Real Estate Rewind Sessions - March 2023 - Kurt Uhlir, Chief Marketing Officer

00:00:00 - Bill Risser

Hi, everybody. Welcome to another Real Estate Sessions Rewind. This week we're going back to March of 2023 with marketing expert Kurt Uhlir, as well as some expertise in some other areas, which I'll save for the introduction. So enjoy.

00:00:15 - Kurt Uhlir

But if it's your business, do you have a site with technology that you control that that is the focal point for anything else that you do marketing wise, whether you're great with email and KVcore or follow up boss or you're wonderful on TikTok or social like, when those algorithms change, when Google spam filters change, have you trained your audience to come find you on kurtulur.com? And that's that second big thing, because then it doesn't matter where you choose to invest in marketing, you have a central hub that everything focuses back to.

00:00:47 - Bill Risser

You're listening to the real estate sessions, and I'm your host, Bill Risser. With nearly 25 years in the real estate business, I love to interview industry leaders, up and comers, and really anyone with a story to tell. It's the stories that led my guests to a career in the real estate world that drives me into my 9th year and nearly 400 episodes of the podcast. And now, I hope you enjoy the next journey. Hi, everybody. Welcome to episode 348 of the Real Estate Sessions podcast. As always, thank you so much for tuning in. Thank you so much for telling a friend. Today. We're going to have a lot of fun. Today we are talking to Kurt Uhlir. This guy did a lot of things prior to the world of real estate, including stuntman scuba rescue and high angle rescue. And he's a certified alligator handler. Yes. That's the first time I've ever mentioned that phrase on the real estate sessions podcast. So you want to listen in? Let's get this thing started. Kurt, welcome to the podcast.

00:01:45 - Kurt Uhlir

Hey, thanks for having me, Bill.

00:01:47 - Bill Risser

Well, look, most of my listeners know that I like to start at the beginning. I really, I am fascinated where people come from, how they got to be where they're at. And so the easiest way to start with that is, is your childhood. And I'm going to go, I'm going to ask you, looking at some of the things I could. In my research, I found out that it seems like you were preordained to have a life in tech and entrepreneurship. Let's talk about that. Your parents, I think your father was early on in this game, if you wanted to call it that. So let's talk about what role that your mom and dad played getting you.

00:02:21 - Kurt Uhlir

Yeah, my dad was. I'd say a glorified grunt at actually, Bell Labs used to be like the apple or Tesla of the day. And so I build my first hours thanks to him, when I was like eight or nine with Bell Labs. So I was really good at math, even very early on. And my dad was the person that would take all like, say, cell phones. Now somebody else came up with the whole network on schematics, and he would lead the teams to actually go build it in the field and so, and take what was on paper and make it, make it reality. And they'd had some problems and he happened to take me in an office and I solved something they'd been struggling with. And he was like, well, we pay people for this. So he built hours for it. So I got to be around some high techs very early on, but it was just also weird from a tech perspective. And I didn't think about it was growth takes time. And my dad is blessed with one of those people where he didn't sleep. And so, like, until he had cancer the third time, I think he slept an hour to an hour and a half a night. Then he started sleeping more like a normal person. And so between, he just put in more hours than anybody I'd ever seen. And my mom just had this country work ethic where, I mean, I remember, like, I mean, I did spend, we moved to Alabama when I was eleven. I mean, I still remember, I was probably like seven, maybe eight, in Michigan where we had cat outages when we lived in Chicago. And like, it's, it's late at night, late enough that the moon is way up in the sky. And I just remember telling my mom, like, when can we go to bed? Well, we were out, like, raking leaves for this like one acre, like, garden that she had. She's like, we'll go to sleep when we're done. Wow. That work ethic, I didn't even, I had no, there's no way I could ever go and pay for that kind of like, basically coaching and consulting that taught me, like, what it's like and exposure to both working hard and really just like, technology at an early age.

00:04:15 - Bill Risser

Yeah, I think that, that probably drives into the fact that when you attended school, you went to Vanderbilt, which very cool school, you were a track athlete, you loved running, and, which is, for me, that's, that's, I don't get that, but that's awesome for you. And, and I think you, you talked about the fact that, you know, being an athlete and having that discipline and all of the stuff that that takes, especially at a collegiate level, really primed you for what you're going to do in your life, you know, running companies and growing businesses and things. Let's talk about that.

00:04:47 - Kurt Uhlir

Yeah. I mean, even now, it's like, you know, if you want to ring my bell, if I'm hiring something, like, I love hiring athletes and healthy addicts, and, I mean, every, every athlete is a healthy addict. But I mean, to say that in terms of people that have had, like, true, like. Like, bad addictions but have overcome that, I mean, that's a huge kind of, like, that's a process into itself. But, I mean, as an athlete, it's like, there's nothing you could do, like, from a running perspective or pick any sport where you could make up for a week or three weeks of, like, screwing off by just going and make up practice in one day. And so, like, I was running, you know, 60, sometimes 120 miles a week, especially, like, in the summer when we're working on things. And it's like, you couldn't. You can't do all of that mileage, like, in one or two days. It has to be spread out. So it's small things done consistently, which is what it takes to be successful running companies. I mean, at the end of the day, it's perseverance that wins. Perseverance and operations. Like, everybody has good ideas. I mean, and good ideas and bad ideas. Like, they're the. They feel the exact same until you realize that a bad idea was bad and you shouldn't have been doing it for six months. But what matters is operations and just putting in the time you get out of school.

00:06:00 - Bill Risser

And I, first of all, you have the most varied background of anyone in the tech world that I've ever interviewed. And. And I'm probably, you know, this is episode 348, so there's a lot of people I've chatted with, but I'm going to throw some things out there, like stuntman, unbelievable, a certified alligator handler. And I live in Florida now, so that really is intriguing to me. And a member of something called high angle and scuba rescue teams. I get the scuba part right, especially with what I'm watching in California, where I grew up, there's a lot of rescue going on in water. But let's talk about, first of all, what's high angle rescue and then really, alligators?

00:06:41 - Kurt Uhlir

Yes. On both, it goes back to largely, I mean, to my dad as well. I mean, I picked up those genes where I do not need to sleep like most people. And so I'm in my mid forties. But, you know, when you only sleep two or 3 hours a night, you get more hours to do things. And so, like, when my wife and I got married, it was like, hey, do you want to go to. Do you want to go to go to bed with me or wake up with me? And I asked her that a couple weeks before we got married, and she was like, it took her a minute. She was like, you do email me at, like, 03:00 in the morning. And then, like, that was just like a mind shift for her. And I was like, so I get a little bit more time. But literally, I became a member of the Alabama state rescue squad in Marshall County, Alabama, at 14, shouldn't have been able to, but there was a bad ice storm, and in the county, there were four total people, my dad and me being two of them, that could drive on the snow and ice that we had. And so he got permission at the. At the state level for me to join the rescue squad. And I was using a suburban or, you know, an old jeep to help pull out Hummers from the National Guard that were off in the ditch. Between that kind of allowance and skills my dad had taught me when I was younger and maybe wasn't the wisest, but still taught. Learn scuba very early. High angle. Think about anything with cliffs, rappelling. I'm not really a rock climber, but I can go down and I'll do a lot of controlled risk, but you and I both do in work. And so I started that when I was 14, and so did that for many years, actually, even when I moved, after I moved up to Chicago, I'd still go down and join Alabama when there was different things that went on. So.

00:08:21 - Bill Risser

Wow. So how did Gators come into play? Come on, Kurt. I mean, seriously.

00:08:25 - Kurt Uhlir

Well, the stunt work, again, I don't sleep. And so Chicago was doing a lot of movies at the time, and I met a gentleman that I was out, and I was like, well, what do you do? And he was like, well, I'm a database programmer by day, but really, I'm a stuntman. Cause there wasn't a real full time movie industry in Chicago at that time and not enough for full time stunt people. And I was like, what does that look like? So I started hanging out with them and literally started training stuntmen and women and training with them. And so people for Batman's, you know, dark knight movies and public enemy and some others, and so friends that have a lot cooler experiences than me, but I took a friend with me to some of the training sessions that he hurt his back pretty bad, and so he needed an epidural. And so I went with him, took off work to go with him, because I'm like, well, I kind of broke you, so I'll go with you, Mike, to bring you back after you get the epidural to lower the inflammation. And as I'm sitting in this doctor's office for basically people with disposable income or time to do stupid stuff like us, I read, hey, there's only one place in the United States that you can legally go learn to handle alligators unless you work for a company for, like, six months full time, because Florida, Louisiana, like those legislators, because the animals are native there, they've done the wise thing. You have to go work for a company for, like, six months full time before they can let you touch an alligator over about this big, maybe, you know, 30 inches long without its mouth taped. And I was like, hey, you're supposed to be good in, like, a week or two, right? He's like, yeah. I was like, all right. I booked his flights to Colorado. And so Alamosa, actually, about 15 minutes north of Alamosa, Colorado, which is still the middle of nowhere Colorado, there's Colorado gators, and it's this animal sanctuary with on a geothermal spring, and that's where I first learned to kind of handle alligators. And so, like, there's 1100 alligators in the middle of nowhere, Colorado, that it's a tilapia farm. And so they literally fillet the top of tilapia. They brought in gators, like, decades ago to be the trash compactors for them. And it's just great business. All you do is insert labor, and you get money out the other side. And so that's where I first learned to do it. So anything up to about maybe an eight foot gator I can handle by myself. Wow.

00:10:37 - Bill Risser

All right. All right. So, yeah, that's never been said on this show before.

00:10:42 - Kurt Uhlir

You may just need to ask some people some questions. I'm sure some agents out there have that experience.

00:10:48 - Bill Risser

I'll have to. It's got to be someone that grew up in Louisiana or Florida, though, not. Not Chicago, and went to Denver. That's great. Well, let's talk about, really, some of your real early successes. When you got into the heavy into the space, there's a lot of things you played in. There's some gaming and website creation and that sort of thing. The spatial data, I mean, I think especially as important as that is today, which is unbelievably important in our world. You talk about targeted ads and all kinds of great stuff. Let's talk about how you got into that world. And maybe for those who don't know, we'll talk about real quick what it is and some of the things that it's being used for today that we wouldn't even think.

00:11:29 - Kurt Uhlir

Yeah, I mean, every one of us used spaceship aid in ways that, like, 20 years ago, nobody used it. And so I went to go work for. Didn't mean to, but I was meaning to go. I was looking for jobs with investment banks and kind of being that go between, between the IT programming side and the top leaders and those working in algorithms. And I got a call from a retained search firm that said, hey, look, we're looking for somebody to come work with. Denise Doyle and Saladin Khan at this little company at the time called Navigation Technologies became nav tech. Now it's called hear technologies. They're literally the spatial data. I mean, many people think about Google Maps, but Google Maps is nowhere near the largest provider of this stuff. We provided all that data. And so if you use, you know, like, I invented the core technology behind Waze, like the navigation apps. And so that IP has been licensed by Google and Apple and a bunch of others. But think about all the places where, like, spatial digital data. Like, every time you do a route from one place to another, or in real estate, we do. I want to search for homes within 2 miles or 20 minutes driving of this school. Like that. All YEet needs two d and three dimensional spatial data behind the scenes. And so I had ten and a half years at this company that we took from $85 million a year in revenue to $1.44 billion. And it was like, I mean, it was like being at McKinsey or Bain basically for ten years, being mentored by people. Like I mentioned, two of them. And then later by Jetson Green. He was the president of Disney theme parks and came kind of as his semi retirement to nav tech until he realized, like, there's a lot of money here. And we were just at that place where the rest of technology picked up. And he went from, like, navigation systems being like a $20,000 add on to, like, it being in your cell phone and doing mapquests for free. Like, I was there for all of that. And so I would walk out of a meeting from Siemens VDO that makes the navigation system for Lexus, and then walk into FedEx Logistics, which is using it for getting packages. And then I walk into my innovation teams where I had friends in the video game industry was like, well, like on the back shelf behind me. I mean, I know we're audio, but it's like, I've got Microsoft Flight Simulator X. Because I had this crazy idea to walk into Microsoft and say, hey, how about we save you $20 to $40 million in building your next flight simulator game? And they were like, let's have that conversation. That was like, literally like 08:00 a.m. At 09:00 a.m. And a 10:00 a.m. But we did that across, like, eleven industries for spatial data. And it was like I could have gone to Bain or McKinsey and may not, maybe not have had that same background.

00:14:03 - Bill Risser

Let's talk about in the real estate space how that's exploded over the last, let's call it ten years, RPR. RPR launched a while ago, and it struggled to get a foothold. I think it's a great tool. I think there's some great stuff in it. I'm guessing your stuff is in there because they do that 20 minutes from here or 2 miles to the office. That's one place. Agents are using spatial data daily if they're using RPR.

00:14:30 - Kurt Uhlir

Well, and there's tons of things like that. I mean, anytime that any, literally any search that you're. That you're just comparing, like, distance or time or anything. I mean, a lot of the applications like RPR might use the United States government's census tiger data, but that data is basically free because the government came to our company and paid us an exorbitant amount of multiple, multiple millions of dollars so that we would give them a snapshot of that data and so for their purposes. And so, like, they've kind of bought data to open source, but it's still not nearly as good as what you can kind of get on the private market. And now there's companies like Mat box and others that Google collects their own data. But, yeah, there's places like, anytime you do a home search, the listing alerts, we all get that come out. And then there's, you know, a ton of other things that we have on there, too. It's like, you know, there's applications that consumers or agents can go to that says, here's the seven homes I want to go look at. Give me the optimal route between those. And then you'll get. And then you'll schedule your times at those based on 1234 as opposed to crisscrossing across town. That's just some of the places that we see the data used.

00:15:41 - Bill Risser

Yeah. So it seems there's this natural connection between what you did in nav tech in here with MLS's, I would guess. I mean, data. It's data all over the place, right?

00:15:51 - Kurt Uhlir

Very much both because it involves spatial data. But like in 2019, RESO, the real estate standards organization, brought me and Scott Lockhart in to talk about kind of two things. One was Showcase IDX had been one of the first companies to start using web API at that time, which was meaningful for accessing the MLS data. But on the other side, like, my 15 to 20 minutes that I really talked about was really meant to scare MLS into why they need to work better together with Riso. And so the, one of the. Oh, one of the reasons that nav tech here technologies exist so well now is they take disparate data, just like real estate. And so we created this multi-billion dollar a year revenue product by going out to all the local municipalities, the states, the counties and the cities, giving them tools very often, but sometimes taking data in many different formats, putting it into one big database for the US and eventually the world, and then having a normalization for, well, what can you and can't you do with some of that data, much like MLS data? And so whether you're bringing in like an IDX fee to provide a home search for an individual agent or much more of what I do now is, you know, running one of the largest sites in the, in the US in terms of active real estate listings, it's still compliance disparate data in very different formats. Like, I love what Sam and them are doing at Riso, but, but this is not a, as you know, this is not a real standards organization. It's a loose, loose standards organization. We have a long way to go. It'll be better for the whole industry if we fully adopt like, real standards that we can share data, but we were able to do that in a different industry. And so part of me talking to Rizo, part of what I do now is having that background saying both. One, there's a lot of money if we can all coordinate, but also if you don't, it's possible somebody will do. Basically what here did was we became the intermediary where these local sources did not coordinate. Somebody eventually invests enough money to come in and do that. It was Philips electronics for us. They invested like $800 million to go and build this kind of normalized platform. We made the money as opposed to the local sources. All they got was free tools that offset some of their it budgets. I actually don't want that to happen for real estate. And it's like standards exist for a reason. Like, we should work together.

00:18:13 - Bill Risser

How do you get to real estate? What was that thing that brought you over? Because, I mean, obviously you had things going very well, really well. And what was that pull for you?

00:18:23 - Kurt Uhlir

Some of it was just timing and serendipity, but I'm a big believer. I've written a good bit of my personal site about net weaving as opposed to networking. Like, networking is kind of a selfish thing to me. At the end of the day, it's not. But we've all shaken hands with somebody and they'll look at your business card, you can watch them talk to somebody else and they make that decision that says, you're not important enough for me to care. And so that's underlying. That's really what networking tends to be. Networking is more of the servant leadership approach, which when we talk about where it's like, look, I'm meeting people because I want to know, like, can I help you? Like, at the end of the day, I hope it comes back and helps me at some point, but I'd much rather just be a trusted, trusted advisor to you, Bill, than just make money off of you. And so I had taken 18 months off after starting one of the first influencer marketing platforms. Only came out of that sabbatical because weird as it's going to sound, I got a call from President Trump. So love him or hate him, but I was called to come do some things with the Made in America movement and run some events and bring him some information for made in America companies using that label and very public C SPAN stuff. And so as part of that, I kind of got back into the game a little bit. And Alan Pinstein, who I now appear of mine I work with, called me up, he's a fraternity brother, Kappa Sigma, and said, hey, I sold this company called Tourbuzz, but I have this other real estate company and it's doing okay. But I really want to just talk to you about, like you talked to your wife into letting you take 18 months off. That seems like a difficult conversation. Can we grab coffee and we just talk about that? And as part of that, it's how he actually mentioned the showcase IDX. And he was, and it was, it's what I actually like. I was talking to some private equity groups and like, superb technology, but ten x, better than anything else that was out there, but they had issues with marketing and sales and growth, and I was like, I mean, I'll grab coffee with Scott Lockhart, make the introduction, and like three or four days we, later we talked and I think the day after that I accepted an offer to come join them. And it was all from just grabbing coffee with Alan to from a fraternity perspective to offer some input, which ended up sucking him back into the business. So.

00:20:30 - Bill Risser

And he didn't get his 18 months off. It sounds like he got a little.

00:20:33 - Kurt Uhlir

Bit of time off and he got involved pretty quickly.

00:20:36 - Bill Risser

All right, that's great. You're passionate about marketing. It shows, you can hear it in your voice. Let's, let's get. Do you have three things real estate agents should be doing right now in their marketing strategy? We'll give them some real takeaways here.

00:20:49 - Kurt Uhlir

Yeah, I both from my showcase IDX days, but also just public, my public stuff. I could see inside tens of thousands of real estate agent CRMs and like a lot of people, as we know, aren't doing a lot of transactions. And some you see this big growth. And the first thing for me is this realization for agents of like three things they do. The first is you have to have this acknowledgement that says it is your business as a 1099 contractor. Like, you are not a Keller Williams agent, an exp agent, not a re max agent. You are your own business. And like, you need to show up every day and think about how you grow your marketing and your business unto that. And brokerages are great. I mean, I work with a brokerage I love, I love all of those that I just mentioned, but it's your business, not theirs. And most agents don't show up that way. I find. And that affects everything else that they do. And when I look at those that have seen this huge growth and those that stay there, they realize it's their business. And then when you do that, it drives two other things. And so the first thing is, the second thing for me is agents need to have their, they need to have their own website. And it's really in it. It's not a subdomain site that's from their brokerage. It's got to be on their own URL. Those others are great stepping stones. But if it's your business, do you have a site with technology that you control, that that is the focal point for anything else that you do marketing wise, whether you're great with email and KVcore or follow up boss or you're wonderful on TikTok or social like, when those algorithms change, when Google spam filters change, have you trained your audience to come find you on kurtuler.com. And that's that second big thing. Because then it doesn't matter where you choose to invest in marketing, you have a central hub that everything focuses back to. And then that third piece is, it very much still goes off of those of being your business is you gotta have a clean database. Like the biggest thing that you have is, is your database of contacts. And like by all means go chase new leads. New leads are important, but those agents that really grow their business, they have clean data. I mean, I have really good personal friends with like the people that run agent hub 360 that literally, so often the reason people come to them is because they're just like, my contacts are mess, the technology is hard. Can you help clean up this dirty closet so I can find my purple shirt that I really like? Like, like, that's kind of the figurative they give because as if it's your business, like referrals and past clients and one p being available, whether you do the Brian Buffini approach or Tom Ferry's approach, like you've got to have, you've got to go back in mind continually your past database. And if, I mean literally, like if you don't, if you don't have your CRM in place, like, what are you going to do at that point? You can't send a newsletter. You have no idea of people moving outside of your area. Depending on parts of the country, like you might have 0.1% or 15% of the people in your CRM moving out of your service area. If you don't know that, you're never going to get a referral from those people.

00:23:47 - Bill Risser

I'll share what I say about CRMs with agents when I talk to a small group or whatever I say, at the very least, if you just did this, you'll be way ahead of the game. When you talk to somebody, document it. Create a contact and document it in the CRM. Create the next time you're going to call them, whether it's two days, two months, whatever, and then call them and do it again.

00:24:06 - Kurt Uhlir

Yeah.

00:24:06 - Bill Risser

Is that. Am I right?

00:24:07 - Kurt Uhlir

Absolutely. They just did that. And those notes are so important. Like, so my wife and I have a little girl who's almost 16 months old. When she came, I got three text messages from people, two of which were agents, that were, and two of those had voice messages or had videos in there that were literally, they took notes. Oh, when she was born, it was at their one, at her one year birthday. And so that means they made a note probably just from a Facebook post about, about Hannah Grace's birth. And they sent me, just like, all the messages were basically the same. It was, hey, this is special. Such a special time. These are the good old years. Like, like, you need to relish this time and put off other things. And it was just like they weren't selling for anything and it was just touch points. Oh, my gosh. That's what, that's what a good CRM does. They made some quick notes that this is a meaningful moment. And I don't know if those three, like, did they do a Facebook comment? Did they send me an email or something when she was born? I don't remember. But one year later, there was only three people out of the thousands of people that I know that followed up on her birthday.

00:25:15 - Bill Risser

That's awesome. That's exactly it. That's the power. Let's stick with websites for a second because I think that, you know, there's this site out there, there's this thing, the Z word, and, and they're really, they have an amazing, they built an amazing website. It's, it's just drives so much traffic, obviously generates billions of dollars in revenue for the company. I'm an agent. I'm just me, I just have my website. Can I, can I hold them off? Is there something I can do?

00:25:46 - Kurt Uhlir

Absolutely. I mean, I'm very biased because I come from, you know, I come from working with showcase IDX, but I mean, there's a bunch of third party reports that say, like, people choose that search which only exists on individual agents websites over zillow. And I think it's for two reasons. One is it is a great modern search and a lot of the home searches agents have, like, the agents don't use them, they go use other tools. And so it's like if you don't have a home search on your site, like showcase IDX, that people will actually use. Well, the only promise I can guarantee you in real estate is if that home search on your site or you don't have a site, but if your clients won't use it, they're going to go to Zillow. And that means a competitive agent is going to call your client 100% of the time. The other thing that I think with that for agents, if that's actually used, is a lot of agents, they do a wonderful job. Like Jay Valento is this agent in California that I just love. Part of him talking and educating his client base is that he protects his clients data, which is not what that big portal you mentioned does. And so you can go look at their public documents like they make billions of dollars. Like with Premier agent, which is basically advertising, selling, providing consumer contact and budget information. Like Jay and others point that out to their clients, it says, look, like when you fill out things on my website, I don't go and sell that information. I make money when I can help you with the transaction and you want to bless me with that. And so that's much different than I find a lot of agents. They try going head to head with some of the big portals as opposed to pointing out the, like, there's nothing wrong with, you know, with a wide range of financial advisors, but I will only ever work with a fee based financial advisor. I'll pay you a flat percentage. I'll pay you for my plan with the guarantee that you will not be making money on the backside for what you recommend to me because that's how I view trust. Well, when you explain to consumers that says, hey, I only get your contact information. And when you're looking for a half a million dollar condo in downtown Chicago, that's like basically going publicly and saying you're going to move a retirement account in the next 90 days, who wants to buy that info? And people freak out. They freak out enough. My wife says, stop asking people. Do they know what happens where I've had a barbecue or something? Because it changes the whole event. That's what I think helps the agent's website is it's not just having the site, but it's making sure their clients and prospective clients realize that they're in a different game as being a trusted agent over some big portals.

00:28:21 - Bill Risser

Yep. So keeps coming back to trust. I love that you talked about Jay. And he feels like he's got influence over his database because he stays connected and influencer. That's kind of a big deal today. Everyone's talking about it. Is there. Is there a world in real estate for that term? Does it look different than what you know? You know what I'm thinking about on Instagram?

00:28:45 - Kurt Uhlir

It absolutely does. I mean, I think one of the things just in real estate is you have to differentiate between, like, let's just call it the b two B, the recruiting agent influencer, versus, like, the consumer focused agent. Nothing's wrong with those two. But the person that's bringing over agents and speaking to other agents and coaching programs, that's a different type of influence than somebody who's going out to consumers. But in both cases, there's definitely a room for it in real estate. I just. I think too often people end up thinking, like, they have to have 10,000 or 100,000 like, people that follow them on YouTube or TikTok or Instagram to be meaningful. And they need to realize that, like, we all have influence. And if anything, like, the smaller your tribe is, the more influence you have. Like, if you have ten, like, I have tens of thousands of people that follow me on Twitter. Do those people generally care? Like, some of them come to my website if I write a new blog post, but if I say, hey, like some piece of information, or I like this piece of camping gear, do those people really like, what do they think about me? I don't know. Most of those people, if my aunt posts that on Facebook, if the average agent posts that, like, there's tremendous value there and trust, and we go back to that trust word you were talking about. And so that's what I think people need to think about, is we're all influencers and this is an influence economy. And you need to realize that as an agent, you get to do something that actually most big brokerages can't do and that most brands can't do and that's run a micro influencer campaign, because in that case, you're the only person that you're having to connect with. And so be authentic, like in real estate. Share content for the 95% of the time when you're, you know, sphere, when you're people in your CRM, that for 95% of time when they're not actively buying and selling, but still relevant to them as a home buyer or somebody in the community, you're going to have influence and your business will grow.

00:30:40 - Bill Risser

Yeah, that's great. You talk a lot about, especially on your website. I'll recommend this, by the way. Kirtjuler.com. Amazing site, folks. A lot of great content, great information. That's where I picked up a lot of this that we're talking about today. But you talk a lot about high achieving servant leadership. Let's discuss that for a second. What is it? How does it help? Especially for, let's say, a team lead who's trying to grow and do something a little bit different? Because obviously there's a lot of leadership involved when you're taking a team from ten to try to get it to 70. Right?

00:31:12 - Kurt Uhlir

Right. Yeah. So traditionally, I mean, all leadership styles fall underneath this big umbrella of authoritative or autocratic like leadership, which basically is do what I say or you get fired. I mean, at the end of the day, as the boss, the team lead. Like, that's still kind of there, but authoritative. Like, you get micromanagement but also like it. That's the threat that tends to be there whether people intended to or not. But it very much the, hey, I'm the boss. Do exactly what I told you. The servant leaders much takes much more of the time to establish purpose and realize that, like, hey, the biggest thing that I can often do in trying to grow my team is figuring out how I can serve them so that they can accomplish what, what I in the company need them to do. I spend an exorbitant amount of my time. I mean, I am very much a doer on my team. Anybody that works with me knows that. But it's like, but I'm only able to do that because like, I have a gentleman named Scott on my team that he's my operations manager, newly into that role as like, part of, part of his job, part of my job is actually to make him successful. It's like he's my factory manager. And so he tells me when to show up to things at time. And so I helped define a strategy and then he, you know, my job is to then step back in and see where he's at and train him, train Tiffany on my team so that they can be better day in and day out. And that servant kind of leadership is, I've been the authoritative leader. I've been in place where I've made people millions of dollars and they still won't take my phone call today. And one, nobody wants to have that wake behind them for the destruction that does in personal lives. But, but I've now been part of high achieving servant leadership teams where I can very much believe whether you're a one person agent that's trying to grow that 70 person team or like in my case now we're a 2000 person company trying to, you know, grow staff and agent count. Like if I want to grow faster and higher than I could in anything else, you serve your people, you follow a servant leadership approach. And that's the best way to approach it.

00:33:12 - Bill Risser

We're running on time. But I have a couple more quick questions for you. The first one is we're coming out of the pandemic with a unbelievable real estate market that I think very few people predicted in March of 2020. And so there's this little correction going on right now. I don't think it's anywhere near what we went through in the dark days. But what do you see going forward? What should we be expecting? And I know that's a tough question. I'm trying to, but I think you can handle.

00:33:40 - Kurt Uhlir

So let me distill what tens of thousands of posts on lab code agents and real closers and what people.

00:33:46 - Bill Risser

I mean, just put it all in one place.

00:33:49 - Kurt Uhlir

Agents are scared. We know that. We see it all the time. But you can't make decisions out of fear. I mean, we look back whether it's the same correction we had before, more or less. Like, the one thing that's consistent when you look back at past corrections in real estate and other industries is this is the time when we're going to look back in two years and a small number of agents, small percentage, are going to have added one to two zeros to their network worth like that. There is such abundance now for agents that says, look, yeah, you'd love to be showing homes, but interest rates were over 7% and they're back down a little bit below that now. If you're not showing homes, the best thing you can do, or if you have spare money, is to invest in organic search and content marketing. You'll have a 50 to 100 x return if you do it right. And it's one of those things. You can't just kind of like running before. You can't just put in a bunch of money right now and get a result instantly. It does take consistency over time, and literally, if you start to do things like build out community pages on your website, bank content that will be meaningful for you to share out over the next two years, you will add one to two zeros to your net worth. I don't care what level you're at right now. That's how big of an opportunity there is if you do that right.

00:35:04 - Bill Risser

Kurt, this has been great. I'll close this with the same question we've asked every guest going back to 2015. And that's what one piece of advice would you give a new agent? Just getting started.

00:35:14 - Kurt Uhlir

They need to invest in building that own website. You don't have to spend money to somebody. You might have a 14 year old niece or a son or something that can build that WordPress site for you, but not for a new agent. It's not just to have that site. It's the process of writing that bio about who you are and why people should care, and the process of building that site that's going to fundamentally change your business business.

00:35:36 - Bill Risser

Kurt, if someone wants to reach out to you, what's the best way for them to do that?

00:35:40 - Kurt Uhlir

My personal website, kurtieller.com dot. I spend an exorbitant amount of time writing right now and would love feedback from people.

00:35:48 - Bill Risser

Awesome. This has been great. Well, once again, I apologize for not making the connection immediately that we sat down at that event.

00:35:57 - Kurt Uhlir

I'm honored you chose me as a guest before you put that personal connection together.

00:36:02 - Bill Risser

Yeah, look, it was like I said, it was just an awesome background. I'm sure we're going to get. I'm going to get a lot of comments from people that get to listen to this, so I appreciate it. I'll see you in Orlando in May, and we'll have to have a drink or something and chat a bit more. And thank you so much for your time. Today was awesome.

00:36:19 - Kurt Uhlir

Yeah. Thank you.

00:36:20 - Bill Risser

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