[00:00:15] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Hello and welcome to Lessons from the Leap. I’m your host, Ghazenfer Mansoor. On this show, I get to sit down with entrepreneurs, founders, business leaders who talk about bold decisions, pivotal moments and innovative ideas that shaped their journeys. This episode is brought to you by Technology Rivers. If you wanna learn more about Technology Rivers, head over to technology rivers.com and tell us more about your product. 

Today on Lessons a Leap, we have David Ewing, CEO of Motive and Content Lion. I’ll let David introduce himself and share more about his background. What he has been up to since to date.

[00:00:56] David Ewing: Thanks Ghazenfer it’s great to be here and I am currently a dual CEO and a podcaster myself. So I have a tech enabled services company called Motive, and our goal there is to drive customer lifetime value by building growth engineering systems that bring together people, process and technology in ways that help customers delight their customers. Our other company is Content Lion. So I’m excited to take the leap with you today, man. So we’re gonna do a lion’s leap and Content Lion is a place that protects and shares the world’s content.

So anybody who’s trying to centralize all that digital stuff, whether it be sensitive HR documents or payroll and finance or marketing stuff that they wanna publish and post directly to social media, as well as handle all of their digital experiences. So all of their sites and mobile apps, we do it all with Content Lion.

So I do both of those things. I’m also the host of Content Kingdom which is a podcast focused on content and and so that all that stuff keeps me busy when I’m not doing those things. I am a big Z member of the Entrepreneurs Organization, which is how I met you and then I also have a son and a daughter and I manage to get into a lot of trouble with them from time to time as well. So that’s me in a nutshell and I’m super excited to be here.

[00:02:21] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Great to have you on the show. So you often said that changing customer attitudes lead to ideal behaviors. Can you unpack that philosophy for us and how it’s guided to motive success?

[00:02:35] David Ewing: Sure. I think I can use maybe an example of something that could have happened to all of us. Right? So imagine you’re at the dreaded airline, you’re at the gate, right? And you’re trying to go home. You’re tired. It’s Thursday night, you just want to be home, right? And the gate agent comes on and says, Hey sorry, bad news. You know, fill in the blank the reason we’re not taking off for a couple of hours, Right. 

And you’re just like in a terrible moment. So what’s your attitude at that moment? Your attitude is stupid airlines, they didn’t do it right again, it’s whatever the problem is. I’m mad at the agent, I’m mad at life, I’m mad at whatever, ’cause I’m tired. Right and what’s your behavior? Usually behavior is to whine and grope and complain and what not.

But in this story of ours imagine that you suddenly look over and sitting in one of the seats at the, also at the gate is your favorite author. It doesn’t matter who, Stephen King, I don’t know, whatever and all of a sudden your favorite author’s there, right? And you’re like, oh my gosh, I get to hang out with my favorite author and he can’t go anywhere and I can’t go anywhere or she or whomever.

And now this has turned into this amazing thing and what happens to your behavior? Well, you know, you’re not so mad at the airline. You’re actually feeling really great right now. That’s an example of a serendipitous. The airline didn’t shape that. They didn’t do that but any negative situation can be turned to a positive situation and so in business there is a customer journey that every customer has as they go through life with you and the beautiful thing about life is that all of us are actually quite simple, right? We get hungry and we get hangry, we get tired, and, you know, we get cranky, right?

We like when people compliment us and you know, we’re upset when they insult us and so the thing is that as a business. You don’t have to take leaps to really turn someone’s situation around when there is a negative moment that matters. If you have systems in place to be able to handle them, then you are going to be much better off.

You’re gonna take care of your customer and you’re gonna turn negatives into positives and so that’s a really big idea about attitudes and how attitudes change behaviors. So if you can change a customer’s attitude at any moment in your process, then you can change the behavior and once you can change the behavior, you can shape the outcome and you can have a much better experience with that customer.

And that results in them buying again, buying more stuff, telling their friends so you can get more customers, all the things that you wanna have happen but you have to really understand the customer’s journey.

[00:05:16] Ghazenfer Mansoor: That’s a really good point. Knowing the customer makes a huge difference and we all buy based on the behaviors.

We’re all humans. So my favorite book, one of my favorite books is from Dale Carnegie, how to win Friends and Influence Others. So, talk about it all the time about how your personal behavior, how you talk, makes a huge difference. So while we’re on this,

[00:05:45] David Ewing: I’m kidding

[00:05:47] Ghazenfer Mansoor: While we’re on it, what was the most difficult moment in the company’s growth?

Like, obviously you were saying like the natural behaviors are different, so I’m sure along the way you had this company for a long time, so along the way you have seen a lot. So is there anything you can share for our listeners and what lessons you learned from there?

[00:06:15] David Ewing: Okay, so thinking about it, I have two companies. One company’s been around for almost 25 years. The other company’s been around for about 25 months, so very different companies and I will say that in the growth of the older company motive, the services company we’ve had some colossal failures, really bad, embarrassing, awful stuff, right? 

One time and I won’t get into the specifics so that I cannot be named, but we accidentally triggered a bug that wound up sending text messages to people about bills that they had paid a long time ago and we sent a lot of ’em, and it was super humiliating and embarrassing and it was horrible for the customer, right?

But we wound up keeping that client and believe it or not, the reason we kept that client is because of a couple things. First, obviously we fixed the problem. Second,  you know, we made it right, you know, I had said to this customer because it was a B2C company. I said, here’s what we’ll do.

We’ll go to the top 10 people who got annoyed by this the most and I, you guys can shoot a video of me knocking on their door with huge gift bags of stuff saying, I’m really sorry. I’m the guy who caused this problem? really embarrassed by it, and I just brought kind of a whole bunch of gifts for you to choose from so that we can say we’re sorry.

And I offered to do that. I put it in writing in an email and so, you know, if they wanted to sue me for anything they could, they had everything right there and I, you know, would’ve had to settle up. Here’s the funny thing, they decided not even to do that, they just thought that the mirror idea that I was willing to do that for them to make it right was good enough.

And that was how, that was probably the most embarrassing, most difficult, horrible thing that I did in my company and you know, as an entrepreneur, sometimes you are going to do things and make mistakes and they’re gonna make a lot of people angry and all you can do is make it right, you know?

And I think that that was an example of how that happened. So that was an example of kind of like personal accountability and how my company made things right, but an example of like another moment where someone is incredibly sad and they flipped it around is an example I hear all the time, and actually this is there’s a guy in my team who put this system in place.

If you’ve ever heard of the pet company, chewy. You know, they send pet food through the mail, right? And they have the data in their systems to know if your pet is a really elderly pet, right? You buy the special food for, you know, old Yeller and feed ’em the old dog food. Well, one day that order gets canceled.

What does that mean? Well, we all know what that means, right? That’s the end of Old Yeller and so what does Chewy do? Well, Chewy takes the time to thoughtfully send flowers and a handwritten card to say we’re very sorry that old yellers no longer here and that is taking a moment that matters.

Obviously an extremely negative moment in someone’s life. Their pet, which is a lot for a lot of people, is like family. It is family taking that and just having a little human sympathy and extending that kind of grace. You know that with, there’s an order for puppy food probably six months down the road, right?

And when that order comes in, guess who it’s going to? It’s going to Chewy, right? And so I think that’s a beautiful example of being empathetic and connecting with people and, you know, making your company really do something extraordinary and creating a system for it that actually makes things happen not just once, not just because you go the extra mile, but because you are systematically prepared and you know your customer and you know when they’re gonna have good moments and you know when they’re gonna have bad moments and you’re, and you do something about it. You insert yourself into the equation and you take initiative. That’s kind of a beautiful moment for that

[00:10:11] Ghazenfer Mansoor: That’s a really good point, David and I think one of the other books I would refer, I love books and I keep mentioning those to my podcast, ask people as well. Joey Coleman, he has a book How to Never Lose a Customer, so he spoke to a chapter as well. I read his book, How to Never Lose a Customer, How to Never Lose an Employee.

So he talks about all those amazing things that you can do on the same, do you do something similar for your employees as well? How do you never lose an employee? How do you retain them?

[00:10:56] David Ewing: Now that is a whole different can of worms. Right and you know, I have a different philosophy on this. I think that we have a pretty low churn rate.

You know, we do the best places to work every year. We get audited. We look at the data, we share the data with the team, and we’ve been scoring quite well, but we haven’t always scored quite well. In fact, I would say that 10 years ago we were probably scoring somewhere in the bottom and I don’t even have data because I didn’t even work on it at that point.

And it was a huge miss for me. It was a huge failure of leadership on my part and what I think the difference is for us is a couple of things. One transparency with the team is really important, but there is a limit to the transparency and finding that balance is really hard. I think when we were in the dollars of being a horrible place to work, it was because we were overly transparent in the wrong ways and and just made a tremendous amount of mistakes.

We also, you know, I think put incentive programs in place and one of the things I learned is that if you have a bad culture, people talk about their culture all the time and it seems like a kind of a squishy conversation to me. But here’s what I think it’s a good litmus test for culture if your employees assess the worst.

Whenever there’s something ambiguous, you have a crappy culture and if your employees give you the benefit of the doubt, you have a good culture, right? And they’re going to do one or the other based on how they feel about their level of trust with you. So I found that what we needed to do is we needed to strike the right balance of sensitivity and transparency.

Find that middle ground that was difficult to find and I think required me to adapt and improve my emotional intelligence. I think the other thing that happened is that we got the incentive programs put in place and we got our employees to realize that our incentive programs are really based on trying to reward greatness and not trying to like dangle a phony carrot out there and then pull it away from them and I think that we got accused of that 10 years ago and now we don’t , so, you know, it is a combination of those things and that all comes down to having a bedrock of trust with our employees and I think, you know, that is a hard thing to get at scale as well.

And I think that the way I’ve gotten trust from my employees has been to really just focus on showing them the data, right? They don’t need a big pat asks speech for me on the glories of working at Motive. What they need is they need data that helps them understand the decisions we make and when we make decisions that are beneficial or decisions that are harmful when we could show the data and prove to them, like, look, we’re always coming at this from this point of view.

I think that’s okay and then to go to my favorite book. So if this one’s not on your list, Ghazenfer let’s see if we can put it on there. Have you ever read The Hard Thing About Hard Things? Do you like that book?

[00:14:01] Ghazenfer Mansoor: I have that book. I have not read that yet.

[00:14:03] David Ewing: You are missing out because that book, one of my favorite mantras in life comes from that book and that mantra is take care of your people, take care of your customers, and take care of your product or your profits in that order.

So your people, your customers, your profits in that order and that is a kind of become a North star inside our businesses. So much so that when we do our EOS 90 minute meeting every Friday. The very first thing I read is our mission is to grow and the way we get there is we take care of our people, our clients, and our profits in that order and then we begin from there and so it is just something that we emphasize to the executive team over and over again. It’s something that we talk about with the team and when we have a difficult decision, we usually start by saying, well, let’s go back to our mantra this is what it is and this is how we interpret it in the situation.

This is how we think that this is putting the team first. This is how we think it’s taking and putting the client second and we think this is how it’s taking our profits and putting it third, this is why we made this decision and this is how we got to it and you know, I don’t think everybody loves every decision that we’ve made, but I think they can respect the integrity that went into the decision.

And so therefore, when they do have some doubts. We get the benefit of the doubt, not the assumption that we are doing the worst and that’s really all you can ask of your team. I think that’s resulted in us having a pretty low turnover rate.

[00:15:31] Ghazenfer Mansoor: No, those are some really good points. So how do you balance running two high growth companies while maintaining that culture and the vision across both?

[00:15:45] David Ewing: Oh, not well. No, I’m kidding. I think we are doing pretty well, but, you know when we first started this I’ll tell you, there was an experience that got me ready for this the year before I started the content lion and we can talk about why I started content lion in a subsequent conversation.but,

I had volunteered to be the president of the Entrepreneurs Organization, Austin, Texas chapter and I wanted to do that because I felt a calling. I felt the need to give back. I wanted to learn, but I also realized that. When you put something into an effort, you get something out and I looked at all the people who had been presidents of this EO chapter before, and all of them were giants.

I, they were way more successful than I was and then I had this epiphany one day and realized they’re not successful first, and then became president of EO. They were president of EO and that’s part of what made them successful and that was true of me. I was amazed by taking on that leadership challenge and seeing just how much forethought, training and care went into the entire EO organization to make sure that the presidents of the different chapters are trained and successful.

And I learned so much in the year preparing for that. But what it affected me personally was while I was doing all this preparation, I’m running two teams now, right? I’m running this EO organization and I’m running Motive. It got me it was almost like training wheels to get ready for, okay, I actually can do two major things at once.

Let me go and as I ramped down EO I’m gonna start this second company and that was big. But the other big thing that happened to me was my son graduated from high school and I told him that we would go on this dive trip together and so for a week I went out in the Caribbean with my son.

And no cell phones. Cell phones turned off and for a whole week it was just he and I on this boat diving and at some point in there I got the mental clarity and I had like kind of a little bit of downtime that I realized I needed a better system for running two companies and so one night on the Wednesday night of that week, I just pulled open my notebook and I started writing down some ideas and I came up with a really simple plan, which is I run content lion in the mornings and I run motive in the afternoons and it doesn’t always work out perfectly that way, but that simple bit of structure made such a huge difference because my engineering team that’s in Europe knew that they could contact me all morning long. My you know, services team, they’re all based in the United States, knew that they had me all afternoon and so that just that simple little bit of organization let me made sure that I’m moving the ball forward on both companies every day that I’m never just kind of losing, taking my eye off of one.

And it gives me structure to put guardrails as to how much I can do. On each one of those things every week and that’s been pretty successful and so I think those have been the key things there.

[00:18:54] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Cool. So motive has generated millions for clients. Can you share what separates the companies that see results versus the ones that don’t? Do you have any insights as you’re working with these companies?

[00:19:11] David Ewing: Yeah, you know, I hesitate to mention names because of NDAs and whatnot, but I have this one CIO who I work with, and he is the most collaborative person I’ve ever met. He does one thing that I’ve never seen any other company in 25 years.

I’ve never seen any other company do this, and that is once a year he invites all of his tech call ’em vendors, if you will. He calls ’em partners, but has all his vendors fly in and he has the CEO get up and we spend an entire day. Going through the company’s strategy talking about the major challenges that they have.

It’s a really frank and, you know, highly confidential conversation. We talk about the wins, they give out awards to people, which, you know, all of us vendors kind of look at each other and try to, you know, rib each other to see who’s gonna win next year and it’s good natured and fun, but we spend the whole day just talking about how to make their business better.

It makes so much sense, right? I mean, here you’re trying to get better, you’re hiring all these vendors or partners and if you never give them the big picture and the strategy, how can you ever expect them to really double down and align their teams around yours? Well, we can do that with them, that makes all the difference in the world. It is incredibly powerful and you know, that’s a kind of company where, you know, I can share some numbers. You know, we’re batting out projects that improve their bottom line by more than a million dollars a week. That’s a lot of improvement, you know?

And it doesn’t take many projects to that can work like that where if you understand the business, boy, your whole team can just be so much sharper about making sure that you are doing projects that are in the interest of their company and so that’s been a big one. I think though it’s in general, it’s a mistake to think about getting a service company and then thinking of us as an us and them type situation. As soon as you’re an us and them, as soon as you hear they don’t want to do this or they decide it’s over you’re in a bad spot. You’ve failed your vendor management capabilities.

And you know, when you’re doing these projects, I mean, the typical project that we work on, automotive, our goal is for every dollar you spend with us or on materials. So projects and software. For every dollar, we want you to get two back. That’s a good win and we’d want you to have those $2 back within 24 months.

So if that’s our mentality going into it, but we have a customer who’s coming at us and it’s like, you know what? I don’t like your rate. I think you need to cut your rate 5%. Well, I’m sitting there going 5%. Really? You want, I mean, this is what we’re nickel and dimming over and so when you get procurement organizations in, I get their role and their function.

They’re trying to keep everybody honest. But when you really stick it to your vendors. You off to the wrong start and you pick the wrong vendor, you know, I think you’re just in the wrong place with projects around customer experience. You’ve gotta be thinking that you’re holding people accountable to the ROI and not so worried on the project costs within limits, of course.

[00:22:21] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Yeah. It’s so common being in a services business ourselves. Surprisingly many times it comes where people are just comparing the price and I mean it’s a value that makes a difference and some of those are lessons learned the hard way in the long run for many of these.

So yeah, and we do get a lot of those projects. So like majority of our work is actually fixing broken projects and many of those are where you spend money, you’ve been for cheaper, but things are never delivered. So the hourly rate could be lower, but if it takes three times, then you are still in loss

[00:23:05] David Ewing: Yeah. I mean, it sounds like you’re in the same boat. We’re in. I mean, a lot of, we’re not everybody’s first choice, but we are our customer’s last choice. ’cause they don’t ever leave, you know, and that’s been pretty powerful.

[00:23:16] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Cool and then million dollar a week saving. That’s awesome. That’s amazing. So I think once people see that number. Then it’s no brainer. It doesn’t matter what you pay, it’s really what you get out of it. Yeah and as you said you put in dollars, you get dollars, $2 back. That’s the one that makes a difference.

[00:23:38] David Ewing: yeah.

[00:23:40] Ghazenfer Mansoor: So coming, going back to the only time, what was the, your reason to start motive? What was the inspiration and what’s the biggest leap moment in turning it into a global powerhouse? ’cause you have been into Inc 5,000 as well, so I wanna hear that story as well. 

[00:24:00] David Ewing: Well, that story is not what it like. You know how you watch these Marvel movies and every one of the superheroes always has like a great origin story.

I do not have a great origin story. I have a terrible origin story, and so let me say it like this. I started outta college in consulting and I did really well and I loved it, but I left consulting because I just didn’t feel like it was that fulfilling. So then I joined a tech startup and this is the year 1999 and 2000.

And you know, all through the year 2000, the market was just cratering, right? And it just kind of came to a crashing halt in January of 2001, and that was the end of that company and so there I am in January of 2001, there is not a job to be had anywhere in Silicon Valley. That’s where I was living.

There is not a single venture capitalist who’s writing a check for a dollar. You couldn’t even get a cup of coffee in that town in January of 2001 and I wanted to start a tech company, right? I wanted to start a new software company. So instead of going to the VCs, I went to friends and family and stop number one on the tour was my parents and I prepared this pitch. My dad’s an entrepreneur and I was like, Hey, you know what do you think of this vision for this software company I have? And my old band looks at me and is like, there’s no way in hell that I’d ever invest in this.

This is the most terrible idea. This is awful and he goes, you know, you were really good at that consulting stuff. Like, why don’t you go back and do that? I’m like, dad, I have no interest in doing consulting whatsoever and then the phone rings and it’s my first client and they’re like, Hey, I heard you’re free. Do you wanna do some consulting? And I’m like, oh, I don’t know if this is the right spot for me. 

So I kind of, the wind was outta my sails. But I started what was San Francisco Consulting Group in January or February of 2001 and started, you know, just at my studio apartment in San Francisco, working with my first client.

And then I got two more in the next week and so I had three clients in the middle of the .com nuclear winner and was just kind of treading water and surviving and doing things and then I decided to grow as I, you know, built up a little bit war chest in those first couple months and so I hired my first employee on September 10th, 2001 right before 9/11 and you know, and so 9/11 hits and then I’m like, wow, I’ve gotta make payroll through this somehow. 

So anyway, it was a rough start and 2002 was even worse. It was a tough year by three and four. I started to get my sea legs underneath me and started to like actually build a firm and not just be a, you know, essentially a lone wolf with one assistant and we kind of got the company off the ground, but it was an ugly, gritty, difficult start.

[00:26:55] Ghazenfer Mansoor: most people don’t share that the ugly start. We all see only the really nice and fascinating exits. So it’s always good to hear those early stories. Those are, to me, those are more fascinating.

[00:27:11] David Ewing: Very humbling part.

[00:27:12] Ghazenfer Mansoor: So you,

[00:27:13] David Ewing: So a quick side story. So the only bright spot in that story is I went to the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce to try to help me. I don’t know, do something with my business. I didn’t know what I was doing. I was really young at the time and they put me in a lead swapping group and I met my wife because of that. So that was how I met my wife. So, you know, so there you go. So you get some good with the bad there. So that was the bright spot and otherwise gritty three years

[00:27:43] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Awesome, so you mentioned your other company Content Lion a few times. So tell us more. How did that come to life? What market are you aiming to fill? What pain points are you solving? So just give us some elevator pitch for that.

[00:28:03] David Ewing: So this is another good story. So here’s what happened. So Motive my first company. The one that’s now been around for almost 25 years, it implements a lot of Oracle technology and I’ll skip the techno jargon and just say that there’s like eight products that we implement for Oracle.

And in December of 2023 so basically almost two years ago now, they announced that they were exiting one of those products and it was a shame because it was a really great product and we went out to the marketplace ’cause you know, I mean, with crisis comes opportunity. So yes, we were going to lose one of our eight products that we built a lot of services on and we had to figure out what, how are we going to make up for this revenue? 

And the first idea was, well, let’s go find someone else who has a, you know, alternative product and we’ll migrate customers over to the alternative. Well, we went out and looked and we weren’t happy with any of the alternatives.

They were too expensive, too old, too unwieldy and incomplete and so, you know, the pitch to the customers was gonna be something like, Hey, you’re gonna have to pay six times as much to buy two different solutions. Pay for us to integrate them, doing really painful migration and when you’re all said and done, you’re gonna be on old tech and that just didn’t sound like anything we wanted to offer. So that’s when we decided, I think there’s an opportunity for us to build a replacement product and so we went out and we raised funds for Content Lion. Now, what does Content Lion do? Content Lion is at first a digital asset manager where you can store all of your content.

So every video, every PDF, every Word document, every image that you have. It doesn’t matter what kind of digital file it is, you can dump it into our digital asset manager and AI will sort it out and help you figure out what belongs where and who should have access and all that kind of stuff. The other thing that we do is we let you build your own data structures.

So if you have like the way you wanna write a blog article, right? And you’ve got headlines and calls to action and hero images and maybe there’s videos in some of your blogs, you can kind of define and put that together and then you can publish that wherever it belongs. So publishing to your AI MCP server, publishing to social media, publishing to your website, publishing to a mobile app, all these different places where that piece of content needs to go.

So we handle all of the connections and we build all of that so that you can protect the assets that need protecting, right? And then when it’s time to share those assets, whether that’s through a secure portal, mobile site, website, certain key vendors, you can share those assets.

Whether that be product management tools, whether that be HR files, whether that be marketing case studies doesn’t matter to us. Investor relations memos, we can handle and organize all of that and make sure the right people have the right access at the right time.

[00:31:00] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Cool. You mentioned MCP doing this one, so I wanna change the topic towards AI, which is impacting or changing or empowering every other organization. How do you see AI is changing your business and you, and how are you leveraging the power of AI in your organization? 

[00:31:31] David Ewing: Well. Let’s be clear. I think, you know, everybody wants to claim they’re an AI company, right? But, I think that’s kind of false because all of us in this enterprise software space are just leveraging API calls to like the three big players, right? So like, you know, that’s typically how people are typically doing things.

So you go into your favorite tool for, I don’t know, like document management or knowledge management, and you start typing something in and it says, Hey, you know, improve this with AI. Well. That company’s not got their own AI engine. They’re just using, you know, ChatGPT. So I think a lot of us are doing things where we’re using AI tools from the real AI vendors like Oracle and ChatGPT OpenAi, and  you know, Claude and so forth.

And, you know, we’re just building connections to them and that’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with it. But that didn’t make me an AI company though that makes me a user of AI technology and we’re a proud user of AI to do all sorts of interesting and cool things. So let’s just draw that bright line and then talk about, well, what can you do with AI when you’re an enterprise software company on behalf of your customers?

One of the things we’re doing with AI is. When you upload a video or a PDF or an image, you know, all of those things you can begin to describe with AI. So an image comes in of a dog, you know, with a big lolling tongue and it’s, you know, it’s a, you know, like a modeled color, right? Well, we can use AI to come up with all those subscription terms so that when someone searches and is looking for any of those kinds of words or words that are similar to those kinds of words, we can use vector search and we can.

We can find that dog. So you could even put in Shaggy and that dog will come up even if that’s not you know, one of the words if it’s a shaggy dog. So it can find intent. So that’s really cool. You can also use AI in a lot of other places. Like for example, the idea of building a website from scratch that is, so 2022 you know, nobody does that anymore.

And so we can just say, Hey, I’d like to have a website and I’d like it to look like this other guy’s website, or I’d like it to look like my old website, or I’d like to make it look like this and this is the call to action I want. You can put that all in a prompt and you know, we can use a series and a cascading series of different AI tools.

To go ahead and build that up and then have that be a meaningful product on our site. So it’s another example of we’re not the AI engine, we’re using a third party AI engine, but we’re then delivering that technology into our product and we’re doing things with it, you know another beautiful example is taking your, like a video and sending it off to a third party that can then chop that video into lots of different little micro segments and then bring back the snippets and then have all of those in our platform so that I can say, that’s snippets awesome.

I’m gonna put that on LinkedIn and then, you know, post that to LinkedIn and take this other one, put it up on my website, whatever you wanna do with it. You know, so we kind of see ourselves as being , you know, the grand central station for your content and we really want to enable you to flow your content in and out, whether it’s to AI tools or to an MCP server or to your different channels I already mentioned, and then bring it back and you know, keep using your content and then have it stored and centralized in one place that you can find it.

So we’re using AI for all of those different kinds of things and you know, the last use case that I think is really great is, I mentioned MCP servers. So people don’t know what that is. An MCP server is kind of like a pre- indexed like phone book directory of all the stuff that you have so that when you’re using like chat GPT, you can build a connection and chatGPT when it’s starting to answer your questions can say, well, I’ve looked on the internet to try and answer this guy’s question. Let me look at the MCP servers there, anything here and it can search and hit the MCP server and it can secretly look at all that stuff ’cause it’s authorized and then it can use the documents it finds in there to make more intelligent answers for your stuff.

So,that’s the MCP server. So that’s another thing that we do. So lots of techniques for this, but I think we’re at a phase right now where everybody expects this. You know, everybody expects that you’re going to leverage the world’s big AI capabilities to do different things and so what’s kind of at the next level, what what I think we’re talking about from a governance and risk perspective is, it may not be cool to be sending that information off to a third party site.

So, you know, there are new standards that are coming out around making sure that not only do you hold onto someone’s content and protect it, but if you’re gonna use it with ai, you have to, we at Content Lion have to make it very clear to our customers. Is that staying within the bounds of the content lion or is it going outside?

And, you know, there’s lots of ways to make sure that it doesn’t, and our customers have been really appreciative of that. But we’re really excited about some of the new standards, like ISO 42001, which is coming out that says, here’s some standards you can be audited upon to give your customers the assurance they need, that their content is safe, and that it’s not flowing around in some AI tool that they don’t know about.

[00:36:41] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Oh no. That there are a lot of insights. MCP is really famous nowadays, so I think we call it like it’s your it is like your API to AI.

[00:36:55] David Ewing: Yeah.

[00:36:55] Ghazenfer Mansoor: So, okay, we’re getting closer to the time. So just one or two small other questions, like what’s one habit or mindset that has changed your life?

[00:37:13] David Ewing: You know, I have started to make sure that I always put things in perspective and I try to not let myself lose the joy in what I’m doing, even if it can be stressful, right? There’s a lot of stress in running two companies, there’s a lot of stress in making sure that everything gets done correctly, that customers get what they want.

And there of course, like anything in life, there are about a billion regrets that get generated a day of like, I wish I’d done this sooner. I wish I’d done that better. I wish we’d, you know, made this more clear to this third party so they could do whatever. Right and the habit that I have found is that there is a voice that can, not an actual voice, but like just a self-reflecting voice.

In your head, who can get very critical, right? Who can say things like, man, you’re just not doing it right. Like, you’ve made so many mistakes you have and that voice can really ruin all of the joy of having this adventure and so I learned and it’s a different story. I learned that it’s actually okay to have a self dialogue in your head where you refute that claim, where you argue against it and say, no, I actually did pretty good today. Like there’s a lot of great things that happened and so yes, there were two or three things that definitely didn’t go well, but these other 7, 10, 15, 20 things, they did go well.

And when talk back to that voice. I know it sounds crazy but it really helps you start to get a true perspective and not get down on myself and not feel like every day is just another day of slog. Instead, I can see the progress and I can see the evolution of the things that are coming to life and it’s very easy to lose perspective there and I think that as the stress ratchets up I need to spend more time on that self dialogue and that self-reflection to stay positive because if I’m negative, the team’s negative. If the team’s negative, the culture goes into the trash and everything goes downhill from there. So it can’t happen.

[00:39:18] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Thanks for sharing. So what leap are you preparing for next? What is next for you?

[00:39:25] David Ewing:  Isn’t this enough? I mean, so yeah, running two companies simultaneously, I think that the biggest leap that I have to make is that at some point, you know, you have to let go. You have to delegate. Now, I’m not saying I’m letting go of the companies, I’m not letting go of these companies. I love them too much, and I don’t wanna sell either of them.

That’s not what I’m saying but I am saying that I need to find and let go of some of the authority that I have and, you know, delegate more decision making to different people on my different teams and really explore the idea of, you know, making sure that those leaders have the tools they need to be successful.

And so I think that’s a big leap for me. I’m a control freak. I’ll just admit I’m a happy, joyful control freak, but I am a control freak and so that transition is probably an inner leap that I need to make. So that I can make sure these companies run extremely well.

[00:40:25] Ghazenfer Mansoor: David, it’s been a pleasure having you on the lessons from the leap. Before we wrap up, can you share with our listeners where they can connect with you and learn more about you, also share about your podcast? yes. We didn’t talk much, but if maybe spend 32nd to a minute on your podcast as well.

[00:40:46] David Ewing: Sure. So Content Lion is meant to advance thought leadership with great content marketers and content managers around the world.

So I’ve done episodes from the friends couch, from the TV show friends with the people who market and maintain central perks in New York and leverage the content of friends and leveraged at IP. I’ve met with MasterCard and talked to them about, you know, how do they create a big tent that gets people from the left and the right and from the this and to that, and like, not polarize, but like bring all of them together and have them all get along so that they can all be MasterCard customers that’s a beautiful podcast episode that.

We’ve had Amazon on to talk about how AI works in search and how, you know, customers can use certain different search techniques and you know, that type of stuff. So lots of fun episodes about content from a lot of different perspectives and adventures along the way.

I’m having a blast doing that podcast and so that’s the content. Content Kingdom and Content Kingdom can be found on Spotify, Apple Podcast, YouTube, and it’s a real blast, if someone wants to connect with me though I have a website, davidewing.com, where I chronicle, kind of my adventures.

And then also Motive is motivecx, So if you’re trying to extend customer lifetime value, check out motivecx and if you’re interested in content lion software because you wanna protect and share your company’s assets and deliver them around the world. Then contentlion.com is where you can go for that.

So I’d love to talk to people on LinkedIn too. So you know, link into me. But the key to linking into me is don’t just link in with no intro. I don’t know, I get a little sketched out by that. So if you wanna link in, say, I was on the big leap. I took a leap and decided I’d link into you and that’s an automatic accept. I will totally accept that.

[00:42:40] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Absolutely. Yeah. Please mention lessons from the leap podcast. That way David knows where you came. So thanks again, David. It was a pleasure having you on the show.

[00:42:51] David Ewing: Well, thanks for having me. It’s been a blast.