“A calm sea does not make a skilled sailor.”
This quote, often attributed to Franklin D. Roosevelt, is a succinct summary of Kurt Uhlir. I had the honor of working with Kurt very closely during our time scaling up eXp Realty’s search portal into the 4th largest US Real Estate portal. In that time, I had several “oh wow” moments when it came to Kurt, but for brevity, here are just a few.
To start with, the depth of his knowledge about Marketing and Strategy seemed to know no bounds. He was constantly available as a fountain of knowledge about Enterprise SEO, Growth Strategies and competitive news. (I’m not sure when he slept, but he made my job considerably easier, and more fun.) Kurt is constantly in the loop on new developments in the market, and is always trying to think one step ahead about what the implications and opportunities of those developments are. More importantly, he’s always pushing to take action, and try something based on that knowledge. He teaches others that the ideas may not work, and they may not be perfect, but we’ll learn something, and that’s the crux of building great things – iterating and moving quickly. Together we built over 140,000 real estate SEO pages, optimized our app for significant performance improvements, and watched them grow from the crypts of Google (page 10), to starting to rank on page 1.
Building things, and teams is hard. Therein lies one of Kurt’s other superpowers. Kurt preaches and PRACTICES servant leadership. He was 100% the ultimate steward of our culture and he did so through collaboration and leading by example. We worked together extensively to review our cultural values, discuss ideas on how to put them into action, and get validation that it was working and making a difference. But at the end of the day, ideas without action are useless. Thankfully, Kurt is an action-oriented leader. When our systems blew and we were in a full blown outage for several days, Kurt showed up as the voice of reason, organizing teams, providing encouragement, and setting guidelines of how to move the entire org forward. That moment forever left me with a blueprint of how I’d like to show up, and how I’d like other leaders to show up in the future.
Kurt’s the CMO and growth leader that every early to mid-market company, particularly in the B2B space – needs, to be able to scale. Going back to my earlier quote, I’ve lived and breathed the hard times with Kurt. It made me better, it made him better, and bringing him on board will make you better.