Nate Matlack
My journey from athlete, to athlete advisor.
Kansas State to Pitt to the Kansas City Chiefs, and then to the side of the business nobody explains to you while you’re playing.
MY Route
Kansas State
Pitt
Kansas City Chiefs
Keating
Firsthand
I played before any of this money existed.
Nobody taught me about money when I was playing. I knew how to read a formation, not a contract. There wasn’t much to manage back then, and that’s exactly the point. The guys who came through right behind me walked into real money with the same preparation my class had, which was none.
I played defensive end at Kansas State, transferred to Pitt, and signed with the Kansas City Chiefs. I played in the preseason and got cut. That’s the window. It’s shorter than anyone tells you, and nobody in the building is responsible for what happens to you after it closes.
So I became the person that locker room needed. Today athletes are the focus of my practice. I know the locker room, I know the money, and I know how fast one turns into the other.
The Part Nobody Prepares You For
Money arrives faster than the education does.
The first real money in an athlete’s life almost never arrives with instructions. It arrives with a timeline, a tax consequence, and a group of people who all want a meeting. Most of them are well-meaning. A few of them are not. Sorting one from the other is a skill nobody teaches in a weight room.
What I noticed, over and over, is that athletes rarely get bad advice in isolation. They get good advice from four people who never talk to each other. The agent is working the contract. The CPA is working April. An uncle has a business idea. Somebody’s financial guy has a product. Everybody is doing their job, and no one is running the play.
The mistakes that hurt athletes usually aren't dramatic. They're small, reasonable decisions made in the wrong order.
That’s the gap I decided to work in. Not because it’s an untouched market, but because I lived the confusion and I know exactly how it feels to nod along in a meeting you don’t fully understand and hope it works out.
Why Keating
Freedom as an advisor, with the backbone of KEATING.
I could have hung my own sign. Plenty of former players do. But an athlete’s plan touches investments, taxes, entity structure, insurance, and estate questions, sometimes all in the same year. That’s more than one person should be handling alone, and a client shouldn’t have to hope their advisor knows what they don’t know.
Keating Financial Advisory Services is an SEC-registered investment adviser with a fiduciary obligation to clients and a bench of people who have been doing this for decades. Athletes aren’t new here either; the firm has worked with them going back to its founder. What’s new is a practice built specifically around them, with someone who has been in the locker room running it.
So when you work with me, you get one point of contact and a firm behind that contact. That combination is the whole reason I’m here.
How I Work
Three things you can expect from me.
Straight answers
If something is a bad idea, I’ll say it’s a bad idea. If we’re not the right fit, I’ll let you know and help you identify appropriate next steps.
Plain language
No jargon, no slides you can’t follow, no decisions you don’t understand. If you can’t explain your own plan to your mom, I haven’t done my job.
The long view
Your career is the funding source, not the plan. Everything we build is aimed at the decades after the last snap, not the next off-season.