S5E78
· 36:34
Hey. It's Matt from Money Lab. I'm in the brewery today, and I got a question from somebody via email, and I wanna answer it. Get some steps in. You know what I mean?
Matt Giovanisci:The email reads, and I quote, hey, Matt. I just discovered you brought back the Money Lab Podcast. Yes. I brought it back in January of 2024, and I've been doing every, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday since. And we are cranking.
Matt Giovanisci:I've been binging your past episodes to get it caught up. Good luck. There's quite a bit. I think for this season, there's already, like, 70 something. I'm curious how working with your family while working from home has been going for you.
Matt Giovanisci:I've worked from home for over 10 years, so I'm familiar with the challenges of working where you also live. Would love to hear if you have any rules for separating work life from home life. And does anything surprise you about working with your wife and brother? Keep the sawdust coming. Thank you.
Matt Giovanisci:Wow. So that is a great question. And let me first talk about the just working from home part. I've been working from home since 2011, so it has been quite a long time. I was actually kind of familiar with it because my father, before it was cool, before the pandemic, like, way before, worked from home.
Matt Giovanisci:He worked from home, when I lived there. So, I mean, I mean, I would yeah. I was we're talking way before 2011, and he was a kitchen designer. He's retired now, but he, yeah, did design kitchens at a laptop in in his office at home. And so I kinda feel like that I was familiar with it, and to me, that was the goal because I'm like and he loved it.
Matt Giovanisci:Like, he raved about it constantly. He was he constantly bragged about it and would say today, I worked from home before it was cool. He that's his words. Right? So there has been some challenges.
Matt Giovanisci:Namely, I am an extrovert. I am a social person. When I would go into work, now it depends on what era of my work we're talking about. So when I was in retail, all I did all day was interact with human beings and loved it, got a ton of energy from it, big fan. Fast forward, I worked in a couple of corp not I worked one corporate job where I was a website designer.
Matt Giovanisci:I had to wear a fucking suit to work, which is so stupid for a website designer, but, yeah. That was horrible. I did work with other people, but I think I only lasted 6 months before I was like, this sucks. I hate this job. I don't think I've ever really talked about that publicly, because it was so short lived that I thought it was, like, you know, yeah.
Matt Giovanisci:But I did work as a professional hired website designer. That was my that was my jam. Hated it, though. I commuted an hour to work and an hour back in a Jeep Wrangler with no car radio, no speakers, stick, and a ragtop. Hour in traffic every single day to and from work and had to wear a suit.
Matt Giovanisci:Had to wear a suit. No. That's I'll I'll correct that. Had to wear nice pants, nice shoes, tucked in dress shirt, and I had to wear a tie. So, like, just everything but the suit jacket.
Matt Giovanisci:Horrible job. I don't know what they were trying to do, but I worked with it was a big office in a in a complex where there's multiple floors, and, you know, anyway, I didn't interact with anybody there. I kinda I I hated this. Everyone had cubicles, like old school shit, man. Anyway, then I worked at a
Matt Giovanisci:I worked I went
Matt Giovanisci:got hired back as a marketing director, and I worked I had my own office. And nobody who worked in that office was my age. Not anyone. Not a single person. And so I did fraternize you know, what what's the word?
Matt Giovanisci:Fraternize? Whatever. I did talk to people, but it was really just it wasn't like casual too much. And then, you know, I worked another job, which is very similar to that one. Then I worked from home, and that was the goal.
Matt Giovanisci:Like, I think because I was I had transitioned from doing retail or customer effacing I had a customer job where I get to talk to people and interact with people, which I loved and was really good at. I transitioned into a computer job. I think that no matter where you work, whether it's in an office or at home, computer work is isolating. It's it's not the challenge that I find is that I'm sitting behind a computer in my own zone. I'm I'm fairly good at it, and I like it, but I don't find the challenge being home and doing that.
Matt Giovanisci:Now, with this email, there's a few other things to note. I don't have any children. It's just me and my wife and my cat. So I am not being bothered when I go downstairs to work, which is I I say downstairs, I work in the basement. Always have.
Matt Giovanisci:Big basement fan. Grew up in my basement at home. I know it sounds like I was summoned like a like I'm some Harry Potter motherfucker, but, no, I I I preferred to be in a basement. Nice and cool down there. But, yeah, I the the I don't have that the the common challenge that I hear from friends of mine who are like, dude, I can't work from home because my kids are constantly bothering me.
Matt Giovanisci:And then it's like, okay. Well, they go to day care, and it's like, well, then we're just at home. I personally don't like never liked the commute. Was never a fan of that as a concept. I think it sucks.
Matt Giovanisci:Anyone who commutes longer than 30 minutes to work, I understand where you're coming from. That's horrible, miserable, not even like you know, some people think, yeah, I listen to a podcast or what. Like, I don't wanna be in the car that long, every single day. To me, the the the reason why I think that that, like, I way prefer working from home over driving into an office is because that commute is cutting into the work time. So as a person who runs their own business, that commute is a complete waste of time.
Matt Giovanisci:Now the biggest obstacle that I found working from home has been the lack of human interaction during the day. That is it for me. That's the big challenge. So much so that I had cut every year, it seems, I have a wild hair at my ass to go and rent studio space or co work once a week or, you know, some kind of social work environment. But every time I pursue that, I always just go, what are you doing?
Matt Giovanisci:Like, that sucks. That's that's that's worse than what you have because, one, it costs extra money no matter what. Me driving into an office, if I even if it was somebody else's office, costs money. Renting an office costs money. You know?
Matt Giovanisci:Okay. Would I be able to collaborate in person with people? Sure. And that is there is some enjoyment to that, but my business doesn't call for it all the time. And so I'll just put that out there.
Matt Giovanisci:Now you mentioned in the email about, you know, is there any sort of separation talk with my wife? And I mean I mean, separation talk. Just got married for fuck's sake. No. Like, yes.
Matt Giovanisci:There is a there is boundaries that are set. Here's how we operate that. I own the business, love business, love talking about it constantly, hence hence this podcast. And so it is me who is the problem. She, my wife, works and then doesn't want to talk about it.
Matt Giovanisci:Like, doesn't want the like, doesn't want the in between time talking about work. Now I will say that there are points where, like, I'll just bring up a little tiny work thing. Maybe she might bring up a little tiny work thing. We resolve it in 2 seconds. That's completely fine.
Matt Giovanisci:So what we do is is everything is prefaced with a question. Hey. Can I talk about this? Hey. Is this a good time for me to talk about this?
Matt Giovanisci:Hey. Can you help me with this? So it's always a question first, and then if the answer is, you know what? Don't wanna get into work right now, then I go, okay. I'll put it on Asana, deal with it another day.
Matt Giovanisci:Or that's the other rule is that don't if you have a question about the business, if you have something that you wanna talk about, put it in Asana as a task and schedule it for a later date, and then we will dedicate time to talk about that. Now that is the that is by her request. If it were me and I and it was 2 mes, we
Matt Giovanisci:were in a
Matt Giovanisci:relationship together, I'd be talking about business constantly. But I think that there is a benefit to not talking about it. When I, you know, I I it okay. Here's it's really hard for me to get in this mindset, but I I try often. When I went to work, and I'm gonna specifically think about my time when I worked at, this one pool company.
Matt Giovanisci:I worked there many, many years, and I was assistant manager at one point And just I was off Mondays Tuesdays, and I worked, Wednesday to Sunday. And I worked all day shifts. So, like, from, I think we opened at 9, so I was there at, like, 8:30 till we closed at 8 on during the week and 5 on the weekends. So we was I was there for many hours. When I would go into work, it's like, okay.
Matt Giovanisci:I'm in work mode, but I'm also, like, with my friends. You know? Like, I was, you know, work buddies. So it's like I'm there kinda doing my thing, you know, a lot of downtime, especially in the wintertime. But when I but I could not wait to get out of work.
Matt Giovanisci:Like, I could not wait to be done with it and to be home. That that's that feeling was real. Even though I enjoyed my work, you know, wasn't I didn't have fun, you know, but I enjoyed it. Does that does that make sense? Like, I I wasn't a huge fan of my boss.
Matt Giovanisci:Like, it was, like, always this nerve wracking thing. It's like, is my boss gonna be there today? Oh, god. It's like that's a that's a that's a fucking day. And then those days, I'm like, I just wanna go the fuck home, man.
Matt Giovanisci:I I just wanna go to the bar. Like, I'm so sick of this. Like, I'm just done today. So I don't get that feeling anymore. That feeling never happens.
Matt Giovanisci:Since 2011, I've never experienced that in my life. That's kinda nuts. That's kinda nuts because that means that I'm I don't care about be going home because I am home. And, unfortunately, it means that I wanna talk about business constantly or I have no time boundaries set. So Steph setting those time boundaries or not even they're not time boundaries, but they're just like, hey.
Matt Giovanisci:If it's fucking 8 o'clock, dude, you don't you'd like you she says this to me all the time. If I start bringing up work stuff at 8 o'clock at night, she's like, you sure you wanna talk about this? Because you're not gonna sleep if you do. I'm like, yeah. You're right.
Matt Giovanisci:And it's like, alright. Table it. Table it tomorrow. Because it's like I get I get all wired and, you know, the brain starts pumping and whatever brains do. I don't know.
Matt Giovanisci:Churning, I guess, they churn. Thoughts churn, I guess. So, yeah, as far as the challenges are concerned, I I it is really just a relationship challenge. And I would I would say to a smaller degree, a, social challenge for me. Yeah.
Matt Giovanisci:Because because being on Zoom with people is not so it does not feed that social energy for me. But the amount of times that I thought, okay. Let me let me get my work out of my home and stick it somewhere else so that way there is a clear boundary. The more I consider that, and I've I have friends who have done that to varying degrees of success, mind you, because that becomes an expense for what? Like, what is that expense for?
Matt Giovanisci:It's a mental expense. Because, really, the only reason you're like, unless you literally need the space to do something specific, then I don't see the point of being, you know, in another location. I have a friend who works from home, and I'll say that in air quotes because he basically never works from home. Now for the last few years, he has been single, and he has a a child, but it not full time. So what he does is and is I think this is just the type of person that he is, is that he just goes and works elsewhere.
Matt Giovanisci:He because he can. He just takes his laptop, and it's the kind of work he does similar work to me, like website design kind of stuff, and he will go to a coffee shop or he will go to a place that has co working. And he does that frequently, almost every day as if he is commuting to work. I can't do that every day. I do that sometimes, although I haven't really done it a lot this year.
Matt Giovanisci:I did it a lot at the end of last year. There's a coffee shop right down the street from my house that's great for co working, but then I just end up going there and, like, drinking too much coffee and spending too much money on sandwiches, and and then it's like and I I never get deep work done there because it's it's distracting. I also don't see anybody, so just being around people is not my idea of work. Talking to people is is just like it's just a social thing. So all of that is to say, I like working from home.
Matt Giovanisci:And the thing that I've been doing recently is setting a timer. So I so my my work, my office is our basement. Our basement has one main room and then 2 spare bedrooms and a bathroom. And no one's in the spare bedrooms, but the main floor, the main room is really all mine. My entire video studio is set up down there, my desk, my guitars, my music, my every everything's just there.
Matt Giovanisci:And, you know, in the morning, I've been trying to be better at just leaving my laptop down there as if it belongs there. And and since we really never go into the basement for any other reason than to work, really, or if we have obviously, we have a company that can stay in the guest rooms, but that's pretty rare. So in the mornings, what I'll do is I'll say, I'm going to the hole, which is basically me saying, I'm going to work. Now besides food, I could spend 8 hours down there because there's a bathroom, there's a shower, there's, you know, there's everything I there's everything I need except food. And I guess I could put food down there, but I don't I don't wanna do that.
Matt Giovanisci:So that's what I do. I go into the hole, that's what I call it, and then I work. But what I've been doing recently is setting a timer and boxing my work into about a max of 4 hours a day, which is interesting because, you know, it it I can hear people thinking like, well, well, that's not enough time to get shit done, and I would argue it's actually way it's actually more than enough time because the problem is is that I will go down there and go, today's work day or all day I can work because I'm from I'm working from home. I can work all day. So I might go down there at, like, 10 AM and, like, work till 1, bring my laptop upstairs, continue working till, like, 6.
Matt Giovanisci:What am I doing? Like, what am I doing that whole time? When I go down there now and I set a timer, it's like, okay. You have a limited amount of time to get whatever you need to get done. Priorities immediately, you know, jump to the top, and so you just work on the things that are important.
Matt Giovanisci:And then you're like, alright. I'm done for the day. Like, I'm done. And what's interesting about that is once I'm done, that that that time barrier mental time barrier feels very similar to getting off of work at 5 PM on a Saturday and being like, it's fucking time to rage. That's what it feels like because it's just like I go there, I do my 4 hours.
Matt Giovanisci:Now my 4 hours might be like 2 hours in the morning, have some lunch, 2 hours in the afternoon, whatever, but then I gotta fill my day with other things on purpose, really, so that I can sleep better, because otherwise, if I get my brain going too much, then I'm gonna have trouble sleeping. Now the the second question or, like, what is it like working with my wife and brother? Like, what are the sort sort of things that have come up from that? So I'll talk about my wife first and then my brother. My wife, we struggled we struggled for many years to try and work together.
Matt Giovanisci:We always knew I did it was a good idea if we did, and we just couldn't figure it out. The reason why it kept failing is because we would keep butting heads. She we met under, you know, like, she owned her own business, I owned my own business. So we're both very alpha in that way, I think. Whatever the word is.
Matt Giovanisci:I don't know if the word is alpha, but you know what I mean. We're both very, like, masters of our domain. I know it's a sign of phone reference, not what I mean, but you know what I mean. So because of that, we would butt heads, especially when we had to work on a project together. It wasn't until, there was a moment and I don't remember.
Matt Giovanisci:I wanna say it was either I think it was, like, 2020. Could have been 2019 or at least the the start of it was in 2019. So she had, you know, always had jobs, but was like, hey. I could work for you part time, and then she, stopped working and then took a hiatus and then was like, I don't know what I wanna do. Tried some things, didn't really work out.
Matt Giovanisci:And I I kept saying, you know, you could come and work for me. We could figure this out. And what we ended up doing was figuring out a way to make videos that fit into her wheelhouse as a creator animator type of person. And so we were like, hey. What if we did pool videos this way, and you made them?
Matt Giovanisci:And then that and then so she became like, her her background is curriculum design, and she also has an animation background. So it was like, okay. Let's put these two things together. You know, we have some university. So that's why we were able to start making consistent videos is because she basically owns that entire domain.
Matt Giovanisci:She is the YouTube czar. Now she's content czar, and I don't interact with that. I don't have anything to do with it. In fact, my job is always like, I'm the I am the employee. So she will write a script.
Matt Giovanisci:She will, she'll write several scripts, as a matter of fact. Actually, this this happened today, so I so it's pretty fresh in my mind. She will write several scripts, schedule them all for me to record in Asana, schedule them on whatever day, you know, is she thinks is fine. That those things will pop up on my to do list, and I'll go, okay. So I go and sit down in front of the teleprompter, in front of the camera, record whatever she wrote.
Matt Giovanisci:Don't question it. I just do it, and then I upload it back to Asana, and then I hit complete, and then she knows that it's completed, and that's it. And then videos just go public on Saturdays. My involvement in YouTube videos is literally the amount of time it takes to film it and read the script, basically. Well oiled machine.
Matt Giovanisci:Now just as an aside, she, was using a program that is just not working for her anymore. It was I'm not even gonna say it. Well, ScreenFlow was the name of the program. It's not working for her anymore. It's way too ridiculous.
Matt Giovanisci:So she was like, you know, I think I'm gonna have to move over to what you use, which is Adobe Premiere. It's what my brother uses as well, and we pay for it. So it's like, okay. You should probably use it. And she was like, yeah.
Matt Giovanisci:Alright. You're gonna have to, you know, teach me how to use it. The way that I taught her how to use it was not to sit there over her shoulder and give her directions. That's not gonna work. Okay?
Matt Giovanisci:It I filmed a 40 minute Loom video editing a minute clip of the video that she was gonna edit and basically showing her, here's how I do it. And then today, she said to she said this week, you know, she at some point, and then she was like, my week is learning Adobe Premiere. Now she's familiar with editing software, so it's not gonna be the a huge learning curve, but, you know, there is something. And she's like, I'm not looking forward to it, and she's like, I know it has to be done, so it is what it is. And then today, she, I was upstairs because I just gotten done recording all of the videos for the day, and she's like, hey.
Matt Giovanisci:Can you help me with Premiere? And so, yeah, I go up to her office, because she has her own office, and help her. Whatever question she has, just answer them. And that's the relationship. It's very simple.
Matt Giovanisci:So I I do interact with her, but, honestly, very little. The only time I actually interact with her is, like, you know, if I have, like, a question about something, like an existential question about the business or, like, something's going on and I'm like, I don't know how to make this decision. She'll help me with those things. But, again, I always have to preface it with a question. Like, hey.
Matt Giovanisci:Can I can I ask you a question about this thing? Is it is it cool? Yeah. Okay. Well, here's what I'm thinking of.
Matt Giovanisci:What do you think? Boom. Okay. Let's move forward. So really simple.
Matt Giovanisci:And and it's been I there's it's been there are, of course, are ups and downs. I'm not gonna sugarcoat it and say it's all, you know, it's all rainbows and Skittles or whatever the hell else. But it's but, yeah, I would say, like, 90% of the time, it's great. And the problem is really me because I'd all I wanna do is talk about it. All I wanna do is think about it.
Matt Giovanisci:All I wanna do is work. And so, like, I'm the one that has to temper himself. And I'm fine with that because I think doing that is ultimately a good thing, or at least I believe that. So my brother, doesn't live with me. He lives in a completely different part.
Matt Giovanisci:He lives in Colorado, but he lives in Denver. I live down near Boulder, and we interact maybe once every 2 to 3 weeks. So, in the beginning, when we were working together, it was more frequent. He was helping me with MoneyLabs stuff, and he was just getting, like, acclimated. We were trying to figure out what his role was.
Matt Giovanisci:Like, we knew it was social media. We knew it was something, but we didn't know what. So in the beginning, there was a lot of, like, working with him. Now he's very different because he is not somebody that I grew up like, it's this is gonna sound kinda terrible, but I don't mean it to be terrible. It's that, like, we grew up and had very different lives.
Matt Giovanisci:Because he is my younger brother by about 4 years, and we did not hang out at all and and still really don't because we have very different we have very different views of the world. Right? And we have very different hobbies. So, you know, we have some overlap, obviously, but in the in the case of, like, that, it's not like he's my, you know, he's like, he's my brother. I talk to him all the time, blah blah blah, and then, like, I he doesn't do the work he's supposed to do, and then I have to give him shit, and it's like we get in a little fight.
Matt Giovanisci:Like, that stuff doesn't happen. It's just not our relationship. It's never gonna happen. So that's that's so that is an interesting dynamic. I don't know if that's true for many people, but I think, like, I know people who are, like, they're tight with their family.
Matt Giovanisci:And so being the person who tells you what to do, it's like it can cause a rift. And I don't want and that doesn't happen. So my brother, he had lost his job, and I was just like, you know what? I could use some help with something. You know?
Matt Giovanisci:I wanted to sort of, I wanted to hire somebody to do you know, know, I was gonna I actually hired an agency to do social media, and I'm like, you know what? This is dumb. And I was just like and it wasn't his wasn't what his profession was, but I was like, hey. If you're interested in this, like, we don't even know what we're gonna do, but, like, are you willing to fucking help us figure it out and just figure it out in general? So what's interesting about him is that he is incredibly reliable, and he doesn't have, like, an entrepreneurial spirit.
Matt Giovanisci:And I'm sure he does to to to a degree. It's not to dis disbar or discredit him, but he's more of a, like, tell me what to do, and it'll get done kinda guy. And that I think I think, we're so everyone in my family is like that. Tell me what to do and it'll get done. I think I just happen to have, like, more entrepreneurialness to me.
Matt Giovanisci:I don't know what I don't even know what that is. But so I said to him, like, I don't know. We're just literally, we're figuring this out. He's like, okay. So he's kinda just happy to be here and doesn't complain and doesn't fight back and just just it's just like, this is the greatest job I've ever had.
Matt Giovanisci:So whatever, you know, whatever you wanna do, I'll do it. And I you know, so and so his job and, again, his job is it he told me, I don't know, a couple months back, and I was just like, oh my god. He works 5 hours a week. He's like, yeah. Maybe.
Matt Giovanisci:Maybe 5 hours a week because he's mastered his what he's supposed to do. I've given him not giving him nothing else to do. I would like to give him more stuff to do. And and, obviously, seasonality, it'll get more intense. But so so right now, what he does, and this is what he's been doing consistently for a long time now, is he publishes 3 short form vertical videos a week for Swim University across every social media platform using a company called Later to schedule it.
Matt Giovanisci:He the scripts are written by Steph. They're filmed by me. It's all done in Asana, and he edits them in Premiere. And and he publishes them through later, and then it has to upload it to YouTube specifically. And the the way that he does that is the way that he's decided to do it, and that's it's this is on him.
Matt Giovanisci:This is where I kinda had to, like, let go a little bit. I'm like, he does it on the day he's supposed to publish. So he gets up early, like, I don't know, 7 AM, cranks out the video, schedules it, it goes live at around noon, and then he's done for the day. So that's what he does. And he pretty much only does it he only works Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and he that's when the same day when he's done publishing the video, he goes and answers all of our emails for Swim University.
Matt Giovanisci:That's it. That's all he does. The other thing I'll probably add to his list is, helping me answer comments across social media platforms, just keeping an eye on everything. But other than that, yeah, that's pretty much it. And, you know, there were we we were trying to do more where, you know, he would help me film, you know, so he would come up I mean, he used to come over, like, every week and help me film, and I just got tired of that.
Matt Giovanisci:I was just like, this isn't working, and it's like, I don't really need we we we could figure out a a better way to do this. So I yeah. For him, it's it's incredibly easy, and I think the reason why it works so well, and I'm fortunate about for this, is that he gets it done. Like, does not skip, does not fuck up. I mean, he's fucked up the edit sometimes, but, really, like, once he's got it once he had it dialed in, it's like, okay.
Matt Giovanisci:And we and, of course, like, if if he was messing up on something, you know, it's that, like, Japanese car assembly line. It's the idea that you don't fix the problem at the where where the problem happens. You go back all the way to the beginning, and you fix the problem so that that problem doesn't happen. And so, you know, there would be things that we could do in the in the scripting to fix things or things that I could do on camera that you know? So things that are earlier in the line that we could fix, we would do that before having him fix it or try to correct our mistakes.
Matt Giovanisci:Does that make sense? So it is it's kind of an assembly line of things. Now I do everything else. So blog post, emails, offers, Facebook ads, recording podcasts, publishing podcasts, accounting, bookkeeping, you know, just general management, like, all that kind of stuff. And so but I don't tell anybody what to do.
Matt Giovanisci:And I think that's the that's why we've been able to work well together is because it's, like, it's not me telling you what to do. It's the process. We, as a team, developed the process. And so everyone has their place, including me, and you just do the process. Now if the now thank thankfully, again, my brother and my wife have never and my myself have never fucked fucked up the process.
Matt Giovanisci:So there is nobody to yell at because we've all just do our jobs. And by keeping the the the the hours low, I'm basically saying, this is all it This is all we have to do. If we just do this, we win. Business works. K?
Matt Giovanisci:Anything else on top of that, I will worry about, and then I will bring the idea to the table. We will discuss it, decide if we wanna add it or not to the process. If not, we don't. So I try very hard not to be a traditional boss. Doesn't mean I'm good at it.
Matt Giovanisci:I'm not a very good leader. I'm not a very good partner. I'm also not a very good coworker. But if you give me something to do, it'll get done. And I think everybody else in the company is like that, and that's why we've been able to sort of isolate our little corners of the process and just kinda knock it out, together but separate.
Matt Giovanisci:Hope that's helpful. Let me know. Shoot me an email. Matt@moneylab.co, and I'll talk to you guys later. Bye.
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