AI, Debt, And Buildings, The New Wealth Stack For Lawyers

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Are you an entrepreneur looking to grow and thrive in the legal space? In this episode of the Maximum Lawyer Podcast, Tyson interviews Matt Anderson, an attorney and real estate investor, about his unconventional journey blending law, entrepreneurship, and property investing. Matt shares lessons from multi-level marketing and business ownership and emphasizes the importance of hiring for culture fit.

For lawyers who are new to the entrepreneurial space, it is possible to build a firm that runs on minimal daily involvement. In order to do this, you need to let go of a lot of the day to day work of practicing law as well as partner and hire individuals who can help you achieve that. Partner with another lawyer who has the same vision as you. After that, look at hiring good lawyers who will do all the necessary work that will bring you success. That way, you can spend your day doing what you want to do.

Matt provides some insights on hiring staff based on culture and character, rather than experience. One way to do this is utilizing personality tests, inner metrics and multiple interviews to find the right fit. For Matt, anyone can learn a skill or aspects of a job. But, not everyone has the character or personality to work for a certain firm. As an owner, you need to determine what kind of firm you want to run and hire people based on what matters to you most.

Listen in to learn more!

• 2:01 Creative Side Hustles in Law School
• 4:13 Building a Business, Not Just Practicing Law
• 9:44 Hiring and Personality Fit
• 16:32 Buying Law Firm Real Estate 
• 23:23 Creative Financing and Seller Deals 
• 25:12 Renting vs. Owning Your Home
• 29:24 AI as a Law Firm Leveler
• 32:13 Preventing Lifestyle Creep in Law Firms
• 34:06 Impact of AI and the Future of Office Space
• 43:36 Who Runs the Firm?
• 47:20 Biggest Surprises in Partnership 
• 49:40 Implementing AI in the Firm
• 53:03 The Role of Hard Work in Success 
• 58:03 Importance of Emotional Intelligence (EQ)
  
  

Connect with Matt:

• Website  
• LinkedIn  

Tune in to today’s episode and checkout the full show notes here. 

Creators and Guests

Host

Tyson Mutrux

Tyson is the founder of Mutrux Firm Injury Lawyers and the co-founder of Maximum Lawyer.

What is Maximum Lawyer?

Maximum Lawyer is the podcast for law firm owners who want to scale with intention and build a business that works for their life.

Hosted by Tyson Mutrux, each weekly episode features candid conversations with law firm owners, business experts, and industry leaders sharing real strategies and lessons learned in the trenches.

If you're ready to grow your firm with less stress and more support, this is your next must listen. Subscribe today.

Tyson Matrux 00:00:02 This is maximum lawyer with your host, Tyson Matrix.

Tyson Matrux 00:00:11 So, Matt, you've got this really unique blend of like attorney, real estate investor, which I think is pretty cool. I think that's going to be pretty helpful for people when it comes to sort of investing in real estate, but then also you bring a different perspective. So I wonder how did that how did that blend happen?

Matt Anderson 00:00:31 Sort of by accident, I would say I accidentally went to law school, and I've always been business minded as the way I would put it. So back in, you know, college, I was doing entrepreneurial things, doing multi-level marketing and dabbling in different business ideas, figuring things out. And I really just went to law school because I didn't know what else to do. To be honest.

Tyson Matrux 00:00:51 I'm very curious. Okay. So let's let's get into some of the multi-level marketing stuff, because I've had I've actually dabbled in some of that stuff too, because I. I was very interested in the whole. I still am the whole idea of that business model.

Tyson Matrux 00:01:05 I it's funny because it's one of those things that it actually does work. If everyone works it, that's an interesting thing. So what are what are some of the ones that you dabbled in? Because I'm very interested.

Matt Anderson 00:01:15 Well, even before then, you know, I was always into stuff like that as a kid. Like, I'd buy, like, I went to the store when they were selling, like, Nintendo game cubes. Yeah, I bought a bunch of them with my friends and then resold them and and did stuff, you know, door to door sales when I was a kid. And so for me, it was just a thing to try to figure out. And it was called mana. So it was like this juice.

Tyson Matrux 00:01:37 Yeah. Okay. I haven't heard of that one before.

Matt Anderson 00:01:39 And I had family that was really into it, and it didn't work that well for me. I got some momentum and then kind of fizzled out for various reasons, but it was a really good learning experience to be in a young adult, reaching out to people I knew, getting some rejection, some, you know, some acceptance and just sort of figuring it out from like a sales perspective, I would say.

Tyson Matrux 00:02:01 one thing that I did was it's not as effective anymore, but early on, and I did this in law school to make extra money as I would go around to like goodwill and things like that and go and find books. And I would, I would go and I would search on my phone, okay, which books are good books to sell? Because some of the books are worth like $0.50, but some are like worth like $30. And they were selling for like a dollar at goodwill. So I'd go around and I would get I would just buy a stack of books for like eight bucks and then just go back and sell them. I get to the point where I was even getting, I was finding on Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist these big, lots of books for like $10 and just reselling it. And so I had these massive bookshelves. At least I had a massive inventory. But it is one of those things where there are little bitty creative ways of of making extra money that if you just look at it a different way.

Tyson Matrux 00:02:53 And I wonder, so taking that approach that you've had, how is that benefited you in the law firm? But then also like real estate investing.

Matt Anderson 00:03:02 Well, the other thing that segue into poker. So when I was in so after that, I got really deep into poker to the extent where my grades started to suffer, like.

Tyson Matrux 00:03:11 Oh.

Matt Anderson 00:03:11 No, my buddy here in town, he, he makes he jokes and tells people how we'd be in our mythology class and I'd be playing four seasons of poker.

Tyson Matrux 00:03:20 Oh my gosh.

Matt Anderson 00:03:21 During the middle of class. So like, it took it took a lot of twists and turns. But it's been really helpful from the law side. I think a lot of lawyers don't have a focus on profit and growth and the entrepreneurial side of owning a business, and they're more focused on serving clients, which obviously is a great thing to focus on. But I think I've always thought about things in that way naturally, and also from a time efficiency standpoint, like I'm always trying to figure out how to get the most bang for my buck with regard to time.

Matt Anderson 00:03:52 So I'm constantly thinking about how to be more efficient. Is this the best use of my time, or is that the best use of my time and leverage? How do I leverage people opportunities? You know, like your example? How do I leverage the fact that they're selling these books for $1 when they're going for $30? My mind has kind of developed that way.

Tyson Matrux 00:04:09 What are some creative ways in the law firm that you've identified that you can do that?

Matt Anderson 00:04:13 Well, the biggest thing for me is my journey with law. It went from learning the craft to figuring out how to spend as little of my time actually practicing as possible, to be honest with you. And so early on, I realized I was going to have to quit my job. But before I did that, I was doing real estate deals. I started a title company I was doing, I was creating other sources of cash flow and income to where I wasn't 100% dependent on the law. So I went from creating other sources of cash flow to trying to figure out, okay, how do I build up this law firm where I'm not the one grinding every day, like the solo law Practice attorney.

Matt Anderson 00:04:53 You see who does that for 50 years. And they do well and they make good money, and they probably enjoy it a lot more than I did. But that's not what I wanted. I wanted the law firm to be a business that I could eventually get out of the day to day.

Tyson Matrux 00:05:06 So why the why the law firm? Why go to law school? I'm curious. Because you're doing these other things and I wonder why. Why law school?

Matt Anderson 00:05:13 You know, I when I was in college, I was I was very into reading biographies and autobiographies and it was really interesting, the lawyer side of things. I started to notice how lawyers were very influential in various aspects of how the world developed and then in business. And I really didn't overthink it much other than I was teaching middle school at the time, and I knew I didn't want to do that.

Tyson Matrux 00:05:38 That's oh my gosh, you got there's okay, we want to get into that too. Okay.

Matt Anderson 00:05:42 So I knew I didn't want to do that long term.

Matt Anderson 00:05:44 And it just seemed to me that I could learn a lot, I could grow a lot, and then I could apply that in in any of the areas that I was interested in. And that's about as much as I had figured out.

Tyson Matrux 00:05:55 Gotcha. So it's funny because like, there are there are people that have law degrees that you're like, oh my gosh, like Tony La Russa, you know, the former managers of the Cardinals and the A's and like, he had a law degree. But I do I do think you're right. I think that having a law degree is even if you don't even use it, is is extremely beneficial. So I when it comes to like the actual law firm, what is the ultimate goal? I know you want to get it to the point where basically it's running itself and you can kind of, I guess, step away. And sometimes we'll I've heard people refer to that as the like the owner's box in a way. So do you think that is actually possible when it comes to running a law firm?

Matt Anderson 00:06:32 Yeah, I mean, I absolutely do.

Matt Anderson 00:06:35 Hopefully I'm not disproven.

Tyson Matrux 00:06:37 Yeah. I mean, I hope you're right.

Matt Anderson 00:06:38 To me, you know, like almost anything in life, it's sort of an experiment. But yeah, I think it's possible. I kind of decided the only way it was going to be possible was for me to let go of control of a lot of things and find partners and partnerships that worked where we could, you know, use each other's strengths. So I tried for years to do that. And it was the problem is it was a learning curve, you know, figuring out how to hire people and how to partner with people in a way that would actually mesh together. I do think it's possible. I don't think, you know, I think if you go into any business trying to be 100% passive, you're likely to be disappointed. You know, it takes work. It's just you can build a business in a way where what you're doing and the value you're bringing aligns with your strengths and your personality, right? So I'm never going to be maybe 100% out of the law firm, but perhaps my value can be generated from business development and relationships and some marketing and some strategy.

Matt Anderson 00:07:36 So I'll always be there working in some way, but maybe not writing a brief or going to court necessarily.

Tyson Matrux 00:07:43 How did you find the right partner or partners for that? because I. What's interesting is, is I've seen I mean, we've been doing this podcast since 2016 and it's I've see sometimes there's resentment, you know, where you've got the partner that's in there doing things all the time or partners, and then maybe you have this partner that's sort of on the outside that has had a significant role in growing the firm. But you've got this growing resentment because they're inside, you're outside. So how did you find the right partner or partners for them?

Matt Anderson 00:08:17 Well, a lot of trial and error. You know, I found I've worked with various people and for various different reasons, things didn't work out. Sometimes it was an ego related thing, sometimes it was just more often it was just not understanding fit. You know that certain people are just naturally inclined towards certain ways of doing business or certain roles.

Matt Anderson 00:08:39 Right? So, for example, I had a guy who's a phenomenal guy. We're still great friends. And, you know, we said, yeah, let's do this partnership thing. But come to find out, it's just not really what he actually wanted long term. And he sort of had to figure that out for himself. My partner now, I think I've learned a lot and I understood what I needed, which was rare. I needed somebody who really wanted to lead and run a law firm, but I also needed somebody who didn't have too big of an ego or didn't have certain issues that would prevent her from understanding what we were trying to create and and from not understanding the value I could provide. So that's the conversation we try to have a lot. It's not as much about who is billing, how many hours. It's about how am I adding value. Right. And so that's that's the focus that we try to emphasize.

Tyson Matrux 00:09:33 So let's say let's say I hire you. You come in, I want you to be my consultant.

Tyson Matrux 00:09:36 Right. And I want to bring in a partner. What sorts of things am I going to look at to determine whether or not a partner is the right fit.

Matt Anderson 00:09:44 Well, one of the things, and this applies to hiring, that I've learned a lot over the last 5 or 10 years, mostly just I mean, I was hiring people. I had no idea what I was doing. It started with the title company because I was running the title company on the side of the law practice. They were two separate companies, so I had to staff up the title company. And I mean, I swear, pretty much almost everybody I hired for the for the first several years was the wrong person. and I really started to understand the value of getting to know that person on a deep level. So we do a lot of personality tests and inner metrics and multiple layers of interviews now, in a way that I didn't used to do to really nail down who is this person, where are they going to thrive? Like, what are they meant to be doing? And you've got to figure out is this role what this person is basically designed to do, or they happen to kind of change themselves and morph themselves to try to adapt to that role.

Matt Anderson 00:10:42 and then you. And then you got to go into also the character ethics, you know, personality side of things too. But it starts with the fact that for most roles, 90% of people are just not a good fit for that role or more.

Tyson Matrux 00:10:54 That's true. Are there any particular personality traits that you all prefer?

Matt Anderson 00:10:58 Well, I, I lean on a business coach because I've realized I've tried to do too many things. And, you know, I can only master a few things, maybe in a lifetime. Certainly at one time. So I use I lean heavily on a business coach for that. And he does like five different personality tests in one. It's kind of like a, you know, grouped up testing. He does I know one's the disc test. I think one's like an inner metrics test. But there's several.

Tyson Matrux 00:11:23 There, there. I mean, there are so many tests at this point. Do you hire more for experience or more for the the fit, I guess. And, you know, it's one of those things where like when we look at people, we look at whether or not there are peop.

Tyson Matrux 00:11:39 So, you know, whether we got passion, the energy, ability to energize other people, whether they can execute on tasks, whether or not they have edge and all those mean different things. But I wonder, are you looking? Is there a certain person that you're looking for that you will then fit to that role? Or are you looking for more of someone that has that experience that that you can put into that role?

Matt Anderson 00:12:01 Yeah. And just to be clear, I definitely don't think I'm a hiring expert. I've made just enough mistakes to maybe help help people, you know, not make some of the same ones I used to. I used to just try to find the person with the experience. It's like, what are they doing? How confident am I that they can do that? Well, and that's kind of all I kind of thought. And then I started to realize that most of the problems I was having had nothing to do with knowledge. So, you know, it depends on the role.

Matt Anderson 00:12:28 Like if you're going to hire a partner at a litigation law firm, they need to they probably need to have some experience. And you can see that they know how to do the job because you can't necessarily hold their hand on everything. But for most roles, I think the character the culture fit in in those other aspects are more important than the experience, because anybody can learn a skill or a knowledge base, but sometimes only a small percentage of people can actually do what you're trying to fill. On the business side of things.

Tyson Matrux 00:13:00 I agree with you. I think the mistake that people make is they hire for experience. And I mean experience is important in many roles, but to me, it's the fit, the person, the the actual person themselves is. And to me, like the most important trades like can they figure it out? You know what I mean? Like can you? Because if you can figure it out, you can get the experience. Some people just cannot figure it out. And that is that to me is one of the most frustrating parts, because you think that you find someone that can figure it out because you put them through all these assessments and everything else, and if they can't just figure it out, that part's that just drives me nuts.

Matt Anderson 00:13:38 And that's hard. You know, in the interviewing process, that's tough to. Sometimes that's tough. You can do all the personality tests in the world, but until you're actually working along some side of somebody. Sometimes it's really hard to know what they're going to be like.

Tyson Matrux 00:13:50 Yeah. So tell me about the real estate investing. I want to shift gears with because I want to. I think that that part's really, really important.

Matt Anderson 00:13:55 Yeah. So I it starts with my wife, actually. So I met her in law school, and she had this crazy idea we were dating. She wanted to buy this house, and I thought she was a little bit nuts. Her mom thought her. She was really nuts. And we get the inspection report back, and it's super long and and she's like, I want to do this. So we move in. We kind of flip it ourselves. And and that was my first experience. And at the time I had been looking at like stocks and investing things and nothing really caught me.

Matt Anderson 00:14:25 To be honest. Stocks seemed pretty boring to me, to be honest with you. And I started listening to podcasts and reading books about real estate investing, and I was hooked, mostly because of the leverage side, you know, when you talked about the dollar book to 30, I'm listening to these stories of people who are buying houses for $0 and seller financing and doing all these creative things.

Tyson Matrux 00:14:47 Now, the risk is a little bit higher when it comes to houses compared to books, but the concept is the same.

Matt Anderson 00:14:52 Well, me and my buddy, I have a poker buddy who also transitioned into real estate, and we basically joke with each other that all we're doing is playing poker with with different chips.

Tyson Matrux 00:15:01 Interesting. Okay, so so tell me, why is that? It's because I want to help me understand that part of it. Because that. Because I look at it differently. But I don't play poker. So let's. I want to hear that.

Matt Anderson 00:15:12 I mean, it's not a perfect analogy, you know, but I mean, what you're doing is you're you're playing a game basically where there are certain rules to follow.

Matt Anderson 00:15:20 But mostly it's a game about people, right? And in poker, if you're going to do well, what you're doing is you're looking for opportunities where there's value, where there's a discrepancy in value basically. Right. So I know the odds and I know the bat. And if I make this move, I have, you know, asymmetrical upside to get a reward. And that's really what you're doing in poker or, and in real estate is you're taking advantages of opportunities that people don't see to create value in the marketplace.

Tyson Matrux 00:15:51 It's interesting. Do you think you could take that same concept and use that tool to apply that to buying law firms?

Matt Anderson 00:15:58 Absolutely. So, you know, I'm trying not to get ahead of myself, but one opportunity I see in the future is I think we've got a long runway. We want to grow revenue. And and, you know, I like to focus on one thing at a time when I can, but you can absolutely do that. And I've got a lot of colleagues, friends who they buy businesses, most of them not law firms for living, and they're looking for personnel upside.

Matt Anderson 00:16:22 Oh, if I bring in this person, I can add value to the business. Or if I add this market, I can, you know, so I absolutely think you can do it with business acquisition.

Tyson Matrux 00:16:32 I hear a lot of people talk about how you should really, as a law firm owner, go buy a building and then essentially lease that back to yourself. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Matt Anderson 00:16:40 Well, I have done that before.

Tyson Matrux 00:16:41 Okay. Let's hear about that.

Matt Anderson 00:16:42 So it's a double edged sword. For me, I learned how to really invest in real estate first. And then I did it like I had people reach out to me sometimes for advice on this exact topic. But a lot of times, if they have no real estate experience, the really, you know, real estate really, from my point of view, starts with making sure you get a good deal on the front end, and if you don't have any real estate experience, it's kind of hard to understand whether you're getting a good deal or not.

Matt Anderson 00:17:08 So with that caveat, you know, if you can get a decent deal on real estate, it can be amazing because you can buy the the building and a separate entity. You can lease it to your law firm company probably at a premium. You get to convert from a tax perspective. You can convert active income to passive income, because now you're taking some of your income and you're sending it to an LLC that you still own, for example. But now that's passive income that's taxed differently than ordinary income, and you get to be in control of your building. You're taking that money you would have paid in rent anyways. And you're you're using it to pay down debt.

Tyson Matrux 00:17:46 Okay. So there's a couple of things I want to cover there. The it's the the passive versus active income. We'll start with that. And then after that I want to get into what actually when you're looking at getting a deal on real estate what does that look like. So let's passive versus active talk about that.

Matt Anderson 00:18:02 Yeah.

Matt Anderson 00:18:03 And I'd go to my CPA for all this stuff. I don't I refuse to give people tax advice but but but my understanding from what I've done is, is basically well there's a few different layers to it. So right now with the bonus depreciation, for example, if I go out and I buy $1 million office and we're looking for this because right now our law firm is renting, if I go buy $1 million building, for example, I can do a bonus depreciation through cost segregation and probably write off about $300,000 of income.

Tyson Matrux 00:18:33 Right off the bat.

Matt Anderson 00:18:34 Immediately.

Tyson Matrux 00:18:34 Boom.

Matt Anderson 00:18:35 So it's, you know, October. If I close on a building in December. Well, the timing might be off if I can get the cost segregation done in order to apply it for this year, then I can offset $300,000 of my active income through bonus depreciation. So that's huge. Obviously. Then on top of that, let's say I'm paying five grand of rent where I'm where I'm currently at. Well, if I up the rent to $7,000, that's an extra 25 grand that goes, you know, comes out of my income, that's not taxed anymore.

Matt Anderson 00:19:09 Then on top of that, the 60,000 in that scenario that I was paying towards, the landlord is going to pay down debt, which I've borrowed, maybe at 5%. So I'm borrowing money at 5%. I'm paying down the debt with something that was already in expense. I'm getting a bonus depreciation. I own the building, so hopefully I'm getting appreciation and if it's a good deal, I'm probably getting cash flow too. So. And on top of that, you know, the biggest risk of owning a commercial building is your tenant leaving. Well, that's a little bit less risky when you're the tenant. You know, if you've got a decent law firm.

Tyson Matrux 00:19:42 So you've taken away the majority of the risk. Not all risk because there's no guarantee that your firm's going to, you know, succeed forever. But that's I mean, you have a lot of control over that, which is kind of nice. All right. So what then makes a good deal. So if you're looking let's say you are, you know, take you out of the scenario.

Tyson Matrux 00:19:59 Let's say you're just an average law firm owner. They're going to go look, they want to buy some sort of office suite or a building so that they can lease it back to their firm. What are they looking for?

Matt Anderson 00:20:09 Well, you know, it's going to be really dependent on the person, you know, somebody who's really focused on the law firm and they believe they're going to grow the law firm, and that's where their revenue is going to come from. They're not trying to be a real estate investor. You know, then then probably there needs to be a little bit more focused on how does the building encourage their business plan for their law firm. Right. So in that sort of scenario, maybe it's not as important to get a screaming deal on the building. Maybe it's more important that the building serves the, the the business. But I mean, the biggest thing is I was talking to a dentist not long ago who was trying to buy their building, spend time talking to commercial brokers.

Matt Anderson 00:20:48 You know, he almost bought a building and started talking to some brokers and realized, I'm going to way over pay for this thing, and I've got a writer refusal on the building anyways, you know? So really, just start to lean on experts is what I would say to understand values.

Tyson Matrux 00:21:05 Gotcha. Would it make sense to buy a building, maybe overpay for it? Are the benefits so great that maybe you overpay for a building? But the benefits are so great that when you get to lease it back to your firm, that it would still make sense.

Matt Anderson 00:21:23 In some scenarios that could wash out to be reasonable. I wouldn't recommend it because there's never a reason you have to overpay for a building. There's always a building that you can buy that's below market value, much less at market value. The only scenario that maybe I would encourage it potentially is like if you're leasing a building long term, you know, you want to be there, you're willing to pay a little bit of a premium because that building helps your business so much.

Matt Anderson 00:21:50 And you can offset that with some of the benefits we've talked about. So it could be reasonable to do that in some situations.

Tyson Matrux 00:21:56 I've sort of in the weeds question okay. All right. If you want to make improvements to the building okay. So because I know that whenever we've negotiated leases, you know, we negotiate where they'll pay for the, you know, certain improvements. And usually the I usually get a better deal if I do a longer term on the lease or whatever. Who pays for that? Is it something that the real estate part of the company, that we're not part of the company, the real estate company would pay for those? Or is that something that the law firm would pay for? Which one's a better idea?

Matt Anderson 00:22:27 If you own.

Tyson Matrux 00:22:28 Both. If you own both.

Matt Anderson 00:22:29 If you own both, it's probably the best idea for the law firm to pay for it, because you can just immediately cut that out of your your income. Now, it negatively affects bank ability. And you know you're going to show less income, right? Less profit.

Matt Anderson 00:22:43 So if that's important for you for that year that could be a consideration. But generally you're going to pay less taxes if you as a law firm pay for a bunch of things. Now your your profit goes down.

Tyson Matrux 00:22:54 So that that's to me that's sounded right, that logically that sounded correct. But I wasn't because sometimes there's things like that you would know because you're on the real estate side that I just, I wouldn't know, like I've already learned a lot from you on just on some of the few things. So that's, that's that's awesome. What are some of the, the other little things that if you're, if you're thinking about, I wouldn't say tinkering, you're thinking about investing in some sort of a building or a suite that the average person just wouldn't know.

Matt Anderson 00:23:23 Things that I would know. Well, you know what? One of the biggest things that I've leveraged is financing. I don't think a lot of people understand the financing side of things. And I remember hearing the saying back in the day, somebody said, oh, you know, sellers sometimes can be unreasonable.

Matt Anderson 00:23:38 And they're asked a lot of times they're unreasonable with prices. And the seller was asking for $1 million, and it was probably worth 700,000 or something.

Tyson Matrux 00:23:47 It's a little bit of a difference.

Matt Anderson 00:23:49 And he's like, I'll give you $1 million. I'll give you a dollar a day for a million days. And the point but the point is, you know, people fixate on price, but if you understand the nuances of financing, what you can realize is there's a lot of things you can tinker with to create value. Another buddy of mine calls it debt equity. So, you know, normal equity would be you bought a building for $500,000 and it was worth 700, and you have $200,000 of equity that equity might be. You bought the building for $700,000. It was worth $700,000. But you got a 30 year loan with 0% interest. Technically, you don't have any normal equity, right? But you have a tremendous amount of upside and value there. So that's the biggest thing I've learned is seller financing, creative financing, figuring out, figuring out ways to create value there.

Matt Anderson 00:24:42 And it's a really amazing tool. And especially in a debt fluctuating market like this, because you can buy things that other other people can't buy at prices they can't pay.

Tyson Matrux 00:24:53 Right. So I see people like I think Grant Cardone has said this, I so I don't want to fully attribute this to him, but I think he has said that he rents his house, he doesn't buy his he doesn't own the house. Is that does that why? Tell me how that makes sense. Does it make sense?

Matt Anderson 00:25:12 I think he even uses stronger language than that. I think he calls people idiots.

Tyson Matrux 00:25:17 So does it. Does that make any logical sense to you?

Matt Anderson 00:25:21 I mean, I think for some people, you got to be careful. Like, one thing I learned was I love learning from other people. But you got to be careful not to take too much from somebody that doesn't apply to you. You know, it's like the way I approach it is I can learn from anybody. But I probably, you know, if, you know, for me, I'm a family person.

Matt Anderson 00:25:39 I probably don't want to study somebody who's a billionaire who, you know, has no whose family is in shambles. Sure. At least not on the family part.

Tyson Matrux 00:25:47 Yeah.

Matt Anderson 00:25:47 That's true. So for Grant, I think he's in such a crazy position with this huge funds and that it probably makes more sense for him to rent. But for the average person, most millionaires, the bulk of their wealth comes from their from their home. So in theory, you know, if you can take your money and you can reinvest it in something that makes you 20%, perhaps your law firm, for example, you could take, let's say you got to put $200,000 on a house to buy it, but you're really confident that if you put $200,000 into your business plan, that you're going to grow your law firm substantially. Maybe it makes more sense for you to rent, because then you can take your cash and maximize the return on it. So I think that's that's mostly what he's getting at. He's getting at taking your cash and getting the most return on it.

Matt Anderson 00:26:33 But the reality of it is, is that most people and probably most lawyers, that's not really their skill set, right. So it depends on who you are. You need to understand yourself, what you're good at. Some people are better off taking more passive and safer approaches to building wealth.

Tyson Matrux 00:26:48 Got it. All right. So you have let's say you had a title company. Do you still have the title company? No. Okay. So you had the title company though. You have real estate firm. You have a law firm. You've been I mean, you've done you've done the poker. You were in middle school, teacher. I mean, you've done a lot of different things.

Matt Anderson 00:27:05 I used to own a property management company, too.

Tyson Matrux 00:27:07 Okay. And that's. We haven't gotten to that. Right? So lots of things. What? Soft spot Sports spots in the market. You see now and I'm talking about generally and it could be in the legal space, it could be outside the legal space.

Tyson Matrux 00:27:20 But I do wonder what. Because what's interesting to me is I've seen a massive investment in legal tech over the last few years. I'm we're talking about massive amounts of money has have flooded into the legal sector, and I'm wondering if that is a soft spot in the market. Generally, I'm using market very loosely. So I wonder if you've identified any other any other spots where you think you you might want to invest?

Matt Anderson 00:27:49 Well, I mean, from the business side of things. Well, let me start with this actually, because I think one thing that's going on that people are sort of aware of, but maybe not fully up on, is the inflation dynamics to where. So one thing I did years back is I took on as much debt as I could, which might sound counterintuitive, to buy assets that I felt comfortable I could hold on to. And one of the reasons I did that is because with the money printing cycles were going through, the values of the dollar is getting devalued tremendously. And I don't think there's there's very little indication to suggest that's not going to keep happening.

Matt Anderson 00:28:23 So the first thing I would say is get Ahold of hard assets like start using your money wisely. Stop letting the lifestyle creep go up so much. Take as much of your income as you possibly can, and get Ahold of as much hard assets as you possibly can. That's one thing that I think is applicable for pretty much anybody, whatever that means for you. Maybe it's buying one single family house. Maybe it's buying gold or Bitcoin. I think that's super important with the AI stuff. I mean, my personal philosophy is that one of the things that's going to do is in businesses where it has a lot of application, it's going to like in law, for example, I think it's going to be a leverage point for smaller boutique firms to compete with larger firms. I think it's going to be like gasoline fuel on the fire if you're trying to grow because you're going to. As we develop this AI, I think we're going to figure out ways to do a lot more with less people. And I don't know about for you, but for me, the hardest part of owning any of these businesses has been the people side of things.

Matt Anderson 00:29:24 So if I'm now all of a sudden, you know, maybe to do $2 million, $3 million in revenue, whatever your number is with 1 or 2 or 3 or 4 less people, that's a huge advantage.

Tyson Matrux 00:29:37 Massive.

Matt Anderson 00:29:38 Massive advantage. And I think that's an advantage that's going to be more for the smaller businesses than for the people you know, than the big firms with 200 people in it potentially. Now, some of them will figure out ways to take advantage of it. But my suspicion is that, like small entrepreneurial business owners will get the most benefit in in areas like law.

Tyson Matrux 00:30:00 I couldn't agree more. The the ability to leverage AI is such a leveling of the legal industry. There is. If I were running a massive, massive like Morgan and Morgan style firm, I would be worried right now. I really would be, because my worry is, is that the smaller firms are not going to use AI and leverage it because they are smaller and they're all busy all the time and everything.

Tyson Matrux 00:30:24 But if they'll take the time to invest in that, I think there's a massive opportunity for them to to take leaps and bounds. Totally do. So. I think you're 100% right about that. I'll tell you a funny, really funny story. It's it's funny. Now, at the time I felt bad, but so like our firm has got this culture of everyone's wanting to use AI and everything and perplexity just came out with their on their perplexity, perplexity, max level. They have this email assistant and it is really good. Really good. Oh, nice. And my, my executive assistant went into our CEO, my wife, her office the day after and I, I, I actually was playing around with it. I was just playing around with I said it the night before I had. I heard our Guild live show that morning, Wednesday morning. So this was a Tuesday. I was just playing around with it, and as I was doing the show, she went into Amy's office and was crying.

Tyson Matrux 00:31:21 She was like, am I getting replaced? And well, the our whole viewing is we're not we're not replacing our humans, our current humans. It doesn't mean we're in we are actually still actively hiring, but we it's one of those things where we're just turning into more of a I mean, we've always been a tech firm, but now we're more of a customer service based, right? So everything's more shifting. We're pushing everything into customer service. So it was it's kind of funny now at the time I felt bad for her. But you know, we explained to her, no, you're not getting replaced. You know, you are all these mundane things that you're doing in the email inbox. You're no longer going to have to do. So. I think it's great you said something else, though. I want to come back to you, said lifestyle creep. I think that that is such a valuable point. But sometimes you see that in law firms too. So how do you prevent the quote unquote lifestyle creep from happening inside the law firm?

Matt Anderson 00:32:13 Well, I'll tell you what I think the biggest thing is, is people and myself included.

Matt Anderson 00:32:19 We have this 90% of human beings, I think, are so concerned about what people think about them that they don't even really necessarily know or like. Yeah, I think that's what's driving a lot of it. Most of the time, where they feel like they need to have the office, that's as nice as the other firm. They need to have the reception area that's as nice. They need to drive the car that's as nice. Live in the neighborhood with the HOA, be a part of the country club. They think they need all the things and they don't need hardly any of the things. I was running the law firm out of, you know, I bought the building. I bought an office building. It was vacant. I moved my law firm in. At first we had a lot of space. Yeah, but as soon as we found tenants to replace it, I was we were basically working out of a closet, I mean, and, you know. And so I just think.

Matt Anderson 00:33:07 And I think it's really undervalued because when you take. You know, if you take 10 or 20 or 30% of your income personally or revenue and you can reinvest it and you, you know, go look up the charts of compounding. You know, they say it's the eighth wonder of the world. Yeah. Go look at the charts of compounding of what your business would do, or what you personally would do is if you just took like 10% of what you're wasting and you found ways to reinvest it over the next decade. And it's astounding the difference between those two people. And and that's one of our secrets as a family. What we did was we took a huge chunk of income. Reinvested it, reinvested it, reinvested it into hard assets. So I'm hoping as a firm, you know, we spend a little bit more on certain things now as we're growing. But I'm hoping that we can continue to be very frugal so that we can, you know, push that into fueling more growth.

Tyson Matrux 00:33:59 Do you think that as AI becomes more prevalent, that those hard assets are going to be more valuable.

Matt Anderson 00:34:06 I don't know what AI is going to do to hard assets. To me, it's all about the the inflation. Personally, I think AI is just going to I mean, I think AI and cryptocurrency are probably going to pair like a lot of these digital assets maybe will be fueled by AI, but I'm not so sure. If anything, I think AI is interesting in the sense of more rural areas in office, like how that's going to all interplay. Yeah, like I'm kind of concerned about the downtown office landscape for the future.

Tyson Matrux 00:34:39 Yeah, I, I've worried about that for since 2020. I think that's one of those things where and it's, it's one of those things where it seems like there's like this internal fight where, you know, a lot of businesses, they feel it's like that. It's almost like what you're talking about where like, they feel like they want to have that office because everyone else, some other people have that office. But then there's other people like, no, I don't really need the it's like this internal fight.

Tyson Matrux 00:35:01 And the reality is, is that you really don't need it. I think you're right. You really don't need it. It's not. It's not necessary. But I wonder, how long do you think that's going to happen? Like how there's this going by internal. I mean like as an industry, but also like as a as a, as the owner. It's like they have like this internal fight. Do I need this? Do I not need this? So how long do you think that that's really going to happen? And to the point where eventually I think eventually people are gonna be like, okay, we don't need the downtown office. So how long do you think that's going to that's going to go on? How many more years?

Matt Anderson 00:35:35 I don't know. I mean, I'm and I'm just making predictions are one of those things where you just throw things out there and at least at least half of them are wrong. But, you know, I think it's going to slowly develop over the next decade where, you know, like you've got Starlink.

Matt Anderson 00:35:49 I think if I understand the technology right. Used to be if you moved an hour away and you were in the woods, you really didn't have cell signal. You didn't really have Wi-Fi. I don't think that's going to be the same anymore. No. It also used to be that you just couldn't get a job if you weren't willing to interact on a daily basis in a, you know, in an office setting. That's not really the case anymore. So I can't really see a reason that trend doesn't continue. How long it takes to play out and what the end result means. I don't know.

Tyson Matrux 00:36:20 Yeah. All right. So let's talk about Anderson and Harrison. Okay. So this I mean, you just started at seven months ago, which I think is an interesting thing. So you're fresh into it and you started to go you went with a instead of a solo. You went with a partnership. And was that solely because you wanted to scale this into something where you can be in that owner's box, or did you? Were there other factors at play?

Matt Anderson 00:36:45 Yeah.

Matt Anderson 00:36:46 Well, so I had started my own firm back in 2020, and I had tried to bring people on with the mentality of that will be my partner and I never could get it to work. My partner now is Jeannie Harrison, and I've known her since law school, and so secretly I've told her this already. But she was on like, I had, like a little list of people who it might work, and it wasn't very long, and she was at the top of the list the whole time. Wow. So I had always thought, man, if you know, but she was working. She was making good money. She was she was doing her thing. I didn't know that it was ever going to be realistic. But we stayed in touch and and so I just had a feeling, an instinct that she would be the perfect partner. So that's kind of how it played out, is there are several years of me trying to find somebody learning the things we talked about earlier, and it just never working out, and I'm pretty optimistic that this is going to work well.

Tyson Matrux 00:37:43 Who initiated that conversation?

Matt Anderson 00:37:45 Well, I originally initiated it years back, and I found I had sent her like an offer several years ago. That was kind of one of kind of like what I do with real estate, where you send an offer and you're like, there's no way that's this is going to get accepted. Yeah, so I'd done that and I'd always told her, hey, I'd love to work with you or whatever. And I think she got to a point in her life where it made sense for her. And then she reached out to me.

Tyson Matrux 00:38:08 Very cool. And so she was working for someone. You were running your own firm. What was it like when you all started? When you. When you partnered? I I'd imagine she had her way of doing things. You had your way of doing things. So what was it like melding those two together?

Matt Anderson 00:38:24 So, you know, like they used the saying, you know, higher, fast or higher. Slow fire fast. Right.

Matt Anderson 00:38:31 And I think part of the reason for that is, at least in my experience, usually like sometimes even the first day, but definitely the first week or two weeks, months, you kind of know, like you, if you're aware and you're willing to look at it objectively, you kind of know, is this working the way I hoped it would or not? And I haven't done very well of hiring in the past or finding partners in the past, so I'd never had the experience to. Where you come into the office, you're working with somebody and you're like, wow, this is going great. Like, this is awesome. And that's what the experience with Jeanie has been like. It's been like, she comes in, she's, you know, and another way I've heard it say is when you add somebody, it's the person needs to raise the bar. So every time you add a person, they need to raise the bar of what what that business is like. And for me, that's what she did.

Matt Anderson 00:39:25 So there's been some things I mean, I probably have an unconventional way of doing a lot of things, so. But I'm not attached to the way of doing things necessarily. So it's been pretty fluid. We've had for me, I've had some instances where it's been hard to let go of control of some things. There's been some instances where we do things differently, but mostly it's worked really well.

Tyson Matrux 00:39:47 That's a great segue because I wanted to ask you about this. What did you have to change to make sure that this was going to be a successful partnership.

Matt Anderson 00:39:56 So this is going to sound weird, but I think that a lot of business owners would do a lot better if they went to therapy.

Tyson Matrux 00:40:03 Okay, let's let's get into this. All right.

Matt Anderson 00:40:06 And why is because like what I've what I think I've realized is that your business usually stops at wherever your personal development is, especially when you're at the top of a business or you're co-leading a business. Typically, whatever the business is capable of is going to be is going to stop somewhere.

Matt Anderson 00:40:24 And that place is oftentimes reflective of the personal development of of the leader. And I kept getting in my own way for various reasons. So, for example, I would work with people or hire people and, and not be comfortable leading them right or holding them accountable. For example, I also had issues with I probably overemphasized the client relationship things. That might sound weird, but I was so worried about making the clients happy and keeping them happy that it wasn't always aligned with the incentive of the business. I also was kind of concerned about what other people thought of me. Right. I didn't want to put myself out there. I didn't want to get on social media. I didn't want to create a brand, kind of stayed quiet. And so for years we only had word of mouth referrals. And that's changing. So I say that to say that like you need to look at yourself like, what are your fears? What are your worries like, what are the things that are holding back your mindset around what can and you know and should be done with the business?

Tyson Matrux 00:41:29 You said the thing about the clients and keeping the clients happy.

Tyson Matrux 00:41:33 Yeah. What's more important than keeping the clients happy?

Matt Anderson 00:41:36 Well, as a business owner, I think what's more important than keeping the clients happy is having a functional business and that your people are taken care of, right? So, for example, if you have a client who pays you a lot of money but they will be your partner or your receptionist. Then sometimes, you know, a lot of business owners will say, I can't fire this client. They're 10% of my revenue. That works short term, but it doesn't work long term. Sometimes decisions have to be made that don't take care of every client.

Tyson Matrux 00:42:06 I do agree with you. So whenever I asked that question, I wasn't challenging you. I. I almost have always sided with my employees. Whenever a client is unhappy about something. Now this is a really heavy, heavy caveat. Yeah. As long as we have done everything right. Right now, if we have done something wrong, we take ownership over it. And that's. But what I don't do is I don't go and berate our employee over it because we or we encourage mistakes.

Tyson Matrux 00:42:35 It was one of those things where we encourage, I know people are going to screw up something that's just it's just a life thing. Right? But it's, it's, it's it's an interesting thing because we also focus on a player's hiring like top talent. And you're talking about raising the bar. I really like that how every time you hire someone you should raise the bar. But what we don't do is we don't berate our people. We just, you know, we talk about it. Okay. It's a it's a lesson. But if it's something where a client is being unreasonable, I will almost always will. If if the client's being unreasonable, I will always sit with our employees. Because I do think that that's important because, like, how destructive it could be. We had we had an employee that would take the other approach. It was an attorney. And he would like he would try to he would try to talk down to the employees just because the case was big. And we're like, no, that's not how this works, because it has a really, really bad effect on the employees, which then are the ones talking to the clients that have an effect, a negative effect on the clients.

Tyson Matrux 00:43:36 So I think that that is such a such an important point, really important. I want to shift gears to, who runs the firm I because it's similar, but I do want to know who is running the firm. And by the way, Jeannie will probably listen to this. So it makes I want to know who's running the firm, who's in charge, basically her.

Matt Anderson 00:43:56 There are there are aspects of things, that I'm over in charge of. Like, I handle more financials, I handle more if there's collections issues, a lot of client relationships and business development, things of that nature. So a lot of the business side of things, I'm still running and she's kind of more learning because she hasn't done that before. But as far as the day to day, hey, run the cases, you know, that's her.

Tyson Matrux 00:44:24 Who's in charge of hiring.

Matt Anderson 00:44:25 Right now. It's well, right now it's kind of joint ownership, but I'm I'm doing more of that and taking more of a leadership role on that because I've got well, I've already made a lot of mistakes.

Matt Anderson 00:44:38 So it's like, you know, you know she might I would imagine she would make a lot less mistakes than I did, but hopefully I can, you know, help her. Hey, here's what I did wrong the last time and why I don't think this person's a good fit this time.

Tyson Matrux 00:44:51 It's interesting because you talked about your hiring process a little bit, and it's somewhat similar to ours because ours, we have multiple interviews, we have multiple assessments, we have personality tests and all that. And we I think it's really important sometimes what I get criticized for by other attorneys is, is the length of our hiring process. And I, I will not apologize for it. I it's one of those things where we take several weeks and months to do these, these assessments and tests and the interviews, because I think it's really I could game almost any hiring process if you don't put people through enough different scenarios just because it's, it's I mean, it's just like a test, you know, you prep prep for it, you can game the system.

Tyson Matrux 00:45:35 But getting to truly who that person is is really hard. And we still make mistakes with it. It's. But I wonder how you. Was it just trial and error, or did you go and like, did you learn your process somewhere? How did you figure yours out?

Matt Anderson 00:45:52 I don't think I have to be honest with you. I think some of the things I'm telling you today are more aspirational than like what I've actually done in the past. I think I'm just now getting to a point where I think I know what I want to do for the future, if that makes sense. But, I mean, anybody who's had to fire somebody, especially for a high paid roller, important role. It is so painful and it is so toxic sometimes, and it costs you so much money to work with somebody for six months, and then you got to fire them and you deal with the departure. Then you got to find the next person. And it's also like a huge momentum swing in the wrong direction.

Matt Anderson 00:46:31 And the opposite is also true. When you find somebody that's a rock star and they come in there and they raise the bar and you're like, and everybody is performing at a higher level. It's very, very valuable. So I agree with you. I mean, you know, it's a it's a tough environment. Like you've got to be competitive, right. You know and some people you find a good person sometimes you got to make an offer in a reasonable amount of time. But I, I think your way is probably better.

Tyson Matrux 00:46:58 It's interesting as you went five years, you had your own firm. You went through all these mistakes and everything. And when it comes to hiring, firing, when it comes to just running the firm in general, and then you bring on a partner, what was the most surprising thing, or what are some of the most surprising things about this partnership that you've learned over the last seven, seven months?

Matt Anderson 00:47:20 I mean, the biggest thing is, is kind of what I'm referencing is how much of a difference it makes when you find the right person with the motivation and the drive, and they're in there doing exactly what they want to do and they're good at it, it makes a huge difference.

Matt Anderson 00:47:36 And there's nothing wrong with any of the people I've worked with in the past. It's it just wasn't what they really wanted. You know, it wasn't the fit for them. That's the biggest thing I've learned is it's just opened my eyes to how much possibility there is. If you do take the time and you're really intentional and you're really clear on who you want, what you want, and you take the time to find that person.

Tyson Matrux 00:47:59 Yeah. The the vision for the firm. What what is your. And I know I'm not talking about the, you know, you basically going to the owner's box. I'm talking more like big picture for the firm. What what do you want to happen with the firm itself? Are you thinking more of a regional presence, local presence, national presence? What do you think? And do you have a big picture vision for it?

Matt Anderson 00:48:20 Well, I won't get too carried away. You know, I've got ideas on like ten year vision and bigger vision, but I try not to get ahead of myself.

Matt Anderson 00:48:29 I mean, the next step for us is to double our revenue. And then hopefully after that, then what we can start to do is to start taking on other areas of law that we're not. Right now we're pretty niche, and I've always been very limited on what I do. I pretty much have only worked with real estate investors for the most part, and real estate owners and developers and construction and litigation and real estate litigation. That's mostly what I've done. Jeannie has almost exclusively done construction and construction litigation, so we're pretty narrow and we're pretty careful on who we take. So I want to focus on doubling the revenue. Then then we're going to start talking about adding a practice area, maybe acquiring a firm. But I think the opportunity is just tremendous. There's I think there's a tremendous opportunity to serve the clients in a way that they don't have access to service right now in our market. and some of it's nothing to do with anyone doing something subpar. Some of it's just opportunities coming up, like the AI.

Matt Anderson 00:49:32 Yeah. And, you know, being able to run a firm with less overhead, like things of that nature, where you can create a better experience for the client and the staff.

Tyson Matrux 00:49:40 Have you all implemented any AI up to this point?

Matt Anderson 00:49:43 Oh yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, the other thing I'll say to real quick is I think that a lot of times law firms appropriately get slack for not having good work environments. I don't think that's a requirement.

Tyson Matrux 00:49:56 What do you mean?

Matt Anderson 00:49:57 Well, it's almost like a fraternity where it's like, you know, you have to get hazed, like it's it's like you got to come in and your life's got to be miserable because my life was miserable. And this is just how you make it. If you want to be a law partner and make decent money as a lawyer, then your life's probably going to be hell for a decade. And I just don't think it has to be that way. I don't think you have to structure your business that way, especially moving forward.

Matt Anderson 00:50:21 Maybe you did at one point in time, but at this point in time, you can start a firm, find out what client you want to serve. Leverage technology, leverage AI. You know, and I think it's possible to create a different work environment. Right now we're we're kind of new in the AI. You know, I use it we use it some to for some document review. We do it some to do research and create research memos. Sometimes we'll use it to to draft lengthier emails and create articles, different things like that kind of base level. But we're looking into all kinds of cool stuff. Like for example, I'm being trained right now on how you can use like an hour of your own video to create modules and videos, training that AI, you know, puts your face, your video, and you're teaching the client about things and you don't have to spend any time on it, for example.

Tyson Matrux 00:51:15 It's pretty incredible.

Matt Anderson 00:51:16 It's pretty crazy.

Tyson Matrux 00:51:17 I will say this something more interesting that you just said I want to go back to because, you were talking about, you know, the, you know, being miserable for the first ten years and, you know, the, the hazing all kind of stuff.

Tyson Matrux 00:51:29 Yeah, I agree, but I want to I want to I want to zero in on that a little bit. Okay, I do wonder and I don't want to give my opinion on this, I want to. I'll give my opinion after after you give yours. But, Are you saying that. Is that the same as working hard for ten years and hustling for ten years, or is that different from what you're talking about?

Matt Anderson 00:51:50 That's different from what I'm talking about.

Tyson Matrux 00:51:51 Okay. Can you talk about the differences?

Matt Anderson 00:51:53 Yeah. Now, don't get me wrong. I think we're entering. Look, there are some things that are really hard to do part time. I would say being a litigation attorney is extremely tough to do part time.

Tyson Matrux 00:52:04 I would totally agree. I don't know how it's possible, but yeah, I've.

Matt Anderson 00:52:08 I've done it for five years, believe it or not. You know, I've built less than 1000 hours for the last five years, but it's hard. It's really tough. So I think there's a place for people like that, like me.

Matt Anderson 00:52:20 But I think I'm unusual. But for the most part, I'm not really talking about working hard because I'm working hard doing other things too. Right? I'm I'm doing investing. I'm doing networking, business development. So I'm not really talking about not working hard. I'm just talking about working hard to work hard for for hard sake or in order to really squeeze the most juice out of everybody to get as much profit to the top of the law firm pyramid as possible. That's more. It's more of a cultural mentality thing than than about how hard somebody works. I think there's always going to be a place for somebody who wants to come in and build a lot of hours and is a really hard worker, and I think it's really always going to be very hard for someone to find their place if they're not a hard worker.

Tyson Matrux 00:53:03 How important do you think to success is is working hard? So how do you think that? Because the reason I'm asking this is you have a lot of a lot of different companies.

Tyson Matrux 00:53:15 And really sometimes law firm owners talk about, you know, this, you know, lifestyle firm and how but they they claim you can become successful, you know, working part time. You know, not really working hard. That's the sell cell is. You don't really have to work hard. You don't really have to hustle to become successful. And I wonder what your thoughts are on that.

Matt Anderson 00:53:34 Yeah, I think and I'm trying to think I know probably I'm in a lot of networking groups and stuff like that. I know probably 500 multi-millionaires by first name kind of know a little bit of their story or whatever. And I would say I might can only keep think of a couple who were not hard workers first before they figured out how to work smart. So that's kind of the way I think about it, is it's you got to work hard before you learn how to work smart. And I think you always if you want to keep growing and building wealth or building a business, you always have to be willing to work hard.

Matt Anderson 00:54:08 Now, there are there are people I know, business owners who are out of the day to day and they don't know what to do next, but they've got a track record. They've got a history where if something hits the fan, something goes wrong, somebody leaves, they're willing to get their hands dirty and work very hard to fix it. I think that's the mistake in the mentality is, I don't think there's anything wrong with the aspiration of I want to create a really freedom oriented lifestyle, and I want to work less one day. That's my goal. Or I want to create passive income. But if you think you're going to get there without working hard, you're probably not right.

Tyson Matrux 00:54:42 Right? No, and I agree with you. It's one of those things where I, I get frustrated whenever I see people selling, you know, the success with the not working hard because it's those don't go together and because what you see is I've seen this way too many times. You have the frustrated then law firm owner that says, well, I've been doing these things and I've got this, I've got this freedom, but I'm not making any money because there it's one of those things where like, they've got this freedom because they're the freedom is that they're not working there, they're going and doing these other things.

Tyson Matrux 00:55:12 But the reality is, I think that you can if you do a lot of the front end hard work, you can then set up all these processes and everything where you can. Then on the back end you don't have the hard work, but it's I think that if you. Yeah. Sure you can have this, this sort of thing where you're not making a lot of money. Everything's kind of just. Okay. You'll have a little bit of the freedom, but that's it's going to always be that level. It's never going to get better than that. That's as high as you're going to go and you're not going to get any better. But if you do put in that hard work and you know, the word hustle has gotten such a bad name, you know, the hustle culture. And that's the part that you're talking about. I think it's yeah, you shouldn't have the hustle culture, but you should still work hard and you should you should encourage people to work hard. Otherwise you're not going to have the success that you're really ultimately wanting.

Tyson Matrux 00:56:03 You're just not going to just the unless you get lucky.

Matt Anderson 00:56:06 Well, and you see people, it can be done. You know, people win the lottery too. But I also think that if you don't earn something, it doesn't end up being as great as you expected. It's typically how it tends to play out. But, you know, like I bought a building at one point and it was like an easy project and it ended up creating $50,000 of cash flow a year. And I'm like, wow, that was easy. And somebody who saw that, they're like, wow, that's amazing. Like, I wish that was me sort of thing. But what they didn't see was, as a baby lawyer, me working full time, taking investor calls while we're flipping our own house that we're living in, while we're driving down an hour away to renovate ourselves, small multifamily houses and how over ten years, I figured out how to put myself in a place to be able to do a project like that.

Matt Anderson 00:56:53 And when I bought it, I had, you know, this contractor relationship of ten years, this commercial broker relationship of ten years, the people who could help me, that I'd built relationships over a decade. So that was a lot of intentionality and hard work to get me into place, to have the opportunity to not work hard for that money.

Tyson Matrux 00:57:12 Ten year overnight success.

Matt Anderson 00:57:13 Yeah, exactly.

Tyson Matrux 00:57:14 What's harder? Real estate or the law?

Matt Anderson 00:57:17 Oh the law. It's way harder.

Tyson Matrux 00:57:19 Why?

Matt Anderson 00:57:20 You know, that's a good question. It's just takes a lot more technical expertise and a lot more EQ. I mean, you're dealing with and every area law is different, so I really only know mine. But you're dealing with clients who are dealing with difficult situations. You're dealing with lawyers who are out to basically, you know, got your case. You're in high stress environment, you're on deadlines. And then hiring is tough because you got to find people who are really good, really good. Whereas real estate, you know, I can I can, keep low staff, low overhead, find a good offer, take my time and find a good opportunity.

Matt Anderson 00:57:59 And it's just easy. It's just easier to be honest with you.

Tyson Matrux 00:58:03 Talk about the importance of EQ. You mentioned that. I think that that's that's a really wise thing to bring up. So talk about that.

Matt Anderson 00:58:09 Well, you know, like in the example of I mean, it applies in so many different ways, but just use clients as an example. There are some lawyers who are phenomenal lawyers. And then at the end of the case, their clients think they suck.

Tyson Matrux 00:58:23 Yes.

Matt Anderson 00:58:24 And then there are other lawyers who. They're not that great. But at the end of the case, they're lying. Their clients think they're amazing. So there's something there.

Tyson Matrux 00:58:33 It's funny you say that because I had a I. It's one of the three family law cases that I took on. The one was, it was a favor, and I'm sure I got just just rolled. In that case, from a legal standpoint, I'm just positive I just got my butt kicked cause I was going against some, you know, family law attorney that knew what the heck she was doing.

Tyson Matrux 00:58:52 And but her her client was just screaming at her in the hallway and mine was hugging me. You know, it's a completely different experience, but it is interesting how like, the way you can make someone feel exactly has such a major impact on on the relationship.

Matt Anderson 00:59:12 Exactly. I think one of my biggest skill sets that I sort of stumbled into was creating high levels of trust with people in short amount of time. And and then the other one is being selective. I think I learned this from tenant selection. You learn. Early on as a landlord, how super important it is to select the right tenants and to avoid a bad tenant. And I think it's similar with clients, you know, if like the client selection process I think is underdeveloped in a lot of firms where it can be really, really nice to have almost exclusively great clients.

Tyson Matrux 00:59:47 Interesting. Can you talk a little bit? I was going to I was going to wrap with one other question, but I want to go into this. What is the if you're looking at tenants, what are you looking for? What makes a good tenant other than the ability to pay?

Matt Anderson 01:00:00 Well, you got to be careful nowadays because you don't want to accidentally.

Matt Anderson 01:00:03 You know, if you don't do things in a consistent way nowadays, you can get in trouble with discrimination and things of that nature, even if you're not intending to do something. So, you know, let's just say there's processes in your state you need to follow, But, you know, there's the obvious things like no bankruptcies, you know, bad criminal records and not paying things on time. There's obvious things like that. But there's also softer things like responsiveness, accountability, responsibility, sort of mindsets, you know, things of that nature that you can pick up on as well. You can't use those as much in tenants anymore if you ever could, because you got to make sure you're you're doing a fair process where there's no discrimination. But for clients, you can take whoever you want or not take whoever you want. And there's a this quote forever ago is which is like when somebody shows you who they are, believe them the first time.

Tyson Matrux 01:00:58 Right. Yeah.

Matt Anderson 01:00:58 I've used that a lot because it's like I used to when I, you know, because I've basically gotten all my own clients for a very long time.

Matt Anderson 01:01:05 And I used to I'd hear something like, I don't like what they said there. That gives me a little bit of a knot in my stomach. Or like, I don't know if I believe what they're telling me. There'd be these different things, and I'd overlook it because I really wanted the client, and I really wanted the money. I started to learn that almost every time my gut told me, this is going to be a difficult client, I was usually right and worse than I expected. So I just started to to be very intentional about feeling the clients out in the cases, out and and basically if it wasn't a definite yes, saying no.

Tyson Matrux 01:01:38 All right. Let's wrap with this question. And Jeannie, turn the turn the the show off. Everybody else, everybody else keep watching and listening. But oh, so you're looking at the next ten years. You can invest in one thing the law firm or real estate. Which do you choose and why?

Matt Anderson 01:01:56 Well, I mean, I think she would know the answer to this.

Matt Anderson 01:01:59 It would not be the law firm for me, because for me, I'm going to have to be dependent on other people. the reality of it is, is I got to a place in law where I almost walked away from it because it just was creating too much strain on me personally for my life. I think I'm a good lawyer. I think I'm a really good lawyer, but I don't think that it fits what I want for my personal life long term. And frankly, like I said, real estate is easier and more fun for me. I think she already knows that. But that's that's a good thing also, because it allows me to come at the law firm from a mindset of we can create something special here and we can build up something, and it doesn't have to be about me, right? Like, I'm only doing my job with the law firm if I'm helping making people better and and creating ways to add value to the other people in the firm, I don't have to, you know, take any certain thing from it.

Matt Anderson 01:02:53 Like, as long as I'm adding value, then I've got a role.

Tyson Matrux 01:02:57 Love it. Matt Anderson, thank you so much. Appreciate it.

Multiple Speakers 01:02:59 Thank you.