Why High-Achieving Servant Leadership Is The Way To Lead An Organization With Kurt Uhlir
When you lead people, you don't disregard their personal lives because it's a part of who they are. They will not work productively if they are not treated well, affecting the business' overall performance. More than ever, this pandemic has shown us the importance of that. In this episode, Chad Burmeister is joined by the Chief Marketing Officer of Showcase IDX Kurt Uhlir. Together, they talk about the challenges of burning out at work, the importance of self-care, and how leaders can connect with their people and support them in business. Kurt also shares valuable insights on the role of faith in his journey and why he believes high-achieving servant leadership is the way to go.
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Why High-Achieving Servant Leadership Is The Way To Lead An Organization With Kurt Uhlir
I've got a guest with me from Atlanta. He has been with Showcase IDX as the CMO, which is a subsidiary of eXp World Holdings where he's the VP of Marketing. This is the first where I've met somebody holding two titles. It's like in the UFC when you hold the middleweight and the welterweight all in one. Let's dig in. Kurt, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me, Chad.
Thank you for joining. Tell us a little bit more about the role you're in now? What are you doing at your company, before we dive into the other side of what we're going to talk about?
Servant Leadership: Causing turmoil in people’s lives will not benefit you. You have to figure out how to communicate well and be transparent about yourself to be successful personally and professionally.
In Showcase IDX, we provide that home service that you see on real estate agents and brokerage websites. If people search for homes on big portals, imagine the cost of tens of millions of dollars to pull in all that data and create the tools, we provide that as a simple WordPress plug-in with a SaaS back end for real estate agents. You don't want a competitive agent calling your clients so you want them to have that good experience on your website. That's what we do for them in Showcase IDX. Similar to that, for eXp World Holdings, I do a lot of strategic growth for them including running their national portals and other areas of growth for them.
This is interesting because a lot of folks that come on my shows are on the sales side. I would say it's probably 10% to 20% marketing. I'm going to be curious to understand some of your passions when you were younger and how that led you to the marketing role. My major in college was Marketing but then I went into the sales side and that's where I stayed for the rest of my career.
To be good at both, you have to have a little bit of bloodletting on the other side of that. I've always been imaginative. I always want to know how to sell and tell stories. You get that in sales or marketing. My parents loved the outdoors. It was a different time. At six years old, my parents had turned me loose in a little boat by myself in a lake in northern Michigan for all daylight hours. They let me go out catching turtles. You still have to come home.
When we were at our main home in Chicago, I was that imagination kid so everything I did would involve imagination. Other people want to build models and take stickers and make all the planes look good. I wanted the leftover parts from the stickers. I would take what was left and I put up almost the shrapnel from the stickers and put them on my walls to turn my bedroom into a spaceship that would let me fly off through instrument panels through the cosmos. That was all about telling stories and looking for ways to help people go on adventures, which fits much into marketing and telling stories. A story arc that starts somewhere and carries a sales lead through until they've been a happy customer, hopefully for many years.
I've heard that a lot, especially with folks that are in my level of experience, I'll keep it at that. They've been able to say, “I went out for the whole day. I was sunburnt and all that. You're out on the lake by yourself or with a friend or something.” When we lived in North Carolina, our kids did that. They'd leave for 4 or 5 hours at a time but it feels like those times are changing a little bit.
I have a kid and I couldn't even imagine doing that in a couple of years and being like, “Go on. I'll holler when I need you.”
You could send them a text nowadays. You can geocode their phone so you know exactly where they are.
Even at two, he knows how to turn on a tablet himself and choose a show.
Was that Lake Michigan, I assume?
It’s a small lake in Colon, Michigan. It was a vacation property for us. The population is about 250 so one of the many small micro lakes in Michigan.
There are hundreds of micro lakes. Taking the scraps of the stickers, how does that apply to what you're doing now?
For some reason, when I look back at it so much of the company that I gravitate to the people that I advise on boards for, when I was younger, the stories I came up with is you always want to be seen as the superhero but it's often the sidekick. I always found that when I was younger, I was creating stories where you help the underdog succeed. That's so much of what I do marketing-wise. I've helped small companies usually as an advisor. I've sat in and helped to grow a lot of 7 and 8-figure business companies. I'll come in unannounced in a company that's a public company but there's a much larger behemoth that's out there. Maybe a multibillion-dollar company at different times but they're the underdog.
I found that when I was a kid, I told stories about how you help the underdog win and overcome something. When I look back, I end up looking at things like, “We were able to do something that everybody else said was impossible.” In some cases, the teams or the product but it was almost always insurmountable odds. As a spaceship, you play it as a kid. That's what you do as a company. You have a team. Instead of me making up things, I’ll get a big team that gets to help me with that now.
I love that. It reminds me of WebEx before the Cisco acquisition. We had a manager off-site at a hotel in Scottsdale, Arizona. We had chips that we were able to bet the ideas that all the managers came up with. They showed some videos of going around the moon and coming back to Earth and they didn't have enough gas in the tank to get back so they had to get the slingshot built to be able to come back around the earth. They gave that story of, “How are we ever going to get the $500 million this year? Yet, we’re going to do it.” We did that and we were the underdog. Microsoft had bought PlaceWare. They were starting to gain some ground and we killed it, crushed the numbers and we’re purchased by Cisco within a year of that meeting at $57 a share from $12 a share.
You’ve got to take bets. In the end, the underdog doesn't win by playing it safe. Innovation doesn't happen from doing the same thing. You don't grow by 10X or 50X by taking a path of, “How do we grow by 20% this year?” They're completely different ways of thinking. It’s much like a six-year-old playing space.
I love the strategic mindset because I can hear that. One thing that everybody on the show shares is it's not always roses along the way. We all run into these mountains that at the time feel like they're insurmountable. Somebody reading this might be like, “You don't understand. I'm in that mountain.” Is there something that you're comfortable sharing that you say, “That sucked,” at the time and now, on the other side of it all is good and you're looking back, it was good that you went through that?
Without throwing any individual under the bus, I've made the same mistake a few too many times. That mistake generally came down to the most painful memories. I've learned a lot going through that. When I choose an employee, I choose to bring somebody or a business partner even alongside me or under me. In some cases, there may not have been a red flag but there was at least a strong yellow flag where I should have questioned their morals and their character but I was blindsided by the potential benefit of working with them. Either the time to getting something or, “This person is great at this part of sales and that's what I need now and they're right in front of me.”
Inevitably, whenever I had that feeling, it may not have been the exact thing I saw come out in the same character moral way. Hands down, the times I made those decisions, the partner and the team lead, I look back and I'm like, “They were exactly who I thought that they were who they showed me in discussions that they were. I had greed get ahead of me because I wanted to move faster versus not choosing that person not having somebody in the role right then.” In the end, I'm a firm believer now that I look back and it's like, “I've been successful,” which is great. I have great teams but I understand too that the ends never justify the means. Even if I would have been successful with those people, I would not have felt good about it.
My teams are also different. I have people coming to me that want to work for me at the company that we're at now with what we're trying to do because they're like, “We did this before,” or, “You worked with one of my friends.” I brought somebody on that somebody I know in the community thought highly enough about me to reach out and be like, “I know you took a role but you need to go work for Kurt.” Two months after the role that they were in, they've now joined the team and that's only because I've learned in the past and pivoted.
I remember at the WebEx, I had this candidate who I knew was going to crush his quota 200% but I have some concerns. The mentor from ADP had spent a lot of time at ADP and he said, “Hire him. Your job as the manager, you need to manage through HR issues.” I did it and it turned out this individual did overperform and even stayed a long time. However, there were a few things that occurred over the years that were like, “That's not okay.” I still am on the fence about that decision.
It’s one of those things, you can play with a poisonous snake. If you don't get bit somebody else might. I tried taking the thing and having done the same thing. In some cases, the person who didn't perform or something that hurt me, some cases that hurt that person hurt somebody else on the team in some way or threw him under the bus. He might not have done anything more than that. I like to be able to look back at my personal life or my business decisions.
I have a kid and a wife. If they knew every decision that I made and what was in my mind when I made it, would I still feel comfortable with that? When I look back at the situations where I got burned or I saw somebody get burned, no. If they knew what I was questioning at the time, I don't think I would have been okay. I don't think I could have explained to my kid when he’s 16 or 26 in the future, “Your dad made this decision and I was completely comfortable with it.” It would be self-evident that I should have not made that choice.
It turns out there's usually not a black or white answer to questions that we have. We make the right decision at the time that we make it based on the cards that we have at the time in our life. It's always interesting to look back. In hindsight, it’s 2020.
I'm a lot better now based on the painful mistakes that I've made before.
What are you passionate about now? You've got two roles? What gets you excited in the morning?
Servant Leadership: If you love people the right way, lead them as a true servant, you'll find the highest confidence of being able to hit your goals with any other leadership style.
I've been successful enough repeatedly. I had a mentor and now a friend asked me, “Have you hit your magic number? What would you do?” She wanted to make introductions if I was going to check out at some point and go sit on a beach. One, I would get bored. You can only do that for so long. What gets me passionate is helping men and women truly become successful at work and home. Usually, even people who come to work for you may be all about work. I've led teams myself where I joke and I was like, “I was the leader for multiple years at a company we took public and later had an $8 billion acquisition.”
If one person on the team cried, I was a bad boss. If the whole team cried or multiple people, it means I dialed it up to eleven. I needed to come back a little bit. I can't imagine what turmoil that caused in people's lives. I may have made people successful at work but there's no way I was helping them be successful in their lives overall. A real passion of mine now is helping people figure out, “You don't have to burn out at work. You don't need to leave a wake of destruction behind you.”
You can end up finding a way to develop the skills and gifts that you have and learn how to be stewards of your money, time and skills at work. Also, figure out if you want to do something in your personal life but you never have to tell me about it. Inevitably, I found out over the last few years that people especially come back to me since I had this big change at work and they're like, “You didn't realize this but this is what happened in my personal life. This is what happened with an organization I was helping outside of work because we changed how we were doing things in the office.”
That's cool. It is much more fun connecting with people in their lives and not just their work-life. It seems like 2020 allowed us to do that a little more too in Zoom meetings because now you're at home. You're not in it in a lot of ways.
It didn't force so much into people's lives and things that they should have realized before. You burn through good people not because you were even intending to. In the past, I intended to. I was a bad boss but a lot of people weren't awake enough to realize that there's a fostering issue going on at home. There's an elder care issue. There's a sick kid at home. A sick spouse going through cancer or something. You should be aware that those things are going on and be there for people. I'm bringing on people on my team now. We're going to triple again and team size quickly.
With the people I have now, I hope I can promote and keep having them grow as leaders. I don't want to burn them out no matter whether its work or something personal happens that I may not be aware of. I need them on my team in 2 or 3 years because I tell them every day, “We're doing nothing but picking up momentum so I need you involved and I need you here to be able to do that.” Whether you burn out from work or you burn out because you have an elder care issue that you didn't feel comfortable bringing up. The only way they're still going to be here contributing in two years is if we help them through the situation now.
I was in Atlanta, 30 minutes north of Atlanta and I'm not going to remember the name of the town. It’s a cool-looking old town when you drive through this and we had dinner on a balcony at a restaurant. They had a meeting with about ten different executives from big companies, 420 branches around the world, etc. They talked about the challenges in a post-pandemic world. The employees are generally saying, “We want to work from home five days a week.” In some cases, 2 or 3 but nobody wants to come back to the office 100%.
There was an interesting perspective shared about what you do. There's been a little bit coming out of New York. There was some controversy and they said, “If you're going to work in New York, we’ll pay you a New York salary. If you're going to work out of Omaha, you're making an Omaha salary.” There's a lot of interesting discussions coming up now. What are your thoughts on work from home versus working in an office now that everybody's worked at home for so long?
It shifted. The tools and how you lead are different. Our company at eXp before COVID, they've never had offices so it's entirely remote. They were committed enough before our company joined them. They bought a 3D environment company called VirBELA. I have an avatar with an office so when I meet with people, my avatar goes and shows up. Whether the person is in San Francisco or they're in Toronto, we meet in that world.
At first, I thought it was going to be a little bit weird but I've been in there for months. By all means, I love workplace chat. I love Zoom things where I get to see some of my team face to face but you lose the serendipity. Especially for top performers, you can't bring me back to the office. I want to see people. I love people and I want to be around my team a couple of times a year. That's important but if you made me come to the office five days a week, that's never going to happen.
Chat and scheduled Zoom meetings don't seem to work the same way for serendipitous conversations. When I'm in a 3D world and there are other things that are out there, you feel much more comfortable popping in and having a conversation where you might feel a little bit weird but you might feel you're butting in by popping up on a video chat to me. That's got to be scheduled. I have much more casual conversations. I can coach much more. I'll work in an office with somebody and share my screen on one side of the virtual office and they share their screen on the other.
That's how we work for hours together pairing we would if we were sitting side by side in an office. Companies will have to continue to embrace things like that to make this work everywhere. Top performers, good luck bringing a lot of them back into the office. People who are on the lower end of the performance side do need to sit alongside others sometimes for their daily motivation level, which is fine. How do we do that? Slack isn't going to cut it.
What seemed to come out of the conversation is that seasoned vets that have 10 to 20 years experience, “By all means, let's have you come in once a week or once a quarter for that matter. You're hitting your number and you're doing your work. It's fine.” The junior entry-level folks who are like, “I wanted to do that too,” and they only have three months in a business setting ever, you're going to set them and you up to fail. The churn’s already 30% in an office, outside an office with two junior people. They thought that could lead to some negative turnover situations.
It could but it's also how you manage. It's always difficult to be a good team leader. It's a lot easier to hide in some bad leadership things when you're in person because you can always walk over to somebody. I'm having to pick up to change my style. I'm the person who likes you to walk into your office randomly and have conversations that otherwise could be a short email. I want to see your face. I want to see if you were stressed. That lets me ask questions about whether there was something going on at home. You have to have different tools. Slack or videos don't always work for that. I'm much more intentional in the one-on-one than I ever was. It's a change but for all of my team, you can find the cultural things that we managed to do. I want extreme accountability. That applies to me as much as a junior employee in three months in the workforce.
We use Trello. Here's what's being worked on. I want to interact asynchronously. I get to see things going on and you could see what I'm working on. At least I learned from those more senior than me, where you and I are now. I thought I was working hard when I was 24. I would sit alongside Judson Green, who was CFO of Disney and CEO of the company we took public. I realized he got more done in two hours than I got done all day and not just value-wise. He would send that many more emails, meetings and spreadsheets he could work through. I was like, “This 24-year-olds is not as good as he thought he was. The old-timer, Jundon, is killing me here.” He invited me in to sit alongside him. You can do that virtually as well as you can in person. You have to be transparent about yourself.
That's cool. It's all relative.
Also, trying things and being okay with failing.
It's interesting, virtual assistants are the new thing at my day job, ScaleX. You can have 2, 3 virtual assistants doing outreach for you and 98.5% of the messages can be handled now by AI because it can be programmed. Until my calendar gets overflowing with podcasts and meetings with prospects, investors and whatever then I need to add another virtual assistant. It's interesting how that's going to change how people scale the work. Tell me a little bit about your keynote. I understand you've done some talking about servant leadership and leading from the front. I'm sure if you play a tape from 500 years ago, it also stood up then too but it seems it's far more important than ever before. Tell me a little bit about why you think servant leadership is the way to go when it comes to leading an organization.
I'm a big proponent of servant leadership. I even couch it a little more by adding that it’s high-achieving servant leadership. Part of the reason for that is there are a lot of books about servant leadership out there. What's different when I come in to give keynotes and give workshops to play at companies is a lot of the books that people have read, servant leadership, it's more of, “Here's how you should lead from the front,” and it's a little bit more sometimes from a faith background.
In some cases, it's a different moral or worldview but it's this is the right way to lead a company, a good person would want to lead this way. That's great and I agree with all those things but there are few books. If anybody read the book, somebody you never heard of servant leadership, somebody that was a bad boss, maybe 1.5 books where somebody would read that and go, “I'm going to change how I lead my company. This tells me the best way to grow my company and find productivity is by high achieving servant leadership.” That's a little bit where I talked about things together.
Servant Leadership: Doing everything on your own will not make you fulfilled. Having a big team that gets to help you grow is essential.
The book that does this that leads well is Cheryl Bachelder’s book on servant leadership. She was the turnaround CEO for Louisiana's Popeye'sLouisiana Kitchen, the public company. She's now done that in a couple of other companies. When you read your book, you'd be like, “I'm never going to be that hard drilling boss. I'm going to follow her way because nobody else could turn around the company except for her.” I've done that in my same place and my companies and it fits well with, especially faith-based leaders, those that have a strong moral compass that goes, “This is how I want to lead but I get pulled in a different direction because I want to make money.” That's okay. If you love people the right way, lead them as a true servant, I guarantee you'll find the highest confidence of being able to hit your goals with any other leadership style.
I think of two women leaders that I worked for. Women and men, it doesn’t matter because they would have still been the top two if they happen to be women. MJ Shootie taught me. It was every Tuesday. We would meet and I remembered Tuesdays with Morrie. My mother gave me that book a long time ago and now I’ve got Tuesdays with MJ every week. By the end of my three years working with her, I went to the next company and had to let a guy go. He was like, “I'm on the nineteenth hole of my career.”
In the end, I worked with him so closely that I finally had to let him go. My son was four at the time and he brought in two massive bins full of Legos because we'd created such a relationship. He was like, “Chad, thank you. Now I get to sell my house and move out to the middle of the country. You've shown me that to execute at the caliber that people need to in nowadays world, I'm not interested in learning that. Thank you for being a high achiever and also being an ethical leader at the same time.”
It sounds like you were transparent with him, which is hard for a lot of people to do. They’re like, “Here's where I'm weak. Here's where I need help.” Also, here are tough discussions that help. Healthy conflict is a good thing. It also means we can have less conflict later. Let's have discussions. Let's bring up the topics and decide where we'd like to go from there. Everybody would like to be treated that way. I've had to let people go and it's never been a surprise to anybody in the last couple of years. Beforehand, it would have been.
Back in the day, it may be. Let's talk about mentors a little bit. You only read 1.5 books and for the audience, what's the name of that book?
It’s a book about servant leadership. It was called Dare to Serve by Cheryl Bachelder. The half a book that's not quite there but still good is Joel Manby wrote a book called Love Works. It takes 1 Corinthians 13 and defines what love looks like and should look like a lot from your perspective. It's good. It's not as results-focused as Cheryl's book is.
Talk to me about Reggie Campbell and Reggie Bradford. You've had some amazing mentors in your life. You’ve read the books. How is mentorship different?
Books are good. In their case, both of those gentlemen in different ways brought me into transparent, personal parts of their lives. Reggie Campbell was much more faith-based and everything he moved on from the business. I saw a lot of his business decisions before. Reggie Bradford brought me in to shadow him at a company we ended up selling to Oracle. He brought me into meetings, maybe I shouldn't have been in with some of the venture capital and private equity people at the time but I got to see every I got to see difficult discussions with his wife, his kids, he would bring in the office. From a mentorship perspective, neither one of them. Even Reggie Radford when I worked for him, he wasn't my friend. As he passed away a few years, he goes, “My goal when you're working for me was to duplicate myself. You needed to see the good and a lot of the ugly of me.” I saw a lot of the good and a lot of the ugly.
I understood what it looked like to make difficult decisions because as a leader, you have to do that. They were also structured in different ways, one had a formal program and the other one is structured like, “I expose you to everything including my emails. There's nothing I'll hide from you and you can ask me any question.” He put the time in the calendar on a weekly basis for me to ask those questions. That's been hugely impactful for me and especially as I look at why did they make the choice to step in a mentorship role. What should I look for when I decide to mentor somebody else?
That's what I was thinking. For our readers, somebody who's an up and comer in their company, did you asked these folks, “Would you mentor me?” Did they tap you on the shoulder? How did that relationship start?
A little of both. A phone call from another CEO introduced me so he made me an offer for a job. After about a month, he asked if that relationship could change a little bit. I also started serving with his kids at church. We had a personal thing that was starting as well. In that case, he made the lead. Reggie Campbell started a group called Radical Mentoring. I'd turned him down. He asked me if I would be in one of his mentoring groups, not just through Radical Mentoring twice. I said no, stupidly.
I realized he was coming to me asking about some bottlenecks in this organization he was growing. I realized, “This man who has been immaculately successful workwise has asked me to join his personal group twice, I said no to.” I don't know fully what a humble heart looks like but I know he has way more of it than I do. I sheepishly came to him and said, “Can I apply for your next group?” He was like, “You can but you still have to fill out the application now.” He made me fill out the three-page application and write an obituary of myself as well. It was part of it. I still had to apply. I don't know if he would have approved me without it but it worked in different ways.
That's huge because Living A Better Story, we launched the foundation. We've held two executive retreats that we're now calling intensive because they're twelve-hour days and four days in a row. I don't have a mentor so you've given me a light bulb that says, “I better get a mentor on this side of the house.”
I couldn't imagine going through difficult things without a mentor. I've got a work thing going on. I don't necessarily have a mentor. We're trying to do something in some way that hasn't ever been done before. I called 10 to 12 people and I’m like, “Amanda, Chad give me your cell phone. You're in a different industry, I'm not competing. Can I talk about your budget and what's happened in the last few years?” A lot of people opened their doors and took some time and gave me transparent insights into what was going on. I have a little bit more wisdom more than what I'm trying to tackle. I'd love to have somebody to walk alongside me.
What's the thing you would tell your twenty-year-old self if you could go back?
If I could tell myself one thing, I should look for the time-wasters in my life and find any way possible to kill them. I'm big on intentional downtime. Rest is important but I wasted so many hours and collective years on stupid things that I knew were stupid at the time. In some cases, wrong decisions. I wish I had that time back. A lot of it was things that I didn't learn from either. It was time gone.
I heard someone put it easy. You drew a list, “Hell, yes. Hell, no.” It's either on one of those columns. It's not in the middle. I've heard other people say, “Yeses are great. Noes are okay. Maybes will kill you in the sales world.” It's the same thing when it comes to life. It’s either a yes or no. Draw it out and delete ones that are the noes.
Does this help me out on anything that I care about? Rest is important. Take a rest. You go and hang out on the hammock for six hours. If you give me a hammock by a creek, I'm a lot happier. I'll still take the hammock because I need that downtime but that's different from a lot of other things I wasted time on.
Last question for you, what role does faith play in your life and in all that you've done?
It drives my choices on a day-to-day and weekly basis. My wife and I are our firm followers of Jesus. We believe that we’re stewards of the money we've been blessed with but we're stewards of the time and the skills. We ended up having a lot of people put together a budget for money. We put together a budget on our time and our skills. That helps drive, “How do we raise our son? Where do we invest our time and community groups? Do I need to take quiet time? How much time do I take mentoring others?”
That's a pretty big driver and where faith comes in. In some cases, I didn't even fully realize it. Reggie Campbell had passed. We knew he was passing for the last couple of months and several of us saw a to-do list on his whiteboard in his office so we figured that these are the list of things he never got to or things he wanted to accomplish. That was the list he made so he finished strong. You’re like, “Maybe I'm not thinking about this steward thing quite as involved as I should.” Most of us are like, “I'm going to let my foot off the gas at some point.” Here's somebody that knew that his foot was being taken off.
It reminds me of when I went on this racecourse in LA and it was a Ferrari. There was a guy in the front seat. We, as drivers, tend to take our foot off the gas far before the cone. He goes, “No. Push. I have a brake over here. I'm not going to let you hit the wall.” By the third time around on six laps, you're flooring it all the way to the wall because you know he's there. That reminds me of what you said of going hard all the way to the orange cone. That's neat because it is easy to say, “If I can get to retirement and relax.” Don't worry, you'll have enough downtime. You can relax for a week, a month, over a year but you’ve got to do things for the kingdom that need to be on your list.
When you have a faith-based kingdom mindset, you will get bored doing other things. We took a company public. That gave two years of handcuffs. We sold the company in three years. A couple of years later, got three more years of handcuffs. I didn't show up to the office for almost 60 days. We took a couple of sales calls I had to do. I didn't even have faith at that time and I got bored. I was a lot younger then. I couldn't imagine having had gentlemen walk alongside me that are many years down the line. I'm like, “I see what it looks like.” It’s like, “By all means, if you want to golf, golf. If you want to go hiking, go hiking.” I'd love to hike the Appalachian Trail. I'll probably do it with my boy at some point when he's older but that doesn't mean I can't be and shouldn't be looking at life as stewardship.
Do you have a daily routine? I asked a loaded question because we were launching this app called 77Pray. It’s fashioned after 75 HARD, which is a mental toughness app that I did for 75 days, 2 workouts a day, 45 minutes each, drink a gallon of water, no alcohol for 75 days. It’s a strict regimen but it missed the spiritual toughness piece. You pray in the morning, you read a Bible verse and it's all automated. It's going to come to your inbox. It pops up. The verse and then act. The act is to invite someone else to the app so they can learn how to pray on a daily basis and pray before they go to bed. Those are the core three pieces. Pray, read the Bible, act, rinse and repeat on a daily basis. Is there anything else because I feel like your mentors probably gave you something? Am I missing something in that equation?
Physicals are a huge part of that for me as well. For me, it's what gets me out of bed in the morning. I tend to do my quiet times in the morning. In most cases, it's after my 5:30 workout. Frankly, if Iron Tribe Fitness was open at 4:30 and had a 4:30 workout, I'd rather that happen because I'm up early. I'm not fully coherent yet but I can go work out. My quiet times are different if I haven't worked out. The other thing is I do give myself a little bit of slack. In 75 days, you did two workouts a day. I respect that crazy. When I tried doing quiet time every day, I tend to fail and I use that as an excuse for myself. If I shoot for five a week, I can do five a week and that still gives me two days to slack off. I'm much more likely to get 7 out of 7 days when I only have to.
That's good feedback because part of the question in the beta is, “Is it editable?” Most activities are. If you add an activity, a workout at 5:30, that's on your daily routine. What you're telling me is I should probably make all of the items editable.” If someone wants to make it 5 a week instead of 7 a week, that's important.
It depends on the personality. I know some people, every day is much better for them. At least where I'm at with a young kid growing a family and a business, it is hard for me every day to get up. We have eldercare things going on. There might be a thing where somebody in the family in the household didn't sleep at all last night. Those workouts are a lot harder to get up for. Is quiet time going to happen then? You go, “I'll get some quiet time in the afternoon.” That doesn't happen for me so the day is off. As a man anyways, women as well but men have a higher sensitivity to the shame trigger. If I was supposed to do something and I didn't do it now, it makes it harder for me to do it tomorrow sometimes.
It's better to set it up right in the first place.
I'm still going to try for seven a day but that's where the small group stuff happens. It's even here in the community. I set two workouts today for 75 days. I can do this.
By the way, one's inside of one's outside. Day three, it snowed 12 inches in Colorado. I’m like, “Great. Here we go.”
I got introduced to a new gentleman in my company who invited me to a group that works out in the morning called F3. While I do have my own gym, they're going to do the Murph workout once a month and I'm like, “I didn't do the first workout with them.” I've done a Murph before and I'm like, “I might join you for future months. That can be fun.” Only because other people are doing it so I'll get and draw other people trying something hard.
Kurt, it's been fabulous talking with you. Kurt Uhlir, CMO of Showcase IDX, which is a subsidiary of eXp World Holdings. It’s been an amazing conversation. Your energy and stick-to-itiveness I can sense through the conversation and the role that faith plays. That's a common thread that I'm hearing everybody that I have on the show. What's under the hood of most successful people is a belief in something bigger than themselves. It's refreshing that we're able to share that on the Living A Better Story Show.
Thank you for having me, Chad.
I appreciate your time. Thank you. We'll catch you on the next Living A Better Story episode. Signing out.
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About Kurt Uhlir
Kurt Uhlir is a globally recognized marketer, operator, and speaker.
He’s built and run businesses from start-up to over $500M annual revenue, assembled teams across six continents, been part of the small team leading an IPO ($880M), and participated in dozens of acquisitions.
As a dynamic and charismatic speaker on marketing and innovation, Kurt’s speaking experience includes speeches across the United States and Europe in addition to presenting at prominent industry events such as PPAI, GDC, the White House, and private company/team workshops. He advises leaders, from startup founders to private-equity-backed CEOs to the President of the United States.
Kurt is a popular and entertaining commentator and has appeared on national television shows and periodicals including the Wired, TechCrunch, Thrive Global, USA Today, Business 2 Community, WGN Radio, NBC, and ABC. Reach out to him for a guest on marketing, real estate, or growing American-based businesses.
Kurt serves as Chief Marketing Officer for Showcase IDX, which has helped real estate agents and brokers bring more than 3 million visitors to their websites in the past year. You’ll find him regularly sharing modern marketing strategies and tactical tips with agents - as well as pointing out the tools and trends to skip.
