Charles: Kris Lindahl is one of the most recognized names in real estate, and not just here in Minnesota, but around the country. And today I’m going to sit down with him to learn the secret sauce all around the country. People have been trying to understand how is it that Kris Lindahl has taken an industry like real Estate, done things completely different and developed a brand that is world famous.

So today on Cleared for Takeoff, episode one, Kris Lindahl.

Kris Lindahl, welcome. Thank you. It’s good to have you.

Kris: This place is amazing. Thanks. It’s good to have you. Yes.

Charles: You’ve been through a lot. You’ve done huge things with your career, with your businesses. What is something people don’t know about you?

[00:01:02] What People Don’t Know About Kris

Kris: Yeah, I think, appreciate the question and it comes up often.

what people naturally think is real estate, right? And that’s what I think. Yeah, it’s what I know. It’s what everyone’s first reaction is. But any time that you think of someone based on the industry they’re in, you’re likely missing a lot. Right? Because to have the level of success that, the things that we’ve been through, you have to have seen a lot of things.

You’ve had to have got a lot of things wrong. and also we’ve had some wins along the way, but I think the thing that people don’t realize at this point is the level of experience we have as being entrepreneurs, right? And I can go to an event, a conference, a conversation, whatever it may be.

I likely can add value to most conversations, not because I’m some know-it-all, it’s because I’ve likely been through a lot of the things that that person or that organization is experiencing. And in my, earlier in my career, I made a lot of assumptions of what people knew and didn’t know. And now that I’m in, now that I’m in more of, the growth phase where we’re at today.

It’s amazing the things that we’ve learned along the way that I had zero experience and quite honestly, I never even thought that I would see. Right. And it’s fun. ’cause you start realizing that it’s when the wisdom is, much of the power and, we’re, we’re sort of this sweet spot of kind of, in the middle of our careers.

It’s talking to someone that’s towards the end and they, they just have so much wisdom, And I feel we, we get the opportunity to learn a lot and I think people make a lot of assumptions that I am a real estate guru. I think more often not there, that’s actually not even hardly the case.

It’s that I know at this point I know a, a decent amount of business. And 10 years from now when we’re having our next, our episode, I’ll, I’ll say 10 years from now, forgot the same thing, wow, I had no idea where I was at before, what I didn’t know. And that’s the beautiful thing about entrepreneurship is what we get to learn.

[00:03:10] The Billboard Guy Myth

Charles: I remember being. In my twenties and thinking to myself, why do people that make so much more money? Why do, what does the world value experience? I don’t have any experience, but I’m worth 150, 200 grand at least. And I, it’s funny ’cause the people who don’t have experience don’t value it ’cause they have none.

Kris: That’s right. That’s right. It’s you don’t know what you don’t know.

Charles: Okay, when most people see you or think of you, they think of the billboard guy, right? They’re Kris Lindahl is the billboard guy and I see his billboards everywhere. How the heck did you get started putting up all these billboards everywhere?

Kris: that’s, I love that you brought that up. ’cause I do think that’s what people think. ’cause I think. That’s what a lot of people see. whether it’s what

Charles: everybody, in the whole state of Minnesota sees, right.

Kris: And also in the other markets we’ve been in or online and even some of the national campaigns that we’ve done that, that everyone has seen, that’s what they think.

And this is the illusion of, of business in general. a lot of times it’s our eyes and ears test. It’s what we see and hear are the assumptions that we make. And what most people don’t see and are unaware of are the, 10 plus years of grinding. Before we were ever in a position where we could pay for one billboard.

Let alone thousands of them.

But now it’s interesting how many people bring up billboards and bring up that conversation, but they have no idea all the things we did along the way that either, worked really well or were learning opportunities that we got completely wrong that led us closer to being able to do billboards.

But, I think back and I’m Very few people ask us about SEO that we’ve been doing for 20 years. Almost no one. no one asks about how’d you become such a high level direct response copywriter? Or, how, how did you understand direct mail at such a high level?

Or when did you learn to write radio ads that were able to meet people where they’re at? Or how do your TV ads do this? People always say billboards, And it’s just interesting from a psychological standpoint of why, or that we connect to that one thing. And what naturally happens is. Is that you’ll have people around the country that will say Hey, we want to go do billboards.

But they didn’t do the 10 years of work of learning and adapting and pivoting over and over and over again to get to the place, to actually earn the right to do a bigger strategy like billboards. And they do billboards and three months later they quit. ’cause it didn’t work because they’re well, I’m

Charles: just going to do some billboards.

Kris: That’s it. And what, what makes the billboard successful isn’t actually the billboards, it’s the messaging. It’s the strategy, it’s the implementation, it’s the adapting, it’s the pivoting. And it’s the same thing over and over again where we, where many people see something, think that’s gotta be what it is.

Or that person had success because they’re in this industry or that economy, or they got lucky here and they don’t realize all the behind the scenes thing. It reminds me of, of the blockbuster Netflix story of the, the back and forth of where, Blockbuster was almost under. Then they went back to the top and where Netflix did the same thing and this series of events went back and forth and at one point.

Blockbuster thought that some of the things that that Netflix was doing was their secret sauce and it wasn’t. And ultimately it actually cost them the entire brand. It’s the same thing with this. many people come in and think oh, it’s the billboards. It’s the billboards, it’s the billboards.

And they enter a world that they have no idea what they’re even talking about, and they don’t have the experience to even handle what any of that means.

Charles: when you think about, you, what you’re saying is the general population recognizes you from thousands of billboards, but those are not the success.

They don’t create the success. Yeah. You’re saying they’re just a, a part of the recipe. Right. And if you just went out and started copying your program, putting up billboards, and you’ve seen it happen, people try and do it. Yeah. And it’s just massive failure.

Kris: It doesn’t work because it’s the experience that we have.

It’s also our focus around attribution, it, it’s understanding why people do what they do and meeting consumers where they’re at. People ask me all the time about marketing, they say, Hey, where’s the best place to, to advertise a market? And my response is always the same. Every one of them works if you have the right message.

There are people everywhere, right? Whether that’s a Facebook ad, a TikTok ad, Instagram reels, stories, whatever. And you’ll find someone having success everywhere with, but the reason it works is they meet their customer where they’re at with the right message. And the message more often than not is the problem, not the medium.

[00:07:56] The Power of Good Copywriting

Charles: I remember when we were, when I first got to know you, and we went on that trip to Chicago for the charity thing, and I remember coming down to breakfast and you had been sitting there writing. For two hours and you were I got this copy and you read it back to me. I’m oh my gosh, that’s brilliant.

I want to call that number, right? Yes. when you think about the writing, the ability to write good copy, I think today everybody leans heavily on GPT already. Tell me about the, the value you’ve seen in being a good writer because you are an incredible writer. Yeah,

Kris: I think, yeah, I remember that.

That was funny. I was really excited about that. But I get excited about most things. Some of them work, some don’t.

Charles: You were really jazzed up

and then you got me all excited and I was shit, I need write some copy.

Kris: I think what, when I think about writing is I would not. It’s interesting.

growing up, I would never describe myself as someone that even fits the writer profile. And I in any assessments or anything that you would ever do, you wouldn’t say Hey, this is the type of person that, that is a writer. it’s a 100% trained, I was not set up to be a writer at all.

I’m super impatient. I’m really fast paced. slowing down and putting words on paper is really hard for me to do, but I know the impact that it makes on other people. I’ll give you a prime example of what you just said. with any of the ai, language models that are out there, whether it’s internally your own or it’s one of the, the bigger ones that, that others use.

We ran a little bit of a test and we did, five, AI generated pieces of copy and we did five that were generated by me. The five that were generated by me outperformed the other one by a thousand percent. And it’s not because I’m not saying that because I’m some amazing writer, it’s because I understand how to connect with people.

And AI will never do that super well. They I’m talking to the level of listening to every phone call that comes in, in the during the day and understanding exactly what the pain points are, whether that’s a recruit wanting to join our company, whether that’s a buyer, a seller, a vendor, whatever it may be.

It’s, it, it takes a level of obsessiveness that most people aren’t willing to go to. one example of this is we went to the Michael Jackson Broadway show in New York. And it was anything on Broadway is great show. Totally different level, Yeah. And when I went to this show.

I was just totally blown away by the, by the person that was, that was Michael Jackson. beyond blown away, this is a spitting image and everything that I’d ever seen, not that I’m a, I’m not a huge music fan, and it wasn’t I wouldn’t say this is, my dream to go to Broadway, but I appreciate the level of, of obsessiveness and, and discipline and dedication that they put in.

what I found out is that they won a bunch of awards and the, Michael Jackson in the Broadway show was in character for, it’s either two or three years before the show started full-time in character, full-time for a couple years, lived this way, lived this way. You can see that when you go to the show.

And it’s the same thing here, where I am absolutely 100% obsessed with understanding the journey of people and, and trying to figure out how can I positively impact them and help them get to where they’re going. And that shows up in the work, but no one sees that. They just see words.

They just see words and assume oh, I’m just going to go post this. They don’t see the work behind the scenes. It’s the, the runner that has the, historic, marathon record, And they, they broke the four minute mile, but they don’t see the years of training underwater and elevation and all that stuff.

They just see the time. He must have good genetics. And and in, in that entire thing. The reason why our copy worked is because we understand the people so well, and very few people are really in life, are willing to take that level of dedication and discipline to go out and do that work.

the easy button is just to go to GPT and throw something in there and say, Hey, here are the pain points, here are the problems. write me this thing this copywriter over here and spit it out I can use it on wherever I want to use

Charles: it. it sounds what you’re saying is having a high level of intuition is a major advantage.

What I want to understand from you is, does everyone have the same level of intuition? Can intuition be learned?

Kris: great point. intuition comes from trauma, and it comes from trauma in your childhood. And there’s all different shapes or forms. I think one of the interesting things about what you just said right there is that there is not one way where these things happen.

We’re all very complicated individuals that have all had different life lessons and upbringings and life experiences and the rest of it. But what’s interesting about intuition is that there had to be trauma that happened in childhood to get to a higher level of intuition, really. And as I’ve had conversations with many people along the way, I’ve noticed a lot of different types of ways that intuition has shown up.

Special needs sibling see it show up all the time. I was actually in a conversation the other day with, a very I think a very talented human being that’s earlier in his journey. And as he was telling me his story, he has a nonverbal sibling. And he said, I had to be the parent.

I had to help out ’cause my parents couldn’t handle, couldn’t do all this alone. Alcoholic parents, I’ve seen it many times where, hey, my, my alcoholic parent was going to show up at home and I wasn’t sure is it going to be safe? Are they going to beat me? Are they going to throw me in the corner? Are they going to

I’ve seen all different shapes and forms of how intuition is created. Yeah. And what stands out to me of all of that is that each person has their own version of trauma. Right. And my trauma, some people might say wow, I can’t believe all the things he’s been through, but I don’t feel I’ve been through anything that bad.

And other people might say, Hey, my trauma was bad, I can barely even function. and I think that’s what’s really interesting about trauma is that there’s many different layers and notches of different ways and there’s also different perspective. And there’s some. Tragedy, tragic things that have happened that quite frankly, if they happen to me, I don’t know that I could overcome either.

Right. And so I feel fortunate that I had enough trauma, to still be functional and still be able to use it as a life lesson. But when I look back to, the early days when I was younger, I think there was a lot of anger and a lot of pent up demand around all of this.

And I think. What I learned as I got older is those were actually gifts. And the reason why I share this is that we have a lot of young generations that are, that are coming up in a world where there’s this abundance of everything.

Kris: everyone gets a trophy, everyone gets acknowledgement, everyone gets praise, and there are very few people going through really challenging things in life, or less from, that’s my perception of it.

Less. And I think what you’re seeing is you’re seeing as a society less intuitive people.

And that doesn’t mean that it’s right or wrong ‘ because we’re shielding

Charles: them from having the feelings and dealing with the, the shame. The hard stuff. The hard

Kris: stuff. the things that and then, and then often what happens is as parents we sort of overcorrect the things that helped us become as intuitive as we are.

We stopped doing those as parents for our kids because we’re Hey, we don’t want to raise our kids the way we were raised. Right. And then we just my dad belt, belt on me, right? we, we adjust our plan and you look, you look through history and you and sometimes you have someone that’s doubles down and their parents goes, my parents did a great job.

I’m going to do that exact same thing. But most of the time you have I’m going to do the opposite over here. ’cause there’s no perfect parenting playbook. Right? And we don’t get it right. And there’s a bunch of mistakes. I’ve, I know I’ve made a ton of them.

Charles: They’re going to blame you for your, their trauma anyways.

Right? That’s right.

Kris: That’s right. But it, but it is interesting, when you look at our society, it is not, it does not feel the same. At all. Right. It does not, it feels like there is an abundance and not nearly the struggle for most people that I think we went through.

Charles: To me, I, it was interesting.

I, I think maybe having siblings can help with that a little bit. Because I, we have friends and it’s I don’t know, should we just have one kid? And I’m please have more than one. I’m not, there’s nothing against only children. it’s not they chose that. But I was on a bike ride with my kids the other day and they’re always bickering at each other.

And for some reason it clicked in my mind. I was oh my gosh. When somebody’s being weird or awkward, their sibling calls them out on it. And that really helps them Develop a sense of what’s weird and not What’s awkward. And they use the word cringe. Dad, that’s so cringe.

But it’s so true. having siblings. Yeah, and having siblings can be traumatic. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. siblings are really hard on each other. Yeah. But when you think about somebody that’s out trying to write good copy, and they’re I just don’t have that spark. How would somebody know if they have intuition or not?

I would imagine people that don’t have it wouldn’t know. They don’t have it.

Kris: Yeah. You, you could do the easy thing to just go ask GBT No, I’m sort of kidding. But, there’s a bunch of assessments that you can, but I think. When people start understanding what intuition actually means and how it’s measured, I think people can start sort of self-evaluating if they have it or not.

Right. it’s Hey, can you walk into rooms and detect that energy’s off? Or can you shift this or shift that? Or you feel something’s not quite right? Right. And as you start going through the sort of checklist of Hey, what are the things, that I, what characteristics would I have if I had a higher level of intuition?

Mm. Right. And you’ll start to find out really quickly do I see these things or not? And then I think then what I found too is that. If you realize Hey, maybe your intuition’s a bit lower. That’s okay. That’s great. You’re self aware of who you are. Then when you’re in certain situations, you have to align yourself around people that are highly intuitive, if that’s the skill that you need in the moment that you’re at.

Right. And I share all the time, we have some people that, that are not as intuitive in, in our community, and that’s fine. But if you’re in a meeting where we need someone to read the energy, read the room, and understand what’s going on, then someone else who’s highly intuitive has to be there as well.

And you, someone that’s highly intuitive, that doesn’t mean that they are the end all, be all greatest of all time. Yeah. Right. There’s definitely people that are highly intuitive that make a lot of misreads because of it too. Right. it’s not a thousand out of a thousand.

they’re going to have misreads or they’re going to detect that something’s wrong and they might not pick up on what it is. And they might, they might try something wrong. They might They might find the, they might. Think that they have the right issue and they might find out that they were totally wrong.

Charles: something that I hear a lot is, and you just told me another example of it earlier when people come to your office and they meet your people, there’s something different about the people that you have. There’s so many cliches around, oh, it’s all about our people. And some people just don’t get it.

Yeah. What is it that you’re doing so differently? remember we were talking about the whole recipe isn’t just the billboards, right? Right. And it isn’t just real estate.

[00:19:46] Building a Great Team

Charles: What is it about people that makes your businesses so different from everybody else out there?

Kris: Yeah, that’s such a great question.

There’s so much to that as, as you were framing that up, I went a totally different direction for a second. Then I’m going to share first, then I’ll come back to that. I was thinking about as you were talking about that I was actually thinking about the people that I get the opportunity to work with each and every day and very very specifically.

There’s a few people that are within the last 12 months that have joined our organization. Both of them joined from LinkedIn, from my personal post on LinkedIn.

Charles: your personal page?

Kris: Yes. Just a post that I wrote. But back to earlier when I said understanding where people are at and being obsessed with that journey is exactly why that post worked.

Not because of the words, because I knew exactly who I was looking for. I have the experience of doing the role that I needed to hire. Right? I think that’s one of the advantages of a founder of Hey, I started at the bottom and I wore every hat along. I know what this role is. I know who this person is, I know what the pain points are and I know what skill sets they need to have.

And when I did all that work upfront, that post that I wrote probably took me two or three hours to write and it got 25,000 views or whatever it had something like that. But 25,000 views on an organic post is the equivalent of going to speak to a small stadium. And if I said, Hey, you’re going to go speak at a small stadium today, you wouldn’t just show up and wing it yet on social media, people throw words or throw it in AI and just throw things out.

And they’re speaking to thousands of people. And as I think about one unique part of this, I know exactly who I’m looking for. I’m crystal clear on that piece. That helps a lot, but that’s only a small piece of it, I’m having conversations with more of the right people. I think the, they’re able to look online and everyone today is going to do the research on anyone,

They’re going to look online, be on Glassdoor and anywhere. Everything. everything, They’re going to, they’re going to research me. They’re going to research. And I think, reviews, obviously in today’s world, I think people take that kind of with a grain of salt, knowing that hey, if someone was unhappy or it didn’t work out, they’re probably going to leave you a low review,

they’re not going to probably say something. Absolutely. Especially if it’s anonymous. They’re going to take the time. That’s it. It’s

Charles: going to be negative.

Kris: That’s it. I, what I found though is the really strong, A players will actually reach out to people that are currently in the organization on their own.

With no facilitation, with no guide from anyone that’s, not me, not anyone else, not the hiring manager, not hr. They just simply reach out and they’re already doing their own due diligence. And but that comes from finding the right people that actually want to do, and you, I want someone to go do the work upfront to know that they’re a hundred percent in or a hundred percent out.

The last thing we want is to bring someone in and three weeks later they’re Hey, this isn’t what I thought it was.

Charles: Yeah.

Kris: You want to be crystal clear.

That’s the worst. that’s the, that as I was listening to you, that’s one initial piece. But then back to the, the bigger broad stroke of how do you get to a place where you have great people? I think it starts with not hiring very well to begin with. So where we started was not very good. 20 years ago. We were really poor at hiring. I hired a bunch of, I, I hired some friends from, that I grew up with. Oh, you’d be great. let’s go, And everyone was getting jobs and I need help.

let’s go. I had no plan and I thought I was the greatest hire in the world and I was terrible. I, and I didn’t know this for a long time, I thought that I had a gift for understanding people. What I realized is that I have a gift in seeing, seeing, I, I, I’m high vision, I can see what people are capable of, but I can’t see what they’re willing to do.

And what I would often do is I’d bring someone in, I’m I know this person’s got the talent to do it, but what they didn’t have is the hard work. And because I did not have a sophisticated hiring system, people would show up with high potential. Low follow through. Ugh. And it was super frustrating for me.

You’re how does this make sense? Yes, yes. And it was, it, it was frustrating. ’cause I found myself at times wanting more for them than they wanted for themselves. And it was frustrating. Why someone, I didn’t understand how someone wouldn’t want to get out of bed and want, want, have the drive when they have all this talent.

And then I started to, on this path of getting to a place of an objective hiring process. having a strategic plan that when someone comes in your world, from the moment that they send a message all the way through the entire journey, the entire mapping the entire thing out. What does that look like?

and I’m not here today to say we’ve got it all figured out and it’s just this perfect, amazing system. we have setbacks. We have setbacks every day. we have an example, we have a player starting tomorrow. She sent me a message two hours ago and said, Hey, what’s the plan for tomorrow?

I immediately go we’ve got a problem. If she’s sending me a message, she start, she’s excited, she doesn’t care. she’s fine. But I’m how does she not know what’s happening tomorrow? And it’s less than 24 hours from now. But that’s the level of obsessiveness I have with trying to get it right.

She was fine. And it was, and I was laughing with another one of our leaders. I said, I thought we were going to get this onboarding experience. Yeah. And we kind of laughed about it. And we still have mishaps all the time. And we can joke about it, but having that objective hiring base and then having high enough standards that you’re willing to constantly improve.

And also being vulnerable that Hey, we dropped the ball. We didn’t get it right. And just, it’s just an ongoing evolution. you’ve got objective-based hiring process, but then you also have the assessments piece of it. Most companies don’t spend the time to use assessments to understand their current people or anyone in the future.

And I’m not saying to use the assessments for hiring, but the assessments are designed to be used to learn more about a person you’re having a conversation with. Right? Because everyone has gifts. We all have strengths and we also have areas where it’s maybe not something that we love to do, that we don’t, it doesn’t bring us a lot of joy.

And adding all of that in, what it does is it slows me down a little bit and it gives me new data points and new information that help me connect dots a little bit better than I did when I was just using my intuition or my gut. And that is how someone can walk into our organization, go, wow, it feels different around here.

What they don’t see is the 15 plus years of getting to an objective based hiring platform and, and into assessments. And the rest of it, what they see is exactly what they experience with the people Are there, this is noticeably different.

Charles: Yeah. Just like the billboards. They’re just seeing the final products.

[00:26:42] Early Life and Upbringing

Charles: They’re not seeing That’s, that’s it. Okay, I to shift gears before the billboards and before all the success, when you think back on your early days and what drove you to be who you are, how did that start?

Kris: Yeah, it’s a hundred percent my upbringing. So it’s all the challenges that I’ve been through my life.

I at an early age said I gotta take life into my own hands. And at a young age I was this, what caused you to do that? it’s, it’s my dad who was an alcoholic. It’s, my dad getting murdered and run over when I was in high school. it’s the, multiple, horrible things.

Yeah, lots of, lots of different things happen. It’s also having a coach in eighth grade, I showed up two weeks late to football. And I showed up and I didn’t know anything about football and he believed in me for the first time ever. he’s like, you’re a really good athlete. You don’t know what you’re doing.

We’re going to put you in nose tackle ’cause you have no idea how football even works. And so I’ve had nose tackle, totally clueless, getting blown off the line by huge linemen. But within six months I was the starting wide receiver. And within a few years I was, one of the, one of the top in the state, that fast.

And it, it, it’s the same thing that I want for people that come into our organization, which is the belief. I think too often so many of us in life are just looking for someone to believe in us. Right. And at that moment in eighth grade, I finally had someone that said, you have something you’re good at.

And if you do the work, you’re going to get better. And that moment changed for me I want to be a teacher, I want to be a mentor, I want to be a coach. Which is what drove me all the way through high school. And then in graduating college to be a teacher. all my education degrees are I want to be a teacher, I want to be a coach, I want to be a mentor.

all of that happened from that moment in eighth grade when a coach came to me and said you’ve got some gifts here that no one had ever told me before. And it gave me a different level of confidence drive towards. And I think that’s when you start getting confidence, you have to overcome a lot of tough things in life.

And you start to take control of your own life. our core values, If it’s owning it is our last core value. One of the most important ones for me. ’cause I can’t understand someone that doesn’t want to take full responsibility for their life and their actions.

me, that’s how a lot of this came to be, am fully responsible for everything that I do in life. I’m not expecting anyone to give me anything. I’m not expecting anyone to give me the answers, to solve the problems for me. I own my outcome and I take full responsibility whether this is good or bad, or I fall short.

I am going to tell you Hey, I did drop the ball here and here’s why and here’s what I’m going to do about it. And I’ve always lived my life that way because I had to take responsibility for my life at an early age. Otherwise, I could have went down the wrong path several different times.

[00:29:30] The Coach Who Changed Everything

Charles: So when that coach believed in you, what did that, what did that do for you?

Kris: it was a light switch.

I was, it changed the entire trajectory of my life so fast. Mm-hmm. early on, I wanted to fight all the time. a lot of kids do anyways. But I was I was angry, I wanted to fight.

I just was so competitive and didn’t know what to do with the energy. I was always getting in, brawls and disagreements and, and everything else. And then as I started to build a better relationship with that coach, I started to realize there were more strategic ways to disagree or to debate rather than just swinging at each other in the locker room.

Charles: Is he still alive today?

Kris: Yeah, he’s alive. Yeah. Are you in touch with him? Yeah. Oh yeah.

Oh yeah. He still does. we hire him, he’s an attorney as well, so we hire him for some work. And, I see him all the time. I support, he still coaches, so ISI support their sporting organizations all the time. I buy, we help buy helmets for the team and he knows he can reach out to me anytime.

And if I, there’s anything I can do to give that gift of to other kids that maybe are in a place that I was. So it took an attorney to get you to pay attention. Yes, yes, yes, yes. That’s it. That’s so great. That’s it.

Charles: Oh man. What a good story. Yeah, that’s cool. So I just want to shift gears and ask some funny questions.

[00:30:47] Funny Rumors About Kris

Charles: What are some of the funniest rumors that you’ve heard people start about you?

Kris: Well, the, the, yeah. The, there’s this is going to be so good. Yeah. There’s, what’s so funny about it is how long, I think what makes it even funnier is how long the rumors have lasted. Right? a lot of the rumors are time sensitive statements.

They’re evergreen, everlasting rumors. it’s we’re stuck in time and we never leave. Yeah. one of them is my ex-wife. He bought all the billboards to hide the money, because he was going through a divorce. This has been said by the way, for at least 11 years now.

And you and her are friends. We’re great friends. and, and, and we co-parent. It’s incredible. it’s amazing. Yeah. It’s truly amazing. But the, they, you, you used it to bury the money that, that’s it. That’s it. And, and I, and I often ask I’m, what the dots that don’t connect for me is Hey, if you were trying to hide something.

Why would you go buy billboards? I can’t think of anything more visible than billboards.

Charles: Oh my gosh.

Kris: Okay. Right. that’s, that’s one that comes up all the time. And, some other ones are, he’s going to go to prison, he’s going to go to jail. He is a conman. They’ll associate me with different types of people that have got in trouble over time.

Charles: there’s, there’s all kinds of that. I heard he did this, I heard he said this. people make YouTube videos about you. Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

Kris: All the time. Yeah. In Reddit and Twitter and X now and everything else. And

Charles: When you’re out and about how often do you get stopped? Hey man, the,

Kris: all the time.

I think there’s yeah, it’s interesting you, you asked that. ’cause there’s a lot of different things that happen obviously locally all the time. And then I think, Nationally from a, in, in the real estate industry. I think a lot of people look up to what we’ve done and then, entrepreneurs, right?

That, that are that have seen the pace that we’ve been able to create the brand and the things that have come along with that. Most entrepreneurs are generally very curious about how did you do this and how did you do it so quickly? And then kids, Kids don’t have the bias that adults do,

they’re not stuck in their ways about who should they should use for real estate or, or who they should support for business. they’re more pure, And they grew up in a TikTok, YouTube, on demand, educational journey. And they have a high level of respect. why I get invited so often to speak at high schools and colleges and, we’ve get lots of college students that want posters and billboards and gear to put in their dorm and, yeah.

Yeah, it’s, it’s super fun.

[00:33:16] The Call of Duty Partnership

Charles: Okay. talking about the, I want to get into talking about some of the big things you’ve done different in real estate. But before we get into that, is it true that you did a partnership with Call of Duty? It is, yes. Yes.

Kris: Yeah. It’s crazy. I remember when, the CMO of Activision called, this is funny, I’ll tell this story really quick.

the CMO of Activision, which is an ama amazing human, the, the super smart great person reached out to our company at the time when they originally reached out. They reached out and it appeared to be a scam. our team flagged it as this is just some scam. ’cause we get these calls all day, every day.

And no one, no one does anything with it, they go, this is some sort of scam. They want Kris to be in a video game, And it just sounds very farfetched type thing. no one does anything. Three weeks later I get a, a message again from our team that says, no, no, this guy wants to talk to you.

He is the CMO, of Activision. And he wants to talk to you about, licensing your marks and doing a collaboration to launch Black Ops six Call of Duty. Now it’s got my attention right now. It’s got, I’m sorry, what? Yes. Now it’s got my attention, I get this message. I did not get the first message my marketing director, which she did great.

normally we screen that stuff out really well. I call him and I’m actually, that happened to be, it was I was headed back from fishing with a friend of mine called him and it was just amazing that their team actually, the credit, really a lot of it goes to their team, truly, that they had a strategy to reverse engineer owned by Microsoft, right?

international company, that they had a strategy to reverse engineer influencers in markets to create what I’ve never seen before, which is a local icon takeover to piggyback off the name that is known by everyone in a market and create a collaboration rather than to go into the market and try to launch the game on their own.

It’s such a brilliant strategy that I’ve never seen an international company find. I’ve never seen it. No, never. Not one time. Brilliant idea, which shows you the level of sophistication that they have to think that way. And they licensed our trademarks. And I remember when they launched the game, they had to replace their character on all of our billboards and on our tv we ran a TV and all the N-F-L-N-C-A, all the football games.

It was everywhere. And I remember looking at ’cause they have report that they track different markets. And we’re talking globally. This is I think it was biggest video game launch to, to my knowledge in history. In history. our brand is the reason for all that, but it was the biggest launch ever.

But Minneapolis and St. Paul, where the big place where we did the biggest launch was number 10. Was number 10, globally. And this was all globally. Yes. Globally. Number 10, when it was all going on because they took a brand that’s got, tens of millions of impressions and, and every, most people are really aware of, of who we are and created a partnership and, and licensed the marks to do that.

It’s unheard of. And from entrepreneurship, especially for us, in a B2C world That’s the kind of holy grail of the whole thing, When you have an international company, Microsoft that licensed your trademarks that you started bootstrap with nothing 20 years ago, it does not get any bigger than that.

Charles: I remember going, I was driving somewhere and I looked up and I was that isn’t Kris. And it was the Call of Duty guy doing this. And I was what the hell? And then I was wait, did they do this without his permission? Then I text you. I was which is what everyone thought. I was dude, what the heck?

And then you were ha ha, let me tell you this story. And I was oh my gosh. What a brilliant idea.

Kris: I know, I know. It was amazing. funny. That many people went to, there’s a problem here. They ripped off Kris. they, and it’s funny how many people in the comment section are oh, this is going to be a huge lawsuit.

There’s all kinds of, it’s Microsoft and they didn’t realize it, that it was, there was a strategic partnership where they licensed our marks. But what it did, it, it did a lot of things. I think it inspired a lot of entrepreneurs around the world of what’s possible.

And the days of this barrier of hey, these really large international companies are disconnected from local entrepreneurs, is, is no more we’re interconnected through social media and through all these other things that anything’s possible now.

Charles: Absolutely wild.

just a wild story. Something that they’ve never done before. Never. No. Okay. I want to talk about, when we talk about the national scope, And you were saying, people have tried to copy your formula, but they’re only taking one little snapshot or one piece, or I’m just going to do the billboards or whatever.

When you think about the things that you’ve done differently in real estate, help me understand why what you do is so different. What is different about how you operate?

Kris: one big. Piece to this entire thing is my crystal clear ability to understand who I am and where my strengths are and where my shortcomings are.

Right? And one thing that that I am, that is one of my genius is understanding what is happening and how to engineer it to be better, right? I’ll give you an example, guaranteed cash offer, when we created that. The reason why I created that is because I sat at the kitchen table with thousands and thousands of homeowners, and I understood exactly what the pain points are that most people go through when they consider selling their house.

It is so stressful, right? When you look at any of the surveys, it’s one of the top five things, maybe the top three. It’s death, divorce, and selling a house.

Charles: Yeah.

[00:39:10] What Makes Kris Different in Real Estate

Kris: It’s

why does selling a house have to be at the top of the most stressful things that ever do? It’s stressful. It is stressful. Yeah.

Right. And hearing these certain things over and over and over again, I realized there, there needs to be a better way. And I started to study the way that other products and things were sold, and what I realized is that most people. Trade their car in, right? Some people know that may, maybe they’ll get slightly more if they go on Facebook marketplace or Craigslist or put a sign in the, in, in front of the car on a busy road.

But they also know the risk and the inconvenience that comes with that. I’ve got to meet unqualified buyers. They might not show up. I might not feel safe. They might know where I live. they might not have the money. They might back out. We know inherently all of the risks that goes with selling a car, which is why we go and just trade it in and go, give me the new car and let me drive off the lot.

I don’t want any more brain damage. Just make it

all work. That’s it. Yeah.

And what’s happening is you have this growing trend now of people that are saying yes to the guaranteed cash offer. Not because I created a new crazy marketing strategy because I sat at the table with thousands of people and I knew what the pain points were, and I knew that it was super painful.

Charles: you were this is just so hard. Let’s just solve this problem.

Kris: That’s it. And yeah, that’s a big piece of it. And now, this is what Not everything that we do, you, I, anyone else is all by design. There is some luck involved too, And, and some of the luck in, in launching that program.

The economy is shaky. The housing industry is super shaky. Rates are really high, And what’s happening now, and most people don’t know this, is the market is getting really soft, fast, And anyone that needs to sell quickly and needs to move on, they have some life changing event and they need to get to this fresh start.

The open market is rejecting thousands and thousands of homes. It’s not working anymore, The old way of take the photos, do the open house, and consumers are just going to drive around neighborhoods on the weekends and just find places to pop in and out. We’re in a world of speed where we’re we want to click a button, things happen.

And the world is changing and it’s going at a way quicker pace. And more and more homeowners that take the old school approach are being rejected by the open market because they’re following the old real estate agent strategy that’s been done for 40 years. It’s not working the same. And the luck for us is that’s not working anymore.

The market is getting shaky and we have the program to help homeowners move fast. So what,

Charles: what is, what is guaranteed? before you launched it and you were explaining it to me, I was first of all, that’s genius, but you had to explain it to me. Yes. So what the hell is guaranteed cash offer?

Yeah.

Kris: when someone needs to sell fast, we show up at their house and we give them a check. We literally give them a check and the number we give them is what they can close and they can close in a few days, whatever. They can leave all their stuff behind.

Charles: So all of the tough stuff, you just show up and you’re here you go.

Here’s the offer. You want it, and you go,

Kris: that’s it. It’s just trading your car. they can

Charles: literally leave their stuff.

Kris: Everything. Yep. You pull in to the car lot. The same way trading a car, you pull in the car lot, you don’t leave with the car, whatever conditions that it’s in, the dealership is either going to give you a check or they’re going to, they’re going to offset it

Charles: they don’t have to clean the house, nothing,

Kris: zero nothing.

And they can move fast. And this is, this is all done in-house with our funds. we have no outside investors, no outside companies, no partnerships. This is us. we provide that. there’s a lot of confusion, where’s the money coming from? How is this working? Is he partnered with this?

This is all done by our brand.

Charles: what do you say when people are okay, that’s great, but you’re not giving me what the house is worth.

Kris: Which is a very common thing. I would tell you that there’s a, a really big effect known in the world that a lot of homeowners aren’t aware of.

And it’s called The Endowment Effect. The Endowment Effect. What it is, is that when you own something and that you’ve put your blood. Sweat tears and just all this resource into you believe it’s worth more than it’s And we have in, in, in our bestselling book, guaranteed Cash offer. There’s a, a phrase that I use in there that I’ve, that I saw often, which is IVS inflated value syndrome.

where the guaranteed cash offer program, it sounds a medical condition. Where, where, where they, that was by design. No, I’m not a doctor. But what I found along the way is that, if you have an, an inflated sense of what something is worth, you’re not going to have success on the open market and you’re not going to have success with a guaranteed cash offer.

No. It doesn’t matter. It does not matter. You are out of touch with what you, with reality. That’s it. Reality. And there are a lot of people that have that. But what I found is that a lot of people that are, that need to move quickly are and are highly motivated. They’re actually pretty realistic about what their the value is.

And oftentimes when someone thinks I’m not going to get maximum dollar if I accept a guaranteed cash offer, the reason why someone would think that is if they have the endowment effect in IVS, if they believe that the value is much higher than the market is actually show showcasing, that’s how you end up with a gigantic gap.

And quite honestly, those are the people that it’s really tough for us to help. Right? If they’re out of touch with what their starting point and what the value really is, it’s tough. If someone’s very self-aware of what their property is worth, it is one of the easiest transactions ever because they go, okay, if my house is worth this and now I can sell it to you with a cash offer and I can close in three days, two days, seven days, I can leave everything behind.

And I don’t have to pay closing costs. I don’t have to pay real estate commissions. I don’t have to negotiate with anyone. There’s much money already wrapped into if they went on the open market that they are saving by going with us. And that’s offset with getting your cash offer today. And then there’s the question of, What is it worth? What is it worth to be able to walk away today? And move on to the next chapter of your life and get rid of that, that feeling of stuck in the sleepless nights and the stress. ’cause a lot of people, when they make the decision to sell a house, it doesn’t go on the market.

The next day, the decluttering starts, the remodeling projects start, the packing starts, the moving starts, the, and, and oftentimes, most people don’t have any experience doing any of this, So they’re at Lowe’s, home Depot, Menards, and watching HDTV trying to figure out what do they do next.

So all that goes away with the guaranteed cash offer. How did you come up with that? Sitting at the kitchen table, listening to many people go through the stress. I would go in and someone needed to sell fast and they couldn’t Because they needed to do much work that the traditional process actually slowed them down substantially.

And what it did is it, in a lot of cases, it overwhelmed people to the point where they ended up stuck in their house. Even though they knew deep down that they needed to get to a fresh start, they ended up challenged that they couldn’t move. And what we want, what we want to do is just help more people get to where they’re going and I will tell you that one of the things that’s becoming very interesting.

Is that a lot of other real estate professionals are now calling us to get cash offers for their clients’ houses. Right? this is one area that we did not expect to grow as much as it did. That’s interesting. it might be a new, a marketing campaign in the future, which is Hey, the guaranteed cash offer, it’s the program that real estate agents approve.

Right? who knows? Maybe we’ll do that at some point, but we’re seeing a, a huge growth in the amount of real estate agents and how they’re supporting that, which is making a huge difference.

Charles: Dude. That’s wild. That’s absolutely wild. Okay, you, before you started out on your own Yeah. You were under re max.

A couple brokerages. Yep. What happened?

Kris: Yeah, I had a great experience at every brokerage I was at. I learned a lot, super fortunate, of all my time at all those places, actually. There’s a lot of great leaders and people that I’m still really good friends with today. there’s definitely all kinds of rumors of, I was let go.

I was fired, I was kicked out, I lost my license. And every story you can think of, but that’s, it can be further from the truth. We needed to declare our, our, our, our independence. we needed to be independent. We, I did not want what we were doing. It was innovative that I did not want to be connected to any other real estate brand.

’cause what was happening, we were helping everyone else at these other real estate companies grow their brands. Right. And people were calling different offices and they were never getting back to us. And it was a, it was a. It was not a great consumer experience either. ’cause there was confusion in the market of Hey, Kris is an agent at which office.

And all those other, most of those real estate companies, most people don’t know this, they’re franchises and each office is independently owned. Mm-hmm. And, and in a lot of cases, most of the money in those franchises siphoned out of the state where the real estate office is and sent to wherever the franchise headquarters is.

Right. most people don’t know that, Mo they’re not actually supporting local Mm. Right. Most of that, that, most of that money, most of those things don’t actually support anything locally. I’m not saying that the local real estate agent doesn’t do things for the community and things like that.

’cause of course they do. But the majority of the dollars that a homeowner or that is investing in real estate commission, if they’re, if it’s a franchise, most of that money goes back to a different location.

[00:48:05] Breaking Away from Traditional Brokerages

Charles: where did, where did you go from being. Kris Lindahl, a real estate agent, the people you see out there that are walking around hustling to being Kris Lindahl, the real estate empire and media mogul.

where did that transition start? Yeah, and how did you, what made you do that Pivot?

Kris: Yes. I love that you asked that. Now, the beautiful thing about asking or answering that question today is my answer is going to be very different. ’cause I can look back. I was actually that when I started. Right? I didn’t know that at the time.

Right When I started in May of 2009, I was obsessed with trying to figure out how to become a marketer. I can’t even exactly tell you why I don’t have this crazy moment where I was oh, I need to be a marketer ’cause that’s the what I need to figure out. I just, every step that I took from when I started was more and more learning.

I was very attracted to marketing and sales and PR and branding and learning that. And I just started taking steps to learn that and trying to figure out how do I self generate business to, to bring into, at the time it was just me bring, bring into, into my business and over time I just kept trying more and more things.

But I, I loved the idea. I, I loved the ideas of coming up with things and then trying them and seeing if they worked. I also really loved when it didn’t work. ’cause I, because I was, I was to me, I, I’ve always been a student first, I was intrigued with things that didn’t work and why because at the, ’cause a lot of times I started, I was this is amazing.

This is going to work well, and then it didn’t. Hmm. And I was why did that not work? Yeah. You’re ouch. why did that not work? I spent all this time and energy in this. I thought I had a clear winner and it bombed. And that’s I got, I learned more from the things that went wrong than I did from the things that went well.

Charles: Yeah.

[00:50:00] The Journey to Becoming a Marketer

Kris: And I think a lot of entrepreneurs could probably share that same sentiment, but that’s what I started getting really curious about marketing and branding and, and getting really obsessed with it. And I think what makes me unique is really that matter at bats, The hours,

It’s anything, you want to become an expert in anything. You need at least 10,000 plus hours of doing anything. And that’s what I have. I just have much time in the seat of trying things that didn’t work that, that I’ve, that in given myself the ability to pivot and do that. I was on that path early on.

But there were some breakthroughs along the way that I had that really helped me. One clear obvious is the market went up pretty much from 2009, almost the entire way through I was doing this. the fortunate, I was fortunate in the sense of if you’re going to make costly mistakes and, and they’re going to be expensive, it’s really nice to do them.

When you have a tailwind it, it makes it a lot easier than doing those. When you add a headwind. If someone tried to replicate even remotely close to what we, what we’ve built today and they started right now, they’d be bankrupt in less than 12 months. There’s no possible way that it can be created again that way.

I rode arguably one of the. Biggest appreciation, real estate climbs in history while this was happening. Values were going up. Values were going up, I start at the absolute bottom, not by design, by accident, And I think there’s some return on luck that happens too in this. But the marketing piece of this and the pr piece of this is actually the most critical components of the whole thing.

And this is the part that very few companies can figure out, this is the part where everyone gets stuck. And it’s how Google has made so much money. People go buy Google ads and people go buy Facebook ads, and they go to all these places and they just buy ads, and they let another corporation be their marketing department.

they’ve outsourced their marketing, abilities. If they have them, they’re I don’t know. Gimme some leads. And they get this huge dopamine rush of oh, I bought another lead. I got another lead. I got another lead. But what happens is, is you don’t actually have independence,

You’re dependent on another brand. And guess what happens when you come dependent on another brand? Prices keep going up. And watch, look at what GPT’s done. The Google search. That’s it. That’s it. it’s wild fast. And they changed the, they, that’s such a fascinating lesson too,

when you look at Google, for example, I think the, in the last year, it’s really come out of how much Google had paid Apple to be the preferred search browser. On devices.

on devices. it’s billions and billions of dollars. What’s fascinating is GPT. Beat them without doing that.

In no time. In no time without. This is the lesson. They did not go spend the money with Apple to be the preferred search. What they did is they created a better experience. And they beat them without spending the money. Which is fascinating that a company the size of Google got caught. That got truly caught.

That off guard is fascinating. And now they’re playing catch up and spinning out of control and who knows where it all lands in the end. Google’s got a lot of smart people and I’m sure they’ll find a way to get back some of it. But patterns are changing. I know from my own experience, we have a, one of the most visited websites, there are a lot more AI visitors.

We look at the analytics every day that are coming to our website that are not coming from Google anymore.

Charles: Really?

Kris: Yes. It And it’s growing quickly.

Charles: I don’t even use Google to search stuff. I use GPT ’cause I know it’s going to gimme a better answer.

Kris: So many people are saying that I’m

Charles: not going to be chalked up with ads and crap.

it’s

Kris: just a cluttered experience, it, that’s the problem with Google. It’s there’s more information probably on Google than there is most other places, but it’s the times that you’d have to spend to get there, which is what I shared earlier about the guaranteed cash offer, which is.

We are in a society where we want to click a button and something to happen.

Charles: Yeah.

Kris: I don’t want to click 17 pages on Google to figure something out. I want to click one button, give me the answer that I can move on. And our attention spans and you look at anything that’s going on in the world are decreasing to the point where we almost can’t pay attention to anything.

Charles: Yeah.

Kris: And we want things so fast and we want convenience and we’re willing to pay $50 for a cheeseburger from DoorDash or pay, way more to Instacart to do something in exchange for convenience and the savings of time. It’s changing. the world is totally different time. It’s, you get rid of it and the more experience that we have in, in doing something, the more we value not having to go waste the time and the energy and the headaches.

[00:54:20] How Many Billboards Does Kris Have?

Charles: Okay. I would like to ask you, and you get asked all the time. How many billboards does Kris Lindahl have up?

Kris: I’ve lost track a long time ago. Give me a guess. we’ve got to be close to four figures. Like thousand plus range. over 10,000. A thousand. Over a thousand. Yeah. We got to be, we got to be approaching a crazy number.

People ask me now and I’m this I want to say this is a bad experiment that went wrong ’cause I no longer have any idea what’s going on. Yeah. it’s, there’s so many of them and they’re everywhere.

Charles: So who chooses what billboards and when and how much.

Kris: So our marketing director, does most of that at this point.

we’ve built the plan and she follows it. and we have a crazy sophisticated technology system that we built with heavy attribution and all kinds of analytical tools that we’ve built in house to understand traffic patterns and flows and consumer behavior. And, that’s our secret sauce.

[00:55:28] Flipping the Commission Model

Charles: Okay. So you, you were explaining something to me. Quite a while back now that I thought was fascinating. It was totally tied to why the marketing engine, the billboards, why the whole engine is so big and powerful. And it had to do with how you flip the commission structure on its head to help the average person be great at real estate without having to do the hunting.

Help me under, explain that. ’cause you flipped the entire model. Yes. Upside down. Yeah.

Kris: It, it, our model’s way harder to execute. First and foremost, this is not easy. Still not easy, When you are taking full control of a real estate transaction, the consumer experience, it’s, it’s hard,

We have every depart. We have so many departments that are all dialed in and part of this and the, the key component of what you’re touching on there. Is de-risking the, de-risking the entire process for agents.

Period. So new agents or experienced agents that come in, they don’t have any risk because we get the we get the By design, yes.

By design. When people call into our brand, we have a team that will set the appointment and we will tell the agent where and when to go. And that’s,

Charles: you’re taking the hard part out of it.

Kris: Finding customers, especially in this environment, is so hard and so expensive, and most people in the world don’t want to take that level of risk.

there are times where leads are 5, 6, 7, $8,000 depending on what platform leads are. The cost of leads are going up because there are less transactions.

When there are less transactions, that’s when the costs get, the pressure on cost happen A new agent can come into our model, we have the Real Estate Scholarship program, for example,

Where we pay for them to get their license. They can come in with zero experience as long as they have some sort of sales background. And within the, and within 30 days, they can be up to speed, trained and in appointments with consumers without having to take any risk.

Charles: So how long would it normally take if I was all right, I’m going to go into real estate, and how would that normally go

Kris: if you went to a traditional brokerage?

Right now the stats are somewhere between 80 to 90% of new agents are out of the industry. In the first 12 months. Gone gone. Gone. Not no longer in it. Massive failure. Massive failure, because. Getting the customers so hard, And if they don’t have any money, then it goes to the secondary options, which are really horrible, which is cold calling and door knocking your friends and family and bothering them.

Hey, do you anyone know anyone that’s looking to buy and sell? I just got my license five minutes ago, but I think I’ll be able to help you real good in one of the toughest markets ever.

Charles: that happened to me. That happened to me. ’cause my sister Had jumped into real estate and it was all of a sudden it was assumed that everybody would just, including me, would just start working with her.

And I was man, I’ve got all these other relationships with people that have been doing this way long time.

Kris: anything you do in life, you, you can make it look easy, right? And so one of the challenges of a model like ours is when someone comes in and they have their calendars full in five minutes, it looks easy.

It looks so simplified, wow, I just got my license for free through the scholarship program. I came in and now I have 40 appointments in my calendar in the next 30 days. easy.

And so sometimes people that come into organization take that for granted and they think oh, I’ll just go out on my own and I’ll just fill my calendar with 40 appointments.

They have no idea that it took us 20 years of trying to figure this out to do that. That made the diff all the difference in the world. But really the most simplified way to explain this to, to anyone that that is listening. Is, it’s basically like an all-inclusive resort. When you travel, everything’s handled for you, your meals, your, your drinks, whatever you, whatever you want, it’s covered for you.

It’s, you know that it’s all done. We have an all-inclusive resort in real estate. Everything is taken care of for you. Everything you walk in the door from the moment you get there, you don’t have to worry about anything. Nothing. It is also, you just go to appointments, that’s it. You’ll get the training from us, you’ll get the mentorship from us.

We’ll help you grow as long as you’re open-minded to it. And then you’ll level up into a very sophisticated experience, real estate agent by going through that scholarship program and getting that mentorship.

Charles: And so you’ve probably seen people come in that had no background and they’ve become superstars.

Kris: So many, it’s the most amazing success stories to watch of someone that, that, they, maybe they were at a place where they didn’t know what they wanted to do next, but they had this drive, but they were unsure how to get there. And then they step into a scholarship program that because that message connected with them.

And then six months later, all their student loans are paid off, all their debt’s paid off, and they’re debt free so quickly. changed their life. Yes. It’s fun to watch.

Charles: So you were a real estate agent who now is changing the lives. Of real estate agents,

Kris: which is the most crazy part of the story, which is take back to eighth grade of the coach that impacted my life and now I’m doing the same work.

Yeah. Just in a different way at scale. it’s crazy at scale.

[01:00:33] Dealing with Criticism

Charles: Yes. Okay. when criticism is really high of you, ’cause you’ve had criticism, it’s part of being in the public light. Yes. How do you deal with that?

Kris: I love it. I love it. I live for it. I live for it I actually do.

Charles: what do you do when you get, when you get heavy criticism, what do you, it doesn’t, first of all, it doesn’t phase you.

Kris: No, no. It actually energizes me it does. You’re well, I’m entertained. Yes. But what? But. But when it first started, it was a little tough, right? It was a little tough. ’cause you go from the super likable person, lots of friends, lots of great things going on, to you’ve got a certain percentage of people that are he must be doing something wrong.

He is going to go out of business. He’s a jerk. He’s this, he’s that. I heard he said this, I heard he did this. I saw him here, there, whatever. There’s every story you’ve ever heard of. the transitional point for me was working through a lot of personal development. ’cause I’ve invested a lot of time in leadership and personal development, trying to be the best that I can be. Mm-hmm. it all changed is when I realized Hey, everyone’s opinions of you are their business and say more about them than they do about you. And when I made a fundamental shift where when I hear these things gosh, I wonder what went wrong in their life.

Mm-hmm. I wonder what’s going on in their world right now? They are having a conversation about Kris Lindahl, who they’ve never met in person, that they heard from 17 other people, through the telephone game of all of this, that they need to post online or go talk at a restaurant, or go have a conversation at whatever office they’re at, that they feel the need to talk about someone else and put someone else down that there’s something going on in their life, which is really what they should be.

they should really be looking in the mirror addressing that more than worrying about what Kris is doing. once I made that shift, it changed because then I had a different level of sympathy and empathy for people that may have had things to say about me. And what’s interesting about this entire thing?

Is that when you put yourself out there, you’re going to get criticism no matter what. But no one ever says it to my face. Never. I’ve never, ever, ever, course, why would they, I’ve never had someone come up to me and say anything negatively or poorly to my face. It’s all been very complimentary. wow. It’s unbelievable the brand that you and your team has built, it’s all very high level complimentary stuff.

Or, Hey, can we take a photo? Can we do this? Can we do that? Hey, will you send a video to my friend? all that stuff is, it’s all amazing. all the noise makers. Are all sort of behind a keyboard. Mostly it’s trolls on the internet. That’s

1. And now I think we’re into a world where some of them might be ai.

Yeah. Maybe. I don’t take, I don’t, I worry for the day that that goes away because I think that’s when we are no longer relevant and making an impact. I encourage that chatter and actually some of that friction’s good.

I actually love when people in certain areas say things about us. ’cause it actually opens up curiosity for others to go Hey, if this many people are talking about them, maybe this is something I should go explore.

[01:03:41] The Mattress Mac Billboard Battle

Charles: Well, and it reminds me of, there, you, you have a really great story. I’d love you to tell about the.

It was, it was you and this guy with the billboards and you were, it was about sports and I can’t remember the team or where, but you guys had a rivalry and it lit the internet on fire.

Kris: Yes, yes, yes. Tell me that story. Yeah, it was Mattress Mac, who is, he owns Gallery Furniture down in Houston, Texas.

He’s done a lot of amazing things from what I’ve read and seen down in the Texas area. And he’s really tied into Houston. Astros baseball has been forever. And the twins were playing, the twins had just, had just won a series and they were playing the Houston Astros. I came up with a crazy idea at the twins game that, Hey, I’m just going to put out a bunch of billboards and call out Mattress Mac and the Houston Astros.

So you bought them in Houston? Loaded them, every one of them. I called the billboard company. I said, I want every single billboard that’s available in all of Houston. I bought them all. I bought all of them and I put up the message, and I wasn’t sure what was going to happen. But some of the best things we’ve ever done are Hey, let’s just take step one and we’ll react to whatever step two is.

And he did. It was great. He ended up buying billboards in Minnesota then. Right. And we did this friendly banter back and forth and it was so good. The problem was the twins were not playing very well, and I had a weak hand. would give us the upper hand on the marketing. Yeah.

But the performance from our team was not great. So I was really starting to spin out of control. I was running out of gas quick. ’cause what was I going to say?

Charles: You didn’t have anything to back you,

Kris: here’s what the last billboard that went up before we ended up ultimately losing the series.

Was an unofficial scoreboard of, not the series, but the mattress, Mac, Kris Lindahl ban billboard banter back and forth. And I gave him a half a point on one of them ’cause it was kind of weak in my eyes. And I, I believe that I won the series and that was the last board that went up.

Charles: you got into a billboard, fight with mattress Mac.

Kris: I got into a billboard, fight with mattress Mac. And I’ve got a, I’ve got a photo, that I’ve never posted online. I should post it online. And it’s, it’s the first game down in Houston. The game first games were down there. It’s mattress Mac holding, his, phone up with the news article of my billboard.

And he is just laughing and he’s just laughing. Have you ever met him? No. Never met him. No. The last game, if we would’ve won the last game, I would’ve flew out there for the, the final game. And the tough part is the strategy I had for game seven. Might have blown up. Houston, it was so big because it was not even remotely close to just buying some billboards.

I’m talking the craziest strategy ever. It was all ready to go. Everything was dialed in and our team couldn’t perform. And it, it was all over over. Sowe let you down. It was, it was, it was over. It, it, it, it just that it was done. And that’s how, great PR and news. You find out really quick that you’re a few hours away from being old news.

And at that point it was done. Like it went from the ultimate hive of excitement. we’re having the time of our life to, it’s over. No one cares.

Charles: it was fun when it was happening. Oh,

Kris: it was, it was wild. It pushed me beyond. Anything that I thought was possible because it was a, I was, huge.

He has a huge brand, I believe, a huge marketing company, and there’s, and, and we just have a few of us. And we were going against our David and Goliath. We were and if I look at the last scoreboard, I truly believe we won. I have to stick to that. I’m Hey, we didn’t win the series, but I feel we won the billboard series.

Oh, you did?

Charles: I thought you did.

[01:07:24] Legacy and What Matters Most

Charles: I would to just ask you, when you look back, when you’re an old man and you’re fishing and you’re, first of all, I know you’re never going to stop, but, but, but someday. When you think about what do you want to be remembered for? What is that? What do you want to be known for?

It’s a great question. I think legacy is obviously on, should be on a lot of people’s minds about what do they want their life to look like? And I always think about if you had a funeral and you were still alive, What would the people say that walk up to the front of the room about you?

Kris: And it’s a question I, I ask people all the time, Hey, what would people say about you? if you were no longer here? And it’s what drives me each and every day. It’s you hear all the time people say Hey, they don’t, they, they remember how you made them feel,

And that is a big piece for me of to positively impact everyone and everything I come in contact with and leave it better than I found it. And I think that’s. Super important for me. And the measurement for me isn’t the number of houses or the number of businesses or brands or any of that stuff.

It’s truly what people say about how I made them feel.

And the, the more people that that, that someday are standing in front of a room at my funeral and are sharing this, I remember this story about Kris and I remember that, and I remember how he stepped up here. That to me is the ultimate measurement of success.

And of course, it starts with your family and friends, Right. And the people that are closest to you. I, I can measure someone’s success, based on my conversation that I have with their friends and family. Yeah. you can tell me all the things you want on the internet about how you’re the greatest person in the world.

Give me 10 minutes of the people that are closest to you, and I’ll tell you exactly what’s going on in your life.

Charles: That’s so good. You know, it reminds me of during CO when we were going through a lot of dark times and there was Kris calling me on the phone every day. you didn’t miss a day.

You checked him on me every day and. It got me through it. you literally talked me through every idea I had. You talked me through every move we made, and it was dude, I don’t know if I’d have gotten through COVID had I not had your help.

Kris: Yeah, I appreciate that. Those were fun times. we had some great conversations.

Charles: what’s a tear in my eye, dude?

Yeah, it was amazing. the thing that, that’s so beautiful about friendships, that we have is I was also learning too, we get to learn together. Yeah. Which is the cool thing, I think the events business was crushed. Real estate was for a moment there too.

Kris: Right. I mean, we didn’t even know it in the early parts of that. are we essential or non-essential? Can we show houses or not?

Kris: there was a point where houses were shut down from viewing, And it was wow, what?

What’s this going to look like? And so having great friends that in your corners, it is critical, we get to learn from each other, which is always fun. Yeah.

Charles: You can downplay it, but it literally saved me.

Kris: Yeah. That’s great. Yeah.

Charles: This is awesome. This has been really fun. Obviously this is our very first episode.

Episode and I had to have you on. Yes. Because I’m geez, if anybody’s going to make it kind of easy for me, it’ll be you, which you did. So thank you for being here. Yes, thank you. Yeah. Come back again.

Kris: Yeah, that’s great.

Charles: Thanks.

[01:10:35] Closing Thoughts

Charles: Hey, thanks for watching Cleared for Takeoff. If you enjoy this as much as I do, make sure you hit that subscribe button, maybe share it with somebody, drop a comment. We’d love to know what your thoughts are on each episode, and we’ll see you next week on another episode of Cleared for Takeoff.