Kyle Ewing on Leading Multiple Companies, Culture, Delegation, and AI

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Marcel sits down with Kyle Ewing, CEO and founder of TerraSlate, a two-time Inc. 5000 honoree known for creating waterproof paper used by top restaurants and NFL teams. Kyle shares his journey from Olympic-level skiing to entrepreneurship and building multiple companies. He shares how his Inverted Pyramid Leadership model—where leaders serve their teams—drives TerraSlate’s success. He breaks down core values of grit, growth, focus, and candor, his “buy back your time” principle for scaling, and his Business Navigator Operating System for helping founders start and scale their businesses. Kyle also explores using AI as a “co-CEO”, documenting systems, and leading with clarity, kindness, and accountability.  

Kyle Ewing is the CEO and Founder of TerraSlate. Under his leadership, TerraSlate has been featured in Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the Denver Post, and NPR, and twice named to the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing private companies. Beyond TerraSlate, Kyle also founded Big Island Honey, Windward Equity, and Cube Dynamics, and invests in Sustainability Partners to advance eco-conscious innovation. He blends business acumen with heart-centered leadership, reminding us that leading with love unlocks true potential. Kyle has been recognized with Business Elite’s “40 Under 40” and as a two-time Titan 100 award winner in Colorado. 

Quotes 

• “Leading with love is doing the hard thing, not the easy thing.” 
•  “Don’t delegate the task, delegate the outcome—and always state the why.” 
•  “Clear is kind. The worst thing you can do to someone is delay feedback.” 
•  “AI doesn’t replace you. It replicates your thinking so your people can lead without fear.” 

Takeaways 

• Flip the leadership pyramid: serve your team so they can serve your customers. 
• Document everything. Systems free people to lead with humanity.
• Delegate outcomes, not tasks, and always explain the purpose. 
• Build a “Co-CEO” AI system to preserve your company’s institutional knowledge.
•  

Timestamps: 

[00:00] Welcome and intro to Kyle Ewing 
[03:00] From Olympic trials to business rebirth  
[14:50] The four values driving TerraSlate’s success 
[21:30] The art of delegation and owning the outcome 
[26:30] Time hacking and the buyback rate 
[29:30] Building a “Co-CEO” using AI 
[37:50] Why true networking happens in service, not events 
[39:10] Closing: scaling business with heart 

Links/Resources: 

• Website: kyleewing.com
• TerraSlate: terraslate.com
• Instagram: @kyleewingofficial
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/kyleewing 

Transcript

Marcel Schwantes  0:03   

Hey gang, welcome back. Glad you are here. I'm excited about today's episode because, you know, every now and then I handpick executives, CEOs and founders of growing companies that you should know about, that I feel and I truly believe, align with the love and action, message and movement. 

Marcel Schwantes 0:24   

You know, these are CEOs that are who are making a mark in their industries, who and who will teach us about success, Leadership, Culture, engagement, mindset, you name it, and help us to level up our leadership. So with that said, I'm going to be speaking today with one of those CEOs. His name is Kyle Ewing. Kyle is the CEO and founder of TerraSlate. I'm going to tell you all about Terra slate in a minute. Okay, so hang tight. Kyle Ewing is the kind of CEO who champions leadership rooted in empathy, empowerment and innovation he earned his MBA and completed Executive Programs at Harvard, MIT and Wharton with a focus on entrepreneurship, AI and sustainability, and under his leadership, terrace link has been featured in Forbes, the Wall Street Journal USA Today, the Denver The Denver Post NPR and twice named to the Inc 5000 list of Fastest Growing Private Companies, which is one of the many reasons Kyle is on the show today, Kyle has been recognized with business elites, 40, under 40, and as a two time Titan, 100 award winner in Colorado, beyond terrorist, late Kyle also founded Big Island honey, windward equity and cube dynamics, and invests in sustainability partners to advance eco conscious innovation. He blends business acumen with heart centered leadership, reminding us that leading with love unlocks true potential, and that cannot wait to get into this conversation. And guess what, guys, Kyle is here. Welcome to the show, Kyle.  

Kyle Ewing  2:15   

Aloha. Marcel, thanks for having me. Big fan of the show.  

Marcel Schwantes  2:19   

Yes, and if you're watching on YouTube, you probably have the big hint that you know by Kyle's attire and his background. Kyle is checking in today from Hawaii, where exactly in the island are you on?  

Kyle Ewing  2:33   

I'm on Maui, and specifically in Kanapaly, which is a little bit north of Lahaina, which people know from the fires, but the recovery as well on the on the way. And it's a, it's a wonderful place to be, yeah, and I'm looking at the background screen, I feel like it should be in my board shorts right now, in the tank top. 

Marcel Schwantes  2:19   

Absolutely. That's great. All right, Kyle, we start like this. You ready? What's your story? 

Kyle Ewing  3:00   

My story is in business. It really started in 2006. I had tried to qualify for the Olympics in skiing. At the very end of 2005 were the Olympic trials, and I broke a piece of equipment and got injured during that and that was crushing for my soul, because I had dedicated every moment of my life to this, and it fell apart in an instant, and I was heartbroken and all the things. But what was incredible was I had a friend who lived in Torino, which is where the Olympics in 2006 were, and he and his wife were like, Why don't you come stay with us? You know, I would, I wasn't gonna be staying in the athlete village because I didn't qualify, right? But I could still go to the Olympics. And then what happened is I got introduced to the CEOs and the brass at the Olympic sponsors. So it's like Coca Cola and visa and McDonald's, and I got to ski with a couple of them because they were really excited to ski with the athletes. But, you know, they can't actually see with the athletes, so the subset like me is great because they have access. And I'm thrilled because these are, these are business celebrities in my world. And they were asking me, you know, like, you know, why aren't you competing? Like, why aren't you in there today? And I told them what happened, and and and they were like, well, you know what, we'd like to know your plan, like? And I thought, Oh my gosh. Like, what do you mean? Like, my plan is to recover and go back and then in four more years I'll compete at the next one in Canada. And what they talked to me about was pivotal, and that was that skiing is a great avenue to learn discipline, learn focus and achieve something. But the truth is, you're so limited in your window of time, and then, if you, for instance, you get injured again, haphazardly, whatever something happens in four years, you could miss this again. And they were like, busy. Let me tell you why. 

Kyle Ewing  5:00   

Business is where you ought to be. And we talked a lot of shop over the course of two weeks with very various different people. And they were like, go back to business school, get your MBA. And here's the key point for me, what one of the guys said was, like getting your MBA is like going to the Olympics in that once you are an Olympian, you were always an Olympian, and once you have your MBA, you always have an MBA, and that will pay dividends throughout your entire career. And it was like, why didn't somebody tell me this when I was 14 or 15 or at any point, right? And so I immediately, I called University of Denver, where I had been going to school, and I was like, I want to enroll MBA program. Let's go. And that was literally the pivotal moment that changed the course of my life, from full time athletics to full time business and then eventually becoming an entrepreneur and getting me to where I am now, which is running businesses, but from here on Maui.

Marcel Schwantes  6:01   

I love that. That's so inspiring. Okay, so I want to know all about TerraSlate, and that's the company you founded. Describe the company and the business that you're in in your own words. Yeah. So at TerraSlate, we manufacture and print waterproof paper. So of all things in the world to invent. I thought the world needs waterproof paper, because lamination doesn't work very well, and ultimately, it's not recyclable, which really irked me. And so I created this material. It took about a year to develop a lot of like playing Red light, green light, stop, go. It's working. It's not working. We're really excited. You know, another round doesn't work. And finally, we landed on a substrate that's easy to print. You can print it through any laser printer. You can write on it with a pen, and it's recyclable, so you don't have to do anything to it after, after you print it. So you print it through any laser printer comes out, and the ink in your printer becomes waterproof on this substrate, so now it's used in everything from the NFL Play charts. You know, when you see the see the coaches call the play on the side and they cover their mouth. That's a sheet of Terra slate. It's the price tags in the grocery store. And then, if you've ever eaten it at a restaurant, you have, for sure, held our products. We make about a quarter million restaurant menus a month, and we ship them all over the world. So the wildest applications have come out of this one material that's fascinating. I love it. I love stories like this, right? Because it's so innovative. You know, you're kind of disrupting your own industry, right, in the because you think about it, in the paper industry, who's doing this? Right? I'm sure you have competitors, but I mean, that sounds very unique to me. 

Kyle Ewing  7:40   

Absolutely, we're a niche product and a niche industry. And I can't, I can't even begin to tell you how many people wanted to slap me in the mouth when I said, you know, back in 2014 I'm going to start a paper company in a digital world, they were just like, Kyle. I mean, we thought you were relatively smart, but you've lost it, man. Like, go back to work, get a job, you know, like you're a management consultant, do not quit that to do this, because it has no legs. Like paper is one of the oldest industries in the world, and it's on a steady nine, 10% decline, year over year over year, till it hits zero, right? And I'm like, no, no, no, you don't understand. I've got it. And, you know, we've had plenty of challenges along the way, but part of being an entrepreneur is seeing the vision and being willing to tell people, Hey, I respect where you're coming from on that you're probably right, but I'm gonna give this a shot anyway. Yeah, that's so awesome. All right, so we got the terrace late vision. We understand the business model, but you're also building other companies. And I alluded to it in my introduction, cube dynamics, Big Island honey company, windward equity. I mean, what connects all these companies together? You know, it's a, it's a systems based, values focused model that I run and I created what I call nos, or B nos, the business navigator operating system. And it's a methodology for for starting or scaling, or should say, starting and scaling, depending where you're at a business, and and taking growth from growth to scale. And it's a way to do it, where you take care of your people, you take care of your customers, and you take care of the financial statements as well. Because, in my opinion, in 2025 and 2026 and beyond, if you're not focused on all three of those things, you will not survive, I mean, much less the AI revolution. You just won't survive as a business and and it starts with number one, you have to take care of your people. Hang tight, gang, we'll be right back. 

Marcel Schwantes  9:43   

Okay, Kyle, I want to get into your leadership philosophy and how you lead your company, and talk about strategies to help our listeners grow as leaders. Many of them are CEOs, and many of them are probably struggling with day to day things that CEOs face. 

Marcel Schwantes  10:00   

Piece, right? So I want to start with what some people would label as soft skills, even though we know that soft is the new hard. Yes, folks, soft is the new hard. Okay, so let's take this growing idea and understanding of leading with love and care and empathy, etc, right? That more and more data and evidence you know this. I know this is coming out that suggests that when you lead through love and care, you're going to achieve even better business outcomes, plain and simple. So to you, what does leading with love actually look like in a fast paced high performance culture like TerraSlate?

Kyle Ewing  10:42   

For me, leading with love is doing the hard thing, not the easy thing. It's holding people accountable because they are capable and not because it's easy. One of the things that I talk about regularly at TerraSlate and my other companies is that in the 1900s we had this industrial revolution, and somebody created the pyramid right top down leadership. You have a CEO or somebody at the top, and everybody works for that guy or that girl, and whatever they say that goes right like and there's one person at every company. And ultimately we all bubble up to that. And the truth is, in today's day and age, that doesn't work in business, right? It works in the military. They've been using it for 1000 years. A lot of companies run this way, but they've got it backwards. And here's what I mean. At TerraSlate, we flipped the pyramid upside down. And so what I tell my people, instead of you guys all work for me because I'm at the top, I would never say something like that, because when we flip the pyramid, what I would say is that I work for you guys, and you guys work for the customer. And I love this philosophy because it changes the mindset of everybody on the team. In all of our signatures, it said, instead of like regards or best or whatever, some generic thing we write at your service, because we truly are at your service. And when I email my team, I want them to know that I am also at your service. You guys work for the customer. I work for you. The last thing I'll say on that culture and soft skills part is that you have to remember that at each moment of somebody's life at your company, you have to demonstrate that you care. You have to show them. And it's not grand gestures, right? Like those are fine, but it's the little thing every single day. It's it's talking to every single person on your staff every single day that you're in the office. Now, I'm only in the office once every six weeks or so, but I still make a point to shake everybody's hand, talk to them. Remember one thing about them that I can ask them about the next time? Maybe it was about their cat, maybe it was about their kids or something that they were excited about doing, like going to a concert or a show. Because if you can show your team that you are a human like them, you become much more relatable, and that is a way that you can lead with love is taking actual time to engage with your team, not just talking shop about work. Like, oh, you know, show me the TPS reports. Like, oh, my goodness, exhausting, right? But if I'm like, Hey, Marcel, last time we talked, you were just about to go on a trip to the mountains with your family, and I think you guys were going skiing. How was that? And then you tell me, they're like, oh, man, I went to ski school. And then now I have something to ask you about the next time or the next winter, right? And those little bits of care are what truly show your team that you are there for them. It's not grand gestures once a quarter, yeah. And you mentioned inverted pyramid, and you know when I was studying the servant leadership model, that's when I was first exposed to the inverted pyramid, which is basically a bottom up approach to leading, not the typical top down Command and Control style that I feel no longer works in this day and age. But yeah, thanks for bringing that up the inverted pyramid. It's huge. 

Marcel Schwantes

All right, so I'm not done with the TerraSlate culture. Okay, so one of the ways that I coach leaders is it to, you know, to think about, okay, how do you get to that point of becoming a high performing organization is through shared values. So let's talk a little bit about that. Why is building a values based culture, which can be so counterintuitive for a lot of businesses, we don't think about values, right? It's the same old, same old, right? It's like, what have you done for me lately? And do as I say, so talk about values based culture that it's not just like you know, a fuzzy concept anymore. And for you, I think it's a growth strategy at TerraSlate. So break that down for us.  

Kyle Ewing  14:50   

100%. Culture is a growth strategy. And for me, my own personal core values match that of the company, and we've been very intentional with those TerraSlate. 

Kyle Ewing  15:00   

Our core values, there were four, grit, growth, focus and candor. And I love these because the first one is grit, and what that means to me is that I don't care if you're good at something. I don't care if you've got the best resume in the world or not. I don't care if you've been doing this for 100 years or today's your first day. If you try hard, you will be successful. Like, I don't care if you're the CEO or the brand new person at the lowest level of the company. It doesn't matter. Grit will get you there every single time. Grit beats talent, and that comes from my athletic background. You know, I was never the most talented guy right out of the right out of the gate. But the truth is, like, I got to be number two in the world for this division of scheme called upright aerials, because I tried really, really hard, right? And I had a great coach. Like, this is you want to get there. This is how we're going to do it. And, like, okay, and then growth is having a growth mindset, which also parlays, for me about having an abundance mindset, versus the opposite. Like we will be able to succeed, and we're going to have to grow together as a company and as a team to do this. Because one thing that that struck me as I built Terra slate from, you know, our first sale to a million dollars to $3,000,000.05 and 10 million, is that there's no book that tells you how to do this. Nobody tells you how to run a $1 million company. And then, you know, you achieve the next level. And they're like, Okay, well, you're a $2 million company. Now, here's the next manual. Here's how you got to change. Nobody tells you that. So you have to go figure that out as the leader of the company. You have to, like, read all the books, listen to podcasts like this one, and participate regularly in your own personal growth as a leader, and then instill that in your team. We even have the Team Read books from time to time, because we are effectively in the hospitality industry, because we serve other people with products and services. So we concentrate on those values so much that's grit and growth. Focus is the ability to like, lock in and do the right thing, get it done, learn it, understand it, produce it. And candor is sometimes the hardest one, because it's about doing the right thing, even when that's hard, right? Sometimes you have to speak truth to power. Sometimes people are like, Kyle, I just blew it. And I tell you, my favorite employees in the world, in the world, are the ones that come up to my office and they hand me a stack of paper, or whatever it is, and they're like, I just blew it on all this. I just cost the company a bunch of money, and I wasted a lot of my time. Let me tell you how I'm making sure I'm never going to make that mistake again. I want to high five that person, because I'm like, Yes, oh my goodness, yes. Like, let's go get a coffee. I want to celebrate, because I never have to worry about that person making that mistake again, because they are holding themselves accountable. The opposite is when they sweep it under the rug and they hope nobody notices. Ultimately, somebody does notice, especially if it's a pattern. And then when you approach them, you say, hey, you know, I'm curious. Like, what happened here? What did we learn from it? And the response is some version of it wasn't my fault. It was because of something else. Well, the challenge there is that that employee isn't taking accountability. They're deferring the blame to something or someone else, and they're not going to learn from that, because the next time it happens, they will do the same thing. So it's getting people like on the team that take accountability for their for themselves and or that can grow to do that. Yeah, and I also found that this is great, that the reason that they're not accountable sometimes is because they work in such a pressure cooker, fear based environment where their managers don't allow the safety for them to like you said, come up and say, Hey boss, I messed up, right? How do we get past this? And let's learn together and so that next time we won't make the same mistake. But if you sleep it under the rug, you are operating out of fear that something bad is going to happen if you fess up, right? And in fear based environment, you keep making other mistakes because and you, and you keep sweeping things under the rug, right, because you're afraid of what the reaction might be from your manager. Exactly right, like leading it from fear. It's very effective for some people, but it's not going to work in today's day and age. It's not going forward. You know, once people feel snake bitten, they feel like they can't do anything right, and they will take every precaution. They're just playing defense. At that point, they're just trying to make sure they don't make a mistake. They're never going to take a risk. They don't have that emotional safety and security to be like, Hey, Kyle, I took a risk on this, and look how bad it melted down. 

Kyle Ewing  19:40   

That's brutal. And let me help you put it back together. You know, like, one of the things I tell my staff, the people that answer the phone or that talk to customers directly, and I think this is critically important, is that if you're ever talking to a customer and they're screaming into the phone, they're just giving you the business, and you feel like you're gonna cry in the bathroom afterwards. 

Kyle Ewing  20:00   

Dollars before that happens. I want you to transfer that call to me right away, because nobody in the world gets paid enough to listen to that. I'm the owner of the business. I signed up for that. That's my job that is on this I'd love to get Kyle. He's the owner and CEO of the business. Let's get him involved. And then sometimes that's all it takes, because the customer just needs to be here heard, right? They need to be heard and understood at the highest level. And I we're happy to do that. And what I tell the customer is, hey, you're mad that you think this person made a mistake. Let me tell you this. We're not going to blame that person that rolls up to me, this is my mistake. And they're like, Well, you didn't, you didn't you didn't have anything to do with it. And I'm like, but I do, because it's, it's my company, and let me own that mistake on their behalf. And then all of a sudden, you get the nicest thank you notes in the world later, or a five star review on Google, because somebody's like, wow, this company really does care. And when the when the guy had the opportunity to burn one of his employees to save face himself. He didn't take that opportunity. He did the opposite, and said, You know what? That person's an incredibly valuable member of our team. Let me take ownership for the mistake. We'll address that separately, but here's how we can fix the issue going forward and get you back to whole and then all of a sudden, everybody's mood lightens, right? It's like having a background in Hawaii, like it just makes you smile a little bit sooner than you might have if you blame somebody else. Ownership starts at the top. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Okay. I want to key in on one of your personal leadership habits. It's a leadership habit that is not common if you're a micromanager and lead with control. And so I'm talking about delegation. 

Marcel Schwantes

Okay, so let's break down delegation for a minute. Why do you think so many entrepreneurs and leaders resist delegation, even though it can free them up to lead more effectively? 

Kyle Ewing  21:55   

Yeah, that's a great one, right? And like every entrepreneur in the world, I don't care who you are, that we're all working on this right, because we know if we do it, it'll only take two seconds, it'll get done right, and then it's I would just move on, right. But you, but it doesn't scale, you will ultimately be the bottleneck of your company if you don't learn how to be a master delegator. I have literally read every book I could get my hands on because I was throttling my own company at 3 million, and then again at 5 million, because I was just doing too much. I had this need to demonstrate how hard I worked my team. But what I didn't realize is that I was actually crippling the team by doing that. And here's what I've learned since then, is like, Don't delegate the task, delegate the outcome, right? So the task is part of the outcome. But what happens is, if you just say, do these four things, they do the four things, but, but whatever it bubbled up to might ultimately fail, right? So assign the thing you want them to do, like, for instance, at TerraSlate, we want to reduce waste. We want to reduce our impact on the environment. We're powered by wind and solar power exclusively. And so what we talk about at the business is materials, paper, waterproof paper only leaves this building in two ways. One of them's in the trash, and the other is in a pretty box, and it goes to a customer, right? And we're not doing great things for the environment, for any sheet we put in the trash. So instead of saying, Don't do this, don't do that, do do these things, what we say is we task the team with owning the error rate. We want to have our error rate below a certain percent every day, and we want them to own that number that way, when they're making a decision like, ooh, should I double check this or should I just click Print and cross my fingers? We want them to key in on that. And part of owning the task is the why. So if you just say, we all we want to reduce our error rates. You know, it's easy to say, like, oh, yeah, you want to reduce your error rate because it makes the company more profitable. Like, yes, of course that is. But the why that's really important to us is the impact on the environment. So if we can keep our error rate below 3% all of a sudden, we're doing much better for the environment than if our error rate goes above that, and yes, when the company makes more money, so does everybody on the team, and that's a great thing. So don't delegate the task, delegate the outcome, and always state the why. 

Marcel Schwantes  24:13   

Yeah, well, that's a great way to measure I love that you're getting into. Like, how do we delegate? How do we measure delegation, right? And we can measure delegation in so many different ways. We could look at it as time saved. But also, what about how do you measure delegation in other aspects of the business, like, for example, morale? Like nobody ever thinks about that. What would you say to that? 

Kyle Ewing  24:37   

Yeah, I think when you can provide a scenario where people are set up for success. Morale is good when people can depend on their teammates, and their teammates will deliver for them like they deliver for each other. Morale goes way up. You can accomplish way more and the way to measure delegation, for me is that when things are getting better. 

Kyle Ewing  25:00   

Delegated well, when teams are working well together, you can separate growth from scale. And here's what I mean about that exactly is growth, in my mind, is where your revenue goes up, but so do your costs, and they're almost linear. They track together, right? That's good. Nobody's mad at that. Wall Street loves it, right? Like any business is happy for that type of growth. But the best companies in the world don't grow, they scale, and the difference is that you disconnect your top line from your expenses, meaning that your revenue outpaces your costs as you get bigger and bigger, and when you have people in your organization doing their highest and best work and delegating the tasks that they don't like or they're not good at to somebody that is good at those tasks and does like those tasks. Everybody's working on their superpower, and that's how you disconnect the two, and you truly get scale. Yeah, yeah. All right, this might be a good segue for introducing something that we term a buyback rate and or even another term that that's called time hacking and, and, really, these terms are to be used more effectively and strategically to help you become more efficient, etc. 

Marcel Schwantes

So I want you to unpack because I'm really curious about these concepts, buyback, rate, time hacking. What exactly is it? And how do you practice that? 

Kyle Ewing  26:32   

It comes from a book, and it's the same thing with time hanging. And the book is literally called, buy back your time. And here's how it works, if you calculate your total income from the company. So that's your salary plus your benefits, and if you're the owner, any distributions or additional perks you make total that up and then divide that number. You know, in the book, they break down the math. But the simple way to think about is just divide that number by 8000 and that becomes your hourly rate. And if you can have a task done for less than your hourly rate, you have to delegate it right now, because you will cripple your business by not doing that. It takes an incredible amount of discipline, especially for me, but buying back your time is what scales and where I come from. Both my parents are attorneys. My wife is an attorney. All three of my wife's brothers are attorneys, and we are all great friends. And the one thing that drives me crazy is that they it's they can't scale their time. They trade time for money, and while they can be very successful at that, they can't actually leverage time. And as an entrepreneur, if you trade time for money, you will never grow your business. It will cap because it will cap at your ability to outwork the problem, and then you add one more problem, and well, now that just isn't going to get done, right? And so it's all about leveraging your time. And time hacking is when you put in systems, tools and processes that allow you to teach other people on your staff how to do something, and then they can own that initiative. And then the best part, like straight out of Tim Ferriss here, is sometimes they get to be better at it than you, and as the entrepreneur, your job is to celebrate that the second it happens. Don't you dare think like, Oh, I'm gonna cut their legs out because I don't want them to outshine me. If they outshine you. You are doing it well, like, call me, come out to Maui. We'll pop some champagne and get out on the water, because that moment is incredible, and most people are afraid of that moment. They feel like they're going to lose control of their company if other people are better. As entrepreneurs, we love to be the hero, right? Like we want the hero's Junior, like I want to be Luke Skywalker. But the problem is, in business, you will cripple your company if you do that. So you've got to, like, systematically, teach people to do the things that you do. So use Loom, use Trainual, and get them to the point where they can do it at least 80% as well as you can hand it off, be the resource whenever they have a question, and then watch them flourish, because they might actually be better at it than you. And you will think, why did I not do that 10 years ago?

Marcel Schwantes  29:06   

Yeah, I love it. All right, we can't have a conversation without talking about AI. And so I was thinking about, well, what, in what ways can we bring AI into the conversation that really affects leaders, especially CEOs? And so I thought about maybe how you take AI to structure your day and lead more strategically, not just at Terra slate, but across all of your businesses. 

Kyle Ewing  29:32   

Yeah, and I'm actually going to change the question. I'm going out on a limb here, because one thing I think every business needs to have is something called a co CEO. Here's what I mean. You set up in chat, GPT, your own co CEO. And what you do is you upload all of your documentation, upload your handbook, so every policy is in there, upload all your SOPs. And then, by the way, make sure that everything done in the. Business is written down. And the way to do that is you have one person in the company who's really good at taking notes walk around to every single person with their laptop and say, How do you do your job? And when they say, What do you mean? You say, Okay, well, just narrate what you're doing, and I'm going to follow you for the whole day or whatever the time period is, and they're going to type down. And it's better if the person taking notes. Doesn't know how to do this, because then there are no assumptions. You know, the example I give is if I was like, hey, Marcel, you've never heard of a restaurant before, but I want you to go to a restaurant and have a nice dinner. Okay, well, you're going to go to this building, because I've put that in the SOP, and I'm going to say, go in the door, but I didn't tell you what doors you might literally walk in the kitchen door, and then everybody in the kitchen is like, dude, well, you cannot be in here. Get out of here. Like, what are you doing? But, like, we didn't write that in the SOP. We have to say, go through the front door. It's gonna look like this. It's gonna have a sign above the door. It's gonna have the hours on it. You're gonna go in and you're gonna say, hey, we need a table for four. So you have to have that level of detail. But once you do, you load this all into your own GPT, right? And what it does is it allows you to give this to every single person in your company, and they can ask a question in a safe space of what they might ask you the CEO, and they can get the answer without bugging you. And when I invest in a company, they have to have a co CEO, because I can't let the CEO be answering all the questions of the internal staff and the customers and things all the time, because I need them working on the business, not in the business. So at Cube Dynamics, one of the companies I started out of building these tools internally. At terraslate, we developed these for people, and there's a systematic way to get the knowledge out of the brain of the CEO and understand their writing, so that if it's like, hey, I need to write an email to Marcel, and I need it to be in Kyle's voice, like I have a difficult customer, or whatever the situation is. How would Kyle say this? The CO CEO will do it, and it will be in my voice, and then they can represent the company on within the company's voice, but they don't have to be an expert in me. And you de risk your company, because if your CEO gets eaten by a purple dinosaur, right at any point, you don't lose all of this knowledge because it's in the CO CEO. And then, by the way, you're allowing people to ask the CEO a question that they might not be comfortable asking in person or via chat, you know, like they're like, Ooh, I don't know if I should really do that, but if you can ask the CO CEO, you get my brain in a totally safe space. 

Marcel Schwantes 32:22   

That's great. All right. Kyle, we have arrived at our speed round. So strap on the seat belt and I'll be I'll be gentle. Don't worry. I won't give you any whiplashes. I don't give you the whiplash. Let's do it. All right. So here we go. I'll fire questions at you. You fire them back at me. What are the greatest lessons you've learned in life? 

Kyle Ewing  32:47   

Be kind, because if you're kind, it will come back to you, and everybody appreciates it, but you have to be the one to put it out in the world first. 

Marcel Schwantes  32:57   

Who is someone that inspires you right now? 

Kyle Ewing  33:00   

Sir Richard Branson, Oh, I love that.

Marcel Schwantes 33:03   

Okay, how do you decompress after a hard day's work? 

Kyle Ewing  33:09   

I have a group that I have formed, and it's sort of formed informally because but it has become a real thing. It's called CEOs that surf and here in Maui, we on Tuesday and Thursday nights. We take our the dads take our kids to the pool, and then we walk across the street and we surf for an hour, and then we pick them up, and that is literally the best way to talk shop, hang with other CEOs and decompress after a hard day. 

Marcel Schwantes  33:32   

Okay, you're stuck in a desert island for one year. What three things will you bring with you? No tech devices allowed. 

Kyle Ewing  33:40   

Okay, but my number one is a guitar, because I can entertain myself and anybody else that's there almost endlessly. If I have a guitar, I live, I live on an island, so I'm semi qualified to answer this. The second one would be, like, a knife, some sort of cutting tool, so that I can, like, build and do the things that you need to do with a with a knife, like cut food and that kind of thing. And the third one would be, man, something to cook with some like a pot, like something I could put over a fire. So I got a guitar for fun. I got a way to cook, and I got a way to, like, cut things, so I can cook and build at the same time, and we can survive forever that way.  

Marcel Schwantes 34:20   

Very pragmatic and very practical of you, okay, your best advice for a new founder, building a culture first company. 

Kyle Ewing  34:30   

You can't outwork the problem. You have to build a system and a process. Write it down. Make a loom video, put it in trainual, because then it will live forever. 

Marcel Schwantes  34:41   

Your biggest hope for humanity? 

Kyle Ewing  34:43   

Oh, man, my biggest hope is that we can focus on education as as a global species. I think when kids are well educated and adults are well educated, they have the tools they need to make great decisions with their lives. We can save our planet, and we can thrive in the future. 

Marcel Schwantes  35:00   

You have survived the speed round. See, that wasn't too hard, was it?  

Kyle Ewing  35:06   

Oh, man, that was reasonable. 

Marcel Schwantes  35:08   

All right, Kyle, we bring it home, as we do with every guest, with two traditional questions. And the first one is, is deleting with love questions. I mean, sticking with themes. We talked about the whole theme of the podcast, the title of the podcast, Love and Action, right? How do I lead with more practical, actionable evidence based love, day in and day out? 

Kyle Ewing  35:32   

One of the things I think is super important is that clear is kind when you're giving feedback to an employee or to a team. If you're really clear, you don't have to put the kid gloves on. But clear is kind the absolute worst thing you can do to somebody is not tell them or to delay that conversation. So you want to manage in the moment and be very clear now. You don't need to raise your voice, right? Like that only works a couple times anyway, before people tune it out. So if you're if you're giving feedback and it's positive, that's easy, right? Like, we all like doing that, but when you have to course correct, it's important to course correct in the moment. Don't wait for their monthly review or their quarterly whatever it is, you know, like managing the moment and be really clear, because clear is kind if you defer that conversation until their monthly one on one, or their quarterly review, or whatever it is, they don't know how big of a problem that's going to be then, and they're working in fear there's no emotional safety there. So being clear is being kind with your team and managing in the moment. 

Marcel Schwantes

Yeah, love that. All right. Bring us home. What's that one thing you want people to take away from this conversation? 

Kyle Ewing

Good question. Here's what we all know, as a founder, as an entrepreneur or as a CEO, your worth is the worth of your network, and the more valuable your network is, the better. But people go about building their network the wrong way you're you're doing it wrong if you go to networking events, because everybody's talking past each other, nobody cares, right? You like, I used to go to all kinds of networking events when I was starting out my career is like, I got to meet people, but you never build a meaningful relationship out of those, because we're just talking past each other. So if you want to network and truly build relationships that you can count on, join a charity or a philanthropic and organization and join their committee, be on the logistics committee, or figure out a way to, like, get to the board and get on the board, because you're all there for the right reasons. And then the networking is the byproduct, the networking that comes out of working or volunteering your time at a charity is 10,000 times more valuable than you could ever get by shaking someone's hand and talking at them during a networking event. 

Marcel Schwantes  37:51   

I want to send massive traffic your way right now. How can people learn about your work, get notified about your online courses or bring you in to speak at their event? 

Kyle Ewing  38:03   

Yeah, my website is Kyleewing.com and we have new courses launching. I have a new book coming out specifically about time hacking. And my goal as a speaker is always to teach a message and inspire the best teachers in the world entertain while they teach. And being a dynamic, engaging speaker is a big part of that. It's something I'm super passionate about. And number two, if you have a need for waterproof paper, for instance, if you laminate switch to TerraSlate. Terraslate.com will ship you as free sample anytime you want. Everything comes with free overnight shipping, and we ship 95% of orders the same day. So restaurant menus, biotech firms like I mean, all different types of wild applications. We have a ton of fun at our company, and we'd love to be at your service. 

Marcel Schwantes

Kyle, it's been rich man, I tell you, what's one of the best conversations I've had? You have so much wisdom and leadership knowledge, and we are all grateful and better for it. So really appreciate you being here today. 

Kyle Ewing  39:03   

Mahalo. Thanks for having me on the show. 

Marcel Schwantes 39:10

Folks, head on over right now to Kyleewing.com. That's Kyle K, Y, L, E, Ewing E, W, I N, G.com, and explore all of his practical how tos on time, hacking, smart, smarter scaling and real world entrepreneurship. It's all there, and more new courses are launching soon. Sign up on his website to get notified. That's Kyleewing.com you can also book Kyle as a speaker to bring these insights live to your next company event or industry conference, and if you're interested in bringing TerraSlate products into your business again, head to Terraslate.com that's Terra, T E R R A slate.com 

Marcel Schwantes  39:53   

For Kyle Ewing and yours truly, remember in the end, love wins. We'll see you next time.