Daria Rudnik (00:00):
Welcome to Built by People Leaders podcast, brought to you by Aidra AI, your AI-powered coach for leaders in tech. I'm your host, Darya Rudnik, and this show is for HR and L&D leaders who are building impact from within and shaping AI-ready organizations. If you go to daryarudnik.com, you can download your AI-ready teams framework, a practical guide to help you build mature teams shaped for AI era. And today we have a very special guest, Kurt. And today we have a very special guest, Kurt Uhlir. Kurt is a CMO and executive operator known for helping growth-stage companies scale from breakout traction to hundreds of millions in revenue. He's built go-to-market teams inside VC and PE-backed companies with technologies now used by Apple, Meta, Microsoft, and Google. And he's also a co-founder of the company, Meta, Microsoft, and Google. And he's also a co-founder of the company, Meta, Microsoft, and Google.

Daria Rudnik (00:53):
In addition to his operating role, Kurt mentors C-suite leaders and serves on the board of CEO Netweavers, a 20-plus year executive community focused on helping leaders win at work and at home. Well, thanks for being here, Kurt. I'm so excited to have this conversation with you.

Kurt Uhlir (01:11):
Hey, thank you for having me.

Daria Rudnik (01:12):
Do you want to share your path, like your journey into CMO and leadership?

Kurt Uhlir (01:17):
Thank you for having me. Oh, sure. I have a very non-linear path. I feel like most CMOs, if you look at them now, they started in marketing and they work in an agency and they move their way through. I've taken a much different approach where I've seen the more successful CMOs in Growth Operator D where I'm a systems thinker. I was originally a software architect. I actually got caught hacking 232 federal systems in the United States when I was 14.

Kurt Uhlir (01:41):
Because my entire thing was, how do you see how something works, sometimes break it, but try to understand why it broke and how can you get around things? And so that's where marketing has gone very well for me now. And so I've worked in 10 industries. I joined a small company after my master's that kind of like in the spatial industry, but we think about Google Maps, all the car navigation systems in Europe, video games. And so we took that company from 85 million a year in revenue to 1.44 billion in 10 and a half years.

Kurt Uhlir (02:11):
We were the nexus for 11 different industries. And so I didn't realize it, but it was like being at a management consulting company where I would walk out of a meeting with Siemens Video that makes the car navigation system for like a Lexus, walk into a meeting with Microsoft Video Games, and then walk into the next meeting with FedEx or UPS Logistics. And then that was every day for 10 and a half years. And so I didn't realize that as I was starting to do marketing things and getting pulled into these, and I was a quantitative person at the time. But our CFO...

Kurt Uhlir (02:41):
Our CEO had been the CFO of Disney as a whole, and he gave me some co-marketing stuff for an industry, and I did really well. And he so gave me some more to do it. And I got just sucked into marketing and have been there ever since.

Daria Rudnik (02:53):
That's an incredible story. I mean, yeah. So from what I'm hearing, you've been in like you've been working with enterprise companies and also scale-ups. What's the difference?

Kurt Uhlir (03:04):
When you're at the true enterprise, we used to joke about like there were things where we got to the point very quickly where if it was more than a million dollar decision, my boss and I would like, why are we, if it's not at least a million dollar decision, why are we here? Like it's a rounding error. And so, you know, we probably could have written a book at the enterprise level about, you know, hey, lose a billion dollars a year to grow faster. And so we left a lot of opportunity on the table.

Kurt Uhlir (03:27):
We also, at that case, at the enterprises, we're much more focused, and I think most public companies are, on hitting quarterly numbers at the expense of medium and long-term growth. At the scale-up stage, in some cases, the funds that are behind them are still the same thing. How do you just hit a short-term or quarterly number? But usually, it's how do you build revenue momentum?

Kurt Uhlir (03:50):
And so you're making investments, you're building systems that may not pay off for 12 months in a day or 36 months in a day.

Daria Rudnik (03:58):
So when a company moves from a startup to scale-up and then grows? I mean, it requires different types of leadership and requires different type of people. What's the shift that leaders need to make this transition?

Kurt Uhlir (04:12):
Especially when for startups in early stage, they've often gotten to the places that they're at because the CEO, the founder, or even the founding team, they're very good at every role underneath them. And very often, they're the momentum driver. I mean, I step into companies that are even 20, 25 million a year in revenue. And it's a noticeable shift if one of those C-suite people are not in the office and working. That doesn't scale long term.

Kurt Uhlir (04:40):
And so those people may be very nice, but I find that they tend to be authoritative leaders because they've gotten to that spot because they have a specific task that they want done their way. And what starts to shift then is to get into the scaling stage. You have to hire people and give them direction less about specifically what to do and shift much more. To the role of a servant to my mind where it says, I'm hiring you, telling you the outcomes I want from you.

Kurt Uhlir (05:07):
And then my job is actually to coach you and remove hindrances and to help you reach those business outcomes, which may mean stepping alongside of you and actually being a coach and showing you how to do it the way I want. But it's less of telling you exactly what to do with the threat of you're going to be fired if you don't do it my exact way.

Daria Rudnik (05:25):
I agree. I mean, I've seen so many founders who. like who said i'm here because i i did that way like i was successful in my role and why why would i change why should i change and i'm curious in terms of hr like my personal hr background it always it often happens that when you're a startup and you kind of have people together you communicate you talk you have fun you make decisions very quickly and it kind of feels you don't need structure you don't need processes you don't need to describe what you're doing you don't need it you don't really need kpis because you they're changing like all the time so you you don't need that at least formally written or stated anyway but once you grow you kind of hit a uh a ceiling of understanding people people don't stop understanding new people come and and what's going on how do i know what to do and i'm curious like from your perspective how do you see that

Kurt Uhlir (06:17):
yeah i i mean i think even when when companies are much larger and they're growing very quickly a lot of times there is kind of this mad sign disapproach which is like we don't need to document everything but but they're very much for me is whether it's early stage and they're starting to transition or then especially as you're uh you're in scale-up mode you do have to document things and so often i find the people that are very good with ambiguity that help them get to 20 people or 20 million in revenue those often are not the people that are really good at documenting and so who jumps out of my mind was like from a people person's uh perspective is i hired a woman on a customer success team for the subsidiary public company i was running and like i did hire her for a customer success role but underlying what i was hoping she was going to step into based on interviewing her was that she was really good at documenting things and so literally that's where we moved much of her time like more than half of her time her name was mandy into was she could just listen in on other people that were doing things and so she stepped into this customer success team that had no documentation they were running things the way you were saying and very quickly within 30 days there was like Google documents galore and every step was documented and they interlinked in a way that I didn't even think was possible because Mandy could hear the systems and the steps that other people were saying. And I think that's what it's often needed when you're making that transition is you need to hire somebody intentionally that's really good at documenting. And now with a lot of the AI tools, Fathom and other things can help with that, but you still need a human, I think, to go through and make sure that it's in human speak as well. So that's a big part of it that jumps out for me. But even at larger companies, I think that my role as a CMO now is I document as much as possible to hand off to my team. And I keep 85 to maybe 90% of my time allowed for either stepping in to help coaching somebody on individual, their role, or being the mad scientist that's trying to create a completely new workflow and document that so that I can hand that back off to a team so that they get to operate a system that's cohesive and not get caught up in the ambiguity.

Kurt Uhlir (08:22):
That I'm in. And that should exist, I think, in people's team and everything else nowadays.

Daria Rudnik (08:26):
I agree. I mean, because it's not that you're creating an extra bureaucracy layer of those documents that people need to follow. You create clarity and transparency. Here's how we do things. Here's what I expect from you as a leader. And if something changes, well, let's change the documents. It's not the document for the document's sake. It's for clarity, transparency. It's for being able to scale it. Because otherwise, it's very hard to scale when people join and there is no clarity on what should they be doing.

Kurt Uhlir (08:53):
Absolutely. I love learning and bringing new people on the team and where they're paired with somebody and they're coached going forward, but they still are going to have all these questions. So the documentation gives them that foundation to go back to. AI makes that easier because they can actually question documents and things now. But I also think about it just from a resilience perspective of, hey, what happens when the person's leading your customer success team in the example that I gave? What happens when they go on maternity leave or they have a family illness that comes up or they got hit by a bus?

Kurt Uhlir (09:21):
And the documentation is the back all for that so that they should feel okay stepping out to take the time off and the holiday where somebody else that maybe they understand the job at enough of a level to do some of it, but they don't have that nuance that that leader does. But the documentation allows me to fill in for you when you step out for three months.

Daria Rudnik (09:44):
We kind of touched upon that, but I'll ask the question that when a company raises a new round or goes to a new stage, how HR needs to change? How leadership needs to change?

Kurt Uhlir (09:56):
They need to become very curious right away. And they need to be, I just say that if they need to become very curious, both of the current team, but more so of the person who just wrote the check from a funding perspective, because what's usually not disclosed, and then the CEO usually knows this, but I find especially the senior leaders are all just shocked by it is in most cases, when a new venture capital company has come in to fund that next round, or especially private equity, what happens is somewhere between three and all of the senior leaders get dismissed and they're going to get replaced. And so what happens is you have a chief product officer who has done everything that he or she needed to do to get the company to the level that they could have that next round of funding or that exit.

Kurt Uhlir (10:42):
And the old style playbooks that a lot of these funds have is, well, we need to replace that chief people officer with somebody who's been in that role for this next round. Well, you need to know if that's, if that playbook is what the funders are planning, because otherwise from a people team, you're not going to be able to be as prepared for it both and starting to look for somebody new, but also making sure you can have a graceful exit for that, for it, for the people that are likely going to get dismissed. On the other side is the same thing for like being curious sometimes the CEO may have been expressing everything to you. My experience, you know, talking and becoming very good friends with my people teams, the CEO may have shared with you ahead of time that says, Hey, I'm, I'm having an issue with the, this team leader. I want it to change. But often what I find is they've held that very close to their chest until that funding round happens. And that's when they're going to start making some changes. And so when you start being curious and being that, that trusted advisor to them, coming to them saying, Hey, this may not be you, but I, this is what we typically see.

Kurt Uhlir (11:42):
It allows you to be part of that conversation earlier, which allows you to better help serve them with what the plan is they're wanting to implement.

Daria Rudnik (11:49):
I love this curiosity and interest in what's going on and understanding what's happening with people. And also, in some previous episodes, we had conversations about mergers and acquisitions. Again, when something drastic happens within the company, don't try to be over-optimistic. Hey, it's going to be all right for everyone. Will everyone be successful and live happily ever after? No, we don't know what's going to happen.

Daria Rudnik (12:13):
We don't know the company that acquires another company will want to change some of the people we want to remove or what changes would happen. So being open to whatever comes and being transparent and not being overly positive, I think it is important.

Kurt Uhlir (12:30):
Yeah, I think that, Curie, I'd agree with that. And for me, I just want to let me add for all the people team, which is most of your audience, when I say be curious, be curious in different timeframes. Because if I just told you, hey, my goal was to be happy in life, well, happy this week, this month, this year, or this 10 year, or my whole life, the answers would be very different for that.

Kurt Uhlir (12:53):
And so when you start being curious in that, you start asking the CEO and those new funders what their goals are. You should be asking in terms of temporal phases, like now through the next 12 months, 12 months to the next 36 months and 36 months plus. Because a lot of times, especially in private equity.

Kurt Uhlir (13:12):
They are planning and making investments and choices that they do want to track leading indicators, but they know they're going to write a check for things that will happen in the company that will not have a real return on investment for 36 months in a day. So when you ask questions and to be curious, it's very important to help. And a lot of times I do find it's the people teams or the marketers that can help force the CEO out of their visionary perspective or they're too operational into.

Kurt Uhlir (13:38):
let's pause and let's think about those three timeframes because you will get very different answers when you start saying, let's talk about these three timeframes and how much do you want to invest in team change or learning development? The learning development for 12 months is very different than how do we start changing the culture of a company over the next four years?

Daria Rudnik (13:55):
I love that you mentioned like bringing like CEO from visionary to more operational, because again, there is sort of like disconnect at least between HR leaders and CEOs. Sometimes you can see as they see big picture, they see long-term, they see like the visionary and they say, what do I do now? Now I have to be compliant with those regulations. Now I have those people who want something or who are engaged or disengaged. Now I need people who need to be trained.

Kurt Uhlir (14:18):
Yeah. And I mean, we all run into that problem where like I will suffer from it as well, where it's like, which time period am I talking about? And so I do find like you both have to help shape the other side of the conversation. But some cases it may be non, it may not just be verbal. Like I know physical things that people do. Like I work for a company, the SaaS based company in the United States. And not only was I running revenue and marketing, but I was also the executive coach for the CEO.

Kurt Uhlir (14:48):
Well, you cannot, you cannot like, those are different roles. And so we actually put something in place where it's like, I can have either conversation, but he wanted to go back and forth. I'm like, hold on. I literally would keep a hat next to me. And I was like, this ball cap is my, I'm now your coach like conversation. I will be your, I will work for you as your CMO when I don't have the hat on. But if you want to talk to me and get advice, I need to physically change because both of us need to know I'm sitting in a different seat in that moment.

Daria Rudnik (15:17):
I think like from my personal perspective, like being HR is like you're wearing those hats simultaneously and you don't show that. You kind of try to coach a CEO, but they don't know that you're coaching them. It's funny. Well, you mentioned AI and obviously it's a hot topic. We cannot just skip it. With AI entering workplaces, how do you see it changes the way teams work, companies work?

Kurt Uhlir (15:43):
hr should work well how it should work and how it is working is very different i'm seeing both in the news and in a lot of my master or master class groups too many companies approaching things where either they're they're not paying attention to ai at all and maybe it's in their companies they're just letting it run wild or on the other side they're like hey i can get rid of 90 of my head count in engineering or marketing or some of these roles and neither of those are the right places to be and so as opposed to thinking about ai in terms of being a force multiplier i mean the way that i'm thinking about where both people things can help shape things but the ai should be running within companies is very quickly everybody should be there's no longer going to be an individual contributor maybe you might have an office manager something's an individual contributor but for the most part everybody will be a team leader it's just are they are they leading people or are they leading a team of kind of robots like my wife jokes at me about like which robot am i talking to like we have a six-year-old knows the different voices for chad gbt versus perplexity versus claude and and even will respond slightly different between those well but because i'm i have agents or i'm just using those for different things and so that's what we're seeing even with social media managers and so it does change the people that we're hiring i mean my current cto commented on a team call i sit in because i'm a product owner for some of their work that he thinks writing code is a little bit more complicated than writing code as a software engineer almost doesn't exist right now but will not exist at all in even you know 12 months to two years but being a software architect will become the new role for everybody that used to just be in engineering because claude and these other things are writing the code for them but it's horrible code unless you know how to architect it that's what i'm seeing in terms of ai within companies right now i mean from a marketer's perspective most ceos don't realize this but it's like When I go have it write content, no matter how many restrictions I put out and what information, somewhere between 8% and 25% of the content that comes out of any of the AIs, it's not only is it like false, some case, and it is false for that percentage, some cases it's so bad from a brand perspective.

Kurt Uhlir (17:52):
I've given it guidelines and it will actually promote a competitor as opposed to us, even though I have guardrails that say not to do that. So if you think you can just replace your marketing team and have the robots write things for you, good luck with that.

Daria Rudnik (18:05):
It's like you mentioned before, like with this, like you have Fathom, you have lots of tools, you have note takers, but you still need a human to actually create the structure, to see the system and to understand what's going on and to make the decision because AI is not making decisions. Humans are making decisions.

Kurt Uhlir (18:24):
Absolutely. And I mean, and if anything, we think about outcomes and you can, I love using AI as a force multiplier to identify gaps. But how often does it just go fundamentally wrong? I've now started to screenshot things where like, you know, I come back because I tell AI, you have actually lied to me and given me, not just giving me like incorrect, but you've given me the wrong answer based on something you claimed was referenced. But when I clicked through that, it was the opposite of what you told, just told me.

Kurt Uhlir (18:53):
I started screenshotting those just because so many CEOs and other executive leaders don't believe me. And I'm like, well, you need, you need to be aware of that. You can bring in intelligence into this decision.

Daria Rudnik (19:05):
I read a report recently. I think it was an IBM report that said that less than one, less than 1% of CEOs actually see chart leaders as a support for AI transformation. Why do you think it is, like from your experience of interacting with people, leaders, HR?

Kurt Uhlir (19:25):
A lot of times CEOs, especially I find at earlier stage or that early kind of scale up stage, they may not admit this to you as the people team, but they view people team as compliance to make sure we're legally covered, but hindrances from reaching their outcomes as opposed to true counselors that are there to help them grow the company. And so there's a trust issue with there. And that's often not from the person that's sitting in front of them at the time.

Kurt Uhlir (19:52):
Post-traumatic stress disorder from previous roles, often when they were an individual contributor. And so that's a lot of it. And so I find that what's helped with that so much is when I see somebody who is truly capable on the people team that kind of acknowledges that. And they will almost counsel through to your point of not like being too open with it. They almost counsel the CEO through, here's the bad experiences a lot of people have. Maybe you've had this. But I want to have a different place to help you with that.

Kurt Uhlir (20:19):
And they're much more open for perhaps some cases getting the pushback. And so I think that's where a lot of it comes. Other cases, the CEOs, they often in an incorrect way, they do not view the people team as being technical. So they, because of that, they don't come to you all for the questions that they should have. And so, which is actually a big detriment right now, because I see, especially on mid-market companies and larger, they're going to these tools that are out there that, you know, they do all the OKR. And they do all the assessments.

Kurt Uhlir (20:47):
And it's like these companies that they're now selling to the people teams. But in fact, it's much more of an implementation operations role where I would rather it actually come from the rest of the organization and the people team helps coach that discussion. But that's not who those companies are selling to. And so, you know, I think that some of it is a lot of times the CEOs just do not view the people teams as being the technical expertise they should be. And nowadays, like, I think you almost really, like, I don't see how a people team can, you know, not be.

Kurt Uhlir (21:17):
I don't see how a people team can be. I don't know, as technical or more technical than, say, the average marketer or even a lot of times the chief product, you know, the chief product officer, because there's so much technology involved in managing teams that are 200 people or 2000 people.

Daria Rudnik (21:32):
Yeah, that's true. I mean, there's so many HR tech tools that support HR and obviously with AI, it's, yeah, it's basic. I mean, you can learn that. Like, again, using AI, you can learn some of the tech stuff. You don't have to be a developer. So, like, what would be your, what kind of message would you like to share with HR professionals so that they are seen more as business partners?

Kurt Uhlir (21:55):
You need to learn to make sure that when you're speaking, as a marketer, I'll say this, because most marketers do not know how to speak a language that their CEO or the CFO or their board will understand. So most, most CMOs are not in the boardroom or they're not board observers. And I typically get brought into those. And so I like to joke, I'm bilingual in that I speak American because I don't speak English. I speak American, but I speak marketing and I speak business.

Kurt Uhlir (22:21):
And so when I come with my marketing plan, I'm going to speak to the board and the CFO as if I am a CFO. I'm going to speak in terms of control risk and how much risk are we going to take over those timeframes that I talked about. And I'm going to speak in terms of almost an accountant, much more than a marketer. In my case in marketing, I'm never going to say, hey, I want to spend. I want to spend a million dollars on brand building. What does that mean to somebody who writes checks? As opposed to I'm going to come and say, hey, we sell to other businesses.

Kurt Uhlir (22:51):
The data says we lose 70% of the deals if we're not one of the top two or three brands within our niche. So do you want to even be at the running so that when 100 people sign up on our website, that as opposed to 70 of them just saying, I will never hire, I will never give you all money. Would you like to at least be in the running for those or much more than just the 30 that might? Consider us and they go, well, yes, of course. That sounds like a bigger available market. We could sell to him like grain.

Kurt Uhlir (23:18):
Now I'm going to spend a million dollars on and I'm still not going to say brand, but I'm say I'm building trust with those potential customers. This is the same thing. I think what people turn with the people team of learning and development, what does that mean? That's very different than how do we help to shape our teams so that we can accomplish this business outcome?

Daria Rudnik (23:37):
And I know you have a story about this lost in translation business to marketing. We'll keep the story till the end. So stay with us. We'll have a very interesting story that Kurt will tell us. And for now, I have a few rapid fire questions about you as a person. Are you ready?

Kurt Uhlir (23:52):
I am.

Daria Rudnik (23:53):
Okay. So are you a tea person or a coffee person?

Kurt Uhlir (23:57):
A coffee person in the morning, but tea most afternoons.

Daria Rudnik (24:01):
Dogs or cats?

Kurt Uhlir (24:02):
Dogs.

Daria Rudnik (24:04):
Are you a morning person or a night owl?

Kurt Uhlir (24:06):
I've made myself become a morning person.

Daria Rudnik (24:11):
Do you have kids?

Kurt Uhlir (24:13):
I do have kids. Yes.

Daria Rudnik (24:15):
Yeah. They usually make us morning people. Would you rather make a phone call or send a message?

Kurt Uhlir (24:21):
I would rather send a message, but I will usually make myself make the phone call.

Daria Rudnik (24:26):
What did you want to be when you were a kid?

Kurt Uhlir (24:29):
A biomedical surgeon. I wanted to do surgeries on amputees.

Daria Rudnik (24:34):
Wow. Where do you go when you need perspective?

Kurt Uhlir (24:38):
Into the woods on our mountain property to cut trails and trees. Love it.

Daria Rudnik (24:44):
What's one rule that you've broken and you don't regret?

Kurt Uhlir (24:48):
I have no problem completely breaking things now. So I used to be very concerned about not messing up a system in place. And now I will almost break any system if I need to.

Daria Rudnik (25:00):
Yeah, cool. If you know the system, if you can operate the system, you can break it and you can build it back. What's one habit or phrase that people... People say it's totally you.

Kurt Uhlir (25:10):
That's a big boom, baby. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So my kids will say it now because they go out in the woods with me and cut down these 50 and 70 foot trees. And so my six year old will shout that when a tree is coming down. But when we hit these big inflection point at companies, especially big revenue, revenue plateaus and work through that, usually that's something that people will say.

Daria Rudnik (25:32):
Well, thanks. Thanks so much, Kurt. I know we have a story to share, but like, again, thanks for answering the questions. Thanks for having this conversation. I really enjoy talking about how companies are moving through different stages from startup to scale up to enterprise and how is it different? Obviously, the topic of about translating business to HR, to marketing and making sure like CEO and CFO understand what's the business outcome. How people can find you, how people can connect with you.

Kurt Uhlir (26:01):
My personal website at KurtUler.com is going to be the best place. I write about a lot of the things that we're talking about right now. And if you have a question or anything. Like, hey, drop me a note. I will likely write an article about it.

Daria Rudnik (26:13):
Absolutely. And like the link to this website will be in the notes for this episode. Do you want to share something with the audience? I know something that they can use. Take them with you with them.

Kurt Uhlir (26:24):
Yeah, I'd say I have an article origin super long. It could almost be a book called The Business Case for Servant Leadership. Everybody should read it because it just gets in that concept that we talked about, about when you're hiring somebody, you're not hiring them to do a job. You're hiring them to do a business outcome. And it. Fundamentally changes how people will approach hiring, as well as how you bring somebody on board. And at this point, it's been downloaded, I think, 200,000 times in the last year alone.

Daria Rudnik (26:49):
Oh, amazing. Amazing. So the link to this is also in the notes for this episode. And now tell us, please, like, what is it? What does it mean to speak business and how that impacts performance, people's careers? What's the story?

Kurt Uhlir (27:05):
Yeah, so I think the story that jumps out most recently is I spoke to somebody recently from a chief people officer that's looking for a new CMO. And their initial reach out was kind of this job description. Do I know anybody that would fit it? They mentioned that demand generation. And for me as a marketer, I'm reading what they're saying, the rest of the details. And I'm like, this sounds like lead generation, which is a completely different thing. Lead generation is like short term, somebody getting in a funnel, filling out a contact form. Demand generation is that trust building over time that starts to grow.

Kurt Uhlir (27:35):
And so that was kind of my reply was, which are you meaning here? And rather than being curious, as we spoke about before, I basically got a justification for why their job description and who they were looking for was correct. And which is fun. Fundamentally, like if not only is it not curious, but it's the wrong approach for even hiring because the proper response should have been, well, why do you ask that question? Or how do you define these two? And instead, like, I wonder what their board is actually wanting them to do.

Kurt Uhlir (28:03):
Are they looking only for that short term, kind of very short term growth that lead generation drives? Or like, are they even aware at all about how their board or their CEO would respond about how much they're wanting to invest in short term, that medium of kind of 12 to 36 months? Or 36 months plus like for hiring for this role, like I would expect that whether it's the chief people officer or the talent, a scout that's out there that they could say, look, we're bringing in somebody. They may not put this in the thing, but we're going to spend $10 million in growth over the next year on this.

Kurt Uhlir (28:33):
And we think it's going to be 80%, 15% and 5% because that's going to detail the outcomes that you're wanting from this person. But yet nothing was curious on there. And so it's very much the way that I think most people teams show up. Both in terms of. But also in this case with candidates, they don't, they're talking in terms in this case. they're speaking French as opposed to English and they don't understand those French words at all. And so that's kind of the words that they were using. And I'm like, well, I have no idea who to refer you to because I don't know what you're actually looking for.

Kurt Uhlir (29:05):
And, or you all have not figured out the outcomes. So you're not speaking enough for me to be able to like open up my network to give you to somebody.

Daria Rudnik (29:13):
Well, thanks Gord. And that's absolutely like true. If you work for the organization, if you are a senior executive, the language that we all need to speak is business language apart from any other language that we're speaking. So thanks for sharing the story. Thanks for having this conversation. It's been a great pleasure. I really enjoyed that. Thank you so much. Hey, thank you for having me.