Aloha 👋🏻
Welcome to the On the Waves of Change newsletter. The place where quiet people find their voice.
Today's lines belong to Matěj Kusý, who now does performance marketing for small and medium-sized businesses. From the age of eighteen he cold-called strangers, and he built his own business on sales communication. Out of every hundred calls, he heard "no" ninety-five times. Day after day. And even though it was tough, he talks about it with the smile of someone who knows that without all those thousands of rejections, he wouldn't be where he is today.
How many times can you hear "no"?
Most of us avoid rejection as much as we can. We don't pick up the phone, we don't write, we don't ask the customer. Matěj turned rejection into a craft, and in our conversation he talks openly about how many years it took him to stop being afraid of it and figure out how to do it.
What came up in the conversation (and why it's worth a listen):
The hardest skill in sales
When I ask Matěj what was hardest at the beginning, he answers with a single word: rejection. And right away he puts numbers on it.
"You make 100 calls and 95 times you hear: stop bothering me, I'm not dealing with that, I'm not interested, I'm not going to deal with it now. For me, that's the most demanding skill a salesperson needs, because as people we don't want to be rejected. We want to be accepted."
He adds that even extroverts are afraid of rejection. They're just a little more at ease around people. Matěj rejects the myth that a salesperson has to be an extrovert - the best salespeople he has met were often introverts who know how to listen to the customer.
Seven years of searching, and a brother who needed two
According to him, the call scripts he was handed when he started were all bad. They taught you to push, repeat the benefits and ignore what was happening on the other end of the line. He had to find his own way to people.
"Out of the 10 years I actively made calls, I spent about 6 or 7 doing it wrong, learning and searching for the way. Only after some 7 years did I find a way to do it that got results and that both I and the people on the other end enjoyed."
He then taught his brother the same thing in two years. Not because his brother was more talented, but because he didn't have to wander around - he got a map. At first he copied the words, then he found his own style.
"Mr Kusý, are you cheeky or just stupid?"
Then came a call Matěj hasn't forgotten to this day. A businessman he had called three weeks in a row, following the script, let him go through every step. And in the third call, he told him in a calm voice:
"Mr Kusý, how dare you contact me and try to sell me something when you know absolutely nothing about me? Are you cheeky or just stupid?"
He didn't shout, he didn't threaten. Matěj was used to that. It was the calm that hit him hardest - and made him take a look at what he was actually doing and how.
A line no train will cross
Matěj says he has to believe in the product. As soon as he started digging into the products and saw in the contracts when they didn't work, his results dropped. And when I tell him about my first summer job in a call centre, where others were switching seniors to disadvantageous plans and I refused to do it, he answers without hesitation:
"For me, that's a no-go. No train crosses that line. I'd rather not run a business at all."
He knows that people who "walk over dead bodies" tend to be successful. But you only get one reputation. It matters to know where your moral compass stands in business.
Where is your line that no train will cross?
"You have to destroy him." Why would I hurt him?
Matěj's line was tested hardest in his own company. Together with colleagues he started his first business, things went well, they were hiring, and Matěj was putting financial reserves aside. And then came the period he describes as the most devastating of his life. His mum died.
"A total blackout. Everything stops making sense. Suddenly. You don't know what to look forward to. You don't know how to process it."
So he asked his business partner to hold the company together for a month or two. Fourteen days later, the partner vanished. For two years. Matěj went back to work and says today that the work held him up at that moment. Everyone around him knew exactly what he should do. Acquaintances, family and friends all told him: "Take it to court. Take everything from him."
"And I said: why would I do that to him? Why would I hurt that person, when I don't have the energy for it, I don't want to have the energy for it, and I'd be hurting someone on purpose?"
The feeling of having "got him" would, in his words, have lasted maybe a week. He needed his energy elsewhere - in a new company with his brother and a colleague, where he was starting from scratch all over again.
Is AI leaving me behind?
Today Matěj is a dad of two young children and in the company he has kept mainly the sales side. When his brother shows him an automation he built in an hour, he gets hit by a feeling probably all of us know:
"A sense of failure. Textbook impostor syndrome. So I'm not a good marketer anymore, I can't keep up. The guys are running ahead of me. AI is running ahead of me."
In the end he gave up on chasing everything new. He can't click it together as fast as his brother, but he knows where his strength is and how to put things together strategically - and that has stayed with him. He looks at AI calmly. He believes it will become an entity that humanity will learn to live with:
"People will have to learn to live with someone right here, next to us, who is smarter, faster and many times more capable than we are."
And yet he remains an optimist. "I always believe in people, whatever the times," he says.
And finally, the message he sends out
Keep going back to the basics. Matěj, who has years of experience in sales and marketing, still buys courses for complete beginners - and every time he finds something new in them.
"When you have good foundations, you can build any complex structure on them. Even with AI, why not."
What else will you hear in the conversation?
- Why don't successful people show their fuck-ups?
- What single question does Matěj use to test every marketer?
- What is it like to be a dad of two young children, a husband and an entrepreneur chasing his dreams?
- What is Matěj learning from his five-year-old son, who can't stop talking about a white butterfly for half an hour?
- What is the worst advice he has ever been given?
Happy reading, happy listening - until next time. 👋🏻
Take good care.
Matěj and Viki are waving at you.