trying to navigate your way to millions?

MATTHEW TUTTLE: I always had the belief. The growth came in the game plan. When I was in college I always knew I wanted to be in finance. All my friends thought I was lucky because they had no idea what they wanted to do and I knew I wanted to be in finance. Then I graduated and realize finance is huge. What part of finance do I want to be in? I don't know. I also graduated in 1990 which was in the middle of a massive recession in the financial industry. Nobody was hiring so I had to get real creative in order to get myself hired and use that as a stepping stone to get somewhere else.

Then the goal was to go to business school but they just kept promoting me and promoting me and promoting me so the growth was in trying to figure out the game plan. That's always kind of always come until finally once I launched the company in 2003, the game plan has gotten a lot more focused. We're still constantly bobbing and weaving and changing as new opportunities arise, new threats, new competition arises but ever since then, the focus has pretty much been the same.

JAIME TARDY: I have a question. So how do you deal with sort of the risk and the fear? Lots of business owners go through a lot of different things. Ups and downs and like you said ? new competition and that sort of thing. How do you deal with risk in general and fear?

MATTHEW TUTTLE: Well, to me I wouldn't want it any other way. I love what I do. I love owning a business and I think that's a key too. I mean you can't look at it as a job. It can't be one of those things where all of a sudden you don't have a boss anymore but your business becomes a boss and I love competition. So there's nothing that I'm really afraid of in business and when it comes to competition, I know what we have is substantially better and if I find someone out there who has got something that's better than what we have, I'll figure out how to copy it and put our imprint on it and make it better. So I'm not worried about that either.

I think with what we've been able to put together, I know that for us to get where I want this to get, it's just a matter of time and so the real goal or the real game here is trying to make it as short of time as possible to get to where we are at the mode we want to go.

JAIME TARDY: That's a really good place to be. You didn't even say that you were fearless; it's just that you are willing to push through no matter what. Like there was no situation that really brought on that fear just because you knew the end of it would turn out the way you want.

MATTHEW TUTTLE: Right. I mean we know we're going to get to where we want to go. What I don't know is whether it's going to take two years, five years or ten years. But I know that if we keep pushing, keep doing what we're doing, the opportunities to really grow exponentially are going to continue to line up for us. Things are going to continue to happen. There's always in the back of your mind, you've always still got to think all right what can go wrong and protect against those things as much as possible and you always know not everything can be protected against so there is a little bit of fear that you know you've got some risks that you're unprotected from and things could set you back if those happen. But if something like that happens that's life and you deal with it and you change and you move on.

JAIME TARDY: And it's that mindset that really sets you up for success. That's excellence. Excellent. So for the last question that I want to ask you, what is one action that the listeners can take this week to move them forward towards their goal of a million?

MATTHEW TUTTLE: It really depends on, so I'll give you two. If you're an entrepreneur the action that you want to take is figure out how to substantially differentiate yourself and do things better than your competition. And again, by differentiate yourself I don't mean oh we provide great client service or we only sell quality products. I mean substantial differentiation where someone who doesn't know your industry would say yes what you're doing is different.

If you are an individual and you're looking to invest your money or plan your finances, don't do what the average investors do ? listen to CNBC and think what they are saying is gospel. Read the Wall Street Journal and think what they're saying is gospel or listen to the stockbrokers who are pitching the same advice, the guy you killed in 2002 and 2008. Educate yourself on what else is out there and again, do something different than the average investor is doing.

JAIME TARDY: Excellent. Okay, so entrepreneurs should definitely take some time this week to set aside, even if it's just a half an hour, to really put some time into differentiating themselves and then the individual could read. I mean go to site and probably learn more information just on the way you guys see stuff.

MATTHEW TUTTLE: Yes, we have a lot our resources on our site if someone wants to go there.

JAIME TARDY: Tell me where we can find you online.

MATTHEW TUTTLE: It's tuttlewealth.com. T-U-T-T-L-E wealth.com.

JAIME TARDY: Great and you have a blog too, right?

MATTHEW TUTTLE: I do have a blog. It is www.wallstreetwise.net.

JAIME TARDY: Excellent. And you guys can check out Matthew's books on Amazon or I think it was also on MatthewTuttle.com. So thank you so much for coming on today, Matt, and I hope you have an excellent day.

MATTHEW TUTTLE: You too!

Tags: Budgeting, business competition, key differentiator, Matthew Tuttle, millionaire interview, Stock Market

Categories: All, Business, Business Model, Finances, Millionaire Interviews, Personal Finance/Wealth

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