Mat Ishbia: From Basketball To Billion-Dollar Business | E85
26:31 Share

- Where do you wanna live? I always tell kids, where do you wanna live? You wanna live in Chicago, you wanna live in Michigan, you wanna live in Indiana, Illinois, California, pick where you wanna live and then find a company that provides opportunity for you to grow. I don't care if your job is 35 grand a year or 75 grand a year, like you don't need that much money to start. Like too many people make decisions based on money and they always will regret it the rest of their life.

You got to make decisions on what you enjoy doing, what your goals and dreams and aspirations are. I'm trying to be great every single day. Money follows success. Go win. Go be successful. Money will follow you around everywhere you go.

Welcome to In Search of Excellence, where we meet entrepreneurs, CEOs, entertainers, athletes, motivational speakers, and trailblazers of excellence with incredible stories from all walks of life. My name is Randall Kaplan. I'm a serial entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and a host of In Search of Excellence, which I started to motivate and inspire us to achieve excellence in all areas of our lives.

My guest today is Matt Ishbia. Matt is the chairman and CEO of United Wholesale Mortgage, the largest wholesale mortgage lender in the United States, which earned $931.9 million in net income in 2022, which as of this morning has a market value of $8.37 billion. Matt owns 71% of the company, shares at our worst $5.9 billion, which places Matt at 156 on the Forbes 400. It

In early 2023, Matt and his brother Justin bought a majority stake in the NBA's Phoenix Suns and WNBA's Phoenix Mercury in a deal that valued the team at an NBA record $4 billion.

Matt was a member of the Michigan State Spartans basketball team that went to three Final Fours and won the NCAA championship in 2000, is the author of the book Running the Corporate Office, Lessons in Effective Leadership from the Bench to the Boardroom, and is a very generous philanthropist who has given away more than $50 million. Matt, it's a true pleasure to have you on my show. Welcome to In Search of Excellence. Well, thanks for having me. Glad to be here with you.

You were born and raised in a Jewish family in the great town of Birmingham, Michigan, which is also where I grew up. Your mom was a school teacher and your dad, Jeff, was a lawyer and entrepreneur. Can you tell us about the influence your parents had on you and the values they instilled in you, including your Jewish heritage? And as part of that, can you tell us about your dad's yellow notepad? Yeah. So, you know, my parents are great. They still live in the same house I grew up in. You know, it's about two miles from where I live right now. And

I learned so much from them about, you know, my mom about structure and accountability with schoolwork. She's a teacher for 25 years in Pontiac. And so all I knew is she was a fifth grade teacher and I had to do my homework and follow up with stuff. And then my father was all about doing right by people and an amazing work ethic. And so he was, you know, he's an attorney, still an attorney, still goes to work every day. He's 75 years old and

learned from him about, hey, always take care of other people. Do right by other people and good things will come back your way. And if not, you still did good. You took care of people. You did the right thing. But also the work ethic of my dad used to go to work every morning before I got up and

And he came back, you know, have dinner with our family, coached me and my brother in sports. And then he'd go back to, as you mentioned, the yellow notepad. He's a lawyer. So he'd start, you know, back then they didn't have computers. So he'd just be working again when me and my brother went to bed. And so that work ethic, that drive is all I ever knew was you work hard to have success. And that's really was the foundation of what has helped me be successful in business and in life, along with my older brother, Justin, too.

We'll talk about the mortgage business in a little bit. And the fact was only 12 people when you took it over, but he had a number of different businesses. What other businesses did he own? And what were you learning about him always dabbling and starting this business in that business?

Yeah, my dad is a serial entrepreneur. He loves business. He loves people. He loves trying things. He loves, you know, he started, he had an alarm company. He tried to eventually try to title company at a restaurant all while still being a lawyer all day, every day. And so just, you know, I learned is like, listen,

You can try things and sometimes they work great and sometimes they don't work and you can adjust. My dad bought a couple of buildings and tried to rent them out. He just tried to do everything. He was constantly hustling. And so I saw that as a kid and all I knew is my dad works really hard. He's always trying to find ways to make money and provide for his family. And he did a great job. And my mom was a teacher. So she was steady with great health insurance. You know, my dad was out there trying to, you know, health insurance and she was,

a teacher, make an impact on kids. And that's just all I knew. And so you learned a lot of that's when you, you know, you learn about your surroundings. Like my kids see what I do and they learn from me. And you kind of learn from your parents in a lot of respects. And my parents were great, great people to learn from. We're going to talk basketball in a minute, but tell us what you were like as a kid, kind of from the time you were five years old to 15 years old, before you picked up a ball and started playing seriously. Yeah.

You know, as a kid, I was always competitive. I always wanted to play. I wanted to play against anybody and anything, whether it's checkers, whether it's basketball, whether it's football. Like, I just like to play and compete. And I didn't like to lose, so I'd always work hard on it to try to be the best. That's why basketball became my thing was because I didn't need someone to play with me. I didn't need my brother to play with me or my dad or my mom. I could just go shoot baskets or dribble by myself.

And that's what I used to do all the time. And so I was a kid that loves sports. I did okay in school, pretty good in school. But really, that's because my mom required that of us. But I just loved, loved competing and loved playing sports. And that's what I did all the time. After school, you just play in the neighborhood, play sports against the neighbors, compete in anything I could do. So you love basketball. That was your thing.

And at the local and state level, you were an amazing player. You played for Detroit's youth Maccabee team from 13 to 16 years old. You played on the Michigan Mustangs amateur athletic union team, the AAU team, which finished second in the nation. As a senior at Sehome High School, which is a mile from where I grew up and where my brother went, you were scoring 23 to 24 points a game. Were named Jewish Athlete of the Year by the Detroit News. And were one of the top players in the state.

When your friends were going out on Friday nights, you focused on your game because you had a dream of playing in the NBA. I do a lot of mentoring and coaching, particularly with college students and young professionals. Many of them are not only going out on Friday nights, but are also going out on weekday nights as well. How important is it to our success to make sacrifice and give up short-term happiness for long-term happiness, regardless of where we are in our career?

Yeah, it's a great question. And that's actually the key to success, in my opinion. There's a couple of things you've got to hit on there. One is you have to sacrifice. You can't be everything to everyone. So even my mortgage business, I talk about like we have singular focus. Be the best mortgage originator, wholesale mortgage. We're the number one mortgage company in America. We focus on one thing. I don't try to do 88 different businesses. I try to dominate one thing. It's hard to be great at everything. So it's hard to be a great basketball player. You want to be a great basketball player one day.

But you also like to go out every Thursday, every Friday, every Saturday. You like to go to, you know, on vacations. You like to, you know, be the best TV show connoisseur. You know, every TV show that's ever been on. You can't be everything. You got to focus. You got to focus on something. Like, so I believe, like for me, it's my three children. I focus on the three children.

Every single day, my kids, I coach them. I'm involved with, I'm not with them. I'm running my mortgage business or now the Phoenix suns and Mercury. That's it. I don't have that much fun. I'm not like, like, it doesn't mean I can't go out and have a drink. Doesn't mean I can't go out to dinner and like, and have enjoy life. But you, like, if you want to be great, you have to sacrifice what everyone else gets to do. Like for years of my career, like for 15 straight years, 17 straight years, I would get up and be in my office suit and tie. Like I am right now at 4 a.m.

4 a.m. here in the office every day. Stayed till 7 p.m. I went home and finished up my day. Back then I didn't have kids. Even though I did have kids, I'd have dinner with my kids and put them to bed and that was it.

Well, you know, no one cared on February 19th, 2014, that I was doing all these things before anyone knew who I was. But I had been doing it for 10 years already, sacrificing, staying up late, sacrificing, going out to parties, like sacrificing to get to where I'm at today. And it takes years and years of sacrifice to be great. And so sacrificing on Friday or Saturday night, if you want to be great, now you just got to prioritize what matters more. Some people...

And by the way, it's perfectly fine. Love third Fridays and Saturday nights and love going out and drinking every week. Like that's cool. Like do whatever you do, but you can't have both aspirations. You can't do both.

When I was at Michigan, we could joke about Michigan, Michigan State. We'll talk about Michigan State in a minute. The grades were very important to me. I thought, all right, I want to go to graduate school. I ended up going to Northwestern Law School, but grades were critical and it would allow me the opportunity to get great jobs. I was in the law library, Matt, every night till 10 o'clock when we had nothing going on. I didn't cram for a test.

I did sacrifice. I would go out, not as much as my friends did, but I would sit there and think, all right, is this really worth it? Telling myself, I think at the end of the day, that it was worth it. And at the end of the day, in fact, it was worth it. It allowed me to go to a really good law school. It allowed me to go to get a good job right when I graduated. And it was interesting. I was visiting one of my daughters at Wisconsin week before last. I just came back from Cornell. My daughter, they're both, they're twins, they're seniors, and they go out a lot.

And it's very different. And I was telling them, I had a very different college experience than you did. But they're great students. They get along. They're very well adjusted. But at some point, I thought, all right, maybe I went too far wrong.

to the extreme, not having as much of an experience in college as maybe some of my friends did. And certainly what they're doing, they have a good life. They're having fun. Yeah. Well, listen, let's make sure it's clear. I know your podcast was about, but life's goal is not money and success and power. It's happiness. And happiness can be achieved by many different ways. Some can be by success in business. Some can be by going out three nights a week with their...

husband, wife, girlfriend, boyfriend, or just buddies. And that's cool too. Like you got to find, like before you can even try to be great in anything, you got to figure out what your goal is and what makes you happy. And then you work towards it. But if you say makes me happiest to be able to do X, Y, and Z with a business, then you can't do all these other things.

And I'm not saying you can't average. It's not like I don't go out and have fun. But you've got to balance it. You've got to prioritize. My kids are my priority, then my business. And then a distance third is all those other things. You've got to balance those things. This episode of In Search of Excellence is brought to you by Sandy.com.

S-A-N-D-E-E dot com. We are a Yelp for beaches and have created the world's most comprehensive beach resource by cataloging more than 100 categories of information for every beach in the world. More than 100,000 beaches in 212 countries. Sandy.com provides beach goers around the world with detailed, comprehensive, and easy-to-use information to help them plan their perfect beach getaway at home and abroad,

and to make sure you're never disappointed by a beach visit again. Plan the perfect beach trip today by visiting sandy.com. That's www.sandee.com. The link is in our show notes. Stay sandy, my friends. We have a summer interim program. We have 32 to 36 kids every summer. I talk to my kids' friends. I have five kids. I have three in college.

The most worrisome aspect of their life is no one really knows what they want to do. They have anxiety in their future, and it really takes a center focal point in their college career and even in their young professional life. What's your advice to most of the college students out there who really don't know what they want to do? How do they deal with their anxiety?

Well, so I hear this a lot when I speak at college. People are like, I got to figure out what I'm going to do. Like, you don't have to figure out what you do. You're 21, 22, 25 years old, 30 years old, still young. You have plenty of time to figure these things out. What I figured out is like, what do you like doing? And it's not necessarily like people are like, oh, I like teaching. No, no, like I find like the actual things I like. Like, I like winning. I like competing. I like winning.

I like, like there's, and so then it's like, okay, so my business happens to be a business where they show the numbers, the biggest mortgage lender. We weren't in the top 10,000 and now we're number one. Like, so I found a business and a thing that I like and I can see the results. And so you got to find out, you don't have to find out like I want to like, and also people don't know, kids don't know. Like I, back to the thing, someone's like,

I love teaching. That's what I want to do, Matt. I'm sure of it. I'm like, great. Okay. So what are you going to do? Well, but the problem is I don't want to teach at a school. I'm like, well, listen, I have a company of 7,000 people. We have 65 trainers who teach adults, right?

Like, do you love children or do you love teaching people things and skills? Because you can like people don't realize there's so many jobs and opportunities out there. They only know what their parents may tell them or what they grew up around rather than exposing themselves. So the big advice to me is expose yourself to as many different

internships or people and networking as possible. And then find out what you really like, because most people don't really like teaching. They might love kids. That might be a different path than if they like teaching, then maybe it's training and maybe it's coaching. Maybe it's learning new things. And maybe it's like, gosh, I love learning new things all the time. I want to be, you know, and you find something that is your path. And the last part I'll say is like 90% of the people I talk to, they're young, they're

They're like, they're pressured to like know what they're going to go do with my major and all this stuff. But what I tell them is, and they always end up happy is that find a company that

that you are aligned with and is in like a fun place to work with other young people. You have 35 summer interns at your company. That's a fun place to work. Like you're around other people that are like you go there. Don't go to like the big corporate job that doesn't have other people that are your age that are trying to grow. Like you got to find a place. The more important than finding what you want to do is finding what you like to do as in like the being competitive or, and where you want to live and where you want to be at.

as a company. You mentioned Fawn picking a senior company. Where does passion calculate into this? You know, you get the advice, you won't be successful unless you're passionate about what you do. Is that true? And what if you can't find passion and don't know what it is? Well, see, people, that's what I'm trying to explain. It's a hard time to explain it. Like, passion is like, you could say, Matt, I have a passion for basketball.

Matt, you have a passion for mortgages, but I promise you, I didn't wake up with a passion for mortgages, right? That's not like the fun thing to do. And so what you find is I have a passion for competing and winning. And so people like, if my mortgage company, if I close my mortgage company tomorrow and I went and figured out, like I would start a business where I could track my numbers, see where I am versus the competition. And I try to win. I try to find innovative ways to be the best in the world at what I do. That's my passion, winning and competing. It's not mortgages.

It's not necessarily even basketball. I love basketball, but it's not like I could go do, we could have done a football team. Like I like to just compete and win. And so I guess I take a step back from like what that passion is. My passion is art. Okay, is it art or is it creating things? And if it's creating things, let's talk about, and then you start to figure out things that you really enjoy. And that's just what's worked for me. Cool.

Going back to high school, you graduated from Sehome and could have played D3, Division III basketball. And instead, you went to Michigan State where you were a walk-on to the basketball team, which at the time was one of the best basketball programs in the country under their amazing coach, Tom Izzo.

Your first three years, you went to three Final Fours and won three Big Ten championships. And you won the national championship in 2000 against then number five Florida by a score of 89 to 76. In your four years on the team, you won 114 games, which I think is the winningest four-year career in Big Ten history. Academically, you graduated with a 3.6 GPA with a degree in finance and were a three-time academic All-Big Ten honoree.

On the court, you said that you were the 14th best player on your 14-person team. And while you may not have lit it up on the court and very rarely played, you were considered the most popular guy on the team. You were the guy who lifted everybody's spirits and were the team comedian. You imitated your coaches. You would lie in your roommate, Brandon Smith's bed, who hated that. And your room was the central meeting place for all the guys when you were on the road.

How important is it to having a great personality to our success? And how important is it to have a great sense of humor to be a leader? Yeah, so I think those are great questions. I think it's important to have a sense of humor and a personality, but it's also important to be who you are. And my personality is I like to engage with people. I have to earn the respect of my teammates. I still have to earn the respect of my 7,000 teammates here at UWM, and now my teammates out in Phoenix with the Mercury and the Suns. And so I have to earn everyone's respect by communicating

out working everybody by being that guy as in like the guy that I say I'm going to be on time, I show up on time or I show up early. You got to do all those things. You got to be someone that cares about other people. Like you actually got to take time to get to know his husband or his wife or her husband or vice versa, like whatever it may be. Like you have to get to know people and know their kids in the world I live in today. Back then, I didn't know what mattered to these guys and like spend time and relate to people, just be myself. And so I think

Being humorous and personality, not all that matters, but really what matters is be who you are. And people like being around people that are friendly and caring and check in with them. And so I think so often people are like, hey, so I got 700 leaders here at our company that lead teams of six, eight, 10, 12 people, whatever it may be. Like, how do I show someone that I care? I'm like,

Show them you care. You actually got to care. You can't show someone you care. So I cared about my teammates. And then what happens, you know what they do? They care about me back. And we built this relationship. And that was part of the culture at Michigan State basketball, fostered by Tom Izzo and Mateen Cleaves. And that we now carry on to UWM, the mortgage company. And now we're doing in Phoenix with the Suns and the Mercury.

One of the reporters who wrote a piece on you for the Detroit News in 2000 and Ted said that every championship team needs a guy like you to win and relieve the pressure and help bring the camaraderie and the DNA together. Do the Suns have that guy today?

Yeah, I think so. So like, you know, I think the Suns, I think every team needs camaraderie, leadership, culture, family atmosphere, caring about one another, and also realizing that the team is bigger than the person. And that's hard in pros.

even in college is harder because in college you're trying to make it to the pros and pros there a lot of them are trying to get that contract that opportunity like when you realize that we can be greater than our some of our parts that's when you're really special because there's a lot of really talented basketball teams in the nba and the wmba and it's not always the most talented team wins it's the team with the most talent and the best chemistry combined wins and chemistry or fit however you want to go that matters and sometimes

having all superstar players doesn't win if everyone's out there for themselves. And sometimes having everyone that's all about the team, but you can't, you got a bunch of mad-ish because they aren't that good of players. You're not going to win either. So you have to have that balance of talent and fit or chemistry. Some people call it. And I think that's really important. And so that the sons have that now, does that mean we win a championship? No, it means you still got to play it out because other teams might have that too. And you got to compete and,

And, you know, I think we're in position to compete at the highest level, but it does not guarantee anything. Just like at Michigan State, we had a lot of those things at Michigan State, but it didn't guarantee we won a national championship. But we got to the final four three straight years, and we had a great, great run of success. In my fourth year, we had a lot of fit and chemistry. Just we lost a lot of players in the NBA. We didn't have the talent. And that's why we didn't make it to the final four that year. So who in the Sons would be considered the glue, the core of the team? Is it the captain? Is it a role player? Is it someone that isn't playing very much?

You know, I don't, you know, we, we got a lot of new guys. And so I've only been out there for a week of training camp and I haven't got a chance to spend time with them. And Frank Vogel might be able to answer that better or Devin Booker, who's the leader along with Kevin Durant. So everyone's kind of figuring out their, their role. And, you know, we got, we got great veterans like Eric,

Gordon who have been around the league a long time. We've got great young players that have come in and actually show some leadership skills and have done some great things. We've got everything in between. And so, you know, I don't have that player to tell you about right now as I spend more and more time and see the season evolve. That will happen if we want to have a chance to be the best. And I think that will happen. And it starts with Frank Vogel, the leader of the program as the coach. But then Devin Booker, who's 26 years old, about to turn 27, who's

one of the best players in the NBA, and hopefully going to be here for the long term along with Kevin Durant. We've got all these great guys, Brad Beal. And so we'll see how it all comes together right now, but that's part of that gelling time in training camp, preseason, and then as the season starts.

Are you looking for your next great gift to surprise a friend, colleague, or loved one? Bliss Beaches makes the perfect gift. This best-selling bright and beautiful coffee table book by Randall Kaplan features stunning drone photography from exotic beach locations around the world. It's the perfect housewarming gift, a great addition to any home or office, and a fun and creative alternative to bringing a bottle of wine to somebody's house for dinner. Bliss Beaches is available for purchase on Amazon, where it has glowing reviews and a five-star rating.

Get your next amazing gift and order a copy of Bliss Beaches by clicking the link in our show notes. After four years at Michigan State, you thought that maybe you want to be a coach. So you stayed a fifth year and were an assistant coach, student assistant coach to coaches where you attended meetings and film sessions and got to study the coach on the bench during the games.

After that, you had an opportunity to join the coaching staff of Mike Garland at Cleveland State University, which would have made you one of the youngest Division I basketball assistant coaches that year. At that point, you're 23 years old and sort of at a crossroads in your career, deciding if you wanted to take that job or join your dad's small 12-person mortgage business. So like a lot of people, you went to somebody whose opinion you respect for advice.

What did Coach Izzo tell you that impacted your decision? And what lessons did you learn playing basketball, sitting on the end of that bench, that contributed to your huge success? Yeah, so a lot of things in there. The first thing is, you know, Tom Izzo's a great guy. He cares about his players. And when you care about your players, they care about your back. And I respect him still to this day.

Talk to him quite frequently. And of course, I have my father as well and my mother, but my father from the business side talking about what to do. So I met with Coach Izzo about it, you know, to go and be an assistant coach in Division One in college would have been like unbelievable. And, you know, going through the things with him and figuring out and then seeing like what my dad, you know, has in his life and like, gosh, what do I want? What matters most to me? And at that point, you know,

you know, coaches have said something interesting. You go, what if you could take some of the things you learned from basketball and apply it to business and be something bigger than a head coach? And I thought to myself, what's bigger than being a head coach? That's the best job in the world. Like that, that'd be the dream. And so, but then I talked to my father and I saw some things that he was going to say, gosh, maybe I can go try this for a year and go learn. I got to know what a mortgage was, a mortgage company. What does a mortgage company do? It's boring. Like, like, like, but I took the competitiveness and,

the drive to be great, the work ethic, the positive attitude. And I've applied it to the mortgage business. And next thing I know, I fell in love with that. And my passion isn't mortgages, but my passion is getting better every day, inspiring people, leading people, coaching, getting like, and like winning. And that's what I was able to apply it to. So I actually wrote a book about the things I learned from Michigan State basketball and applied it to business. And, you know, there's so, cause I could talk for hours and hours about that stuff.

How much money were you going to make as an assistant coach? And how much money did you make your first year at the mortgage company? And as part of that question, what's your advice to everybody out there, especially young professionals, kids coming out of college, on the importance of money where it's often the number one factor in deciding where they go to work?

It's such a silly factor, people. I get it. Like, I was 23 also. I made $18,000 a year out of college. College degree playing basketball, right? I think the college basketball job would have been maybe like $35,000, $40,000, $45,000. Like, it would have been more money. But it

And you have no responsibilities when you're 22, 23 years old. If you have no kids, you're not married. Like you don't have to take, like if you are literally like, you got to go out and you have seven, eight years to build, to build your life and to build yourself. Like money should be third, fourth or fifth. Opportunity should be first.

Where do you wanna live? I always tell kids, where do you wanna live? You wanna live in Chicago, you wanna live in Michigan, you wanna live in Indiana, Illinois, California, pick where you wanna live and then find a company that provides opportunity for you to grow. I don't care if your job is 35 grand a year or 75 grand a year. You don't need that much money to start. I got debt, man. I got debt from student loans. You'll figure it out. Too many people make decisions based on money and they always will regret it the rest of their life.

You've got to make decisions on what you enjoy doing, what your goals and dreams and aspirations are. And I know it sounds like I know people can eat. I can eat ramen noodles, too. Like I go to McDonald's still to this day and I have enough money not to go to McDonald's. Like stop worrying about money so much. People focus on money so much more. Even in my business, I run this company all day, every day. We don't talk about money. My CFO, great guy.

I look at the financials for like 10 minutes a month. I know I'm a public company. People don't want to hear it. I don't give a shit. We're out here trying to win. I'm trying to be great every single day. Money follows success. Go win. Go be successful. Money will follow you around everywhere you go. Don't go chase money. Money is just the wrong thing. I don't understand any money to pay bills. I do too. And I did back then when I was making 18 and 30 and then eventually 60,000. I got

married in 2007. I'm divorced now, but I got married in 2007. I was making $60,000 a year as a 27-year-old man and getting married. And that was fantastic. That was enough money to pay for everything. I didn't want for money. I wanted for success and money follows. Thanks for listening to part one of my amazing conversation with Matt Ishbia, the owner of the Phoenix Suns basketball team. Be sure to tune in next week to part two of my amazing conversation with Matt.