Pick the Hassle That Pays the Most with Matt Theriault (CFFL 0010)
Pick the Hassle That Pays the Most with Matt Theriault
Jack Butala: Matt Theriault is the guy behind both the Your Do Over and Epic Real Estate Investing podcasts on iTunes. He’s a fifth generation California native, and Desert Storm veteran. After his tour of duty, he resumed his pursuit of a career in music, which ultimately added up to 15 successful years, until the bottom fell out of that industry. I remember Napster. After a year or so of soul-searching, real-estate seemed to present the greatest possibility of doing so, through self-education, consistent and persistent action, he’s been able to recreate the former life he once enjoyed through music and more, like teaching multiple streams of income, cash flow, and real-estate investing. Welcome Matt.
Matt Theriault: Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.
Jack Butala: I got a chance to listen to your podcast, I don’t know, a couple days ago, because I knew we were gonna have you on the show. Congratulations man, nice work.
Matt Theriault: Well thank you, Steven.
Jack Butala: So you’re from Los Angeles, right?
Matt Theriault: I am.
Jack Butala: What’s the weather like, man?
Matt Theriault: It’s been 88 degrees for eight straight months.
Jack Butala: (laughs) That’s great.
Matt Theriault: I get to talk to a lot of people just like you do, and they’re form all over the country, and they complain about the cold and the rain and the snow, and I was lie, “Please, just one day of snow.” I just want one day of snow. At least. They can’t believe that I get bored and tired of 88 degree sunshine, and it’s possible. It is. If you have too much of anything you want some change.
Jack Butala: Right.
Matt Theriault: Especially if one of those 88 degree days is on Christmas, and that’s no fun either.
Jack Butala: We’ve had very rainy week here, two weeks, and we have all been celebrating, here in Scottsdale.
Matt Theriault: Yeah, You’re in the middle of a desert and you get more rain than we do. I don’t understand.
Jack Butala: (laughs) So tell us who you are in the real-estate industry? Do you flip houses? Or what’s your niche?
Matt Theriault: I do a few things. Personally, I am an investor myself. I’m a cash flow investor. It was all inspired, you know, beck in 2000, 2001, by the book “Rich Dad, Poor Dad”, like so many of us entrepreneurs were. Really, took an interest into crating passive income and multiple streams income, and in the real-estate world we call it cash flow. So I invested in a rel-estate investing education, and just started buying properties and holding them for rent. After three or four years of that, I found myself, per the definition inside of “Rich dad, Poor Dad” I had escaped the rat race. I got my passive income to exceed my monthly expenses. When people around you, your friends, you network, your family, they’re kind of wondering like, don’t you ever go to work anymore?
Jack Butala: (laughs)
Matt Theriault: Like yeah, sometimes. So that inspired a lot of coffee meetings, and lunches, and dinners, I just want to pick your brain, how did you do it? I want to do the same thing. So just teaching, I guess, kind of became a natural next step for me, and I started with a podcast and an online platform called the Epic Pearl Academy. Then it turned into, after I got done coaching people, they kind of said well, that’s a lot of work. I never said it was going to be easy.
Jack Butala: (laughs)
Matt Theriault: I just said it was simple, and I did it. I’ll show you how I did it. That, I guess, gave birth to a lot of conversations, can you just do it for me.
Jack Butala: Mm-hmm (affirmative)
Matt Theriault: So that started the third head of our business, being a turn-key real-estate investing operation, where we go out and we build cash flow portfolios for busy professional. So I’ve got my own investing, I teach how to do it, and I do it for those people that are just too busy, or just don’t have the desire to do it themselves.
Jack Butala: Well you path is really similar to the one that Jill and I went down. Were developing a product, I think we haven’t really formally named it yet, Jill, but I think it’s called Turn-Key Investment, Real-Estate Investment Company, Right?
Jill DeWit: Mm-hmm (affirmative)
Jack Butala: Where we do everything. You know, we … Everything from getting you set up with a phone number, you know, a website-
Jill DeWit: Someone to answer the phone.
Jack Butala: Yeah.
Jill DeWit: Data, all that stuff.
Matt Theriault: Sweet.
Jack Butala: Yeah, so we’re due to release that in January of next year.
Matt Theriault: Awesome. Congratulations.
Jack Butala: So a lot of people try to do what you do. What makes you successful at it, or why are you different?
Matt Theriault: You know, I coach a lot of people, I’ll say a good 20 percent, 30 percent just really give up before they ever get out of the gates. I think the, I just went in with proper expectations, understanding it was going to be difficult, and also understanding though, if I were to persevere, that the rewards would be worth all the effort. I also constantly aware of the alternative, because I was in the music business for 15 years and then you know, when the digital download came along and turned that business upside-down, I had to reinvent myself, so to speak. When I went out to go and look for a job, you know, six months of job searching, all different types of stuff. Life insurance, car salesman, admin work, I was like, please just give me anything. I looked at franchises, I looked at MLMs, I tried everything, and I didn’t like nay of it. Once I was introduced to real-estate, I was like, okay, this has to work because I can’t go back to any of that other stuff I just tried.
Jack Butala: Yeah.
Matt Theriault: So I think that’s my driving passion, is just to, like I’m running away from ever bagging groceries again, so to speak.
Jack Butala: (chuckles)
Jill DeWit: (chuckles)
Matt Theriault: I did that at age 34. That was a humbling experience. So I’ve just been, took a grasp of learning, and just doing what I was actually taught, you know. So I’ve been such a fan of personal development material and books and stuff like that for so long. I look back on my life like, I would to a seminar, read a book, I’d feel so excited and supercharged about life, and realize that I didn’t implement anything I learned. I just felt good. I guess when you hit 35, 36 years old, you start to get, gain a little bit of wisdom, and I looked back like, wow, that sure made me feel good, but what difference did it really make in my life? So I made a commitment. If I have to learn something new, I’m actually going to do what they tell me to do this time. If I don’t, I know what’s waiting for me. It’s paper or plastic.
Jack Butala: (chuckles)
Jill DeWit: (chuckles)
Matt Theriault: That’s what kept me motivated. It’s just like anything, it’s a skill, and it’s just like a skill as simple as tying your shoe. There was a time where you just could not make that bow happen.
Jack Butala: Yeah
Matt Theriault: Now you’re at a place where most people, or at a place that you know, they can be chewing gum, have one ear one the phone running halfway out the door and still tie their shoe without even thinking about it.
Jill DeWit: Mm-hmm (affirmative)
Matt Theriault: You do something enough times, with enough repetition, it becomes just like that, and that’s how real-estate has become for me. So it’s not even a challenge for anymore
Jill DeWit: Mm-hmm (affirmative)
Matt Theriault: So I guess that’s a long answer to your question, why I’m different.
Jack Butala: No it’s great. You know what makes me feel great is cash flow. I mean, it is truly the greatest high there ever was.
Matt Theriault: Absolutely.
Jack Butala: You wake up in the morning and it’s like man, I hit the ground running when I wake up in the morning, because it’s just you know … I call it getting high. I get high in the morning.
Jill DeWit: Mm-hmm (affirmative)
Matt Theriault: Mm-hmm (affirmative)
Jack Butala: Don’t take that out of context.
Matt Theriault: I wouldn’t judge you if it was in a different context.
Jill DeWit: (laughs)
Jack Butala: (chuckles)
Jill DeWit: It is freeing, and I like what you said too, when you get to that level where your income, your passive income, out-cedes what you need every month. Gosh, don’t you sleep well at night, and you can really get creative now, and maybe go some different directions.
Matt Theriault: Indeed. You know, when I was in the music business, it wasn’t really a residual income like that because records at that time in the music industry, the shelf life was getting shorter and shorter on new records because new records were coming out so fast. You had to get that big spike and that big, as much money as you could in that first month or two. So I always had a decent size bank account. I always had a really healthy bank account, but that did not give me the peace of mind that the smaller bank account with the monthly cash flow every month does. So I sleep a lot better and I wouldn’t really categorize myself, or categorize me as rich by looking at my bank account, but if they saw what came in each month that I didn’t have to work for, then they, you know. Once you have a taste if both, I prefer the cash flow.
Jack Butala: Yeah, you know, I have an accounting background and I don’t know any other investment vehicle at all, that provide both the income statement, and the balance sheet peace to what you’re saying. So you’ve always got that equity you can fall back on too.
Matt Theriault: Right.
Jack Butala: Like Jill says, how do you put it, Jill? Hey, if something goes wrong, we’ll just sell a bunch of these things. So it provides both, and people … When I explain to certain people that we own a bunch of real-estate and a cash flows, they either really love that, or they just look at me cross-eyes, as if to say why would you want that hassle. You know? So people either get real-estate or they don’t. I think it’s great that, you know-
Matt Theriault: I love that question. I just got an email, or I a guy signed up for my coaching program and then he had his initial call with me, and then the next day he asked for his money back, because he said, you know what, that’s just gonna be too much work. I’m just gonna go back to my customer service job at one of the department stores. The he said “Sorry to inconvenience you.”
Jill DeWit: (laughs)
Matt Theriault: I was like, “Inconvenience me? You’re going back to a customer service job right now.” So why would you want to deal with that hassle? You can deal with the hassle working for yourself, or you can deal with the hassle working for someone else. You’re not gonna survive in this world without having experiencing some sort of hassles. So I picked the hassle that pays the most.
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Jack Butala: Yeah, exactly. Pick the hassle that pays the most.
Jill DeWit: (laughs)
Jack Butala: (chuckles)
Jill DeWit: Great.
Jack Butala: You know at the end of these podcasts, Jill names the show.
Matt Theriault: Mm-hmm (affirmative)
Jack Butala: That’s a good contender, Jill.
Jill DeWit: Yeah, I’ve already written it down here.
Jack Butala: (laughs) So give me some example of a deal that you’re working on right now, a real-estate deal.
Matt Theriault: Let’s see. I buy, we do probably 10 to 15 transactions a month. What I’m working on right now that really exciting, is I just started my own real-estate hedge fund.
Jack Butala: Wow.
Matt Theriault: Went through the whole private placement process with the SSE-
Jack Butala: Yeah.
Matt Theriault: And the whole lawyer thing and put down a giant chunk of money. It was a little bit uncomfortable, but I know it’s all gonna be worth it. I put that together because, over the, I’ve done very much with my real-estate with very little of my own money or credit. A lot of money partners, a lot of different structures, and joint ventures, and lenders. I got to a point where I think I had eight LLCs with, I don’t know, combined probably 19 different partners in those LLCs with a different strategy operating in every single LLC, with a different structure. It just became a bookkeeping nightmare. One strategy would work, one LLC was working, the other one wasn’t, so then you had to rob Peter to pay Paul, and you had to go back to Paul and pay back Peter, and it just became a headache.
So what I was introduced to was the world of hedge funds. A lot of, we hear that word. It’s pretty commonplace in most households not, but I don’t know if most people know exactly what it is. What it was for me was to take, liquidate all of those LLC, transfer all of that into one fund, to the point where, now anytime I come across a new investor that wants to partner with me or wants to loan me money, I don’t have to go through all that hassle of creating another LLC, creating another bank account, another structure, and go back and forth in negotiations. Now they can just buy shares of my operation.
Jack Butala: Yeah.
Jill DeWit: Mm-hmm (affirmative)
Matt Theriault: So I’m extremely excited about that and that’s what we’ve been working on. We actually just opened that up last week. So that’s what’s been most exciting in our business lately.
Jack Butala: Have you raised the money already?
Matt Theriault: No, we just opened the doors, like seven days ago. We had our first three meetings in the last 48 hours.
Jack Butala: Boy, I’m gonna watch that very closely because, every once in a while, this is the conversation Jill and I have, what if we like, 15 million dollars on-hand? What could we turn it into? Could we turn it into 30 million, and how long would it take? Or, the typical assets that we turn … we purchase an assets, let’s say it’s a 40 acre property, for very little, four or five thousand bucks. We either turn around and sell it 12 to 15 cash, or we sell it for something like 22 thousand or 25 thousand on terms and the collect a couple hundred bucks a month forever. You know, 20 years or so. It ends up being we do, at the end of they day, it ends up being a 50 percent, year over year, 50 percent return. So to any investor, that’s fantastic, especially because you’ve got the asset base forever.
Matt Theriault: Sure.
Jack Butala: Almost forever. So you know, I can’t wait to see how this goes for you, man. I’m sure that it’s gonna go well.
Matt Theriault: Yeah.
Jack Butala: Plus you’re-
Matt Theriault: And we’ve already-
Jack Butala: You seem like an adequate salesperson.
Matt Theriault: Yeah we’ve already done it so now we just it all under one umbrella, instead of all spread out. It’s not really a concern of how it’s gonna go for me. I’d be happy to share with you. No problem there, but it’s what we’ve been doing for a decade now already, just in a different format. So now we’re just gonna crawl under one umbrella and save some trees so we don’t have to do as much paperwork.
Jack Butala: (laughs)
Jill DeWit: Mm-hmm (affirmative)
Jack Butala: So how do you, what’s you typical, how do you source properties and then how do you sell them, or rent them, I guess, in your case?
Matt Theriault: Our sourcing, we do a lot of direct to seller marketing to private owners. We’ve got, we operate our turn-key operation in 10 different markets right now. So we’ve got a couple real-estate agents in each market. We’ve got a couple property managers in each market. We’ve got a load of bird dogs and wholesalers in each market. I buy a lot of property from my students through my Epic Pearl Academy. So we’ve got deals and we’ve got buyers, and you know, some of the stuff we hold for our self. A lot of the stuff is gonna be going into the fund now, because they’re just deals that we can’t afford to pass up and sell to someone else. We’d rather keep them.
Jill DeWit: Mm-hmm (affirmative)
Matt Theriault: Then to our turn-key clients as well. Then whatever doesn’t fit any of those categories, we just wholesale it to another investor whose category to doesn’t fit.
Jack Butala: That’s great.
Matt Theriault: Mm-hmm (affirmative)
Jack Butala: Yeah we do a lot of transactions with our members also.
Jill DeWit: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
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