2025 marks the seventh anniversary of publishing quarterly updates on my blog. These updates serve as a tool to provide updates about my family, MarketBeat, Homegrown Capital, and the different community initiatives that MarketBeat supports. Many friends and acquaintances have told me they enjoy reading these updates, so I continue to write them and publish them once a quarter. This quarterly update is a bit of a grab bag. There’s some commentary on getting healthy, staying focused, investing strategy, philanthropy, and what’s happening at MarketBeat in 2025. Enjoy!
Overdoing It
This is a common theme in my quarterly updates, but again I find myself in a place where I am trying to be too many things to too many people. As I get further into my career, I realize that you can only do a small number of things very well. If you try to do too many things at once, you will be “phoning it in” on all of them and constantly stealing time from one thing to deal with an urgent matter from another thing.
For a while I was trying to follow the path of many banking and healthcare executives in Sioux Falls who are directly involved with a lot of different community organizations and non-profits. I’ve come to realize that I have a different lot in life than they do, at least for this season of life. I have a special needs daughter at home, a son who needs help in school, a wife who needs my help and support, and not to mention, two businesses to run. I turned down the opportunity to serve on an important community board last fall and probably won’t add anything new in the next couple of years.
Instead, I am encouraging my employees to participate in leadership development programs and serve on different non-profit and community boards. Our employees currently represent MarketBeat on about a dozen different non-profit and community boards, and we hope to grow that number over time as we grow our team and develop more leaders.
Work and Family Travel
We had a relatively quiet travel schedule last fall. Our family went to Las Vegas for Karine’s birthday in October. Matt went to Austin, TX to attend Scalable Impact Live in October. Matt went to Orlando in November to participate in the Four Rooms Mastermind event. We went to two Vikings games last fall, which we thoroughly enjoyed. Matt will be heading back to Orlando later this month for Financial Marketing Summit, where he will be speaking. Our family is planning on spending President’s Day weekend in an AirBNB near Naples.
Weight Loss, For Real.
About a year ago, I received a high blood pressure diagnosis. My numbers were not good and I decided to take my health much more seriously this year. During the last 12 months, I have lost a total of 27 pounds (187Lb -> 160lb), or about 14.4% of my initial body weight. I have tried to get back to my “college weight” several times over the years, but this time was different. First, I took a low dose of Tirzepatide (Mounjaro), which is a second generation GLP-1 inhibitor that helps keep one’s appetite under control. It is like a new version of Ozempic, with far fewer side effects. With the medication, you just don’t get hungry nearly as often and it really helps you avoid overeating.
I also really benefited from being around other people in the MarketBeat office who are also interested in healthy living (shout out to Amanda, Alix, Arin, and Don). Based on their encouragement, I ramped up my protein intake (targeting 125 grams per day), tried to eat more whole foods, started taking some basic supplements, and logged my daily food intake in an app. I do exercise, but I don’t exercise dramatically more than I did a year ago. Overall, these changes have been very positive and I hope to stick with them in the new year.
MarketBeat Update
MarketBeat had an exceptional year. In 2024, we redesigned our website and updated our brand design for the first time in five years. We revamped the back-end system that powers MarketBeat called the “Web Admin.” We doubled down on our YouTube channel, which now has more than 140,000 subscribers. We worked to develop new advertising relationships and dial in our media-buying efforts that have allowed MarketBeat to grow to 5.2 million email subscribers. We brought on four new employees and several new contractors. These efforts allowed us to top more than $40 million in top-line revenue in 2024, which is up about 35% year over year. While some of the results we achieved were the result of election-year excitement, we really think we are firing on all cylinders.
One of the bigger changes we made at MarketBeat this year is that we learned to love advertising agencies. Historically, we have shied away from them because there are a lot of mediocre agencies that make big promises that they ultimately can’t deliver on. However, we knew there were areas we needed to improve on (such as Search Engine Optimization) and we just weren’t getting the results we were looking for without outside help. We rolled the dice in several different areas and found some great agency partners to work with. We now have a technical SEO agency, a digital PR agency, a newsletter advertising agency, a Google/Bing media buying firm, and a Meta ads media buying firm that we work with. MarketBeat does not have a dedicated marketing department, but working with our agency partners has allowed us to be exceptional in acquiring new users.
2025 will be a bit of a different year for MarketBeat, primarily in that we aren’t really trying to do anything new. We’re launching no new media brands. We aren’t adding major new features to the website. We aren’t planning a bunch of hiring. Instead, our focus is to do the things that we already do better. We have some technical debt to clean up in our 15-year-old code base. We want to redesign and improve several aspects of the MarketBeat website. We want to retire some of our older, less popular websites and brand efforts. It is an editing and cleanup year for MarketBeat, but the work we do will ultimately set us up for long-term growth and success.
Estate Planning
A couple of years ago, my business banker encouraged me to start getting my estate planning in order because of how crippling the federal estate tax can be to high-net-worth families. The amount of legal work required to properly set up trusts is astonishing. We are about 18 months into this project and probably have another 12 months to go before our various trusts are set up and assets are titled the way that they need to be. We have been working with Legacy Law Firm on this project, and they have been excellent to work with. If you happen to be a high-net-worth person, my encouragement is this: don’t sleep on estate planning. You will need to do it eventually and your family will be better off if you do it earlier in your business career.
Commercial Real Estate Update
The commercial real estate market has really slowed down in 2024. We only completed two transactions – purchasing the Empire East and a plot of land on 41st and Veterans Parkway for a future retail center. We looked at several new development and acquisition opportunities, but nothing really penciled out in a way that makes sense. Warren Buffett is quoted as saying that “interest rates are the greatest force in the economic universe,” and now I understand why. Until interest rates come down, most real estate projects we look at just don’t make sense when you can get 4%-4.5% in essentially risk-free money market funds.
Consequently, this has left me with significantly more capital to invest elsewhere. Some of it has gone to private deals like Prismatic and Homestead Living. The rest of it has largely been invested in index funds or left in simple money market funds. A strange dynamic of wealth is that you are no longer trying to “shoot the moon” on returns. You are simply trying to protect the nest-egg that you have developed, which causes you to be less interested in the next great technology startup and be much more interested in simple investments that will grow over time that you never have to think about.
Venture Capital Update
Homegrown Capital, the boutique venture capital firm that I own with my partner Tim Weelborg, made two new investments in the fourth quarter. We invested in Legacy Farmer, which helps farm families protect their assets and achieve their financial goals. I highly encourage you to checkout the Legacy Farmer website, which has some of the best “social proof” examples I have ever seen. We also invested in Hummingbirds, which partners hyperlocal creators with brands that sell consumer packaged goods (CPG) products. Overall, our portfolio is performing well and we are nearing the end of the investment period for Homegrown Capital Fund 1.
CEO Summit
MarketBeat and SiouxFalls.Business will again be presenting the Sioux Falls CEO Summit this Spring. Last year, we featured senior executives from Dillards as they celebrated their grand opening in Sioux Falls. We’ll be doing the event in March and featuring speakers who have insight into the new presidential administration. We may have a new venue this year but haven’t locked it down just yet. This is an invite-only event, but if you are a senior executive at an established business that has a presence in Sioux Falls, drop me a note and I’ll get you an invite. Along with the CEO summit, we will be doing our third annual “30 under 30” awards. Jodi Schwan has been a great partner for this annual event, and we look forward to growing and expanding it over time.
Philanthropy Update
In 2024, the MarketBeat philanthropy committee received 57 applications and funding requests totaling $416,483. The committee made contributions to 31 unique non-profits totaling about $148,000. We ended the year by inviting BreadBreak, a small non-profit that collects unused food from restaurants and delivers it to agencies that distribute it to those in need, to our last staff meeting of the year. We surprised them with a $25,000 check to help them buy a new van for one of their routes.
2024 was the second full year of the committee and it has been a big success. I simply do not have time to personally review every charitable giving request that comes in these days, and our philanthropy committee has created a process that allows non-profit organizations to request grands and direct charitable dollars where they will have the greatest impact in our community. We plan to continue the committee in 2025 and bring on some MarketBeat employees as new committee members.
You likely won’t see much from MarketBeat in terms of major new philanthropic initiatives in 2025. We have several multi-year commitments with different organizations which will consume most of the MarketBeat/Matt philanthropic budget, and that’s okay. It often takes several years to get new initiatives off the ground, and we need to be there for our existing non-profit partners before signing up for a bunch of new stuff.
Wrap Up
If you are still reading, I encourage you to lock in your tickets for the Lallycooler Music Festival that is happening this summer. It will feature country and non-country music, including headliner Sam Hunt. MarketBeat is the title sponsor for the event. You can learn more about the festival here.