Mrs. Godfrey was running the careers stand in the school hall when sixteen-year-old Matthew Fiddes reached the front of her queue and told her he wanted to teach taekwondo for a living. "Don't be ridiculous, Matthew," she said. Nobody makes money doing that. Go and be a PE teacher. He left school with no qualifications. Three years later he drove back to the same school in a brand-new Ferrari 355 convertible, asked to see her, and took her for a ride. He was making a million and a half a year from taekwondo. She cried, hugged him, and told him she was glad he hadn't listened, because her words could have ended his career before it started. That's part two of our conversation with Matt Fiddes, founder of the largest martial arts franchise in the world (2,106 locations at last count) and, for ten years, Michael Jackson's bodyguard and friend. Part one was the Michael years. This one is how a bullied, skinny kid who left school with nothing became someone Michael wanted to meet in the first place. George runs this one solo; Paul was on his way to see Matt in Cyprus. Find Matt at https://mattfiddes.com or message him on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/officialmattfiddes (he says every DM reaches him). Matt's franchising content for Rethink listeners: https://skool.com/rethink It starts with Anthony, the much bigger boy who beat Matt up in the playground from age five to seven. Thirty-four years later, a TV show tracked Anthony down and put them face to face on live television in front of twenty million people. Matt shook his hand and thanked him. Anthony is now the anti-bullying ambassador for Matt's entire company. The escape route was an accident. Matt tried jiu-jitsu first and hated it (long legs, sweaty grappling, no thank you), then moved to the taekwondo class next door and found he could already do the splits. For the first time in his life, an adult told him he was good at something. At thirteen, stuck in a maths lesson working out how many ways you could make fifty pence for a red phone box, he turned to the back of his exercise book and wrote down what he actually wanted: to be the best-known martial arts instructor in the world, a millionaire by twenty, and a Ferrari 355. His mother kept that book. By nineteen, every line on it had come true. The route there was ugly. His family (a lawyer mother who was one of fourteen university-educated siblings, an engineer father) cut him out for a couple of years for choosing martial arts over university. He bounced between £30-a-week bedsits, lifeguarded for under three pounds an hour, and at seventeen spent his last £350 flying to a martial arts business conference in America. The school owners there took one look at the English teenager who'd bet everything on being in that room and took him under their wing. Within six months he had seven hundred members at a single location. Two years later he was their biggest client. Then the tabloids found him, and one of the people watching was Uri Geller. Uri introduced him to Michael Jackson, and Michael took one look at Matt's six schools and told him to stop thinking so damn small. Franchise it. When Matt said nobody in martial arts had done that, Michael said that was the point: be a pioneer, not a follower. He wrote the plan on a napkin and passed Matt to his own licensing lawyer. They sold four hundred franchises in a year. At twenty-one, Matt retired on the income from the property he'd been buying at five to ten houses a month. Within six months he was on antidepressants and sleeping pills, and back at work. The one Michael story in this episode is really a story about Matt. In 1999, Michael rang to say he was in England and wanted to come to Matt's Black Belt Extravaganza, held in an 800-seat theatre in Barnstaple, a farming town of twenty thousand people. Matt picked him up from a McDonald's on the edge of town. That night Michael walked out under the Billie Jean spotlight, did three songs for a room full of stunned martial arts families, and was gone minutes later, with strict instructions that Matt was never to confirm a thing. His life, he told Matt, was the greatest mystery on earth. Keep it that way. The next morning a breakfast TV crew was broadcasting live from outside Matt's house. It made the ten o'clock news. The papers ran with it for months, and one put "fraud" on its front page, insisting it had been Matt in costume. (If you heard part one, you'll appreciate the irony.) Michael went silent for a month and let the mystery do the work. At nineteen, Matt hated every minute of it. It's also the best lesson in manufactured attention you'll hear this year. From there it gets practical. Every one of Matt's classes carries fifteen minutes of the life skills school never taught him (money, fire safety, online safety, goal setting), and no child grades for their next belt without a form signed by their schoolteacher and their parents. His own taekwondo association threw him out for teaching in English instead of Korean and playing music in lessons; two years later they were copying him. He'll tell you he's done over half a billion in sales, then tell you why that number means almost nothing (turnover is vanity, profit is sanity). He ends his talks by telling the room he has nothing to sell, and he still outsells the speakers with the pitch stacks. The sharpest stretch is on reputation in the age of AI search. When someone looks you up now, an AI hands them a one-page brief built from whatever's out there, and one false article can end up as the headline. Matt's answer is the one he's used for thirty years: bury it under real social proof, starting with video testimonials instead of the written ones nobody believes anymore. He also makes his case that cash is disappearing for reasons that have little to do with convenience, and explains how a tax investigation showed him exactly how much your card history gives away. Then he tells the part he says makes every audience lean forward, because almost nobody else on a stage will. In 2009, Michael died. His first marriage ended. A family member set up a rival business behind his back and took his staff, his head of curriculum and his father with it. And his mother, his rock, was given six months to live. He describes walking the corridors of an empty mansion at two in the morning with a Ferrari on the drive, seeing his three kids every two weeks, and he's frank about how far down those years took him. They're also the years he met his wife. Engaged in two weeks, married in three months. Fifteen years later, they've spent three nights apart. It closes on what he values now, and it isn't what you'd expect from someone with his balance sheet. He thinks the new millionaire is ten million, and says nothing in his life changed between ten million and a hundred million except how many people he could help. The supercars are sold, the F40 included. His advice to anyone starting out: build a health plan first, work out what you actually want to own, then build the vehicle to pay for it. Train your legs. And two weeks before recording, he turned down a week with Richard Branson on Necker Island because his wife and kids weren't invited. He's writing the book, too, with Paul's help. Not the Michael tell-all he's been offered half a million pounds for and turned down, but his own story, timed for his company's thirtieth anniversary next year. At thirteen, Matt wrote "Ferrari" in the back of a maths book. At forty-seven, he sold his. This episode is everything in between. This episode includes frank discussion of depression and suicide. If you're struggling, call or text 988 in the US (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline), or call Samaritans free on 116 123 in the UK and Ireland. Listen & subscribe: Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0i1GYauyKzywre3YbAlPOT Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-rethink-podcast/id1896340851 YouTube (full video): https://www.youtube.com/@RethinkAndGrowRich Get the books on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B001K7ZD68/allbooks Download the free Rethink Habits planner: https://rethinkhabits.com
