The Kulka Group

A few years ago, I, like so many of us, was so intrigued (and I still am) by some of the personalities that have emerged to make a name for themselves (and a fortune) on social media. I’m not talking about the Kardashians, or Jake Paul. It was the businesspeople, the Gary Vaynerchuck’s and Grant Cardone’s of the world that fascinated me the most.

I am not intrigued because I want to be a “social media star” or “influencer.” It is because of the impact that they make on people’s lives, and the economic impact they make on their own lives.

This is not a debate of whether or not the material they distribute is valuable or whether you follow the people I mentioned or not. This is a statement of the impact that they have had, the fact that I can mention them in this article and (most of us) know exactly who they are and what they represent. The type of “influence” they have comes with a massive amount of attention and countless rewards come along with that attention. I know they work hard, and they struggle to get what they have, but they have built something incredible with the content they create and share with the world.

Let’s face it, I don’t have half the charisma of either one of these guys mentioned and being an online “personality” just isn’t in the cards for me. However, like many of us, I knew that if done correctly, this type of exposure could have a massive amount power for my business, my network, and the people closest to me. And, when the topic was discussed amongst the team at Kulka, we all agreed that we need to get on board with the “content” trend and start harnessing the power of social media. But How? What is the “right way” to get in front of the right people without being in front of a camera all day?

After months of hard work, brainstorming and planning we conceptualized a platform that would not only give ourselves and our brand a voice, but we would virtualize our business network and give our friends, acquaintances, business partners, and customers a place to voice their opinions, connect with each other and blossom new relationships on a local level. We thought that we cannot only give ourselves a platform but also, the people around us a platform to have a massive local influence on the very people that we each do business with.

I’m not going to lie, at first, we were excited about the grand idea. Then we were concerned, we were uncertain of our capabilities/desire to be a “media” platform, but we knew that it could be special. The excitement about the idea that we were a construction company that was going to leverage technology in an innovative way to help our community of businesspeople voice their opinions and get exposure for their brands was exhilarating. But it also seemed crazy and scary. I mean, we are a 46-year-old construction company! What did we know about launching a “media” platform?

But we threw the fear out the window, rolled up our sleeves and barreled through. We didn’t just stride through, we barreled through. We invested heavily in this idea that a commercial builder didn’t have to be defined by the old normality and that we can be both builders and innovators. We built a state of the art video studio (and I mean STATE OF THE ART! -check out the pics), we called on friends and colleagues to contribute articles and started producing videos for the platform, we worked with web developers and designers to help us create an experience that we felt would be beneficial to all users and we went all-in on the fact that this is the future that we live in and valuable content would ultimately help us even if we didn’t have the exact plan of where this “media” platform would take us.

Through the process, we built a platform to tell stories and share videos that will help share people’s day to day business journeys with an audience of people they can actually do business with. We wanted it to be entertaining and informative. We made sure that we had high-quality content that would not disappoint, and we worked our tails off to make sure that we chose the right contributors that would be dedicated to helping the people that read their articles.

We stayed late and we were in early. While producing our shows, we had fun, but we were exhausted. We were stressed and we missed deadlines. But in the end, it all came together, and we were able to launch something that we are insanely proud of. And we did it all while still running a construction company!

We are still not certain where Kulka Interactive will be in 5 months, 5 years, or 5 decades and we don’t know what the future holds for this portion of our business. But what we do know is that we are going to help a lot of people and we are going to connect with old friends and new friends in a way that we never have before. We are going to provide business owners and professionals a place of comfort, a place to know that the struggles and/or successes that they are having are the same struggles and/or successes had by other like-minded professionals. The platform will be a place to share stories, get information, learn, meet people and grow as individuals and as a community.

The Kulka Interactive team has worked tirelessly to make this possible and we sincerely hope that you find as much value in this effort as we do.

Lastly, I’d like to take a quick minute to acknowledge all of the hard work and dedication from everyone who was a part of putting this together!! There were lots of you and it is appreciated. But a special thanks to the man himself, Devin Kulka, who was crazy enough to believe in all this, a huge thank you to Marchella Verdi who made this whole thing possible with an immense amount of hard work, dedication, and creativity (without her it would still just be an idea), thank you to Nick Prainito from Gold Hive Media, our production partner, who spent countless hours and nights getting our videos and shows ready for launch and thank you to all of the contributors who were outlandish enough to trust that we were going to build something special and believe in us enough to spend their valuable time preparing with us and writing great articles for everyone to enjoy.

Lastly, thank you to each one of you who took the time to visit the site and read this article. I hope that you all find the value out of the content we will be sharing here and we hope that you check back in regularly to support our local community and the amazing contributors we have here on Kulka Interactive.