Matt Theriault - Building Passive Income (After Losing It All)

Foreign.

This is Ryan Daniel Moran, and in case you didn't know, you're listening to Freedom Fast Lane. You know, almost every entrepreneur that I know has this fear that one day everything that they built is going to come crashing down around them. And most of the time, that's a really silly fear. But for my guest today, it actually happened. Today, Matt Therio is going to be sharing how he went from six fig month to $7 an hour. Now, I'm sharing the story with you today because Matt didn't stay at $7 an hour. In fact, he used his lessons that he learned from that major setback and built something that was way bigger than what he was doing before. And it taught Matt the importance of passive income. And so after we talk about Matt's story, he and I are going to be talking about passive income and how Matt built his passive income through real estate. We also talk about something really interesting. We talk about how it really takes less effort and less passive income than most people think to live a life full of freedom. And we'll be talking about that concept and we'll be talking about the strategies that Matt used specifically in real estate in order to achieve that dream. So enjoy today's call with Matt Theriault.

Hey, gang. This is Ryan Daniel Moran, and you're listening to Freedom Fastlane. Today I'm very excited to be joined by Matt Theriault. Matt, thanks for hanging out with us at Freedom Fastlane.

Oh, you bet, Ryan. Thanks for having me.

Matt, you're the author, if you will, of a very successful podcast, your do over, which takes people from basically starting over to incredibly awesome success stories. But. But you have an unbelievable story of being successful and then losing it all and then having to go in a completely different direction. And I'd like you to kick things off by sharing that story with Freedom Fast Lane.

Sure, I'd be happy to. Well, Ryan, when I got out of the Marine Corps, I spent the next 15 years of my life in the music business, pursuing my passion, living my dream. And, you know, I'd make music and I'd market it and sell it, and it just created a wonderful lifestyle. And each year got better than the previous and had an amazing momentum going into my early 30s. And then this thing called the digital download came along and basically wiped me out as well as, you know, probably 50 to 60% of the music industry out there. And I was in a position where I had to learn something brand new. And because I didn't have a plan B, I didn't know what I was going to do. There's only one thing I knew how to do. There's only one thing I was good at. And, you know, that took me to a place where I was bagging groceries while I was trying to figure that part out. Literally bagging groceries, literally for about six months. I was the paper plastic guy, for sure.

But Matt, you were incredibly successful in your first career, right?

Yeah, I mean, I would like to think so. No one probably would ever heard of me. I was very much a niche part of music. We were an underground hip hop label, but we did have major label distribution And I had three employees. And, you know, we sold 20, 30,000 units every time we came out with something. And that doesn't sound like much in the world of music, but when you only have three employees and. And most of all of your employees are the ones that are making the music too, it's a really, really high profit margin. So we didn't have to sell a whole lot to be successful.

But my understanding is you went from six figures to $7 an hour.

An hour. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. I had a very.

Proven system, a proven formula for selling my releases. And we came out with a release every single month. And that formula worked really well for about. For those last two or three years. And when it started to not work as effectively, I just kept on throwing more and more money at it, trying to get that same formula to work and. Same formula to work and where I just, I ran it into the ground to the point where, you know, it was just unrecoverable.

Yeah, it makes sense to me. I've done similar things in my old businesses. If something worked for a few years and when the market changes, you can either follow the market or you can be insistent that you're correct in the market is wrong and throw a lot of money at it. And I've made that mistake myself.

Yeah, it was just, you know, it was my real first. You know, I was young, I was all through my 20s as my only real experience as an entrepreneur. And what I was doing worked right away. And so I was like, okay, if it works, let's just do more and have it work more. And this thing of the Internet wasn't even like, thought of. Like no one knew how it was going to impact the world, and certainly no one knew how it was going to impact and turn the music industry upside down.

So, Matt, what was that like when you went from being successful in your first career to, dare I say, bottom of the barrel what was going on in your head? Were you going through self defeat or was your fire even that much greater?

Self defeat was certainly something that was there.

I felt very sorry for myself. And at age 34, and you're sitting there at the end bagging groceries and you're taking your lunch breaks with 16, 17 year olds, I'm kind of like, wow, now what? Because I didn't finish college, and when I was in the Marine Corps, I didn't really have a skill that was transferable to the civilian world. And so I didn't know how to do anything else. So I didn't know what my choices were. Most people, when they hit that point, they're thinking they have to go back to college. And, you know, I remember there was one time, there was one day, Ryan. It was about, I don't know, I've been there about four or five months and I graduated to the actual checkout clerk. So I got a nice little raise to $9 an hour, whatever it was. And I remember there was a typical. If you were going to draw a picture of a soccer mom, a typical affluent soccer mom came through my line and, you know, just had the little exercise outfit on and was manicured to the tee, and the hair was right, the nails were right, and she had her kids with her and everything was looking perfect for her as far as her life looked, at least from my point of view. And I remember when she pulled out her credit card to pay for the groceries, a little. Her ATM receipt came out, fell out onto the little counter, and I couldn't help but sneak a glance and I saw it. And the balance was $256,000. This was in her checking account. And the reason that number was significant was that was the highest number. That was like my number that I was chasing because that was the highest amount I had ever had in my own checking account when I was in the music business.

You had $256,000 when you were in business?

Yes.

And then you went to $7 an hour. Wow.

Correct. And so just that, that moment was like, how. I don't know if this was on purpose or what, but that was the exact amount that I'd had at my peak in the music business of just fluent me having liquid cash. And I had to. I felt nauseous. I had to excuse myself. I insist. Told my boss, I'm taking a break. You're gonna have to finish up here. You know, I went out to my car and tried to recoup myself and gather myself and was crying And I was like, okay, I'm way better than this. I'm never going to have this again. I'm never going to experience this again unless I actually get up and do something. Because obviously I've been here for four or five months asking friends and family for help and direction and no one's doing it for me. You know, I found some good shoulders to cry on, but at the end of the day, no one was actually going to do what I needed to have happen. And so I had to figure out, you know, on my own what I was going to do to recreate the lifestyle that I had become so accustomed to.

And was that difficult for you? Because as an entrepreneur, you had done it once before. And we tend to think that us as entrepreneurs are natural go getters. We naturally take life by the horns and have that experience. And out of my own curiosity, I'm very interested in why at the peak of your music business you didn't have contacts or other avenues that could have taken you down other directions rather than going back to $7 an hour bagging groceries.

Well, Ryan, at the time when I decided that I had to go a different direction was at a time where there was no business model in the music industry. You know, the year I did this, Sony music had laid off 10,000 people. Universal Music had laid off 10,000 people. And then like three months later, Sony did it all over again, laid off another 10,000 people. It looked like the end of the world was coming as far as music was concerned. And, you know, Napster was thriving. Itunes wasn't even thought of yet. And because we were in an underground form of music, and it didn't matter whether it was underground hip hop like us, or underground dance or underground rock music, that audience, the underground audience, embraced that digital download way before general population did. And, you know, that impacted us small little labels much quicker. And then when we started to see the major labels, you know, running for the hills basically or doing massive cuts, then we're just kind of like, well, gosh, if they. If they can't do it. And, you know, no one. And the Virgin records is going out of business and tower records is going out of business. All the major music stores are going out of business, filing bankruptcy. They're all returning their product in massive quantity, looking for credit. And so it was like a tough time to where, you know, I don't know if I wanted to be in music because the people that I knew in music didn't know what they were going to do with their future. So there Wasn't a whole lot of people to look to for help at that time.

Matt, I'm fascinated by this because I think most entrepreneurs at some point in their careers face this voice in their head that says, what happens if you lose it all? And the proverbial fear is, you know, we're going to end up having to move back home or end up working at Walmart or whatever it is if we lose it all. Even the most successful people that I know have confessed at some point having a voice in their head that is like, if this project doesn't go well, I'm going to lose everything that I have and I'm gonna have to sell the house and the car and move back to Oregon with my mom and work at Walmart forever.

Right?

But I always say that never happens. And then I met Matt Therio, who actually went to Baggin Groceries. But you didn't stay there. You had this moment where you're like, all right, it's time to make some changes.

Yep, yep. I had a few, few incident or a few events within the next few days that really kind of just changed everything for me. And when I went back off that break out from the parking lot and went back in and to check back in and start working again, my manager had pulled me aside and he just kind of asked me what was wrong and what happened. And so I basically just told him the whole story. I just told you right now. And he had said, you know, Matt, if you really want your life back, if you really want to get into that type of money again, you really need to look at income, real estate. And then he kind of shared with me of what he owned. I mean, he'd been a manager there for 30 years at this Ralph's, but he had managed to buy several single family residences that he had had his income property. He had a couple apartment buildings. And he said, this is my retirement and this is how I've been able to do it and I don't need this job, I could quit today. And blah, blah, blah. Just went on and on and on about the security and the freedom and the comfort that he had felt at that time. And he says, if you want to do it, this is. He actually said the words that real estate is the last frontier where the average person has a shot at real wealth. And I was just like, okay, if this is the last frontier. And you know, certainly there's exceptions, you know, but just for the average person, you know, it takes a moderate amount of education and then just taking some action, some Proven action that's worked for people for centuries.

This is of course, before the Internet, which I believe to be a new frontier. And there's always a new frontier. But real estate has always kind of been around as available to even somebody bagging groceries.

Absolutely. And that's what I mean when I say average person. I mean you have your exceptional people that go out and are entrepreneurs and start business and stuff like that. But even the, you know, you know how the failure rate is there, it's so significant.

I would disagree with you. But go on, Matt.

Okay. Well, when you look at. So I went and did some research that night and I looked at, I started just googling real estate, real estate investing, real estate education, how to invest in real estate, stuff like that. And actually stumbled across an aunt that I had in my family that I hadn't talked to for a while. And she just two cities over, she'd been the number one real estate agent for the last 20 years in this city, just two cities over. And so that's where I kind of looked and I made an appointment with her and met with her the next day. And I guess within 48 hours I was on the road to getting my real estate agent license. And after about four years of that, realized that, you know, this is not where the wealth is. I'm sitting on the wrong side of the desk. It's not. As a real estate agent, I should have been chosen the path of being a real estate investor.

You went back to just having a higher paying job then?

Yep, yep, I made good money. I got rookie the year, my first year, and I did better each year after that and. But I was working probably 70 to 80 hours a week. Don't even remember what a weekend was like. And I had a couple clients there at the end of that, that turn or that term of. They gave me, they were great clients. They gave me business over and over and over again. I just, I was working with like three or four people and I started to just kind of realize like when we would show up to our meetings and I'm in a suit and tie and they're in jeans and a T shirt and I'm like, they're just signed. I have all their papers ready for them to sign. They sign the papers and then they take off for the weekend and I'm stuck there with the paperwork and holding their houses open. I'm looking at the final, the closing statements and I'm like, okay, yeah, they're being really generous. They're giving me my full 3% or my full 6%, but they're walking away with 25, 30% profit. And I was like, that's where I need to be. Yeah.

Matt, I want to go into the specific things that you learned in real estate here in a second, but I want to address this point in which you had basically lost everything, you were starting to rebuild everything. And you now have this podcast about starting over, about your do over. I'd like for you to address for a minute the parallels that you've seen a lot of people take that have lost things and then regained it back. What mindsets and what strategies have you seen that are common among people who are resilient enough to earn it all back after they've lost something?

What's common?

Well, I certainly took note of all the mistakes I felt I had made the first time around. And you know the famous insanity quote, you know, you do the same thing over and over, you're going to get the same result. So I decided, okay, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to change these things. And what I've noticed, and taking pages out of successful people's books is one I thought. I never really had a mentor. I never had a role model. So that was kind of where I started. I said, okay, I got to find a role model that's doing what I want to do, that has what I want to have, who's the person that I respect and who I want to be. And then the second part was to be intentional on creating an environment of like minded people, which was another huge, huge thing, because there is not another entrepreneur in my whole family. I was the lone ranger in that respect. They were all civil workers and I come from a lot of policemen and firemen in my family. And so I made sure I got involved in real estate investing communities, people of like mind. And I think that would be applicable to whatever your pursuit would be. And those two things made the biggest probably difference of mine. And then I got around people who were really producing, not people that were just talking. And I got to see what actual work looked like. And then all I had to do is really just mimic that. And that's, that's where I got started. And then the next part was recognizing that you don't have to do it all yourself. Because in the music business, I was a one man band. I did everything. I mean, I was even on, I was producing the music, I was going out and finding the talent. I was designing the album covers, I was setting up the marketing plan, I was interacting with our distributor, I would go out to the stores to make sure the placement was right. I mean, I did everything. And then when I started to get into real estate, I realized that I didn't have to do everything. I could delegate. And so with environment and a role model and learning to delegate and accepting that and embracing that, that's what I noticed that other people that were very successful were doing. So I did the exact same thing and I think I got a fairly similar result.

You know, you started doing this at a time when the Internet was fairly in its infant stages. And today both of those things, that association piece of the equation of being around people who are like minded, you can find them at meetups, you can find them on forums, you can go to YouTube and listen to Tony Robbins or Robert Kiyosaki anytime you want. And that piece is more available to us now than it's ever been. And in the same token, that delegating piece is easier than it's ever been before. But it wasn't available to you at the time. But now we have. You can outsource overseas, you can outsource to people who work from home because we have this thing called the Internet. Now. We have an interview here at the Freedom Fast Lane podcast with Chris Ducker who full time works with people in the Philippines and outsources everything there and helps people connect with with virtual assistants.

One of my full time assistants came from Chris's service.

Oh yeah? Yeah. And that is more available to us now than it's ever been before. Both outsourcing and associating with people. And I've found that you're right about what you said about surrounding yourself with people who have achieved what you wanted to achieve, no matter what that is. Whether it's real estate or in my industry of Internet marketing, I've seen whole businesses be launched and successful. Just the result of people going to conferences and meeting or people going to real estate conventions and doing a deal or whatever it is. That association piece is so important to your do over, you achieving the result that you want.

Indeed.

So Matt, why don't you go into the specific strategies then that took you from that place of really not knowing where you're going to go next or being frustrated working 80 hours a week to the results and the success that you have now.

Sure. You know, there was a big shift in my actual mindset that really launched it when I was making that transition from real estate agent to real estate investor. And you had mentioned just a few minutes ago the name Robert Kiyosaki and I think so many of us have read that book and it is a life changer. It certainly can scramble your brain and make you certifiably unemployable. For sure. You know, but, you know, one of the things that, that Kiyosaki, his book has been criticized for, it was really good on theory, but it kind of lacked on the how to part. And, but that's okay. It was, it was enough of a shift of my mindset that I had to go out and find the how to part. But that big shift was, you know, when I was in the music business and even for a good portion of my time as a real estate agent, not probably the whole portion was I was really focused on making money, working hard, making money, saving that money and reinvesting it to make more money. Just make, make, make money. And where the shift really happened for me is when I from that book and is the fact the first time I ever really heard the phrase passive income is where I stopped focusing on making money and started focusing on making streams of money. And it's. God, it's just that one little word is the difference between the two mindsets. But when you get up and go to work every day with those two different mindsets, your activities and your actions and your intentions are completely different. They're just polar opposites. And I started to do the math and you know, and it might have been in rich dad, poor dad, or the four hour work, or not four hour work week, the cash flow quadrant where he talked about, you know, you define yourselves by months of the day, like how rich you are. You 15 days rich, 20 days rich, 30 days rich. And that was where you just need to get your passive income to exceed your expenses. So if you did, how many days of the month could you survive? And that was just such a simple way of putting it that I was like, okay, all I have to do is make it to 30 days. That's all I gotta do is make it to 30 days. Because the next day I get to start all over again.

Right, right.

So that was a very different way of doing it. I started doing the math and I was like, wow, okay, I could probably do this in two, three, four years. But if I had that other mindset where I'm just make, make, make money, that's going to take me 40 years.

Yeah.

And then it's, you know, and it's like, and what happened if you work 40 years and you don't make it? Yeah, then what?

That's. But then you Got everybody has, right? Yeah. They're going to run out of time.

Then you got to go to the passive income thing anyway because you don't have a ton of time to start all over again. Do it the other way. Yeah. You know, and that's exactly what I set my mind on. I set my intentions on. So I focused on just squishing my expenses down as low as I could, became a very much of a minimalist and then focused on acquiring assets and that came in the form of rental property.

So you did it with rental property. You know, you mentioned the four hour workweek accidentally. It talks about Internet businesses or other side businesses which I know very well. I don't know the real estate side as well. Although I am a bit of a novice investor. I have a handful of income producing properties. So I want to hear your strategy. You became free following a specific strategy and I love how you put it, you just needed to get to 30 days of passive income and then you were home free at that point rather than having to save a million dollars or whatever it was so that you had enough money to outlast your life. Right. So I want to hear about your strategy and I want to know how long it took in order to get to that. That day. 30 point.

Sure. Okay. So once I had the mindset shift, I'll start there because that's where the strategy really kicked in was I had just come off of about a year of flipping short sales because the country was full of them and the bank regulations didn't even know what they were really loose then as far as they handled them. So I was flipping these properties and make a lot of money but I wasn't holding anything. So I still had a job. I was making good money, but I still had a job. Then I started the same leads I was generating. So my actual strategies, I was send out direct mail and I specifically used this yellow letter that has generated all my business since then. That's what I teach today now too. It but I'd send it to absentee owners, people that owned properties but didn't live in the properties. And I send it to pre foreclosures and I would send there. It was very simple letter, yellow piece of paper and red ink. I'd say hi, my name is Matt, my girlfriend, I would like to buy your house. Please call me at blah blah blah blah. Very simple. And that right there. I think direct mail is like the industry standards. You get a 1 or 2% return rate and we got about a 15 to 16% return rate on that yellow letter. And I would just look for, they would call and I would have three basic questions that would kind of flesh out the motivation to see if there's an actual motivation there. And if there was a motivated seller on the other line that was willing to trade some equity for peace of mind, then I'd make an appointment and we'd put a structure in place where it took very little to any money out of my own pocket. And a lot of that was where there was a subject to taking the property, subject to the existing financing, where we left the loan in place and I just took over the payments and gave them a few bucks to get to their next destination or an actual seller financing structure. And I started looking for those specifically and started to build a passive income stream for myself.

So you, you held onto them and then you rented them out?

Yep, yep. And so I did a, I don't know, probably a half a dozen of those in Southern California. And then I had a friend who was doing the same thing and he had a, he had three multi family units in Memphis, Tennessee that he under a contract, but he only had enough money to close on two of them. So he wholesaled that third property to me. I went out and got a private loan from somebody, made them a partner. And when I went to Memphis to go and conduct my due diligence on the property, a whole new world opened up. And this is where my life really changed was where I didn't know they had properties for 40, 50, $60,000 anywhere. You know, I'm in Southern California and our median at the time was probably about 350, the median. And all of a sudden I found these houses that were selling for 50 grand after repair, after you put, after you fixed them up, and they'd rent for 7, 800 bucks. And you do that calculation on the most conservative side of things, you know, you're getting a 15, 16, 17% cash on cash return with no debt on the property.

Right.

And I was just like, wow. So I had a bunch of friends and family and friends of friends and family of family and all the combinations of here in Southern California that had nowhere to put their money. And I had a lot of people that they weren't wealthy people, but people had 40, 50, 60 grand, maybe 100 grand on the sidelines, sitting in a bank account getting 1%. And so I started helping them build their portfolios as well. And that would raise the money for me to continue to build mine.

So in that way you were able to enter in Deals with no money out of your own pocket, but you're still building your passive cash flow.

Exactly.

I want to address something that comes up a lot when I hear people talk about this, and that's that you can't get deals like that anymore. And as I'm sitting here, it's, it's late 2013. My last real estate deal was three months ago. I live currently in Austin, Texas, but my home, where I'm from is Cleveland, Ohio. And I bought my last property in Cleveland, Ohio for $40,000 cash and it rents for 950amonth. So almost the exact same numbers that you talked about when you started finding out about this process. Those deals are still everywhere, all over the country, depending on the market that you're in.

Indeed. I mean, the last 15 properties I picked up were in Cleveland, Ohio. All right, yeah, we did 100.

Stop taking all my deals, Mat.

Cleveland's a great market right now. The city's really, I don't know, it's building up. I don't know what it was before I got there. I just made my first trip there about a month ago.

But you know, we were in, we did 100 of these deals in 2012. We probably doubled that in 2013. And I think we'll probably do it double it again in 2014. And we're in Memphis, we're in St. Louis, Kansas City, Columbus, Cleveland, Cincinnati, and we're going into Indianapolis, we're going to Pittsburgh and Illinois.

Alright, so those types of deals are everywhere and I'm guessing that you specialize then in that level of housing and you rent them for that level that you mentioned. And then you split the cash flow with your company and the people who have invested in them.

No, actually two different ways we do it. We can pull together.

Three or four investors and we create an LLC and we buy a bunch of properties on behalf of the LLC and then I'll manage the LLC for them. So it's a, it's a real passive income for them. I deal with a lot of busy professionals, your doctors, lawyers, small business owners that, that want to invest in real estate. They just don't have the time to do it. So that's one structure where we'll actually do the investing for them. And then we have others that, you know, they might have 50, 60 grand, they want a house. So what we do is we go acquire the property, we fix it up, we put the tenant in place, we coordinate the management and we sell it to them as a cash flowing asset.

Got it.

And then the Profits from those two models is what I use to build my own portfolio.

Your own passive cash flow portfolio you mean?

Correct. So all of my properties are right next to all of my clients properties. We're all in the same city, in the same town. And now we've built up such a volume where we represent such a significant part of our property managers portfolios that we get priority treatment, the performance goes up, the expenses come down. It's like we've really been able to leverage all of these relationships and, and so we're kind of this massive little presence there in these certain markets where it's working really, really well.

And how long did it take you to get to that day? 30 passive cash flow point.

It was about three and a half years. Okay, about three and a half years.

And now I'm curious, man, I love to ask this question to people who have gotten to that point is most people have this dream of getting enough passive cash flow or enough in the bank to where they don't have to work anymore.

And what I found is that when people get there they go, oh crap, what's next? I want to know what came up for you at the three and a half year point when you had enough money where you didn't have to work anymore. I know you're still in the real estate business and now you share your knowledge with other people. What was that experience like where you finally were liberated from the job, from the necessity of working and you had to figure out what was next for you?

Well, I'm human. I still want things, you know.

I still want to travel, I still want toys, I still want to live in a nice neighborhood. And when I got started to hit that point in three and a half years, I definitely pushed down all of my expenses. So you know, I was driving a little beater car, I was living in a small little apartment and.

I didn't go out, I didn't travel, so my expenses were really low. But then once I got there, then I started as my, as I continued to increase my passive income, then my lifestyle followed, so to speak. And so I still, now I live in an awesome neighborhood, in an awesome place, but I still want to live in a more awesome neighborhood. I'm ready to go to Malibu here at the end of 2014 and I'm not a big car guy anymore, so I'm cool with my little Ford Edge, but I love to travel and I've got a two and a half year old so I want him to have all really cool things that I didn't get to have as a kid. And so I just continue to build a passive income. But you're right, when I hit that three and a half year mark, and a lot of people that if you're not there, you're not going to believe this, but I really did feel like, wow, that was easy. That was not that big of a deal. That wasn't that big of a deal. And it was just having that shift in mindset and taking actions correlate to that mindset. And it's actually a very quick journey, relatively speaking. I mean, three and a half years compared to 35 years, the old fashioned way of doing it, you know.

Amen to that, brother. Now, a lot of people will hear something like this. They'll hear my success story, they'll hear your success story, or any of the people that we interview here on Freedom Fast Lane, and they'll say, well, that's great, but I'm not you. You know, this won't work for me. Or a lot of times I get asked the question, hey, does such and such a strategy work? And it comes up of, I can't do real estate or I can't start an Internet business or I can't whatever it is. What do you say to somebody when they say I can't do something? When you sat there three and a half years in and said, that was pretty easy.

Mm.

The old cliche. And it's such a cliche and it's so overused and worn out that it's a shame because it's so true. And I know you've heard it before. If you think you can, if you think you can't, you're right. And if there's someone, there's always, if you keep this in mind, there's always somebody that has achieved what you want to achieve that started out in a worse position than you did.

Yep.

There's. There's always somebody. You can always find someone who had it worse. I mean, you could just, you, you could just look at Oprah Winfrey and never have to look for another example again. You know, she just came from absolute squalor. And now she's one of the richest women in the entire world. And we're talking about just creating, you know, 5,000 bucks a month of passive income. I mean, if Oprah woke up tomorrow and found $5,000 of passive income was all she had, she'd probably kill herself. You know what I mean? So. Or even if she had, you know, 10 times that, she'd probably kill herself. So it's all relative. So it's in the grand scheme of things, doing what I did just, just to get your start is not that big of a deal. It's not difficult. So yes, you can do it. And you know, since then.

You know, I've launched a, an online academy, Ryan, where I show people exactly how to do what I did. And my last, I think last two or three months of episodes, I've just done this wrap up year end review of all the people inside of the academy that got the great success. They've come from all walks of life. So it is duplicatable. And these are people that, you know. One guy, the most he'd ever done is bought his own personal residence and he had a. He inherited a cleaning business from his father. He hated the business and he wanted to go do something else. And he joined the academy and now he's wholesaling. The numbers are sick. If I told you, it wouldn't even make sense. He's an exceptional story. He's making like 40 grand a month wholesaling property.

Great.

And just over and over again. I've got a bunch of examples, but that's an exceptional example. You don't need $40,000 a month to really turn your life around. Right. And so anyone can do it. And you know, if someone else did it, why can't you? And if you got an issue with that, then you probably got to look deeper than the right business to start.

Yeah, I agree with you because I think the evidence is around us for whatever we want to believe are there. So if you, if you want to believe that you can't do something, you can find enough examples of enough reasons to not try. But if you believe that you can do something, you can find enough reasons to support that too. It's just what lifestyle do you want and what actions do you need to take on a consistent basis in order to achieve that result? But Matt, I'm curious, do you think that losing it all and still being okay, do you think that that actually contributed to your ability to go after something much greater?

It definitely gave me.

Yeah. When you're bagging groceries for seven bucks an hour and you're 34 years old, you know, that could be looked at as rock bottom. And I know people have, you know, been homeless and on drugs and stuff. And I would consider that much deeper than what where I was.

We've had some of those people on the show. Yeah.

Have you? Yeah. I mean, I'm not comparing my story to them at all, but you know, They've picked themselves up. So why couldn't I is really how I looked at it. And having come from a place where, you know, it was a six figure a month type income that we only had to split between four people and down to $7 an hour, it was just like, whoa, okay, so I did do it once, I can do it again. But I think no matter where I would have ended up, I probably would. I don't think I had to hit rock bottom and I don't think anyone has to hit rock bottom. I think you just have to be dissatisfied with where you are.

What I found is when I went through my period where I lost everything and had my do over was first I freaked out like you said you did too. There was a lot of self defeat. There was a lot of negative thoughts that happen. But after I was done beating myself up, it was kind of like, I'm still here and I'm still the same person that I was a couple months ago. My bank accounts just smaller. Well, if that's the case, then I'm really infinite and I can achieve anything. It took me a while to figure it out and boil it down in just that sentence. But when I found that I lost it all and I was the same person, all of a sudden I felt free to go after and do whatever, do whatever I wanted because I could go bet big and lose. And I know that I'm still the same person. It doesn't affect who Ryan Daniel Moran is. I'm still me even if such and such a project doesn't work out. And I find that most people who.

Haven'T had that experience are holding onto their success so tightly that they end up sabotaging it because they're strangling it from holding on to it so tightly, afraid of losing it, afraid of having to go bag groceries. You bag groceries and guess what? You achieved a level of success that was way higher than what you previously had when you thought you were on top of.

Yeah, you know, I didn't have that distinction then. I certainly do now. And I can look at it from a much wiser perspective and. But it's just, you know, you mentioned, you know, you could go watch a Tony Robbins video, who I was a big fan of and still am. And he talks about your motivators. What's really going to drive you to success is going to be the pursuit of pleasure is going to be, are you fleeing from the pain? And at that time, bagging groceries was painful to me. And I think that was my biggest Motivator. I just knew that I don't like this. And after three months, four months of crying on people's shoulders and realizing that there will always be a shoulder to cry on, but there's only going to be one person that's actually going to do it and do it for me, and that's going to be me.

I'm reminded of what Jim Rohn says, and Jim Rohn talks about there's many strategies to get a result that you want. If you want to make more money, you can demand a raise, wait for a raise, you can go on strike, you can wait for the government to change the minimum wage laws, all of which may work as strategies. But the one he recommends is becoming more valuable in the marketplace in order to achieve the result that you want. And that strategy tends to work for the most people. Matt, you did it in real estate, so I want to give you the chance to talk about your online academy where you teach that strategy.

Yeah. You know, it's funny that this is the first time we've ever talked and you just segued into that exact distinction in talking about my academy. And if you want to go to the Academy, it's epicproacademy.com but that's not really what I want to touch on what you just said right there, because I think it's really important. I'd heard two things that. One, specifically, I was listening to a podcast, and this literally changed my entire business. As far as a teacher goes, as far as an educator, is that how would your business change if you weren't compensated until your client got their desired result?

And, you know, I started the first year or so of when I was teaching how to invest in real estate. I was very much, well, this is how you do it. You follow step one, follow step two, follow step three. And if you do that, you're going to get the result. And I thought that was. That was a good way to do it. And then I heard this distinction. It's like, okay, so I gave them step one. How can I make sure that they actually complete step one? And then once they complete step one, how can I encourage them and get them to go to step two? And I just, It. It's another slight little shift, but it changed the way that I talk to people. It changed the way that I created my course materials. And that right there is just. I became of a greater value because I had that distinction and because I create became that bigger value, the academy naturally just started to grow and grow and grow. So I Think that's very important, what you just said there. It's really the value that you can create. The book Science of Getting Rich by Wallace D. Wattles, you know, the science of getting rich is to provide 10 times in use value that you ask for in monetary value. And so I've taken that and just embraced that, like, okay, I need to provide more and more and more. I'm asking, you know, if I ask 500 bucks for this year, I gotta give them $5,000 of use value out of this just to start. And that's, that's how I focused and built my business. And that's one of the bigger distinctions of why what I'm doing now is being so much more successful than I was in music. I didn't have those distinctions. I was like, let's make good music put out there and see who buys it.

Yeah.

You know, and now it's just increasing your value, I think is so important. Another thing that's really changed in my business is, gosh, we were sitting here, I'm talking a book show. This is our book recommendation show.

The book with Gary Vaynerchuk's the thank you Economy and his one distinction there that I've taken. I've completely ran with it and has built my business. Both my online business and my real estate business is the more high tech your business gets, the more low tech your customer service has to become. And I didn't really understand that until he went and kept on elaborating on that. And, you know, we've all been where we had to call a customer service place, whether it was for a credit card or your cable company. And you go through that phone tree and it's so annoying and irritating to go through that phone tree. And it's so annoying and irritating now when you have to actually speak to the phone tree. Like you can't even push the numbers anymore. And then you get a response from your email from the company, says, noreplyuchandsuch.com like, well, congratulations, you've done such a great job at removing all of the people from your whole process. But I'm one pissed off customer, you know what I mean? And so I've just taken all those things and put them inside my business. And I think that all of those things have separated me from others. It's given me definitely an unfair advantage because I'm willing to take the extra time and employ people to make sure that people get to talk to people. And we've just created a greater value. So thanks, Ryan, for Segueing into that, because those are some of the things I'm so passionate about inside of my own business and building my business that they've really made a difference.

Yeah, well, since you're having the book show, I'm going to have the Jim Rohn show.

Okay.

Where he says you don't get compensated for the time that you bring to something. We get compensated for the value that we bring to an exchange. It takes time to provide value, but we don't get compensated for the time. We get compensated for the value. So is it possible to provide $100,000 worth of value in an hour? The answer's of course. You know, I've done it with clients before. You've done it in real estate before. It's simply the process of taking things where they're of lesser value to where they're of greater value. You've worked, when you started in real estate, you worked with people who were willing to trade some of their equity for peace of mind. And to them that was a valuable trade for you. You could provide that, and it was easy for you to provide that. And you got value in exchange in the exchange of equity cash, which then you took to someone else who saw an opportunity. And it's just an exchange of value. That's why I get frustrated when people think that there is a finite amount of wealth in the universe or that rich people are greedy or that you have to take advantage of people in order to get ahead. That's not true. You actually have to produce value. And when you do that, you're compensated and the overall pie of value goes up rather than down. That's why I'm passionate about teaching this stuff. And that's why you share stuff through your academy and through your podcasts.

Well said, well said. Absolutely. You know, you can certainly.

You can make money and you can make a lot of money, but for short term by not following that. But if it's a long term business and you plan on doing this for the long term, and even if it's to a point where you want to build an asset, to where you can pass on and sell it, you hit the nail on the head. You have to provide value. And gosh, just with the Internet, there's so much free information out there, so now you've got even a greater competition to increase more value. So I think it's a great exercise in becoming just an awesome entrepreneur. When you look at your, you know, your competition is Google. So what can I, what can I produce? What can I provide? What can I offer that provides a greater, greater value than, you know, what's out there available free so.

Well, Matt, thanks for continuing to spread that message and thanks for hanging out with us today at Freedom Fast Lane.

You bet. It was my pleasure, Ryan, thanks.

I love what Matt and I talked about today where you don't need a million dollars in the bank, you don't need $10 million in the bank. All you need is enough passive income each month to last you 30 days. That seems a lot simpler to most people when you break that down. I'm always amazed at how many different ways there are to earn passive income. My strategy has been slightly different than Matt's, but it's been to earn my money on the Internet with Internet businesses and to invest that money into cash producing real estate and to invest it into long term dividend paying stock. That's my financial strategy. And for other people it's slightly different. You know, I talk about all of this at the blog@freedomfastlane.com and also at our live events which you can find out about@freedomfastlane.com hey, you know, it always helps us spread our message. When you leave us a five star review on itunes and when you share the show with a friend, we get lots of referrals. That's where most people find out about us. And I really appreciate you spreading the word and spreading the message about Freedom Fast Lane. As always, thanks for listening and I'll chat with you soon.