Mat Steinwede opens up on losing his son Logan to suicide and what he did next
When Mat Steinwede’s son Logan suicided his world was rocked to its core. But with six other kids to care for he knew he had to be there for them.
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If anyone knows the fragility of life, it’s Mat Steinwede.
It’s just clocked six months since his 20-year-old son Logan took his own life – a reality he struggles with every day since he got the phone call no parent should ever have to take.
In the 201 days since, he’s had to be strong. For his family. For his six other kids. For his son’s memory. But when he’s alone – in the car, on the treadmill, in the surf (a place where Logan was truly at home) – he unravels.
“Sometimes I’ll just be running on the treadmill and burst into tears for no reason, because I’m thinking about him or I hear a song,” he says through tears.
“I try not to talk about it with general people these days because I don’t want to keep rehashing it – but life is like that.
“There’s all these things that you’ve got to somehow deal with, as much as they might rock your world … you’ve just got to get up the next day,” he says.
“One foot in front of the other.”
Steinwede has been through a lot over his 51 years.
He may be one of the country’s leading residential real estate agents, personally selling over $320m in residential sales each year – but he wasn’t always an award-winning agent.
He grew up in Maroubra – “with all the Bra Boys” – and left home when he was 17, around the time he “started partying in the city and never came back”. He became a drug addict. An alcoholic. Homeless. And a criminal – even making an appearance on Australia’s Most Wanted.
“So then I got a job as a bouncer on Oxford St, and the rest is history,” he says.
But all of that trauma pales in comparison to the grief he’s felt over the loss of Logan.
“It’s like a bomb went off in our lives,” he says.
“I watched all the kids falling apart, and one day, I looked at them all and they were really, really struggling hard, and Jaxson said to me, ‘Dad, I just don’t want to come out of my room, I just can’t deal with it.’ He just said, ‘I just never want to come out again.’
“And in that moment, I looked at him and I thought, ‘I’m gonna have another casualty on my hands – I can see it a mile off.’
“I thought, ‘I’ve got to pull these kids up with me – I have to pull them up, not be down with them.’ I had to be the energy that they need to see … I just had to step forward.
“Because Logan was fun – he was free spirited, he was cool, and they all loved him so much. And it was like – I just had to be that steady force for a bit.”
Logan was an aspiring pro surfer who had been competing since he was seven. His mum Karina had remarried NRL great Kieran Foran. His uncle, Karina’s brother – parenting expert Justin Coulson – broke the news of Logan’s death on social media after he was found at his grandparent’s home. He was the youngest of four children Mat had with Karina before they divorced.
“It was very difficult,” Steinwede says of losing his son.
“I spent every day on the beach with him, he was headed towards becoming a pro surfer.
“I used to take him to the beach at five in the morning, every night … so as he got more and more experienced, I used to sit in my work clothes and have a call list, and in the middle of summer I’d make calls on the beach, watching him. Then when he hit 17, I don’t know – I always knew the party scene might be a bit of an issue for him because he’s a very good-looking kid, he looked like his mum more than me, and I think it became too attractive for him.
“He went down that path and got a bit lost, unfortunately.
“I have been through so much pain over the years – my sister killed herself when she was younger and I was not desensitised to it at all – like the opposite. It was more like, I got to a part in life where (I thought) how am I going to deal with it? Because you can only do that. You can only put one foot in front of the other.
“It’s that choice in any moment, whether it’s that or a divorce or something that’s not great in your life – how are you going to react to it and deal with it and move ahead of it?
“It does take a lot of inner-processing.
“You do have a choice in every moment – what are you gonna do now?”
He’s had a few of those moments through his life. None was more important or pivotal, than the day he was on Australia’s Most Wanted. For Steinwede, that moment changed everything.
“I’d been in real estate for one year, and I used to walk the streets and knock on the doors every day all day, and ask people if they wanted to sell their house,” he says.
“I didn’t have a car, I used to walk from street to street all day – rain, hail or shine.
“And one day I caught the bus home and I was renting a room off this old lady that was a friend of Karina’s, and Ray from the fish and chip shop at Killarney Vale rang me and said, ‘Hey, Matt, you’ve just been on Australia’s Most Wanted.’
“So I had to go and hand myself back in, and then I went to court, and it was a long hearing.
“And at the end of it, the judge said to me, ‘Mat, today you should be going to jail for quite a few years.’ She said, ‘I don’t know – I’m just looking at you and I see some good in you. I’m going to give you a second chance.’ I had so many warrants out for my arrest; I was preparing myself to go to jail that day.
“I think angels intervened. I did community service for a really long time and it took me eight years to pay back all the fines that she gave me – but I walked out of the courtroom and I rang my best mate who lived up in Terrigal – and I said, ‘Dino, I’m going to make you a promise – I’m going to promise you I’ll become Australia’s number one agent.’
“And that moment changed my life, because I never break a promise.”
Another moment that changed his life came 28 years ago. That one was because of Australian real estate entrepreneur John McGrath.
“I sent him a videotape when I was one year into real estate from Killarney Vale and I said, ‘Hi Mr McGrath, I know you’re the king of real estate – I’d love to meet you one day.’ And I sent that to him with a note on it saying, ‘This will take one minute and 55 seconds of your time to watch – but it could make a wealth of difference to your life and possibly mine,’” he says.
“And he rang me like two weeks later and said, ‘Come down for breakfast.’
“So I went out – and talk about prospecting – and then one day I rang him about five or six years after that videotape was sent – and I said, ‘John, would you ever think about us and McGrath?’
“And he said, ‘Matty, I’m nowhere near franchising.’ But he asked me why, and I said our franchise agreement was up for Raine and Horne – and he said to me on the phone, ‘Let’s make it happen.’
“In 60 days, we became the first McGrath office, and it literally has been life-changing for us.”
Steinwede and his partner Jaimie Woodcock opened an office for McGrath in Terrigal on the NSW Central Coast in 2005. A year later, McGrath announced its franchise business model, granting the first franchise to Steinwede and Woodcock. Under their leadership, it has grown to 10 offices and more than 150 staff. It’s been a rapid expansion, and along the way Steinwede has been the four-time winner of Agent of the Year at the annual McGrath Awards, 11-time winner of regional agent of the year, and the coveted John McGrath Founder’s award for the most outstanding team member in recognition of his work, community commitment and values.
This weekend, Steinwede will be a keynote speaker at the Australasian Real Estate Conference on the Gold Coast.
“I’ll be talking a little bit about my journey,” he says of the conference. “I’ve been around a long time in real estate, so I’ll touch on my background, but really what it takes to create success in a business or in sales, and then I’ll be talking about energy and the law of attraction, and how that can increase your results.”
He also says “having a life routine that you love” is important to sustain a career. “I used to work so hard and did nothing else and then I just burned out, and became very disconnected. So I’ll be helping people understand how to have a long career. I’ll also be talking about just doing it. I have a saying that if you don’t own your time, everybody else will.”
Now with almost 30 years in the real estate industry, he coaches and trains agents on peak performance through the Mat Steinwede System and the 31 Minute Movement. He is an author of two books – 31 Mins: The Secret to Living Your Best Life, and Frequency. They both came about because he took matters into his own hands, and with it, claimed his life back.
“I was really not healthy,” he says.
“I was very thin, I didn’t eat properly and I went to the doctor one day and he said, ‘I don’t know how you’re still standing – your cortisol is through the roof, you’ve basically got no testosterone.’ So I walked out of there – and I was 43 then – and thought I’d better do something about it.
“All I did is dedicate 31 minutes a day to doing something – I started on a treadmill basically, and then I just made sure that became the big rock of my day and everything worked around it. Because before that I used to just work from morning to night. I’ve been divorced twice and have seven kids. Life was difficult. It was really, really hard to keep everyone happy – and at the cost of myself.
“Then I just went down this journey – I was like well, I’m really transforming myself, and I think a lot of people took notice. I’ve literally just changed myself over the last 10 years or eight years.”
He doesn’t drink – that helps – and believes firmly in the powers of attraction.
“I would guess I would have had 1000 messages from people saying, ‘You’ve changed my life, I stopped drinking a year ago’ – because it’s actually poison,” he says.
“That poison goes in your gut and it wrecks the bacteria in your stomach. It’s a whole sequence of things – like sleep, the nutrition you’re having – but then why would someone drink alcohol?
“When you think about it, your body’s got a process to poison. What happens when you when you drink poison? You get sick. When you get sick, you’re actually forced to make those decisions – whereas I just wanted to make them before any of that happened.
“You’re going to meet a version of yourself in the future and you can literally design it in your mind and then decide, ‘I’m going to do this because I want to. I want to meet my optimum version of me at 55. I really do.’”
He likes the saying, “If it’s gonna be, it’s up to me.’ He also lives by, “If you want it, you’ll do it.” You may well say they’re the secret to his success.
“Because let’s face it, a lot of the stuff that makes you successful is not fun, it’s boring,” he says. “It’s embarrassing, it’s anxiety-filled – knocking on doors was the last thing I wanted to do – and I did it for 20 years. I think when people have difficulty doing that, they just don’t want it enough. So I always find it interesting when they say businesses fail – they only fail because they don’t have enough prospects. So if I owned a doughnut shop, I’d be out door-knocking some of the day, just so people knew who they were – like a free doughnut for your kids if you come in and buy six or something.
“That’s the secret to any success in business. It’s about who knows you, not who you know. And really all I did every day was 40 proactive connections – so I went out and I wouldn’t come back until I’d done a minimum of 40 people that I’ve seen and ask them if they want to sell their house. That’s almost 10,000 people a year, Monday to Friday. Prospecting is everything you need if you’re looking to create a successful business. Unfortunately, a lot of people do it the other way around.”
The law of attraction is something he’s studied for some 20 years, but it’s never been more important to him.
“Because your emotion is a frequency,” he explains. “So when you’re excited, then you will apply hard work, you will find great opportunities.
“So you will find people – the phone will ring, you’ll bump into somebody – I call it ‘the zone’.
“You’re in that energetic zone where the gate is fully open, and you’re just a magnet for things going right. But when you’re worried, anxious, depressed, angry, resentful, you’re at a totally different frequency – like you can’t watch Channel 9 on Channel 7 – they are different frequencies.
“So when you understand that – my whole job now, everything about my life now, is to make sure I start the day in the zone and then hold it as long as I can.
“I’ve moved forward throwing my energy forward in the same vibrational pattern as things that are going good, but as soon as you get disappointed and then you throw that forward you’re just trying to connect with more disappointing things, or things that might work right, or the pothole that will burst your tyre – I’ve really worked that part out.”
Now, the addiction of selling real estate, of making people happy, is his drug of choice.
“I love taking care of people and I love when they find a house and you’ve been a part of that – it’s the best,” he says.
“When I got into real estate I said to Dino – the guy I rang and made the promise to – I said, ‘This is just like drug dealing, but it’s legal,’” he laughs.
“You have to find the supplier, find the buyer, and you’ve just got to put them together.”
He’s also got a newborn baby with wife Tara, and little Summer means the world to him.
“I’m 51 now and I’ve learned a lot of lessons,” he says.
“It seemed like a blur when I was trying to manage kids and being separated and all the things over the years – but I knew it would settle down somewhere. My eldest son Jaxson lives with us in a cottage at the front of our property. And Phoenix, he plays for the Roosters – and then Paris, my other daughter, lives locally. And I have Flora and Bay who live in Wagstaff with their mum but I see them all the time. And then I have Summer. I manage it … I’m that happy with my life, I can’t even explain it to you.”
He’s currently writing a book called Design the Life you Love, to help people do just that.
“I just want to find what I’m capable of now. I’m really interested in human potential because I’ve literally changed myself over the last few years – I’ve rebuilt myself from the inside out.”
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