Ep 12: The Stewardship of Leadership: Serving to Scale with Kurt Uhlir (Matthew 23:11)

In this powerful conversation, Dr. Lee sits down with Kurt Uhlir, known as "the king of scaling companies," to explore his unique approach to leadership rooted in biblical principles. 

Kurt, who has led teams through massive exits and over 60 acquisitions, shares his personal journey of faith, detailing a week where his life dramatically shifted after facing marital infidelity, a lost business deal, and his father's cancer diagnosis. This pivotal moment led him to Christ and a profound re-evaluation of his leadership style.

This episode is an invitation to leaders to redefine success, embrace vulnerability, and multiply their impact by serving others first.

In This Episode, You’ll Learn:

• The Transformative Power of Crisis: How personal breaking points can lead to profound spiritual and professional shifts.
• Servant Leadership as a Business Imperative: Why leading with a servant's heart is not just ethical, but also a highly effective strategy for scaling companies and fostering high-performing teams.
• The Role of Curiosity and Healthy Conflict: Understanding why empathy alone can be toxic and how genuine curiosity about team members' lives can lead to better support and outcomes.
• Stewarding Your Whole Life: The critical importance of proactively planning and protecting family time and personal well-being, even amidst hypergrowth and demanding careers.
• Multiplying Your Impact: How to extend your influence and leadership principles through discipleship and intentional mentorship.

Resources Mentioned:

Moody Church

CEO NetWeavers

Connect with Kurt Uhlir:

LinkedIn: Kurt Uhlir 

Website: KurtUhlir.com

Connect with Dr. Lee and the Regulated Roots Community:

Visit our new website: regulatedroots.com

Join our FREE Skool Community: The Regulated Roots Academy is a free community for faith-led entrepreneurs to connect, learn, and grow. Access free courses, resources, and bi-weekly Q&A sessions with Dr. Lee. 

Follow on TikTok: @leechelseacordell

Connect on LinkedIn: Dr. Lee Cordell

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello everyone. Welcome to today's episode. I am so honored to be joined by Kurt Euler, aka the king of scaling companies. He has led teams through a$880 million IPO,$8.1 billion exit, and has been a key part of over 60 acquisitions, not just as a consultant, but a full-time operator in those trenches. Kurt brings a system first servant leadership approach rooted in the biblical principle that in order to truly lead, you've got to learn how to serve and trust and empower others. So Kurt, thank you so much for joining us today.

SPEAKER_01 0:37

Hey, thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_00 0:39

Now, you've been a part, as evidenced by your intro, of some pretty massive exits, some hypergrowth journeys. I know that you're really focused in on this servant leadership aspect. And so I'm curious, what did that look like for you personally along the way? Was there a specific moment where your faith came in along that journey and shifted how you personally approached leadership?

SPEAKER_01 1:04

Yeah, great question. Yeah, my my faith, I came to my faith in early to mid-30s. And my faith, it caused me to re-examine how I had led people, but it that was not what led me to servant leadership. So at that time, I had three major life events that happened all in the course of a week. I found out my wife at the time had been having an affair for seven years at that point. I knew it had happened before, but I thought it was done. And so that happened. I lost a hundred million dollar plus deal. I was part of the small deal team for it, thought it would tank my career, and found out my dad had lung cancer. And so all of that happened. I'm on the floor uh between or on the floor of the stairs in between two floors of my building in Chicago. And that's when I gave myself to Christ. And part of it was when people found out about some of those things, nobody cared. And so I had a mentor in my life, and he was a believer and he cared, but nobody else really cared that my life was falling apart. And so that caused me to start to look back at what had happened in the lives of the people that had worked with me. So that was in the mid-journey of a company that we took from 85 million a year in revenue to 1.44 billion across 11 industries. And so I'm looking back and I'm like, well, my life's like turmoil. And there was just a wake of destruction and personal lives behind me. And a lot of those were both in what actually happened, or people that were high performers that chose to leave, which I look back later, those were people that were making wise decisions because we had a toxic work environment. So while that was the crux of my faith change, it caused me to look at it from the pure business perspective. If I've been leading from an authority perspective, if I've driven away all these high performers, if I've lost resilience in my team for my burnt out people. And like people become very unproductive when they get divorced or they start going through marital problems or issues at homes or things with kids. And I was like, wow, from a pure business case perspective, I'm like, we had this huge growth in the company, but what could it have been if we had led differently and what would that look like? And I probably read 200 leadership books in the course of like six months. And I really thought like most people just cluttered leadership. And so for me at that point, I thought it was very binary. I still think it's very binary, and that you either lead through authority, which is do what I say, how I say, and the time frame that I say it, or you're fired. And that threat is always there, even if somebody is a nice boss. Or what I ended up coming to is saying servant leadership, and very different than I think, even like the term that came out in the 70s, but was the moment I hire you, I've hired you not to do a job. I've hired you to reach a business outcome that I want, either as the team leader or the boss. At that point, my entire job is not to do your job, my job is to help you reach those business outcomes, which may mean coaching, it may be serving, it may mean a whole bunch of other things. But that's the only two approaches, basically the threat of being fired, or at the end of the day, I will still fire people, but it's saying that I show up every day to say, How do I help serve you to reach the business outcomes that I want? Now, my faith supported that. And my faith has made me much better at that. And not only it did shift how I showed up at work, but it helped me become, I was already a really good follower. I had mentors that would say, God, you're the best mentee I've ever had, because they would tell me to do something and I would follow. But I think from a leadership perspective, that gave me the permission to say, no, sometimes you do just need to get in the uh trenches and work shoulder to shoulder with people.

SPEAKER_00 4:19

Yeah. Wow. Oh my gosh, there's a lot to unpack there. And there's so much goodness. First of all, thank you for being so transparent about like that weak experience that you have. I've sat in the room with some really high-level like people who just have a lot of responsibility, whether it's for lives, livelihoods. I have to say that week is one that without Christ, I don't know how you survive it. That's just the quintessential like example of things falling apart so that he can come in. And I just want to witness you in that because, oh my goodness, what a thing to go through. There are a lot of leaders out there who are listening to this, who I know are going through similar situations at many different stages of their faith journeys. And I'm curious, like, I'm hearing you say you found him in that moment, but what did that look like practically for you moving forward? Like that day forward, what did you shift? What did you change in like a moment-to-moment basis?

SPEAKER_01 5:20

Yeah, I had been seeking for a little while. For a few years, I'd gone to two churches in Chicago, and so I at least had a faith structure around me to go to. And so that became much more intentional. I am a very analytical systems thinker. And so thankfully, the family pastor at Moody Church, which is where I was going and became a member, was the former general counsel of Moody Bible Institute. So a lawyer that had moved to family, basically family counseling. That helped a lot because he was very just matter-of-fact, and yeah, things are turmoil. And so, if you want to know more about Christ, we had like Moody Church is basically set up like a school and they have 100, 200, 300, 400 level classes. He's like, I have a curriculum and we can start walking you through that. And he adjusted that because he's like, you consume information at a large rate. And so I basically took like all the 100 and 200 level classes at once that they had. But there was that, and then he did sit me down and be like, All right, like here's what the Bible says from a relationship perspective, and so here's your options. Let's make some choices, and then I will help you implement what that looks like. And so things started to shift from a work person from a home perspective at that point. Did not change that relationship. My my wife ended up making very different decisions and continuing the path that she was on, but it did change then how I showed up at work a lot too. At that time, I wouldn't have told anybody, but it was like because I was such a high performer and I'd created such a high performing team. Like there were probably six months where I might have worked four hours some weeks, but I was so performing. I actually got promoted during that time period because not just because I was still high performing, but I had was showing up differently for my team. I was actually pushing them harder, but I was starting to train them at that point versus just give expectations.

SPEAKER_00 7:02

Well, you you spoke to this with the first question around giving people an outcome, right? I think when we are people who love to grow, we do really well with outcomes. And a lot of times that is a place that with authority, you'll be given the outcome. And a lot of times you're not given the why, or you're not given the this is how I want you to do it, or here's how I want you to figure out how to do it using your skills, your gifts. And it can be really tough for somebody who's like, I want to do a really good job. I love growing, I love performing when those outcomes aren't clear, or when you're not telling me why you want me to go after those outcomes so that I can use my critical thinking skills to then also serve. I heard you say that the performance really shifted after that. What kind of other changes did you see in your team as you started to shift into this? I'm going to focus on the outcomes and how I can help you grow to meet those.

SPEAKER_01 8:01

Yeah, they started to come back to me with different ideas a lot more and point out things that they felt was holding up them reaching the outcomes that I wanted. As an example, I had a I ran an organization called Business Affairs. And so basically pricing. So we were at that time think MapQuest, Garmin, every car navigation system, Microsoft Flight Simulators, which is back on my shelf. All of those use the data from our company. And so Google Maps back in the day before we hired them. And so our sales team had five to 10% of room they could move on pricing. If you wanted more than that, you had to come to our business affairs team for term changes. And so that part was an umbrella team. And so basically it's more than customer support tickets, much more, but it's the customer support system. Hey, this$20 million contract wants us to change pricing or change these terms. And so we put them into kind of serve, they thought their job was to make the sales team happy and close deals. And when we shifted it to no, what we are wanting is profit, but long-term profit and growth. Well, what happened was so many of these changes that came back, both in small contract changes, but also sometimes in even just like percents, like, hey, we were more likely to give one or two percent off if it meant we'd get more revenue later on. Well, it meant stop going back and just being the yes person to the sales team, even when like the VP calls and says, Hey, this needs to be done. And when all of those things come through, like you can say no. And part of it was also we had tried rolling out like when those requests came through. So it's both business and a little legal. Like, here's the format of all of those basically tickets for your requests. And sales for years had never come back, and like they never just came to our templates because when things are templatized and you give me the exact information I need, I can make a quick decision. And everybody in our team was that way. And so everybody came to me separately when I started saying, I need to know what's holding you aback from doing what I want. And they all came back and sales just won't want do what we want. So I implemented No Fridays was if anything in our business affairs request was not to the exact template that we wanted, you summarily fired, just said no to it. It was nope, rejected. You didn't even have to tell them why, you just said it's not the template and send it back. Let that let sales figure it out. And my team loved it. And sales freaked out, like it went to the board within like two days, but it fundamentally changed then how sales showed up. And I got to watch my team at that point shift from compliance to commitment because they got the commitment of they knew what we were wanting to do, and they knew that we had their back because part of that was you all are the front lines for this, it's gonna go through multiple people before it comes to me. And so by the time it comes to me, my response is how many times have you been told no? Okay, that's the same response, and to take all the heat when that came through.

SPEAKER_00 10:44

Yeah. Well, and there's two things I hear in that one, they know that you're committed to them, so they know you're gonna back them up when they say no, and they go over that person goes over their head to you, that's huge. And the other thing that you said there that I think is really interesting is that a lot of times people, when they talk about servant leadership, like they think that means that you're a yes person. They think that means that all you do is try to make the other person happy. And I always go back to a love, like from the Bible, that word means to love someone, means to will their good. And you're talking about long-term growth. Allowing someone to do something in a way that makes it harder for other people, and then also long-term really stunts the growth of the organization as a whole. That's not a loving, serving kind thing to do.

SPEAKER_01 11:39

Yeah, yeah. I think so much of that comes from too the modern wording around servant leadership, all comes from the term being coined in the 70s, even though we've had this leadership style for as long as we've had humans. It's either been authority or it's been serving the people that work for you. And there's nothing wrong with that, but like there's been literally hundreds of books written on servant leadership. And I tell almost everybody that's a leader, there's only two you should read until you firmly have this figured out. And the rest of them, like, you actually have to disregard like 70% of what's in there because most of them all start with the concept of the most important thing at the cost of anything else in leadership is empathy. And I'm like, empathy can be toxic, and empathy is a tool just like a hammer, and sometimes you use that for different things. You can pry with it, you can hit with it, you can use it as a weight to just keep a tarp down. But it's like empathy is a tool that you use within servant leadership, and that's what I think the vast majority of people have is well, you have to be a nice person at the cost of anything else, and you have to identify with the feelings of the person. I'm like, no, I do need to understand your feelings and how you perceive how I'm showing up to work. But at the end of the day, that is not the most important thing.

SPEAKER_00 12:50

Right. Yeah. That idea of empathy, and it's something that I know has come up a lot recently, especially in the faith settings over the last few months. Empathy is to put yourself into somebody else's shoes. And I really try to have this conversation with people. I'm like, do you know how many blind spots come up when you try to put yourself into somebody else's shoes? Because unless you know that person's situation and you understand them very well, you're going to do a poor job of putting yourself in their shoes because there's a bunch of things you don't know. And so the more helpful move in that moment, a lot of times, especially if you're having a tough conversation with somebody, you're having to give correction or direction is help me understand how or why you did the things in the way that you did them. And also let me tell you how and why I'm doing things so you can better understand me, rather than like, oh yeah, I can totally see that you're upset right here. Like for me, I'd rather you try to understand me better than try to tell me, oh, I totally get how you're feeling.

SPEAKER_01 13:54

Right. Yeah. Empathy, it is a tool. It is not the goal. I would much rather, before somebody even begins to think about like empathy, I would much rather them focus on becoming really good at healthy conflict and being really good about being curious. And so, like the example that I give, especially for your audience, somebody's at 2 million, 12 million, they're trying to grow more. It's like, okay, you've had somebody on your team, either they've been a really good performer, or you just hired them and you think they're going to be a great performer, and all of a sudden things feel like they shifted at work. Well, you could just go very quickly to them and been like, well, you're not showing up, or you're late, or your productivity has gone way down. And that could be a very harsh conversation. Or you could go saying, Well, something has shifted, especially if they've worked for you for years. Because what almost for sure is something has shifted. It could have been something at work, but it could have also meant they got thrust into elder care. They could have had a child diagnosed with something, they their spouse could have been diagnosed with something, and their relationship could have just gone sideways. They could have found out another fair or something. Any of those things that have nothing to do with job will affect somebody's work performance drastically. And so, like, I've gone to people and been like, hey, like I pinged you now a couple of times, performance has dropped. I'm not seeing you on Slack because I work remotely a lot now. And I'm like, I'm not seeing you working as much. What's going on? And it may take two or three times to get that response. And one of the times more recently, I had to do that, like it was the if you don't tell me what's going on to the point we know that we can work on it together, it's going to be a problem. Meeting one of my counters, that person had been thrust in elder care. They had been struggling with it for about six to eight weeks, was covering it until the wheels came off. And when the wheels came off, everything dropped at that point. And so they went from being by far one of the highest performers I had ever had in that role to being probably one of the worst performers for like for 30 days, back up a little below average over 60 days, 90 days, they were average. Over the course of six months, they were back up to the top 10% of people. If I looked at the whole year, that like six to eight weeks that things went sideways, it didn't even show up as a blip. They were still over the year in the top 1% people that have ever been in that role for me. But if I would not have approached that properly, I might have actually churned out that person or I might have burnt them out at work and probably made the home life much worse as well. So I would have lost a great employee.

SPEAKER_00 16:12

Yeah. You're describing so beautifully, and I'm really grateful for this. You're actually describing trauma-sensitive leadership where you're going, look, so often when people don't show up the way you expect, it's not a character issue. Sometimes it is. And that's something to really be able to distinguish between the two. But a lot of times if you have someone that you've got evidence of this is how they typically are, and something shifts, you've got to be able to have that conversation and you've got to be able to notice it. Cause I see a lot of leaders, they get so wrapped up in everything that's going on, they don't pause and take a moment to really look at those metrics and not just the metrics of like how much got sold, but again, okay, let me look at Slack this week. Like person X was just really out for a little while and those projects aren't getting done. So what's happening here? And I love that you're like, you're supporting this person as a whole person because I think exemplified by your story, like you don't separate the business person from the person themselves, like a personal and professional, they're going to intertwine, they're going to mingle. So being able to support people and go, hey, like how how can I help you? And you're also saying you've got a job to do. Like this still gets to get done. So how can we support you and make sure that this outcome still happens?

SPEAKER_01 17:33

Yeah, because we are, we all are whole people. And so as the leader, as the boss, I do have to take the limitations that the employee decides to put on that relationship. I hired somebody that was a believer, found that out afterwards, because clearly not part of the interviewing process. I'm almost positive he was married when I was hiring him and shortly afterwards, but personal life never came up at work. I know he was not married when he stopped working for the company. And even now, years later, like, I still just don't know that because I'm still always the boss and the person that introduces him for jobs. And he chose to hold things like this. Now he would come and felt comfortable saying, hey, he needed more time, and he would share just enough to be like, I need some more margin, but he did not want to discuss things personally, which is completely okay. On the other side, I have somebody who worked for me for years, and I was probably the third or fourth person that got a call the other day that said, Hey, this is a medical situation that's going on with me. Just to let me know about what's going on in their world. And hey, I'm still looking for another role. Like I appreciate both of those things, but as the boss and leader, you do have to take the cues and then step in to where they're going to do it. Because like I do have a strong faith, but even more than that, I want people to be successful at home and at work if they come and work for me. Another example too is like I acquired a company, they were doing just into seven figures a year in revenue. We bring bunt them in to this big marketing technology company that we ended up selling to Oracle later. And the day after the acquisition, fly the two founders in, and we sit down and they're like, So, like, what are we talking about? Like, we're gonna go take it from a low seven seven figure till eight figures and how quickly? And I'm like, before we have that conversation, which will be tomorrow, I need you all, because I knew they were both married. I said, I need you all to make sure that you can come back to me and say that you have spoken with your spouse about what you all need to have a good family life over the next 12 months. And I'm like, I'm not gonna tell you you have to go on so many dates or you have to go on vacations or what do you do with your kids, only one of them had kids. Like, I'm not gonna tell you any of those specific. You just have to come back and look me in the eye and say, I've spoken to my spouse and we have a plan that we're both in agreement to. And they asked a couple questions, and one of them was direct, like, are you trying to get into like my home life? And I'm like, I'm not, I am, but I'm not. The reason I'm asking, I'm bringing it up is I can tell you that you are so going to enjoy the growth and the dopamine that you get from selling 10 to 15 million dollars a year product, and I'm gonna put you in front of brands, Fortune 500 brands, that you never even thought that would talk to you before, and you'll be talking to them in 30 days. And I was like, You're gonna so enjoy the dopamine, you will destroy everything that you care about because you're going to wake up in the morning without an alarm clock and being like, I'm gonna go close half a million dollars in deals today. And it took them a couple of days, and so they realized, oh, he's he's not trying to like really get involved. And they came back three months later, both of them individually, and they were like, I'm so glad you had that conversation. I was like, Why? Like both of them had some version of my wife now feels comfortable coming back and saying, Hey, you told me you're only working late three days a week, and it's not one of those days. And they're like, That's been very healthy for us. And I was like, That's great, because I need you closing more deals. And if she stopped talking to you, you're not gonna close deals tomorrow.

SPEAKER_00 20:51

That's very true. Well, and I oh man, I got chills as you were saying that because I work with personally, like probably about 80% women, 20% men, and we've had these conversations. I'm like, look, your what happens inside of your home will wreck what happens outside of your home. And what happens outside of your home will wreck what happens inside of your home if you are not intentional about it. And you brought up a really powerful word there, the dopamine. As you start to grow and scale, especially for people who really love that, like they're motivated by that. That can become such a central focus of everything that you're doing that, and you can get so wrapped up in it that you forget about these other things and the reasons that you're doing it for in the first place. And I've seen this a lot. I've seen people who they're like, Well, I'm doing this for my family. And I'm like, Okay, I want you to go ask your family if they feel like this is being done in a way that benefits them. And so I love that you're bringing that in proactively because who you probably saved two marriages right there, allowing and giving them the ability. To really think about that and have that plan. So I'm curious from a blind spot perspective, I know that you've learned a lot of what you're sharing, obviously from personal experience. Are there other places as you have grown that looking back, you're like, wow, yeah, I had to fail. I had to get humbled in those spaces of like doing it a very specific way and then learn how to do it from this servant leader way. Any examples that you'd want to share that would be helpful for the audience?

SPEAKER_01 22:31

Yeah, I every bit of coaching advice I give, I usually have two or three kind of coaching clients and only two or three because I'm a full-time operator at companies. But every kind of bit of coaching advice I give or something for a stage, it's all advice that applies back to me. And so, especially for people that I've mentored or coached in the past, it's like I have to tell them, especially usually afterwards, I'm like, I've been so hard on you for this because I keep failing at this same area right there. And so it what actually makes even that much worse is imagine being the number one speaker around the world in servant leadership, which you know, from an operating perspective, because there's names out there like John Maxwell, but they haven't led a company in 40 years. And so I'm out there talking from a stage or giving a podcast, and my wife listens in and she knows where I'm failing on things. And so I will admit that, and she will admit that does not always make it easier. It's like I thought I was screwing up and I was getting a five out of 10, but because I'm talking about it, I'm actually getting a three out of a 10 from a perception perspective. So that happens all the time. The bigger thing for me though is not just even for my personal life, it's I was able to take 18 months uh off during my career on a Symbatical, 12 months off. It was gonna end up, I asked my wife if I could read it for another year, I was going to before I started advising President Trump. Because when you get a call from a president, you do those kinds of things. Well, during that 18 months, I had already been mentored by some incredible people before, but I spent a lot of time because I wasn't working just planning on whether I was gonna write a book, I had a book offer on the time, and I ended up speaking with people that had major exits, like the gentleman who sold the company that became FedEx Ground. Like he owned it, he sold it, still at FedEx for years. I spoke to 40 of those people or more. And some of these people are billionaires, all of which were worth tens of millions of dollars at least, if most of them hundreds of millions of dollars. And a hundred percent of them all said, if I look back, there was an some of them had just decimated lives as well, but they all had some version of there was a number that looking back, I should have been okay with that. And not that I would not have done more, but here's the list of things, and they all could just nail five to ten things that they screwed up in their personal life. Like a lot of these people, like they had kids with no relationships, or they would look back at things. And I'm like, wow, you all have more money and have been more successful than I could ever imagine. So being able to see that ahead of time. And so at that time, I was in the book launch group for John A. Cuff's book. One of his books was all about like choosing to fail. Like, what do you fail at so you can succeed? And like I like the concept, but I hated all the examples in there because one of them was I don't fold my clothes anymore because we have somebody that does that. I don't do my lawn care. And I'm literally sitting at somebody's uh somebody's kitchen table reading this part of the draft version of his book where it's like, I hired a lawn care person because my time was worth more. And somebody who's worth hundreds of millions of dollars said, Kurt, if you ever get rid of your lawn care person and you're having kids, it's the worst move you could ever make. And they could articulate something that others had given me some version of it. They're like, anything that you do, because it's all knowledge work. They said anything you do on your laptop or your phone, your kids will perceive it as playing video games. So the you have to have things in your life where you sweat shoulder to shoulder with them, where they learn work, not from seeing, like, yeah, you may have been working for 15 hours a day on your laptop. They're still gonna think you're playing video games because that's what they do, whether they're homeschool games or not. And they're like, so lawn care is going to be one of those things. You need to go rake leaves when you have kids. And I'm reading John's book, and I'm like, well, like John, I think your family's gonna try it pretty well because he spent a lot of time with them, does that. But I was like, this is not the example of things to choose to fail at.

SPEAKER_00 26:11

That example hits home, and I think for a lot of women too, because that was one of the things that I first learned as I was growing multi-six into seven figures, was oh, you're just gonna outsource everything. But when I really started to deepen into my faith, I'm reading the Bible, I'm like, there is something to be said for ritual and practices and not being someone that only does this very one specific thing, and then I don't do any of these other things anymore in my life. I have found that those little things that I get to do, like you just said, shoulder to shoulder with my kids, those are some of the best moments. And I've been a lot more intentional recently about like 6 p.m., the computer has to get shut, like the phone has to go off. And I'm laughing because my husband's gonna listen to this and be like, yeah, she's hitting about four or five out of 10 on that right now. But you're so right in that if I'm telling my kids, hey, get off your phone, go play, go do these things, like let's go have these activities, let's go experience life together, let's be present. And then I'm like, but it's different for me because I'm negotiating a seven-figure deal. Like a five-year-old, even my 13-year-old, would be like, that's cool, mom, but you're still on your phone. You're still doing those things. And it so it speaks to integrity and it speaks to like, am I gonna practice what I'm teaching?

SPEAKER_01 27:32

Right. Other people are they're gonna pick up who you are and what you believe from your actions. And I had a boss that had this major change with his wife before she actually unexpectedly died of a heart attack two years later. So it's also really good they had this, but they they had this discussion, which I did not know until years after I worked for him that actually, I'm sorry, until she passed that they had faith in their lives. But I saw it in their actions, and I saw it in their actions because they had this apparently really difficult discussion where she was like, You're not here. And so we were working crazy hours in this massive ramp for this company, and so things shifted. So he was always on the 5 p.m. or 5 30 p.m. train as opposed to working to like 8 30 or 9, 9 or later some nights. And so he was always on one of those two trains to head home, and then he would come back online at 10 or 10:30 after everybody else went to sleep because he still had to put in the time because time is part of it. But they had that discussion about what was most important, and apparently part of that discussion, as I found out later, was you might lose your job from this, but it is more important for our relationship and our young kids that we restructure and that you're home after hours. And so part of that then was the negotiation, which was he's like, Well, I will lose my job unless I'm working more hours, so I'm not going to bed with you and I'm gonna be a lot more grampy in the morning. So I got to see that in action, and it was an instant change at the office. Then when I learned that he was that they had faith, and that what drove the discussion wasn't until much later, now it all put into place. Now then it would have been that anybody watching them, watching you, watching the people that are choosing to lead differently, they will know who you are from your actions. And so, what's the most important thing to you? I can make a lot more money just doing keynote speaking, but it would also mean I'd have to be on the road for 200 days a year. Like, not something I'm gonna do.

SPEAKER_00 29:24

It is really hard to make those decisions. And I think that having faith and being able to go back to biblical wisdom and go, okay, like you said, I'm gonna go learn. What does the Bible actually say about this? What does God say about this? We had a situation over the summer where we were working with a client and it just became very clear in a lot of different ways that, like going in two separate directions. And it was a huge conversation from a family perspective. My husband and I work in our agency together. He had one opinion, I had another. We were trying to figure out the way in which to do this. And one of the key decisions that came up as we were deciding how to approach this exit was our kids' feedback. And they were like, Y'all are just talking about this a lot. And it was like, okay, how many conversations are getting replaced? These valuable conversations. We have a 15-year-old and 13-year-old twins. I'm like, I only get a couple more years with y'all in this home with us. So if we're having all of these conversations, and even when they're productive, they still feel tense, and that's the experience that you're having, then that right there really informs what our next move is and how we want to approach this. And I think it's it's a question of how you want to steward the assets that you have, your time, your money, your energy, and how you want to do that in a way that honors the calling that you're feeling, honors the growth that you want to create while also honoring the relationships that you're deeply committed and devoted to.

SPEAKER_01 30:56

Absolutely. And I like the term stewardship. But my wife and I, the way we think about it is we steward our money or our time and our skills in the same way most people to uh steward just their their money from a day ransom perspective. And so, does it make sense for me to go dig ditches sometimes? Yes. I have a four-year-old and a six-year-old who we have a mountain property, and while I do outsource some of the work, my six-year-old knows how to use a pickaxe because I make both of them clear the drainage ditches on our one mile driveway because it's a gravel driveway up to the top of the mountain. But on the other side, like I'm not gonna do that from a pure work perspective. I'm doing that because I'm trying I'm raising good adults that need to see what work looks like. From a work perspective, if I unless I'm coaching somebody about how to do something like that, I'm gonna cap out at how much groundwork I do because that's not a good use of stewarding my skills and time. At the same thing, I'm keenly aware of them from a leadership perspective, I'm not just providing for my family. I'm providing for the family or the relationships of somebody single of everybody that we give a paycheck to, whether contract or full-time. At which point then I need to be thinking about like from a stewardship perspective, what are we doing to make sure that we are providing for them? And that means not just providing monetary-wise, but providing everything else that they are choosing to give to their family from their own decisions.

SPEAKER_00 32:10

That's a huge part of what gets missed in a lot of the books that you were talking about, too, because the level of maturity from a faith perspective and also just from a leadership perspective to be able to understand how to do that well, how to steward assets in a way that helps people in the short term, even if it doesn't always feel great, and also really provides for their growth, produces that fruit long term. There's something you said actually that I pulled out from your bio when I was reading over it. You said, I don't need to pitch anything, I want to serve your audience with something that sticks. And for everyone who's listening, before we started, Kurt was asking really incredible questions. I've never had somebody ask these questions before. He was asking about the audience, like, who are we going to be talking to? Who am I serving? And so when you say I'm going to show you who I am through what I do, there's an example of that right there. But that's a very deeply like kingdom-minded approach. And I'm curious, like, what do you believe God has called you to steward through your platform, your experience and your voice? Like you said, you could be speaking, going on stages, traveling. What are you feeling called towards in this stage of your life?

SPEAKER_01 33:23

I'm trying to multiply myself. I do believe that how I have figured out a business case for serpent leadership is significantly better from even taking faith out. It's a much better business approach. It lowers risk, it increases that the numbers that companies are going to hit. It aligns with my faith. It aligns with a lot of other faiths. So I am trying to multiply myself in that. I have turned down some book deals before. One of the reasons I storage my time to talking with people like you that have audiences and are building audiences is to help spread that message a little bit more. But I'm also keenly aware, like, hey, somebody pays me tens of thousands of dollars to come speak from stage. It's probably more motivational. Maybe people have a little bit of a change of direction. If they read a long book or something that I've written, okay, they're going to get a little bit more from it. The life change, if somebody pays me money to coach them and they're one of those few slots, they're going to get more life change out of it and learn how to change different. But still, the best way to multiply myself is that discipleship method that says, like the people that work for me and work as my peers or that I work for, that's who's going to see something different from me. Like I'm working for somebody right now who he is exactly me from a servant leadership perspective. Like one of his sons is an all-star high school golfer, will undoubtedly go to college on a scholarship. And if not, we'll be pro one day. Well, every day, my CEO, when it's not freezing outside, is being a caddy for his son. If something is on fire, you can call him in the afternoon. But there are certain days where it's like, no, he will not take sales calls because he's out there being a caddy. When he could clearly hire a caddy, he could hire a team of caddies, but instead he's out there serving and then also showing other people where he puts his priorities. Like I get to learn from that as well, but other people get to see that. So it is that multiplication. How do you multiply yourself?

SPEAKER_00 35:11

That's amazing. Last question, and thank you so much for taking the time to do this. I deeply appreciate that this matches up with your calling. And I think this is going to be just such a huge gift for anyone who listens. How do you stay rooted in that approach to leadership when the world is constantly offering you other definitions of success?

SPEAKER_01 35:36

Uh, small groups and peer groups. So for me, that takes two different forms. And a lot of people, I think, that talk to certain leadership will bring their spouse in there. But my spouse is not, does it should not be in her role, in my opinion, to keep me accountable to performing the way I should be and to separating work and personal life. That's not her role. And so she does that sometimes, but that's when I realized I've hit the guardrail driving too fast, and she shouldn't have had to bring that up. So I both have a have a small group of men that I've been part of that I went through a mentoringship program with probably like nine years ago now. Are we friendly? Yes. Are we friends? A couple of us, but we are all very transparent, very open with that place of kind of refining each other from that. Separate from that, I'm on the board for a group called CEO Net Weavers. It was started in Texas. We've got, I'm now based in Atlanta. We're rolling back out to multiple cities around the US now. It's literally a group organization for senior leaders. It was started CEOs and CEOs only, like C-suite people at companies of like$10 million up to maybe half a million, half a billion dollars more in revenue. And one of the core principles is servant leadership. And so I'm part of that organization because it's not posturing, it's all shoulder-to-shoulder time, it's all volunteer time with other people. And it's your question about like how do I stay true to that? It's the input that I choose to get from organizations like that. Like we had a deal we were selling a company that came off the table during COVID. I went to somebody in that organization and then a group of them because I knew of like the 10 figurative options I might have been able to put on the table. Seven of them did not align with microservant leadership approach. And I was only going to get things within that narrow kind of three-ish range that would have been, and then get guidance on that. And so I you have to have other people around you that are doing this with you. And it is really hard to get in that initial group. It's like you have to force it to happen and fail a lot of times.

SPEAKER_00 37:29

Yeah, right. It sounds similar to this mastermind principle of you are really gonna surround yourself with people who are in at similar levels, in similar experiences with different perspectives, who are also willing to call you in the moments that they're like, hey Kurt, you just said this. This is what I'm seeing. And conversely, that you can come to and be like, hey, help, right? And that are gonna have that accountability piece for you. And also, yeah, they're gonna love you while also being friendly with you, while also saying, This is out of alignment with what you've told us that you want. Like, do you see that?

SPEAKER_01 38:05

Yes, all of that I would agree with. And often it may not be part of the group, but need having multiple people that are several seasons ahead of you. We started it with the mentoring group for somebody that was three seasons ahead of us, but CEO Netweavers, like it's all senior executives and another area that we called Encore leaders. And so those were people that were in our position, but they're a retired CFO who's a CFO of three mid-market companies,$100 million plus, that does it, like he's retired, but doesn't want to be out of the game. And so, like, well, for a current CFO or current CMO like me, to be able to be like, yeah, here's somebody who just wants to be your friend, has advice, and can tell you what that looks like, whether work or personal, and is 30 years your senior from that. We've intentionally built that into that organization because there is such value in that we wouldn't get on just a peer basis.

SPEAKER_00 38:54

That is so valuable. And it's also something to think about. A lot of our listeners are getting to that point where, okay, yes, you may not be at the point of some of these companies that Kurt has been mentioning yet. And you're a lot further than you used to be. So you being able to also serve in that position for someone else, talk about servant leadership, you being able to also say, hey, is there any place in my life that I am personally mentoring? Because if not, that is a very valuable experience as well. So I've had students come with questions that I'm like, wow, nobody's asked me that in four or five years. And hold on, when's the last time I asked myself that? I gotta go think about this for a minute. There's a very interesting learning that can happen when yes, you're putting yourself in rooms with people who are at that same level, you've got that mentorship that's several steps ahead. And to cap it off, you're also serving as that person who's several steps ahead of someone else from the perspective of them being able to come to you in the same way you're going to your mentor.

SPEAKER_01 39:59

Absolutely. And let me add one thing to that for your for the for your listeners, and knowing the size companies that they're at. Yeah. If you don't have this right now, yes, you're probably thinking you need to solve this for yourself and get that group, which is true, but the people that work for you need this as well. And you can't be that for them. Like Vistage has grown largely because people retire and then they want a mentor and it's a framework, but it's also only for CEOs and CEO operators, a president operators. What about for these companies that are$5 million,$15 million? And so they actually have leaders underneath there. There are no organizations for those. Now, CEO netweavers, we have a place for them, but we're only one organization, we're only in certain cities. Like, so if you're if you don't have this right now and you're a five million dollar company and you have leaders in there, I think what you need to do is figure out how not only do you solve this for yourself, but how could you perhaps solve that in a way that works for others? And so that could mean, hey, you get together with eight peers and you form this group and you're just all gonna meet at Waffle House twice a month, but also then split out into say, all right, everybody else can bring four or five people to the pool and we will split up so that I will mentor people that are in your organization with another peer. And so you can create that to help all of your organizations grow, but you cannot do that as a boss, you but you can have your peers do that and help each other out.

SPEAKER_00 41:22

Wow, that's such an amazing idea. I'm so excited to even go implement that myself. I as you said that I'm like, oh, there's six or seven people that I know that we could do this. So thank you so much for that last bit. Kurt, I know you've done all the things, you're doing so many beautiful things. Where can people go to learn more about what you're currently up to? Where would you love us to send them?

SPEAKER_01 41:44

The main thing is come to my own personal website at Kurt Euler L I R.com, or you can just literally go to any of the AIs and say, tell me about Kurt Servant Leadership. And then I mentioned CEO Netweavers. You can ask, what was that organization he meant? Like all the LLMs know it at this point.

SPEAKER_00 41:59

Thank you for bringing in the AEO optimized option. I love that. We're really big on AI and automation over here and doing it in a way that is human centered and also effective. So thank you so much for that. I love that. All right. Well, we will see you all next week. Thank you so much for tuning in. And Kurt, thank you so much for joining. I deeply appreciate it.

SPEAKER_01 42:18

Hey, thank you for having me.