Honest Marketing

Kurt Uhlir: How to Scale an Established Business

• Honest Podcasts • Episode 43

Share episode

Scaling a business is a challenging endeavor that requires a combination of strategic thinking, data-driven decision-making, and strong leadership. 

In this episode, we'll uncover some essential considerations for businesses on the path to growth with my guest, Kurt Uhlir. Kurt is a serial entrepreneur and an experienced consultant, working with established businesses to help them sustain their success. 

We dig into some must-know stuff, like the importance of transparency within a company. It's about knowing what everyone's up to and keeping everyone on the same page. Plus, we talk about what to look for when hiring, because it's not just about skills—it's about character traits, too.

As you dream about where your business is headed, take a few notes from Kurt on the importance of being humble, having the right character, and being transparent as you scale up.

Tune in to the full episode to gain valuable insights into scaling your business successfully.

Specifically, this episode highlights the following themes:

  • Finding character traits before skills in hiring and promotions
  • Understanding the impact of investments and marketing campaigns
  • Embracing authenticity and amplifying true influencers for business growth

Links from this episode:

Want to give your podcast the boost it needs to stay ahead of the competition? Check out honestpodcasts.com and take the first step toward achieving your podcasting goals!

And if you have a guest in mind who you think would be a great fit for this show, drop me a line at hello@honestpodcasts.com. 

Kurt Uhlir [00:00:00]:
I say I'm looking for people that are okay with healthy conflict. And today that's a scary thing because if you want to change marketing, you want to change sales strategies, you want to change product development, we're going to have conflict. And so it is character traits that are going to unlock scaling much more than any technical skill

Travis Albritton [00:00:24]:

Welcome back to the Honest Marketing Podcast, where you learn proven strategies to grow your business without selling your soul. I'm your host, Travis Albritton, and today I had the privilege of sitting down with Kurt Kurt Uhlir to talk about growth and scale. And what I love so much about this interview is, you know, I tend to be very practical, very strategic, and tactic oriented in my questions. But very quickly, the interview skewed more towards the real advice that is not often given when it comes to growth and scale for your company, for your business, for yourself that I think is really important for all of us to take in and embody. So I'm really excited to be able to share this interview with you as someone who's trying to drive forward and be better tomorrow than you were yesterday. Kurt has been a part of many successful businesses that have grown and exited and sold and does a lot of consulting with larger businesses now. And so I also loved being able to tap into his expertise and wisdom when it comes to sustaining success with your business. Once you've uncovered some things that have worked for you and then also the pros and cons of taking on outside capital that a lot of businesses think, oh, if I can get a venture capital firm or an outside investor to come in and burst more fuel in the fire, maybe we can make this thing go faster.

Travis Albritton [00:01:12]:

And so I think Kurt, having been on both ends of that can really offer us a lot of advice and expertise. If that's something you're considering, definitely make sure you stick to the ends of the episode where I'll give you my number one takeaway, my conversation with Kurt. But here it is. Let's dive in. Kurt, thank you so much for taking the time to be on the podcast. Excited to pick your brain and see what we can learn together.

Kurt Uhlir [00:01:31]:

Yeah, thanks for having me here, Travis.

Travis Albritton [00:01:33]:

So just to set some context, I'd love for you to just introduce yourself, your professional background, and what you're known for.

Kurt Uhlir [00:01:41]:

Kurt Euler. I've been both a serial and parallel entrepreneur, but more than that, an entrepreneur. I've started a bunch of companies. I've invested in a bunch of companies, but actually, starting very early, like right out of college, I got pulled into a company that almost ended up being management consulting to a large degree. I'd started multiple companies before then, actually, but I got pulled in this company called Navtech. It became here. Technologies. And so now we think about Google Maps as so many places, and so this was instead a company that still today, it's way bigger than Google Maps.

Kurt Uhlir [00:02:14]:

It's all car navigation systems that aren't on that. It's all garmin devices and things. So we took that company from 85 million a year in revenue to 1.44 billion a year in sales. And I came through kind of that background where I did a bunch of investing outside, but it allowed me to be in the pivotal point for Eleven Industries, all the places that use mapping data. And I was running marketing and growth in all of those areas and helping it through companies across there. And you'd have to have gone to Bain Capital or something for that. And so that's kind of my background. I stumbled into this place that I didn't mean to be got exposed to there, that I'm an operator and I'm good at scaling more than anything.

Kurt Uhlir [00:02:52]:

I just tend to come in from a marketing growth perspective because, of course, everybody, whether you're a five person electrician company or a 5000 person SaaS company, everybody wants to scale their business.

Travis Albritton [00:03:01]:

That's a word on the street. Every business wants to generate enough cash flow to stay in business and reach their goals. So, yeah, I'm really excited to dig into some of those things. But the first thing that I want to ask you about is I would love to hear the story of how you ended up in the White House.

Kurt Uhlir [00:03:16]:

Volunteering, actually, to a large degree. So my wife had actually started I credit my wife for it because she was running this very successful marketing agency and took on a pro bono client for this called the Made in America Movement. And so I got pulled in and ended up being the chairman for that organization and did some work with them myself. And when President Trump, love him or hate him, he came into office and they started to reach out and they asked ten industry experts, hey, we want to do the symposium at the White House with American based businesses, those that can use the Made in America label and who should help us organize this. And like, five or six of them mentioned me, and the others mentioned the Made in America Movement. Margarita just points to me and is like, I don't do things like that. That's too public. And so that's basically how it ended up, that and I really thought it was a prank call when I got the call.

Kurt Uhlir [00:04:05]:

I mean, you may have friends like this as well, but I have friends from college. I haven't spoken to some of them in ten years, and they would still try to prank me with something. So I was like, I need a public number that I can verify and then call back. How do I get back to you? And it was legit. So that was the first of a couple of things that we did with the White House. And very cool. My dad thought it was really cool to have been on C Span. I mean, speaking of keynotes or podcasts, that never would have interested him, but like, dad, I'm on C Span.

Kurt Uhlir [00:04:33]:

If he had still been alive, he'd have been like, I'm proud of you, son.

Travis Albritton [00:04:37]:

Yeah, well, and the reason that I want to lead off that story is not only because it's very unique, but so much of especially B, two B. Marketing is who you know and who your connections are and also the reputation that you build over time with those connections. Right. Because it's not even necessarily your immediate network that unlocks the ability to tap into new opportunities, but it's the network of your network and what is known about you and what you bring to the table.

Kurt Uhlir [00:05:00]:

I was on the phone this morning with a friend named Barry Robbins here in Atlanta, CIO, transformation expert, a lot of companies, and he was asking for, like, hey, he's looking to make some connections and things. And I was like, I can help with a couple of those. And some of it are things for direct introductions, and others are like, I'm at an event in two Fridays. Would you like to come with that? Because it's the best way to do that. He's like, absolutely.

Travis Albritton [00:05:23]:

Texting back jumping into you mentioned that you've been involved in growing lots of companies, starting others. I imagine over time, you've developed a wisdom and an instinct and an intuition whenever you're approached with either a pitch for a new company or you're starting to get involved with one. I'm curious, what are the things that you look for for companies that are built to scale or ready to hit that next level of sales or revenue, whatever those goals are? And what are the things that you're looking for or indicators that tell you this company is either ready or we need to address some things first before they're ready to hit the gas?

Kurt Uhlir [00:05:57]:

Yeah, great question. There's things both within the company, but before that, especially if I was stepping in and somebody came to me, said, hey, we have a 500 person company. We'd like you to join our team, what would that look like? The first thing I'm looking for there before I start looking at data and processes is, does the leadership have a humbleness of heart? And I say that of things of if people are trying to find that inflection point to help the revenue scale up, it's possible that they may just not have figured something out. What's more likely is that they're wrong about something in their business. And I say that as somebody who at any point in my career, I can always look and say I've been fundamentally wrong about at least three things in my life. Because I'm sure you've done something that, if you look back over the last six months, you're like, God. I realized, based on data, that this thing I was doing for the previous two years was the wrong thing. But you were never doing it because it was the wrong thing, because being wrong and being right feels exactly the same until the data proves that you're Wiley Coyote and you're out over the cliff and you're like, oh, crap.

Kurt Uhlir [00:06:59]:

Why have we been doing this? And so I'm looking for does the executive team, especially the CEO, or if there's a private equity background, are the investors open to? The fact is we may uncover some stuff you all have been actually doing wrong, which is okay because that's how we're going to unlock things. But that's also a process. It's one thing for them to have it, it's another thing to have processes in place that give me data up front or are they open to come in and saying, gosh, you really don't have the data to let us know what's going on in your business? Are you okay if we basically just put analytics everywhere and then full transparency? I don't care who you are, data gets seen by everybody. We don't hide anything on there. And that's some of the things that I look for and some companies have it. It's been rare for me to find a company that has had anywhere near the amount of data I would like to look at to help guide them into what's next, whether I'm coming in as an executive coach or those full time companies that I join.

Travis Albritton [00:07:56]:

That's interesting that the first thing you look for is a character trait in the people on the leadership team because it's not the answer that you would typically expect to hear.

Kurt Uhlir [00:08:03]:

It's also like from a scaling perspective that also starts to tell you, can you come in and reshape things? There's great email automation marketers, as you're aware of, and great people at Facebook do meta ads and stuff. Sometimes I might outsource some of those things, but I'm always going to look for the things before I even start looking at skills. Do people have character traits that you can see from their actions? Because that's often going to be who I show the door if I come in as a leader, but also when I'm hiring. Like your point of character trait, every job description that's come out of me for the last like 15 years says I'm looking for people that have a bias towards action. That's a different situation. People that have strong opinion tell loosely, hey, I've been really successful, I've failed a lot of times, I'm going to come with a really strong opinion. But Travis, you might have a very different way of doing it or data, that's an okay thing. The team would see that in people's actions.

Kurt Uhlir [00:08:56]:

But the third thing is that scares off a lot of people and just starts some great conversations is on the hiring, I say I'm looking for people that are okay with healthy conflict. And today that's a scary thing because if you want to change marketing, you want to change sales strategies, you want to change product development, we're going to have conflict. And so it is character traits that are going to unlock scaling much more than any technical skill because you could be the best technical skill ever. And if you and I don't discuss six months before when we could have when you go off in a different direction, be like, why this side project? I know I'm right. Well, that's not healthy conflict.

Travis Albritton [00:09:36]:

Yeah, healthy conflict is, like you said, it's very interesting because nobody likes offending anyone. It's very rare to find people well, type A entrepreneurs, you might tell a different story, but for the most part, people aren't looking for friction. They're not looking for social friction. And then when you're trying to operate well as a well oiled machine, as a leadership team, an executive team, it's like you want to be on the same page. How do you lean into those differences and really pull back the thread on some of those things to maybe initiate some of those conversations that have been avoided for so long that need to be had so that way you can get unstuck and move forward?

Kurt Uhlir [00:10:13]:

Yeah, great question, because while I typically come in as like a CMO or Chief Strategy Officer, I'm kind of quickly going to get my tentacles into everything just a little bit. And for me, it's transparency. When I step into organizations, whatever that role is, so often I find leaders, and sometimes it's the CEO versus others that have their pet projects or other things that are going on, and they're not doing it to be malicious. What they're doing is I believe that I'm right. And so I'm trying to figure this out over here because it's going to unlock our growth, but it's the opposite of the strategy that the team has agreed to. And so I want to uncover basically, what is everybody doing, including myself, like, hey, my activities happen in a trello board. Just it's viewable to different people than what others might be. But the CEO, my peers, would always see everything that I'm doing.

Kurt Uhlir [00:11:03]:

If I'm running marketing, they're going to see all of my daily activities, unless there happens to be something like a divestiture going on or we're buying a company that might live somewhere else for obvious reasons. But I think that's the first thing for me is you have to uncover what people are doing. And people have to be okay with that because the conversations change when you start saying, yeah, but Travis, I'm not doing it because I want to tell you you're doing something wrong. I want to do it because if you're doing something that is different than what we've agreed to or different than what I think, I want to understand why. So it doesn't matter on the approach. I'm seeking to understand the why behind, do you think this is important? And sometimes like, okay, we need to tilt the whole ship towards that. But the worst thing that happens for anyone is you have these people that are diverting resources and then the CEO doesn't realize, well, the product team isn't getting ahead on the things that I think is getting built. Well.

Kurt Uhlir [00:11:53]:

It's because 30% of the resources are built on something else because they're trying to unlock something. Well, that's not good for anybody. It's okay if they unlock the lottery, but if it doesn't unlock the lottery for growth, that's a bad thing. And so to me, it comes to transparency and it comes to making sure it feels so much like you slow down. But every individual contributor has to understand the real outcomes the company is wanting to accomplish and the reasons for those, because so often the change happens from transparency. And when you start showing this is what we're trying to accomplish, it's the people that are making everyday decisions go, well, if that's what you're wanting to accomplish. I've spoken to 17 customers this week, and they're telling me that those things that you're investing $2 million on, they don't care. That marketing campaign doesn't connect at all.

Kurt Uhlir [00:12:46]:

It doesn't mean that they're right. But when you open up the environment to the outcomes a company wants to hit and you expose what's actually going on and you provide a safe environment, people raise their hands and go, but have you considered and that's how conversations start to happen. And so it's amazing how much comes from literally just really people management and relationships. And most of us fail at it because we're trying to do things and we think we're right, or as a.

Travis Albritton [00:13:11]:

Leader, feeling like you have to be the one that has all the answers instead of tapping into the collective wisdom of the team that's doing the yeah.

Kurt Uhlir [00:13:19]:

I mean, there's nothing wrong with a visionary for I worked for three years for EXP Realty. Glenn Sanford there that founded the company. Now they're the largest real estate company in the US. And they didn't even exist 15 years ago. So that's a visionary. That's a drive around things. What I love is people like him that not only do they have that vision, but they're open to hearing input from others and they're seeking wise counsel from things because it's okay for the CEO or leadership to have a vision, but you might be wrong. And so you're only getting unless the team's open to pointing that out.

Kurt Uhlir [00:13:56]:

So it's really, at the end of the day, what's the outcome are we trying to hit? That's what matters. And then you allow other people to go, but have you considered yeah.

Travis Albritton [00:14:03]:

And for anyone that's listening that wants to do some introspection and consider that maybe they are not as approachable as they may think, or that the team doesn't feel safe to bring things to their attention. What are some tools that you use to help people be more introspective and think? Okay, maybe I assume that I have an open door policy that people can approach me with anything, but I really don't. Or this is an area I really need to improve on in order to unlock the benefits of the psychological safety of the team. Feeling like I can raise my voice, and if I have an idea that gets shut down or if it's different than the CEO's idea that I'm going to get in trouble or it's going to come back to haunt me later when I want to go get a raise or promotion. How do you, as a leader, have those moments of meditation and reflection? And what would be the markers that would point out that this is an area where I have work I need to do?

Kurt Uhlir [00:14:55]:

I mean, there's a lot of 360 degree survey tools, but that's just going to tell you where you're at. And even then, a lot of people don't feel safe answering them. For me, you put in place processes that literally hit potentially every agenda on your team and every one on one you have with somebody, even if it's just 20 minutes catching up with somebody on an email campaign. And that's asking at the end of it, what might I or the company be wrong about? We just talked about this. What might be wrong about for this or something else? And then what I like to ask is, what do you think that I'm not seeing? And you can't be defensive in either of those. So it's like it literally sits on most of my agenda items to remind me because I wish I had that full humbleness of heart, but I don't, because I've been successful. I've seen repeat things, and if it's not a bullet item, I often won't remember to ask. And so that's part of it.

Kurt Uhlir [00:15:50]:

And it is an every meeting thing, because so many employees come from I mean, myself, we have PTSD from working for Toxic Bosses. People said that they were open. But, you know, if you ever pointed out, I don't think this is a good plan, you might have got your hands lapped, figuratively. And so you have to reinforce that on an almost every meeting basis. But the other thing is, as a leader, at any level, there's things you get wrong all the time. And usually, what do we do? We don't want anybody to know about it, so we just tuck it down here. If you want people to open up to you about what they've done wrong or show that you're open to hearing things, you have to tell your team when you've done things wrong, whether it's at the current company, sometimes it may come up, or stories from the so, like, I have no problem sharing those things with people. And so when you do that, it starts to change the environment over time.

Kurt Uhlir [00:16:44]:

Because if you're opening up about those things when there's that change of strategy when you're looking at the data, Travis, or you're going through this exercise, I have to uncover, what could I be wrong about today? And it's just a 32nd kind of introspective, and you actually realize the data says the decision you made was wrong. You need to own that to the whole team, and then that reinforces all of these conversations. Now, there is one other little hack to it, which I have, but in the three years that I was leading a team for EXP Realty, I only had two messages come through it. If you're using Slack, there's some anonymous survey tools built into there where basically you see the anonymous user in your Google doc. Somebody can enter something. And it's not like an NPS where, you know, well, this is what Travis said on his NPS about why he gave me a six. No, it's not like that. It's literally just it comes from there.

Kurt Uhlir [00:17:38]:

So then it's just a wording in there. Only twice was it filled out, and I'm pretty sure both times were by the same person. But I can't prove that because it's completely anonymous. And, I mean, I was leading a 50 person in house team for a long time. That's a good backup, though. And some companies I've seen that actually be used more frequently because they maybe aren't quite as rigid in asking for, hey, what could we be wrong about?

Travis Albritton [00:18:01]:

Yeah. So I love how initially I was thinking this conversation would be tactics, strategies, product, market fit, and it's turned into you have all the ingredients, you just need to put them in the right place and organize everything to unlock your particular potential. Because if you've gotten enough traction to be where you are, you've discovered something, there's something that you've tapped into that is pointing towards another level of the version you're at. And if I'm understanding what you're saying, the key is not necessarily a new strategy, a new tactic, a new implementation. It's just getting out of your own way.

Kurt Uhlir [00:18:37]:

Yeah. If you have an established company that has real revenues, there are people that are really good at going from zero to a million. That's not me. I've done that at a service based company. We can do that, no problem. You and I want to go start like, an eight figure a year marketing agency. We could probably do that. Start from scratch today and be there in 18 months.

Kurt Uhlir [00:18:56]:

I'm good at that. But a SaaS company doing that, that's not my skill set. My skill set is coming in where it's like, you figured out enough that there's 10 million, 100 million a year in revenue coming in, whatever industry it is. And then when you change the people and the processes, the data will lead you to what's there. And so I mentioned inflection point, you never get to a $50 million company without having figured out a whole bunch of things. You can't fail your way to a $50 million a year company in any industry, but if you're at a $50 million a year company, almost guarantee, I can help you become a $250,000,000 a year company by changing how your people interact and bringing in real insights to the data. Because the data will then tell us if we're wrong. And especially those questions when you change things.

Kurt Uhlir [00:19:41]:

Imagine if every decision for people that are listening. So if you've got 20 people in your team or 200, you're thinking back now, travis and I talked about it, that it's like, okay, yeah, I look back six months ago, I was wrong about this. I could have known it beforehand. Think about right now if going forward, every decision that it would take you two years to figure out that you're wrong about, you figure it out three months in or six months in, how much do you compress? Getting to 17. Really solid big rights. You get to it in a very small amount of time.

Travis Albritton [00:20:14]:

Now, one thing I want to ask you about, especially in those kind of like, mid to large size companies where we're now living the age of the Internet, where you can't control the narrative about your brand, about your company anymore. Because so much of the information that somebody stumbles onto when they start searching for you, learning about you, is from people, whether it's captera and Google reviews or people tagging you on X, formerly Twitter. And so much of marketing or the way that people used to think about a brand narrative is now in the hands of people that aren't on your team. The term that was coined influencer marketing, that you're tapping into these individuals that have created these microcosms of communities online, and they're interacting with your brand in some way, shape, or form, how should businesses be thinking about that, both as an opportunity and as potentially a threat? Like, where can influencer marketing really start to bite you if you're not mindful of how you're engaging with it or interacting with it?

Kurt Uhlir [00:21:17]:

I tend to be more on the B two B side than the B to C. If I'm on B to C, it's tend to be more like enterprise SEO. But on the B to C side, you have a little bit less control. But on both of them, I think it's important for people, any marketer, any executive, they have an agency pitching them. Are we talking paid influencers or are we talking true influencers that are there? And that's important because if it's a paid influencer, I don't care whether it's Kim Kardashian or somebody that's got 10,000 people on YouTube that's paid advertising, that's a different environment. The moment you pay somebody for that. True influencer marketing to me, especially for B to B and where it excels and makes things go a lot faster, is there might be some compensation. But it's people that like your product, people that are in your industry, and you're taking stories and amplifying stories that are out there already when you're doing that, and you shift when they're authentic stories.

Kurt Uhlir [00:22:11]:

And so you still do some of your own marketing. I love pay per click ads, but what I love is coming into a SaaS company and coming and unlocking the true stories that are people that are using it. And also very much from the marketer's perspective. And the product team sometimes hates this because they think they're talking to customers. I will deliberately go and look for and get all the data about, I want to know who's been paying us for three years, but they're not logging into that $30,000 a year SaaS platform. And we're all happy. And you think they're happy, I want to talk to that person. We might churn them.

Kurt Uhlir [00:22:43]:

That's a problem. But when you talk to them, you talk about the customers that fail, it starts getting you into a place where you get authentically what's happening, the value. And then not only does it change from you can amplify the positive stories, but you get to find out months or years earlier the things that are holding back your product from scaling. And so we sold a company to Oracle, and it was a great acquisition. It was well under $300 million, but the usage was bad at the time. It was okay. It was social media management. Back when it was just really getting started, there was really three of us, of our companies that got started, two of us on the enterprise side and Hootsuite at that place.

Kurt Uhlir [00:23:26]:

It was okay for not a lot of people to be using it because in 2012, how many companies were actively doing things, which is why we had a big service arm. But nowadays, if I had a social media management platform and people aren't using it to your point, you want to start going after influencer marketing because if the stories are there, you sell them, which is great, and if they're not there, you need to know ahead of time because you all are going to fail.

Travis Albritton [00:23:49]:

Something that I've seen to be true over and over and over again is no matter how good your product is or how good your service is, prospects always want to know, has this worked for someone like me in the past? To give them the confidence to say, okay, whether it's Enterprise or B to C or whatever, has this worked for somebody else in the past? Can you show me an example of somebody else that's in a similar situation that gotten certain kinds of results so I know what my expectations need to be going in? And so it's not even just the anti marketing of, okay, how do we prevent bad news about us or bad influence? But how do you capture stories of how people interact with your product or.

Kurt Uhlir [00:24:28]:

Service and how do things change for them? Some cases at EXP Realty, my team and I built this agent to agent referral tool. It should seem so easy, hey, you're in the same brokerage, and it's like, I want to send you a referral. And that should be an agreement, right? What's taking like 45 minutes on average for. That to take place. So we build this tool. It did a lot of other things, but it took us, like, 45 minutes down to about 45 seconds. Hugely valuable on there. Well, for me, and the usage was wonderful in the first five or six months because I left then shortly after.

Kurt Uhlir [00:25:01]:

But the best part of it was not just saying, hey, now we're seeing so many more referrals happen. That's good for the brokerage. Or people are saving 44 minutes on average for doing it. What made the growth go was I started sharing. This is what agents are doing or what they're having their virtual assistants do with those 44 minutes. Instead of going and finding a form for a different state, finding out what brokers need to sign it and stuff. It all happens here. And now they're able to do that in 45 seconds as opposed to 30 to 45 minutes.

Kurt Uhlir [00:25:34]:

And instead the VA was able to go, now schedule your social media post for the week. And then people go, that's where their brains opened up. All of the rest of it's important, but it's a shift of not just what does my product do, but especially if it saves me time or I can do more of things. What else am I able to accomplish now because of it? You never know that unless you're talking to your customers and in a nice way, stalking them. I love things like hot jar and stuff where you can go watch the screen recordings of people using your software. But then I have no problem calling people black up. And I'm like, you're hunting and pecking for something in the software here. Can I call you? What's going on? Well, sometimes people go, well, this is what's happening.

Kurt Uhlir [00:26:18]:

I've done that I don't know how many things. And they talk about something else that our product could have been solving that they didn't know about, that somebody walked in their office about. So that's what was going is they're just kind of over here talking while somebody came in the door. And I went, well, you know, we solved that, right? This is like an integrated platform that does all the things. They go, well, no, I had no idea. I'm like, well, that's my mistake for not messaging it. I mentioned, like, that referral tool. We built an internal tool to help find other and because internal within can internal product marketing is so different than external product marketing.

Kurt Uhlir [00:26:51]:

But people are having a hard time finding agents. People didn't know about it when I started telling them, when they said, the hardest problem I have then is how do I find Travis to send him? Like, you're the agent that meets my thing. You speak Spanish, you're this, you're do that. And I was like, there's this tool for that. People go, There is my onboarding training for people then didn't point both of those together. That was my fault. I only got that by asking questions.

Travis Albritton [00:27:16]:

Yeah. All comes back to humility right? And being willing to learn and admit that you're wrong. One of the last things I wanted to talk about before we kind of wrap up here is outside funding, especially businesses that are kind of established but are looking for either funds to accelerate their growth or looking for experts to come in and help lend their expertise in consultation to unlock the business. Where have you seen that go well for businesses and where have you seen it go poorly? Like the pros and the cons of venture capital, of outside funding because it can sound like this really great idea. Like you pitch this person thinks it's a great idea. Yeah you pitch this person, they're like, that sounds great, here's one hundred k and you're like, I just be at. All I did was have a conversation and show them a pitch deck. This is fantastic.

Travis Albritton [00:28:00]:

That's the wedding ceremony. You got a life to live with this person afterwards. So what are the pros and the cons of if someone's considering outside funding for their business just so they can have both eyes open and have the rose colored glasses taken off? What's the reality of that?

Kurt Uhlir [00:28:13]:

They need to understand that depending on what they're doing, especially if it's venture capital, the moment they take money, initially they're on a road that they don't control anymore in a timeline they don't control. If it gets before the venture space then there's nothing wrong with raising money. But the key is you need to understand what the investor's expectation is. The reason I say you don't control your fate at the point from the VC perspective is, well, each venture capitalist has a fund that has a timeline and a horizon and so they have so much time before they have sold basically that they need to put a return on investment. So the companies need to be moved through. And so if it's private equity, that might be a three to five year flip. If it's venture capital, maybe it's a little bit longer. It's seven to ten and some will get out earlier.

Kurt Uhlir [00:29:01]:

But it's like, well if you raise a million dollars, well you're probably going to have to go raise 5 million next and 15 million at some point. So every time you get more diluted, which there's nothing wrong. Hey 100% of zero is zero. So if you happen to give away 30% over time or 70% but your piece of the pie becomes bigger, that's okay. But those investors, especially if they have rights, could kick you out. That's a problem. And so often when I see companies and people that I know that have raised $5 million for something, everybody else is congratulating them on LinkedIn because there's easier press release or something. And I send them something that's along the lines of, I'm sorry, you have a good weekend because Monday is going to be rough.

Kurt Uhlir [00:29:46]:

It starts your ticker. And it's funny to see the responses back from people that are like, yeah, they know it going in, but not everybody does when you first get on it. So I often tell people, if you can at all not raise money, you really shouldn't, or if you raise money, you need to make sure that the expectations are correct on people on the other side. So I'm coaching, actually a Canadian company through right now. They're not quite into seven figures a year in revenue. They've raised a good bit of debt capital, and they've had to give away there's some equity components to it. Well, they've done it in a way that they could pay people back, and they had realistic conversations, and they've had them again recently too, because they've been going for a while. I think the companies could be gigantic, but the expectations are what matter.

Kurt Uhlir [00:30:34]:

Because my first question or my question about first question, the third meeting, which was, what do your investors think? Tell me about the timing, because if it's been two years since they wrote a check that was a VC, they're expecting something different. It's a family office that might be different. Most people I'm like, if you need to raise money, really try not to. You don't want a boss. You founded a company, you had a million dollars a year in revenue. Guess what? You're no longer the CEO of the moment. You take money, you now have a boss and a timeline that you don't control. You think you control it, but you don't.

Travis Albritton [00:31:07]:

No, you're just the Aaron boy now. You're operating, but you're not calling the shots.

Kurt Uhlir [00:31:12]:

Be it can be wonderful. And once you get into there, I mean, I've been with a lot of venture backed companies. I'll probably stay a little more in the private equity space. But it was like one of the things, looking back at the company we sold, Oracle, is named Vitru. My boss at the time, Reggie Bradford, he's now passed. One of the things that he looked back after the sale because he stayed my mentor for a while is he was like, gosh, our competitors just way raise more money. And he'd told me this a little bit then, but he realized he hadn't quite done it. He was like, look, once you get into that path, he was like, pretty much, if there's money to take, you should take the money.

Kurt Uhlir [00:31:45]:

The terms need to not be crazy, but our biggest competitor, they just raised so much money, it was really hard to kind of keep up with at some point. And so I really taken that in with some other things, because, again, you're not entirely in control at that point. And we had raised 30 plus million dollars.

Travis Albritton [00:32:01]:

So I think kind of drawing a common through line. That the last thing I want to ask you before we wrap up. I know I said that was going to be one. But this came to mind, and I think this is really important. We've talked about internal audits to prepare your business, to be able to take advantage of everything that's at your disposal already. We've talked about tapping into influencers and stories and things like that. We've talked about raising capital. But I think the thing at the end of the day, in my mind at least, is how do we convert all these conversations and ideas into sustained success? Because anyone can have this hockey stick moment ten X the company.

Travis Albritton [00:32:38]:

But then how do you keep that going? Like, how do you actually set yourself up to sustain that success for a long time, especially if you're not aiming for an exit? This is a lifestyle company. This is something you do because you love it and you enjoy it. You're not trying to have this eight figure exit. What are the things that you do with companies that are more on the private equity side, that are self funded, or the person that founded it is still running the company to sustain the growth that they're looking to see beyond just that initial season where things start to turn around.

Kurt Uhlir [00:33:11]:

I get them to document everything that they do, and then if it's repeatable things, build individual Google Doc standard operating procedures for it. Hey, if you're the one that does accounting and that's okay, and you have 15 electrical trucks on your team, great. You need to have a process, and you're the one that's doing the accounting or handing off certain materials. You need to have a Google Doc that defines that for everything that you do repeatedly. And then your job, especially if you're in that position, your job is to try to disciple somebody, to be able to take that from you. There's documents if you get hit by a bus, but also try to hand that stuff off because you've grown your business to wherever it's at. But there should always be some mad scientist stuff that you're doing. Heck, I step into a 500 million dollar company.

Kurt Uhlir [00:34:01]:

I'm running marketing and perhaps revenue for the whole company. I'm always going to be in the weeds doing some things. I'm going to be looking Travis at your drip email campaigns and working through some stats with you. But I'm always going to have everything really belonging to somebody else because I'm mad scientisting. The next thing over here that said, yeah, we did $500 million a year in sales. I think this will be another 500 million if I can get it right. And then as I'm figuring it out and testing it, I may bring in some people. I'm documenting those things.

Kurt Uhlir [00:34:31]:

And now my team usually knows what my mad scientists experiments are going. Sometimes they feed into it. Sometimes they just go, he's in the closet talking to himself again. But I think if you're the leader, whether you have a 15 person company, a three person company, or, I said 500 million a year in sales. Your job is to document everything religiously. You won't get paid if you don't have it documented. Let others see what you're doing so that you can hand stuff off and then mad scientist stuff, and as your experiments work, hand that off so you can go try the next crazy thing, which may or may not work right.

Travis Albritton [00:35:05]:

But then everything is a learning experience. Everything builds on itself. You learn lessons, gain wisdom, apply them moving forward, and just enjoy staying in the game, enjoy being in business. It's easy to lose contentment around the fact that we get to play in this really cool sphere like being in business and serving customers and serving clients. And it's easy to take that for granted and think, oh well, the real purpose or the real inner contentment comes with the next milestone. Instead of just how do I just enjoy the game of learning how to do this better and better?

Kurt Uhlir [00:35:37]:

Absolutely. I mean, I have largely self taught myself. Now I've gone in with some other deep experts, especially on topical SEO and stuff, but chat GPT for things I could probably not have like twelve junior marketers on my team with things that I can just replace chat GPT with. But I've done that from we have these fun things to experiment with and try with, and when they work, great, I put it in a master class and I hand it off to the rest of the team. Like, you all can go and do this now, but it's the journey. I care about the outcomes. People need to care about the outcomes, but they have to know about the outcomes first. And it's the outcomes we're wanting to get and the journey that gets there.

Kurt Uhlir [00:36:16]:

And when they're excited about doing the grind every day, then you're going to get to those outcomes if you have the right data.

Travis Albritton [00:36:23]:

Now, where can people go to find you, connect with you online? Where's the best place for them to go and learn more about you, what you're doing? And where should we send people?

Kurt Uhlir [00:36:30]:

My personal website at Kurt Euler, uh, L I R.com is the best can that'll send you out to LinkedIn or Instagram. You want to see pictures of my four year old that'll send you to any of those other places. That's my journey. But there's a ton of free material there as well. And some of the companies that I work with, I'll feature those periodically as well on it.

Travis Albritton [00:36:49]:

Fantastic. We'll link that in the show notes below so you can just go and click on over. Kurt, it's been a blast. Thank you so much for being on the podcast.

Kurt Uhlir [00:36:55]:

Hey, thanks for having me.

Travis Albritton [00:36:56]:

So my number one takeaway from my conversation with Kurt is that so often we can think that it's a tactic or a strategy that's going to unlock the next level of our business when really we have all the ingredients, we have all the tools already. It's just about getting out of our own way. It's about having the humility to recognize that I don't know everything that I think that I do. And there are some areas where I'm probably wrong and I don't even know it yet, those blind spots that are holding me back. And so hopefully for each of us, we can take a moment this week to really just reflect and think about are we really approachable to our team? Does anyone feel like they can raise their hand and offer their take or their perspective on what could potentially work? And are we fully utilizing all the members of the team to help us unlock that next season of growth?

Kurt Uhlir [00:37:43]:

Definitely.

Travis Albritton [00:37:43]:

Make sure to connect with Kurt over at his website, kurtuhlir.com Links, in the show notes below for your convenience, and I hope you enjoy the rest of your week. As always, be honest.