KGCI: Real Estate on Air - From Foster Care to the NFL wth Anthony Trucks

Episode Date: September 17, 2024

I'm super excited to interview Kurt Uler today in this next episode. You can find him on Kurtulur.com and Kurt is spelled with a K. Uler, it's U H-H-L-I-R. And he is a king of scaling companies. It was what he is called. And I wanted to understand who is he? What did he start on? How does one get into this line of work where your job is to scale companies from, I don't know,

$75 million to $880 and make them go public, right? So I'm just going down on this path of searching. What do people do with money? How do you grow things? How do you invest in the things? How do you make your money, making money, right? And I thought Kurt would be a great guest for today's episode. So that's interview Kurt.

Welcome to go-gopreneur, where Gogh-Bethki, your host, interviews badass rock star entrepreneurs of the world, figuring out who they are, how they got to where they're at, and the lessons they learned along the way. so you can learn those lessons and turn it into money. Let's go get them. Okay, so let's start. So I became a reluctant entrepreneur early,

and I say reluctant in that. I had to form two LLCs when I was 14. And my dad went out. So can you even do that legally? Don't you have to be like 18 to start a company? You don't. But at 13, I was hiring enough people that my dad informed me that the federal government

was going to make me pay payroll taxes and come after me. So I was going to have to file taxes. Okay. Let's back this up. I didn't even know you can start a company. I just assumed you can't until you're 18. So you're telling me there's no age limit on starting an LLC in the U.S.? Not from an investment perspective anyways.

And LLCs are always owned by somebody. Wow. Okay. So what kind of business that you had at age 13? The one that ended up being much more like anyone can start is I was really good. And I started a lawn care business that had evolved into then doing pressure washing for houses and driveways and whatnot. But I was really good at selling.

And so I was in a small town in North Alabama. And very quickly, I didn't realize, but I had sold more lawns than I could service myself. And so I hired a friend. And it's like, well, if I can do that, I'll just keep doing it. And so I kept selling. And I mean, it was good business. It was really good business as a high schooler. I was actually going to shut down that business when I went to college because you don't know

anything when you're a new entrepreneur, much less being, you know, 15, 18 years old. And I worked with the, volunteered with the rescue squad in Marshall County, Alabama. And this old timer, many years retired was like, he knew how many of my friends I employed because I employed two of their dads and 12 of my friends. And he was like, you don't shut that down. You sell that business. And so he kind of guided me through that a little bit. So I mean, I had a six figure exit, made college parties really nice for a while. So that's amazing. So I learned. So I learned. that lesson too. I did not know. I learned my hourly rate. And then I had this other business over here that was making me like, I don't know, $5,000 a month. And it required eight hours of my time.

And I'm like, I can go sell one boot camp over here and make that in like five minutes. Right. So I'm like, we are done. I shut the business down. I gave the book of business with a, with an affiliate agreement to a company, right? Let's learn. Why did I sell that? $5,000 of pure profit is It's money for someone and they can do it from home in eight hours, in eight hours, right? So I could have sold that, but since it wasn't worth my time in my mind, what do I know? It's not worth anybody else's time. It does. For somebody who's $5,000 is income in a month working only eight hours in return for the $5,000, I could have sold that book of business.

So I learned that lesson too. Absolutely. Well, it's also like looking back, I kind of wish I would not have sold that business because like I think high school and college counselors do people a disservice. They always sell towards, you have to go to college. This is what's expected. And like, I could have earned millions of dollars a year doing lawn care in North Alabama. But it was expected that I went to college.

And I did get a scholarship for in one sport, but I participated in three sports at Vanderbilt. But, I mean, I dropped out of Vanderbilt because I was. Okay, hold on. Let me get this straight. So you had a good brain and you were good in sports? You had both? Both. Oh, that must be nice.

Tell us more about it. Well, it's also helpful that my dad has the genes that doesn't require sleep. And so I got a lot of that. And so I don't know if it was nature or nurture, but I keenly was aware of my dad had two full-time jobs, much of me growing up, and that he would wake me up at like two or three o'clock in the morning to go on a field trip because like he wasn't sleeping. He figured I should go and do things. And so I kind of picked that up.

So I also have a few more hours than a lot of people to play at things. That's right. So how much sleep do you need? Now I'm about three and a half to four hours a night, but I have a little bit more body fat on me than I would prefer. If I get my body fat below about 14%, I'll probably go back naturally to about two and a half to three. Wow, that's really a little, that's very little sleep. It's actually way more than my dad used to. My dad would sleep an hour and a half to two hours a night until his third time he had cancer, at which he point he started sleeping much more like a normal person. So when my wife and I got married,

I asked her, we got engaged and then married within about six weeks. And I asked her one day, I was like, so I need you to think about when we move in together, do you want to go to bed with me or wake up with me? And she said it clicked and went, oh, my God, you send me emails at like two or three o'clock in the morning about something to do on the weekend. And I was like, well, yes, because I'm awake. Well, so can she answer neither? Because I would have answered neither because I did my sleep.

So I was sleeper. I'm full of opposite. I feel like I go, go, go, go, go, go during the day. And then I don't know if I have two options. I'm on or I'm off. Like, when we watch TV at night, I literally play games on my phone the whole time as I watch TV. And my husband is like, can you just for once just do one thing? You know what happens if I turn the games off on my phone?

I'm out. Yeah. So if my brain is not being used, I literally have two options. Or I'm awake or I'm sleeping. Like there's no in between for me. As soon as I turn the games off on my phone, even though I'm full force watching the movie, I can tell exactly what's happening. If I'm not playing the game, I'll just fall asleep.

He would say I saw the first five minutes of every movie unless I played games. So let's go back. If we're good at sports, what sports did you play? Cross-country, indoor and outdoor track. Okay. Yeah. And then you went to college for what? I went originally for biomedical and electrical engineering.

I was minoring in math as well. But to my knowledge, I had had a couple internships while I was at school. I thought that meant I was going to sit in a cubicle. and do engineering work. And nobody explained to me, and that wasn't appealing to me. I'm not doing this face right here. I'm like, I can't. Yeah.

I cannot sit in one spot, do the same thing over and over again, in quiet, no one to talk to. Nobody explained to me that, like, said, hey, I could have gone and got a master's in business or an MBA later. And so I went back to my dad who never really coached me, pushed excessively, but never gave me real advice. And I said, I'm going to drop out. And his response was, okay. And so I dropped out, I dropped out of Vanderbilt with 21 hours left to graduate and took six months off. I had had an e-commerce business. My brother and I had started that was doing quite well. And I programmed much of the shopping experience. And that was doing well. And my dad goes, what are you going to do?

I said, I think I'm going to hang out for a couple of weeks and we're going to make a go with that company. And so we did. My brother ended up running that business for for years as his full-time job. And then what happened after that? How did you start going down on the path of, you know, scaling companies, becoming CMOs of multiple companies and then investing into companies? I didn't intend to. I came out of college finally with a master's in financial engineering. So I could code all the high-end financial quantitative stuff that investment banks worked on. Bring it down. So by the way, I'm from Romania. I didn't speak English until I was 21 years old. I'm 42. So I don't speak English. I don't speak English. English now. I speak American and Southern. So would you please translate for your foreigner friend over here? What is quantitative something? What did you even say? Like quantitative finance. And so mortgage back securities. So you take a whole bunch of mortgages and there's equations behind the scenes and software

that will carve those up into different risk classes and then sell them as bonds. Well, there's software that somebody has the right to do that. So I came out with the masters to be able to identify the risk of all, say, a bunch of mortgages, and then carve them up into bonds and then allow those to be sold off by a fidelity or a vanguard or something. And I thought that's what I was going to go do. Is this something that you did in your basement? It is something you did like Apple in the garage? Like, did you get hired into a bank? Like, how did this see? I ended up, well, I became, I got silver medalist for a couple jobs with investment banks. And I'm sitting on a couch in Chicago and a Retained search firm calls me and says, hey, this isn't what you're looking for, but you seem like an

entrepreneur. We have a high-tech company that's the chief strategy officer wants to hire somebody underneath the woman that works for him. Can you come out an interview? And that wasn't what I wanted to do. So I said, thank you, but no, and hung up the phone. And so it was a little company that's really big over Europe now. It was called Navigation Technologies, became Navtech, and now here, car navigation systems across

Europe, Asia, pretty much cross-rural. So if there was a navigation system with mapping data for the first 15 years of navigation systems in the U.S. or Europe, 100% chance in the U.S. it was from this company's data and traffic. And so the retained search firm calls me back and says, so here's the deal. I spoke to the chief strategy officer. We can't hire, we can't find the person for this. He thinks you're the right type of person. Come and interview and have any time in the first six months, this doesn't make sense for you. He'll pay you out for the year. That was enough for me to come out. And as a dumb, I'm a two-year-old. I was like, I'll come out. And I had no idea. I mean, the gentleman was named Solidian Khan, him and Denise

Doyle, I worked for were great. I had no idea what I got into. This was literally mapping and spatial data, MapQuest, car navigation systems. I ended up inventing myself how they built Microsoft Flight Simulator. We were at the core of 11 industries using map data. And so we took the company from 85 million a year in revenue to 1.44 billion in 10 years. It went public. Investors did really well. The Nokia bought us out did really well for investors there. And during that time, I had been writing some investment checks for angel investment deals. What is an angel investment deal? Usually pre-revenue companies, technology often.

almost all of my technology. Let's go there. What's a pre-revenue company? Someone comes up with an idea. One of them was a CRM company, a competitor to Salesforce, pipe drive, and whatnot. And when I invested,

they probably had 50 to maybe $150,000 in revenue, but they were still losing, you know, three quarters of a million to $1 million dollars a year. And so, I don't know, maybe we wrote them at $50 to maybe $100,000 check for equity in the company, hoping that they would figure it out.

So, okay, so let's explain this. Let's say one of our listeners has $100,000, not exactly sure what to do with it. Where does one start to invest into a company? Is there a market for that? Do I go to invest into Companies.com? You can go to funds for it and give the $100,000 to them. It really depends on risk tolerance. I mean, whether you start a business, you're growing a business, as you know, or you're writing investment check, I think everybody just needs to think in terms of, of what's the risk tolerance for it. And so, I mean, my wife does not let me write angel investment checks anymore, partially because she looked at the percentages of them that pay off, even the money that you invested into them. And she's like, this sounds like philanthropy to me. Like, you might as well just write the, you know, light the pile of money on fire or so give it to somebody. Don't go start

some company that's going to lose the money because we have a different risk tolerance. And when you're married, you take, you know, you take their advice on that. But in that, case, I was earning really good money. I had some cash flow business on the side, a big corporate job. And so writing the $25, $50,000 check, it wasn't like it was nothing, but I was comfortable with the risk of it being worth nothing because I didn't need it or there being a big payout at the end of the day. Okay. So would you share a success story and one that wasn't so successful with the angel investors situation? So let's start with the negative in that we go into, I guess. Well, sometimes they go together. So one of them that was.

was really successful. I actually had forgotten. I wrote the check. It was a CRM company. I won't name the name, but I wrote the check. And I mean, I couldn't take it off on taxes because until a company goes bankrupt or just like if you buy stock and it goes until it is sold or goes bankrupt, you can't take a loss unless you have to sell your shares. And so I had written a check to the CRM company. And I had heard, I mean, they did okay for a while. And it had been like seven or eight years and I had heard nothing. And then a much larger company eventually bought them. I mean, by the time they came back out of it and figured it out, they had raised more money. I mean, I wasn't even getting investor updates, but I had a decent chunk from having written a check

years before. And I literally found, so I thought I'd failed. Like, hey, I wrote a $50,000, $100,000 check and got nothing for it. That's a big failure. And then I get a letter in the mail. And it's like, hey expect this check coming up next look for it we just need you to sign the sign this for sign this agreement for the sale is taking place and that you're not contesting it i went upstairs and i talked my life with it um yeah i need you to take a look at this so we we got a seven-figure check i want to say how many comments were there sounds like two comments it was a seven-figure check so it wasn't life-changing overall but i mean still for something that to me it was it was a bankrupt company. I haven't heard an investment investor update in years. And it's getting it up with a, you know,

multi-million dollar check out of it. So it felt like a failure did end up being successful at the end of the day. That's awesome. So let's go into, I learned so much and I feel like I'm this little Nemo swimming with the sharks, right? So this year, Kenton named the company, but I got asked to be their CMO and I got shares in return. I was so excited until I talked to my tax attorney. And then he says, Go-Go, you're going to have to plan for this because you're going to have to pay taxes on it this year. Hold on. They're not, I can't sell it. I can't. It's worth technically nothing until they go public. But I have to pay taxes on the perceived value this year. And then wait, if and then they make it. And if they do make it, and if they do make it good.

If they don't make it, then I have to wait until they, as you said, file break of receipt. So then I can write off the laws. Right. But that's part of controlled risk. So, I mean... Does it really have value this year? Like, can I go get a condo on it or two or three or can I use that and invest it into a syndication? It's a perceived value.

It's not real money. There's nothing I can do with that today and today's market. That's also how that's structured. You could also do that with instead of getting shared. You could get options, and depending on what those are worth at the time. And then that just delays your tax. Yes. So that's what we are doing right now having the conversation of do I have the option to turn it into options, right?

So that's what you are doing now. I'm very familiar with that. I tend to work as a full-time CMO for later stage venture or mid-market companies. private equity brought me into a company that we sold to EXP. So I was at EXP for three years after that. Before then we sold that company off from EXP to compilation. Okay, so let's talk about this super quick, because I see the EXP Realty pillow.

It looks like in the background. From Inman, New York, maybe three years ago. Okay, so tell me what is your relationship to EXP? Because I didn't actually know as I was interviewing you that you had a connection to it. I have no relationship right now besides, I did send a video congratulations to Leo for his new promotion. Very well deserved. I was super excited for him.

Yes, he's our new CEO, if anybody's listening. Yeah, so a private equity investor had brought me in for showcase IDX. Hold on. I'm just going to stop myself. Did I just say if anybody's listening, they better be listening. This is a podcast. I meant if you're listening and you don't know what just happened. Leo Perea is a new CEO of the XP Realt.

Okay, continue. And so I worked for Leo for two years, so he's great. So private equity brought me into Showcase IDX to help stabilize that company and grow it. We ended up during COVID selling the company to EXP World Holdings. And then on the day after the company was announced that Glenn decided that he would tell inman that our team was going to be building a portal to compete with Redfin, Zillow, Trulia, without any discussion of resources because he's the visionary CEO and he gets to do that. that. We did end up doing that. We built the fourth largest website, real estate website in the world for EXP. But then we built the referral tools. My team and I, we actually invented MyLink

by Lead, which is running through EXP. And so I left EXP last September. And so... And I think through the MyLink, my lead, I was the number one. You were one of the... You and Brian Collain, you were the three that Glenn said, here's who needs to test it. But I think I did okay, right? I've seen your numbers. You did pretty well with it. I thought so.

I thought I made pretty good income too through those referrals. So, okay, so now what? So right now, I am a fractional CMO for a couple of companies, but one is in the real estate space, EZ with a Z home search.com, building another national portal, similar to a realty.com's kind of model where agents will come to them and they'll vet them and partner with somebody on an individual county basis across the US for all the leads that come through. So not like Zillow or Zillow is going to get your percentage or you pay for every lead. Really, hey, if you want Boone County, North Carolina, they're going to pick one partner,

mortgage or agent and partner with them for that. So it's established teams, which goes back to marketing and controlled risk. So it's, you know, it's not for new agents. It's not for low production agents. It has to be somebody who has systems in place that knows what to do with the lead flow so that the investment is worthwhile to them. So how did you get down on the real estate side of things? Is it started with the Showcase IDX?

It started with Showcase. I've been in a couple of marketing technology before, but I think too often I think entrepreneurs will look at things, especially technology where it's like it has to be real estate or health care, where it's like if it's marketing technology, showcase is marketing technology. You're not running a real estate transaction with it. You're marketing your personal website with it.

And so that point, it really doesn't matter what industry it's in. It matters more the type of technology. So my understand with Showcase IDX is that it'll allow the IDX feed from the analysis to feed to a specific website, correct? Yes. Okay. So I understand it. So pretty much KVCorps uses Showcase IDX technology.

KVCorps has its own. Yeah, KVCorps has its own. But it's also built a little bit different. I compare, I love KVCorps. But for an agent, I think it's like how do, most agents are not technology experts. and so I'd say most agents shouldn't you say showcase. KV. Corps is much more like a car. And so where I say is a showcase is an engine.

And so you still have to, you know, nobody, nobody has an individual. You don't need, you don't buy an engine to go to the grocery store. You buy a truck or a car or a minivan. Well, that's what KV Corps is. It does a whole bunch of things pretty well. Showcase, on the other hand, is just an engine. And so you still have to somebody build your website behind it. And so it's good for those that can.

You own it much more, but it's also controlled risk. Like most agents can't do it. I'll tell you, a 14-year-old daughter, a 14-year-old son could build an average agent website. And that would be better. I mean, now we have Chad GPT, some of the worlds that literally build your website in two seconds. You said, I want a website that has these feature three pages. I want a thank you page.

I want a little, you sit back and you watch and it's done. Yeah. It's insane. I love, you know, I love technology. life to live my life by these three words, automated, delegated, or eliminate it. Absolutely. So where do you see technology going? What are you working?

What are you excited about? I'm using AI a lot. My wife makes fun of me where you can only make so many calls to chat GPT specifically or perplexity on a three hour basis. And my wife will ask me usually every couple of days, how many times have you hit that cap? frequently actually so tell me tell me how are you using are you using chat gpt in the day-to-day or mostly business like do you talk to gpt he put a recipe together i have these five ingredients or how do you how do you how do you use a i in your day to do i use it for research i usually um i do a lot of long form writing

myself and my personal okay so let's start with research how do you and do you prefer chat gpte like now google's coming out with their own like what a i if i'm doing research i actually prefer perplex Proplexity.AI. Okay. Proplexity. Proplexity. Proplexity. Is that something you can download onto your phone?

You can download it on your phone as well. It gives you much more references, but they work in different ways. So if you and I were going to write a 5,000 word article about real estate leads, I may use perplexity for broad research for it or for deep research. It's going to give much more detail. It's going to help with the research. But, and it will give you an outline for the article. But chat GPT, I find makes better outlines for articles if you were going to use it for that. I tend to not use either for writing too much because it's too generic.

And it doesn't sound like my voice, even though I can train it on that. But I will often use one or both of them for research, for outlining things. I'll then do a couple iterations to see what have I, what is it missed? Or what have I missed if I'm doing outlines myself to make sure I'm covering topics? I would much rather do long topic coverage than just something that's short like a 1,500 word article. There's places for that. But if I'm going to write about something, I'm probably going to write a 5 to 10,000 word article on it and then use AI to chop it up into smaller versions. Give me a script for YouTube out of it.

Give me short scripts out of it. And I'll use chat GPT for things like that. I love it. And what do you write for? My wife raises our kids right now and runs our households. also own a big mountain property in North Georgia. So she keeps everything kind of running for that. But she used to be a marketing exec. So she is starting to take control of my speaking business. And more importantly for both my consulting and the speaking business, she plays the most critical

role, which is much more important than doing the work. She bills for the work because I inevitably fail at doing that sometimes. And so she just informed me she would be taking that back over for my corporate clients as well. I love it. So how do you make money today? Okay. Either fractional CMO for mid-market companies. And so that's cash and retainer. How does that work? Companies, there comes a place and even at larger companies, one of my clients is at $75 million a year and annual revenue. They could not afford me and their team full time to grow. And so it's a better business model for them to pay for 15 to 20 percent of kind of my time over the month. and let me bring in, do strategy.

I'm a full member of their C-level. I show up to board meetings for them, but they just don't have 100% of my time. So they get the expertise of my time. And then I set up processes, which is what they really need. And I'm actually doing more coaching on their mid-level marketers right now for teaching them what to do. So I do that for a variety of companies.

So can I ask you, is that salary plus bonuses? Is that salary and for jobs? shares in the company, like what does that usually look like? It all depends. So it's usually retainer plus shares of a company or retainer plus shares of a company. And my preference is a percentage on the company hitting goals. Got it. So let's talk about retainer.

Retainer is not a monthly salary. I'm assuming it's a chunk up front. No, it's usually a monthly salary. But I won't work with a company unless I'm going to be working with them for at least 6 to 12 months at a time. So there are fractional executives that come in and they'll do monthly agreements. I'm like, that's a consultant. That's a short-term opportunity.

It's really, I'm working with CEOs and companies where they require a full-time CMO. They just don't have the budget for the expertise for this. I scale. That's what I do. Company has $20 million a year in revenue. They want it to be $200 million a year in revenue. Or $200 million. They want it to be $2 billion.

That's where I help the most with companies. And so they want to grow quickly. They just, they can't afford the full-time kind of comp, or they may not need it yet. A lot of companies I work with, they have the bones, like with the house. They have the foundation. And like, not that they couldn't afford me, but it wouldn't be the best use of their resources to bring me on full-time. Got it.

And then what else do you do? Because I sounded like it was just one of money. I'm coaching two CMOs about how to be better at their job at mid-market companies. and I'm coaching uniquely, this is interesting, a CEO came to me. He loves the woman that is his CMO, but he does not know how to communicate with her in terms of marketing because he is marketing and sales illiterate. He's a former software engineer. And so he literally, I am coaching him to talk to his chief marketing officer and chief growth officer on the sales side.

And his team doesn't even know that's taking place. So let's talk about marketing. What are your beliefs on social media marketing? On social media marketing? Mm-hmm. Everything is social media. Everything now and increasingly so is companies, whether I think it's on the selling to consumers or selling to other businesses,

it's all about influence and acting like a media company. And so I mentioned I'm working with easy home search right now. Well, there's a huge bit of just building the product so that it ranks on Google. But much more of that is to say, hey, like, how do you produce something so that it runs as almost a media outlet unto itself? Like, can you out Zillow, Zillow. No, you can do what you're doing about creating your YouTube channels and TV channels. And so that's the same type of thing for a portal like that. Or if it was a CRM company, I've been speaking with the CFO at Pipe Drive right now.

She's wonderful. One of my good friends is mentored by her. And so he put us together. Pip Drive has been doing that much more from a CRM perspective because how do you can compete against Salesforce. The product is great, but they're trying to create a media outlet unto itself so that they get, and then they tell the story is not a pipe drive, but of the people that are being successful with that product. That's the future of marketing to me. It's influence. So then some of these, I've only ever built businesses when it's built on a personal

brand. Where do you think is going to go with companies like easy homes? Easy home search. Easy home search. Yeah. So where do you think, how do those companies grow? Do you think they're going to go to influencers and break into their audiences? Do you think they're just going to keep it? Like, what do you think, what do you recommend for these companies to spread the board faster? I mean, they do have to still have brand marketing and build brand and market as the company.

But in that case, like Preston, the founder and CEO, he's got a good personal brand. he's worked in the space as an agent broker for years. So you can push him. But I think any of these companies, it is going to the customers or an easy home search highlighting and promoting the agents that they're partnering with. But I think for most business of business companies and even consumer companies, it's using your employees, and this scares so many CEOs, but it's using the employees as influencers.

Like if I was at a CRM company right now, where I'm selling software to other businesses, are you going to pay more attention to the company brand or to the salespeople and the CEO or the customer success team? And so I think that's much more of where marketing is going that says, you're right on personal brand. It makes sense for individual agents. But I think on any business, it's like,

I don't want just my local HVAC company. I mean, there's a lot of private equity-owned HVAC company. I'm working with, you know, for this property here, we have still a large company, but it's owned by a single person. His father started it. And so it's a different thing. He wants to make sure that when his, everybody that works for him knows that people and clients will show up to him at church and say, this was my experience with your company.

And then so to take a little bit off of that as well, he has started at this company, they've started making sure that their sales reps, their customer success teams, all have that kind of public-facing thing. I found out from one of their head of sales, you can't be a sales company for this HVAC company until you've been a technician for five years. Because he's like, you have to know the business before I'll let you sell the business,

and then after a couple of years, we'll start promoting you and make you an influencer to the company. That's awesome. That's awesome. And then you have a book for our audience. Yes, I do. So I talk a lot about, about networking and net weaving.

I find so many people don't like networking because it feels selfish. And I think it's very much how you approach business. Net weaving is a term my friend Bob Lattel wrote a book on in the 80s, much more of saying, like, it's for those of us that are paid forward. It says, hey, you know that sometimes you can take 11 minutes to do a Zoom introduction with two people that could fundamentally change somebody's life for their business. And you'll take that time. That's net weaving.

So this book will walk somebody through that and really teach, anybody how to become that trusted resource in their community. I love it. So everyone, if you're listening, you can go to kurt-U-U-L-R-T-U-L-R-T-O-O-L-R-S-F-W-L-R-S-P podcast gift. So again, it's Kurt Uler. com forward-slash podcast gift. Thank you so much. I had my team download that, so I know what I'm reading later on tonight on the couch.

And let me ask you a couple questions. Do you like reading books? A very good bit of books, yes. Okay. What's your favorite book? First one comes to mind. The favorite one I recommend to most people is profit first. Okay.

Why? Because I see so many friends that are entrepreneurs that have a $10, $15 million business, and they're literally one illness away from bankrupt because they don't take money out of their business. They don't structure it so that it actually makes it. makes money and throws off cash at the end of the day. Okay. What is the lesson that took you the longest to learn? That I'm probably wrong about at least three things in business that I think I'm right

about today. I always say, you don't know what you don't know. Like the more you learn, the more you realized, oh, gosh, I didn't know that. Well, yeah. I mean, I'm clearly aware of when you're wrong about something, it feels exactly the same as being right about something until you then later realize. that was a bad decision. So what do you look forward to?

My kids and seeing them grow up. Oh, how old are they now? They're little. I saw you used to go. Yeah, four and a half and two. Oh, gosh, you're just going to those ages. I have 14 and 16, yeah, almost 15 and 17. So totally different ages.

Yeah. I love those days. I love those days when you could dress them and they were still cute. They're cute, but my little one, she is, we joke, she's full of spice. If there's a confrontation, she'll dip her head and charge into it. Oh, that's awesome. So you're a, you're a girl there too. What is that that you look forward to? I said, seeing my kids girl. And the business side. Business-wise, I'm always looking forward to a challenge. Like, it's hard to scale. I've written a couple of long articles. There may be a book about hypergrowth.

I've been part of two hypergrowth companies. EXP was one of those. Most people try to grow things five and 10, 20% a year. I always try to grow up through things 300%, 700% a year, and structure the teams for that. And if something's only growing 10% a year, it bores me. And so I look for the challenges, even the challenges, how do we make this thing grow? Oh, I love it. I have my trackers have trackers, right? Like I have stretch eight.

And one of the things that we are tracking was the agent had found last year life. And it was a kind of a painful year in real estate. And the way we are tracking it is an average of a month-to-month growth. So it's not an overall from last year to this year. It's an average to month-to-month. And the average, I think it came out like 2.17% or something like that. And I about through the computer out of window. I'm like, what do you mean?

What do you mean? Right? And then I was like, oh, hold on. Hold on. That's monthly. Okay. So how much did we actually grow from last year to this year in a full year? So it comes out to be like 27 some percent.

I was like, oh, thank you, Jesus. I was about like throw the computer out on the window, right? So I realized that monthly growth, right? Like it sometimes can feel so painful when that percentage is so little. Like I'm like you. Like I pull my weight. I want the results on that piece of paper to show the weight that I'm pulling, right? So if I think about that last year, 30% of realtors love the industry and we still grew 27% in the positive, I think that's a pretty good year.

Yeah, that's what we experienced that at Showcase as well. The big competitors were IDX broker, I Homefinder. They were both much larger private equity back companies. When COVID happened and real estate agents started pulling back their marketing spend and sales spend, their revenues tanked and Showcase kept increasing. Yeah, that's awesome. Any growth was so good. Yes, exactly. Thank God, especially in the down markets. Right? And I go, thank you, Jesus. Right. So what is the best way for people to get a hold of you? LinkedIn is the best way to kind of keep up with me from a business perspective, but then my personal website will splinter you off anywhere else. I know some people just like seeing what it's like to be an entrepreneur and scalar. So it'll send you over to Instagram to see pictures of my kids or me and driving the skids to your through the mountain property.

I love it. And Kurt Spouse is named with a K. So if you're looking for Kurt Euler, it's K-U-R-D. U-H-L-I-R pretty much everywhere, including dot com, including on LinkedIn, forward slash Gert Uler. So, Kurt, thank you so much for your time today. Thank you for having me. Thank you for showing up and sharing your knowledge with my audience. Yeah, happy to. Ready to elevate your mindset?

Now it's time for what would Go-Go do. Tennis Springer underscore realtor. What's the blueprint for the best team structure? So, Tena, to be honest with you, I'm not sure I'm not sure. qualify to answer this question. I have a cute little adorable team with two webstreet agents in Michigan called Gratt or Goghuz Rio City. Here is my idea behind it. I never had the I'm going to use the word idea again. I never had the idea of wanting to grow a mega-icant team. I don't want to run an adult daycare. I am not the world's best manager by any means being Eastern

European. I make people cry on databases by noon, right? So I do not want to have a massive team the reason why I have a team is because I want to, so said, monetize on my organic leads. So think of it this way. Even my team, I don't have an office. I don't buy leads. I don't have overhead. I like to joke and say, I don't even want a printer for my team, right? I don't even live in the state where my team is at.

I live in Tampa or close to Tampa down here in Florida, but my team is up in living in St. County, Michigan. So with that being said, my two cents on the subject is do it until it's very, very profitable. So since I don't have expenses, any income that I make on the team, it's pretty much a 100% profit for me. Right. So that's how I always build. They want to build businesses where I don't have a high cost. If you look at some of these mega-icanteens or these brokerages, yes, they bring home millions of dollars in GCI, or I should say, they make millions

of dollars of GCI. But if they break a 15 to 20% profit, they are bawling. So if they made a million-dollar GCI with a 15% whatever it's like profit rate, right? Like we are talking $150,000. You can be a solo agent do 15 transactions at 10,000 piece of commission and you're at 150,000. You do not have to get into that much expense,

that's much liability, that's an overhead to make 15% profit. So I don't like to run business that way. That's why I wrote a cute little adorable team at max three agents at a time. The most successful year we ever had was close to 5,000 GCI, 4,000. 190 something. I wasn't even in the state. I don't have overhead. I don't buy leads.

And that's my story and I stick it to it. Right. So I rather have a cute little team with much larger percentage of profit than a massive team with a lot of liabilities and overhead and 15% profits. So that's just me. How do I do the splits and the value add? Well, why do agents actually need a team in my opinion because they haven't learned to lead generate or if they good at lead generation, but they're not good at follow-up or they're not good at systems. So that's my experience with the agents that I had on my team. Or they couldn't lead generate if you put a gun to their head, right? But they were really good at following through and getting the clients that they gave them and getting them to the closing table. Or they could

get a client's left and right. But if you ask them if they wrote near down down or when are we closing, they couldn't answer you, right? Because they needed you for the structure. So I feel There's two types of agents that are usually on a team. And those are my experiences, right? And you're going to be able to keep them as long as they need one of those two things. Or they need leads or they need structure, right? And that's what you provide as a team lead, right? You provide them what they need in order for them to be successful.

Because if they try to do it on their own, they would fail because they're missing one or the other. As for the splits, I do a 50-50 split on the buy side and the 60-40 on the listing side, because I'm the listings. Me as a teammate, I have a little bit more expenses with the yard signs, the broker opens, those kind of things. And for the value, out is like, what do you bring to the table as the team lead, right? Like, are you available for them to, or are you teaching them to negotiate? Are you teaching them to get better as agents?

Are you giving them resources? Do you have an in-house VA? Do you have a transaction coordinator? Do you provide photography and closing gifts in these kind of things, which I do, everything that I just mentioned here. So that's my answer to Tennispringer at Tennispringer underscore career. You get paid for the hour what you bring to the hour. Or in other words, the fastest way for you to earn more is by learning more.

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