Matthew B. Murphy III is the Co-Founder and President of Emboss Partners, LC – a financial consulting firm based out of Indianapolis, Indiana. After graduating from the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University, he spent several decades working for a number of prominent companies including Mays Chemical Co., Inc., BWI, LLC, and Huntington National Bank. His extensive professional experience eventually led him to establish Emboss Partners, LLC in 2009. The company helps entrepreneurs and not-for-profit organizations secure the necessary financial resources to grow their bottom line. Through strategic, financial, and organizational planning, Matt and his team of industry leading professionals assist in assessing capital needs and provide prudent financial advice to businesses.
What do you love most about the industry you are in?
What I love about what I do is how fulfilling and rewarding it is to help clients uncover their “pain points” and solve their problems. I enjoy collaborating and developing strategic solutions to ensure an optimal outcome. I love going to work each day to help clients develop and finance their growth strategies.
What keeps you motivated?
What keeps me motivated is my sense of knowing where I fit into the world order of solving problems for businesses through my extensive and varied experiences. Secondly, the positive impact that my success continues to have on my professional and personal fulfillment, on my family, and on the community that I operate within, which in turn motivates me to want to reach more people and more businesses.
How do you motivate others?
I think I have a unique talent for being able to inspire people to reach deeper, to look within, and to bring forward the best of themselves. Whether they are employees, clients, influencers, or other colleagues, I really have been effective, at least in some small way in bringing some inspiration to individuals as we work together, and that is how I have been able to successfully motivate and encourage others.
How has your company grown from its early days to now?
My company has grown through the years by the sheer numbers of clients, businesses, and entrepreneurs I have served and how we have brought impactful solutions to aid them in their growth. The more clients we have helped, the more we have grown, and that breeds opportunity for even further growth for our firm.
Who has been a role model to you and why?
I have had several, starting with my parents in my early years. They were extremely helpful as role models to inspire me to dream big and seize opportunities.
I have had several others professionally along the way, but none more impactful than a gentleman by the name of William G. “Bill” Mays. He was the founder and CEO of the company that I worked the longest tenure of my career, Mays Chemical Company, Inc. He was a phenomenal leader, an inspirational visionary, a highly-respected titan of the industry, and a civic and community giant. He was one of the brightest and most personable people I have ever known. He always saw something in me that gave me even greater inspiration and motivation to do what I enjoy and to desire to experience even more success with the skills and strengths that I bring to the table.
How do you maintain a solid work life balance?
In the early stages of my career, I would say that was a huge challenge for me. It almost became a self-imposed rule of the road for me to always work hard, work long, and work often, which sometimes did get in the way of being able to maintain a positive work/life balance. But I think in the latter years of my career, I’ve been able to intentionally put the emphasis on maintaining balance and as a result, I’ve been able to achieve it more readily, at least more so than before, by setting out a significant portion of my week in making sure that I focus on the other things that are also important to me, with family being at the very top of the list. I believe that has served me well in getting the balance that I need and desire.
What traits do you possess that makes a successful leader?
I think empathy is one of the biggest parts of being a successful leader and I’ve been blessed with this important attribute. I believe I have the ability to inspire people and to bring out the best in them. I focus on teamwork and cross functional collaboration when working with others. And equally important, I’m highly goal oriented.
What suggestions do you have for someone starting in your industry?
Being a consultant sometimes has a different meaning to people depending upon who is measuring the significance of that type of work. My recommendation to anyone looking to become a consultant is to really lean into the culmination of one’s experiences, both the good and bad, the successes and failures, and not to be afraid of sharing both in a way that helps others see that each of these can be considered as two different sides of the same coin. The desire to be a successful consultant starts with understanding that it requires being somewhat vulnerable about one’s own failures and understanding how together these have shaped your professional attributes. Additionally, and not in a boastful way, but to be genuinely proud of your successes enough to share them as well so people can understand that success, even with the added experience of failure, is attainable. The foundation for this is the need for a strong desire to be viewed and validated as a trusted advisor. The true definition of a successful consultant is one who has been given a tremendous amount of trust by his or her clients and who is compelled to deliver on that level of earned trust.
Where do you see you and your company in 5 years?
In five years, I would like to think that Emboss Partners will have grown to have more of a nationwide reach of business clients who are participating in the vibrant global economy and are utilizing the expertise of a highly experienced and trusted advisor to assist them with navigating the challenges of their growth opportunities. By that time, I would like to more than triple our size and to have landed some pretty notable clients who we can help to achieve even bigger successes in their own right.