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

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From Books to Bots: A New Era in Thought Leadership

Ruth King, the Profit & Wealth Guru, shares how she turned decades of small business financial expertise into best-selling books and a groundbreaking AI tool. By leveraging stories, media, and technology, she’s scaling her impact and empowering entrepreneurs to build wealth and achieve lasting success.

How do you turn decades of expertise into a scalable thought leadership business?

Ruth King, known as the Profit & Wealth Guru, shares her journey from one-on-one financial coaching to becoming a best-selling author of an AI innovator. She began by helping small businesses demystify their financial statements, but quickly realized her reach was limited. Writing books became the answer. Her first book, “The Ugly Truth about Small Business: 50 (Never-Saw-It-Coming) Things That Can Go Wrong…and What You Can Do about It,” featured lessons from 50 entrepreneurs, offering readers practical insights into navigating difficult challenges.

Publishing was just the start. Ruth took her ideas to a wider audience by leveraging TV, radio, newsletters, and now podcasts. Weekly newsletters since the ’90s have built her credibility, while speaking engagements and media appearances have kept her message evergreen. Her approach is simple: stories over statistics. Sharing real-life examples from her clients makes complex financial principles relatable and memorable, ensuring her audience stays engaged.

As technology advanced, Ruth embraced AI to scale her impact. Recognizing its potential during a Mastermind session, she and her team developed a groundbreaking AI tool to simplify and analyze messy small business balance sheets. Rooted in her decades of expertise, this tool standardizes processes and delivers insights at scale—no Zoom required. It’s a game-changer for small businesses seeking clarity and growth.

Ruth’s next move is clear: scale the AI solution by partnering with professionals who serve small businesses. Accountants, CPAs, and referral partners are already helping bring her vision to life. For Ruth, it’s not just about the numbers; it’s about empowering entrepreneurs to grow profitably, build wealth, and create lasting success.

Three Key Takeaways

Stories Simplify Complexity: Ruth King’s success lies in using real-life client stories to make financial principles accessible and memorable, demonstrating the power of storytelling in thought leadership.

Scaling Expertise Through AI: By embedding her decades of knowledge into an AI tool, Ruth has transformed her expertise into a scalable solution that helps small businesses make sense of their financials without needing her direct involvement.

Long-Term PR is Essential: Thought leadership isn’t a one-and-done effort. Ruth’s ongoing use of newsletters, speaking engagements, and media appearances ensures her message remains relevant and her audience continues to grow.

Ruth understands that to have maximum impact you have to be able to go to scale. If you want to learn more about “Scaling You” check out this video by Leveraging Thought Leadership CEO Peter Winick.

 

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Transcript

Bill Sherman 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 six books, three 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.

Ruth King Thanks for having me, Bill. I am so excited to be here. We’re going have a great conversation and hopefully I’ll be able to educate and entertain your listeners. So I want.

Bill Sherman 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 two rule of the day many, many years ago, and now we’re 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, the business, my question is, how did you get into this area of thought leadership and the work that you do?

Ruth King Well, I wanted something that was not dependent upon me. I’ve been working with small businesses since the mid-1980s and understanding and growing their businesses through a 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 where the books are 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 I came up because I have been until we started the A.I. piece of this, I have been doing everything manually. And I know we talked about slide rules. It’s gotten a little bit better. I didn’t use it. Egg salad and stuff. The line best 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 a I basically how to read financial statements. And so.

Bill Sherman 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. I, I want to unpack pieces of that journey. Right. 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?

Ruth King Well, actually, book number one happened in the early 2000s way before I and everything else at that.

Bill Sherman Right, right, right. Yeah. Yeah. We’re going in the way back.

Ruth King Yeah. So essentially, back in the day Wolfram 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 6 or 6 start up 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 the book called The Ugly Truth about Small Business. And it’s fifth stories that 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.

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

Ruth King The impetus was don’t let people make the same mistakes we made. All right. My thing has always been Sheri. 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 that. Expand it. Grow profitably. Build wealth. Do something significant with their lives in the lives of their boys. So that was the first one. And then Sourcebooks at that point who was in the small business arena and has gotten out, decided, Hey, we want you to write next one because it was so successful. How about managing people? So we used the same format for managing people so the stories don’t make these mistakes. That was really successful. And I started on the third one was, 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 went to the back hash and self-published it. Not a good idea for a lot of different ways.

Bill Sherman So traditional publisher, self-publisher, and as 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 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 that.

Ruth King Yeah.

Bill Sherman Yeah, yeah, yeah. But if I were doing it old school, that was hard.

Ruth King Yeah. I mean, Sourcebooks was a traditional publisher. They were very entrepreneurial in the sense of that, that they really looked at the authors and first time authors, which was not unusual or, you know, used publishers. And I had not gone the traditional route first. I probably would have had a tougher time with self-publishing. And then I ended up going with another publisher to publish my last three books, which is a hybrid between self-publishing. And they go out to 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 well she was. And could I have it now?

Bill Sherman Well, and it can be a fit for some people and it can cause fits for others, right? Yeah. So. You move to writing and publishing 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 ever growing, you know, that they’re not going to become dated because of Y2K, for example.

Ruth King 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 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. And they sold books, right? Yeah, podcasting now is the thing to do. 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 Uneasy, which was back in May and 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 be CC 249 people and you know, and stuff like that. Now you don’t have to. It’s all I mean I can write them six months in advance if I wanted to. Not that I would, but you could.

Bill Sherman Totally and I would assume your numbers have grown substantially beyond the and at that initial 200 as well. Yeah, absolutely.

Ruth King You know. And so that has helped a great deal for a lot of 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 of Baby is Born. And then you have to hear and nurture the baby at 18 years. If it’s my daughter, you know, something like that. But it’s that, you know, I’m still doing PR for the books. You know The Ugly Truth About Small Business, which was published in 2005. Yeah. How many years ago was that? That was a lot of years ago.

Bill Sherman Absolutely. And whether a business book has a shelf span and a life expectancy at 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 underappreciated how long of their life span of their book will be.

Ruth King Yeah. I mean, if you take the Courage to be profitable, which is the book I started writing later after I self-published the book, it’s, you know, it’s panels and balance sheets in English, you know, babble. So, I mean, that is timeless. I mean, banks haven’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 PNL balance sheet has not changed. Tax laws changed and haven’t changed. And so, as you know, and it’s story driven and it’s you know, everybody gets that book and they go, my gosh. And then they start reading. And, you know, I actually get this. And it’s like, yes, I’ve done my job.

Bill Sherman And that 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 1 to 1. This is like accounting 50, right? You know. Yeah. It’s not like Exactly right. Whereas for them it’s like, now I get it. And so there’s a challenge in throttling down. And I want to ask you about that. How do you. Keep. Complex ideas are simplifying complex ideas fresh for yourself so that you can repeat them over and over.

Ruth King I am never bored. My clients give me so many stories and I can always talk about. Obviously, I’m like, who say name, who, where, when, stuff like that. But, you know, do you have to get hit between the eyes with a two by four? What do you mean? Well, here’s what happened to one of my clients. And it’s because he didn’t pay attention to cash. And so, I mean, back to the stories in the book. And somebody will go read that and go, my gosh, I’m doing the same thing. Maybe I better not do this anymore type of thing. So it a lot of it is really Storify. And I say that story about.

Bill Sherman Yeah, sure, why not?

Ruth King And so the things you got to do are in stories. They’re not. Okay. Step one. Step two. Step three. People remember stories more so than they remember looking at a page of numbers.

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

Ruth King But it would point me. Yeah.

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

Ruth King Yeah.

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

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

Bill Sherman That’s fantastic.

Ruth King That’s why I think. Yeah.

Bill Sherman Absolutely.

Ruth King Absolutely. One inventory idea. That was it. They say at 20 min. I thought that was pretty cool.

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

Ruth King Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Like that.

Bill Sherman Because you remind yourself of I am making impact and not just shouting out into the void.

Ruth King Yeah. And 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. It’s like I panicked. Get it now? You know, it’s a little bit of work that they got to do. But, you know, look at it. So where did that.

Bill Sherman Skill come from, Ruth? Do you have any idea? Why are you good at this in being able to break it down?

Ruth King Well, I’m a chemical engineer by training. All right. So I didn’t.

Bill Sherman I went into financial statements. Okay.

Ruth King See, I work. So I.

Bill Sherman Chemical engineering is noted are notoriously accessible and easy to understand.

Ruth King Yeah. And, you know, I admire this. Like it can be checked where nobody would ever, ever read any of these books. So I had always known I wanted my own business 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. Then everybody else was looking at this going, God, this is hard. And I’m like, Wait a minute, you have chemical engineering math? This is it.

Bill Sherman This is inorganic. This isn’t analytic chemistry. Yeah. We’re all good here. Yeah.

Ruth King Yeah, this is. This is it. And it was funny because I was going through some of my microeconomics classes, and there was a differential equation stuff and everybody’s going, I am going, You’ve got to be kidding me. So 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 learned 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.

Bill Sherman They usually are, right? Yeah.

Ruth King 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 it’s, you know who said it? Malcolm Gladwell. But that 10,000 hours of practice. Well, I’ve had more than that.

Bill Sherman 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 I want to get today I put on explore. Is there anything in the middle in terms of scale that you explored as well?

Ruth King I mean, I still do workshops. I still do them. But again, it’s me. It’s one of a few it’s night, right. And 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, my goodness. And then all of a sudden the light bulb goes on and then they get engaged.

Bill Sherman And they go from feeling that they’re in high school detention to their eyes light.

Ruth King 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, they said, Do you have inventory on your balance sheet? And he goes, No. And I said, Can you tell me why is that? And never bothered to do it. I said, Well, what are you planning on doing with your business? And he said, Well, I’m planning on selling it. I said, okay, how much inventory do you have under in your shop right now? About 200,000 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. And then because he didn’t realize the consequences of what he was doing or where he wanted to go, guess what he did when he got back out of class?

Bill Sherman It. Well, and that makes me think of a story as well from. Previous incarnations of what I’ve done. But working with the Harley Davidson principals and a number of folks who were in the world of Harley as owners of, you know, the retail environments, but also are in love with the product. Yeah. So their back room would have inventory that they loved and said, 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 Nonmoving inventory. Right. And so that challenge of how do you approach that which you have? Don’t fall in love with things that you can’t let you back.

Ruth King Yeah, exactly. And with it, the consequences for not getting rid of that. You know. You know. 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.

Bill Sherman 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?

Ruth King Yeah, exactly. And the choice is yours. And you can take the easy way and the hard way. And. So.

Bill Sherman Now, let’s talk a little bit about AIG, which sort of emerged on to the scene about a year ago in a large way. You’re 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?

Ruth King So I do not ask any of my clients to do anything. I don’t care. So I have a coach. I have a mastermind guy for me. And two years ago, it was two years. Now, probably two and half, maybe three years ago. I was sitting in the meeting room and one of his speakers was talking about data. And the fact that you know how you use A.I. 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 panels and balance sheets. And so we did that manually first. And then we looked around for somebody who could actually write the API. And everybody knows we can write that for you, you know, telling us to access. You know, we have not done it yet, but we can do it. So my team and I looked at each other and he said, Well, just do it. And so we now have the only eye in the world, and I’m not sure how long it’s going to last. Right now, we have the only AI that can read small business, messy financial statements. I’m not talking about the sanitized statements that, you know, a big force PR firm will do for all of the, 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. I have messy statements. That and that that had to be on.

Bill Sherman Has to be a challenge in trying to teach the eye where to poke and wonder and go, That seems weird. Tell me the story of this.

Ruth King We had to write all the rules. Yeah, we had to take what was in. First thing we did was take 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.

Bill Sherman So how long did that process take? Because that’s sort of like doing a full rule-based brain bill.

Ruth King Yeah, it was you know, I don’t know whether any of the listeners are Star Trek fans, but, you know, I’ve let the how the mind meld into a I would your fingers on my face. I know they’re not seeing this but imagine, you know what’s mine. Right. And it’s the get.

Bill Sherman Something narrow minded to my mind. Yeah. Then my rules into your algorithm.

Ruth King So it took us once we started learning the AI about six months to get it absolutely right. And now we’re on the back end. A bit of understanding the graphs and all the stuff that we do to make sure that 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 a individuals, businesses, financial statement against everybody in their industry or anybody in their geographic area or anybody in their size or wherever else it is. And AI is going to be able to do all of it.

Bill Sherman 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 five-star review at ratethispodcast.com/ltl and share it with your friends. We’re available on Apple Podcasts and on all major listing apps as well as ThoughtLeadershipLeverage.com/podcasts.

Bill Sherman 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 zoo. Yeah. How do you plan to get that into the hands of more business owners?

Ruth King Actually, through to 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 might 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 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.

Bill Sherman Well, let’s stay here for a moment, because I want to underline the 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 enabled them. Right.

Ruth King Yeah, it’s quicker. Plot quicker.

Bill Sherman 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.

Ruth King I didn’t have to do that. I got a team who does that.

Bill Sherman 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. And perhaps. Am I understanding that correctly?

Ruth King Well, there’s there was there’s still a lot of people say they can do things they can’t do. That thing that good for takes care of everything. It does not. So, I mean, I have a really good team and they you know, they’re my partners. They’re my I.T. 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, I can 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 and the groups of people that we want to work with, the small businesses that, you know, stuff like that, than us having to go out and do it.

Bill Sherman 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? There’s the entrepreneurial trap of, you know, chief cook bottle washer. And the entrepreneur wants to do everything I can, delegate nothing right.

Ruth King Now and delegate everything else.

Bill Sherman There are also those who are not as aware as to where their strengths lie. And there’s a big difference between fault leadership skills in codifying content, building rules, making the complex clear and accessible to. 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 it the more time you spend in IP codification and becoming really good at, you know, your thought leadership practice the less time your spelling spending, selling and marketing. And those are skills that are like muscles too. You have to build a.

Ruth King Way not only to have to build the, you know, an IP product sitting on the shelf, even if it’s phenomenal, is worthless.

Bill Sherman Right? Exactly.

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

Bill Sherman Right, exactly. And you can work with 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 and you can work at scale, but you it’s about highest and best use of your time.

Ruth King Right? You got it. So you taught that over the years, too?

Bill Sherman I’m sort of hammered and you’re one of the people who has clearly seen it and exemplified it. We’re asked we often get clients who come to us and they try to you keep all of the plates spinning, developing the IP, the sales, the marketing, the client delivery. And she felt bonkers. I mean, you wind up in a circus is a solopreneur. It’s a trap.

Ruth King Yeah. You’ll get nothing back.

Bill Sherman So. Ruth, this has been a really good conversation. And as we begin to wrap up, I got two questions for you.

Ruth King Rick.

Bill Sherman First of. Go back to those days of Toastmasters and when you started the first baby steps into the world of thought leadership, you know?

Ruth King My God. Now.

Bill Sherman What advice would you give your younger self? And the reason I ask is there are a number of people who are now they’re just considering and, you know, some technology gets dated, as we all know. You know. But what advice, what evergreen advice would you give your younger self?

Ruth King 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 Apple as I was in the beginning and you don’t think on your feet well, and you don’t prove that, 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.

Bill Sherman 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?

Ruth King We have small business owners throughout the English-speaking world right now using financially fat 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 Ferrari that they really want to see it. From a personal standpoint, it will give me the freedom to go around the world and teach. And I still do that.

Bill Sherman 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 that to me signals a level of joy in 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, go, I get to do this again.

Ruth King I love what I do.

Bill Sherman And Ruth, thank you for joining us today. Leveraging Thought Leadership It’s been a wonderful publication.

Ruth King 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.

Bill Sherman Absolutely. Okay. You’ve made it to the end of the episode, and that means you’re probably someone deeply interested in thought leadership. Want to learn even more? Here are three recommendations. First, check out the back catalog of our podcast episodes. There are a lot of great conversations with people at the top of their game and thought leadership as well as just starting out. Second, subscribe to our newsletter that talks about the business of thought leadership. And finally, feel free to reach out to me. My day job is helping people with big insights take them to scale through the practice of thought leadership. Maybe you’re looking for strategy or maybe you want to polish up your ideas or even create new products and offerings. I’d love to chat with you. Thanks for listening.