Great leaders start with a clear vision and then find a way to inspire and motivate their people to turn that vision into reality. This requires an understanding of what your team needs in order to work at their best, the ability to communicate with others clearly and effectively, and the intelligence to aim high, remain flexible, and create the right processes for your business.
Trent Richards, CEO of Metrix Coin Ltd, also strives to live by the same philosophy and enjoys finding the best people for the job at hand and acting as the most robust support for them to achieve growth. He believes that by simply defining the end zone for each project undertaken, collective success can be achieved alongside establishing a trusted leadership role that ensures that the end goal does not get out of reach.
Trent has worn several professional hats in his professional journey, spread across a number of verticals that ultimately led him to currently leading a digital currency company. Exeleon exhibits the same through this exclusive feature.
The Will to Be a Leader
Trent Richards can distinctly remember one school morning where he saw a man pushing a cart and dropping off a local newspaper to each household. His curious mind started to wonder how long it would take for the man to deliver the newspapers and back to the refill stack to pick up the new ones. He arrived at the most common deduction that it would take long for the man to walk to the refill stack, deliver again, and then return to his delivery run. Soon, he started seeing the same man regularly on the way to school and back home delivering the papers.
That observation ignited a spark in Trent’s mind to do the same job, but only had the papers delivered to his home. Perceiving the situation, he then recruited five of his friends to provide 20% of the total supply with the same push bikes on the way to school. He recalls, “We met at my house at 7.30 am, and each added their stack to their custom bikes, and all arrived at school before 8.45 am with the entire delivery round completed. They each received 10% of the total payment for the delivery round.” These short rounds of clever work generated a lot of good, early income for Trent.
As a few years went by, Trent understood that he did not like the school and only wanted to participate in it as required by the law. He was more inclined towards doing business. “I could see that school taught people how to get a job and how to work for 40 years and survive their retirement years financially if they were lucky. I wanted to learn from business leaders who created the jobs, not working the jobs,” elaborates Trent.
Hence, when Trent Richards was 17 years old, he started his business in the holiday industry, filling up empty hotel rooms with people for a discounted holiday. And before he could understand any better, the business transitioned into a full-fledged marketing company as he surveyed his customers whilst they relaxed on holiday.
Subsequently, he only saw continuous growth in his entrepreneurial adventures, following his stint with the holiday industry. Trent turned to real estate, wherein he established a company selling investment property, followed by setting a Mortgage Broking Business, Financial Planning Business, Accountancy, Insurance Agency, Property Development, Land Acquisition Company, and Call Centers. The names on the list kept growing with a few ‘fun’ companies, including Nite Club, V8 Supercar Racing Team, Helicopter Aviation, and much more.
While this was all going well, years later, one of Trent’s investments started to fall apart. The situation and Trent’s will of seeing this investment through led him to become the CEO of Metrix Coin.
Leading a Digital Currency Firm
Over the few years of Metrix Coin’s operations, the team at the business started to fall apart, affecting the overall sustainability of the project. For Trent, the situation demanded either of two things; join the team as a volunteer to turn it around or let the investment go in vain.
To Trent, the first option seemed a better choice. “I decided to reach out to the team, who I knew very well over the years with many deals done between us. I came on board initially as a Business Development Manager and very soon after took the reins as the CEO,” details Trent. “I believe that since I have been the CEO, we have seen a significant turnaround in the project. We have now listed on multiple Centralized Exchanges as well as created a wrapped version of MRX allowing us to list on many Decentralized Exchanges as well.”
For Trent and Metrix Coin to grow much, he has had to learn a lot about this continuously expanding and evolving space. While his earlier entrepreneurship ventures had 600+ staff members employed in over five countries, his present team comprises community members around the globe. None of these people are paid for what they do. For Trent, this factor alone changes all the existing corporate ways of thinking and working. “The learning is simply ongoing!”
Trent also has quite a different style for leading the company from the front. He says, “Most CEOs meet on a monthly or quarterly timeline to plan the future Road Map and monitor their team’s performance. I am personally the exact opposite to this and do not believe in simply sitting on a board to make conversation.” Hence, he proactively extends his skills to take on other projects as well. His interest extends to cash flow management, business development, team development, inter-project communications, partnerships, and much more.
Extending on the operational front, Trent believes that the real-life cases of his projects separate one from the other. And in the digital currency world, partnerships play an essential role in the space, which at the moment has worked splendidly for his business. For instance, the collaboration with Coins Paid allowed the firm to accept MRX, BTC, and ETH from external sources. The firm also removed the Paypal integration to strengthen the case for cryptocurrency further.
A Guide to Traverse the Digital Currency Landscape
Being in the industry for over two years, Trent warns aspiring and emerging business leaders to stay vigilant against scammers. The current space occupies a chunk of people trying to scam other people. And businesses in this realm spend a lot of energy and resources on these scammers across all the platforms. The newcomers must be wary of such nuisances while conducting business operations in the space.
A Bright Future
Trent has had a remarkable journey of the last two years, committing thousands of hours to his business, to his project. He is immensely proud of the current working team environment observing the enormous amounts of greatness the firm has achieved so far.
And for the future, Trent wants to grow the ecosystem of the firm, including Wage Street Gaming, MetriVerse NFT platform, Metrix Name Service, Metrix Alarm Clock, Web3 Development, and the in-progress Metrix Dollar DAO DeFi platform, to grow, even more, it has in the past couple of years.
All in all, Trent has lined up quite some things for the company and perceives the future to be bright.
