Treat Everyone Well: Interview with Kyle Matthews, Founder and CEO of Matthews Real Estate Investment Services
I recently went one on one with Kyle Matthews, founder and CEO of Matthews Real Estate Investment Services. Before becoming a successful real estate entrepreneur, Kyle played safety at USC, winning a national championship in 2003.
Adam: Thanks again for taking the time to share your advice. First things first, though, I am sure readers would love to learn more about you. How did you get here? What experiences, failures, setbacks or challenges have been most instrumental to your growth?
Kyle: I went straight into commercial real estate brokerage out of college. I started very slowly, but I knew I would never quit. I avoided the “the valley of despair” that so many go down into and never come out of, and I was confident I would make it, and eventually, I did.
I started putting deals together, one after another. Fast forward about 10 years into my career, where the company I was at was being sold organizationally and subsequently restructured, and the only path forward for me was to go out on my own. From there, I started my own company called Matthews Real Estate Investment Services™. I started the company in 2015 with around 20 people. Now, we have around 450 people in 14 offices around the country.
I self-funded the company with my own money, with no debt and no investments. While that created its own set of challenges early on, the company has now hit its stride, and it’s refreshing that my team and I have total control over the direction of the company.
The major setback that comes to mind is obviously the Spring of 2020 when COVID-19 hit, and our entire pipeline almost blew up in a span of 60 days. We had a significant payroll, rents across a dozen offices, and various other types of expenses. At that moment, it looked like revenue would be gone for a long time, but we decided that we would not fire or furlough anyone for as long as we possibly could. All the executives took a material pay cut, and we kept all of our people. Miraculously the market came back very quickly in the second half of 2020, and we went on an 18-month commercial real estate bull market, the likes of which I had never seen. That was only possible by having our entire company still intact coming out of those first couple of months of the pandemic, as opposed to almost every other brokerage company, which terminated large chunks of their platform personnel.
The decision to push forward when everyone else was pulling back, combined with a best-in-class new agent training program, allowed us to do something in our industry that has never been done before: crack the top 10 largest transaction brokerage companies in the US in 7 years. The next youngest company in the top 15 is over 20 years old since its founding, so the future looks bright.
Adam: In your experience, what are the key steps to growing and scaling your business?
Kyle: This is written in no particular order…
Sacrifice. A tremendous amount of sacrifice and mental preparedness is required for the likeliness of very long work hours over a long period, 10+ years at least
Delayed gratification. Much like interest, gratification compounds in growth, so the longer you delay gratifying yourself with your success, the greater the success and gratification that comes with that is
Reinvest profits back into the business
Hire mindset over skillset
Zero asshole policy. The second you realize you got an asshole on the team, no matter how talented, get rid of them. Life is too short
Adam: What are the best lessons you learned from your playing days that have been applicable to your business career?
Kyle: Hard work and preparation overwhelmingly win over raw talent
Adam: What is the most surprising thing about life as a college football player at a major program? What is something that would shock fans?
Kyle: The physical exhaustion. You are just so tired all the time. Then, assuming you are taking school seriously and going to class when you are already tired from workouts and practice, and you go into an auditorium, and they dim the lights, it’s hard to stay awake, which can affect your grades.
Fans think college is easy for athletes, but if you pick a serious major, it is much harder to achieve great grades than a typical well-rested student who has more time to study/prepare.
Adam: Who was the best teammate you ever had and why? What are the characteristics of a great teammate?
Kyle: I had so many great teammates that I hate to choose. What makes a teammate great can be a range of many different characteristics and attributes. It could be leadership style, setting an example by way of work ethic, actual talent, and performance on the field, and on top of all those, the teammates there were simply great human beings. If i had to choose one, it would be Troy Polamalu. He was a generationally unique combination of all those things – A Hall of Fame Player with a Hall of Fame Work Ethic, and most importantly, I would put him in the Hall of Fame of People (if there was one). He is an incredible person who I aspired to be like in all facets of life, and I am grateful for knowing him and having the opportunity to play the same position as him during college.
Adam: What were the best lessons you learned by playing for Pete Carroll?
Kyle: Two Things; the first was to practice harder than the games. If you practice full speed in full pads every day during the game week against some of the best players in the nation when the actual game came around on the weekend, it was easier than practice and put us in a position to win. In a workplace sense, it should feel easy if you practice harder than the actual pitch/meeting/interview when the time comes for that big moment. The second was always to have fun. There will naturally be tremendous pressure, anxiety, and stress when you are highly successful in college football or a professional setting. It is unavoidable. So, if you are going to have to deal with all those negative emotions that come with being a top performer, then you might as well mix in a bunch of fun with it, or else the journey, and oftentimes every winning moment, won’t be fun or worth it. While Pete pushed us like crazy to practice full speed and outwork the competition, he made sure we had a blast doing it. Whether it was pranks, celebrities joining us in a full padded practice, or random days where we would be walking out to practice in full pads and Pete would have us redirected to buses where we would be taken down to the beach to go act like kids in the water, he always had an innate sense of how to balance too much pressure, with just the right amount of pressure mixed with hilarious distractions that made you grateful to be part of the program.
Adam: Other than Pete Carroll, who were the greatest leaders you played for and with and why? What do you believe are the defining qualities of a great leader?
Kyle: My Dad, even more so than Pete. My Dad coached me in high school and sports throughout my childhood, and I learned the most from him. While I learned a lot of technical sports skills from him, the valuable skills I learned were life skills centered around overcoming adversity, never quitting, how to process failure, and, just as important, how to process success.
In my opinion, the defining qualities of a great leader start with always leading by example. People inherently respect and listen to a much greater degree if they see you leading from the front, not dictating from the back. I always say to people at Matthews™ that I will never ask or advise them to do something that I didn’t do myself, and that is what allows people to assign a tremendous amount of credibility to what I am coaching them to do. Other great characteristics include consistent and clear communication, treating people the way you would want to be treated, and most of all, having people know that while you need the company to be successful to fulfill your professional mission, you genuinely care about them as a person and can turn off being a CEO from time to time.
Adam: What are your three best tips applicable to entrepreneurs, executives and civic leaders?
Kyle:
When starting a business, venture, or pursuit, write down the five things you love to do most in life, and be prepared to sacrifice all of them for an extended period in pursuit of professional success. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. In the professional world, the action taken of doing something great creates the equal and opposite reaction of having to sacrifice other things to achieve your destination.
An overwhelming majority of people are not wired like you, so stop being aggravated when they don't create, perform, or sacrifice like you. You have committed to the incredibly challenging pursuit of material professional success over a long period because you're different. You are not better or worse, but you are different. Manage your expectations. Don't get frustrated and potentially develop resentment.
Approach every day with impatience but approach your career with patience. On any given day, you must be impatient because you are always go-go-go. But when viewing your overall progress towards whatever you define as success, you must be very patient and keep making slow progress, one foot in front of the other.
Adam: What is the single best piece of advice you have ever received?
Kyle: Manage expectations, everyone’s, including your own, all the time.
Adam: Is there anything else you would like to share?
Kyle: Treat everyone well. Avoid negative people. Celebrate success with your teammates. Never quit, never surrender. Everything is possible if you never give up. If you want to live an extraordinary life, then it is only fair to expect an extraordinary amount of sacrifice. It wouldn’t be fair any other way.
Adam Mendler is the CEO of The Veloz Group, where he co-founded and oversees ventures across a wide variety of industries. Adam is also the creator and host of the business and leadership podcast Thirty Minute Mentors, where he goes one on one with America's most successful people - Fortune 500 CEOs, founders of household name companies, Hall of Fame and Olympic gold medal winning athletes, political and military leaders - for intimate half-hour conversations each week. Adam has written extensively on leadership, management, entrepreneurship, marketing and sales, having authored over 70 articles published in major media outlets including Forbes, Inc. and HuffPost, and has conducted more than 500 one on one interviews with America’s top leaders through his collective media projects. A top leadership speaker, Adam draws upon his insights building and leading businesses and interviewing hundreds of America's top leaders as a top keynote speaker to businesses, universities and non-profit organizations.
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