Matt Argall

Matt Argall was born in Los Angeles, California in 1980. His family moved to Canada a year later, where his parents, both chiropractors, established a successful chiropractic business. When Matt was eight years old, his parents sold the business to return back to US, now settling in Florida. They applied the experience from their practice in Canada to open two clinics in Florida, which they ran until 2012 at which point they sold them as well.

Matt attended middle school in Florida, where he met Ali, who would soon become his best friend and his first business partner. At age 17 he helped Ali to save a big online company, taking care of marketing, while Ali was in charge of the administrative work. They kept the focus on the online market, selling wholesale products online. The idea was to sell items such as area rugs, Bombay chests and all kinds of bedroom furniture on EBay and send auctioned items directly to their buyers, an idea that was entirely novel at the time. The business grew fast and soon they had up to 300 auction sales per week. Matt’s first business venture came to an end after September 11th, 2001, when Ali suddenly disappeared.

So how does a successful businessman get into the Citizens Commission on Human Rights International, a nonprofit organization whose stated mission is to "eradicate abuses committed under the guise of mental health and enact patient and consumer protections”? During his teenage years Matt belonged to Scientology and as part of the church membership, one of his duties was to help the human kind. In order to do so he had to choose a group he wanted to support. He picked the Human Rights Commission, following his deeply rooted interest in helping people.

As part of his work for the Human Rights Commission, he started looking into their marketing, especially the group’s telemarketing efforts, curious to see how people could prosper in that field. This is how his marketing career started: Filling the position as treasurer and later as president of the group, he was in close contact with people making donations to his human rights cause, most of which were from marketing companies’ owners. Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, Matt seized the opportunity to learn from their experience.

At the age of 21 Matt Argall started working for MCI Inc., where his job was to sign up people for 12-months long cell phone contracts over the phone, approaching both, new cell phone customers and those who already had a cell phone with another company. People got great deals as an incentive to sign up for a contract, but the company ended up spending too much and six months later MCI had to declare bankruptcy in the middle of the cell phone boom. By that time Matt had already gained enough business experience to set out and start his own company, with more to follow. One of his first businesses served the gas and electricity industry, where he employed 100 people in call centers in the United States and another 400 overseas, in the Philippines. He switched customers from variable rates to fixed rates, thereby helping 1.5 million people in deregulated states to save money.

But Matt did by no means limit himself to only one industry. He founded and owned various other businesses, such as a student loan debt consolidation, which granted loans subsidized by the US government for 98%. This model gave 600 people with two or more loans a chance to extend payments from 10 years to 30 years at a lowered percentage, so the overall amount would come out to almost the same without the necessity to make major payments every month. Always trying to find a profitable business model while at the same time offering a valuable product to his customers, Matt Argall started the Easy-1-Rate program back at a time when long-distance calls still cost a lot of money, with 800 000 subscribers, both business and private customers. Never one to be bound by borders, Matt also expanded into the South American market. He studied the market in the US, took the best product he knew about, had it translated into Portuguese and launched it in Brazil. With 180,000 Brazilians selling into said product, it turned out to be a really successful endeavor.

Matt never rests on his laurels though. He is still out there, watching markets, always on the lookout for new ideas and opportunities. Currently, he is looking into business ideas in the water filtration, greeting card, supplement, and mortgages industries. With his many years of experience in a multitude of industries the next success story sure is just a matter of time.