Gold Coast, Australia
Hi, I'm Matt.
I run Gallantway, a strategy and performance marketing business for founders and high-growth companies. I'm also building Radical Good — for people who want to keep doing what they love for longer.
I live on the Gold Coast, Australia. Surfing, golfing, and slowly building a life between two countries 🇦🇺 🇪🇸
What I write about
Strategy, marketing, lessons, mistakes and my personal experiences
The creative side of building - How I'm fufilling my creative desires
How to use business as a vehicle for family wealth and the long game
How I think about purpose, health, longevity, and a life worth building toward.
Hey, I'm Matt
I've been running Gallantway for nearly 10 years - a performance marketing and strategy advisory business that helps brands and founders implement customer acquisition strategies online. I'm also currently building Australia's first lifestyle longevity brand, Radical Good — for people who want to keep doing what they love for longer.
I learned the hard way that a business consuming everything isn't success. It's just a different kind of problem. Now I build with longevity as a design principle — for the businesses I work on and for myself.
September 18, Health & Purpose
I think we should close the hospitals.
Every dollar spent on preventing disease in Australia returns $14. Yet we spend 2.3% of our health budget on prevention.
Now before you laugh, I have it on excellent authority from my partner Maria, who is a Registered Nurse here on the Gold Coast, that the system is genuinely excellent if you've got a problem.
You need a new knee? Magnificent. A stent? World class. A bypass, a hip replacement, a course of chemotherapy administered with extraordinary skill and care? Australia is very, very good at all of it.
The problem is what happens before any of that.
Almost half of all Australians live with at least one chronic condition. Chronic disease accounts for 89% of deaths in this country. In 2022-23, Australia spent $82 billion treating chronic diseases. Over a third of that burden is attributable to modifiable risk factors, diet, physical inactivity, tobacco, alcohol. Things, in other words, that may not have needed to happen.
We have had these numbers for decades. They have been published in reports, presented at conferences, cited in submissions to government inquiries, and delivered in PowerPoint slides to rooms full of people who nodded seriously, went to lunch, and ate a chicken schnitzel with chips.
Our response has been to continue spending 97.7% of our health budget on the expensive end of a problem that could have been addressed at the cheap end.
It is a bit like a restaurant that has perfected the art of treating food poisoning and remains serenely unbothered by what's happening in the kitchen.
It makes sense how we got here. It is a system designed around the wrong incentive. Treatment has a billing code. Prevention does not. The hospital gets funded when someone arrives sick. Nobody gets funded for the ten years of daily decisions that kept them out of it.
The result is a health system genuinely excellent at fixing things once they break, and structurally indifferent to stopping them breaking in the first place. It's kind of like we have built the world's most sophisticated and expensive ambulance fleet and parked it at the bottom of a cliff that we are not particularly interested in fencing.
The maths is not complicated. Every dollar spent on prevention returns $14. The correct answer, taken to its logical conclusion, is to close the hospitals entirely and redirect the $82 billion upstream.
Closing the hospitals is obviously insane.
But so is investing 2.3% in prevention.
The kitchen needs attention. Maria can confirm.
September 18, Health & Purpose
Every dollar spent on preventing disease in Australia returns $14. Yet we spend 2.3% of our health budget on prevention.
Read essaySeptember 11, Building
Walking into a Chemist Warehouse is like walking into a JB Hi-Fi that decided to pivot to vitamins. Impressive in scale. Everything you could possibly need. And about as personal the self-checkout at Coles.
Read essayAugust 28, 2026, Building
Nearly every morning when I lived in Bondi I would drag myself to the beach for swim training with the Bondi Surf Life Saving Club. Running, laps, paddling, and the immediate self-doubt that arrived the moment my feet hit the water before 6am in winter. I always told myself I just needed to get through the warmup. I'm pretty sure it was always cold.
Read essayAugust 20, 2026 Building
Most neighbourhood disputes involve fences, noise, or parking. Mine involved two poodles, a storm drain, and a woman with a surprisingly confident position on composting.
Read essayAugust 17, 2026 Building
I spent thousands of dollars learning the wrong answer. Then I changed the question. It turns out I needed a sidestep, not a sedgehammer.
Read essayAugust 9, 2026 Health & Purpose
Most people treat their health the way they treat their car. Ignore it completely until something makes a noise it shouldn't.
Read essayJuly 23, 2026 Building
Two weeks ago I was driving to a surf break in Spain when a friend asked me who Radical Good was actually for.
Read essayJuly 18, 2026 Creating
I'm pretty sure to have found the one thing Spain does better than everyone else, and it isn't the football, seafood, weather, or their heroic refusal to eat dinner before 10pm. It's the beer glass. Specifically, the small one.
Read essayJune 22, 2026 Compounding & Health
My father passing away changed how I think about wealth and time.Not in a philosophical way. In a practical, sit-down-and-recalculate way.
Read essayJune 2, 2026 Compounding & Health
I used to run Gallantway like a CEO and my personal finances like a student. I could tell you weekly profitability down to two decimal places. I had no idea what our net worth was. This is how Maria and I fixed that.
Read essayMay 12, 2026 Building
I nearly shut down my agency completely. Not because it was failing. Because it was working - and I was miserable.
Read essayThoughts on building, creating, compounding, and living — from someone trying to do all four at once.