Invest In Yourself: Building Up Your Fundamentals So You Can Find Success In Your Industry With Jason Matthews
If you really want to succeed in your industry, you need to have a knack for learning. The ability to just constantly educate yourself. Read every book, do research, get mentors, or listen to podcasts. Do what you have to do so that you can succeed and don’t make mistakes. Strengthen your fundamentals and move up from there. Join Tim Herriage as he talks to real estate executive Jason Matthews about his journey into real estate development and construction. Discover how he did it by investing in himself. Learn how he put some of his sports philosophies into creating a successful business. And find out how Jason is helping ethnical minorities break into the real estate industry. Start educating yourself today! — Watch the episode here Listen to the podcast here Invest In Yourself: Building Up Your Fundamentals So You Can Find Success In Your Industry With Jason Matthews I’m here with my good friend, Jason Matthews. Jason, thank you for coming to town. Thanks for having me. I’m looking forward to it. One of my favorite guys. I don’t know about all that, but let’s start off. Why don’t you tell the audience a little bit about yourself. Jason Matthews, born and raised in Los Angeles, California, and played high school and college basketball. I used that life of basketball, that vehicle, to guide me through my business career. I’m now living in Tampa. Many years as a real estate investor. I’m married. I’m a dad of three, great kids. I’m happy to be here in Dallas, Texas with you. I’m glad you’re here. I like to start with what I call the Bottom-Line Up Front. Imagine someone’s reading, they’re excited, they have to stop to do something for 5 or 10 minutes, and they forget to go back to reading. Let’s try to find a way to tell them the most important things happening in the market now, your opinion about that, things you think they should be focused on, things they should be doing, and maybe some things they should be avoiding. The most solid advice I can give people at this point in time is to focus on their education. You have to dig deep into the fundamentals because the fundamentals will teach you how to make adjustments. In the real estate market that we’re dealing with right now, things, underwriting guidelines, and values are changing so rapidly. You got to drill down into the fundamentals and know how to make adjustments. Our approach has been to study what’s going on, relying on the knowledge that we’ve gained over the last 25-plus years, and make the right adjustments. We’ve done a great job so far of doing that. We also have an action plan with more rate hikes to come. We also have an action plan with looking at some different uses for our short-term rental portfolio that we have. That’s what it’s going to take to be successful and get through the next few years. I’ve invested in my education on a continuous basis. I’ve invested in a couple of courses that have helped me. I’m investing in some more excellent coaching. I’m in a phenomenal real estate mastermind group that has a lot of talent, knowledge, and experience. I came into the year 2020 expecting to have to make these adjustments, expecting to build our infrastructure a lot stronger with the growth of our portfolio. That’s what we’ve been able to do. It’s worked well for us. I got to meet you in the Boardroom Mastermind in Denver in June 2022. You were immediately one of those impressive human beings, not because you’re a short man because you’re rather tall, but because you were soft-spoken but intelligent. I like to have intellectual conversations at times. I want to go back to something you said in the bluff. You talked about education and a team. It seemed like you were leveraging other people’s knowledge. Going back to your time in sports, because we talked a lot about that when we first met, what is it about having a team specifically in times like this that helps you? To be a part of a team, to have a team, I was fortunate. My dad put me in team sports at four years old at tee-ball. My dad was my Little League coach for ten years. It’s a phenomenal experience. You have to be on time and prepared. It’s not all about you. You can’t win the game by yourself. My dad was big on sportsmanship. Knowing how to get along with your teammates and realizing that even if you’re right, it’s okay not to have to tell everybody that you’re right. That transferred into being a businessman. I’ve never liked the vertical management of our businesses and being an entrepreneur. I’ve always preferred to work in a team. Whether I agree with it or not, I value the input from others on our team because they have different perspectives. They live in different neighborhoods and cities. They’ve had different experiences, personal experiences, family experiences, and business experiences. I want to look at the whole global view of what’s going on out here. I believe that a major reason why I’ve been able to stay in this industry for many years through all the real estate cycles and ups and downs and things of that nature is that I am willing to listen and learn from a variety of different people. I’ll give you a good example. When I was younger in the business, if I had a major business decision to make, I would intentionally ask one of my mentors’ opinions. I would ask one of my colleagues’ opinions. The third person I would ask would be someone that’s not even in the real estate industry. That was my process. They gave me three different perspectives. I added my perspective and then I move forward with the decision. That was a practice
Read More
