Taking The Leap From Fired To Founder, with Matt Goodwin

Dan Sullivan: Hi, this is Dan Sullivan. I'd like to welcome you to the Multiplier Mindset Podcast.

Dan Sullivan: Hi, this is Dan Sullivan, and I've got a great one today, and that's Matt Goodwin, who's from Naples in Florida, beautiful Gulf Coast. It reminded me of a question I was asked once, and the question was, of all the entrepreneurs you've coached, and I've coached since 1974, it's just a little bit above 7,000 entrepreneurs that I've personally interacted with, and they asked me, is there one thing that all the entrepreneurs that you work with have one characteristic? And I said, yeah. And they said, they're all killers. And I said, killers? And I said, yeah. I said, and some of them are quiet. Some are loud. Some of them are extroverts. Some of them are introverts. Some of them are great talkers. Some of them mostly just think a lot. But they kill off all alternatives except doing what they have their mindset on. And I have that. And you could just see this resoluteness that he has that once he locks on to his goal, he's going to deal with any obstacle in his way and turn it into his advantage.

Matt Goodwin: My name's Matt Goodwin, I'm a real estate attorney focused on real estate transactions throughout the state of Florida. I have a law firm and a title company and we handle the money when you're buying or selling your house. We also handle the legal issues if one comes up. So we clear title and we deal with all the funds, we work with the lenders, we work with hundreds of realtors across the state and also independent investors. You know, when I finished high school, I didn't ever have a traditional job. I had to go generate business or I didn't get paid. They were always commission-based jobs. And then I learned how to cold call, and I learned I never quite fit into that employee mindset. I worked for, for instance, a Sprint store in the suburbs of Detroit before I went to school, formal training, and they joked around and called me CEO. Well, it wasn't meant to be. It was more like, this guy acts like he owns the place, sort of thing. And I always had that mentality. Fast forward many more years, I finished my undergrad and my law school studies, was working for a law firm, and I got fired after six months being on the job. And then I realized that if I go sell myself and my credentials to another company, this is probably going to happen again because I don't like being told what to do or how to do it. I like to just go out and generate business. And I've done it before, so why can't I do it again? And I have my own ideas. And I had so many of my own ideas, and I didn't want to take anybody else's direction. So I said, I've got to start my own thing. I told my wife. Within three hours of being fired, I decided I was going to start my own law firm. So I went to the library every single day, scoured the materials with the Florida Bar and cold called people and just read a lot and just started branding and learning how to, like, what do you do? I designed my own logo. I designed my own website. Basically built it all with a vision from scratch and learned a lot along the way. I lived in South Florida my entire life, born and raised, and then we ended up in the suburbs of Detroit. I was doing loan officer work at the time, and then I worked remotely. This was right before the crash of the subprime mortgage market. And within three months of us moving to Michigan, I was fired. And then the entire retail division of the company I was working for was shut down. And then the guy who fired us was fired. And then the whole world turned upside down with that sort of thing. And then I'd already enrolled in school. Started going to school and got really good grades and then got pushed by my wife primarily to go to the best school I could get into, University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. The community college was $70 a credit hour. Actually, not even the community college. University of Michigan has three campuses, or they did at the time. And the campus that was most practical was $70 a credit hour. Ann Arbor was $1,300 per credit hour. And I look at my wife at the time, and I remember thinking, this doesn't even make sense. Why would I do that? She said, well, if you get in, you have to go. You can't just get into the University of Michigan and pick your campus. You have to apply. Well, they have a 95%, 96% attrition rate, which means most people who start, they finish. So it's hard to get in, especially as a transfer student. So I was able to get in, and made the commute an hour every day. And that's when I just worked on myself more, stayed focused on studies. But fast forward to the end of that, our first son was born at two months before I started law school, actually less than two months. So we started law school, which is, the first year is supposed to be the hardest. We had an infant, we had no family. My wife started as an attending in a hospital, which means she was now the leading ER doctor, and we had a live-in nanny. And we went through three nannies total, but I was able to graduate from University of Florida Law School with honors. Barely any gray hair, surprisingly. More of the gray hair started to pop up after my first few years in practice on my own. But when you start a business, sometimes on blind faith, which maybe just come out of confidence, you have to get one client that's going to start you and give you the margin of time you have that's going to give you cash flow to pay your bills. Well, I found that source, and then from there, I had the confidence and the experience to just approach and market myself everywhere. So I cold-called lawyers. I took them to lunch. I cold-called financial advisors. I joined the organizations that I knew I wanted to be a part of that were going to generate referral business for me. And things just started to happen. I got on the committees that people said I would never get on unless I was a board-certified real estate attorney or knew somebody on the committee. Well, a couple lawyers encouraged me to just apply, and then that got me in front of more of the players in town. Over the last several years, I've just planted a bunch of seeds in those early days and started to see them bear fruit. Like, all right, so what's next? I say that I just have 10x’d myself multiple times where I remember looking at $75,000 in a quarter was like, yeah, that was good money because that was a little higher than the salary I got as a first year associate at this law firm that fired me. So I'm like, all right, that's good, but it's got to be more, right? So I just kept doing what I was doing. And then before I knew it, I was at $300,000 for the year, you know, and $600,000, and then a million. And then I have gotten to the $2 million revenue standpoint. And I just keep thinking bigger and bigger. Well, in 2018, I went from being a lawyer to being a manager. And that's when things got really hard. That's when all those books I read as a sales guy 20 years prior were coming back out off the shelves and from the Audible archives. One of the things that I attribute my confidence to is the thick skin I developed making cold calls in my 20s. Six years, we would say, smile and dial. We would take leads, we would call them, we'd get a disconnect, we'd call the next one. We'd get a, this number's out of service, call the next one. Someone would pick up and then hang up, call the next one. Someone would pick up, we'd start to talk, and then they'd say, not interested, hang up, call the next one. And from time to time, we would call back the people that we knew hung up on us. We'd say, I think we got disconnected. I just wanted to finish talking about what we were talking about. And I learned all these little tactics, you know, how to take a no for an answer, but not settle, right? So the sale started at no. That really went a long way because I look back at my earnings over those from my early 20s to mid-20s, even close to 30, and it was sad. All right, something's not working, but I'm going to fake it ‘till I make it. And you hear that, and you say that, and sometimes it has a negative connotation to it, because you're like, who are you trying to fool, right? But I read these books, I bought this program. I tried this thing. I made some money. And then over all those experiences, you realize that you're not really faking anything. You're just acting as if. And you have to have confidence. And I went through so much as a kid, a lot of stuff. It was hard. That just made me who I am today, whatever you believe you can achieve. So speaking of that, that was my favorite saying from Napoleon Hill, is that, “Whatever the mind of men can believe, they can achieve.” And it's so funny because I read that book, Think and Grow Rich, when I couldn't even grasp the concepts in it, didn't have a college degree. And when I was in my first year of law school, second semester, they give the opportunity to greet the incoming law students. Or no, it was my second year. Then you have to apply, though, to become one of these ambassadors. And they interview you to make sure you're not going to make the school look bad. You know, it's a top school and, you know, certain caliber of students and, you know, getting in is one thing, but being the face of it is another. Well, one of the questions was, tell us about a mentor of yours. And I couldn't think, I was like, what is a mentor? I was 30 years old in one of the top law schools, went to one of the top public universities in the country, and I still didn't have this concept. And I knew what a mentor was, don't get me wrong, but I don't feel like I ever truly had a person. So I said, Napoleon Hill. This is after searching deep for, gosh, I got to have something to say. I was thinking, an older man who's wise and smart and took me under his wing. Well, that didn't exist. So I said, Napoleon Hill. And the lady looked at me like, isn't he dead? I said, yeah, thinking that either I said something that was wrong. And I was just like, I didn't say this. But I thought, who cares? That's my answer. Needless to say, they did not make me an ambassador that year, and I didn't even bother trying again. And I always felt like I thought differently. I stood out differently. I paid my own way through school. I applied every year for student aid. My mom was a waitress, still is. Dad was gone years ago. Never had that support from an educated parent or a wealthy parent, you know, because you don't have to be educated to be wealthy. But I had neither one. And then I had to sort of inject myself in these circles and just kind of seek out my own mentors. And that's where cold calling came into play in the future. I was able to just pick up the phone. Hey, I want to learn more about your practice. Can I take you to lunch? And I did that for the first three to six months in Naples, where I ended up landing, sometimes five days a week, someone different. Half the time, they would pick up the bill. And I was all intention of buying all these lunches and not necessarily smooching people or trying to manipulate anyone, but just doing field research. All of a sudden, I was getting referrals from longstanding attorneys because instead of hanging my shingle and saying, I'll take whatever you got, I narrowed my focus from the beginning. People said a couple things. Good luck making it in Naples. That's a good old boy town. It's not going to happen. You should try Lee County. I had people say that to me. I'm like, OK, thanks. And it's like, kind of brush it off. I won't be calling or answering their calls again. Next. And then you shouldn't narrow your focus so soon. You're not going to have any cash flow. And you've got to learn this stuff. And I said, well, why? Why not? So I put on my business card, this is what I do. And I don't do anything else. And you could have brought me a check for $20,000 if it was for something that I didn't do. I would refer it out because I didn't want to be branded as the general practitioner. And it worked. And it still works. And now I continue to narrow my focus. And now I'm focused more on working on the business rather than in the business. And I have multiple locations. We do business across the state. I have a total of nine of us. And I look back on the friends of mine that I grew up with. I surpassed every single person in my high school class that I know of. But those things, those hard times made me who I am today where nothing really scares me except maybe jumping out of an airplane, which I haven't done yet. No one gave me a rule book, even though there's books for every topic you can think of. So I learned a lot of things the hard way and still am. 2021, my wife was the breadwinner for the first several years, having gone to medical school, working in a multi six-figure job while I was in law school. That enabled me to have the margin of time to study, focus on studies. and not worry about paying or even largely contributing. We weren't overspending, splurging or anything. We just had a comfortable lifestyle. Then she was getting burnt out and wanted to go part-time and go out on her own. And I wish the timing was a little different, but in 2018, when I started to really take off and started to pay myself, she went part-time and there wasn't any. So I was like, can we both be doing good at the same time? Like, all right. So I was thinking we got one to three years of that and fast forward to 2021 when I 10x'd again or multiplied in every way, I had a significant amount of monthly positive cashflow that enabled me to, you know, take trips with the family, not come in on a day, and the revenue was still being generated and money was being booked. Take the kids somewhere, go on a family vacation. I mean, we took the kids to Spain when my youngest was 10 months old. My oldest was five years old and people say, you're nuts to do that. But, you know, did a little business here and there. I make a conscious effort in the mornings to connect with the kids. And my wife and I are continuing to work at scheduling that time where it's just us. And because she's also a business owner now, it is complicated. So in terms of freedom, there's a lot of it. But I'm still in that growth stage. So it's hard to sit back and say, I have the ability to do this. But now I'm more conscious of it. What's next? You know, I might end up doing a joint venture with somebody in the same field with real estate. I might buy a commercial building. I don't know exactly what's next. I'm focused on strengthening the foundation that I started with this team that I have now and identifying where my unique contribution is. And I'm getting close. We've been rebuilding our team over the last several months, and certain things have come to light. So I'm almost at that re-education stage, where I'm seeking higher education once again, going back to some of even the basics, just to figure out what's next.