How to Leave a High Paying Tech Job with Real Estate Investing – Matt Shamus

Sean: [00:00:45] Thanks so much for being on the show today. Go ahead and introduce yourself and let us know how you got into real estate investing.

Matt: [00:00:49] Thank you so much for having me. My name is Matt Shamus with Driven Capital Partners. I got started in real estate investing I guess when I was 19. I got my real estate license and sold my mom’s house, the home that I grew up in, and made her a nice profit. And I kind of got the bug at that point. I went off to college and studied economics, took some real estate courses and was very interested in real estate. In fact, I thought I was going to go into brokerage right away, but I had an internship in college that just didn’t pan out. It didn’t give me a very good feel for the industry sadly. I’ve had a career in Tech up to this point. I live in the Bay Area and I recently worked at Facebook for the past 6 years and had a chance to do some amazing things there. I actually went there to work on the original Facebook for iPhone app in 2012 and was part of a small team that ended up developing that and then you know, as you do at a company like that, you can move around and do several different things.

I worked on internet.org, which is Facebook’s initiative to bring free internet to the poorest countries in the world. I did that for a few years but throughout my time there, I was investing in real estate and I happened to grow up in Stockton. And Stockton if you don’t know was hit very hard in the great recession and there were tons of buying opportunities in town and I felt like you know what? I’m interested in real estate. Why don’t I go see if I can buy a single-family home and see if I can you know, make this make any sense for me. So what I did was I bought the worst house in kind of a B-class neighborhood, decent neighborhood, and I turned it into through renovation, turned it into the nicest rental property available in the area and that was my intention. That was my goal.

So they worked really well. I got a great tenant in place. I got the property at a really good price and I learned a ton along the way and as soon as I was done with that first project, I said I got to do this again. So that’s exactly what I did. So I did it a few more times with the same formula, buy the worst house in a decent neighborhood and create the best rental property available in the area. It worked well a handful of times but I ran out of my own money and so I started partnering with colleagues and friends that knew what I was doing, and I would take their money. So they would fund the deal or the majority of the deal and I would do all the work and we would split the cash flow and the profits 50/50. That was also working really well, but I realized in order to reach my goals, I would need to scale to a hundred or 200 of these houses and I just didn’t see that in my future. I didn’t see that as something that I wanted to do or that I thought was a reasonable path for me. So I started thinking, you know, what do I need to do to add a zero or two to pretty much everything that I’m doing because I’m doing the right things, the scale is too small.

And so in 2013, I actually started looking into apartments. I started doing some underwriting. I started contacting brokers and trying to develop some relationships and I put together a few deal packages for real deals that I was going to go raise money for and I did the full underwriting, I did the full due diligence, I put the deals together. I never quite have the courage to go actually make it happen. And so it really took me a handful of years fast forward to 2018 is when we did our first syndication deal. And so now what we’re doing is basically buying higher quality assets than any of us can buy on our own and just pulling money together from individuals to buy those higher quality assets. So it starts with Dan, who’s my partner in LA. It starts with our vision for wanting to build out a portfolio of our own. So we are putting our own cash into every deal that we do and so our first consideration is do we want to invest in this deal. And then, since we have a process in place for due diligence and vetting deals and we see a lot of deals, we figured we might as well invite some investors along to to participate as well and it’s been great so far.

Sean: [00:06:11] I think you’re one of the very few people that I know who’s actually made that transition from a high-tech job into real estate. So you quit your job full time now, right?

Matt: [00:06:18] Yes, so I left Facebook in May of 2018 and Dan, my partner, so he were longtime buddies or actually best friends so for the last like 12 years we have had no choice but to hang out together and get to know each other and we decided you know what? Why don’t we make this productive? So Dan was also investing in real estate on the side very similar kind of background to me in terms of real estate investment but his career was in professional sports. He played professional soccer for 12 or 13 years and recently retired. So we kind of talked for a handful of years about what would it look like if we partnered up on something real estate-related and we kind of both reach that moment in our careers where it made sense to to make the leave and go do it full-time. So we’ve just closed on our fourth transaction, one in 2018 and then three so far in 2019, and yeah, it’s been a great ride. We still have obviously quite a bit of work to do but we’re excited about it and motivated and passionate about it. For me, there’s nothing better than that. That’s what I was looking for.

Sean: [00:07:31] Awesome. So you already closed three this year?

Matt: [00:07:33] We have. Yes, we’ve closed three transactions, you know, this is kind of how real estate can go. You have a lot of deals in the pipeline. At various stages, you never know which is going to land when. And we just kind of have a few that landed right in a row and I think we’ll probably have you know, three or four more throughout the rest of the year, but yes, we’ve closed three so far in 2019.

Sean: [00:07:57] Congratulations! And are they all in the same location?

Matt: [00:07:59] No. I think one of the things that probably makes us a little bit unique. Again, we are first and foremost building a portfolio for ourselves and for me an important component of a portfolio is diversification across geographies, but also across asset classes. So we are currently invested in Huntsville, Alabama. We have a property in Atlanta and we have a property in Santa Barbara, California. And we will look to continue to kind of build out a portfolio of unique well-rounded deals that will all have slightly different characteristics. They won’t all look the same.

Sean: [00:08:46] Actually, very interesting because you know, I’ve heard Texas like Dallas and Austin all the time. I’ve heard Atlanta and I’ve heard of Huntsville, but I think you’re the very first person I’ve heard that’s buying apartments in Santa Barbara. Isn’t it isn’t expensive down there? How are you guys doing that?

Matt: [00:09:01] Yeah. So just to be clear, we don’t only focus on apartments, but that is an emphasis. So I love markets outside of California and particularly in the Southeast for what kind of longer-term steady cash flow and I also think a lot of our growth markets in the US are in the Southeast. These are places where people are moving in comes arising etcetera. California is a tricky Market to make anything cash flow, but what it does offer is a great opportunity to create value and exit, and capture the value. So that’s exactly what we’re doing with this deal in Santa Barbara. This is a 17 Unit office complex, which is right off of State Street. Great location in Santa Barbara downtown. In the 60s, it was built as apartments. In the 80s, it was converted to office space if you can believe it. That was more desirable at that moment. And it just kind of stayed as office space up until now.

It was recently inherited through trust and the people that inherited it didn’t really know what to do with it. When you walk in, it’s an office. It’s being used as an office but you still see the original bathroom. You see the original kitchen and it’s a great location Santa Barbara has 2% vacancy multifamily right now and throughout California, there’s a housing crisis. It’s no different in Santa Barbara. So the opportunity that we saw was purchase the property, convert it back into apartments and and then sell it to someone that wants to own apartments in downtown Santa Barbara. So that’s that’s our intention for for that property. It is unique. We’re not necessarily looking for deals in Santa Barbara or in California but we had a great opportunity and we felt like we should take advantage of it.

Sean: [00:11:04] Awesome and not to go too much into the details here but you know, what’s the process of doing that converting it from an office back to apartments? And how long is it going to take?

Matt: [00:11:13] Yeah, it’s a good question. The process is where the risk for this deal lies. We budgeted about nine months for the permitting process. We want to do everything above board so we’re going through the process of getting everything permitted through the city of Santa Barbara. Most of the time frame for this particular deal is get permitting from the city and then do the renovation. The lease option actually be fairly quick because it’s only 17 units and it’ll be a desirable location. So really the risk is how quickly can you get the permitting and how quickly can you do the renovation? And so we’re expecting about nine months to get permitting.

Sean: [00:12:03] And the meantime, is that office space occupied or is it vacant?

Matt: [00:12:07] It’s occupied. So luckily with this deal, most of the tenants were on month to month leases. There are a couple vacant units and we’re leasing those month to month just to get a little bit of cash flow while we wait but really the value here is is, you know, people are buying properties in Santa Barbara at four and a half cap for apartment. Again, that’s the intention not to hold it long term, but essentially a flip right? This is kind of a two-year flip.

Sean: [00:12:37] Yeah, I mean that’s why I like commercial better because when you’re doing your two-year flip, at least you’re getting cash flow from the tenants, whereas we have single family residential, you got nothing.

Matt: [00:12:47] That’s right. Yeah, absolutely. Typically on a single family flip, you’re reliant on the market and people’s emotions because you’re likely going to have a home buyer move into that home. And a commercial property when you do a flip like this, you are relying on creating value through cash flow and then that end buyers going to pay a multiple on that cash flow. So you have a little bit more, you know, you have a little bit more bigger safety net there I think in commercial properties.

Sean: [00:13:21] That’s right. You have more control over your estimated profit at the exit. So I wanted to go back actually to your beginnings. I think that’s what people are most most interested in seeing someone go from a full-time career into real estate full-time but in the meantime you are doing real estate part-time. So, how are you able to manage a full-time job at a tech company? You know Facebook at 2012. IPO, they were just starting up or they were wrapping up like crazy. How did you have time to do your projects in Stockton?

Matt: [00:13:52] Well, I made time. There’s really no easy way to do this. I was passionate about it. I was excited about it. My free time was spent researching and writing offers and you know getting bids for contract work, but that’s what was exciting to me. So while it was additional hours, it didn’t feel like work, you know in the traditional sense. And I also had a vision even though I didn’t necessarily have an explicit goal. I didn’t have a vision that I would move on from kind of the corporate world and go do my own thing. One thing I didn’t mention about my background is Facebook is only the second job that I’ve ever had as an employee. Everything else I’ve done has been entrepreneurial. I founded two companies before Facebook and I just knew that eventually I would move on and go do my own thing again because that’s where I thrive and so it was really building towards that. And I think you know, one of the thing that might be interesting, I don’t think there’s ever a perfect time right to jump from a high paying, you know demanding but cushy job, like something at Facebook. There’s never a perfect time. You’re always going to have doubts. You’re always going to have hurdles in front of you. You’re always going to have a bonus waiting in a few months that you’re going to collect if you stay or stock that vest in a couple months.

So for me, what I felt like was really important was go do something that I’m passionate about, go do something that I’m excited about. The worst case scenario at the end of the day, I can probably go get a job at Facebook again in a year if I need to. I could go get a job at a different company, but you know, I’m not going to need to. That’s clear to me now and so I’m thrilled that I did it at that time, but it didn’t feel feel like work when I was you know, when I was spending all that additional time outside of my day job.

Sean: [00:16:02] Yep. Absolutely. It’s like a high-paying hobby. You know, like you enjoy doing it and very profitable to.

Matt: [00:16:08] Well, that’s right. I realized I may not be making more money than I’m making in Facebook doing real estate investing but I can sure see a path that I can make more money. You know what, I need to stop talking about this and just go do it. So I finally reached that moment in 2018.

Sean: [00:16:24] Congratulations. So, how long was that journey between when you said, hey real estate’s pretty cool, I’m going to start because you said you sold your mom’s house, but that doesn’t really count because then you went to school and then you got a job or you started some companies. So what was it that you said? I’m gonna start doing real estate investing investing some stocking homes until 2018, I’m gone.

Matt: [00:16:43] I think our first home we bought was 2011. It might have been 2012.

Sean: [00:16:47] Perfect timing.

Matt: [00:16:48] It was. No doubt. The market timing helped tremendously, but I will also say this, there were other people in my life that were better equipped to profit much more than I was and knew more than I did in the same exact market and for whatever reason they did. So I think yeah, the market timing was critical, no question, but the strategy that I chose was also to go and enforce value from day one. And so when I look back at the deals that I was looking at in 2013 or 2014 or 2015 or 2016, I should have said yes to everything. Right? But I didn’t. I was very very conservative and I only wanted to buy the things that I knew I was buying a discount and I knew that I could force value into right away. And that’s the same exact strategy that I’ve taken into what we’re doing today. It’s just bigger deals with another zero or two at the end of them. But we’re really kind of value investors. We’re looking for undervalued properties and how can we you know, force appreciation through improvements and through improving the cash flow.

Sean: [00:18:04] Yep. Absolutely. Other quick question though. Do you think it’s better to have you know, if you think everything’s cheap go balls to the wall, buy a bunch of stuff or always take conservative and only go for those value plays because like on the one hand it hurts you on the upside, but then protects you when there’s a downside.

Matt: [00:18:22] So my philosophy is this is just my temperament and my personal kind of my personality. I’m always going to skew towards value investing. I’m going to want to feel like I’m going to say no to a lot of deals, but the ones that I say yes to I’m going to feel pretty confident in. And I’m okay with that trade-off, you know, this is pretty similar to the way a lot of companies do hiring. A company like Facebook has a very high bar for hiring people. What they’re saying is we’re willing to make the trade-off that we’re going to say no to a lot of highly competent people and the ones that we say yes to, we’re going to be very very excited about and that’s kind of the same philosophy that I’ve taken, you know into real estate investing. It has worked well so far. I just don’t see my personality changing and going after more speculative deals.

Sean: [00:19:13] Yep, makes sense. And back when you’re starting your acquisitions in Stockton, where they all picked off the MLS, which you have some kind of connect that was giving you off market stuff?

Matt: [00:19:22] Everything but maybe one deal was bought on the MLS. There is one deal that I did some creative financing for. My uncle owned a duplex in a C-area. And he owed almost exactly what the property was worth. So his note was for almost exactly what the property was worth. And I said, you know what? Let me take this off your hands. I’m not going to give any cash. He thought of it as a liability at that point in his life and career. He didn’t want to deal with it anymore. I was an aspiring real estate investor, and I said, let me take this off your hands. I will pay the mortgage. After a year, will transfer title into my name. After a year, the property will be seasoned. I’ll be able to refinance in my name, will get you off the mortgage. It’ll be a done deal. And it was a great transaction for him because he didn’t have to pay transaction fees to sell the property and it was an amazing opportunity for me because I got into a deal with zero money down because of that reason I had very little risk and I learned so much from the financing process to what it takes to manage your property like that in a  C-location, and one of the things that I learned was those aren’t the properties that I want to be investing in. I’m much more interested in kind of a solid B-class property and in a B-neighborhood where you have, you know, a higher quality tenant profile and people that ultimately you are more comfortable doing business with, because that’s really what you’re doing is a landlord. You’re doing business with the person on the other end of that transaction. So, but other than that, everything else was pretty much on the MLS.

Sean: [00:21:04] Cool. I mean what good is a high cap for if they don’t pay rent?

Matt: [00:21:08] This is actually an interesting thing I’m finding is investors today, if they invested in deals before, like in the last handful of years have very high expectations for returns and I think the world today is just a little different than it was back in 2014 for instance. It’s not likely we’re going to be able to double someone’s money in two years and do that repeatedly. What we are going to do is buy very conservative investments that we feel confident in over the long term and I think the paper returns are different than the real returns. Sorry, my three-year-olds visiting us. Sorry about that little comic relief.

Sean: [00:21:50] That’s super cute. I mean, that’s one of the benefits of being a full time real estate investor. You can have the free time to hang out with your kids. I mean it’s three o’clock, right? How often do you get to go home at three o’clock when you’re working at Facebook?

Matt: [00:22:01] There is no dad that I know that sees their kids more than me. How do you put a value on it? I love it. You know it has its trade-offs too. Right? Your three-year-old comes in and interrupts a meeting. But you know what at the end of the day, so what? It’s a lot of fun having them around. I have two young boys and they’re just a blast.

Sean: [00:22:24] Awesome. So I’m actually pretty curious. Back when you’re working a full-time day job, I’m pretty sure you weren’t driving up to Stockton all the time. So how did you manage your rehabs or are you a property manager at this point or did you have someone doing that for you?

Matt: [00:22:37] So I did self-managed most of my properties there and I did that intentionally to learn what the business was like and to try and build. I have this mentality of I want to build some systems in place from day one so that I am not required to be on the clock in order for the machine and the train to run. So technology has actually helped quite a bit even in the last five years. I was most recently using cozy for instance which is great for individual kind of landlords that own maybe a few properties. And what I tried to do was build up a team in Stockton and that included my realtor. She also kind of doubled as my project manager and she actually has been a tremendous help in everything that I’ve done. I’ve compensated her well, but she’s earned it and it’s allowed me to be a little bit less hands on. It allowed me not to be driving back and forth all the time. Honestly, these properties could have been 2,000 miles away. I visited them very occasionally. It was not something that I went where I would go, you know, once a week or anywhere near that. I try to build a team of people in place that could support what I was doing and also, you know get paid a reasonable wage along the way. So, that was that was my strategy.

Sean: [00:24:13] Yeah, because this transitions into my next question, you have properties in Atlanta and Huntsville and Santa Barbara, and you’re not anywhere near those places. So how are you able to manage those from afar?

Matt: [00:24:25] Well, we try to again build a team in that location and partnered with the right people so we have a unique model and that again, I told you the first thing that I’m doing is I’m an investor for my own account. Every deal that we look at, I’m buying with my own cash, a proportion of it. So and given the fact that we want a diversified portfolio across geographies and asset classes, I can’t count on myself to be an expert in all the different regions and all the different asset classes. So what we’ve decided to do is partner with operators who are excellent at what they do and have a specific region of focus and we’re also actively looking and sourcing our own deals, which we also operate but I want to pair my deal up against a deal from a potential partner/operator and then decide which of these deals is better and try to objectively make a decision, and if my deal doesn’t beat the other deal out than I don’t want to do my deal, I want to do the other deal because I’m an investor at heart.

So what we try to do is partner with people on the ground whenever possible. Sometimes that means partnering with a property manager. I think increasingly that will mean partnering with a broker. We don’t have systems in place to find off-market deals, that’s not part of our business plan. Part of our business plan has been trying to develop relationships with brokers in the markets that we like and this means going to those markets. This means understanding. This means meeting people face-to-face, so it needs to go into these markets multiple times, which we’ve done and it means developing a relationship with them such that they can bring deals to me that they want to own, that they want to be a part of and we’re happy to accommodate that. You know, one of the things that real estate investing in this community of people affords is this mentality of abundance and I try and keep that mentality in mind. We want to allow people that we partner with to own a portion of the deal so that they’re incentivized in the right ways and aligned with us but also so that they profit from it the same way that we do. So that’s kind of been our strategy today.

Sean: [00:26:53] Awesome. And can I summarize it, you can correct me wherever I’m wrong. So let’s say that, you said you want diversification all across the United States, right? So you probably travel a whole bunch to all the different places you want to go to and you make the connections while you’re there and then are you hoping that brokers would reach back to you and say, hey, here’s the deal I have, check this one out or maybe operators says here’s a deal, check this one out.

Matt: [00:27:16] Yeah. Well, I’ll give you an example. So Huntsville Alabama is a market where we’ve been to many times. We own two properties there.  Huntsville is the fastest growing city in Alabama. It’s going to be the largest city in the state within a handful of years. If you haven’t been there, it’s not what you think of when you think of Alabama. It’s a very high proportion of PhDs. Literally, these are rocket sciences. This is where NASA as we know it was born and the technology that put man on the moon was born. So it’s a very unique place. Facebook has a data center there. Google has a data center there. It’s growing, Toyota Mazda is building a 1.6 billion dollar manufacturing plant there. We saw Huntsville as an opportunity as a market that we could compete in from day one. And so that’s what we decided to do. We look to source deals actively in Huntsville that we want to operate.

A market like Raleigh, North Carolina is also a market we love. We are disadvantaged to find deals there right now. It’s highly competitive. People are over bidding on things at least from my perspective and we’re never going to be in a position, it’s not our strategy to win a bidding war. So we really need to win on relationships. So in a place like Raleigh, what we will do is look for what asset classes do we like in Raleigh, and can we find an operator that we really like in Raleigh that we can potentially partner with. And so these are long-term plays this doesn’t happen, you know over a week or a month. This is months and months of research and meeting people and traveling back and forth and trying to add value to these other people along the way and ultimately, you know, the strategy is for a partnership to form and you do one deal together and see how you work and with the intention of doing multiple deals together. So that’s that’s kind of the two different ends of the spectrum of our strategy where we do our own deals kind of front to back or where we may be partner with someone else that’s an expert in a particular asset class.

Sean: [00:29:31] Makes sense. So I guess to go back for it one more time. Imagine your brand-new in the space and you want to go somewhere. Let’s say Cincinnati, you’re going to type in Cincinnati operators or something like that right? Who does commercial real estate deals in Cincinnati and you see a list of people who have syndication deals and yada yada yada then maybe you send them a cold email, call them, fly over there and visit them, build a relationship, try to add value to them and then if they have a deal, they send it to you and you can find a way to help them close it, whoever is funding for it, etc. etc.

Matt: [00:30:02] Yeah, it wasn’t, you know, it hasn’t been that systemic for us. It’s been more relationship-based. It’s been more like, oh, you know we meet someone at a real estate event in Dallas for instance, oh, you’re active in Raleigh. That’s interesting where you know, we’ve been looking in Raleigh and we can’t figure out any way to make anything work and that you know, blossoms into a friendship and you know learning about each other, making sure our values are aligned and then is there an opportunity to work together. One of the things that I think holds people back from moving into real estate full-time if that’s their interest, is they feel like they have to have all the pieces in place themselves. And that’s just not the case, you’re never going to have that. The real estate is about partnerships. It’s about relationships with other people. It’s about doing what you are best at and then letting someone else do what they’re best at and fitting the puzzle pieces together so that everyone can profit.

Sean: [00:31:02] That’s right. It’s all about that abundance mindset where there’s enough to share for everyone.

Matt: [00:31:08] Yeah.

Sean: [00:31:08] Now, I want to ask one more quick question. Now you said that you used to do all these products by yourself until you ran out of money. I want to know how big was your portfolio before you ran out of money? Because I’m sure that if you’re saying hey, this is my very first deal, like no one is gonna give you money. But if you have a track record and a portfolio, then they might say, okay, I’m down.

Matt: [00:31:27] Yeah, so throughout, I mean probably the first deal that I partnered with someone on was maybe my fifth deal, probably did four deals up and I can’t remember exactly but it was around there. But then after that I still did a few deals on my own. I would partner with someone when the opportunity came up. So yeah, I think it’s important to have some kind of track record. And you know, you’re going to learn a ton doing deals on your own. So it’s valuable to learn with your own time and your own money. I personally didn’t feel comfortable putting anyone else’s money at risk, and honestly that wasn’t even part of my mentality at the time. My mentality was, I want to own a real estate myself, and I’m reasonably intelligent, I know a little bit about the market. I can learn quickly. I’m going to go dig in and see what I can get done, as opposed to I didn’t have the mentality of going out and raising money, you know, right from the start.

Sean: [00:32:29] Alright, so let’s imagine that your brand-new, okay, your past is gone, but you want to do the same strategy where you hit up an operator to partner with. How do you have that conversation? And what do you say to them to try to add value to them to get on their deal?

Matt: [00:32:43] Well, I think you know, I wouldn’t use that approach or I guess I should say I haven’t used that approach, the approach that we’ve used is we’re going to be in this business a long time. We’re really kind of just getting started. We like this market. You are active in this market. We respect what you do. Let’s get together and see if there’s a potential opportunity for us to do something together. And that’s really it. You know, the mentality has not a been about just finding someone to work within a market, it’s been more about who do we want to partner with, what markets do we like, can we go find you know someone in that in a market that we like that makes sense for us to partner with. So we’re not forcing anything. We’re simply looking for opportunities to invest ourselves. And that means doing a lot of due diligence and kissing a lot of frogs to find one that you know find one that you like.

Sean: [00:33:54] It’s like you said, when you’re building relationships, it really is just trying to build a great friendship and seeing people that you can work with, because when I go to some meet up events, some people just take a stack of their business cards and they pass them out to every single person or they drop them on the table. Like no one’s going to talk to, you have to actually make that legit connection with people.

Matt: [00:34:12] Well and you can tell too. Like I just turned down an investor this week because it was clear that our values weren’t aligned. This person was expecting something that I could not deliver. And so, you know, it is really important to have at least for me that you know, their values. The character is what I’m looking for first. This is a long-term game for me, so I am not intending to make a fortune on the next deal. What I’m intending to do is build a solid foundation of people that I can work with for a very long time. And so there’s no way for that to happen unless it’s first through for the kind of relationship building.

Sean: [00:34:57] Amazing. Now, if there is someone that wants to quit their job in let’s say 5 to 10 years, what are your recommendations of the first thing they should be doing today?

Matt: [00:35:07] Well specifically, you know, if you’re interested in moving into real estate investing, I think open up your mind to the fact that you don’t have to know or do everything. If you’re really good at one particular thing, one particular skill or set of skills in real estate investing, you can go find someone else that has complementary skills and that may make it easier to jump out and do something on your own. I would not wait for the perfect moment because it just will never come and I think this is one of the curses of high paying W-2 jobs is you get paid well, you live in this zone of complacency, and I love my job, I mean, I’m not really interested in it or passionate about it, the pay’s great and I can go out and have nice dinners every weekend, I have a nice car, but I’m not excited about it. And the problem is it’s very easy for one , two, three, five years to tick off and for you to find yourself in not too different of the situation with a higher mortgage payment and more fancier clothes and a higher car payment.

And I think for me at least, my realization was, I’m never going to find the perfect moment. The best thing for me to do is go jump into the deep end and know that I have a reasonable safety net and if something were to happen, I can always go back and find a job. And I just did not see a way to get all of the things done or compressed time frames the way that I was able to without having a full-time day job and I wouldn’t have. If I was trying to do this also while working on the side, I wouldn’t have achieved nearly as much in this amount of time and I wouldn’t be on the same trajectory. So I don’t think there’s ever a perfect moment.

Sean: [00:37:14] I mean yeah, being trapped in the golden handcuffs is a really big problem for sure.

Matt: [00:37:18] Yeah.

Sean: [00:37:18] Awesome.

Matt: [00:37:19] Yeah.

Sean: [00:37:19] So how can people get in contact with you?

Matt: [00:37:21] Our website drivencap.com, short for Driven Capital Partners. We have the sign up for our mailing list. We have top 10 reasons real estate creates millionaires, spend something that our investors of have appreciated, just a quick resource to kind of give you an introduction into how real estate is beneficial in the long term wealth builder. You can email me, matt@drivencap.com. On our website, there’s a link to schedule a call If you want to chat, happy to do that even if you’re just considering hey, you know, I’d like to leave or put a plan in place to leave my job, happy to chat with you. This is not rocket science, this is about committing and being true to what you really want. And whether it’s real estate investing or anything else. I think you have to go in full steam ahead and make a commitment to it. I hope that someone else that sitting on the fence, listening to this may you know, may be inspired to go make a change.

Sean: [00:38:20] Awesome. Thank you so much for being on the show today. I really appreciate it and I hope to see you soon.

Matt: [00:38:25] Hey, thank you so much for having me.

Here are some of the key takeaways I got from speaking with Matt, opportunities are everywhere. You just need to go out and get it. When the market turned, there were tons of people who are more capable and in a stronger financial position than he was, but they didn’t take action. Build genuine relationships and find people that you can work with who have a physical presence where you want to invest and find ways to add value to that person. You need to have an abundance mindset. There’s enough to go around for everyone. And finally, you need to create a purposeful life. You can’t just sit on the fence forever. It’s very easy to stay trapped in the golden handcuffs and they will never be a right time to leave your job. So get out there and start making moves. Good luck.