Have you lost it all and gone broke on a business venture? What did you do? Did you start over? Come up with something new? Our guest today is Matt Theriault, who shares his story about how we went from a millionaire, to broke and bagging groceries, to pivoting and building his own real estate empire.
TODAY’S WIN-WIN:
Using a quadrant scorecard to measure how you take care of yourself, your relationship, your business, and your wealth.
LINKS FROM THE EPISODE:
- You can visit our guest’s website at:
- Get a copy of our guests’ book: CLICK HERE.
- Attend our Franchise Sales Training Workshop:
- https://bigskyfranchiseteam.com/franchisesalestraining/
- If you are ready to franchise your business or take it to the next level: CLICK HERE.
- Connect with our guest on social:
- https://www.youtube.com/@EpicRealEstate
- https://epicrealestateinvesting.com (podcast)
- https://www.tiktok.com/@epicrealestate
- https://www.instagram.com/boogiusmaximus/
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/matttheriault/
- https://x.com/estate_epic
ABOUT OUR GUEST:
Matt Theriault is the CEO and Founder of Epic Real Estate™ and a Desert Storm Veteran (USMC). Since 2003, he has been a full-time real estate professional, building a substantial portfolio without using his own money or credit. Known for his ability to simplify complex concepts and implement systems, Matt has helped countless others achieve success in real estate.
His journey began with a personal goal to master “multiple streams of passive income.” Now, as an experienced investor, writer, and educator, Matt shares his expertise in creative real estate investing and cash flow strategies, aiming to give everyone the opportunity to achieve financial freedom.
Outside of work, Matt enjoys golfing with his son Mateo and relaxing with his wife Mercedes and friends in Las Vegas.
Matt’s mission is to help others break free from traditional financial wisdom by leveraging creative real estate strategies. His belief is simple: wealth is achievable for everyone with the right mindset, consistency, and approach.
He is also the author of “ESCAPE: Crushing Conventional Wisdom with Real Estate Investing,” a book that guides readers on a journey to financial freedom through unconventional methods. In this book, Matt debunks real estate myths, overcomes perceived risks, and provides practical strategies for transforming financial futures. His insights challenge readers to master the real estate game and take control of their financial destiny.
ABOUT BIG SKY FRANCHISE TEAM:
This episode is powered by Big Sky Franchise Team. If you are ready to talk about franchising your business you can schedule your free, no-obligation, franchise consultation online at: https://bigskyfranchiseteam.com/.
TRANSCRIPT
Tom DuFore (00:01):
Dr. Tom DuFore (00:01):
Welcome to the Multiply Your Success Podcast, where each week we help growth-minded entrepreneurs and franchise leaders take the next step in their expansion journey. I’m your host, Tom DuFore, CEO of the Big Sky Franchise team. As we open today, I’m wondering if you have ever lost it all and gone broke on a business venture and what did you do? Did you start over, come up with something new? Well, our guest today is Matt Theriault and he shares with us his story about how he went from a millionaire by 30 years old, to broke and bagging groceries, to pivoting and building his own real estate empire. Now Matt is the CEO and founder of Epic Real Estate and he’s a Desert Storm veteran from the US Marine Corps. Matt’s mission is to help others break free from traditional financial wisdom by leveraging creative real estate strategies. His belief is simple, wealth is achievable for everyone with the right mindset, consistency and approach. He’s the author of the book Escape Crushing Conventional Wisdom With Real Estate Investing, a book that guides readers on a journey to financial freedom through unconventional methods.
(01:09):
As a quick note before we jump into the interview, just know that none of this information that Matt shares or describes is investment advice. Always seek the advice of professionals to support you with that. So let’s go ahead and jump into our interview. I really like your story and the message you’re sharing. To me it’s maybe culminated in your new book that’s come out. I’d love for you to share just an overview about the book and why you wrote it, what led you to actually put the words to paper?
Matt Theriault (01:37):
Perfect. Well, thank you for that. It’s kind of a long story and I’ll condense it as much as I can. When I got out of the Marine Corps, I spent the next 15 years of my life in the music business. I had a small hip hop record label, but I had major label distribution. So really with not a whole lot of effort at all, I was very fortunate I did something that people were willing to pay me for, that was produced music. So I made my millions by the time I was 30. I was living the life and having a great time, and then this thing called the digital download came along. I don’t know if you remember that company Napster.
Dr. Tom DuFore (02:12):
Oh, for sure, I very vividly remember Napster,
Matt Theriault (02:16):
It turned that whole industry completely upside down. When you own a record label and you make the bulk of your money on selling compact discs, and people stop buying those and downloading it in instead, then it puts you out of business really fast. In hindsight it’s crystal clear what happened, but at the time it was happening it was very unclear. What is a download, right? I was like, this is never going to take hold because people must walk into a music store, they got to smell the vinyl. They want to read the liner notes, they want that whole experience. I loved going to the music store, I didn’t think it was ever going to take. By golly, in six short months I was out of business. It happened that fast. I went out looking for what I was going to do next, because the job market basically told me that I wasn’t qualified to do anything. Because I didn’t have any credentials and there wasn’t any demand for this out-of-work business entrepreneur, or entertainment entrepreneur I should say. So after taking my stab at selling cars and taking my stab at selling insurance … and I did some door knocking for Aflac and going into the high-rise buildings.
(03:20):
Those that say no solicitations or no solicitors, my boss was like, “Go to those places first.” And then I went through a number of multi-level marketing companies and I ended up bagging groceries at the age of 34, because I had to eat. That was a very humbling experience. I was at a point in my life where I was blaming everybody and everything for what had happened to me. I’m just like, what happened? I mean, I’m here halfway through … feeling like I was halfway through my life. What a kid I was, now that I look back. But halfway through my life and I was like, I really miss my money, I want my money back. I just knew I had to learn something new, and the most unlikely mentor was the grocery store manager. We became kind of close, because he was 34 years old and I was 34 years old, I was pushing carts and he was managing the store.
(04:12):
He had said, “Matt, I’ve been here since I was 16 years old, I never left. I’m here 18 years, I have two more years and I’ll be able to withdraw 70% of my salary for the rest of my life via my pension.” He’ll be invested 70%. I was like, “Well, that’s great.” He goes, “But look what I’ve done along the way. I’ve been able to buy a couple of apartment buildings, and the cashflow from those apartment buildings are going to pay me more than what my pension was going to pay.” And then he said these words to me, and I’ve never forgotten them … I’ve probably repeated them 1,000 times since, here’s 1,001 times. He said, “Real estate, it’s the final frontier where the average person has a legitimate shot at creating real wealth.” At that point in my life, I was feeling far below average so who am I to aspire above that? The final frontier, wow, this is it, to make real wealth? I was like, I knew I had to learn something new. So I just chose, okay, well, if that’s the final frontier, I better learn how to do that. That’s how I got into real estate. It was 100% money play because I missed my money, and no one was buying music from me anymore. So that’s how I got into there.
(05:17):
And then the more I got involved and the more I was in real estate, the more I saw how powerful of an investment vehicle it is for the average person. It started to really click, because you have the ability to use leverage unlike you can really for the average person in any other asset class. You have for-profit centers, you have cashflow, you have appreciation. You have the tax deductions and then the depreciation, and you have the amortization. If someone’s paying you to live in the property, they’re actually buying the house for you. That was just like, it checked so many boxes in what I was trying to accomplish so that’s how I got it. There’s this little book, I doubt if you’ve ever heard of it … I’ll introduce your audience to it because they’ll probably want to write this down. It’s called Rich Dad, Poor Dad. Have you heard of this book?
Dr. Tom DuFore (06:04):
For sure.
Matt Theriault (06:06):
There was that book the grocery store manager gave me at that time, what was that, in 2001 I think. The book was brand spanking new and I read it. There was two things that really pointed out to me, that weren’t clear to me when it was time to go out on my second venture in life. One was a redefinition of wealth. I thought it was having a lot of money in the bank. He defined it as, no, you just want enough money coming in each month without your direct involvement to pay your monthly bills. I was like, wow, that’s a new way of looking at things. And then this whole concept of passive income. I speak English, I can take the word passive, I can take the word income, I can put them together and figure out what it means. But that had never been taught to me as an intention, something to pursue like a real business, whether it’s business or it’s real estate. Those are the two places where you can make it happen as just a normal person, without being especially gifted or talented in anything. So I pursued that and I pursued real estate specifically with that in mind, with that goal. In three and a half years, I had hit a point where I had enough passive income to pay my expenses. I wasn’t rich by my previous standards but I was free.
(07:17):
And having experienced both of those things, I think I liked the second one better. I really liked that one better. The people around you, your friends, your family, they start to notice and they’re like, wait a minute, you’re playing golf on a Tuesday and I’m going to work. You were just bagging groceries a few years ago, how did this all happen? A lot of people ask me out to, “Can I pick your brain?” I don’t know how many times I heard that, pick your brain for dinner, pick your brain for lunch, pick your brain for coffee. I went to this one little seminar … I had this stream of passive income and then someone suggested, we need to diversify your streams. You only need to generate new streams now. So I went to this little seminar and it was this whole thing about membership websites. This is a while back, this is a whole new idea. You could have a membership website where people would pay you a monthly fee to join your website, and what do you put in there?
(08:10):
The guy on stage, he had said, “Wealthy people, they’re wealthy because they’ve learned how to do one thing really well and have created multiple streams of income from that knowledge.” He said, “The next logical place for most people to go to is to be a consultant or a tutor, or an educator or a trainer or a coach or something like that.” It was like, “Take all your information, put it on video and put it behind this membership website and boom, you’re off to the market. You’re off to to the races.” I was like, well, that sounds like a great idea. I don’t have to talk to anybody. I don’t have to be there and sell anything, it all gets done for me. So I did that and that took off too. And then I wrote a book about my life, it’s called Do Over. It was half autobiographical, half personal development, so here’s where I messed up in music and here’s how I recreated myself through real estate. Tim Ferriss, do you remember him? I was going through iTunes and I had listened to his book already, and then I searched his name to see if he had written anything else. All that came up was a bunch of audio downloads that were free. He had a podcast and that’s when I was very first exposed to that.
(09:21):
I was like, oh, this stuff’s all free? I paid all this money for the book to listen to, but I can listen to it for free. It was a cool experience. He had an episode on how to self-publish your own book and one of those top 10 things was to start a podcast, so I just started a podcast. I’ll just go down the list, I’m really good at following instructions. I did that and then that’s when the business, it really blew up, because I’m the longest running real estate podcast now on the Interwebs, started that in 2009. I still had to explain to everybody what a podcast was when I told them I had a podcast. That’s cute, Matt, that’s cute. You go do your little pod thing, right? But that turned into a whole business all by itself and here we are, what, we’re celebrating our 15th year from our podcast. So now we have Epic Real Estate where we still are building our own portfolio. I teach people how to do it, and my wife, she helps busy professionals and she goes out and does it for them. So people that know they want real estate but they don’t really have the time or the desire to go do all the heavy lifting, she’ll go out and she’ll find the tenant, she’ll find the property.
(10:27):
She’ll fix it up, she will put a property manager in place, she will arrange the financing, just hand over these houses that are producing cashflow on a silver platter to them. That’s what she does, so we kind of have this trifecta of businesses all around real estate. So I guess that guy was right back at that seminar, we got good at one thing and figured out multiple ways to make money from it.
Dr. Tom DuFore (10:45):
Thinking back to your record-producing days, you still are producing something and it’s replication. You’re just distributing that and in theory, if the artist is popular, it becomes this residual type income. That people just-
Matt Theriault (11:01):
Totally. Totally.
Dr. Tom DuFore (11:02):
… keep buying records or CDs, or in today’s world downloads or they’re playing it on Spotify or iTunes, whatever they’re listening to.
Matt Theriault (11:09):
You know what I’ve learned since then, which I wish I would have pursued? Oh, I could even show you. I still get these every single quarter, okay, this is a little check from BMI. They do the publishing for music. I haven’t produced a record in probably 20 years and I still get these little checks. This check was for $41 and then this one is for $33. But the point being is, if I would have known that then, I would have probably not focused on trying to sell CDs so much and focused more on trying to get my stuff on the radio and in movies and TV, because that’s what these are coming from. But yeah, definitely residual income. Those are nice when I get them, but they’re getting smaller and smaller for every one I get.
Dr. Tom DuFore (11:50):
I love how you’ve taken this idea of getting great at one thing and figuring out different ways to do it. Our business is helping entrepreneurs franchise their company, and that’s kind of the same idea. It’s that they’re really great at this thing, this craft, whatever business they’ve started, and now this is another way to branch out into a new way to generate income, doing basically the same thing and now it’s other folks doing it and giving them an opportunity. That’s really, really interesting. As you’re describing the whole Napster thing, I was a sophomore in college when the whole Napster thing really got big. A freshman or sophomore, maybe a junior in college. I remember the whole thing shifting and I was an aspiring recording artist. I really thought I was going to be something. I recorded a CD and put one together and the whole thing. Then it was like, wait a minute, I still have 1,000 CDs sitting in boxes in my basement. It was like, my mom, my mother-in-law and a couple of aunts bought some CDs.
Matt Theriault (12:50):
Every time someone comes over, you give them one before they leave.
Dr. Tom DuFore (12:52):
Yeah. They don’t even take them anymore, I can’t even give them away as coasters.
Matt Theriault (12:57):
That’s funny.
Dr. Tom DuFore (12:57):
Let’s talk a little bit about your new book Escape. You mentioned the book about your story and lessons learned, but let’s talk about Escape and what that is, what you’re doing there with that.
Matt Theriault (13:08):
My publisher insisted I put real estate investing on the book, but I really didn’t set out to make a real estate investing book. It’s really a money book and it very much takes off where Rich Dad left, these multiple streams of income and different asset classes and the multiple benefits that you get from asset classes. What the book is really about is just challenging conventional wisdom on what we’ve all been taught to become wealthy. You have the Dave Ramseys and the Suze Ormans of the world that are all about saving your money and being debt-free and maxing out your 401K, and paying off your house so it’s free and clear. All of that stuff, if that’s what is most important to you, then by all means, go ahead and do that. But what I experience a lot is, people will also say their financial freedom is really important to them, where they’ll say, “Financial freedom is the most important thing to me.” The irony is, paying off your house, if financial freedom is the most important thing to you, those can really be conflicting actions, or a conflicting action, with that value.
(14:18):
And maxing out your 401K, you’re essentially retiring your money before you retire yourself. It’s sitting there waiting for you when you’re 62, but by the time you’re there, the greatest and best years of your life are behind you. All of those are ideas based on what might have worked for our grandparents in that type of economy. But now that we’ve experienced so much inflation and we’re living longer, those old types of ideas aren’t really getting people to where they want to go. The Department of Health and Human Services released a study a few years ago where today’s 65-year-olds, 95% of them are not prepared to retire on their own resources, their own devices, their own investments. 95%, so something’s not working. And then only 4%, the government will define you as financially independent but you really don’t want to hear what the government’s definition of financial independence is. Because most people are definitely going to have to change zip codes for that definition to apply to them, and they’re probably have to take in a roommate. I don’t know who wants to change zip codes and take on a roommate when they’re 65 years old. So really only the 1% is making it, and 74% of them either made their money or preserved their money in real estate. They’re business owners and real estate investors.
(15:44):
There’s a big clue right there, something is not working. So you can do what the smart money is doing and get what they got, or you can do what the masses are doing and get what they got. Today they’re getting diddly squat, right? So the book is really taking some of these sacred cows that we’ve all been taught and raised with and challenging them, and just pointing out that you just can’t outwork inflation. You’re going to be working far beyond 65 these days, if you want your money to last as long as you’re alive. Which I always thought was funny with financial planners, one of the questions if they have you in their onboarding meeting is, “How long do you plan on living, Tom?” Those types of things are just kind of insane when you start really looking at them. And then I started doing all kinds of research and I dove really deep into other stuff that I had no idea about, such as the stock market. And people will say a rigged game … and I’m not pulling out my tinfoil hat and all this kind of thing, but I went down into micro-trading, they have these supercomputers. There’s this small group, they were from some Ivy League school.
(16:46):
Like 10 nerds got together and figured out how to get these micro-trades in, so they could buy and sell really, really fast and cause some sort of fluctuation in between that buy and sell. They could anticipate on people’s personal trading behavior and companies trading behavior and all this kind of stuff, and then institutions started to adopt it and now banks adopt it. So the whole Wall Street is working off of this micro-trading that totally leaves the normal guy like you and I at a huge disadvantage. We’ll never even get to participate. I wrote a chapter on that. I wrote a chapter on the fraud of compound interest. Yes, it works as long as it’s not interrupted and as long as you live long enough for it to experience the hockey stick. And then what they don’t tell you about all the fees that come in with those investments … the financial planners say it’s only a 1% fee and you’re like, ah, it’s 1%. Okay, I’ll give you 1% for doing your job. But if you extrapolate that out over and you’re waiting for your interest to compound, so does the fee. The fee compounds as well and most people, at the end they’re not seeing that giant pile of money they were promised, because just that 1% fee can take away 20 to 30% of your entire savings.
(17:59):
You thought it was 1%, but you gave up 30% to the person that put it all together. Those are the types of things. So real estate checks a lot of boxes, income-producing real estate specifically. If you borrow money, a depreciating asset, to purchase real estate, an appreciating asset that produces income, that puts you on the right side of the Fed without even having to understand how everything works. You don’t have to be an economics genius or some mathematician or whiz, or anything like that. But just by leveraging money, a depreciating asset, to buy real estate, an appreciating one, it puts you on the right side of the economy, of the system, of how the system works. So yes, it’s a real estate book but for so much bigger than just, oh, I hope my house is worth more next year than it is today, like how most people view real estate.
Dr. Tom DuFore (18:49):
Where can someone get a copy of your book, what’s the best way for them to do that?
Matt Theriault (18:53):
Sure. Well, it’s on Amazon. The title is Escape and you can get it there for 19 bucks. Or you can go to Myescapebook.com and then it’s there for four bucks. But I’ll also give you a free course there with the book that Rich Dad Robert Kiyosaki himself commissioned me to make for his community. He said I could give it away for free with my book buyer, so I’ll give you that. That’s called Creative Cash Flow.
Dr. Tom DuFore (19:20):
Wonderful. For someone that’s tuning in, maybe they don’t sign up for this course with you, how else can they get in touch with you, follow you and see what’s going on?
Matt Theriault (19:30):
Super. If you’re listening to this show, then you’re probably a fan of podcasts, Epic Real Estate Investing Podcast, wherever you’d listen to podcasts, that’d be a great place to go. I got a pretty big YouTube channel as well, Epic Real Estate.
Dr. Tom DuFore (19:43):
Wonderful. Well, we’ll make sure we include all of that in the show notes, so people can click and link up and sync up and follow you and be a part of it. I really love your story with what you’re sharing here and the advice you’re providing. So thank you. Well, Matt, this is a great time in the show and we make a transition, we ask every guest the same four questions before they go. The first question we ask is, have you had a miss or two on your journey and something you learned from it?
Matt Theriault (20:08):
Two things, one was the digital download, I didn’t think that was ever going to hold. I was one of the people that really thought the Internet was a fad, and I really just did not embrace that. I wish I would have been a little bit more curious about it at the time, rather than just shunning it. So if I learned anything from that, when crypto came around that was going like, oh, this dumb crypto thing. Then I was like, oh, wait a minute, I said this a couple of times before in my life, let me look into it. I guess the verdict is still out on crypto. But now when I hear a little trend or something like that, I pause and give it actual consideration, rather than just being the grumpy old man and saying, no, I’m not going to do that.
Dr. Tom DuFore (20:48):
Let’s talk about a make or two, a highlight. You’ve shared a few, but I’d love for you to share something else that stands out.
Matt Theriault (20:54):
When I got into real estate, the big make was … well, there’s maybe two of them. But the biggest one I can think of, when I got into real estate, that was 2002, 2003, so that was just as everything was going up and then 2008 hit. What I think, I can give all the credit to just social media not even being a thing at that time, so I didn’t really know any better. I didn’t realize that the real estate market had crashed and I’m supposed to be hurting and struggling. I was like, I just got to go do more of what I did the other day before, and that’s that. So I did that, I probably made the most money in real estate between 2008 and 2014, and that really launched everything. That’s after I’d been in real estate for a few years, but I just shifted and implemented a different strategy and it was very, very successful. So that was the big make there, and then obviously the podcast was a huge surprise that I could have never predicted.
Dr. Tom DuFore (21:55):
Let’s talk about a multiplier. Have you used a multiplier to grow yourself personally, professionally, or businesses you’ve run?
Matt Theriault (22:02):
I’ll reiterate the podcast because that is a huge multiplier in the sense that … My wife and I, we’d helped a lot of people out of pre-foreclosure, a lot of people out of a short sale situation during that time period. What we would do is, we would go to meetup.com. It’s just a place where you can meet socially online, but you actually get together and you arrange events that you’d meet in person. It’s a very local thing. So we would set up little meetings on there, like how to navigate the foreclosure process without crushing your credit score. We’d throw a little event, a little party. We’d have a little happy hour, sandwiches. We worked really hard. We do that once a month and we’d have to promote that and I don’t know, sometimes we’d get 10 people there, 15 people there. Sometimes we’d get one or two people there. So that was a lot of work but we’d always get deals, we’d always get business out of that. But when we did a podcast … and I remember that first episode we released, I think I got like 150 listens or 150 downloads. I was like, do you know how hard we’d have to work to get 150 sets of ears on our message when we were doing these live events? Now it’s 20,000 an episode so it’s like, that is a real multiplier.
Dr. Tom DuFore (23:16):
The final question we ask every guest is, what does success mean to you?
Matt Theriault (23:20):
It means a lot of things. But I think I know I’m being successful when I don’t wish I was doing something else. That’s when I know I’m being successful.
Dr. Tom DuFore (23:30):
I was thinking about that manager that you worked with, have you all stayed in touch? What’s going on with him? Just curious.
Matt Theriault (23:37):
We have not, and boy, you’re right, I have been asked that question. Clarence from the Manhattan Beach Ralph’s in Southern California, Los Angeles, if you’re listening, reach out, hit me up. I’d love to get back in touch because you’ve changed my entire life.
Dr. Tom DuFore (23:53):
Fantastic. Well, Matt, as we bring this to a close, is there anything you were hoping to share or get across that you haven’t had a chance to yet?
Matt Theriault (24:01):
Tom, I’m just really grateful that I got to connect with someone like yourself, who’s helping people very much in the same way. You’re helping them go out and create their financial independence and if they do it right, it can result into freedom, whether that’s through business or real estate or any other asset or investment class. I think this is the greatest gift we can give people and it’s nice to be associated with you. I mean, if you go back and just think about your high school reading curriculum, what if they just swapped out Catcher in the Rye for Rich Dad, Poor Dad, how different would lives have been if that would have happened? It hasn’t, and it still hasn’t happened today, so there’s people like you out there, that are there to give people that help when they’re looking for it. So I’m grateful for you having me on the show and I’m grateful for what you’re doing. I love fellow teachers, so good for you.
Dr. Tom DuFore (24:52):
Matt, thank you so much for a fantastic interview. Let’s go ahead and jump into today’s three key takeaways. Takeaway number one is always remembering that you have to be willing to learn something new or try something different if you have to pivot or make a change. That’s exactly what he did when his initial business failed because of the changing times. No one was buying physical CDs anymore or not at the same rate. He went out of business and he was bagging groceries. It took his manager at the grocery store to help guide him down this direction, and talk to him about real estate and share the book with him called Rich Dad, Port Dad, that he eventually read and changed the trajectory to where he’s come today. Takeaway number two is the miss he talked about when he said he missed the digital download revolution that happened in the late ’90s, early 2000s. He said he thought the Internet was a fad and he wishes that he had been more curious about that. Takeaway number three is success and how he defined that. I love the way he defined it. He said he knows he’s being successful when he doesn’t wish he was doing something else.
I thought that was just a great little nugget, a great little takeaway. Now it’s time for today’s win-win. Today’s win-win is when he talked about, when he went to a seminar and he learned, wealthy people learn how to do something really well and then can create multiple streams of revenue from it. I just think that’s a huge win-win because now you’re able to share that, and I think about the clients we serve and the people we help who are franchising their business. As a franchisor, as the entrepreneur franchising, you’re able to take your business, that’s something you love and that you’re really great at, and now you’re figuring out multiple ways to generate revenue and income through that. And for me, what I love about franchising, now you’re able to share this with someone else to also use that same system and process to create a life and a lifestyle they are interested in creating and pursuing. So that’s the episode today, folks. Please make sure you subscribe to the podcast and give us a review.
(27:12):
And remember, if you or anyone you know might be ready to franchise your business or take their franchise company to the next level, please connect with us at bigskyfranchiseteam.com. Thanks for tuning in and we look forward to having you back next week.
