We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Steve Morrow . We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Steve below.

Hi Steve , thanks for joining us today. What did your parents do right and how has that impacted you in your life and career?

It takes a village. I was fortunate to be raised by a mother who always allowed my sister and I to pursue our dreams. She encouraged us to have an imagination and tried to instill in us a great moral compass. She taught us how to be strong and how to survive. My grandparents also were extremely supportive and had always stressed to my sister and I the importance of education and reading. Through my love of reading I was able to develop a desire to become a detective. My grandfather was self employed and seeing him live his life the way he wanted to was inspiring. My Uncle was a police officer, when I was a kid he and his partner sometimes would drop by my neighborhood in his police car, he showed me that hard work and discipline would take me wherever I wanted to go, it was also through my Uncle that I developed a love for martial arts. The village that showed up in my younger years helped develop not just myself but my sister into people that pursued who we wanted to be. The lessons of becoming who you imagine yourself to be, sticking with what you believe is right, obtaining knowledge through the traditional and also not so traditional means, and being disciplined were all parts of the foundation that have contributed to who I have become today.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I started my journey into becoming a private investigator in 2003 inspired by my child hood hero Easy Rawlins. I was fortunate enough to meet a private investigator named Dale Gustafson in high school on career day. He told me about a trade school, Nick Harris Detective Academy located in Van Nuys, Ca at the time. After going to a junior college I attended Nick Harris and learned the basics of what I would need to pursue a career in this field. My earlier years I did a lot of surveillance, tracking people down, taking statements, and going to court houses to pull records. Later on these skills became transferrable to the different facets of investigative work that I wanted my practice to perform. I now primarily do family law, criminal defense, personal injury, and wrongful death/elder abuse cases. My case load may look like on Monday follow a parent whose alleging that they don’t work, document if they are working and where, get photographic evidence, then go to a court house pull records for a background investigation for another case, then go back out in the evening and take a statement and serve subpoenas or other documents. The next day may be an office day where I am doing database searches and perusing social media for background information on a subject I am trying to locate. Bottom line no one day is the same as the next. Each has it’s own challenges and ups and downs. You may successfully clear a file one day while still being boggled down by the changes and challenges of another.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

Life is always is changing, we just went through a pandemic that halted our economy, in some communities social growth, and put some businesses completely out of business while showing that some places are/were capable of running remotely from residences. Parts of my business had to be scaled back as they weren’t essential. The following people to places of employment to establish they were gainfully employed halted to a dead stop, so did the small percentage of infidelity cases that we would work as well. Luckily, the courts were still running at a minimal so papers were still needed to be served, subject’s were still needed to be tracked down, and their individual backgrounds still needed to researched. Prior to Covid serving papers was approximatley 20% of my firms business, during and after it became 45%, and we started specializing in the difficult serves ( people that are hard to find or purposely avoiding service) the difficult serves have been challenging and career wise rewarding. I have seen firms fold because their client base is solely focused on one type of client, it’s great to specialize of course but if your entire client base is lets say Jane Smith Insurance company and they decide to close their doors, or bring in their own SIU what are you going to do? It is extremely important to diversify. Had we not changed our way of thinking we may have had to close our doors during the pandemic.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

I can tell someone that I’m great and they may take it into consideration. But if someone else says it then it’s more believable. I ask for review’s good or bad…Bad reviews show the consumers that we aren’t perfect. It also shows that we are real. That we’re not paying folks to say glorious things about us. In my line of work there are so many different variables that can be deemed successful, let’s say that you had a surveillance focused on whether a person is drinking after work, you follow the person from work and they go to a gym, then go to a drive thru restaurant, and then home. They do this same pattern for the whole week and you present a report to your client with your findings. On the one end the surveillance was successful, you weren’t caught, you got verifiable facts, and you were able to provide that evidence to your client. Now the client may be upset because you werent able to confirm their suspicions. However, you as the investigator did a great job. I had to learn this in the beginning. I used to beat myself up when my surveillance efforts, backgrounds, statements, etc. did not support what my clients theory of suspicions. I used to cringe at the thought that they were going to say we weren’t great because we had somehow failed to obtain the evidence they needed. And everytime I saw a negative review that said we didn’t get it, it also confirmed that we went out and tried and that we didn’t get it because it wasn’t observable to obtain. I learned that negative isn’t always a negative.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.MorrowDetectiveAgency.com
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