Shownotes
Episode 184 Frederick Dudek (Freddy D)
Scaling service businesses doesn’t require more hustle—it requires the right secrets to avoid chaos, churn, and burnout before they destroy momentum.
Scaling service businesses successfully means knowing which mistakes to avoid before growth magnifies them. In Episode 184 of the Business Superfans® Advantage Podcast, Freddy D sits down with Kurt Uhlir to uncover the real secrets behind sustainable growth.
Kurt has helped scale companies from startup stage to over $1.4 billion in revenue, and he’s seen firsthand why most service businesses collapse under pressure. The issue isn’t demand—it’s unchecked chaos, rising churn, and leadership-driven burnout.
In this episode, Kurt reveals how servant leadership reduces burnout, how deep customer understanding prevents churn, and how empowering teams replaces chaos with clarity. If you’re serious about scaling without sacrificing your people, culture, or sanity, this episode delivers the championship-level blueprint.
Discover more with our detailed show notes and exclusive content by visiting: https://linkly.link/2Zb8w
Key Takeaways
- The secret to avoiding chaos is operational clarity: Growth without systems multiplies confusion instead of revenue.
- The real reason churn happens isn’t price—it’s neglect: Customers leave when leaders stop understanding their real-world problems.
- Burnout is optional with servant leadership: Teams thrive when leaders create margin, trust, and ownership.
- Empowerment beats enforcement every time: Authority creates compliance; empowerment creates scalable execution.
- Superfans act as shock absorbers during growth: Loyal customers and employees stabilize businesses as they scale.
- Saying no is a growth strategy: The wrong clients and hires introduce chaos faster than slow growth ever will.
- Small leadership gestures produce massive loyalty: Micro-actions prevent burnout and fuel long-term advocacy.
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Guest Bio:
Kurt Uhlir is a growth operator and servant-leadership expert who has scaled companies from early-stage startups to $1.4B+ in revenue. Known for helping leaders avoid chaos, churn, and burnout during rapid expansion, Kurt specializes in building teams, systems, and cultures that scale cleanly—and create superfans at every level.
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Freddy D’s Take
This episode exposes what most leaders learn too late: growth doesn’t break businesses—unprepared leadership does.
Kurt’s secrets aren’t flashy tactics. They’re fundamentals—rolling up your sleeves, listening to customers, empowering teams, and building systems before scale forces your hand. Chaos shows up when clarity is missing. Churn shows up when empathy disappears. Burnout shows up when people are treated like resources instead of partners.
This conversation perfectly aligns with the SUPERFANS Framework™—turning employees, customers, and partners into advocates who fuel growth instead of draining it. Businesses that win long-term don’t sprint blindly; they scale with intention.
FREE 30/Min Prosperity Pathway™ Business Growth Discover Call
The Action:
The Action: Eliminate one unnecessary friction point this week
Who: Your team or your customers
Why: Small friction compounds into chaos, churn, and burnout
How:
- Ask: “What’s one thing making your job harder than it should be?”
- Identify a redundant step, approval, or process
- Remove or simplify it immediately
- Announce the win publicly
Guest Contact
Connect with Kurt Uhlir:
Website: https://kurtuhlir.com
Resources & Tools
Easy Home Search – Privacy-first real estate platform
Servant Leadership Principles – Burnout-resistant leadership model
This podcast is hosted by Captivate, try it yourself for free.
Links referenced in this episode:
Copyright 2025 Prosperous Ventures, LLC
This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis:
OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy
Podtrac - https://analytics.podtrac.com/privacy-policy-gdrp
Podcorn - https://podcorn.com/privacy
Transcripts
Best case, I'm going to rent a referral from somebody when I say, hey, I'll give you $100 gift card if you refer me to a new customer. That's renting advocacy. But I am the world's biggest super fan. You're like a super fan.
Intro:Welcome to the Business Superfans podcast. We will discuss how establishing business superfans from customers, employees and business partners can elevate your success exponentially.
Gain insightful knowledge from the experts who create applications that help you create passionate superfans is the Business Super Fans podcast with your host, Freddy D. Freddy.
Kurt Uhlir:Freddy.
Freddy D:Hey, super fans. Freddy D. Here in this episode 184, we're joined by Kurt Ulier, known as the king of scaling companies.
And he tackles a challenge that holds back countless service based businesses. How to scale fast without breaking your systems, your team or your margins.
Too many owners chase growth before building the go to market and the operational engines to support it. And the result is chaos instead of momentum.
From his early days as an operator to leading growth across companies from startup stage to to over 1.4 billion in revenue, Kurt has built and scaled the systems behind a hyper growth. If you're looking to grow with clarity, control and confidence, this conversation shows you what it really takes.
Freddy D:Welcome Kurt to the Business Superfans Advantage podcast. Great conversation that we had. So welcome to the show.
Kurt Uhlir:Yeah, thank you for having me.
Freddy D:So let's go back to the beginning. You've done a lot of interesting things. I've read a lot of your background and how did it all start? What was the beginning?
Kurt Uhlir:I mean, for me, business actually started long before it did for most people. Not just because like a paper route, but my dad worked for Bell Labs. He too would take me into the office sometimes or the installation places.
And so I actually build hours when I was like 8 to 9 years old with Bell Labs. But my first real company, which near and dear to your audience, was actually in home services. At 14, my brother's 18 years older.
He brought me into a company he was starting was that flea market selling things. But I started a lawn care business, that lawn care business.
By the time that was when I was 13, finishing up Christmas of that year, my dad goes, hey, you're going to need to figure out how to create an LLC because you're hiring people. And so we crossed into the next year with me having 14 people on payroll, most of them full time.
Freddy D:Yeah, I started pumping gas for a dollar an hour back when I was 15. So you beat me, had a business I Was just working for somebody. But it was a buck an hour was the rate back in the.
I didn't have a business till I was what, about 20, something like that. I had a janitorial cleaning business.
Kurt Uhlir:Even though I had a business, I mean my dad was enough for pushing me always to do more. Never got that attaboy that I would have liked. So like I'm, I'm 15, 16 years old and I have employees.
I'm working for my brother on weekends at the flea market for a business that we're going to get going much better. And my dad felt, hey, you need to work for force somebody. So he forced me after school to go work for somebody that owned a sign company.
So installing billboards, climbing up on those ladders, you need to develop to be a man. Keep that business, you're making money. But I need you to go work hourly work.
Freddy D:Wow. See, my dad was completely different. I ended up going down the road that he went, which was doing engineering work.
And so in middle school I started taking drafting classes and I was a draftsman for a while.
And actually if you remember the 82 Ford Escort, I'm the guy that designed the spot wall guns, that spot welded body panels when pre robot days when guys had the big weld gun on the gimbal and had to pivot and go in perpendicular to the metals and all that stuff. But so yeah, you're completely different roads.
Kurt Uhlir:Yeah, very cool.
I think the biggest thing for me is too often people that start their own businesses or whether they're knowledge based work or more blue collar jobs, they feel like they need to shield their kids from what they're doing. I don't want my kids to have it better than me.
I'm like, look, I have to acknowledge like my kid, anything I do like right now working my laptop is going to feel like a video game to him. He's six, you know, it's no like I'm not raising a kid. I don't want him to have a soft life.
Like I'm raising a man and so I'm raising a woman with my daughter. One of the things that they hear around the house all the time is we do hard things, then we look for things. We can instill that with that.
Freddy D:Yeah. And it's important the way you're bringing up your kids because they're learning to be better prepared for life.
And unfortunately I think one of the things that people sort of shortchanged is that let them all be a kid. But at the same time you still have to learn some life lessons because it's more difficult to be in life.
And all of a sudden now trying to figure it out.
Kurt Uhlir:We also think what that it's worked to us. But I look back and like my daughter's about to turn four is raking work. Yeah, it is.
But I've now at this point heard from billionaires that I've been able to spend time with and people that are worth hundreds of millions of dollars. And I asked him. One mentioned it to me and I've asked others. I'm like, what's something you regret? And he was like firing my lawn guy.
And he was like, there's very few things in my life. He was a general counsel for a large company. He was like, there's very few things in my life where I could work alongside my kids.
And I had that with my lawn. Instead I outsourced it to somebody else so I could go bill $500 an hour at the end of the day.
My kids don't like doing home hard work because they've never really seen and sweated suck shoulder to shoulder with me. And I'm like, wow. Then I take that in. Like even my 3 year old and 6 year old and what I think work, they think is fun.
Freddy D:It's all how you present it. Because I had to do. My dad was from Europe and I'm originally from Europe as well.
He used to have racing pigeons and guess who had to go clean the pigeon coop? This guy. That was one of my first jobs. I had to go and scrape all the pigeon poop out of the coop. That taught me some things to be self resilient.
I ended up helping him. We had a cottage on a island in Michigan and I'd learned some home remodeling stuff. Today I'm handy.
I can do stuff where a lot of people can't even change a tire. I've ripped engines out, transmissions out and remodeled homes and all that stuff because of the things that my dad instilled in me.
Kurt Uhlir:Yeah, absolutely. It does pay off for me as an adult because I don't believe that anything is below me.
I'm really good at scaling companies because I don't believe that I'm too good to call customers. I actually think I should always be calling customers. I think I should be in tickets at some amount of time to see what problems people are having.
I should call the pain in the ass customer that nobody else wants to and figure out why. Is it them? Is it something that we did? I think that's because my parents always taught me we do hard things.
There's nothing that you should ask somebody to do that you're not doing some amount of your time yourself. And because of that, it's allowed me to get into a variety of businesses and industries and figure out things that feel like most people miss.
I'm like, because you have no idea what's actually going on in the day to day lives of your customers.
Freddy D:Yeah.
Freddy D:And what it does is it gives you the ability to really understand all aspects of the business and then you can actually help elevate your team to be successful in that area.
Because you understand and more importantly, you gain the respect by you rolling up your sleeves and say, all right, let's do this thing together, we'll figure this out versus the leader that says this is what your responsibility, you're doing this and all that stuff. So there's different levels of leadership and you're in there with them means you're creating a team.
Kurt Uhlir:Absolutely. I'm a big believer especially in larger companies, which is I tend to be at mid market in larger companies.
But as leaders we should step into each other's roles periodically so that we can have kind of fresh eyes and hear from others. Hey, have you thought about doing this way? I need to get on the front lines at times.
I need to get in my case on my marketing team, my pay per clip team. I need to see what they're doing to see where I both need to tighten up the standard operating procedures.
I give them as well as give them more margin either to be creative and try things in a different way.
Because I didn't hire them to do a task, I hired them to reach a business outcome or give them that margin, especially if they're customer facing so that they can, in some cases, like I tend to work in technology, give the engineers time so that they can go look at problem tickets that are in there that everybody else keeps deprioritizing. And they go, I can solve that. And I bet that is actually a problem for somebody. And I'm like, give people the margin to over deliver for people.
And usually companies don't do that. I find too often, especially now we see all size companies, people are just trying to eke out the last penny or dollar or save five minutes here.
And by all means I want to have the team as efficient as possible. But at the end of the day we're trying to grow the company and sometimes efficiency is not the best way to get there.
Freddy D:You're doing two couple things. One is you really, what I quote, empowering people that they can actually make decisions themselves.
And once you empower people, that gives them the self confidence that gets the momentum going. If you take a racing rowing boat, you've got the coxswain, so you're acting as a coxswain on that boat. But then you got to get everybody aligned.
So you got to get the other seven people on the boat aligned. And everybody has one. It's not two oars, it's one oar.
And if you got to get everybody in sync in line with the mission, because otherwise that boat's not even, it's not going in a circle, it's just wobbling because it's not going anyplace. And now you get that momentum going and you get everybody in sync on the mission and they're part of something, that boat flies.
And that's what you're doing with the companies is you're getting everybody because you're part of it. You're getting everybody aligned so that business can scale.
Kurt Uhlir:Yeah, I started that so early in my business as well. Like being front lines helps create Personas you might not get from other places.
Selling lawn care business and pressure washing, it's not rocket science. But on the other hand, to your point, customers want very different things.
Some people I would sell to and I could tell very quickly almost how they might have, they would answer the door. Some people simply wanted to not get fined by their HOA for as little amount, as money as possible.
There's other people that they wanted to take pride in. Hey, they had stripes in their lawn, which is difficult, especially if they're trying to grow Bermuda under trees in our case.
Some people, especially if they were older.
What they weren't actually looking for from us and why my business expanded was they were looking for somebody trustworthy that could help them stay in their house as long as possible. Hey, you only mow my lawn. But when I would notice, hey, there's leaves building up in your roof.
They had no problem paying me to do that as long as I would point out those things. Hey, did you know your house probably needs painting? It's going to start being a problem.
I would point those things out, but those are three completely different types of customers. And I couldn't paint their house for them, but they wouldn't even paid attention to it because they were 75, 85 years of age.
They wanted me to stay in their house.
And just getting that little bit of honesty about, here's what's going on, then that woman would recommend me to somebody at her church and so I'd get two more customers out of it.
Freddy D:Yeah, you created a super fan is what I call a super fan. And that super fan is the best PR that you can give.
If you think of the Chicago Cubs, everybody knows the Cubs and it took them 100 years to win a championship. But throughout that whole hundred years they had super fans that were die hard fans of the Cubs. I'm a Cub fan. I spent years in Chicago.
And the bottom line is once you transform somebody into what I call super fan, they stay a super fan unless you really do a face plant and really mess things up. But they're your champions and you can't buy that kind of priority.
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Kurt Uhlir:Here's the deal.
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K-O O L.com Ninja Prospecting: Kurt Uhlir:Yeah, not only do I want the referrals that come out of that, and it's great that they don't churn, but they're easier customers at that point and it's more enjoyable to actually serve them. If I tried serving the elderly person who's wanting to just stay in their home and aging place as easy as possible.
If I tried serving them the exact same way that I was serving the other two Personas I gave, they're not going to be happy. But when I pay attention to them and I go, oh, this is who you are.
This is what you're wanting out of us, and I decide myself that I can deliver that and I want to deliver it it makes it easier for me to also hand that off to somebody because I can tell them, of the three customers you're going to have today, here's what each one of them is going to be like. And so it makes it really happy.
Freddy D:For everybody because you know how to deal with what, who you're dealing with right off the bat so you can be prepared. Okay, oh, this is Mrs. Johnson. I got to handle her this way. And that's Mr. Smith. And Mr. Smith prefers to be handled that way.
And that's applicable in life because it goes beyond just business because it's also how you deal with co workers. It deals how you deal with suppliers and distributors and contractors and complementary businesses.
And geez, nobody even thinks about ancillary businesses. But they're part of the equation.
So you're really leveraging that whole ecosystem of the business by properly respecting each individual as an individual and treating them appropriately for their needs.
Kurt Uhlir:Yeah, absolutely. I've worked in many different countries. I've had people work for me on six continents. And I usually do because we're building teams.
Because you can't get somebody to work for you in Antarctica. Stereotypes exist for a reason. When I built a joint venture in China, they had a stereotype of the typical American. And it's not entirely wrong.
There may be a stereotype. Groups tend to be the same a lot of times, but we're each individual. My wife is a completely different person than I am, even though we both.
She lived in China and I've just spent a significant amount of time there. Both of our experiences were different and both of our friend groups are very different.
Freddy D:Yeah, that's one of the things I told my wife is we're two individuals with their own individuality that's coming together for our commonality.
Kurt Uhlir:Right.
Freddy D:And you're right, I've also played on a global stage myself. And dealing with different cultures and language barriers and all that stuff, you really learn to respect other people's point of views and cultures.
I was in Japan years ago and I was trying to set up a reseller there, a master distributor for the software that I was marketing. They loved this technology.
I focused on all the business stuff and here's the business plan and here's the things you could grow and here's the contract. And was at the trade show for 10 days and all this stuff and going no place. I'm in Australia and I'm at a restaurant with my distributor there.
And his name was Paul. And I go, paul, you've dealt with these guys what am I doing wrong? He goes, what are you talking about?
So I'm talking about the contract, the business growth. Shut the hell up about that stuff. Start asking them about their culture and everything else. I was like, huh?
And soon as I flipped the script on it, I remember them coming to Scottsdale, Arizona to take a look at our office and everything else. And we spent two hours in the office. I spent four hours driving them around the valley so they could actually experience this stuff.
Two months later, I had a $200,000 order signed contract, and we had a partnership. Bottom line is I got myself out of my own way.
Kurt Uhlir:Yeah. I find too often people are focused.
No matter the size of the company, they're focused on the sale and they're focused on the short term view of both what their product does as well as what the problems are. And it's most of the time, especially in technology, your software will do a whole bunch of things.
If you look at the actual users of it, they're not using all of those things. You might sell features 1 and 2 to one company and feature 7 and 8 to another.
But it's also important to understand what else they're doing in their lives.
I love stepping into new companies because I've stepped into companies that are $2 million a year in sale, $20 million a year in sales, and $250 million a year in sales. And in all of those cases, I step in and I'll go to the marketing team, I'll go to the sales team and I'll ask them, hey, this is what we're selling.
This is what we think that they're using it for. What else is the person that's using the product or service doing on a daily basis or a weekly basis? And almost nobody can answer that.
Like line items like what line item do they pay for our software or pay for our service? People usually won't know. And I'm like, how do you not know these things? Are companies growing?
And that's how we got to a hundred million dollars a year in sales. I'm like, yeah, but you could be at $200 million a year in sale if you knew these things.
We sold a technology company that was in marketing, technology and real estate to a good sized public company. And right before then I had this discussion with the investors and I was like, what do we sell? They were like, we sell prop tech.
And one of the, this one investor was a large real estate agent. And I'm like, proptech doesn't exist. There are certain things like property management and things. But I'm like, what do you do with this?
And in that case, we built software to let them build out websites and do real estate search like Zillow on your individual website and get tens of millions of visitors from Google. And he's easy to get leads. And then it sends out listing alerts and my clients can use it so they don't go somewhere else and get spammed.
And I was like, none of those things you just mentioned to me seem like something called proptech. He was like, probably. And I'm like, then you sell marketing technology to real estate agents. That's what you invested in.
That's what the public company is buying. He had invested years before and to him it was like I was telling him he could fly. He was like, I entirely did not think that's what our company did.
And I'm a customer of it. I'm like, now we'll be able to make it grow very fast.
Freddy D:Sure, yeah. You remind me of when I was selling manufacturing software.
I would basically say, all right, Kurt, there's four of us in this field, so we get that out of the way. They all can do the work, give or take. But let's talk about where do you see yourself in 2, 3, 4 years as your business.
What's your biggest business challenge? Oh, we're scrapping metal. The milling machine is not cutting the metal correctly and it's scrapped. Okay, so how often does that happen?
About 12 times a year. And what's that cost? What do you do with that metal? We can't use it until someone else requests for that type of metal for their particular project.
So I says, all right, so if we could help solve maybe three or four of those, not the whole 12, but a portion of that, is that worth continuing the conversation to look at the technology. And so I flipped the script. We weren't talking about the technology anymore. We were talking about the business challenges.
And this is just a vehicle because if it does. I always used to tell people, if it's free or $5 million, if it doesn't do the job, who cares?
And I created super fans out of those guys because they were my. They started out as a 40 man shop and over the five years I worked with them, they became 140 people. They had multitude of businesses.
They bought both buildings aside from them and built breezeways and everything else. And they would introduce me to other tool and die shop owners because they all know each other.
That collapsed my whole sales cycle because all of a sudden I get a phone call and says, hey, Jack says, I'm doing some overflow for work for Jack. He says, I need to buy your stuff. How much? How fast can you get it here?
Kurt Uhlir:Yeah, I love that story.
Part of that makes me think the problem too many people have, especially on resale or renewals for customers, is they're so focused on the actual renewal that they're scared to talk about price. They're scared to bring up whether they're going to increase the price or not. As opposed to. That's the initial conversation.
That's the start of everything for me. Because let's be clear, you're paying me $10,000 a month. Okay, then we're renewing.
I'm going to start with either saying, look, so we're not increasing a price this year, but we could add in some more services if you'll re up for a longer period of time. I want to bring that up front because we're talking about business and it sets the conversation for everything.
Let's acknowledge you're going to give us money. You're going to get more value out of it than what you're given.
And it shouldn't be about the widget that we're selling or the outcome, because I'm at right now called easy home search.
EZ is in zebra homesearch.com and so it's like we do bring in tens of millions of consumers, but our actual customers are a single real estate agent or office in every county around the country. We now have multiple subsidiaries because we listen to the customer. Hey, we came out there with the original product and it was working.
Everybody else was selling leads. We came to them with something else. People would say they had issued branding and content. We're like, what if we just co branded stuff?
So we changed the business model, worked great. Then what happens?
People still say with the Telephone Consumer Protection act, there was a big change that was supposed to take place in January where the fines were going to be much more if you did not allow people to opt out instantly. We came up with a product that we ended up rolling out as a different company as well to verify.
Hey, when you sign up on our website or you're in somebody's CRM, is that person on the Do Not Call list? Can we actually validate and show that recording to you?
When they say, I don't recall signing up, when you called me Freddie, you actually signed up here, but I'm happy not to call you because we listened to problems they were having in other parts of their business. We kept getting referrals because we have gotten serpent.
We kept hearing people say, yeah, but there's no really good CRMs, no customer relationship tracking tools now because the best ones got purchased and they've been folded into larger companies. So we have a new CRM in real estate that's coming out. It'll be launched in December.
We have announced already because we listen to our customers and we say no a lot. But when they say, could you do this? We go, why do you ask us that? And then they're open to sharing with us.
And then when we're able to solve those needs, we always over deliver and we say no to people.
There are people that come to us and they want to work with us and we say, we don't think you'll be the right partner for us since we only have one partner in every county.
And that's part of, I think, coming up with super fans too, is you need to tell people no, either because your product isn't going to meet their needs, or they're just maybe a personality with how they do business. Your company does business, and you know that's going to cause conflict in the future. And it's better to say no.
I'd rather shake your hand over the conference than for you to churn out and us be unhappy either side.
Freddy D:Because it's a ll for everybody.
Kurt Uhlir:Right?
Freddy D: industry when it began, like:They were creating features and functionality that they thought was cool. And people will go, I don't need that.
And so what you really brought up, I want to really emphasize that, Kurt, is the fact that if you're listening to your customers and you pivot and adjust and tweak, you're going to deliver something that they want and more importantly, they're going to go. And that's how you create the superfans. Wow. That's my idea. And they incorporated it.
And now that person is committed forever because they listen to me and then they can turn around. Oh, hey, that's my feature that I suggested at. And that's just powerful.
Kurt Uhlir:Yeah, no, I love that you listen to them and they don't even know what their problem actually is. And you repeat, you actually identify what's going on and then solve that for them.
So I've been Part of working in technology at a large brokers before. So I'd seen this. But here, what did we experience? Think about Zillow and Redfin and Movoto.
These are websites that get hundreds of millions of people registering them. But it's. What did we notice, like, from a buyer perspective, a consumer that owns a house or something like that. He didn't. Nobody thought about it.
But it was like, we start asking people when we were at church or at a barbecue, hey, have you ever thought about what happens when you fill out a form on one of those search sites? Does your phone, like, ring or not ringing afterwards? And they're like, oh, my God, like 15 people call me and they just.
They just incessantly email me and text me and all this. I'm like. And so my wife told me, I stopped asking.
billion in:And they're like, wait a second, honey. And then they stopped the conversation. Come here. What did you. What email did you use? And people didn't even know they had that problem.
When Preston built this company, he had an idea for doing it as a privacy first bit. But that wasn't a big part of the marketing. That wasn't a big part of telling consumers why things are different.
It's a much better application of site to use. But what resonated with people, hey, we don't sell your information. When we hand off an agent, you know exactly who it is.
And we're not rotating through those people. This is one partner in each place. So it's a vetted person. We choose to not to work with people. And people like, well, how valuable is it?
I was like, well, just think about it. If you're buying a $750,000 house, would you ever go to some financial website and say, fill it out.
I have a $750,000 IRA and I'm going to change brokerages in the next 60 days, because that's how valuable your phone number is at that point. People are like, oh, my gosh.
So just by letting people know about the pain, like giving them words to it, we've created superfans that we had never even thought about before.
Freddy D:Yeah, I get 5 million text messages of how do I know you?
Or your number's in my phone and it's okay, I must have gave it out somewhere and someone sold it or swiped it or whatever, and you get barraged by it. And so what you guys are doing is you're changing the whole equation. And now it's basically more important.
It's a valuable lead that's a qualified lead that's vetted indirectly.
Kurt Uhlir:Yeah, I love when you can find the pain that somebody also, they cannot fully articulate it themselves, and then you can name it for them and then solve it.
That's even when I look for operations internal, like, I know there's things that I think I'm right about in our business today and how we operate, but I'm actually wrong about. So I try to make space to tell people on my team and other teams there's things that I'm doing right now that I think are right.
And in six months or in two years, something will happen and I'll figure it out. So even if you have a gut feeling, can you tell me what that gut feeling is?
I'd much rather figure out in two months or three months because somebody on the team mentioned some gut feelings than wait two years to correct a major problem.
Freddy D:And what you're doing there as a leader is you're enabling people to be able to contribute to the conversation versus there's some leaders that you know are directive and it's their way or the highway. And you wonder why that organization's got churn where if you're empowering the team like we talked earlier, they're going to come up with ideas.
And I worked with a company a couple years ago and we scaled. It was a small company. It was a husband, wife, team. They've been in business for 30 years and regroup by a million in a year.
This one person, she had depression, challenges, and so there's days that she just couldn't show up to work because she just wasn't there. And what I ended up doing was I ended up giving her more responsibility. I did the opposite of what everybody would do. I gave her more responsibility.
And then all of a sudden, she started to feel better about herself. And she ended up growing the one department by $125,000 in a year. That department was doing under 100 grand. And we more than doubled it in one year.
And she was primarily responsible for doing it because she was empowered to come up with clever ideas to solve the things that I didn't see or whatever. She would ask customers that would come in because we were doing interpreting and translation services.
So people were coming in for document translation. Nothing big, but the way she handled it and we were getting reviews from people.
And so yeah, that's the difference between leaders that scale businesses because they get the whole team behind the mission versus the leaders that are directive. And it's be grateful you're working here versus I'm grateful that you're part of my team.
Kurt Uhlir:For me, two of the most important parts of truly scaling companies at the center, there's these two chains that most people will miss, one or both sides of it. The one is, to your point about they may do what you ask them to do. Well, from a leadership perspective, too many people, I think, lead by authority.
At the end of the day, as you said, either do it my way, the exact way I say to do it in the timeframe, or you're fired. That threat's underneath it, which is okay. But that's going to get you obedience.
That is not going to get people that are actually happy to work for you. And like, I'm not looking for obedience.
I'm wanting people that are feel like we're providing for their families and are looking for ways to make our customers happy. Because on the other side, I don't want to just fix the customer's pain, even to do that.
If my team doesn't have the ability to change a process to fix a customer's pain either in a single instance or long term, there's no way that's going to get solved for customers.
And so if I haven't given, if I haven't served them in a way and given them the ability to, to think for themselves, they're never going to fix the customer's pain. So I'll never have advocacy. On the other side, best case, I'm going to rent a referral from somebody.
When I say, hey, I'll give you a hundred dollar gift card if you refer me to a new customer, that's renting advocacy. I don't want that. That's not influencer marketing. To me, influencer marketing is your point about being super fans.
You like working with us so much, you have to tell other people about us.
Freddy D:Do you want to tell other people? Because the experience. And you said a key word there that I want to really emphasize there, Curt.
And it says when people say you work for me, the reality is, no, they don't. They work for themselves and they're selling you their time for money.
And as a leader, if you understand that and you treat them appropriately, like a business person, because in a sense that's what they are, then you have a whole different mindset.
And outlook with them because now they're working with you and when you've got people that are working with you, and that's what I did with that one company. That's why we scaled by a million dollars in a year. Is everybody, we were working together as a team with a goal.
The difference is again between good leaders that scale businesses and leaders that don't. The leaders that don't is, you work for me, you do what I tell you to do, how I do it.
And so now people just, I got another 15 minutes before my time is up and they're clock watching it.
Kurt Uhlir:Yeah, I'm usually at high growth companies that are, they found growth already. They're either approaching scale stage, which may mean that they're a $15 million company.
They're trying to become $150 million company in two years, like massive growth, much bigger than what a lot of people expect. That means I'm not wanting people to work just 40 hours or 50 hours. I'm wanting people to do what it takes to hit the business outcomes we want.
I'm also acknowledging that, hey, we're going to have, whether it's virtual assistants in the Philippines or content writers that we get from hiremymom.com or somewhere, but people that are working different time zones on different continents. So I'm going to show up sometimes on Saturdays or at 2 o' clock in the morning my time, because I don't expect everybody just to shift to my time.
And when I start to show up for people that way, acknowledging just the reality of our businesses, they start to go, oh, you're actually here for me, you're here for my family.
We've made people massive amounts of money because I think the best way, like you can have more resilient companies that will grow faster when people are there for you and they know that you're there for them too. Hey, you want to make money. One of the best ways to do that for your employees, to your point, to not churn, you need to make profit first.
So you back off your growth a little bit.
So that when the lean times happen, when you lose one customer and you're a marketing agency that's got only three or four customers, you don't have to fire a bunch of people. You banked stuff for it and you talk to people about that, they're going to show up for you. Different at that point.
Freddy D:I've shared a story many times, but it's appropriate to share it again. Is when I was in the early 80s, we were prepping for a demo for a company. So we were doing.
I was involved in a computer aided design CAD space and the CAM space, computer manufacturing CAD cam. And we were prepping for a demo and we know we were taking companies from drafting boards to computer aided design on the computer.
So you had to take their part, design it and their show how you could do it and all that kind of stuff. And it was not magic. You had to do it for real because they were watching.
And it was about:And then when he left that night, says, I know you guys are going to work overnight and do an all nighter and all that stuff. Do what you can and we'll see you in the morning. And he left. We did an all night.
We freshed up into the bathroom because we brought our suits and switched into suits. It was game day. We did the demo, went well. He came in afterwards, did the thing, says, right guys, it's Thursday afternoon. See you Monday.
Get the hell out of here. And I share that because I learned excellent leadership from him of how to empower people that transform my life, of how I look at things.
Kurt Uhlir:Yeah, absolutely. I think people knowing that you're there for them and you also see who they are, that's meaningful.
People that are at the stage of life and just really enjoy working, they're single, they don't have kids, they want to work 70 hours because they're trying to get ahead in their career. That's very different than somebody who's a single parent who does have to pick up their kid and will put in hours.
And just even acknowledging where they're at is meaningful. I'm a huge fan. Micro gifts for people as well. I've been at a few companies where we've used this platform called thanks. It's like ph n k s dot com.
You can either spend like $15 or like $5,000, but you can go in and here's a catalog of things you could pick.
And so there was for a while, like I had this team of 60 people and I gave all of the managers ability, like, all right, for your other teams too, like, you can go and pick this. And they were just going, all right, Everybody gets a $50 gift card. Everybody does this.
And I pulled it back very quickly because I'm like, that's not who your people are. This Person might want ice cream to take their kids to. And those are different things. You have to know your people.
And I was like, at that point, we actually built in a process that said, look, you know a lot more about what you want to thank people for. We're only going to send these to your team if you can give us something specific to put in the card.
So we had to build in a process where the managers could actually tell us something specific and about the person and then we wrote it for them.
Freddy D:Yeah, that's one of my sayings, is the little things are really the big things. And that's a little thing. But to that individual, it's a big thing.
Freddy D:Sure.
Freddy D:Thing that I've always mentioned to people is Aunt Lucille's in the hospital. And a lot of people said, I'm sorry, you can't leave. My attitude to that is, let him go and pay him for it. It's cheap money. It's cheap money.
At the end of the day, go let them see Aunt Lucille in the hospital. They're going to come back and they're going to tell everybody that, wow, my company let me go see my aunt in the hospital.
And more importantly, I didn't get doc pay. And now you just created that person as a super fan because they're already telling everybody else what a great company they're working.
And it's a little thing. It's cheap money. And I can't believe how people stores miss that little goodwill.
That's a little thing for the company, but it's a big thing for that person.
Kurt Uhlir:Absolutely. In letting your frontline employees do that for not just their customers, but people that they interact with.
I think maybe because I owned a lawn care and pressure washing business at the time, I looked for a lot of those examples. I'm in a neighborhood of about 120 people. You want to know how they got the person taking care of their lawn?
They had balloons out front because they had a new baby. And they got a knock on the door from somebody that was doing one of the neighbor's lawn and came over and said, hey, we saw you just had a baby.
I have extra time. Can I mow your lawn for you? They took care of it themselves normally. So they mowed the lawn for free, didn't ask anything and just left.
They ended up. They have done that. Company has done that for two people in our neighborhood. One of them became a customer. On the other hand, too.
It's like, I do know it's not. I mentioned I want to mow my own lawn because it's how I'm teaching my kids. I have four homes around me.
None of those people have ever come and said hi. There are times where we've been sick or we're traveling and I would like to pay somebody. And it's also easy to roll into having somebody do that.
None of those people have even waved to say hi. I deliberately wave at one. There's a new neighbor across the house and they have a new company. So I've been waving to them.
But if one of them had come to me at some point and just said, we see you mowing your lawn, we're sure you don't need us. But here's our card in case you ever just needed to fill in a sub.
I would have saved that card and they would have at least picked up a couple of services and maybe had a reoccurring customer because again, it's easy to roll into that. You have to do by allow both giving your employees the margin so they can do things like that and then rewarding them when they do it.
Freddy D:Absolutely correct. That's the key right there. So as we come to the end here, Kurt, great conversation. How can people find you?
Kurt Uhlir:So if you're looking for a home, come to easyhomesearch.com but anything about where I'm talking about how I lead businesses and what we've talked about. Super fans, it's my personal website, Kurt Euler. U h l I r.com or you can just go to Google and type servant leadership. Kurt and I'll pop up.
Freddy D:Oh, we'll make sure that's in our show notes. Great conversation and thank you for your time and we'll love to have you on the show down the road.
Kurt Uhlir:That'd be great. I've enjoyed it.
Freddy D:What really stood out in today's conversation with Kurt is the powerful reminder. Superfans aren't created by tactics, they're created by leadership.
From rolling up your sleeves alongside your team to truly understanding what your customers are trying to solve in their real lives, Kurt showed us that business that scale faster are the ones built on trust, empathy and shared ownership. For service based business owners, this matters more than ever.
When you listen deeply to your customers and your team, you stop selling features and start delivering outcomes. That's how you reduce, churn, create advocacy and turn everyday interactions into long term loyalty.
And as we talked about today, that's how you move from transactions to true superfans. If you enjoyed today's conversation, make sure to hit subscribe so you don't miss future episodes.
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Intro:We hope you took away some useful knowledge from today's episode of the Business Superfans Podcast. Join us on the next episode as we continue guiding you on your journey to achieve flourishing success in business.
