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Please give our readers an introduction to your business. Please include what your business is all about, in which city you are located and if you have offices in multiple locations/ cities.
Happy Living is a health and wellness media and book publishing company. We’re on a mission to improve the health and wellbeing of the world, one person at a time. We create content to inspire others to believe as we do—that a better self is always possible – today, every day, for the rest of their lives. Our creative team includes the founder, Matt Gersper, A.K.A. Mr. Happy Living, experts on nutrition, fitness, medicine, and performance coaching, the worlds first blog tester, Scott Barry, as the star of Blog Theatre™, and Content Sherpa, Kyle Gersper, who brings it all together.
Our content is focused on the seven foundations of health: physical fitness, mental fitness, spiritual fitness, financial fitness, love, adventure, and significance. Our library is designed to inspire no matter your media preference. It includes more than 400 blog posts, two unique podcasts, both audio and video talks, and five books that we have published in the last few years.
Our company is a virtual one—we live on the World Wide Web. Our community is largest in the United States but extends to every continent. We call headquarters Matt’s home on Lake Norman in North Carolina.
- Please give us a brief description about yourself.
Matt Gersper is an author, motivational speaker, and entrepreneur. He is the Founder of Happy Living: a health and wellness media and book publishing company. He is the author of Turning Inspiration into Action, The Belief Road Map, and Inspiring Women. Matt believes a better self is always possible – today, and every day. He dedicates his professional time and resources developing and sharing best practices for health and happiness.
In his leisure, Matt loves to hike, paddle board, laugh, read, think, and spend time with his wife and four children at their home on Lake Norman.
Previously, Matt spent 30-years helping businesses in retail, accounts payable auditing, and international trade compliance. He specialized in business process optimization and best-practice development. Matt held roles responsible for starting, growing, and leading successful businesses including: vice president of strategic auditing, the founding entrepreneur of a start-up, president, and chairman of the board. Matt was instrumental in negotiating the sale of his company Customs Info to the Descartes Systems Group in 2014.
Matt graduated from the University of California – Davis where he studied economics, played football, and pole-vaulted for the track team. Immediately after college, he pursued his childhood dream of becoming a professional athlete, only to come up short with the unique distinction of being cut from three different football teams, in three different leagues: Canadian, USFL, and NFL.
- How did you initially become involved in your industry?
During the summer of 2013, I was six months into my new role as chairman of the board for our newly merged international trade company. My plan was to slowly transition out of any day-to-day responsibilities, into a truly oversight role requiring just a few days a month. When I had begun my chairmanship, I’d known I wanted to start some kind of new business venture. Now I knew what it was. I had purchased an expensive piece of real estate on the World Wide Web called HappyLiving.com.
The trade company would keep me working a fulltime schedule until the day we sold it nine months later. Whenever I could find time, my thoughts turned to Happy Living. How would we help others believe, as I did, that every person has a calling, their own special gift to the world? I began writing down thoughts and ideas as they came to me. These eventually became my outline for a simple business plan.
On January 9, 2014, I invited my oldest daughter to review my plans. They included stealing her from her current employer to join me as an owner of Happy Living. Much to my delight, she accepted.
The following week, reading in my comfy chair before starting my workday, an inspiration struck me that would shape the trajectory of the rest of my life. I captured the moment in the following note to myself. I signed it to make it official. It was January 16, 2014.
“During my morning reading, I had a very strong feeling “come over me” that Happy Living is to be the Masterpiece of my life – my personal and unique gift to the world.
I am committed to selling the international trade business and dedicating my professional time and resources to building Happy Living into a successful company that helps people lead happy, healthy, and extraordinary lives.”- What three pieces of advice would you give to young business owners?
How about four from My Philosophy for Lifelong Work?
1-Find work you want to do for your entire life.
2-Find work with results that can be broadcast to the world. Try to avoid work with limited geographical reach.
3-Find work with highly recurring revenue. This means customers pay for the products or services, every month, or every year, forever.
4-Find work with near-zero marginal cost revenue. This means creating a product or a service once, and selling it over and over again.- What would you say are the top three skills needed to be a successful small business owner?
All the skills needed to succeed in business can be learned or hired. But here are three things that I think are essential to success:
1-You must know WHY you want to be a business owner. What is your purpose?
2-You must never, ever give up.
3-Be patient. It’s going to take a lot longer than you think it will but that’s O.K. because you have the rest of your life!- How do you go about marketing your business? What has been your most successful form of marketing?
Focus | Fit | Serve
We focus our marketing efforts within a few wonderful communities that we love to be a part of—Paleo f(x), the World Domination Summit, Make-A-Wish, the University of California, Davis (my alma mater), and a little village in Spain called La Seu d’Urgell. Then, we make the effort to cultivate a relationship with the leaders of the community, understand their purpose, and explore how we can best fit within it. From there, we do everything we can with the resources we have to serve the members of their communities.
- What is the best way to achieve long-term success?
I believe that each of us is here on Earth to become all we are capable of becoming and to develop the gifts we have been given so that we may give to others, lifting them up and helping them to become all they are capable of becoming with the gifts they have been given.
If you want to achieve long-term success, find your reason for being on this Earth, get after it, and never stop!
Visit us for more information http://www.happyliving.com/
