Gurmeet Judge
Encompass solutions founder and CEO Gurmeet Judge interview successful business leaders as he dives deeps into the world of business to help people like you become successful business leaders!
Gurmeet Judge
The AI Trap: What Most Leaders Get Wrong About the Future
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Strategy sets direction, positioning differentiates your brand, and strong leadership powers execution—together, they accelerate growth, revenue, and lasting competitive advantage.
In this episode, I had a discussion with Kurt Uhlir, known as “The King of Scaling Companies,” is a globally recognized CMO, GTM architect, and growth operator. He has driven over 60 acquisitions and exits, supported an $880 million IPO, and scaled companies to $1.4 billion in revenue across six continents. With 20+ patents, he pioneered social media management, influencer marketing, and enterprise SEO. Currently CMO at ez Home Search, Kurt champions servant leadership and advises founders, CEOs, and the President of the United States.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kurtuhlir
Chapters
00:00 Intro
02:20 Introduction to Business Leadership and Growth Challenges
03:11 Developing Teams for Growth
06:01 Public vs. Private Company Challenges
08:58 Communication and Disconnect in Organizations
11:48 The Role of AI in Business
15:03 Servant Leadership and Its Impact
18:03 The Future of SaaS in an AI World
25:44 AI in Marketing Teams
32:11 Evaluating Company Scalability
41:55 The Journey to Servant Leadership
45:23 Identifying Blind Spots for Growth
Intro
SPEAKER_01I love AI. It's a force multiplier, but the problem is AI, it's dumb. It may act smart, but it doesn't truly think. It averages mathematically, it is taking an average of everything that's out there. If it's a $10 million, $25 million company or $100 million company, and the leadership team has been there for a while, they've reasoned, they've been successful for a reason. They know the company, they know their customer, they know the pain points, they know how to speak to it. The problem with so many people that write books, whether it's like an economic society or business book, is they think they're right on the answer. And so they wrote this book, the whole thing. And when you look at it, you're like, no, the data supported that you were correct on the on the problem that nobody else realized. And your solution is a hypothesis. It's not data backed, and that's just your and that's not backed. So we can learn from the first part of the book, but not maybe the last two-thirds. Two big changes that I that I see are things that hold up people from that inflection point where growth happens if they can work through it. The the the first is Hi there.
SPEAKER_00Welcome to Business Leadership Podcast. In this episode, I had a discussion with Kurt Olier. Kurt is known as King of Scaling Companies. He's a global recognized CMO, GTM architect, and a growth operator. He has driven over 60 acquisitions and exits, supported an 880 million IPO, and has scaled companies to 1.4 billion in revenue across six continents. With 20 plus patents, he pioneered social media management, influence marketing, and enterprise SEO. Currently CMO at Easy Home Search, Current Champions, Server Leadership, and Advise his founders, CEOs, and even President of the United States. You know, this was a very interesting discussion. If you're looking to grow and scale your company, this discussion is for you. Hope you find the value out of this discussion as much as I did. And don't forget to like, subscribe, and share with your friends. Until next time, thank you for your time. Please welcome Kurt O'Lear. Hi, guys. Welcome to Business Leadership Podcast. Today our guest is someone very special, Kurt Uhler. Kurt, you know, you've been helping businesses to scale, helping business leaders to uh get some perspective on a direction and you know to grow their company, scale their
Introduction to Business Leadership and Growth Challenges
SPEAKER_00businesses. So I'm looking forward to a discussion. Thank you so much for time. Welcome to the podcast.
SPEAKER_01Hey, I appreciate it. Thank you for having me.
SPEAKER_00So you you've been working with a lot of business leaders. Let me start from here, Kurt. What, you know, if you can pinpoint every business can have a different challenge, every leader is gonna have a different challenge, Kurt. Are you able to pinpoint some of the common challenges that you see when you deal with a lot of business leaders or companies?
SPEAKER_01The biggest change, what I just say there's two big changes that I that I see or things that hold up people from that inflection point where growth happens if they can work through it. The first is the the ability to like businesses will only grow uh to the level of their current team. And so you always think, I'm gonna get to a place and then I could hire that next person. And while that's always possible, it means like you're kind of running a lottery at some degree. And so, as opposed to, no, you should be growing and developing your current team.
Developing Teams for Growth
SPEAKER_01And that may mean coaching, it may mean coaching people to leave the company, maybe firing people, but it but it means treating and investing in your current people and learning and development, whether you're a five million dollar company or a five billion dollar company, is almost like faux pas. People don't want to talk about it now because they think it's not gonna pay off in time. And the second thing that holds people back is they sometimes they're really nice people, but what they don't realize they're they're an authoritative leader. And and because of that, I we can talk about how I approach it as opposed to being a servant leader, but they're hiring people and whether like I step into hundred million dollar companies and they think that they've given permission and authority to this other C-suite people to go run their things. But underlying is this bit that says if you don't do what I say in the time frame I'm saying and get the results I want, you're fired as is parts of your team. And that's different than providing true authority and letting those people drive business outcomes for you. And so many CEOs, especially if they've self-funded and grown really fast, they don't realize that they're really an authoritative leader that's holding the company back.
SPEAKER_00So let me dissect a little bit about developing of people. What are we developing for? You know, there's no shortage of information out there. There's there's there's no shortage of knowledge out there. So what are we doing developing people for? I know it's changed over the last, you know, if you look at five years ago, 10 years ago, there was always short of information. You know, how do we find the right information? These days, there's no shortage of information. There's you know, we we're talking about AI these days, right? So uh knowledge and information is on everybody's fingertips. So, what are we developing people? Uh is it a skill set? Is it a mindset? What are we developing people on? Because the information is there.
SPEAKER_01Some cases it's both of those, but it's to some degree we're drowning in information. And so, especially if it's a $10 million, $25 million company or $100 million company, and the the leadership team has been there for a while, they've reason there's a they've been successful for a reason. They know the company, they know their customers, they know the pain points, they know how to speak to it. And so it's not always just fully skill set, some cases it's like I like to use woodworking as an example. And so, like I I could have built cabinets all day long, but but if if you're 20 years more advanced than me in doing that, or you've come from a different way of doing it, you're going to do that different than I am. And the results is going to feel different. And so I think about customer success. I'm that weird chief marketing officer that's I'm gonna fight the revenue team for for customer success. Well, I was at this family office uh backed SaaS company, and we could have gone and hired a new head of customer success. We were not onboarding people well, we were dealing with support tickets horribly. We had no real training plan for customers when they were on board, but I had an individual contributor, no college education, but she had a heart to want to make the people succeed, and she knew everything about their pain points like intimately well, better than what we could have gone paid any outside company for. So we ended up elevating her because I sat alongside
Public vs. Private Company Challenges
SPEAKER_01of her and coached her till she one became the head of our customer success team. And later, after we sold that company to a public company, she I promoted her to being the business unit manager because she it's not that she didn't have the desire and she had a ton of skill set. We gave her a bunch of credentials. But what she needed to know was how does Kurt handle customer support? It's helped grow dozens of SaaS-based companies. Some people say clear out Zendest tickets. And I'm like, no, my approach is different. You leave a Zen desk ticket open for 17 years if you have to, so that the everybody knows that that person is still dealing with the bug report until it's fixed. But I don't, because I'm not telling you, I'm not hiring you to deal with the Zendes ticket. I'm hiring you to have helpful customers that get value of our product, which part of it knows, hey, we didn't fix something that's bothering you. And so the moment, but she needed to not just be told that she needed me to sit alongside of her and actually do Zendesk tickets every once in a while for two hours a day, once a week, for like six months before she goes, He's really serious. This is his approach to how he does this. And when it fine, she finally clicked, she went from good individual contributor to okay manager to an ex excellent manager. There's no level of outside training I could have given her to do things in my flavor.
SPEAKER_00Hmm. Very interesting. So great point. So not only business have an inflection point, I think people get stuck with some of their own inflection point as well. And you, you know, we need to help them to get over that obstacles and to excel and do what they want to do, you know, to achieve that success.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. Well, and part of that little development, her team uh is we went look at that customer success team to stay that example. There, what we did need skills. And so, could she have gone out and find the best certifications and the best training for them? She could have. Instead, I had her attempt to do it first, it didn't do well. Then I gave her options. I knew what we were gonna pick, but I coached her through picking the right option for the team. And then she led her team going through three levels of this customer success manager training. So, to your point, that was part of me saying your team is either gonna get replaced or we're going to have to upskill them. And by all means, like a $1,500 to $2,500 investment for each one of the levels was a great price for upskilling people that wanted to help and knew our product and customers really well.
SPEAKER_00Very interesting. Now, you work with a lot of public company and a private company. These challenges that, you know, whether it's a you know, people development or whether training, or we talk about some of these challenges are almost similar or that these are different challenges when you're trying to grow a public company compared to a work you know, private company?
SPEAKER_01They're they're the same in both, but they're gonna they usually come out in different ways. Same thing, I would say private equity is gonna feel a little bit more like a public company in most cases because they're gonna act about hey, what are your quarterly numbers? And so learning and development, there may be more money to put around for something like that, but true learning and development is gonna come from one-on-one coach time or one on a few, like discipling coach time for people. And so you have to make room for that within your organization.
Communication and Disconnect in Organizations
SPEAKER_01Public companies will usually give you that much more than like a $10 million or $25 million, you know, VC backed company is gonna do that. On the other side, that that authority perspective, I find the public companies, it is rare for me to find somebody in a corporate environment, even like a small public company, that is not does not truly act like an authoritative leader. And so, like at the end of the day, they may be super nice, but they're still at the end of the day, I hired you to do tasks. And I think it's the the people we that that are still coming up, they're $10 million, $25 million companies, they're usually more open to somebody like me or you stepping in and saying, you did not hire anybody on your company for a business to do a job. You hired them to get a business outcome. So let's change from leading from authority to helping them get the business outcomes that you want. Somebody at a $25 million SaaS company, if you explain that to them, they go, tell me more. They're locked in at that point to go, you're right. I care about a business outcome. I don't care about a task.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So they got objective to the shareholders, they're simply saying, How much money do I have to put in to get to the number I want to get to?
SPEAKER_01Right. But so at public companies, even though they have that quarterly, that quarterly numbers that they have to hit and expectations, they're so much more just kind of hit forwards, like they're they're more risk averse. They're they they they kind of hide a lot of things. You may still be able to make longer-term plans, but they're not going to talk about them publicly usually until it's a certain thing. So it's it's just a different environment. It's also from our perspective, and you probably see this as well. As a marketer, I find that I can speak to my marketing teams a lot of times about branding and marketing speak. And I might talk to learning development or coaches in other ways. But when I'm talking to the CEO, the CFO, the board, no, no, that's when my master's in financial engineering comes out. We need to talk like a CPA because that's what they're looking at. And so at each one of these different size companies, I think that's the biggest thing is how do you how do you become bilingual to be able to speak the business speak that your leadership needs to be able to make controlled risk investments alongside of you?
SPEAKER_00Whether you're dealing with the in you know, financial numbers, or you're talking about engineering, we're talking about the marketing, is there so much disconnect? Is that one of the challenges that there's so many disconnect in a teams environment? If you have a public company, there's so many teams, so many layers of management. How big is that problem that there's so many disconnect and and uh people not communicating the way it should be, and information is not translated from financials to you know technical and technical to business?
SPEAKER_01It it gets worse the larger your organization gets, whether or not it's a public company or a private company. I was mentored by a gentleman who's my CEO for a long time when I was just out of my master's degree, but he had been the CFO of Disney as a whole and the C and the president of Disney Theme Parks Globally. His name was Judson Green. So I was promoted because Judson came to me and 10 other people that were all entry-level
The Role of AI in Business
SPEAKER_01frontline people with a condition. And it was nobody knows we're having this meeting. And I will accelerate your career under two conditions. One, you never tell anybody about this relationship until I tell you you can. And so for me, that was until we left. And two, I will come to you for information about what's going on in your division and things that you see. And I will probably never ask you for opinion, but you will never give me opinion unless I ask for. I want ground truth. Because to your point about information flow, having come from Disney, and he stepped into a company where 90% of her revenue came from automotive, so very corporate as well. Was he knew that good information goes up, not bad information, not gaps, not questions, not risk. And he knew to be he was successful at Disney because he had done the same thing at Disney. And he that was his way of fixing the communication issue. Was he needed to get that information from me and others so that he could ask the best information of his direct leaders and their direct leaders. And after 12 months, there was only me and one other person that was still that had not opened their mouth. I knew what I knew what that looked like. I will never, I cannot pay for I had finished my master's, I cannot give $200,000 to get mentored by somebody like this. I will never say anything until you say I could. And he he was true to his word. He helped me out a lot. But that was one of his things. And the second side is still with that servant leadership approach, the thing that people don't realize when they're authoritative leaders is and there's this threat of jobs and firing, you're trying to get people to tasks, is a servant leader acknowledges there are things that I might be wrong on in my business right now, in what I have purview over that I think I'm right about, that you think you're right about. And a servant leader says, I I humbly realize that that exists. And so by letting that out there and telling the team that says, look, you will not like you might get in trouble for doing something you're not supposed to, but you will never get in trouble for coming to me and saying, I think that's a bad idea. Here's why. I mean, I go so far as like solicit for my team as I don't need data. I I want to know when somebody has a gut feel that something in their their purview or they may see in another division might be wrong, potentially. Like, I want to know what those feelings are beforehand. I'll sort through it later. I'll ask a call-up question. Servant leaders, they create an environment where people come from an information flow. And it is rare to find that at a company with 10,000 people because you're gonna have, to your point, some level of MBA andor management in there that's gonna be like, I can only let good information go up. Well, that just stops everything.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, but you absolutely right. I think that's a great point. People already know that they already have the feeling about something's not right, you know, whether it's a process, whether it's a systems, whether it's it's communication, they already have a better idea or they have some sort of gut feelings. Tapping into that, you know, how do you feel about it? You know, wrong or right, we can we can you know dissect the little one, but um understanding that there was there's some sort of uh the feelings they're hesitating about it, you know, to talking about it. I think if you can tap into that, there's a lot of potential to fix a lot of things.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. And and in the state of AI today, that is something I want your uh your other your listeners to to really hone in on because I I love AI, it's a force multiplier. But the problem is AI, it's dumb, it may act smart, but it doesn't truly think.
Servant Leadership and Its Impact
SPEAKER_01It's it averages mathematically, it is taking an average of everything that's out there. And so if it can help prompt you to think through these things, but like it's going to like it's great for simulating data, it's great for so many purposes. But but what I'm going to do is I do believe that as humans, we are fundamentally creative. I'm not a wet machine that is just forced based on my biology to make this decision, to talk to you now. I think that there's a reason that we have creativity as humans. And so, with that, I want to make sure my team is able to come to me. Come to me with data, come to me with your AI report that's gone through, you know, 17,000 pages of a CSD file. That's great. But also come to me with things where you're just like, I think, I think we're hemorrhaging customers and or we're gonna hemorrhage customers, and here's why. And like, you don't have to have all the data behind it. There might be something there, and there might not be, but but but you're going to have that intuition long before a lot of times the data will show. Now, data's great, sometimes data will show at first, but if you do not create an environment for your team to speak up and be humans, then you might as well just like fire them all and just let the robots tell you what what to think.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, you know, I was speaking to a kid or Ali. She's she's uh very good on AI as well. So, one of the points she made was very I thought was brilliant. To your point, what you just mentioned that that AI is very good on giving you end result. Hey, how do I do this? Here's a five steps. How do I do this? They give you end result, how to get to point A to point B. But on a human level, this process of understanding gut feeling, this this process of achieving something together, that that journey that we go through, there's just a joy in working together and figuring something out of ourselves, that you cannot replace with the AI. And I think that's that's where you know the gut feelings, whether it's a gut feeling or simply just uh you know, figuring out, hey, what do you think about it? You know, how do I think about it? How do I approach this? So the this journey of going through something and achieving some result, there's no way you can get that from AI. AI will tell you, okay, you're doing this way, do these two things, you can get there.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. And in some degree, what I like about AI right now is I think it is gonna force a revolution of systems thinking in people in broader knowledge. There's a book called Range by David Epstein that talks about how generalists, people that are deep knowledge in many areas, are far superior every time you look at research than the deep specialists. If I want brain surgery, I'm gonna have somebody who that's all that they do. But if I'm gonna hire a COO, no, I want the person, he or she has been in six industries, and they've helped 12 companies across six industries find success or find their way through that because they're going to outperform somebody who's only been in this industry, is what the research shows. And I think part of that is like AI, I'm I now have a folder. I'm screenshotting. You've done this, I'm sure your daughter's done this, where the AI says, Oh, sorry, I didn't really look at that file when I gave that to you. Oh, sorry, I'm lying to you. Oh, yeah, no, I didn't do any of that research, even though it just did that. And three times in a row, it might have lied to you. Because I think there's helpful one, I'm kind of cataloging, but I'm gonna have an article that's like, these are the examples that the rest of you think you can just trust it.
The Future of SaaS in an AI World
SPEAKER_01Like you need that somebody who has broad knowledge to go to, hmm, how does this work? I mean, in terms of AI, I I create an excessive amount of company. We have we own I'm working in a company that's a conglomerate of companies right now in the real estate and technology space. We just started a CRM. We create a massive amount of content with AI, but we have framework and framework behind there. Here's our comp customer personas, here's their pain points by each persona, here's how we're different. Like, and these documents are some of them are 12, some of them are 37 pages long, and they're broken up because if you also just put them in one document, the AI will get confused and you have to know when to call up things in different ways. Well, that's something a person can do, but you know what? I even with all the framework that I've done and coming through this in many different industries and growth periods like you have, it's still like never mention these competitors. And you read through an article and it's gone through something and it mentions a competitor, and maybe even mentions them more favorably than it does our company. And I'm like, this is why a human eye has to be on this sometimes. And so I I love it and it's wonderful. And I, you know, I've a small team now that out could outperform the 60 person team I had at a public company a couple companies ago. But wow, it can lie to you too.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. What do you think of that? You work with a lot of SaaS companies. What do you think of that? The SaaS, the you know, product and service it was sold for so many years. You think uh it still survives with that with the with the time of AI, or can I get dissolved into an AI and and uh you know every solution is gonna have an AI as a part of platform?
SPEAKER_01I think AI will be part of everything. I I what we're hearing in the market is it's the death of SaaS, and that like, why would I ever buy a CRM when I could just you know vibe code one, you know, with with clawed code or something like that? I think that's completely overrated. I think, but but I think when you look back, when you look back over the last like 15 years of SaaS, there's a lot of companies that were not actually a SaaS by themselves. It was a feature, it shouldn't have been a company, and that's why they usually get acquired at some point or they they they fail out. I think those are gone. But it's like right now, the amount of time it would take for me, like we just launched a new CRM for small businesses, and it's like, well, there's a reason for that. By all means, if you're a real estate agent, you're a roofer, you're a general contractor, you could go vibe code a CRM. Even like how much time is that gonna take for you to keep update, you know, as opposed to just hire ours, which is AI first and run with it. Because on the backside of it, like we're hearing things like 40 to 60 percent have major security flaws. Vibecoding, nobody's ever thought about uptime. What does that look like? And now, oh, you actually have users, and what about DevOps? It's like, no, it's not the death of SaaS, it's but it's gonna shift things and in a good way. I also like right now, every one of my engineers, we have no, like, even those that don't have somebody reporting to them, we tell them all, you are all now managers and leaders, like you, because you all have robots working for you, and I'm watching them in Slack saying the engineering team or my marketing team, and they'll bounce in between Kursher and this, and they'll go back like that's but they basically have robots that they're now managing. And I do find just like the servant leadership conversation before, when you approach working with them about here's the outcomes I want, it's AI is way more performant than trying to just give it tasks.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. So it's let's talk about servant leadership. You you know, it looks like you've been working with that uh for a long time. Did that change your perspective on anything that in terms of a company or service, the way they deliver? You know, what what what impacted it from what do you would what do you learn from service leadership? How do how does that change your perspective on a few things?
SPEAKER_01It completely changes it because one at it like no matter what everybody says they're focused on outcomes, but when you look at where they spend their time and how they reward people or how they critique people, there most leaders I are authoritative leaders. To me, it's it's very binary. It's one of the two. Everything else is a flavor underneath there. You're letting somebody go because they didn't do actions that you want. I'm letting somebody go because you didn't hit the business outcomes that I wanted. Like those are two very different approaches to things. For me though, the The the biggest thing then cut really comes down to is not just like, hey, how are you hiring and how are you approaching things? But it it who is why are we building this company? What are we doing? At the end of the day, like Salesforce is a massive company. But if you go inside, I spent a lot of time within Salesforce, almost sold them a public company, Oracle bought it instead. And so, but when you're inside Salesforce at the highest levels, they they actually care about serving and providing for their customers that are using your product. Would I ever use Salesforce? No, I hate Salesforce. I don't want to have to hire Salesforce and intershare. But the company, that's their thing, is they're wanting to serve. I look at other things and go, like, often, like, I'm in real estate or real estate technology. That's one of our industries that we serve. Well, a lot of times people will go, like, if you listen to Gary Keller, they built Keller Williams thinking that the most important person in the transaction who Keller Williams served was the real estate agent. I'm like, Are you absurd? Like, really? Because I'm the person as the homeowner that brings the check. My real estate agent has never come and bought my house for me. And so that as a so I think part of servant leadership is deciding who do we serve best. There's a book called Dare to Serve by a woman woman in Georgia here named Cheryl Backhelder. She was the change CEO for Popeye's Louisiana Kitchen, a franchise fast food chain. They realized that who they served when she took this company from going bankrupt to highly prof uh uh profitable. And then those leaders have done this at many companies since. She got a great track record. Was that there who they needed to serve was not me as somebody who would might walk in a restaurant. Who they needed to serve was their franchise owners because that's who was serving those people. And you take that servant leadership approach, it fundamentally changes everything in the customer because uh and the uh customer experience because you can only have one top priority, and so that's a big difference. Am I serving the person who's buying a chicken sandwich, or am I serving the person who owns the franchise that's building the, you know, making them that chicken uh sandwich?
SPEAKER_00So is that a business logic we're talking about, Kurt, or is it is that intelligence and a software that makes sure that you know we're serving the right person, or are we looking at more on a company's core values or mission or vision that that level, you know, the figuring out company strategically, or or simply just what's inside the software?
SPEAKER_01I think it's all of it. It's the it it does very much impact what you're building from a company perspective because when you have a here's who I'm serving and what they're trying to achieve as an outcome themselves, now you get out of feature creep within these SaaS products where they're just adding all these little things that people like are using 10% of the whole solution. You get out of that and you go, Well, no, yes, these people asked for that, but we we could we could fundamentally like 3x the value to our wide customer base if we don't do all these small things. That's a conversation that only takes place in a servant leadership culture, but it affects the features that you have. But it also impacts on the other side. We've all we've all either consulted into or we've worked full time at companies where you see on the you see their mission statement and core values on the website, and that's not how anything inside runs. The servant leadership side points out, and we've done this at companies where we say that stuff on the website now it's onboards, day one. That is to hold for you to hold me accountable as your boss. And when I don't act well, you get to call me out on what's on the website. Don't make up stuff, it's on the website, and and then you keep reiterating and come back and you bring up the bad examples where you've done that. That culture only happens in a servant leadership environment. But when you do that, that's how you get to the feature side. Because when I come out and point out, gosh, I believe my core value, one of my core values is healthy conflict and strong opinions held loosely. When you, as my product manager, come to me and say, Kurt, you have not
AI in Marketing Teams
SPEAKER_01been acting that way. And here's why. And I go back to our 50-person division and I point out how I failed you. What happens is where I've been telling everybody, and everybody else, all the other managers have been telling people, come to us with those gaps that you feel like could be out there, they start to believe it's true. Hmm.
SPEAKER_00What interesting. That that looks like that's not the same skill set that we'd acquired in the past to build the software development companies, right? So, you know, tech skill used to be very, very important, whether whether it's a developer, whether it's an architect, whether it's a programmer, these skills were core of any any SaaS-based company because this is what the skill to build. But what we're talking about is, you know, one, you know, it's not the same skills that's gonna take you there on a business side, right? So it's a different skill. Somebody got to have that you know, development background, but they they gotta understand the business side of things or the core value side of things. So it's not the same skill set, and another part of that is you can't outsource to offshore companies, simply say, listen, give me some development skill set, and I can just build that, right? So so how does how does a company handle that piece? One, you can't outsource, build the teams overseas because that's just a core tech skill. They're gonna give you developer programmers to do that. AI can replace some of that stuff. I don't know if if you can play a role in that, but other side of that is what you what are we talking about is is a business acumen skill set, right? So that's not it's usually not the same people because they have a different career path.
SPEAKER_01They may they do have a different career path. Although I would say now, like I tend to say, like, let's just say within marketing and go to market teams, because sometimes I'm leading sales teams with marketing, sometimes just marketing. I'm seeing teams tend to get structured in two ways. Either one, everybody on the team is highly technical compared to five or 10 years ago. They're able to build AI agents, they're not even they're not working just in claud cowork, like cloud chat, yes, it's cloud cowork, maybe, but claude code, like most of those, everybody on the team is probably doing it at some level. The other structure I'm seeing is where within the marketing team, they have people whose entire job is to only build AI agents, and the other people are much more the systems thinker and working through, and they're almost acting as product managers and content supervisors or strategists, speaking with the other side of the marketing team that's hiring it. In both of those cases, can you do that offshore? Maybe. I think it's harder a lot of times. Like I've worked, you know, with I've had teams in six continents. There's certain countries I I I've still learned a little bit more on, but it's like South Korea, India, throughout Europe, Eastern Europe, like they're all very different a lot of times culturally. I could step into a lot of those and and and work with some offshore teams. I find most Americans could not. And some I might struggle with a little bit more than others. This still's approach it from a servant leadership perspective. And it's even if when you're hiring outcomes people, it's how you're paying them and you're paying them for the outcomes. So it's like traditionally you go to tech talent off overseas and you're paying them on projects or you're paying them on hours. Well, no, I'm paying you based on outcomes. And so that I might still tie that to projects, but it's like you get what you reward. And so you just have to rethink from a business perspective how you're rewarding those people. But on the other side, people have to accept that contract as well.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And if you're paying by outcome, Kurt, that means you got to sort it out from a start to the finish in your head and and some sort of uh idea and some sort of plan. You gotta have a some sort of plan, what I'm looking for as an outcome to to you know get to your goals, right? And and and but going by hourly is very straightforward. Okay, I'm gonna just buy pipy, but hourly. So a lot of work needs to be done up on your cellfas or figuring out what strategy, what are you trying to get to, you know, but part of the outcome of the result of the business.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. I think at all of the companies for your audience, the key thing that they should be hiring for anybody that's not just straight out of school is that they need to be a systems thinker. Because and by that, like, well, I mean, the some of the best chief marketing officers will use me with me with that. Like, I'm a former software hacker. At 14, I got caught hacking 232 federal servers. I was a software architect. Some of the other best chief marketing officers they came out of software, they didn't want to keep doing it. They are former lawyers who are trained to think systematically. Sometimes I know microbiologist, that was like again, it was thinking of these very much system type thing and was like, I can't do this anymore. And now is an she's an incredible marketer. And so that's very different than what a traditional chief marketing officer looks like. That's also what I'm looking for for somebody that's not just doing email automation, that's what I'm looking for for now from somebody that does social media because they're going to be running AI agents. They might be working with offshore people. They have to think in terms of systems in discrete pieces, whether they're writing the AI agents or they're running a team of agents, or they're working with somebody offshore.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, but but development or a software architect, all these are technical or these are logical roles. You know, we they taught logic from the you know, from all the computer science, whatever the course they go through. It's is what they'd learn in school, it's just a logic, you know, two plus twos, put in a compiler, four gonna come back. So they are so trained on logic where marketing comes a little bit of creativity. You gotta understand emotions, you gotta understand uh personas, you gotta understand a little bit a lot more creative, a lot of artwork there. So, how do you combine those two skills? Like, is there a challenge to combine those, or is it just a natural people logical, they can pick up that skill set very easily?
SPEAKER_01Uh for me, the logic, like I happen to be very creative without a blank canvas, but I'll I if you give me five examples, I can then be creative from that. The blank canvas doesn't work for me. I find the systems thinker and marketing right now, whether AI or just thinking about automation over the last like five and 10 years, it's like used to be look at all the big marketing agencies out there. It was all creative, they're the unique idea for the Super Bowl ad. That's super easy bit at that point. Like, that's that's easy. Right now, I step into a SaaS company and we identify their pain points or what we think their pain points are. You're doing $100 million a year in business. I almost guarantee I will dial in your ideal customer profile way tighter than you ever thought it was. And six months later, when your sales team speaks, your customers will go, damn it, that's right. How did you know? As opposed to trying to sell to them. Well, how we get to that is we're going from a systems perspective, we're gonna put in 3,000 different ads into Facebook targeting those people, and we're gonna test what works well, and we're gonna take them to landing pages and we're gonna test AI, you can be some of this in different ways. But that's a systems approach that either one, I'm gonna take the creative asset that I'll pay once to the agency
Evaluating Company Scalability
SPEAKER_01for, or we'll come to it ourselves by either mining our transcripts or our sales transcripts, or by testing ad variants out there and quickly getting to things. I mean, I used to say I helped 60 companies come through this incubator at Georgia Tech. People are like, all right, we just got $25,000 for joining the incubator. What do we do? I was like, take five grand and put it towards Facebook ads or Google ads. And they're like, why? We don't know what we're selling. And I'm like, because we're only gonna use it for testing what the pain points are that somebody will click. Yeah, you don't have a product yet. But if like people aren't clicking on the ad, you have no idea what their actual verbiage is or pain. And they're like, We can use like Google Pay-Por Click for testing like pain point variants for building a company. Yes, what happened? They raised $50 million, they raised $50 million, they raised $50 million. So that's where the systems bit of it, like you get to the logic bit of it because at the end of the day, like, we're not doing jingles anymore. Although I'm I'm the weird marketer that's like, I will go and pay somebody to create a jingle for a SaaS company, but uh old style, give me 1950s, 1930s jingles, it's kind of funny, but but nobody does that, which is why it works too. But like you get to what works, and that's all that matters.
SPEAKER_00Hmm. What interesting. So when you take on a company, uh uh, you work with a lot of you know, but the the large larger corporations, when you take on a company, either small or large, what do some of the some of the uh I you know trades you look for, you know, some of the symptoms that that you see, what do you see that in a company? So you know there's a possibility you can scale them, you can get them where they need to go. Or some of that, some of the areas where you see, you know, something the company is doing, and you look at, oh well, this is gonna be challenged. We're not gonna get there where we're trying to get. What are you looking for in a company that gives you a little idea that hey, this is scalable?
SPEAKER_01Great question. Two things come to mind, and and these are one, I get one I will ask directly. So whether I will often get introduced into the board or I'll get introduced into the CEO. And I will ask them how much of their go-to-market budget is spent on two to 12 months, 12 to 36 months, and 36 months plus. And if either they don't know an answer, like they don't know within that, or they say they're only focused on the two to 12 months, I I I that tells me a huge bit about how they've run internally and how they're evaluating things. The second thing I can't ask them about, but then that's part of whether or not I can help you, is does the CEO have a humbleness of heart to hear where they might be wrong? Because like I have no problem stepping into a hundred million dollar company or a $25 million company that has they maybe all of their actual ad budget and and and marketing budget is spent on two to 12 months. I find often it's not. If I was to go in look at the budget, the CEO thinks that, but the CMO has actually been putting some of it to those two to two later time frames, but they just didn't feel safe enough or they didn't have the language to discuss the needs for that risk assessment to their CEO or to their board. So they were still spending 10%, 20% of the budget on that, they just weren't doing it. Well, that's a problem. And so what I need to know is from the CEO are you willing to hear that reality may look different than how you see it? Because if you have a $20 million company or you have a hundred million dollar SaaS company, you have done well, you've figured out a ton of stuff, you are right on a lot of things, you're probably a really good business person. Also, a ton of things that, like, you're there's a reason you're talking to me at that point. You either are trying to grow faster with less money, or you're needing like the ship's on fire. You're like, we gotta hemorrhage this, we got to cut the team, and I don't even know what to do next. Great, love stepping into that. What's your part in this? Like, that's what I want to hear.
SPEAKER_00Interesting. So there's a lot of inflection point, as you mentioned, whether it's 20 million, whether it's 50 million, we get stuck on the inflection point, and we need to get over that. A lot of people stay there for a long time, you know. You know, simply uh, you know, I think a lot of personality trait comes in, a lot of ego comes in. As you mentioned, you know, if somebody gone to 20 million, 50 million, they already figure out a lot of stuff. That the getting over the inflection is even more harder because because they figured it out, they know something worked in the past, letting that go and try new things is sometimes a risky state of what so what holds people back when when there's an inflection point and you trying to get them over the inflection better, you can see it, but somebody working in a business, they can't see it on an ongoing basis because they're so deep in it and they they got theirs working so hard, but they can't see over the inflection part, but you can from outside. What holds them back?
SPEAKER_01A lot of times it's that's all that they know. And to your point, they've been successful. So they're like, well, this works, but but more often than not, they they and their leadership team often are coming, have come from from that industry. They're in, they're all in real estate. You do marketing technology for real estate, you're doing whatever, you do accounting software. And so they have hired other people that have either risen within that company and they've been there for 15 years, or when they go look for that new head of sales, they look for the head of product, they they they look for people, and even at the next couple levels that have 10 years, 15 years in that industry. Well, there's a reason, kind of like with the large language models now, where things start to sound the same. And so I've been successful in 11 different industries that I've worked in full time, as opposed, you know, in addition to being kind of a management consultant at times and coaching like you have. And so that allows me to see things that have worked really well or two or three under other industries, and then ask questions about using the team's knowledge that says, why would this not work here? Hey, I've seen this work there and there, it might not work here. Walk me through it. In some cases, it is directly applicable, often it does need to be changed. And and and you it's not helpful a lot of times to come in and say, This is what has worked in the last two or three industries that I've helped coach somebody on. We're going to do this here. You get kind of pushback. So you want to ask that in terms of so how does it solicit the wisdom that this CEO, that this leadership team has, and say, Why would this not work here? Because that may bring them along into, well, we just haven't tried it or we haven't considered that. But they may often very likely that gut feeling that raises up the tightness across the chest, or my six-year-old comments about bubbles in his stomach. That's what he feels pressed. And like the CEO, the 50-year-old woman, and she's like, or she's like, I've got bubbles in my stomach. But but that that gut feeling, that's what I want to pull out of them because okay, it might not apply. Tell me what you're feeling. What's your no, that won't work? What's behind that? What led you to that conclusion? Have you considered that conversation? Is going to come very quickly about how would we adapt something that's worked in other industries that you all have not done, that we could try in a controlled risk fashion to find out if this it is this gonna work well? Great, let's put gasoline on the fire and and now we're gonna run.
SPEAKER_00I heard somewhere people say the pain is a couple layers down. When you dig a couple layers down, you find the pain. By the by the sound of it, it looks like opportunity is also a couple layers down, right? So you get you got to get to this like a peeling layers of onions by the time you get to the opportunity. I think that it's the same approach with the pain and the opportunity.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. I I was trained early on, you know, like 10, 12 years old, that said if you want to learn something, you read a book three or four times and they walk through different ways you read it at different times. The first time you're just trying to figure out what's the lay of this book, and then you read through as like, what are they trying to convey? So, like now, I'm kind of at this thing where I may not have to do it that many times, but like I believe whether it's a self-help book or a business book, it is it is like it's rare for somebody to identify the actual problem in a book, but let's assume that you actually figured it out that what and and you've even figured out what the different options are that you could consider. The problem, so many people that write books, whether it's like like an economic society or business book, is they think they're right on the answer. And so they wrote this book, the whole thing. And when you look at it, you're like, no, the data supported that you were correct on the on the problem that nobody else realized. And your solution is a hypothesis, it's not data backed, and that's just your property or and that's not backed. So we can learn from the first part of the book, but not maybe the last two-thirds. That's the same thing with me, even in business. That's why I need somebody like you to come in and say, Hey, why do you believe? What do you mean by that when you say you want to this is your go-to-market strategy? Okay, Kurt, what led you to that conclusion? Hey, Kurt, have you considered this? Those three questions are going to pull out of me things that one might change my opinion, but it's also going to help me explain to the rest of the people in the room in a way that I might not always do, even though I train people in this. I need somebody like you to come ask me those three questions.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. Yeah. When you get deeper, that's when you find all the real gems, right? And and definitely sort, you know, business owners as a whether a CEO, whether a president, they got so much on their on their on their plate. They got to focus on operations, they got to focus on finance. There's so many blind spots, just to say, you know, before we go getting down our layers, there's so many blind spots. That's why it needs that discussion, which you just mentioned, that figure out how many blind spots we have. You know, how do we go with some of that stuff and how do how do you get better at it? And I think it's working together and figuring things out. I think that's the process the process there, that's what delivers the end result in the longer run.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. And to your point before about like culture and coaching people, what what one of the things I don't have to see this from my CEO because I can help coach up with that. But what we need to find very quickly in why in those conversations is how are we going to work together? And so some of that is like how when I show up in certain ways, how does that trigger you? Or how do you need to hear information? When I ask people about how much of your investment is in different time frames, I have no problem if that later three plus year
The Journey to Servant Leadership
SPEAKER_01time frame is zero. What I care about is one, have you considered it? And two, if you have these three time frames, because I'm gonna push towards those three time frames, how do you, oh and I, with you being my CEO, how would I come to you so that we could actually have a conversation about that second or third timeframe that's not the short term in a way that doesn't have you because we're gonna track leading indicators on those because it's three years out, it's 24 months out. And so most CEOs aren't just gonna be able to have that all in one conversation. And so, like, I had one CEO, I physically had to wear a hat if I was gonna come talk about like a middle time frame, and I had a different hat if I was gonna like so in a meeting, like he could have the same, he could talk about all three in the same 45-minute session if I was in his office. But I physically had to put on a hat and be like, all right, now we're talking about 12 to 36 months. I think we actually might have been 12 to 24 months for the second time frame. And he needed that physical reminder about I'm only talking about there, I I don't care, I'm talking about risk and investment over that time frame, not revenues in six months. And I was like, and it was his idea, and I was like, seriously? And he was like, I don't know, let's try it. And it worked, and I was like, awesome. And so now I've gone back. Like sometimes husbands and wives in the same business, small business, they have to do that. Like, like, I'm not your husband in this conversation, I'm your business partner, or I'm your or or you're the CEO or president, and I'm the head of marketing. Like, okay, and they have like totally whatever works, right?
SPEAKER_00Whatever works, separation of us identity. So let's talk about your journey, yeah, Kurt. Uh, how do you get so good at that? How do you get committed into this? You know, if you talk about your uh background, how did you get to this point where you know working with a lot of business owners and trying to help them?
SPEAKER_01I have failed so many times, most people would crawl under the table and die. That's part of it. But but with that, I used to be the very authoritative leader. I was at a company, we took from 85 million year in revenue to 1.44 billion, where that that I was mentored by mentioned, the former president of Disney theme parks. And like we were in his retirement gig, that was a really good run. We took the company. Public, it was wonderful. So part of that was having examples of what was like I was a highly authoritative leader, and I sat around when I had these three major events, only one of which was business-wise, and I lost a hundred plus million dollar deal, not knowing that large deals like that. So if you don't win it this year, you're you pick it up the second or third year. But I thought I was blackballed. And I that was one of the things. And I'm looking around and I'm like, God, like I'm looking at how first of all, nobody in my team cared. But then I also was aware of the people that I thought might have cared that I'm like, what are they doing now? So I get up. That was when LinkedIn was getting started. And I start looking around. I'm like, wow, the best performers that I had in any country, they've they left. And uh I was a toxic, authoritative, I was a toxic leader, not just an authoritative leader. And not only had they been some of my top performers, they were way more successful when they went to other companies. And I went, could I have won this deal? Could what could we we've had a billion dollars in revenue? What could we have hit if he was here, she was here, if they were here? And so that started me to come back to going, like, okay, and so I I did it. I started interviewing some of them. Like, there's about 20 of them that still won't take my phone call today, even though I think I'm a nice guy now. I've apologized. I've sent gift baskets and family baskets to some of these people, and some people I've made restoration with, but some people are like, You were such a toxic boss, I never want to talk to you again. I have actually gotten that email. But so that was one of the big changes for me was
Identifying Blind Spots for Growth
SPEAKER_01how much money I left on the table, how much capital did we waste? Because people that would have pointed things out, and I I literally sat down in like six months and I wrote out the business case for servant leadership. And so I have refined this uh this day, and I've looked at it, I'm like, wow, the companies that now, as I come in and I teach my style of servant leadership, they spend less capital, they're much more capital efficient, they they're much more they're they're they're much better at identifying risk and not having like random things that happen that otherwise uh mess up the company. And they grow faster and they're more resilient when things like COVID happen. And so I'm like, well, I'm never going back. Like, like I thought I was micromanaging things before, and now I've realized, wow, I thought I knew what was going on in my teams, but no, I knew a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the decisions that we're making in impact on our customers. And now I still might only see one percent of those things, but I'm entrusting you to bring me the things I need to know.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. It's completely different way of looking at it. You know, definitely people, end of the day, you know, they deliver whatever you're looking for, right? So you know, as you say, you know, that this is where you need to spend time. What are you trusting, uh, Kurt? People who are listening to watching, uh, why you know, watching us on a you know on a YouTube or listening on a podcast, if they're in a business, what what can they do? You know, if they want to scale their companies, you know, that there's a lot of blind spot, where can they start? Is there something they can start their own, you know, try to figure, you know, get to at least point or highlight some of the challenges they're up against, and then they find uh whoever can take them over those those challenges, right? So as is there something they can do to start highly, you know, figuring out, hey, this is my obstacles, and I need to find help.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think that the the first thing is just like looking for do you have an inflection point that you're aware of? Do you have a do you have do you can you articulate one or two things in your company where like I I've been struggling with this for more than like 12 to 18 months? If so, like you definitely need to find some outside help at that point. Like it's not a sales issue, it's not a marketing issue, it's not a product issue. If you've been hitting it up for 18 months, there's something else going on, and you're not seeing it. So you, me, somebody on the outside is going to be able to help coach them through that. For me, the other side is like go Google a Kurt Euler Servant Leadership or Business Case for Servant Leadership. It it's it might take you four hours to read. It should be a book, it's that long on my website, but but it walks through this. Hey, are you are you expecting the people on your team to do tasks or to reach business outcomes? And it does have several frameworks in there for how to think about like, you don't have to hire me, you don't have to go buy a book. Like in 90, 30, 60, 90 days, how could you start to shift that culture in your team so that your your internal team that you were already paying for would come to you and say, here's ideas you haven't considered. Here's what I think could be holding us back. And and that's quick 90-day plan, you'll start seeing results sooner than that. I now you or I could help accelerate them with that. But I think that's one of the things that, like, hey, I've been stuck. We've been hit at 25, 20 million dollars, 25 million dollars a year in revenue in our SaaS company for the last five years. Your team knows the answers. The problem is, how do you pull that out of them? I could help them. I I presume you could as well.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So I'm going to include a link to your website, you know, all those the context below this video. People get to click a button. So people, you know, watching, definitely business leaders, whether you're CEO, whether you're president, you know, I learned tons from your uh our discussion, you know, just just for a short time. You know, I will strongly encourage business leaders to click a button, reach out to Kurt, you know, have a conversation. Who knows where the discussion is gonna go? But uh one thing for sure, you can again a totally different perspective. You're gonna learn a ton. So, you know, click a button below, reach out to Kurt, have a discussion. Who knows where the discussion is gonna go? So links below. So before we go, Kurt, where can people find you? First of all, before I have one last question, but I want to find where can people find you? What is the best way to reach out to you?
SPEAKER_01My personal website, Kurt Euler.com. If you want business stuff, it's there, I could send you to LinkedIn. But some people just want to hear things like I make hiking trails on the weekend with my kids, and uh, you want to see that? It's gonna send you to Instagram. There won't be business quotes, there'll be no like motivational stuff. It'll be like me and a skid steer or an axe.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Or interesting. Before we go, can you think of a couple companies, like one or two companies who are doing things right away? If you can think of one or two companies that you thought, you know what, they got a game on, they're doing things right, whether it's a service leader leadership or just in a general, they got all the stuff rolling in the right direction.
SPEAKER_01The servant leadership thing's hard. Sometimes you see it. What I would say the company I think is doing things right is cluttered space. So product management tools like Trello and Asana and all those, there's been thousands of people that have tried this. There's a company called Dart AI, which like I don't know if they're servant leaders. I know nothing about their leadership teams. I've hit them up on Slack a few times. I'm in there with them. But that product, I feel like, is one of the few things where I'm like, wow, you uh did come through. Now, part of it was the AI thing, but like, what does it take to move me off of like Trello or Sana or tools that work? You know, some people love Monday.com. Like, they have fundamentally taken a different approach for how do you build that in a way that's like it, I it feels like like for my single account, but I instantly have like a 12-person virtual assistant team that's in there, like the way AI is integrated. I'm just like, wow, like to the point I'm using it as examples with my team for other things about like will I be considered approaching things like this? And like in something as outdated as like let's say project management tool, the next thing would be like, Can I find an accounting example?
SPEAKER_00So, yeah, yeah, very interesting. Hey, I can talk to you, listen, you know, and and learn from you for forever, but just a shorter time. Uh, thank you so much for time. It was it was a great discussion. I enjoyed it. Um, there's tons to learn from you. Definitely, people are watching and listening to us, click a button, reach out to Kurt, have a discussion, and uh you're gonna find a different perspective. Thank you so much for time, Kurt. Pleasure talking to you.
SPEAKER_01Thank you for having me.
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