Leveraging Stories, AI, and Media to Empower Entrepreneurs | Ruth King | 610

When you're clear on your goals for your book, you are more likely to achieve them. That's one of the findings from the 2024 Business Book ROI Study that we co-sponsored. Today, I want to take a deeper look at this question, specifically with an author who has had clarity around her goals for her books her thought leadership business, and new products. Meet Ruth King, a business profitability expert who has written 6 books, 3 of which have become bestsellers. In this episode, we'll explore how Ruth has used thought leadership techniques to reach her target audience, streamline her processes, and create value for those who follow her ideas. I'm Bill Sherman. You're listening to Leveraging Thought Leadership. Ready? Let's begin.

Welcome to the show, Ruth.

Thanks for having me, Bill. I am so excited to be here. We're having a great conversation, and hopefully I'll be able to educate and entertain your listeners.

So I want to talk about the— with you about the automation and scaling of skills, right? And before we were talking about how slide rules were the tool of the day many, many years ago, and now we are living in an age of artificial intelligence, right? That can process at a rate much faster than we can. So in terms of financial Insights for the Business. My question is, how did you get into this area of thought leadership and the work that you do?

Well, I wanted something that was not dependent upon me. I've been working with small businesses since the mid-1980s at understanding and growing their businesses through financial statement analysis. And I realized a long time ago that I am one person. I can only impact so many people one-on-one doing things by myself. So that's why the books were written, because there's a lot of people who could, can, and will read the book or listen to the audio or read it, you know, electronically on Kindle. And so I could impact so many, many more people that way. And AI came up because I have been, until we started the AI piece of this, I had been doing everything manually. And I know we talked about slide rules. It's gotten a little bit better. I did use Excel and stuff along those lines to do that. But it's really taking it to a point where anybody anywhere in the world can truly understand their financial statements. And it's not dependent upon me at all. I mean, I jokingly say that I have taught AI basically how to read financial statements.

And so Well, and you've just laid out a journey from you sitting down and doing financial statement analysis on your own with printouts or Excel sheets all the way to teaching AI. I want to unpack pieces of that journey, right?

Okay.

So let's go back to you're doing financial statement analysis and you're working one-on-one with clients and helping them understand what's really going on with the business. At some point an idea came into your head and said, you know, I could write a book, right? How did you decide to write book number one? And knowing that you have six that have been written, but that decision to go from financial statement analysis to writing book number one, what was that experience?

Well, actually book number one happened in the early 2000s, way before AI and everything else like that.

Right, right, right. Yeah, we're going in the way back.

Yeah. So essentially, back in the day, Wilson Harrell used to have— was the editor of Success Magazine, and he used to talk about entrepreneurial terror. And I said, it can't possibly be that bad, right? Okay. Yeah, right. So my 5th or 6th startup was as bad and as scary as it could potentially be. And it was like entrepreneurial terror. And so, I actually made it through it. And I figured if I went through this, there's other people who've gone through it. And I got a publisher interested in the story. So, I created a book called "The Ugly Truth About Small Business." And it's 50 stories of 50 horrific stories that have happened to 50 of us so that you don't make the same mistakes we did. And you can actually learn from our mistakes and not make those. You'll make others, but you, if you listen and learn from those, you won't make those. And that was the first book.

And was that motivated to share ideas, to build your brand? What, what was the impetus behind the first book?

The impetus was don't let people make the same mistakes we made. All right. My thing has always been sharing. And I think you can tell, you know, just from our conversation already, my goal is for people to take what I do, learn from it, expand it, grow profitably, build wealth, do something significant with their lives and align with their employees. So that was the first one. And then Sourcebooks at that point, who was in the small business arena, has since gotten out, decided, okay, we want you to write the next one because it was so successful. How about managing people? So we used the same format for managing people. 50 stories, don't make these mistakes. That was really successful. And I started on the third one, which was about cash. And then they got out of the small business industry and they said, we're releasing you from your contract. So I wrote The Ugly Truth About Cash and self-published it. Not a good idea for a lot of different reasons.

So, traditional publisher, self-publisher, and you've gone through with different experiences on that. Let's talk about the self-publishing for a moment because that puts a lot of burden on you. And there, like you said, from an entrepreneurial terror perspective, yeah, there's a lot of things that can go wrong in the creation and self-publishing of a book. Now the tools today are a lot better than they were.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But if you were doing it old school, that was hard.

Yeah.

I mean, Sourcebooks was a traditional publisher. They were very entrepreneurial in the sense of, of that, of that they really looked at the authors and first-time authors, which was not unusual for, you know, huge publishers. And had I not gone the traditional route, first, um, I probably would have had a tougher time with self-publishing. And then I ended up going with another publisher to publish my last 3 books, which is a hybrid between self-publishing and they, they go into the bookstores, they do that type of thing, and they help with promotion and stuff like that. So my sense of it is I'm really happy with them. But had I not had the very first experience of the traditional publisher, I probably would not have known how bad self-publishing was. And it's good, I have it now.

Well, and it can be a fit for some people and it can cause fits for others, right? Yeah. So you moved to writing and publishing. Mm-hmm. And then how did you work on getting the books out in the world? Because some of these are, you know, like mistakes entrepreneurs make. Those are probably pretty close to evergreen, you know, that they're not going to become dated because of Y2K, for example.

Yeah. I mean, if we look at the very first book, Source was really good. They had a really good PR firm that we worked with and, and they helped. And back in that day, getting on TV and getting on radio and things like that were still the things to do. Now podcasting—

And they sold books, right?

Yeah.

Podcasting now is the thing to do. And so, but back then, The thing was, get on TV, get on radio, and I ended up doing it really well with them. I also write every week and have written a— well, I still call it an ezine, which was back in June of 1999. I started my first one, and I have been writing every single week since then. Now, back in 1999, there was no Constant Contact, there was no Mailchimp, there was nothing like that. We, every Monday we had to BCC 249 people.

Mm-hmm.

You know, and stuff like that. Now you don't have to, it's all, I mean, I can write 'em 6 months in advance if I wanted to. Not that I would, but you could.

Totally. And I would assume your numbers have grown substantially beyond the, that initial 200 as well.

Oh yeah, absolutely. You know, and, and so that has helped a great deal for a lot of different different industries, you know, and I write and I speak and, you know, you name it, I'm, you know, I jokingly, you know, call it, okay, it's like having a baby. And since I'm a mother, I can say this, you know, writing the book is the gestation period, publishing the book is baby is born, and then you have to take care and nurture the baby for 18 years if it's my daughter, you know, something like that. But It's not, you know, I'm still doing PR for the books, you know, The Ugly Truth About Small Business, which was published in 2005. You know, how many years ago was that? That was a lot of years ago.

Absolutely. And whether a business book has a shelf span and a life expectancy of 5 to 7 years, many of them extend decades, right?

Yeah.

I've got books on my shelf that were written in the '90s that I still turn back to. On a regular basis for a framework that is still as useful today as it was then. And so I think a lot of people underappreciate how long of their lifespan of their book will be.

Yeah. I mean, if you take The Courage to Be Profitable, which was the book I started writing later, um, after I self-published the book, it's, you know, it's P&Ls and balance sheets in English. You know, an accounting babble. So I mean, that is timeless. I mean, it, yeah.

Right.

Hasn't changed since the Venetian monks did it in 1200 or thereabouts to be able to take care of the rich Italians' money. The format for P&L and balance sheet has not changed. Tax law's changed. Mm-hmm. Hasn't changed. And so there's a lot, you know, and it's story-driven and it's, you know, everybody look, gets that book and they go, oh my gosh. And then they start reading and go, I actually get this. And it's like, yes, I've done my job.

And that aha moment where something which seems confusing or inscrutable to someone and they get it, it may seem basic to you and you may be going, yeah, this is even before Accounting 101. This is like Accounting 50, right? You know? Yeah, exactly, exactly. Right. Whereas for them it's like, oh, now I get it. And so there's a challenge in throttling down.

Yeah.

And I want to ask you about that. How do you keep complex ideas fresh, or simplifying complex ideas fresh for yourself so that you can repeat them over and over?

I am never bored. My clients give me so many stories and I can always talk about, obviously I'm not gonna say name, who, where, when, stuff like that. But you know, do you have to get hit between the eyes with a 2x4? What do you mean? Well, here's what happened to one of my clients, and it's because they didn't pay attention to cash. And so, I mean, that kind of a story's in the book and somebody will go read that and go, oh my gosh, I'm doing the same thing. Maybe I better not do this anymore type thing. So a lot of it is really storified. Can I say that? Storified?

Yeah, sure. Why not?

And so the things you gotta do are in stories. They're not, okay, step 1, step 2, step 3. People remember stories more so than they remember looking at a page of numbers.

Well, and that's a good point because you could easily have written this in textbook format.

Ugh. Ugh, it would bore me. Yeah.

Exactly. And so the collection of stories, making it human, making it visceral, and making it something that people can connect with is essential.

Yeah.

And because you're doing the work, and you're working with clients, you've seen so many stories over the years.

Oh yeah. I had one person send me an email. I spent $15 on your book and I saved 20 grand. Thank you.

That's fantastic.

That's a pretty good ROI, I think.

Yeah. Oh, absolutely.

Absolutely. One inventory idea. That was it. He saved 20 grand. I thought that was pretty cool.

That is And those emails, when they come in, often many authors put them in a sort of keeper file in a folder of the— on a hard day, I go back and look at these.

Yeah, exactly.

Because you remind yourself of, I am making impact. I'm not just shouting out into the void.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. And you know, I do that a lot with just the whole financial statement side of things because everybody says to me, you have a knack to be able to explain this in English and make everything very simple in terms of understanding, you know, what this is all about. And it's like, oh, I kind of get it now. You know, it's a little bit of work that they gotta do, but you know, they'll get it.

So where did that skill come from, Ruth? Do you have any idea? Why are you good at this in being able to break it down?

Well, I'm a chemical engineer by training. All right. So I didn't—

And then went into financial statements.

Okay. Some work.

So chemical engineering is notoriously accessible and easy to understand.

Oh yeah. It's, you know, my house is like a chemie textbook. Nobody would ever, ever read any of these books. So I had always known I wanted my own business. Even when I was a kid, I had little businesses. So when I, where I went to college, they had no business classes back then. None, zero, nada. So once I get out in the real world, I ended up going back to school, getting my MBA, and that's when I realized how easy this is. And everybody else was looking at this going, oh God, this is hard. And I'm like, wait a minute, you haven't been through chemical engineering math.

This is easy.

This isn't organic. This isn't analytic chemistry. We're all good here. Yeah.

Yeah, this is easy.

And then it was funny 'cause I was going through some of my microeconomics classes and there was a differential equation stuff and everybody's going, ah, and I'm going, you've gotta be kidding. I mean, it's all perspective. I really and truly think it is all perspective. And the other thing that really and truly happened is my husband, who has now passed away, made me go to Toastmasters when we got married. So that I could learn to speak properly and that I could learn to think on my feet and do those types of things. And so you should hear my first speeches. They were awful.

They usually are, right? Yeah.

But it was practice and practice and practice and practice and doing it and doing it and doing it. And now I don't have a problem anymore. I mean, I can— I've had one time where the building caught on fire in the middle of one. I mean, crazy stuff happens, but you just take it in stride now because you, it's, you know, who said it? Malcolm Gladwell with that 10,000 hours of practice. Well, I've had more than that.

So we've talked about working with individual clients on financial sheet analysis or financial statement analysis. We've talked about writing books and speaking. Let's talk about other experiments. Did you try workshops, for example, or how else did you try to scale in between the early days and AI? I want to get to AI, but I want to explore, is there anything in the middle in terms of scale that you explored as well?

I mean, I still do workshops. I still do them. But again, it's me. It's one to a few. It's not—

Right.

Exactly.

You know, I love teaching. I love writing. I love when the light bulbs go on for everybody who's sitting in the room going initially, I don't get this. And then all of a sudden the light bulb goes on and then they get engaged.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. They go from feeling that they're in high school detention to their eyes light up.

Yeah, exactly. You know, and if I can tell a story in, in construction and heating and air, a lot of owners are really reticent refuse, whatever, to put inventory, you know, and actually account for inventory properly. So I said to a guy who was in one of my classes, I said, do you have inventory on your balance sheet? And he goes, no. And I said, can you tell me why? He said, yeah, I never bothered to do it. I said, well, what are you planning on doing with your business? And he says, well, I'm planning on selling it. I said, okay, how much inventory do you have in your shop right now? Oh, about $200,000. I said, so are you willing to take $800,000 to $1.2 million less for your business because you refuse to put inventory and use it properly? And he went white.

Mm-hmm.

Because he didn't realize the consequences of what he was doing for where he wanted to go. Guess what he did when he got back out of class?

Well, and that makes me think of a story as well from previous incarnations of what I've done, but working with Harley-Davidson principals and a number of folks who were in the world of Harley as owners of, you know, the retail environments that also are in love with the the product.

Yeah.

So their back room would have inventory that they loved and said, oh, we can't get rid of that because that's a fill in the blank, you know, and would have an emotional attachment to inventory rather than discounted, get it off the shelves and get rid of non-moving inventory. Right. And so that challenge of how do you approach that which you have. Don't fall in love with things that can't love you back.

Yeah, exactly. And, and look at the consequences for not getting rid of that. You know, you know, all, you know, when he understood that he wanted to sell his business and he didn't want to take $1.2 million less, he got it. Yeah, yeah.

You get the bottom line and you say, hey, what happens if you make this change. And part of that is being able to see around the corner into a possible future on behalf of your audience and then tell them what that means. And sometimes you have to drag them around the corner and say, see that? Here are two paths. Which one do you want?

Yeah, exactly. And the choice is yours. You can take the easy way or the hard way. Yeah.

So now let's talk a little bit about AI.

Okay.

Which sort of emerged onto the scene about a year-ish ago in a large way. Year, year and a half, right? And sort of exploded, right? Yeah. So my question is, how did you start exploring that as a tool for businesses? When did that idea come and say, hey, I'm going to make this work?

So I do not ask any of my clients to do anything I don't do. So I have a coach, I have a mastermind guy for me. And 2 years ago, was it 2 years? No, probably 2 and a half, maybe 3 years ago, I was sitting in the meeting room and one of his one of the speakers was talking about data. And the fact that, you know, how you use AI with data and like the light bulb went on. And so first thing we did was I had to make everything consistent. We had to have standardized, you know, graphs and standardized formulas and standardized ways of looking at P&Ls and balance sheets. And so we did that manually first. And then we've looked around for somebody who could actually write the AI. And everybody goes, "We can write that for you. It's only gonna cost you X." And, you know, "No, we have not done it yet, but we can do it." So my IT team and I looked at each other and he said, "We'll just do it." And so we now have the only AI in the world. I'm not sure how long it's going to last. Mm-hmm. Right now we have the only AI that can read small business messy financial statements. I'm not talking about the sanitized statements that, uh, you know, a Big Four CPA firm will do for audited, you know, Fortune 500 annual reports and stuff like that, which are neat and clean and pristine. Well, guess what? Small business is messy. Financial statements are messy. Messy statements.

So, and that had to be, that has to be a challenge in trying to teach the AI where to poke and wonder and go, that seems weird, tell me the story of this?

We had to write all the rules. Yeah, we had to take what was in my— first thing we did was take what was in my head, which is really, really, really difficult, and put it in rules. All right, the fact that I'm an engineer actually helped with the rules, to be perfectly honest with you.

So how long did that process take? Because that's sort of like doing a full rule-based brain dump.

Yeah, it was, you know, I don't know whether any of the listeners are Star Trek fans, but you know, I'd love to have a Spock mind meld into AI. Put your fingers on my face. I know they're not seeing us, but imagine, you know, it's fine, right? It's the guess of it.

Our mind into my mind.

Yeah.

Thing. My rules into your algorithm.

So it took us, once we started learning the AI, about 6 months. To get it absolutely right. And now we're on the back end of it, of understanding the graphs and all the stuff that we do to make sure that the, the businesses are going in the right direction. That will be finished by fall. And then by next spring, the easy part, quite frankly, is where we'll be able to compare an individual's business's financial statement against everybody in their industry or everybody in their geographic area or anybody in their size or whatever else it is. And AI is going to be able to do all of it.

That's pretty fantastic. If you're enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. If you'd like to help spread the word about our podcast, please leave a 5-star review at ratethispodcast.com/LTL and share it with your friends. We're available on Apple Podcasts and on all major listening apps, as well as thoughtleadershipleverage.com/podcast. Let's talk about the concept of scale here, because you've now created a tool that doesn't require you to be in the room or the Zoom.

Yay!

How do you plan to get that into the hands of more business owners?

Actually, through people, through people who can help us do it. Who wrote the book? It's not how, but who. Somebody wrote that book and I can't remember who it is right now off the top of my head, but it's not like, okay, you've got this product, who can help you get it in the hands of people you need to get it into? So we've identified potential partners. We've identified people who are working with a lot of small businesses. We have a group of certified referral partners on our website who are accountants and CPAs who understand financial analysis and financial advisory services so that they can help people, you know, review and understand the graphs and all that sort of fun stuff. So Dan Sullivan wrote the book. So, you know, it's not what, but who. And so that's what— that's the way that we're going with it because I'm one person. I can do my normal thing, but the reality is, is to get this global, I need global partners.

Well, let's stay here for a moment because I want to underline a distinction.

Okay.

You reached out to potential partners on the development and coding side, evaluated that, and then realized, hey, we can do that in-house and keep it in-house. But then rather than build sales and marketing and a go-to-market, you said, okay, let's build channel partners, let's build resellers, let's go with people who already have the relationships and enable them, right?

Yeah, it's quicker, a lot quicker.

And so where my question on that is, I think a lot of people say learning an entirely new skill set on, AI, for example.

I didn't have to do that. I got a team who does that.

But still, solving the unsolved, right, was in your perspective and from your decision, a less risky and easier challenge than figuring out and bringing go-to-market in-house. Am I understanding that correctly?

Well, there's, there was, there's still a lot of people who said they can do things they can't do. They think ChatGPT-4 takes care of everything. They, it does not. So, I mean, I have a really good team of, they, you know, they're my partners, they're my IT partners, and they're phenomenal. And so we work together, you know, we talk to each other almost every day and stuff along those lines, getting stuff out and testing and things along those lines. But I don't— I mean, again, I am one person. I should not be the one to have to go into the marketing. And it's so much easier to find people who are doing— have the groups of people that we want to work with, the small businesses, the, you know, stuff like that, than us having to go out and do it.

And I absolutely agree in terms of— and it sounds like you also recognized, hey, going back to Toastmaster days, you went from that first speech, which was rough and bumpy, to being able to deliver a speech now and feel comfortable on it. There are certain things that you can do, but you also said there are some hats I don't want to wear personally, and I can't wear all these hats. Let's enable others to do them. And I think we talk about traps, right, Jack? Yeah, there's the entrepreneurial trap of, you know, chief cook, bottle washer, and the entrepreneur wants to do everything and can delegate nothing, right?

No, no, I want to delegate everything.

There are also those who are not as aware as to where their strengths lie, and there's a big difference between thought leadership skills in codifying content building rules, making the complex clear and accessible to— that's, that's on sort of like the IP codification side. The other part is how do you take it to market and scale? And what I've seen over 20 years is it is rare for someone to be excellent in both of those categories. You can The more time you spend in IP codification and becoming really good at, you know, your thought leadership practice, the less time you're spending selling and marketing. And those are skills that are like muscles too. You have to build them.

Well, you not only have to build them, you know, an IP product sitting on the shelf, even if it's phenomenal, is worthless.

Right, exactly.

You know, so I mean, what everybody has said, including those who've seen the product, is like, you are really, really, really, really good at financial statements, understanding them, interpreting them, explaining them, which is what we put in AI. Let me do what I do well and let everybody else do what they do well.

Right, exactly. And you can work with the— your coding team and having them advance the AI, capture more of your thinking and analysis and making the product better without having to spend as much time on go-to-market. But when you spend time, you can do a speech at a large event, you can, you can work at scale, but you're, you, it's about highest and best use of your time, right?

You got it. So I think you've taught that over the years too.

I've sort of hammered it and you're, You are one of the people who has clearly seen it and exemplified it, whereas we often get clients who come to us and they've tried to keep all of the plates spinning, developing the IP, the sales, the marketing, the client delivery, and she felt bonkers. I mean, you're, you wind up in a circus as a solopreneur.

It's a trap.

Yeah, you'll get nothing done. Mm-hmm.

So, Ruth, this has been a really good conversation, and I, as we begin to wrap up, I've got two questions for you.

Okay.

First off, go back to those days of Toastmasters and when you started the first baby steps into the world of thought leadership. You know, oh my gosh, what advice would you give your younger self? And the reason I ask is there are a number of people who are now there just considering, and you know, some technology gets dated, as we all know, you know. But what advice, whatever green advice would you give your younger self?

Stick your toe in the water and do it. Had my husband not pushed me into it, maybe I wouldn't have done it. But even if you're as awful as I was in the beginning and you don't think on your feet well and you don't present well, Toastmasters and everybody there is really, really good at helping you get where you want to go. All right. So you start there, then you start doing some speeches, and then you're going to blow it and you're going to screw up. But keep the end goal in mind because it's all the steps to the end.

And then my last question, I'm going to give you or let you borrow for a few minutes the magic wand of thought leadership. It's now 3 to 5 years from now. You found wild success. What does that look like? And how are you measuring it?

We have small business owners throughout the English-speaking world right now using Financially Fit Business. They are doing incredible things. They're becoming more and more profitable. They're being able to become more wealthy. They're giving back and they're really happy. So from a business standpoint, that's where I really, really want to see it. From a personal standpoint, it will give me the freedom to go around the world and teach. And I want to still do that.

That is cool. And I hope the listeners can hear the energy and excitement you have in your voice, not only for evangelizing this level of insight to your target audience of small business owners, but also that excitement for, I want to keep telling the message. That to me signals a level of joy and practice of thought leadership, which becomes sustainable. And you've got to find that sweet spot for you so that you can wake up in the morning and go, I get to do this again.

I love what I do.

And Ruth, thank you for joining us today on Leveraging Thought Leadership. It's been a wonderful conversation.

I appreciate it. I hope I've helped your audience. Just do it. I know I'm stealing Nike's line, but stick your toe in the water, make the mistakes, just do it.

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