Kyle Porter is the founder of Normal Sport, a news media company that offers a blend of golf coverage, fresh perspectives, and heartfelt storytelling to over 15,000 newsletter subscribers. In this episode of In Our Expert Opinion Real Estate Podcast, Kyle joins Tyler Davis and David Hill for a slightly different conversation that explores entrepreneurship, branding, and calculated risk-taking.
While their discussion is not heavily focused on real estate, it still delivers meaningful takeaways on dedication, resilience, and strategic decision-making that can apply to all aspects of business. Mixed in with some fun conversation on the upcoming Masters Tournament, the episode offers valuable insights into building a business, identifying market opportunities, and leveraging storytelling to engage an audience.
Below is an excerpt from the interview. Listen above for the full podcast.
Kyler Porter, Founder of Normal Sport
How did you start your first venture? The thing that I think back on is whenever I started [Pistols Firing]–and I'm proud of this now, but it was hard at the time–I wrote a hundred blog posts before I launched.
The reason I did that is because I wanted to build up the rhythm of–and this is what I tell people now–you just got to do it every day. Whether it's writing or land or selling cars, if you don't love the process of doing it every single day, then there's no amount of money that you can make later on that will make that better. The day-to-day is still going to be incredibly hard if you don't love it.
I feel very grateful that my career has kind of revolved around something that I love. The amount of money that I've made from it has ebbed and flowed, but my delight in doing it hasn't really changed since day one.
How have you utilized humor in your writing? If you try to be super serious all the time, you're going to lose people. It's too much and it comes across as not that genuine because nobody is that serious all the time and nobody is that deep all the time; we're humans.
I think people miss out sometimes on writing–whether it's about golf or other sports or anything–where they write in a different way than they communicate day-to-day. That's always struck me as kind of odd.
Kyler Porter joins Tyler Davis, President of Saunders Real Estate, and David Hill, Regional Managing Director of Saunders Real Estate in Arkansas, on the In Our Expert Opinion Podcast to discuss his experience in networking and starting a business, as well as the upcoming Masters Tournament.
The importance of a healthy work-life balance. The part that I've struggled with is being at dinner and my kids asking me a question while I’m thinking about like how we can get five more paid members tomorrow. And you're like, “that can wait until tomorrow,” but in my head, it's just always there. It is hard to shut it off.
Intentional questions. I think everybody is interesting. Everybody has an interesting story or part of their life that we don't always know about.
Question-asking is an act of humility because you're basically saying, “I'm going to withhold talking about myself so that you can talk about yourself.” For most of us–I think the majority of the time–we love to talk about ourselves. We love to impress people. We love for other people to think highly of us. So, as I started to embrace this idea of humility as I got older, I think question-asking became the manifestation of that.
I like to draw out of people what's going on in their hearts and not just what's going on in their heads. Sometimes that's hard to do, but you do have to ask some interesting questions. Part of it is just an annoyance with the idea of “small talk”. We have such a short time on Earth, why are we spending it on small talk?