Part 2 - How Kurt Uhlir Built A Personal Brand That Earns Six Figures

Foreign welcome to this edition of the Million Dollar Mastermind podcast. This is where we pick the brains of high achievers from all walks of life and get their hard earned real world insights on winning. I'm your host, Larry Wydell. I think we hit on this last time, but how long have you had it as a priority? And it, you know, where did it come on the radar screen for you that I'm going to build my own personal brand and that's a priority that's important for me. How did that happen and how long you've been working on?

I've probably only really been working on it for maybe a year and a half or so. But I've dabbled with my personal brand for a good while. I mean I first got paid for my first keynote speak probably 17 years ago and I've done, you know, outside of part of my corporate jobs at all, I mean like when I was at Exp Realty, I did more than 100 speaking events for the company. What national international events or whatnot. I probably did 200 paid speaking gigs. And so a lot of that personal branding just does come from that. I was offered a couple of book deals. I didn't like the restrictions that come with working at the big publishing house. And so that really spurred me to say, well, if I don't want to to be restricted, how else do I get my message out? And so that's what encouraged me much more to start thinking about a personal brand, which is really just how to get the message out there as your own website or YouTube channel.

Yeah. And what's your best way of getting your. Have you found so far building your personal brand other than doing podcasts and things?

Long form writing tends to actually be the best thing for me for a couple reasons. One is the way that I write. Google seems to love it, which is awesome for driving traffic to you, but it also helps crystallize my thoughts that much more. So it makes my next speech better, my next podcast better. When I finally say like I wrote a guide on hyper growth building hyper growth companies and that does really well. Like if you search for hyper growth and Google are growing companies fast, like it's going to come up but that just crystallizing that has helped me go through and nail so many examples from.

How many words is a long form?

For me it's usually long form starts at about 7,000 and I may it's not rare for me to have an article that's 10,000 words long.

Good keep if you push it up a Little bit. You can have a hundred page book.

I have thought about that. I have a Kindle book right now. That actually is a long form article I wrote on enterprise SEO for a CFO at a public company. It was my kind of our internal getting him to understand why I was asking for a six to seven million dollars budget. And I was like, well I'll just put it up as an article on my website and somebody why don't you put that as a PDF? And then I was like, well if I have a PDF I might as well put it up on Kindle. So it's Kindle. That's quite well, yeah.

You could just write 30 or 40 Kindle Publishing books and let them do all the work. Yeah, but not if people want to find. Now they can search Google search. But if they want to want to dig into some of these that you've done and would not have, you know, the title or the subject at hand, should they go to your website?

They should go to my website@kurt euler.com and any one of my articles that are categorized, it'll take them there. There's a player at the top. If you don't want to read 8,000 words, you can just hit play and listen to it like a podcast.

That's pretty cool.

There'll be links to YouTube or anything else on there as well.

Yeah. Now talk about how you got into from, you know, the lawn care business, how much schooling. You know, a lot of times you get your real education by doing things like having the lawn care business and having to start your corporation and pay taxes and things like that. But now did you go, you know, and school can be superfluous, you know. In other words, Zuckerberg dropped out after a year at Harvard. Same with Gates. And you know, they got a contract for software, the Altair computer and they dropped out of Harvard, moved to Albuquerque and so, and by the way went to work for my cousin who invented the first personal computer. That's another story for the other day. But the thing is, a lot of people, once they start getting the business experience, don't feel like they need the education. And so what was your thinking as you were coming up through high school? And you know, it seems like your dad was pretty well informed, pretty well involved and aware of what was happening. What was the conversation and the thinking of about for you in those formative years?

I was never pushed on formal education. I have a master's in financial engineering. I came out being able to code Black Durman and Toy and take a trillion dollars in mortgages and carve them up into mortgage backed securities and different tranches and sell those out. But looking back at it like, you know, my master's was, was valuable but to a large degree now I don't even look at degrees for people on resumes that if I'm interviewing them, especially if they're 28 on what I care much more is about their experience. I would always take at this point if two marketers were coming to me for a still an earlier to intermediate marketing level role. And one person had been an only high school education, but they'd been doing email campaigns and social media ads for the last five to seven years, you know, growing through that. And the other one came out of Kennesaw State, Georgia State or somewhere with a four year degree and maybe two years at an agency. I would always choose the non college person in that case. I want the doer that's been in there doing things right right now. Now clearly I want, I want my medical doctor, whether they're an ND or an MD to have gone to school. You know, I'd like my accountant to have a cpa, but I don't care about that they actually have a degree. I care, they have a CPA which unfortunately does have that degree requirement. But for most things I care much more for and I think most people are looking much more at what's on the ground training nowadays, especially in terms of marketing. I mean, I've got a group of a couple dozen other CMOs at mid market companies that I'm amazed at what we're teaching each other about how to use AI right now in any part of marketing you could imagine. And we're all running individual experiments. I mean There's a Fortune 100 company that I was able to solve a major SEO issue that they've struggled with for three years. I solved it at Easy Home Search and now they're being able to implement it over there. And it's like you can't learn any of those things with a formal education. It has to be real world testing of things and go, I figured this out. Yeah here, you know, and it was only because I knew like they don't mention the problems you have on any of your, you know, public analyst calls. It's because I'm intimately in relationships with some of these people. And they were just like, we're struggling with this, we can't figure it out. I was like, I think I just figured it out. Do you want to help me test it? Yeah.

Yeah. Now Coming out of school, did you have a different, you know, getting the master's degree and you know, you're in that environment coming out of that, did you have a different attitude about what? The experience you wanted, the kind of company you wanted to get, the kind of situation you wanted to get. What were you looking for?

I knew exactly what I wanted and it is not what I got.

Yeah, okay.

I wanted to come out and go work in one of the investment banks and being that intermediary between the highly quantitative people that only cared about equations and the software engineers that were actually creating all the risk models and do the interface between them. And I kept coming in silver medalists from so many of the brands we would all know.

And.

And instead I got a call from a routine search firm and I turned them down the first time. And I ended up at this little company called NavTech. We spoke about them a little bit in the first time. I literally. They were looking for somebody that they didn't think existed and had been looking for for a little while. And it was me. It was somebody that did have a quantitative and very technical degree, but that had an entrepreneurial spirit at the heart that wanted to work for a company. Because most people that come out that want to be entrepreneurial, that have started companies when they're 14, 15 and stuff, they're wanting to go to try, at least try. Most are going to fail, but do what Zuckerberg and them did. And I didn't want that. I wanted it to go like my place. I was like, I'll make much better dollars working at a company. I just had no idea what I was going to get. And this company I ended up being at was at the core of like literally like 11 industries just blowing up, like from almost nothing to big or transformative. Like, we were the core behind navigation systems and real time traffic in the automotive industry internationally. Well, that was in 2000. Car navigation systems had only been in our cars for a couple of years and most of them were horrible at that time. And that became so big and then Garmin Devices and all. And so it's like I was in the industry that powered all of that and had so not what I was looking for. But I look back and I go, if I had gone into Bain Capital, if I had gone into Boston Consulting Group and you know, been on a partner track, I would not have been able to learn nearly as much as being at this company, NavTech, working for Solidine Con, as I did.

Yeah, you know, you've got a Lot of contacts and a lot of successful people. What do you see among. We won't spend any time talking about the people who are not successful and we and what they do because that's an unlimited field. But let's talk about things that off the top of your head as an outside observer that energize you, things that you see, traits, tendencies, attitudes from these other high level people in business in different areas that you admire, catch your attention and energize you. It's like, you know, the Bible says whatsoever things are lovely, if there be any virtue, be any praise, think on these things. And so much of the time we're flooded with nincompoops what the nincompoops do and we're arguing with stupid people. But the thing is there are people, if you're fortunate enough, there are people in your life that do things right and that can't inspire you and you can learn from and pick up ideas. So, you know, I wanted to put.

That in front of you. Yeah. The people that are successful, for me it really matters are they successful in their personal life that the personal life that they would actually want. Now what they say will make them happy today, but like if you can nail them down or, or fast forward to them to where they're going to be in 10 or 15 years and where they look back and go, wow, the previous 10 or 15 years I've been happy with where my personal life has gone, where it's at now, and that they're happy on a, with a work perspective as well. I say that because like one of the best corporate finance directors that I've ever worked with and I think now he's finally been promoted, was at a public company I was at man. We tried promoting that man. I don't know how many times until finally he said it. I want to be really clear, if you promote me, I will quit. And he was really good. I mean he was a director, so he had a VP and a CFO above him. And so he still had those crunch break. He had a couple little kids and he had a wife that he loved. And he knew that at the company we were at it was going to mean a lot more hours and consistently if he went up. And so he looked forward and said, I want my wife to know me, I want to spend time with her, I want my kids to know me and I'm making more than enough money to stay in my financial plan. And he was so adamant, he said, I will quit if you all promote me because we finally just said we're promoting you. We've gone through this a couple of times and he said I'm out then. That's what success actually looks like to me. That's a life that he looks back now and you know, it's 20 years later. And he goes, I'm really glad I've made those decisions with that. The people that I kind of outside of the people that you asked, who energizes me sometimes? The people that energize me are not the people that may fully be successful at work and or even person wise. The people that energize or who I choose to work with the most are on this big spectrum to me and they're the tail ends of it. The only people that I really will like would enjoy working with. And so there's, on this core spectrum there's these people that all they ever want to do is to make as much money or be as popular as they can in their industry. I love those people because I know when we're working together and a problem comes up or an opportunity comes up, I know exactly how they're going to make decisions. Now it may be throwing me into the bus but you know where they're going to be at on the far end are people with a strong moral compass. They're devout Christians, they're Muslims, they're Jews. That may not have a claimed, you know, spiritual bent either but they have a defined moral compass. And I love those people energize me because it's the same as the other side. I know they have self identified how they're going to make decisions because what taxes me is there's a huge opportunity or a big problem which is usually the only two things I want to work on. And people don't. You don't know how everybody's going to decide, well I need to know are you going to charge into war with me or not or are you going to run for the hills? And if we're instead when there's this massive opportunity, if we're all on the corporate C level team having to figure out well what's your motivation? Well that's taxing because if it's a problem we're going deeper in the hole and if it's a huge opportunity it's more likely we're going to have risk for somebody else coming in because we're not charging, charging towards the horizon. And so that's the people that energize me. Self identify where you're at morally one way or the other, that can be money. That's fine. Just tell me who you are.

Right? Yeah. You know, the thing is that you do want to have people around you that. Because problems are going to come up and you, you want to know the kind of people, like, you've got to learn a new skill or you got to go do this or the other. That's great. I've never been there. I've never. I don't know how to do that. You know, that'd be fun to learn that, you know, you where their first response. It's almost like you could tell so much about a person, how they're going to react towards you is if you see them somewhere in a crowd and they turn around, the first expression on their face when they see you tells you all you need to know about if they're going to work with you or they're going to, you know, if you're going to have any kind of relationship.

Yeah, well, I mean, that comes from. Also, I love you. Think about the expression on their face. Like, when you're in a leadership role, things don't always go well. And so I try only hiring people that at least want to understand a healthy conflict, because we're going to have conflict. Even when things are going well, you're still going to have hired people in directions of the company that need to change. And so you're going to have to let people go. And not every person's good for every role. Well, I find too many people, like, if they run into that person they've had to let go at a grocery store, they're going to change aisles because they're not going to want to see me. And I'm like, if, if I've had to let you go, it should not have been a shock to me. Now there are cases where I have been part of a reduction in force where it was not my decision. And, you know, the CFO comes in and says, we are cutting 26 people on your team tomorrow. You need to pick those people. And you'll be notifying them at 3pm okay, that can be a shock. But then afterwards, I, you know, I try to help those people find roles when I can't. Right. Yeah. I still follow up with some of those people. But. But if it's a performance thing, it's hard of like, you think it's. It is that people that have. That define who they want to be morally and what they think that means. It's like it should never be a shock for a performance issue, good or bad, right? I've had stellar people that I just praise them because they're incredible workers. And they're like, I have. And they tell me they've never heard that type of feedback before. And then as I get to know them more and more, I'm like, you've been a superhero at every company you've ever worked. And I'm like, the only thing I can imagine. Our bosses were like, they didn't want to tell people how good they were because they either might have to pay them more, the person might leave and.

I'm like, Or might take their job.

Yeah. I was like, but that's okay. I want somebody to feel okay seeing me outside of work or 10 years later and go, I'm glad to see you, Larry.

Yeah, I'd like to thank you for listening to part two of this episode of the million Dollar Mastermind podcast. Timing is everything. You may feel that now is the time to get moving forward so you can do something even greater with your life. Now, if that sounds like you, I've got a free training video to show you how that transformation can take place. Getting introduced to how the cycle of success works has been a major transforming event for so many current million dollar earners. And that's exactly what this video is all about. And yes, it's completely free. Join us at the video@widelonwinning.com and thanks for being part of our.