Artificial intelligence isn’t just a buzzword anymore. It’s rapidly transforming the way modern marketing teams operate, from content creation and SEO to team structure and leadership models. But while the hype is real, most organizations still aren’t ready.
In a recent episode of Performance Delivered, Symphonic Digital’s Steffen Horst sat down with Kurt Uhlir, CMO of EZ Home Search, to talk about what AI is actually changing—and how leaders can prepare.
🎧 Listen to the Episode:
The Real Impact of AI in Marketing
Kurt, a self-described “quantitative guy” with a background in financial engineering, has helped scale companies through over 80 funding rounds and exits—including an $8.1 billion IPO. In his current role at EZ Home Search, he’s using AI not to replace teams—but to amplify them.
“It’s a force multiplier,” says Kurt. “I can do with a small team today what I used to need 25+ content writers for.”
From streamlining SEO content to powering home valuation models, AI is woven into every layer of his marketing and product operations.
Why Most Marketing Teams Aren’t Ready
Despite all the AI buzz, Kurt sees a major gap in implementation. Many organizations are reacting to AI instead of strategically adopting it. The result? Misguided mandates, unrealistic expectations, and a rush to cut headcount instead of enhancing capabilities.
“Too many execs demand three AI projects from every department in 30 days,” Kurt explains. “But they’re micromanaging instead of trusting their teams to innovate.”
He urges CMOs and agency leaders to focus on outcomes, not tools—and to stay hands-on with experimentation.
Rethinking Leadership: Servant First
Kurt’s leadership philosophy is rooted in servant leadership—a framework where managers work to serve their teams by removing barriers, not just giving orders.
This includes creating a culture where junior team members feel empowered to challenge ideas and innovate using AI, without fear of “getting it wrong.”
“You can’t ask your team to experiment if you’re not showing them how you experiment yourself,” says Kurt.
What This Means for Agencies
The relationship between brands and agencies is also shifting. Rather than simply executing, agencies will increasingly act as coaches and strategic partners, helping in-house teams navigate new tools, build internal capabilities, and maintain performance during rapid change.
“I’ve hired agencies just to train my team,” Kurt admits. “That’s the level of partnership we need now.”
SEO in a Generative Search World
With Google’s AI Overviews and the rise of answer engines, traditional SEO tactics are becoming less effective. Instead, Kurt and his peers focus on topical authority and semantic search—creating rich content clusters that fully address a topic rather than chasing keywords.
“Write articles that answer pain points—even if they only get 20 searches a month. That’s what LLMs surface now.”
How to Future-Proof Your Marketing Team
So, what should scaling companies do over the next 12 months to stay competitive?
Kurt recommends two key priorities:
- Outcome fluency – Make sure every marketer understands how their role connects to business results.
- AI literacy – Encourage hands-on use of AI tools, treating them like teammates—not replacements.
Final Thoughts
AI is here to stay, but it’s not a threat—it’s an opportunity. As Kurt Uhlir puts it, marketing teams that embrace AI with curiosity, discipline, and humility will be the ones that win.
“The CMOs who aren’t practitioners anymore? If they’re not gone already, they will be soon.”
Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] This is Performance Delivered Insider Secrets for Digital Marketing Success with Steffen Horst,
[00:00:10] Steffen Horst: welcome back to Performance Delivered Insider Secrets to Marketing Success, the podcast where we uncover what's driving results for some of the smartest marketers out there. I'm your host, Steffen Horst, and today we're talking about a shift that's already redefining the future of marketing, even if most teams aren't quite ready for it.
[00:00:28] Today we will explore how AI is reshaping the future of marketing teams and why most aren't ready. We've all heard that AI is transforming marketing, but what does that actually look like inside fast scaling companies? How should teams evolve? What roles should agencies play and how do we separate meaningful innovation from hype?
[00:00:48] To help us answer those questions. I'm joined by Kurt Uhlir, a growth strategist, speaker and marketing executive who has LED teams at high growth startups and large enterprises. [00:01:00] He's currently serving as the CMO at EZ Home Search, a leading real estate technology company where he is helping transform how marketing teams operate in the AI area.
[00:01:10] Kurt brings a unique perspective on team structure leadership and how organizations can stay ahead of change without chasing every new tool that hits the market, whether you're in house or agency site, there's a lot to take away from this one. So let's dive in. Kurt, welcome to the show.
[00:01:28] Kurt Uhlir: Hey, thank you for having me.
[00:01:29] Steffen Horst: Now, Kurt, before we get into the nitty gritty of today's topic, let's rewind a bit. How did your journey into marketing begin and what brought you to where you are today?
[00:01:40] Kurt Uhlir: I did not intend to be a marketer. I got pulled into marketing. I mean, I have a master's in financial engineering. I mean, I can actually code out all the advanced models for carving up billions of dollars of mortgages into like different securities.
[00:01:52] And so I'm a quantitative guy, but I ended up with A CEO, who's a former president and CEO of Disney Theme Parks, who [00:02:00] started, I didn't know at the time, but had reached out to me and was kind of starting to mentor me and did mentor me later in my career. Because of some partnerships and co-marketing opportunities with companies like Garmin and MapQuest back in the day, and even Microsoft.
[00:02:12] I would get these little bits of marketing and I did so well with it. I kept getting more of that. I think as we've continued now, and I stayed at that company from 2000 until 2010, became an angel investor, been able to be a category defining B2B companies or B two B2C companies, and that systematic thinking it takes to be a quantitative person, I.
[00:02:32] I think we're gonna get, well, let's end up talking about it a little bit. But because of where marketing has gone with automation and SOPs and all that has made me, just as it's made many former lawyers, as former software architects that are coming to marketing, it's made me immaculately successful and allowed me to help make companies make so much money.
[00:02:50] They just keep saying, what more budget do you need? Because you're gonna scale things. We give you money. It's gonna come out a lot more on the other side.
[00:02:58] Steffen Horst: Yeah. So let's [00:03:00] start with the big picture. You've described AI as a force multiplier for modern marketing teams, especially at companies scaling fast.
[00:03:09] What does that actually look like in practice?
[00:03:13] Kurt Uhlir: It's a great question. I mean, for me it feels a lot like what we've seen with other things we've kind of grown through over times. I mean, I've scaled companies through more than 60, probably at this point, more than 80, maybe even 90 funding rounds and exits, including public IPO of $880 million and like at $8.1 billion exit.
[00:03:30] So like from super small, but to really big, and AI reminds me a lot of these other inflection points we've had over in time. So to your point about like a force multiplier, I think that's the way that at least we're looking at it at Easy home search. Well, are we looking at it for generating content? Yes, we're generating large amounts of content.
[00:03:49] SEO, optimized content with editorial safeguards never on autopilot, but I'm able to do here with a smaller content team. What IHA had [00:04:00] 25, maybe even 30 content writers full-time working for me at exp Realty. What's now the largest brokerage in the world, I'm able to do that with a fraction of the people.
[00:04:08] We use it on the product side for forecasting home values with models and data that others aren't able to do. Um, it does come into marketing, but we have, we have data like in the US and 80 million properties across the us. That's all the residential properties. There's so much data that's never gone into forecasting, is your home gonna be worth more or less that others Were using oak archaic, basically log, you know, linear algorithms and we're able to do that with ai.
[00:04:34] Our engineering team, they're using it. So each one of the engineers, as with a lot of companies and my content writers, they're acting as if they're not sole contributors, but they're using it as if each one of them is leading a small team where they have junior people. That force multiplier changes how people think.
[00:04:52] And so like for me, I think modern marketing teams need to think about it, about, it's not replacing talent. You may hear from your CEO board that's like, [00:05:00] Ooh, you don't have to have 30 people on your content team. Let's cut 'em down. Well, if you were lucky enough, I mean, I was that as a big public company mind to have like 30 ish people on my content team.
[00:05:08] Like, well, no, no, no. Maybe we reduce some head cow, but put in for that. Instead, imagine what we could do with 300 people or with five people. If we change how we operate, we're gonna be able to operate as if we have 25 or 50 people. And you get the per the CEO or the CFO thinking about, it's not about saving money, it's about making more money with resources we already have.
[00:05:32] Steffen Horst: It's interesting that you say that because there's a lot of conversation about AI is going to kill a lot of jobs, you know, and Sure. Looking at it in regards to what AI is able to do, the initial thought might go in that direction, but you know, I. Even for us here at Symphonic Digital, we have started to incorporate AI in the day to day and get the labor intensive task out of the way through ai, and therefore elevate the people that add [00:06:00] value through their strategic thinking and the more higher level Workday would like to do and we would like them to do, and therefore adding more value as an outcome basically.
[00:06:11] Kurt Uhlir: Absolutely. I mean, I think actually to summary, it will display some jobs or it's gonna adjust how those jobs work as well. But it's like if we look back, even like through all of these technology changes over time, like when the combustion engine came out and we got tractors and cars, did it do away with farming?
[00:06:27] No. It allowed a smaller number of people to still produce more food than we ever thought was possible.
[00:06:32] Steffen Horst: Yeah.
[00:06:33] Kurt Uhlir: And so. Well, we reallocate people of course, and it does change how I hire and I think we'll talk through that, but it's like I don't wanna necessarily get rid of people. What I wanna do is make sure I have the right people, perhaps with different skill sets and train them.
[00:06:45] I mean, I was lucky enough to come out, you know, out of very early outta school and be very successful where. I had people that were in their fifties working for me, which was weird being a early twenties person. And you have that, that cultural dynamic. Yeah. But now it's like, well, you come straight outta school.
[00:06:59] I [00:07:00] almost expect you to learn how to manage people right away, because whether it's using AI or setting up AI agents, you are gonna have a team that you're managing
[00:07:08] Steffen Horst: picking up on this right out of school, right out college. What are your thoughts on how to integrate people that are really coming out of college that don't have any experience?
[00:07:18] Because the thought is that a lot of these. A lot of that work could be done by ai, therefore eliminating the need for kind of entry level positions.
[00:07:29] Kurt Uhlir: I mean, I'm glad I'm not coming outta school right now because I do think it would be really hard coming out is so much of that grunt work where you and I cut our teeth and we learn things like I don't necessarily need the person right now.
[00:07:39] I think though, from a company perspective, that companies always need to be aware of kind of two things. One, they need to be aware of. They're never gonna be able to outgrow the capabilities of their team. So if you're gonna have to add new people at some point, like yes, you may change, but most companies want to continue going.
[00:07:56] And so the company does need to keep hiring people to be able to have [00:08:00] people with capabilities, which doesn't mean you need to train them, but on the other side, you also have to think about succession planning and leadership development. And so I have to always be aware of, forget, even if you wanna say the job, if you're the owner.
[00:08:12] Or you're the CMO you just hired, like you want to go on vacation, which means this whole team needs to run without you at times. Yeah. And so I think when you people take that approach, yes, you may be able to just use an AI agent for something, but as soon as you can train that person up, they're gonna be that force multiplier we just talked about, and they're gonna be able to do more and you're gonna be able to offload things.
[00:08:32] Well, then I am gonna hire somebody straight outta school and I'm gonna coach them much more and shadow them. And I don't expect them to just go off and work by themself and get, have grunt tasks. I'm probably gonna have to pull up next to them if we're in an office or pair with them a lot more virtually and show them what I'm doing and just work together.
[00:08:50] And then periodically turn over and go, Hey Amanda, why don't you try doing it this way?
[00:08:56] Steffen Horst: Now, Kurt, you work closely with later stage and scaling [00:09:00] organizations, and many of those are rethinking how their marketing organization is structured. How are you seeing AI and other market shifts influence team design and the role agencies are playing in the new structure?
[00:09:13] Kurt Uhlir: Great question. I've seen great examples and bad examples. So let's start with how not to do this. So, because I actually see way too many companies doing this, and I've seen small SMBs do it, and I've literally seen public companies do it where the CEO or the CMO for, since we're talking about marketing teams, I.
[00:09:29] Comes forward and says, I saw the CEO of a public company come forward and tell everybody at his level, or that reports him in one level below, say, I want all of those teams to come back to me within 30 days of at least three AI projects that you will be implementing in each of those division levels within 60 to 90 days.
[00:09:47] And within that was kind of a, and I do expect headcount reductions within there, although that wasn't explicit for that statement. Well, like if we think about like, let's go outside of marketing with, from a bad example. Do you need to have three [00:10:00] things moving within the control or accounting system of your mid-market public company?
[00:10:03] You need to be considering things, but you need to think about controlled risk. And so I think from a marketing perspective, I see too many people coming forward and just they're forcing AI in as opposed to trusting their teams to come back to them with wise decisions. They're micromanagers as opposed to pointing out the business outcomes that they want.
[00:10:22] And so the way that they should be approaching these and structuring the marketing teams and working with agencies is coming back and using this to reiterate to everybody, especially the agency partners. These are the business outcomes we wanna achieve. I'm bringing you on as somebody on my team or my agency partner, and these are the outcomes.
[00:10:42] These are the reasons I'm paying you money on a monthly basis. And so while I may be giving you a role to fill, I. The key is these are the outcomes. I'm expecting that role, and I'm giving you the permission to come back and say there's a different way we could implement this to still reach those outcomes.
[00:10:57] And so when you think about restructuring your [00:11:00] marketing teams like that, it's giving people the flexibility, including those individual contributors to say, I think there's a better way to do this. I think there's a different way you haven't considered this. Specifically with like the agencies, there is so much I can do internal right now, but there's also, to me, there's these gaps that I, to see even companies of all size, but especially in B2B where I like could I hire internally for a true account based marketing team and platform.
[00:11:29] Absolutely, and it's a certain level I have to do that, but I still am probably gonna bring in an agency or a coach at that level to keep guiding what they're doing and bringing in the best practices that maybe that individual person for our in-house team's not doing or performance-based marketing.
[00:11:45] Yeah, I can do that myself. And like at Easy Home Search, we are doing that ourselves right now. There will probably be a growth level internal where. To scale beyond, we might want to go out and bring in some people, and then I'm gonna move to an agency level as well, where it [00:12:00] says, all right, now I need to go back and really build out a bigger in-house team.
[00:12:04] But because AI is changing things so much,
[00:12:06] yep.
[00:12:07] Kurt Uhlir: I think it's actually really rare in some of these like places where the margins are so small, as you know, whether in-house or agencies where it makes sense for me to have my in-house team, but now I need to be budgeting in an agency where there's some cases they're doing the work as agencies do.
[00:12:22] Well. In other cases, I go back to that agency and say, I'm gonna build up my in-house team. Maybe I want them to help me do that or not, but I'm gonna change from the retainer model and performance based model we've had to say. I need you all to move into a coaching and training model to guide my internal team.
[00:12:38] And a lot of agencies, that's a weird conversation with, because they're used to just doing the work. And I'm like, well, I'm used to scaling companies and so there's always a level where I need to bring that in-house. And I think in a lot of these areas like performance-based marketing, everybody's gonna realize that very quickly.
[00:12:53] Steffen Horst: Yeah, that's a great point. But despite all the headline, most teams seem to be lagging in [00:13:00] implementation. Where do you see the biggest disconnect between what's possible with AI and what's actually being used effectively inside marketing teams?
[00:13:10] Kurt Uhlir: Yeah, it is a shiny object syndrome. We've always dealt with it before, but I think what holds back so many people at all levels of companies is that, well, could I be doing this better?
[00:13:21] I mean, like, I know personally like, you know, I know Noah and the people that run App Sumo and it's like, it's so easy to be like, ah, is there some other lifetime deal that I could purchase for like, you know, 50 to $200 or $500? And they'll change everything I'm doing. Well, yes. Do I already have a tool that will do this?
[00:13:40] And so I think in ai, the biggest mistake from an implementation perspective is people thinking, well, things are moving so fast, I don't wanna just jump in here because it's gonna be something new tomorrow. And so I think that both, one that's holding people back from making headway today, but it's really holding back kind of back to even your question about the marketing [00:14:00] teams.
[00:14:00] Companies are hiring CMOs or like chief growth officers. The problem is most companies, once they hit a certain size and like that kind of series B up through private equity acquisition, they often hire C-suite people that are not implementers. They're people that are doing strategy that barely are coaching their team, but they have no idea.
[00:14:21] If you really get down to it how to implement an, you know, email automation platform like HubSpot. So I think those people are quickly gonna be put outta work because like I've been really successful at those series B up through private equity companies because I believe that the best way to growing the team and finding scale is I want 85 to 90% of the team to be working without me.
[00:14:42] I. I'll coach them through that and I'll plan for that. But I want the growth to be happening without me, while I am going to be trying to implement and test new things often because I have peer groups that I'm testing things with where I can come back to my content team. I did this at EFP World Holdings where about every six to nine months I would come back to them or [00:15:00] and tell them either here's a new way we're gonna be using phrase or surfer and some of these other things, a new workflow, we're gonna change everything you're doing.
[00:15:07] But I didn't screw them up during that six to nine months. They were implementing really well. Or I would come back to them and say, here's one of the experiments me and these two junior people have been working on, and we can't get it to work. And I don't want you all to change anything, but I'm gonna let you all know for like the next two to four hours.
[00:15:24] I'm gonna walk through everything we've been doing as myself as the CMO and A team. I. To be implementing things and why it hasn't worked. So you all can learn from a failed case study.
[00:15:33] Yep.
[00:15:34] Kurt Uhlir: And realize, hey, I'm not changing things and not everything works out, which also changes. Then from an implementation perspective, it shows the team that are doing things that the boss doesn't always get it right, which no matter how many times I find that, I tell you, I want you to test, I want you to try things.
[00:15:50] Unless I'm exposing transparency where I myself have failed, not just in the past, but currently, nobody actually believes it. I mean, I think about myself. I have [00:16:00] PTSD from working for shitty bosses. And because of that, I know other people do. And so they're gonna see from your actions. And so by taking that, it allows people to keep implementing fast today.
[00:16:10] And I think that's where we're continuing going. So it's like, you know, AI can and should be used to guide your experimentation and test headlines and. Explore things and guide the questions that you should be asking your agency that you don't know what to ask.
[00:16:23] Yeah.
[00:16:23] Kurt Uhlir: But at the end of the day, it is about those outcomes and implementing towards that.
[00:16:26] But I think the CMOs that are not practitioners anymore, if they're not fired today, they'll be let go pretty quickly. For those of us that aren't.
[00:16:34] Steffen Horst: So are you saying that because you are much more involved in kind of testing the tools that kind of potentially take you to the next level, that allows you also to better understand how they all impact kind of the day-to-day of the team basically, instead of just saying to someone, Hey, you know what, Stephan, there is this new AI writing tool, I want you to test it.
[00:16:55] And that person goes out and tests it and kind of goes through the motions there. And you just [00:17:00] receive the results without kind of necessarily knowing the ins and outs of that tool.
[00:17:04] Kurt Uhlir: Yeah, I mean I do believe that. Absolutely. I think Is the CMO ever gonna be as efficient as the content writer that's using surfer or phrase or any of those to do this?
[00:17:13] No, but they should be able to actually struggle through an, optimize an article for it. And I think everything kind of works it that way. And so whether it's me coming to my team with a tool and having them use a small portion of their time to test it before we change it, if I, as the CMO. Could not actually use it myself and do not understand the ai, the good and the bad, and the limitations and where it goes sideways, then I should not be telling my team to structurally change what they're doing because it will be a force multiplier.
[00:17:43] But the problem is it might be a force multiplier that's running your entire successful demand gen off the cliff as opposed to going up the mountain faster.
[00:17:51] Steffen Horst: Yeah. If that makes sense. Now, a few minutes ago you mentioned shiny object syndrome, right? So every day there are new [00:18:00] tools coming out and it's like, oh wow, this has two features that I really wanted to have, and I wonder if that would be better than what we are currently using.
[00:18:08] How do you evaluate which tools are worth testing and how do you keep teams focused while still staying innovative?
[00:18:15] Kurt Uhlir: Yeah, great question. At the core for keeping the teams focused, I'm reminding people that I've hired you to help the company reach a business outcome. And at the end of the day, if we're not reaching that business outcome, you're not adding the value that I've expected.
[00:18:27] And so at the end of the day, it is about implementation so we can have a healthy conflict discussion about how much time should be spent for testing you test I test. That's fine. At the end of the day, implementation as we just talked about is what matters, and so that's a good reminder of people for things.
[00:18:42] It also makes me personally realize that even at my level, there is grunt work that I need to do. And so at the end of the day, like there's things I need to do that aren't fun, but they've hired me to reach outcomes, and so it makes me really happy to do those things. You pay me a lot of money. You give me health benefits, I do these things, great.
[00:18:58] We're okay with that. But I [00:19:00] also think a lot of what happens now, both at my level and even for individual contributor levels. Is we should be thinking about like peer groups. I mean, you think about, you may see ads, people that listen may see ads for like Vistage, so like peer groups for CEOs and founders of small companies.
[00:19:17] Some of these are big companies, a hundred million dollar companies, or there's World 50, another one of those too. Well, those are large private equity backed organizations to help CEOs and owner. Founders well. There's no real organizations that are doing that for CMOs or content directors or, you know, there's some agency coaching kind of masterminds like that.
[00:19:35] I think the best thing for everybody today is you need to create that structured or unstructured group yourself of peers that are non-competitive that you're sharing things with. I have a group of, it varies between 10 and 12 of us, depending on who shows up. Uh, CMOs and two people are just full-time consultants because there is this new thing called topical authority and semantic search, which almost none of us [00:20:00] really understand.
[00:20:00] I understand. My friend Corey understands, and so we have two people in the group that that's what they're experts in. We come together and we share the AB tests that we're implementing that are working and are not working at our companies. And so I'm able to look into the e-commerce for Fortune 100 brand to see everything they're doing from an SEO performance marketing perspective, what works and doesn't work.
[00:20:23] And that would have never have happened 10 or 15 years ago. Well, I've pulled together this group because I knew I needed it to be successful, and I knew that I had value that you would get as well from what I'm working on, what works and doesn't. And so I think every content manager, every performance marketing person, if you don't have that already one, look to see who you're connected with, but just start sending out some direct messages to people on LinkedIn saying, I'm putting this together.
[00:20:48] Do you want to get together? And then just once a month. Get on a Zoom call. An average structured is really easy to do, but that actually is a really easy way for me to be able to stop the shiny object syndrome [00:21:00] because I still give myself and the team budgeted time to be able to test things. Some cases I'm telling other people what I'm testing ahead of time, but when a new tool comes in, I pop straight into a WhatsApp chat because not everybody's based in America and I say, here's something I just saw as anybody using this, or something similar.
[00:21:18] Very quickly, I get that dopamine response of, we tried it, it sucks. We didn't try it, but we're trying something similar to it. We're in an active test, and I go, oh, I can put it out in my mind. We'll talk about it later.
[00:21:30] Steffen Horst: Interesting. Now, search is obviously also shifting as part of this entire AI revolution, especially with kind of AI first platforms at LLMs.
[00:21:41] What should marketers and agency leaders know about SEO in this new landscape?
[00:21:47] Kurt Uhlir: Yeah. Well that's a great question. Especially 'cause as I'm finding out, I feel like 99 to 99.9% of marketers, especially SEO agencies are freaking out. You see all these posts about SE o's dead. I mean, how [00:22:00] many times has SEO died?
[00:22:01] I, so I mean, I have just because it's really easy to kind of capitalize on things. I mean, I kind of have written the definitive guide on generative engine optimization or Anson engine optimization, but I'm kind of just regurgitating what my friend Corey has talked about with. Topical authority in semantic search where he put together the defacto like topic of that.
[00:22:20] It's the same thing. So those of us that have gone very close, that run in these, this group of about a thousand core A followers, we literally share a Google drive with patents from Google and Microsoft and these oms, the same things that he talks about to be successful, but to truly rank on Google and what's been successful the last couple years.
[00:22:40] That's the exact same thing that the generative engines and the answer engines are looking for. It's instead of thinking about like, you know, clustering and writing, SEO, the way people have done in the past, it's like, how do you instead cover real topical authority? I know a lot of people, they have love and hate relationships with Neil Patel and it's like, I find like 15% of his [00:23:00] concepts are just incredible and then there's like 20% that are so basic or I don't agree with at all, and then you have to weed through to find the rest of it.
[00:23:06] But like he's purchased some things like Answer the public, which at some level people go, God's so basic. Why would you ever write something where only 10 people search for it a month, or 50 people search for it a month? And I'm like. Well Core A has been talking about this for years. That's what Google was looking for.
[00:23:21] That's what the LLMs want is if I could write a piece of topic that answers a question that only 20 people search for a month but is on a B2B product, that's a definite pain point that we solve with our product. Go write that article and go write 200 things just like that for, and you will end up showing up in these LLMs in the AI first platforms.
[00:23:41] Steffen Horst: And then there's the multiplier.
[00:23:42] Kurt Uhlir: Yeah.
[00:23:42] Steffen Horst: Again, might be only 20 people, but you know, if you have a hundred, 200 of these written, you know, they're very targeted in the end.
[00:23:49] Kurt Uhlir: Yeah. And an app, it completely changes things. I mean, like even at Easy Home Search, do we have real estate glossary terms? Absolutely. Is it still successful?
[00:23:57] Well, now that Google's really rolling [00:24:00] out, you know, AI search everywhere natively, I feel bad for the people that have only been writing content about like, what is a split level home? Well, Google's gonna answer that when somebody just searches natively. If you go read our version of that. It's gonna talk about yes definitionally, where that is, but it's gonna talk about how people look for it, the type of populations that want that, and don't want that.
[00:24:21] Split level homes do not work for multi-generational homes because wheelchairs and crutches and people with walking issues don't deal with stairs very well, and it's gonna guide through why that's a good thing are a bad thing, and things you need to think about when you're purchasing homes.
[00:24:34] Yeah.
[00:24:35] Kurt Uhlir: So that's a different way of doing those glossary based things so that the oms, when people ask all of these questions, it does surface our answers for those because we provide a lot of these nuanced responses that is based on the expertise and experience that our agents have.
[00:24:53] Steffen Horst: Now, let's talk leadership for a minute. In the most effective marketing organizations, you're seeing what's [00:25:00] changing at leadership level. How are they creating space for experimentation without losing focus or performance?
[00:25:07] Kurt Uhlir: Great question. I've kind of gone into this place where I'm thankfully now ranked as like one of the top speakers in the world on servant leadership, and I kind of stumbled into it naturally just in a concept because while the term came out in the seventies, it's really how I think successful leaders in fast moving environments have always behaved.
[00:25:25] And so while the terminology came out in the seventies, to me there's only two types of leadership for structuring these teams and making that room for experimentation. I. You can be an authoritative leader. I brought you into my agency. I brought you into my marketing team to do exactly the tasks that I asked for, and if you don't do them in the way that I said in the timeframe, you're fired.
[00:25:43] Or there's a servant leadership, which goes back to the outcomes we talked about. And so the restructuring of this, what's effective today for me is acknowledging and keeping the conversation going. I hired you, Stefan, for these business outcomes and with a specific role, and I'm gonna give you the [00:26:00] guidance and the SOPs, but I'm acknowledging that there may be better ways to reach the business outcomes.
[00:26:05] And at the end of the day, I don't want you doing tasks. I want you reaching business outcomes. And so I'm creating this environment for me that is servant leadership that says, the moment I hire you, yes, I am technically your boss, and so I have the authority to fire you, but the moment I've hired you, my job should have shifted at that point to saying, how do I serve you to help you better reach and the organization better reach the outcomes that I brought you onto?
[00:26:30] Yeah, and when I do that. It shifts then to say I want to be coaching from a generational perspective, I'm willing to be coached as well. Like I may have hired somebody that's just outta school. And you know what? You probably understand TikTok better than I do. Great. And so I'm also humble enough to say you may see things that I don't see, or you may come from a background that I don't see as well.
[00:26:51] And so it's also one of the reasons I've been very successful working with teams on different continents. 'cause I do know I can step into any industry. We bought a [00:27:00] company in South Korea. So very easily could I step in and start working because I know how to do processes. But I also know that locally from a culture perspective, there's gonna be see things that you would see being in Native South Korean that I wouldn't see.
[00:27:14] So, hey, I need you to bring that to me. And then my guide is that servant is to say, let me make sure that you understand the best way to bring me that input, because it can't just be a fire hose. And like I'm okay with you confronting me in a team meeting and pointing out something.
[00:27:30] Yep.
[00:27:30] Kurt Uhlir: I had a CEO recently that if we were one-on-one, I could push back as strongly as you could ever imagine with him on why I thought he was wrong, but in a team meeting or with anybody else present you, he didn't want that.
[00:27:45] And thankfully he was wise enough to know himself that said, come at me as hard as you want. I don't need the nuance. If we're one-on-one chat me, but don't do it in a team meeting.
[00:27:54] Steffen Horst: Yeah. Interesting. Now, before we come to the end of today's podcast episode, if a [00:28:00] scale stage company wants to future proof their marketing team in the next, let's say 12 months, what's one mindset or capability that they should start building now?
[00:28:11] Kurt Uhlir: Yeah, I think it does bounce between a couple. And so outcome of fluency, we've spoken about that everybody should be able to back not just the business outcome, but how their actions tie to those AI literacy, like if they're not actually using it. Then would become the second piece of it, that hands-on experience about what's using.
[00:28:29] And so like at our team, I'm coaching people to be using AI on a daily basis, telling you what the outcomes they're trying to reach are and treating AI like a teammate. So for me it really is fluency and outcomes and having conversations with your AI teammates as opposed to AI replacements.
[00:28:47] Steffen Horst: Well, Kurt, thank you for joining me on the Performance World Podcast and sharing your knowledge on how AI is reshaping the future of marketing teams and why most aren't ready now, Kurt, if people wanna find out more about [00:29:00] you and Easy Home Search, how can they find out more?
[00:29:03] Kurt Uhlir: Well, for easy home search, you can just type EZ, the letter home search.com and go there. But for me personally, you can go to my own website. It's the hub for everything else. So it's Kurt uler, UHLI r.com, and it'll splinter you off. If you wanna know what it's like growing companies with two little kids, it'll send you to my Instagram.
[00:29:20] You want more business stuff? That's gonna be my website or LinkedIn.
[00:29:23] Steffen Horst: Sounds great as always. We'll leave that in the show notes. Thanks everyone for listening. If you liked the performance of our podcast, please subscribe and leave us a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast application. If you wanna find out more about Symphonic Digital, you can visit us@symphonicdigital.com or follow us on next at Symphonic hq.
[00:29:41] Thanks again and see you next time.
[00:29:44] Performance Delivered is sponsored by Symphonic Digital Discover, audience-focused and data-driven digital marketing solutions for small and medium businesses at [00:30:00] symphonicdigital.com.
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