Kris Safarova  00:45

Welcome to the Strategy Skills podcast. I’m your host, Kris Safarova, and our podcast sponsor today is strategytraining.com if you want to strengthen your strategy skills, you can get the overall approach used in well managed strategy studies. It’s a free download we prepared for you, and you can get it at firms, consulting.com forward slash overall approach. And you can also get another download we prepared for you. It is McKinsey and BCG winning resume, which is a resume that got offers from both of those firms. And you can get it at firms consulting.com forward slash resume PDF, and today we have with us David Ewing, the innovative CEO of Motif. David’s Harvard engineering degree taught him to dive deep into technical challenges, and he focused on revolutionizing the realm of customer experience since 1998 and under his leadership, motif has earned the spot on the Inc 5000 list of America’s fastest growing companies, and in 2023 the company was also recognized as a great place to work in the US. David, welcome.

David Ewing  01:53

Kris, thank you so much for having me. It is a pleasure to be here.

Kris Safarova  01:58

A lot of achievements, congratulations.

David Ewing  02:01

Well, I’ve had a lot of support, and I’ve made a lot of mistakes along the way, so I might as well have the achievements too.

Kris Safarova  02:09

When you first started motif, what were the key decisions or actions that set the foundation for the long term success of the company?

David Ewing  02:18

Well, oddly enough, I didn’t make the decisions that set the long term success of the company. So there’s mistake number one, i i started motive out of necessity, and I really didn’t have a great plan. So really, what happened the true story is that I was 24 years old. I was living in the Bay Area. I’d been a really good tech consultant, and I just came off a failed startup, and then the.com nuclear winter hit in the middle of 2000 and and I needed to come up with with a game plan for what I needed to do to just keep paying the bills. So the first two weeks, I was late. After I was laid off, I, you know, I wrote this business plan, and I had this very exciting vision for a software company. I was going to build a middleware product, and I couldn’t get any funding. And finally, I went to all the angels that I knew I couldn’t get any funding from them. And then I went to my family, and I couldn’t get any funding from them. But ironically, I’m sitting there pitching the last person, my dad, and he’s saying, no, no, no. And he says to me, he says, you know, you’ve been a pretty good consultant. You have a lot of experience there. Why don’t you do that until this, you know, recession passes? And I looked at him and was about to say, No, when the phone rang, and it was an old colleague of mine who needed some consulting. And I just looked back at him and said, Sure, I’m available. And so I took the job, really, because they need to pay the rent and and I hired my first employee on September 10, 2001 so then 911 hit, and you know, that was the the origin. So it was a gritty, difficult start to the business. But it wasn’t until 2005 that I really had my, you know, I had four years of, you know, kind of hand to mouth, feast and famine type business before I really had a chance to step back and say, Okay, what is this really going to be about? And that’s when I really started to put the groundwork in place. But it was four years of really trial and error as a young, 24 year old consultant, and so it was until I was 28 that the game plan really started to ferment.

Kris Safarova  04:34

So what were some early moves four years into the journey, when you’ve started feeling okay, things are starting to get momentum here.

David Ewing  04:42

You know, I think by then, I had come to one essential realization, and it’s something that I think is hard to do in your 20s, and that was that no one was going to check my ego. There was nobody around. I was running things. I had some employees. I had. A little bit of success. And if you define ego as disassociating from something, disassociating from reality, right? And not paying attention to the signals around you, I had a terrible ego problem. And you know, it started with the belief that I could be successful if I just tried hard enough. And that’s not how it really works. You have to really make sure that every one of your opinions about yourself and about the forecasted outcomes you want has to be grounded in some kind of reality, and you have to be honest enough with yourself to see when that’s not occurring. And then, you know, look deep in the mirror, because you can say, I’m really going to hope that my employees will. They’ll check my ego. You know, they’ll they’ll speak up. They’re never going to speak up. You hold the power of hiring and firing over them, it’s never going to happen. So you have to find that sense of grounding in reality from other places, whether it’s self awareness or a peer group. And I used both. And that was where I started the to really start to gain some wisdom and start to realize that this company had to be bigger than just me. It had to be more than what I could just do on my own and and as a result, that was when things really started to gel. I started to listen to other people. I started to listen to my customers, and lo and behold, you know, what? They told me what they needed. And then I was, I think, fortunate enough to partner with Oracle. And, you know, really working with that big company as a small, very small entity at that point, really helped me see kind of the other end of the spectrum, and that enabled me to start putting in the disciplined business processes and that have the real open mindset to to have the ability to just comport myself and, you know, and the ego began to shrink quite a bit as I realized what a small fish I was and and that, ironically, allowed me to grow.

Kris Safarova  06:59

Would you say that partnering with Oracle was the defining moment for the company?

David Ewing  07:03

Yes, without question. And it was funny how it occurred, because even that was not something that I can take a lot of you know credit for. What happened instead was I wanted to partner with salesforce.com and I just thought it would be a good partnership for where we were. We could do some some interesting things. I called them. They were so unimpressed with me that they said, you know, they were real rude to be they have an ego problem too, I will say. And, and they said, you know, we need you like we need a hole in the head. Goodbye. And they hump the phone. And I was so angry that I just started looking around for who possibly could help me compete against them, because I just wanted revenge. I admit, I was a little off my rocker back then, and and I found Siebel systems, who was, you know, kind of trying to play catch up on the on the world of cloud computing back in 2005 and I started to go through the process of becoming one of their partners, and, you know, they were hungrier at the time because they were playing catch up. And I remember, it was a Friday in 2005 I got a phone call from the partner manager, and we’ve been negotiating back and forth. And he said, I can’t tell you why, but I all I can tell you is that if you don’t sign that agreement today, you’re never going to be able to sign it. And I knew what that meant. I knew, Oh, it’s an acquisition I didn’t know by who, so I signed my partnership, and I became the last Siebel partner ever. And therefore, on Monday, I woke up and I was an Oracle partner, but that became the defining moment, because Oracle’s approach to how they do things is very disciplined. It’s very rigorous. They have a top down strategy that’s driven by Larry Ellison, for better or for worse, but, but you know you, you line up with that, and you start to figure out how you fit in and how you can make your own unique contribution. And when we built our business around services with Oracle, quite literally, it saved us in 2008 when the financial recession hit. And all my other lines of business in one week in 2008 and you know, about November, about this time. What was that? Gosh, 16 years ago, they, they just drew dried up in one week. And we went from, you know, really fast growth to zero in every line of business. And I called my Oracle colleagues and said it explained like, Hey, if you guys can’t help me, I’m I’m done. I don’t have a game plan here. And they, you know, I think that they made about 10 phone calls, and I had five new clients and and we were back on on track. And I realized that’s the power of having a great partner, of having a great alliance, and the humility to just be transparent about how, vulnerable we were as a company, and, and they saved me and, and that was amazing. And so we, we really drafted and got serious behind Oracle. That was our third year of the partnership, and, and that’s what really allowed motive to flourish. And so, yeah, 16 years later, it’s, it’s still one of the strongest lines that we have.

Kris Safarova  09:59

Yeah. And they can see why they saw you as a good partner, because you’re very honest, and that is not something that is common. So that’s very refreshing. Thank you for doing this.

David Ewing  10:09

Am I being too honest? Kris, no, no, not

Kris Safarova  10:14

as much as you want. So when you were pitching yourself as a partner before you landed that great partnership. What you were offering that they didn’t have.

David Ewing  10:24

You know, the thing is, is that what made us so weird for Oracle was that they were used to dealing with people who came at their solutions from a very technical, very it mindset. And, you know, my background had been in strategy and marketing, and I have an engineering degree, and I love engineering, but I’ve always loved solving or identifying the problem more than solving it. So I went to Harvard engineering, and I remember we used to have this huge inferiority complex because we thought MIT engineers were just the bomb, right? And they are, they’re incredible. And we were talking to our professors about maybe we need more bench time. We need more practical hands on stuff, because it’s a lot of theory at Harvard. And I remember Professor Jones stood up and he said, you know, building the box, whatever goes inside that box to fix the problem, is very fun. It’s very exciting. But so often engineers make the mistake of thinking that the box is everything, and really it’s the problem that the box solves, that’s what’s so important. And so Harvard engineering takes a really different approach. The classic line is, is that MIT engineers are far better engineers than Harvard engineers, but they all work for Harvard engineers. And so it’s a different program. So going back to what happened with Oracle? Well, there are a lot of people who are super excited about what you can do with Oracle technology. I mean, it’s super powerful, it’s scalable, it’s highly secure, it’s fairly affordable. It’s actually far cheaper, usually than the alternatives, and you get so much more. But if you fall in love with the box, and you don’t spend time looking at what problem are you trying to solve with that box, then you’re missing things. And so when we came in, we were so excited about building dashboards and reports for CEOs and really trying to take data from all sorts of disparate parts of the organization and boil it all up and build these like, amazing templates so that, you know, my dream was the CEO would be addicted to the things that I built. So they would wake up every day, and he or she would log into a system that we built and go to our dashboard and be the first thing they would look at. And if that happened, we were doing something right, you know. And I would tell the story to Oracle engineers and all the people there, and they’d say things like, Well, yeah, but what do you use to integrate from x to y? And I was like, I don’t know. We’ll figure that out when we get there, but, you know, what about this? And so there was, at first, there’s a huge disconnect, because, you know, it was as if they were from Venus and I was from Mars, and we were not talking the same language, but, but where it snapped together for both of us was in about 2010 they called me and said, Hey, we’re doing this road show, and we want to go to seven different cities, and we want to have lunch and learns. And we were wondering if you have a customer that you could recommend that you implemented with our technology to talk at one of those events. And I said, Well, what are the seven cities? And they gave me the seven cities. The seven cities, and I looked at our customer list, and I came back to them, and I made some phone calls, and I said, Yeah, I’ve got, I’ve got seven customers. And they said, What do you mean? You have seven customers? And I said, Well, I’ve got a customer in each city. And i i they’d agree to speak to us. And they said, David, most of our partners can provide one, you know, or zero, like, they can’t provide seven. You have seven in all seven cities. I said, Yeah. So this road show suddenly became the motive and Oracle road show, with all of our customers talking about how great everything was. And that’s when we got the exposure to them, that where they said, Wow, you guys, you get the what needs to happen with this stuff, not just what does the stuff do and and that’s really when we just, we went to the next level with them. And that was really cool. That was fun,

Kris Safarova  14:11

Definitely. Well, that’s very consistent with what you already said earlier. That’s just how you operate, doing a lot and really building good relationships with people. So people are willing to go and speak at an event, which is not something that every person enjoys. Public speaking is well known to be not something that many people like,

David Ewing  14:31

You know, it’s a muscle like anything else, but you know, if you learn how to do it, I think you’re you’re better at it. And then I think, like all skills, you know, if you’re willing to be coached, you can be that much better. So it’s often very difficult. I remember the first time I had a presentation coach, and they just tore me apart and and it was difficult. And that was 15 years ago, and I was on a podcast, gosh, maybe three months ago. And afterwards, I asked the host, how’d I do, and he tore me apart. So I still have a lot. To learn so but it’s fun. It’s always fun.

Kris Safarova  15:03

But also, there are always going to be people who will find something that you need to improve. Doesn’t mean that you actually need to improve it, because those imperfections may be things that actually make you stand out and make you really enjoyable person to listen to.

David Ewing  15:15

That’s right, that’s right, yep.

Kris Safarova  15:18

So could you speak a little more about how the types of services you offer, the work you did for clients, changed once you became a partner of Oracle.

David Ewing  15:29

Yeah, well, you know, there’s being a partner with Oracle did fulfill two lifelong dreams for me. So, two quick stories. One story was when I was in college. I i pulled an all nighter in computer science, you know. And I don’t remember what the assignment was, but I was 730 or eight o’clock in the morning. I’d been we didn’t have Red Bull back then, so I was, you know, totally taking no dose, which is not as much fun as Red Bull. And I was staggering out of the science lab, and my CSTA came over, and she said, Hey, have you, would you like to meet Larry Ellison? And I said, I have no idea who that is, and I’m completely, you know, out of my mind. And she said, Come on, you can do this. And she dragged me into the science center, and there Larry Ellison was, you know, giving a talk called the network is the computer. And essentially he was talking about the early days of having disparate decentralized things, you know, that in the old client server model coming together into kind of a thin terminals and a client. So essentially it was, it was probably the precursor to cloud computing. And I thought he was such a interesting and passionate guy. And what really got my respect was when he went to the Q and A after his diatribe. And he was pretty passionate. Some of the graduate students started asking very difficult CS questions about databases, and about Oracle databases in particular. And he could absolutely go toe to toe with all of them, and he knew his products inside and out. And I thought, Wow, this, this is a super impressive person. So anyway, so it was a lifelong dream to become an Oracle partner. That was one thing, but, but the customer experience is the area of that we really specialize in at motive, and the reason we specialize in it is because of another story that was happened to me, and that is when I graduated from college, I did what everybody does, right? I bought a Euro rail pass, and I went to Europe to go on, you know, my backpacking trip. I went by myself, and when I got to the airport in Detroit, which is where I was born and raised, my flight to New Jersey had been canceled due to a mechanical problem, which meant I was missing my flight from New Jersey to Charles de Gaulle. And that was it. It was the year of the World Cup. It was 1998 World Cup was going on in Paris, and there were no more flights. That was it. And so I remember just giving this sob story to the to the flight agent, you know, at the gate or at the desk, and I was like, you know, this is the biggest trip of my life, and I’m just getting started, and all this, you know, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, she listened, and she said, You know what, there’s no flights for three weeks, but I’m going to put you in first class, and I’m going to get you to Charles de Gaulle. You’re going to France. And I just, I was so thankful. I was so amazed, you know, and they deserve the recognition. It was Continental Airlines. They’re unfortunately not around anymore. But I was like, continental is the greatest airlines of all time. I love these people. And then I fly to New Jersey, and then I get on the plane to Charles de Gaulle. And I don’t know what happened to the that woman, but there was another woman who was the flight attendant on that flight, and she came and found me, and she said, Sir, we’re not in the habit of taking, you know, unemployed ex college students and putting them in first class. I don’t know how you got here, but you don’t belong here. And then she stormed off at a huff. And I thought, What was that for? Like, did that help Continental? I was about to become a continental customer for life, forever. And you you know, with that unnecessary speech, which didn’t change the cost structure for Continental or do anything beneficial for them, you know, she almost wrecked it and and I just realized that’s the power of customer experience. You know, those two things, those are two choices that two people made, one that led to a lifetime customer, and one that absolutely shamed someone and made them feel terrible, and and we’ve all had that experience, you know? We’ve all done that. And so what I’ve always wanted to do in customer experience is bring the autonomy and the magic and the systems so that you could create those moments of wonder, so that you could create customers who wanted to stay with your company forever, who would go out of their way to find ways to give you an excuse to do business with them, you know, and and it to do that. Yes, you sometimes you can give someone a free ticket to Paris. That always works, but, but better than that is when you have systems where you can do things that don’t cost the company a lot of money, but. They they bring that wonder and that joy. And if you can do that with discipline and systems and data, which we have so much in abundance now, then that’s the magic. And so Oracle customer experience products are scalable and allow you to bring that wonder to not just one person, but, you know, to 1000s of people all at the same time, if you do it right? And that’s that’s really where we come in, and that’s what makes a lot of fun.

Kris Safarova  20:25

What was the most difficult as you were growing the company, the company was doing really well now, with all the changes and this new, exciting partner,

David Ewing  20:32

The most difficult thing that I’ve ever had to get over? Uh, there’s a story for that too. So boy, Kris, you’re pulling him out of me tonight. I have always had a very negative, very critical voice in the back of my mind, constantly whispering, not whispering literally me or I’m not crazy, but constantly telling me about all the things that are wrong, right? What’s not good enough, what’s not smart enough? What’s gonna go wrong? Constant, constant, constant, and, and the thing is, is that there’s a good it’s good to think about and anticipate negative outcomes so that you can be prepared for them, and you can, you know, avoid them from happening, or be prepared when they do. But, but that voice robbed me of my joy. And so, you know, while it’s important to strive for, you know, we just talked about that perfection, you know, you can strive for perfection, but you have to find excellence along the way. And that voice was crushing me. So what happened was, I am, I was at a talk a couple of years ago with the Entrepreneurs Organization in Miami, Florida, and they had this woman named Molly bloom on the on the call. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen Molly’s game. It was this big movie that came out about five years ago. It’s about how this woman, who is an Olympic athlete, and she was a skier, slipped on this small, random twig that had been in there. She came out of her ski, she broke her back, and her Olympic dreams were over, and she tried to make a comeback, but she couldn’t quite get there. And then she wound up to go, you know, create this illegal poker game, and became the world’s biggest poker game. So that’s what the movie’s mostly about. Very great movie, if you haven’t seen Molly’s game, but Molly was there. And so the question I asked her is, I said, Molly, after you slipped in the snow and you broke your back, you tried to make a comeback. How the heck did you get into the skis again? I mean, that’s crazy to me, like that. You would even have the courage to do that. And she said, you know, it was very difficult. And her dad, who’s a psychologist, was her, her main coach. And she said, when I got back into the skis, I would tell my dad, I’ve got this voice in my head, and it’s just telling me, I’m going to slip again, I’m going to I’m going to do it again, I’m going to break my back again. And his response to her is the game changer for me. He said, It’s okay if that voice is in your head, but what you have to do is you have to talk back to it. And talking to voices in your head does sound really crazy, but I have found that every night, when I go to meditate before I go to bed, that voice is there talking about all the things that didn’t go as well as I wanted them to, and I have to talk back to it, and when I do, I can get to some place in the middle where I’m being honest and rational about what’s happening in my life, but I’m not letting it ruin and rob me of my joy. And growing this company has been a constant struggle, and and pushing the envelope and trying to do more and trying to solve the next problem, trying to put the right process in place, trying to find those great people, find that next great customer, and and over and over again, but, but I didn’t have joy for like, seven years, because it just that I got robbed and that that made me change, change the game for me, and I’m a much happier person.

Kris Safarova  23:47

This is a very powerful advice, and thank you for sharing it. And many of us have this voice, and often with these things that we were told when we were a child, and it just keeps on repeating and became our voice over time. So I agree we should talk back to it or ignore it or tell it to stop talking. So you mentioned meditation. Are you using specific type of meditation? Did you try different things and you found something that works best?

David Ewing  24:14

I did. I so first off, I did what any consultant would do, and that is, I hired a consultant to help me meditate. Gotta practice what you preach, you know. And so, yeah, I had this wonderful woman come in and just simply teach me how to meditate, which turns out, you know, I was super glad for the consulting advice. But you anybody can do this. And so I practice two kinds. The first kind is just pure stillness, and just focus on my breath. And do that every day, and I try to put it into a habit stack. So usually I work out from about six to 7am and right after that, I stretch, and then right after that, I meditate, and that sets my tone for my day. And I like that. That’s just a quick stillness meditation. But you know. I’ve tried to do some Transcendental Meditation, which is really nothing more than just having a nonsensical word that you say, until you know, some really bad thought comes into your mind, and then you sort of just have this imagination of it just being in a balloon and floating away. And I’ve done that too, and Transcendental Meditation has been really great. I often do that on long airplane flights. So I was on a flight to Serbia two weeks ago, and and there was a person in the row next to me. I’ll never forget this. There’s a little old lady sitting in front of him, and she wanted to put her seat back. And he refused. He kept jamming her seat forward, and he and I had words, and we were all upset, and everybody comes very awkward. And I’m like, great, we’re gonna be sitting here for 12 hours, you know, like, and, and I just went into a transcendental meditation after we got all that done, and I was able to let go and just not sit there and be fuming mad at him. I don’t know, I think he was fuming that at me, but, you know, I thought I was on the right side of that one let the little old lady sleep. So anyway, that was that was pretty handy.

Kris Safarova  26:02

How long do you do meditation for?

David Ewing  26:06

You know, I have dreams and goals of doing really long ones, but I’ve done like a one hour meditation, like once or twice, half hour meditations I can do pretty you know, like once a week. I’ll do that, but at the very least sometimes I like to just do between five and 10 minutes, and I feel like that That’s enough most days, that’s enough to kind of help you clear and stay still.

Kris Safarova  26:31

Thank you for sharing. Meditation is very powerful, and this surprising how many people do meditation but never talk about it, and so other leaders are not doing it because they don’t realize how common it is for people who really keep things together and grounded and feel peaceful and calm and centered and have a good perspective. So I’m glad that you mentioned it. Thank you for leaders who are listening to us now, let’s say it’s someone who’s a Partner at a consulting firm or a senior person within a tech company, and they thinking, You know what, I want to start my own business. That’s it. Now I’m listening to this. This is so exciting. David was able to do it. I can do it, though. So what do you think it takes to succeed as an entrepreneur?

David Ewing  27:14

Oh, boy. I would say more than anything it takes a willingness to fail. That’s more than anything else, you’re gonna pick up the skills that you need. And you know, I belong to the Entrepreneurs Organization, and we have a one of the core values is Be bold. And what does that mean? And to us, the way we define it is the willingness to bet on your own abilities. That’s what Boldness is. And so Boldness is not about ego. Boldness is not about taking crazy chances. In fact, I think the best entrepreneurs take few chances. They don’t take big risks. And I think that’s the biggest misconception. People think an entrepreneur rolls the Dyson as a riverboat gambler. Quite the opposite. So if someone’s feeling uncomfortable with risk, I’d say, embrace that. If that’s great. Figure out you know where you have real confidence based on fact and and be bold and and bet on your own abilities. You’re going to learn the things you need to learn, but that’s the thing that you need to get comfortable with, and you have to be willing to fail, because you absolutely will. There’s no such thing as an entrepreneur who goes out and was right about the market and was right about the price point and was right about the operations and knew exactly how much money they need. I mean, if that was the case, like everybody would do this and and that’s not the case. So, so you will make mistakes on all of those things. If you can still have your joy while you do it, you should. And I remember the reason I became an entrepreneur. It actually comes down to one moment my life. It wasn’t because my parents were entrepreneurs, because they were that never did anything for me, but I was riding to school with a friend’s dad, and this friend was his dad was an engineer for, I think, General Motors back in Detroit, and he asked me what I wanted to do, and I said, I didn’t know. And he said, you know, do you get good grades? I said, Yes, sir, I do. And he said, You know what? If you get good grades, you should go work for yourself, because you’ll be you’re always better off working for yourself. But it wasn’t that advice that he gave me, it was the longing in his voice like he hadn’t done it. And I could feel the regret in this man’s demeanor as he was going to work and he wasn’t happy about the job that he did. And I didn’t know him particularly well, and I didn’t know the friend who gave me a ride that day very well, but I just I’ll never forget that regret, and that was what made me an entrepreneur, because I never wanted to feel like that and and so, you know, yeah, I’ve been there and bounced checks all over town and all kinds of embarrassing things and failed, but I had not, I’ve not had to have that feeling of longing. And. And I’m super grateful for that.

Kris Safarova  30:02

And you also noticed it, because many people would not notice, but you noticed it.

David Ewing  30:07

It was pretty clear it was. It almost was like tearfully sad and awkward

Kris Safarova  30:16

for someone who is thinking about starting a business but they’re not sure what to focus on, what problem they should solve, what they should do, what would be your advice?

David Ewing  30:27

Some businesses can start small. Some can’t. But I think no matter what, there’s always a way to to try something, even if it’s just through test conversations, until you get right. And in fact, just yesterday, I heard a talk by Ryan Holiday. And for people who don’t know Ryan Holiday, he’s a great author. He’s really well known. He writes a lot about ancient philosophy and how it applies to modern day life, but at one point that he wasn’t known for that, he was known for writing marketing books, and he went to his publicist and said, I have this idea. And the publicist said, you are going to be committing career suicide if you switch and start writing about Marcus Aurelius and meditations like, that’s bananas. And what was really interesting, what I learned yesterday was it’s not that he just went off on his own and was like, forget you. I’m going to do what I want. Like he didn’t do that. He instead, he took a much more disciplined approach, where he constantly talked to the people he knew through his marketing books and tested out concepts until he found the right one. And, you know, he was telling this great story about how he wanted to write a book about ego and how ego can be such a problem, and what is ego versus confidence and the difference, and he couldn’t come up with the right title. And he said he was talking to an NFL football coach, and he was telling him, you know, this is what I want to do, and I don’t know exactly how to do it. And he’s like, I want to write a book about ego, though. And the coach said, Oh yeah, Ego is the Enemy. And he was like, That’s it. That’s how I write the book. And he realized at that moment, the title of the book is, Ego is the Enemy. It’s where you got the title and and it made me realize you can always test your concepts low risk and then bring the risk up. And again, going back to what I said earlier, entrepreneurs about taking risk out of a situation, not not just going for it. And so if you’re thinking about starting a business, find a way to test the concept virtually or with friends, or, you know, simply call up people who are potential customers, or find a way to get in front of them. But doing that kind of primary research will eventually give you the things to do. And then, you know, like I said, some businesses you can start small. Some of them you can’t start small. But when even a big one, you can do, you can you can test on it. And, you know, my sister is a great example of that. My sister runs a company called literati. It’s a really wonderful business, and they they send books to kids and that you can pick which books you like and put the rest in the box and ship them back, and she’s got better prices. And then Amazon and the book curation is awesome, but she that was not her original idea. You know, before she went to venture capital and raised all this money, she had all these other ideas, and they all were terrible. But fortunately, she didn’t put all the money into them and kept honing and trying and testing different things in small scale, so that by time she went to venture capital and got the revenue to scale up and do this big thing, you know, she knew exactly what she wanted to do, and I think that was why she was so successful.

Kris Safarova  33:24

What are your thoughts on building a smaller business that you own 100% versus going for something bigger, but then you have investors?

David Ewing  33:33

I am a big believer in smaller and 100% I think that there’s a place for investors. I like Angel investors a lot, and I like having relationships there, but I will tell you, and it probably is going to ruin me one day when somebody digs out this interview, but I’m going to go on record and say that I don’t think that the bigger investments have the right focus and priorities. So I don’t like private equity, that’s probably going to kill me one day. But yes, I don’t like private equity, and I don’t like private equity for all the reasons that they have to do with customer experience. I think that when private equity comes in, they’re looking for that three to five year exit. They’re looking to load up your company with debt. They want asymmetrical gains for themselves. They’re not your partner and and I think that can really lead to a lot of bad choices. And I think who suffers the most it well, the entrepreneur suffers a lot. But even worse than the entrepreneur is what happens to the customer. Because, you know, oftentimes the prices go immediately up, or there’s massive shrink flation in the offering where, like the best parts of it, are scooped out, and it doesn’t show right away, but it catches up with them over time. I mean, you can almost always see a company that’s been bought by private equity, and you can watch the deterioration of their reviews. You can watch the deterioration of their things long before their revenue falls off and. Yeah, but the nice thing is, is that if you’re an entrepreneur, there’s some there’s always a other side of that coin, which is there’s gonna be a new market opportunity there, because that which used to be unassailable and amazing and dominant is now vulnerable and soft and, you know, and and upsetting customers, and that’s where you can win. And so I like to play the other half of that game where I’m taking business from those guys as opposed to working with them.

Kris Safarova  35:25

That is true. In that situation, you have customers who would gladly pay more to a competitor, yeah, because they’re so upset,

David Ewing  35:33

Yeah, yeah. And that gets back to this idea that, you know, and this is something that I remember when I was eight years old, my dad took me to go buy a bicycle, and there were three bikes on the rack, and one of them was just the best bike in the shop. But I didn’t like that bike, and I admit this now, but when I was eight years old, the bike I wanted was overpriced, and it had this really cool like, like, tinted clear chain guard. And I don’t know why is it that was the coolest thing. And so I tried all three bikes, and my dad was like, You sure you don’t want this other one? It’s high perform. It’s really great. I’m like, No, I want this one. And what I realized later on, when someone explained it to me, is we are emotional beings. We have, we get an emotion, and then we justify everything after the fact with like logic. You know, we like almost curve fit the logic to fit the emotion. And that’s why customer experience is so important. Because if you can make people love you, if you can make them love your product, and they trust you, and they, you know, stand by you, then they will constantly do business with you. And where you can point to the dollars and cents on that is lifetime value. It means every time you win a customer, instead of getting, maybe, you know, the average, you know, repeat orders three times, you can get to six repeat orders on average. Or, you know, they’ll subscribe for five years, not two years. And when you start doing the math on what the net present value is of customers who are who are worth two or three times as much as what you have now, customer experience easily pays for itself and and that’s what really can bring the that magic to a business. So, yeah, I love that.

Kris Safarova  37:10

What can businesses do better in serving customers? So for our listeners now who are running their own business, or they are part of a business where they have relatively senior position and they can influence how customers are treated. What would be your advice?

David Ewing  37:24

So I’m a big believer in start, stop, continue. It’s a nice tool. So I’ll give everybody one thing to start doing, one thing to stop doing, and one thing to continue doing. So I would say start doing primary interviews yourself. No matter what level of company we’ve all heard about these great companies where CEOs of airlines like, you know, they’ll work a flight be a flight attendant, or they’ll answer phones at, you know, Zappos, or they’ll do something like that. Everybody can talk to customers. There’s nobody who should have a monopoly on that, and that should not always just be delegated to a market research firm. So start talking to customers, no matter if you’re the senior executive, a mid tier executive, or you’re just an ambitious junior executive, talk to them the lingo and the insights will be there. And eventually you will find a pattern. Not everything has to be statistically significant, and you’ll you’ll learn a lot. So that’s the start. The stop is stop thinking that a pep talk is going to fix your problems. You can’t pep talk to the customer service team or the sales team and get anything other than something that lasts to the end of the day. Because Does anybody remember the pep talk they got last week? Can you remember a pep talk you got last week? I’m sure we all got one, but I don’t remember it. And so so stop doing that. Instead, focus on disciplined systems and processes that you can scale that will give people latitude. I’m not saying that the process has to be super rigid so that people don’t have choices. I’m saying quite the opposite. I’m saying make a process and be deliberate about what choices you’re going to push all the way to the people who are closest to customers, but give them latitude that you can control, and then when they have choice, you’re gonna find that that pep talk was totally unnecessary, because when they can make choices about what they’re doing with the customers, they’re gonna be more control. They’ll be more assertive, more confident, and it’ll come through in your customer experience in terms of continue, though, I would say that every there’s not a firm out there who says, You know what I’m going to do, I’m today, I’m going to wake up and I’m going to screw my customers. Nobody says that. You know, we all do it on accident all the time, right? Because of a mistake that was made or something else, but, but I really believe there’s nobody does it. So keep, keep that intent in mind, and recognize that your intention to do good by your customers is not the same thing as the impact of doing good by your customers. Those are two different things, but continue to have that in your heart and continue to want that and you’ll figure the rest of it out.

Kris Safarova  39:56

Over the last few years, can you recall some aha moments? Realizations, maybe two, three you could share that really changed the way you look at life, or the way you look at business.

David Ewing  40:07

Well, I think we’ve gone through a couple, but let me think about some aha moments. You know, I think that in the last year, one of the ahas that I had came from a mentor of mine, and she is a lawyer, and she said the person with the piece of paper wins. And I thought it was kind of a funny little mantra, but the more I’ve been thinking about it, the more I realized that it’s true of so many things in life. For example, you know, we all probably have some kind of knowledge wiki for our company, but very few of us have turned it into this gold mine. That’s just amazing. And I heard what you said, and then I looked at our internal wiki and our knowledge management tools. And I realized, you know what? This needs an upgrade. This is static, and the material in here is not that helpful. It was great three years ago, but the world’s moved on, and we don’t have systems to make sure that that material stays current. So, you know, going back, the person with the piece of paper wins. The our piece of paper is our processes that are written in there, and we just needed to massively upgrade that so free plugin for something that I don’t get any commission for but, but notion was the tool that just made our team super excited to document and refresh and continue to document content. And I have to say, it seemed at first, when I looked at it, that it that it was exactly the same as our old, antiquated system, which I will not name but, but it just, it just wasn’t and I realized, wait a minute, I should be eating my own dog food. Look at what they’ve done. Notion has made people love to enter their knowledge management materials, and they do it now. And the old system was had the same buttons, it had the same functions, you could do the same things, but it didn’t feel the same. And that user experience is all the difference that you need. And so, you know, it’s a testament to user experience, and really the fact that they’ve nailed it, and that made the piece of paper that wins. I think, I think that’s it. So, so that was, that’s kind of been a big one that I’ve seen lately. The other one that I feel like that I’ve had a big aha, is the importance of training. And, you know, we’ve all had learning management systems, but how many of us have just wanted to hit the easy button on learning management systems and say, You know what I’m going to do? I’m just gonna, I’m gonna buy this learning management system. It comes with library of content, and I’m just gonna import that content, throw my logo on it, send it out to my employees and call it done. And aren’t I smart for, like, putting an LMS out there? That’s good, good. And the answer is Nope. That’s a total fail. Because now everybody is, you know, turning on the LMS because they know they’re being monitored, and then they go get coffee or make a sandwich or whatever they do, and then come back and go to the next lesson, because they’re so dry and so non relevant that the learning management system is just trash, right? And so and then, of course, the questions are all nitpicky little questions that sound like you’re at the DMV. That’s a fail too. So I especially at motive, where we have to have fantastic training. I just realized it’s not something I can delegate. When I look at the things that are going to be high impact, I’ve got to do some of this myself, and I’ve got to make sure that the material is the most current, the most useful, the most relevant for the team based on all of the different years of experience that we have from our people, but then it’s got to be packaged and delivered in a way that makes people want to stay there. It’s got to be entertaining. It’s got to be short. It’s got to be brief. And if we can do that, then we can have LMS materials that will last for hopefully, they have a 36 month or a 48 month shelf life before we have to update them and record them, but they’ll, they’ll actually have a difference in the business. And so that’s, uh, that’s been a big aha. So I think that’s too Kris, that’s what all I’ve got for you right now.

Kris Safarova  44:09

Yes, that is great, but it’s very helpful. I also wanted to ask you about time management. So you have a lot on your plate, and you managed to steal the meditation and work out and other things. Just before we started recording, we were talking about an event you attended, so you have time for important things in your life. What advice would you give to someone who haven’t yet found a good system to use?

David Ewing  44:33

Well, I think that I thank you for the compliment, but, but let me just say, I think I struggle with that like everyone else, and let me tell you what my latest Thought is on that. So I recently finished being a volunteer president of the entrepreneurs organization I was I was doing that for a year. It’s a full, full commitment. It’s at least 10 hours a week, oftentimes 20, and I still had to run my company. So getting into that year, what I did. As I met with my executive team, talked to them about why I wanted to do this. It’s very important to me to both give back, but also I was excited for all the learning and opportunity that came with it, and so I really got the help from my team in that first year to do both of those things. But I will say that I don’t think my time management was an A plus that year. I think I struggled with it, and then when that year ended, I I wanted to start a second company. And so now we have a new company called Content lion, and it’s very exciting, and it’s, it’s, it’s complimentary and emotive, and it’s very cool. But I realized, gosh, I’m going to be the CEO of two companies now. It’s sort of been a CEO of two companies before. What can I do differently? And and while I was kind of off on a vacation with my son, I sat down for a couple hours and got kind of my thoughts together, and I realized that the key to the whole problem is the schedule and communication of the schedule. So so really now what I do is I get up at 530 every morning, but only because I forced myself to go to bed at nine o’clock the night before. So head on the pillow at nine, up at 530 and I give myself the first 30 minutes of the day to do whatever I want. Because some for some reason, if I have to get up and go for a run or do something that just fills me with like I’m going to bed, I’m hitting the snooze button. So if I can get up and just do whatever I want for 30 minutes, then I just pop out of bed, and so get up at 530 great six o’clock, that’s when I buckle down and do a workout, and I work out from six to seven. Seven o’clock, I’ve got an hour to eat, to think, to meditate, to stretch, to write. And then eight o’clock, the day begins, and it’s four hours with one of my companies, followed by one hour of catch up time to eat and, you know, rest, relax, and then four hours with the other company. And I’ve just had to communicate to both of my teams like, these are the four hours when I’m available for each of these things. And so by five o’clock, you know, the both of those commitments are done, and now I’ve got more freedom in my schedule between five and nine to, you know, be a family man, to catch up on something if I need to to, you know, do whatever is there. And so that, you know, by engineering the schedule that way, I’m able to keep a steady pace. I’m able to be more consistent and, and I found that that that’s been the key so that that’s really what’s allowed me to do that is I’ve just defined it. I think that’ll last for a while, and probably, you know, in another three to six months, I’ll reevaluate that, decide what I need to change and how I need to optimize it. But it seems like if I don’t make any sudden moves, then everybody knows when they can count on me.

Kris Safarova  47:32

David, and what do you do on the weekends? Do you give yourself a break? What do you also work?

David Ewing  47:37

I don’t work on the same things because I do believe that ghost leads to burnout. I spend a lot of time with my daughter. I have two kids, one is already in college, and boy was that a wake up call. I mean, we had a great time. I didn’t lose that time with him, but in fact, I was his robotics coach for years, which took was another job, but when he left, boy, did that make me have a big hole in my life and in my heart, and just realized that an era was over, and there are these really depressing statistics, like, when your kid leaves for college, that’s 80% of the life time that you’re going to have with them. And you know? And I was like, holy smokes. And so anyway, I figured out some plans to make sure that doesn’t happen, but I still have a daughter at home and and I have her at home for, you know, 27 more months, and boy, I am not gonna let any of that time pass. And so it’s really important to me to just squeeze every moment that I can and savor it without making her crazy, because she’s also 15, and I get it the old man’s not the coolest guy in the world, but, um, but. But if I can just make sure that I’m doing things that she’s interested in, and that we’re connecting together, then I’m a really happy guy, and so I do that’s my number one weekend priority.

Kris Safarova  48:53

I think you are quite cool.

David Ewing  48:56

Thanks, Kris, you’re all right yourself,

Kris Safarova  49:00

and you wanted me to ask, and they didn’t anything else you wanted to share.

David Ewing  49:03

You know, I, I just came from this two day conference, so I’m all pepped up on all these different ideas and things. And so there’s just a couple of things in there that I thought were, were really great. So the the conference, by the way, the entrepreneurs organization, to me, is the secret superpower behind everything, because everyone who runs a business has three things that they’re always going to be struggling with right there. They’re going to be struggling with the business itself. That’s number one. So you know the making sure that all that stuff goes correctly, but that’s only 1/3 of the problems, right? The second third is how you balance the crazy stress of running that business with being a spouse or a parent and not letting your kids and your your spouse suffer. And so there’s a whole second category of problems about how to make that work. And funny enough, there was the CEO of Bell Helicopter. Was, was at this event, and she said that there’s no such thing as work life balance. Like, that’s ridiculous. Like, there you can’t keep them in balance. There’s always going to be out of balance. But what you can have is work life integration, which is, you know, you can work one day and you know, it’s a crisis day or a deadline day, and you’re going to just tell your family, you know, today is not the day for me to be here. Like I will not show up today, because I have to just crush something at work. But as long as you can be fully present at work, do the thing, then when it’s time to go, be fully present with the family and say, now it’s family time, I’m drawing the boundary around this, then you can do that too. And so work life integration was her point. I thought it was an excellent point. But getting back to Entrepreneurs Organization, there’s the three things. So you got the family, and then the third thing is you got all sorts of problems in your own head. And funny enough, as an entrepreneur, with all the anxieties and stresses and sometimes the inability to talk to people about your problems, most entrepreneurs get in their own way more than any other problem they have, and an Entrepreneurs Organization has cracked the code on how to help you deal with all three problems and to build your toolkit for all of those. So anyways, EO had the their big, you know, conference where they brought in all these great speakers and and that was just, just a wonderful two day event. So I think that, yeah, if someone is out there and they’re they’re working on a business, and they feel like they they can’t talk to their best friend anymore about the high highs and the low lows. They can’t talk to their spouse, because it’s going to freak that spouse out. They can’t obviously, they just are running out of people to talk to about their problems. Entrepreneurs. Organization is for you, my friend, it is the place to go to to try and make that happen. And I think that’s been the secret superpower of my life, and it’s definitely helped me change and adapt and grow through all the crazy times.

Kris Safarova  51:54

David, thank you so much for your honesty, for how generous you are with your advice, for the work you’re doing in the world, for how much you care about people. I really appreciate you, and I really enjoyed our conversation.

David Ewing  52:07

Well, thanks, Kris, it’s been a pleasure to be on your show.

Kris Safarova  52:08

Our guest today, again has been David Ewing. And our podcast sponsor today is strategy training.com if you want to strengthen your strategy skills, you can get the overall approach, Houston well managed strategy studies. It’s a free download, and you can get it at firms consulting.com forward slash overall approach. And you can also get McKinsey and BCG Binion resume, which is resume that got offers from both of those firms. And you can get it at firms consulting.com forward slash resume PDF. Thank you everyone for tuning in, and I look forward to connect with you all next time.