Kurt moved to Houston cold, no network, and hit 21 clients in his first year
He was teaching clients to find their purpose while never having named his own
After some clarity breaks it came clear: he exists to make a positive, meaningful, lasting difference in the people he meets
A Costco parking lot moment showed him that purpose lives everywhere, not just the session room
Eleven years on it still drives him, because a purpose that points outward makes you do the hard things
When I moved to Houston, I knew one person in the whole city: my daughter. No network, no referrals, none of the warm introductions that make the first year of a practice survivable. I came in cold.
So I made myself a rule. I would not sit down in my office until I had twenty clients. I pushed my chair away from the desk and I stood. I stood through the calls and the prep and the quiet stretches of the day nobody warns you about, the ones where it's just you, the telephone, and whatever's on your agenda. Twelve months later I went back and counted. Twenty-one clients in a year.
I don't tell you that because the hustle was admirable, but because of what I managed not to notice while I was doing it.
Teaching a thing I hadn't done
By then I was taking clients through VB1 and VB2, teaching them to find their purpose, cause, or passion as part of their core focus. I was doing it by the book, and it was working. People were having real epiphanies in the room, the kind where you watch something settle behind their eyes.
And I would drive home from a day like that and it would sit on me. I was asking these teams to name the thing that drives them, and I had never named my own. I could quote the tool. I could run the exercise. I had never once run it on myself.
That is easier to do than it sounds. You get good at the work, the calendar fills, and you can go years being useful to everyone else's clarity while dodging your own.
What came clear
It took a couple of clarity breaks and some writing to get there. A little thinking, a little sitting with it. And then it came, clean, no fog around it: I exist to make a positive, meaningful, and lasting difference in the lives of the people I meet every day.
Not why I do business. Why I exist. I wrote it down and looked at it and thought, that's it, that's the whole thing.
People ask me whether that first version felt like a house of cards, whether it wobbled before it held. It didn't. I knew exactly what it was the moment it landed. And part of why I trusted it was that it wasn't confined to a session room. I could live it at home with my wife and my kids and my grandkids. I could live it at church. I could live it in a Costco parking lot.
The Costco parking lot
I remember one day I hadn't done much good yet. Hot Texas afternoon. There's a young couple loading two carts of stuff into the back of an SUV, two little kids sitting in the cart, and they don't see me coming.
I stopped behind the dad. Tapped him on the shoulder and told him, deadpan, that I was going to call the cops. He turned around, half alarmed, and asked what on earth for. I told him it was because those two kids were too cute to be legal. He laughed. I walked away. I have no idea how lasting it was. It was positive, and in that moment it was probably meaningful, and that was the point.
Because here is the question that reframed my whole practice: how often do you actually get to do that at work? For most people, almost never. I get to do it nearly every day, as an EOS® Implementer, in the room I'm sitting in right now. I half-jokingly call this room a holy room. Sometimes I come in when no client is here just to be in it, because good things have happened in it and you can feel that.
Why it still drives me
Eleven years on, I still feel exactly the way I did the day I wrote it down. And I've come to believe the passion has to be strong enough to drive you to do hard things, because none of this is easy. The common denominator of success is that successful people make a habit of doing things that unsuccessful people don't like to do. The part people miss is that the successful ones usually don't like doing them either. They do them anyway, because they want the thing on the other side more than they want the comfort.
That only holds if your reason points outward. If it's not about something outside of you, it's likely to fade the moment the challenges get big. Mine points outward, at whoever is in front of me, so on the days I'd rather not have the uncomfortable conversation, it makes me have it.
I spent a year teaching people to find their why with my own still unnamed. I don't recommend the order. But I'd tell any Implementer this: the tool works on you too. Go run it on yourself before you run it on one more client.
