January 19, 2026 – Network Marketing Brian Carruthers and AI Coach Kenneth Darryl Brown

0:04 Intro 1: Broadcasting from AM and FM stations around the country. Welcome to the Small Business Administration award-winning School for Startups Radio where we talk all things small business and entrepreneurship. Now here is your host, the guy that believes anyone can be a successful entrepreneur, because entrepreneurship is not about creativity, risk or passion. Jim Beach,.

0:26 Jim Beach: Hello, everyone. Welcome to another exciting edition of School for Startups Radio. Sure to appreciate you being with us as always. Please tell your friends and family and foes and make sure that everyone you know is listening to this show. Our goal is not to create a daily product. We’re honest here. We’re not going to hope you listen every single day, because we produce more than you could listen to. What we want you to do is pick the episodes that are relevant to your life, the topics, the guests we have that would help you in your business grow. Sometimes it will be technical issues. We’ll give you some AI advice. Sometimes it’ll be motivational someone in your industry that did it better than you, that you can learn from and copy from. We’re just trying to be here creating a mosaic for you to listen to when you need a little bit of help in your business. We have an amazing show for you today. First up, we have Brian Carruthers. He is a network marketing guy, but he has 400,000 people in his network, and so that means all 400,000 are paying him. Think about that. Think about that.

He is making a ton of money selling LegalShield, which we have all, I think, heard of. It’s a great product. I will let Brian explain more about it, but imagine supporting your entire family incredibly well just off of LegalShield. And as he points out, there are people who are doing it, just in the B2B space, going to businesses and saying, Hey, this could be a great benefit for your company. Won’t cost you anything. And, boom, they have a B2B business right there, free to start. Don’t tell me you can’t find a business model. You can copy Brian Carruthers and make a kajillion dollars after that, we have Ken Brown. He is a friend of mine from the Atlanta area. He has been a sales and motivational coach for about 20 years, and I have known him for a good chunk of that we are. I’m excited to get caught up with him and for him to share how he is evolving his practice and bringing in AI and other learning modules and systems and paradigms and pedagogies into his practice. And so I’m excited for that. Always excited to ask the coach, how’d you get your first customer? Because I think that is by far the single most important question that I can ask a coach. Anyway. Great show today. I can’t tell you how much I am impressed with Brian and his LegalShield success. We’ll be back in a second to get started.

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3:50 Jim Beach: We are back and again. Thank you so very much for being with us. Very excited to welcome my first guest today. Please welcome Brian Carruthers. Boy. Has he done some interesting things. He started off in the network marketing, where you market to your network and he has been incredibly successful with some 400,000 associates in his network marketing business. He has had six best-selling books, incredibly best-selling too, like, you know, 2,000 reviews and stuff like that, which means it’s been a true, true best seller. His first book that I remember was building an empire, the most complete blueprint building a massive network marketing business, which has 2,005-star reviews. It’s just an incredible success. He also has a new book out. What’s the newest one got game or exit interviews got game was Lewis, isn’t.

4:48 Brian Carruthers: It got game was number five and exit interviews was number six. Okay, sorry.

4:53 Jim Beach: About that, Brian, welcome. How you doing? Good morning. How are things with you? Is it cold? Where you are today?

5:00 Brian Carruthers: I am down in The Villages in Florida, staying with the in-laws for a month, and so it’s a little bit warmer than Virginia, America’s.

5:07 Jim Beach: Happiest hometown. Yeah, I love The Villages. I used to do woodworking in Ocala, right around the corner from The Villages, and we would go down there and look at all of the retirees, and you just hear incredible stories about The Villages number one STD rate in the country.

5:31 Brian Carruthers: Yeah, I will not be a statistic, I promise.

5:35 Jim Beach: Brian, what is a network marketing business? Let’s start off by some definitional stuff.

5:41 Brian Carruthers: Sure to give some context or background. You know, I was born into a family where we had a family owned real estate companies. When I got home from Villanova, from college with an accounting degree, which I never used, I decided to jump right into the real estate game. And all through my 20s, I was out there hustling, selling houses, making making good income. I was making six figures by Thomas 25 so I was doing pretty decent financially, but I was grinding. I was working seven days a week, and another agent I was trying to hire to come work for a real estate company tells me about how he’s marketing this legal plan to his clients and friends. I had no idea what he was talking about, but he explained what the service did. And after I understood what it was. I said, well, I need that. I want to use that for getting my will done and handling speeding tickets and all the different things that the legal plan did. So I I asked him to sign me up, and so he did, and he tells me that he was, he got paid a couple $100 for signing me up, but more importantly, he was going to get paid every month for the rest of his life, even if he never talked to me again. So how’s that work? He said. He said, It’s residual income. You know what that is? I said, Oh, yeah. He said, Oh, you do. So you have some? I said, Well, no, and he laughs. He said, You don’t understand it, Brian, because if you did, you’d have some by now. So I said, Okay, please explain. He says, you know how an insurance agent sells an insurance policy and gets a they get a nice big commission right away, but then every year the policy automatically renews. They get automatic renewal income. I said, Yeah, I get that. He said, Well, that’s how this model works as well. And he said, every, every time I sign up a customer, whether it’s a client of mine for a value add or selling it to a friend or somebody, I get a nice commission. But then month after month, year after year, for the life of them, being on this service. It’s a subscription based service. I get paid every single month for life. And I said, My gosh, so I was really, I had an eye opening opportunity or moment there to fully understand the power of residual income, because I was in my career, I was basically, if I didn’t work and sell a house, I didn’t get paid most of most people across across the world, if they don’t work, they don’t get paid again, and so I love the idea of residual income. But then he also said, you know how your parents have this real estate company and you’re I don’t see your mom and dad out there in the marketplace selling houses? I said, No, they don’t. They open up offices and recruit agents, and when the agents sell houses, they get paid a little piece. And he said, Well, Brian, that’s what network marketing is, you know. And some of the fastest growing real estate companies in the world now, like eXp Realty, on the last 10 years, grew from 3000 agents to 89,000 agents. And the way it happened, Jim is because it’s not one broker out there trying to hustle and recruit all these agents. They allow the agents to recruit their fellow agents that they’re in the marketplace doing deals with. And when you when an agent recruits another agent, they brought them to the company. So they deserve a little override on that. Agents forward house sales. So that’s how network marketing works, and it’s a model that’s used by a lot of companies to bring all kinds of products and services to the marketplace where the company doesn’t have to hire and train. You got these people out there in the field that are already doing the hiring and already doing all the training and motivating and leading and all that. So it’s just a brilliant model,.

8:59 Jim Beach: And you’re still with LegalShield.

9:02 Brian Carruthers: I’ve been with LegalShield now full time for 27 years. I walked away from our family real estate company of 34 offices to get involved with LegalShield. It was funny Jim, my brother and my father both call me an idiot and a moron for wasting my time with this little home base side project. They thought I was just again. They thought I was wasting my time on it. What’s interesting is, in 2008 when the when the market collapsed with the banks and all that they had at that time, about 30 offices, and they were holding on with white knuckles, trying not to close up offices and lay people off. And I was sitting in my home office, just my mom business, building LegalShield and making a seven figure income with no employees and no leases and no exposure, no overhead. So it’s a, yeah, I’m full time 27 years. Unbelievable.

9:54 Jim Beach: So how, how do you go out and do that? I mean, obviously. The The stereotype is, is that you sell it to all your friends, and your friends don’t want to talk to you anymore because you’re trying to sell them something. And yeah, but obviously you’re way past that. That happens. You burn that out in month one. So how are you making sales today? And being so successful, I’m kind of blown away by that. Yeah.

10:25 Brian Carruthers: I mean, look, you know, the stereotype or the stigma of the network marketing business model is that, oh, I have to get sucked into one of these schemes where I only make money by recruiting other people, and it’s just some Ponzi scheme. And there is such thing as a Ponzi scheme, and that’s not what network marketing is. I mean, a Ponzi scheme is people putting in money, and then they go get more people to put in money, and everybody’s just getting paid off of future people putting in money. Those are illegal. And of course, that’s, that’s ridiculous. A true network marketing company, you know, our legal skills been around for 53 years. Each year, at our annual convention, we have an attorney general on our stage talking about why everybody, why everybody in America should have our service, and how much they love our company. So the company is, is, you know, the model itself in our company is incredibly solid as a day as long. But here’s the thing, you know that stigma is kind of deserved, because there have been many companies in this industry over time, over the last 50 years, where the company’s product had no true value. You can go buy that product cheaper on Amazon or Walmart or GNC, you know, and or they model their business based on paying people to recruit, which is not legal. So all to say, when I got into LegalShield, I saw the value in the service. I said to myself, I want this. I’m buying this. I and I said to myself, who deserves access to the legal system? Because at $300 an hour. Most people are priced out of the legal system for a $30 legal plan on a monthly basis. The whole household has the ability to use all these attorneys and all these legal services and not have to worry about getting a legal bill. The value is incredible. I mean, most people don’t have a will. 70% of Americans don’t have a will. Cost about $1,000 to get your will, living will, power of attorneys and all that stuff done. And LegalShield does that for free with this membership, for as little as $30 a month. I’m like, everybody I care about should have this. I was not gonna it was not gonna be the kind of situation where I was gonna go beat him over the head about it. But I wanted to inform and educate everybody I cared about that they that this exists and I bought it and that they should consider getting it. And so Jim, I started contacting a lot of everybody I knew. Some people said yes, some people said no. Some of the people that did not get the service later on, when they got a speeding ticket or something came up and they needed a contract review or a letter written, or they had an IRS audit come up, or whatever, they circle back to me and say, Hey, you still have that legal plan thing. So when I look back on kind of my journey, you know, you start off with people. You know, the great thing about network marketing is, Jim, if you signed up as an associate with me in the business, you have hundreds of people. You know that I don’t know, but I can tap root through you and help you contacting your contacts to get this information in front of them, to invite them to get on a zoom presentation, or send them a video that explains things with your link attached, or whatever, so you can get credit when they sign up. So every person that I meet that is interested in LegalShield, I sign them up as a member. If they want to refer to others and be able to get paid a referral fee, I can register them as an associate, and then when they, when I help them, start spreading the word to their contacts, they’re getting paid a commission on that. And so it’s just basically tap, rooting through every person leads even more people to more people to more people. And that’s why, over the years, the network has grown so big, and the customer base has grown over four and a half million people so far.

13:59 Jim Beach: Okay, and so what has been the most successful way of getting a new customer to sign on? So how do you find the new customer? What’s the best closing technique?

14:14 Brian Carruthers: You know, I tell people, stop selling, start solving. And same thing, if you want to build a team and and recruit people to be on board with you. Stop recruiting and start solving. So the stop selling, start solving. Concept is, nobody wants to be sold, but people enjoy buying. Like I walk into a store and the employee runs over. Hey, can I help you? No, I’m just browsing. I just want to browse. Okay, if I have a question, I’ll find you. So you know, stop selling, start solving. Means, if you can figure out what problems in that person’s life that our product can solve for, you make them aware of their problem, and then you show them a solution, and then they’ll buy it. So that’s basically what I do. I’ve got a little 14 question survey. Just ask them a few questions. It takes them one minute to give me some answers. I. You know, Do you own a business? Do you own a gun? Because we have a gun owners plan. We have a small business owner plan. Do you have your will done? Have you ever been mistreated? You know, all these different questions. And then I can just look at their answers and say, Oh my gosh. Legal Shield. Our legal plan can help them with getting their will done. We’ve got we can help them with their small business legal needs, you know. So at the end of the day, my job is to help make people’s lives better, empower them with this membership, give them the peace of mind. And one of the things I do is, you know, I share stories. You know, facts. Tell stories sell. So I don’t need to sell anybody on LegalShield. I help them, number one, discover the needs that they’ve got. And number two, I can share some stories and and so they can see in their own minds. I how our service can solve problems for them. I’ll give you an example. I had a dry cleaner the first time I ever use this membership. 27 years ago, I had a dry cleaner ruin a $48 dress shirt that I got from men’s wear house, not an expensive shirt, but nonetheless, they ruined the dry cleaner, ruined the cup on the sleeve. And so I took the shirt, and they said, Yeah, we know we did that. We tried to fix it. Sorry, we couldn’t. I said, no worries. Let’s just get me a new shirt. And they said, sorry. It’s not our policy. We’re not responsible for damaged items. I said, but, yeah, you but you did this. You just admitted that. You guys ruined my sleep, and you’re still not gonna take care of it. They said, sorry. So I went home, I called LegalShield. They wrote a letter to the dry cleaner for me from the on a law firm’s letterhead, and the next week, I had an apology letter and a check for the $48 to get me a new shirt. Now, most people would sweep that another under the rug. We don’t die a death of a bazooka blast. In life, we die a death of 1000 little cuts, a $48 shirt here, a $200 situation here, $100 situation here, $1,000 so, you know, most people wouldn’t call an attorney for a situation like that, but if you got a LegalShield membership, you’re just going to pick up the phone and have and get justice. You know, whether it’s big or small. So, and that’s just one of the 60 plus letters that the law firms have written for me over the last 27 years for all kinds of things big and small. Give me another quick example. I’ve got a bunch of rental properties, and I had a tenant move out of a property up in Annapolis, and left me with an $800 water bill. I took it from a security deposit because I didn’t use the water. He used the water. So nine months later, I get a letter from a law firm in my mail. I open it up and I’m being sued by this guy. I’m like, You got to be kidding. So I called up LegalShield. My attorney says, give me a copy the lease in the letter, let me work on this. A couple days later, he calls me up. He says, Mr. Carruthers, we’re all done. I’m like, What are you talking about? We’re not going to court. He said, No. I said, so here’s what happened. My tenant was thinking, I’m a business guy. He’s thinking, is Brian gonna spend a couple 100, a couple $100 an hour, probably a couple $1,000 in legal fees fighting this in court, or am I going to stroke him a check for the 800 take the lesser the two evils and get him out of my hair? That’s what he was thinking. But my attorney told his attorney to tell him that my attorney’s fees are going to be zero and he’s gonna have to pay his by the hour. You know what he did? He’s tucked his tail and ran it’s called doing a legal fortress around you that you never had before. So as an individual, I will never be without LegalShield in my life. For me and my family, as a business owner, as an entrepreneur, I will never not have this for my business legal needs. And we also have, by the way, 33,000 companies across North America offering our services as an employee benefit. It doesn’t cost a company a dime to offer it, but in this environment right now, you cannot in the economy. Most of these companies can’t afford to attract and retain good employees by paying them more. So they got to figure out, what can we do to bring these employees in and keep them here? Well, offering them better benefits and LegalShield is one of the most popular benefits right now. We have people in our company, Jim, they’re they’re making incredible incomes by just going out and offering this as an employee benefit in the B2B space.

18:50 Jim Beach: Brian, we need to move on and talk about the book. One of my favorite stories is I had Ian beret. I was having trouble walking, and I had to use my hands to balance and everything. I didn’t tell everybody, and I had a two story office. I was on the upstairs, and we had a balcony ledge that kind of wrapped around and I would go out onto the balcony and have to look down because I had trouble walking. And directly below me there was our Comptroller, and my CFO came to me one day and said, the comptroller quit. And I was like, Oh, that sucks. I liked him and he quit. Any reason why? No, it didn’t know any reason. I ran into him five years later at the mall, and I was like, Comptroller, why did you quit? I liked you so much. He’s like, because you were always staring at me, Jim. I was like, he’s like, You were always staring at me. I was like, I know. What are you talking about. He’s like, every time you came out of your office, you were staring at the ground, at me. And I was like, Dude, I had gillion beret. I was having trouble walking. And that disconnect led to me losing one of my best employees. Tell us about your book accident or exit interviews, why people quit network marketing and how to create a culture that no one wants to leave.

20:14 Brian Carruthers: Well, yeah, it’s it’s frustrating when you’re in this business model, trying to assemble a team and they’re coming in the front door, going out the back door. And there’s a lot of reasons for it, but the challenge is most people never even investigate what those reasons are. They just get upset. I can’t believe that person came on board and now they’re gone. You know, they’re quitters? Well, maybe they’re not just, they’re just not just, don’t label them a quitter. Maybe they had a reason to go somewhere else, but people never investigate that. So I spent some time basically interviewing hundreds of people who got into not just my company, but all kinds of network marketing companies out there, to assemble a list of reasons why somebody might quit the business that they were so excited to start, I came up with 35 common reasons throughout there’s hundreds of interviews and and I wanted to not just say, hey, here’s why people might be quitting your team, but here are some viable solutions to plug those holes in the bottom of your boat, to kind of stop that revolving door in the back on the way out. And I think that’s a very, very needed book, because, you know, if you can develop a world class culture where people feel like they’re valued, people feel like they’re celebrated, not tolerated, if people feel like they’re being paid properly, if they’re being supported properly, if their sponsor is not here today, sign them up, and then they ghost them and they’ve got no support. And there’s all kinds of reasons why people might decide to go in a different direction. But here’s the thing, I’m when somebody gets started as an entrepreneur, you know, I think it’s a shift for somebody that needs to, needs to happen for them to go from a w2 employee mindset to making that leap of faith, to making that mental shift of I want to become an entrepreneur, because entrepreneurship is truly the path to be able to put in place the kind of lifestyle that you want, the kind of passive income that you that you need to do, that they need to be supported, and so it’s super important. The reason why I love network marketing is because it’s a true alignment of interest. When I got started in LegalShield, there were people that were already very, very successful, and they were willing to help me learn the ropes. They were in the trenches with me, helping me to go build the business, because the company paid them an override on whatever my business did. I didn’t have to go find these people. I didn’t have to go out and beg them to help me. I didn’t have to pay them a P, you know, pay them out of my pocket to be my mentors. The model already dictated that, so that’s why I love it. But we need to make sure that people stand up to their end of the bargain. You know, if you sponsor somebody into a business and you want to generate an override on their production, you need to be a good sponsor, and people just don’t know how to do that. So I think it’s that’s why I wrote that book last year. I think it’s one of the most important books that I’ve written. You What.

23:03 Jim Beach: Is your writing process? How do you actually do it? Do you sit down in the morning when the house is quiet and put pen on paper?

23:10 Brian Carruthers: My house is not quiet in the morning, I’m I’ve got young kids, so it’s a late night process building an empire, which is my most known book across the world. That one took me about a year and a half to write it. I wanted to be a complete manual, like from A to Z nothing missing. And so I, I would, I would write it from 11 o’clock till till one in the morning, write a few chapters, and then, you know, pick it back up a few days later. And then, you know, I think, okay, the book’s done. And then I go out and do something one day, and I’m like, Oh, that’s not even in the book. So I spent a year and a half making sure that everything I was doing in our business from all levels, from from top to bottom, I wanted to make sure it was all in there. So that’s why it took that long to finally write that or complete that book, my untrapped book. And I’ll just, I think this important for the ending of our, of our conversation here, untrapped freedom manifesto, that book I wrote, I wasn’t planning on writing it, but I talked to so many people every day who say they want time freedom, but you can’t have real, complete time freedom if you have to keep giving away your time to get new money. And everybody’s always going to need new money. You can’t live if you don’t have money coming in. So people say, Well, Brian, I’m not trapped. I make a ton of money. I make a half million a year. I’m not trapped. Well, you’re paid well for being trapped. If you stop doing what you do for that half a million, it goes to zero, right? They’re like, yeah, like, there you go. People say, I’m not trapped. I love what I do. Okay, you love what you’re trapped doing, but if you stop doing what you love, your income goes to 00. Yeah, you’re right, Brian. So here’s the thing. It doesn’t matter if you’re paying well, if you love what you do, either way, if you stop doing it, your income is gone. The only way to get real freedom is by having passive residual cash flow coming in that you don’t have to keep working for. You need to set up a business asset that will be able to provide it to you. Warren Buffet said, If you don’t find a way to make money while you sleep, you’re going to work into. To die. So what attracted me, why I left real estate, the grind of chasing deals in real estate to build a network marketing LegalShield business from home, is because I wanted to go out and build up a customer base on a subscription based service, like our legal plan, where you sign up a customer one time and you get paid month after month for life. I wanted to be able to have that asset, that book of business, that if I decide I want to stop tomorrow, that residual cash flow from the book of business that was already put together will keep on paying me month after month, year after year, forever. So I just want to implore anybody listening to us right now, if you don’t have residual cash flow that comes in that you don’t have to keep going out and chasing then you’ve got to figure out a vehicle to do that. You have to get that you I want everybody to get untrapped.

25:50 Jim Beach: Brian, great, great, great advice. How do we find out more? Follow online. Get in touch with you. Play along.

25:57 Brian Carruthers: Brian carruthers.com C, A R, R, U, T H, E R, S. Briancrothers.com is my personal website. Got all my books and all my stuff on there, and I’m on everywhere. I’m on YouTube, I’m on Facebook, Instagram. People can find me, and I love talking with people, so I’d love to hear from folks that are intrigued by what we’re talking about.

26:17 Jim Beach: Thank you so very much for being with us. Great information, and we’d love to have you back. Thanks a lot.

26:22 Brian Carruthers: I appreciate it great to have you

26:24 Jim Beach: And we will be right back.

26:40 Intro 2: Well, that’s a, that’s a, that’s a wonderful question, actually, oh my gosh, I love the opportunity to do this. Thank you, Jim, wow,. That’s, that’s, that’s a great one. You know, that is a phenomenal question. That’s a great question, and, and I don’t have a great answer, that’s a great question. Oh, that is such a loaded question. And that’s actually a really good question. School for Startups Radio,.

27:07 Jim Beach: We are back and again. Thank you so very much for being with us. I’m very excited to welcome back to the show. KENNETH Brown, he has been a friend here in the Atlanta area. I think we’ve probably known each other for 15 years or so, probably through the Chamber of Commerce. He is a sales AI, profit coach, evangelist. He has an amazing business helping others grow. He has helped over 1000 different people become better at their profession. He is named one of the top 25 influential sales leader by inside you and his he has a show of his own called the passionate entrepreneur, which was named one of the best small business podcasts out there. Ken, good to catch up. How you doing? Marvelous. How are you? Jim? I am great. Thank you so much for being with us. How long have we known each other?

28:02 Kenneth Darryl Brown: 1520, years. Maybe we’re we’re old.

28:06 Jim Beach: Yeah, we are old. And it was.

28:10 Kenneth Darryl Brown: Chamber networking. I get around, you know, you got to get out there and meet people and share knowledge and and find out. There’s a term called net working. But there’s also a term called net weaving. And I love the net weaving that’s instead of seeking out people to sell, to seek out people to help, I like that better.

28:30 Jim Beach: I like that. That’s a great idea. Hello, and I know that about you, too. I’ve seen you do that. So you are known for that. The Metro Atlanta chamber has died here, not died, but they got rid of small business. And that’s the trend going on across the country. Yeah, they what, you know, they said that 90% of their revenue came from 10 clients. Problems came from small business that generated, 10% of the revenue. So they got rid of Nancy Watley and all of the people who did small business, and now they only have 10 clients. But they’re happy. You’re kidding. No, that’s what happened. That’s the truth of it, all of the big chambers, so they don’t have all the events that you remember all the events that Chris Hanks and I did, and all of the stuff that we used to do down there, all that’s gone now? Wow. How do you physically meet people in Atlanta these days?

29:30 Kenneth Darryl Brown: Well, I you know, networking is nice when you go to these Chamber of Commerce things, but I realized that I’m spending too much time on the road. Spends too much time, and then these things can be expensive. I had this idea, and the idea was, why don’t I leverage the Internet, the web to network? And so I created online networking sessions. I would do it every every week, and people told me I learned more about other. People on this networking call than I ever did in the networking session and at a Chamber of Commerce. So I like that, and it makes a difference, and it saves time, and you get to meet more people and learn more about them and how you can connect and to help other people grow their business, help each other. That’s what net weaving is all about. And that’s not my turn. That was Bob lales term. He came came up with the term net weaving, which is not seeking out people to sell, but seeking out people to help. And that makes a difference.

30:38 Jim Beach: That’s a great idea. I love that. Are you still doing those networking online events?

30:47 Kenneth Darryl Brown: I’m gonna start doing them again. I’ve been focusing on building this, rebranding my company from sales to sales, AI ESO and profits, so but I’m looking at doing them again. Actually, I’m thinking about creating a whole new model and utilizing AI and technology to bring people together. I’ll tell more about that if we have time.

31:13 Jim Beach: Okay, so how much is AI changing what you’re doing? How many What are you using it for? And which platforms are you finding the most useful? Everything?

31:26 Kenneth Darryl Brown: Let me give you example. I sent you a framework. The framework the powers. The superpowers are with 2006 and beyond. I had an idea. I’ve got my own superpowers. Pretty good. Coach. Sales is another expertise, another superpower, and pretty good entrepreneur. I just realized that could be another superpower. I’ve been self employed for probably 2030, years. I started thinking, you know, in the year 2026, what superpowers? What do you need to have to be successful, not only for this year, but beyond? So I started thinking. I wrote down all the superpowers that I had and what made me successful. I had to have a vision. Had to create systems. I had to understand where I wanted to take my company, so I wrote down these powers. And then I asked, AI, can you, you know, want to try to get this organized? And it put it in a really good organization that made sense. And then, Jim, what I did is, you ever heard that the notebook? Lm, yeah, I uploaded that and I created a podcast. Audio podcast. We had two people who were AI talking about my concept of the 26 powers, and it just blew me away. I’m like, oh my god, so now I can take that share with people. They can learn about the framework and learn how to be, how they can utilize sales and AI and EXO and be more profitable. Not only did I do that, but I turned that into a video presentation, five minutes that I can share with people. It didn’t take me long to create the audio presentation. Didn’t take me long to create the video presentation. Ai did that for me. And then you looked at the framework. You have that right?

33:33 Jim Beach: I’m looking at that right. The foundation powers and the chart, and then the power of vision, the power of agency, the 2526 different powers that you have.

33:51 Kenneth Darryl Brown: That was created by notebook LM, AI, and I looked down like, Oh, my.

33:59 Jim Beach: Beautiful chart. On the left, there’s a circuit,.

34:03 Kenneth Darryl Brown: No book. Lm did that. Which one actually? I actually created the first one that I think I did this through. I did this through chat. GPT, be honest with you. And then I put it, I uploaded the the example, and it created this.

34:22 Jim Beach: Presentation that you, that you’re reading through, well, it’s one of the most beautiful graphics I’ve ever seen.

34:28 Kenneth Darryl Brown: Oh, thank you. Thank you. I’ll take a little.

34:31 Jim Beach: Credit for what generated it. You should have spent hours on my fingers were bleeding into the keyboard, Jim and the cost.

34:46 Kenneth Darryl Brown: Thank you. I’m just trying to help. You. Know, I love this stuff. This is, this is good stuff.

34:52 Jim Beach: As a presentation tool to bring in a new client.

34:58 Kenneth Darryl Brown: Absolutely it. You know. So you can call somebody say hi, how are you? I was wondering, but if you can show them a slide presentation, if you can show them a video, if you could show them a share of an audio of two people talking that they can actually interrupt and ask questions about the conversation about being a sales AI and EXO profit evangelist that’s powerful didn’t cost anything. Yeah, it is. Hello.

35:39 Jim Beach: So I’m looking at the 2026 blueprint, an operating system for business success. And I will post this picture on line in the transcripts and all of that for you to look at. It’s got the world engine in the center. Ken, can you walk us through this and explain this operating system?

36:00 Kenneth Darryl Brown: Yeah, I will say that you can’t just go into say, Okay, I want to do AI, no, it starts with you. It’s who you are. So when I help a client, start with myself. What is my vision? What do I want to accomplish? What I want to see my company in the next one year, three years, five years, 10 years, and then what specific things do I need to do to take my company forward, to be successful, to turn that vision to reality? That’s that’s vision, and that’s mission. And your mindset you get you got to get your mind right. You got to figure out who you are, where you are and where you’re going, and if you don’t know that, and anywhere will take you there. So it’s, it’s, it’s critical to understand who you are. Another part of that is, I call it, they call it the power agency. I used to call it just owning what you do. But it’s, it’s looking at how you cannot be a victim, but take advantage of the opportunities that you have, and our artic be architect of your own success. Oh, that is so important. Hello, and and then it comes with you got to have habits. When you have a first meeting, you don’t wing it. You have created a script, and you practice, and you take people through that first appointment. And it’s not about who about you and who you are, but it’s about that other person, and what are their goals? What are their aspirations? What are they trying to accomplish, and how you can be a strategic partner, resource and asset for your clients. So and then the power to think that’s we’re just talking about phase one. I don’t know we got there’s like six phases, and there’s about 25 superpowers that people need to have.

37:54 Jim Beach: All right, go through a couple superpowers and explain that, please for us, go into depth on a couple.

38:00 Kenneth Darryl Brown: You need to know. And I call it your domain, but there’s two domains. One is your personal domain, the other is your industry domain. The first domain, your personal domain, is who, who are you? What is your personal story? What is your why? I mean, when I I started in business, I didn’t think about this, but I’m originally from Detroit, Michigan. We I grew up in the projects. My mother raised me, and then she bought a house well, she fell down the steps, and we ran out of money. We had crackers of water, and the crackers ran out. I’m drinking water going on three days, and I’m asking my mom. I said, Mom, we don’t have any food. And I just felt she got she didn’t react. I just okay, she’s getting up. So I’ll cut to the quick on this. But I was waiting on my mom to defeat me. I couldn’t wait anymore. I ended up getting a paper route. I started. I had 40 subscribers. I built it to over 250 on daily weekends, I’m sorry, on weeks, during the week, and then on the weekends, 350 I started making money. I knew how to ask for the sale, and I grew my that was my first business. I was 11 years old. It was my job to get to buy the groceries. That was my responsibility. So that’s my personal story. And so Jim, hearing that personal story, how did that impact you?

39:32 Jim Beach: I mean, damn, you know, I thought of several things. The cracker and water analogy was amazing. That story that’s that hit, that’s gonna hit anyone in the gut, you know, and I love more now, Ken, yeah, that’s, that’s my.

39:53 Kenneth Darryl Brown: Personal story. So when you understand how to how to create, how to communicate your personal story, people see themselves in. YOUR Story, and you build a connection. So that’s very important. So besides, so you have to have a personal story. You also need to know who you are. I call them your your personal strengths. You’ve heard of strengths 2.0 Strengths Finder, 2.0 Yeah, you take that’s a book. You take it. There’s an assessment. I discovered Jim that I was a learner. This is my strength to learn. I like to maximize a person’s potential and an organization’s potential. I’m an achiever. I like to achieve things on a daily basis. I’m also an activator. I like to take action, and then I’m also futuristic, and that that bodes well for me, because I’m a coach, that’s what I do. So if you know who you are, that’s why I was saying if you know who you are, where you are and where you’re going, your goal will take you there. You got to know who you are, what are your personal strengths? So you can leverage those strengths from your business learn and leverage that for technology and AI, so you can amplify your personal strengths. If you don’t know your personal strengths, then you’re, you’re, you’re you’re behind.

41:09 Jim Beach: If they don’t know, if a listener doesn’t know the answer to that, how do they find out that? How do you come to terms with picking out what that is? Maybe using AI and or my strengths are.

41:23 Kenneth Darryl Brown: There’s a book called Strengths Finder, 2.0 okay, yeah, buy it for like, $25 there’s an assessment that you can take. You can probably take it online also. But I said buy the book, you know, and learn. Because people, I’m shocked that people don’t know what their strengths are. So that’s your that’s your personal domain, and your unique selling proposition is, is what you say. When you say, what do you do? I say, I show people. I I say, if you can’t sell, you don’t have a business, you have a hobby. If you don’t run your business properly, then you won’t be in business for very long. And if you don’t understand AI, the systems, the principles, the tools, the resources, you’ll be out of business before you can begin. That’s my unique selling proposition. That’s my USP, so that’s, that’s your personal domain. We haven’t talked about your industry doing you got to be an expert in your domain. Mine initially was actually, I was a systems analyst and then became a certified financial planner. That’s my domain. I got into the PEO industry. That’s another domain, industry, domain that I’m I’m very good at. That makes sense?

42:34 Jim Beach: Yes, it does. Yeah. How do we start with AI? If it just sounds really scary, and you know, we’ve heard of people using it as Google. We want to move past using it as Google. How do we do that?

42:47 Kenneth Darryl Brown: I think the first thing is probably the multi purpose tool. You can use chat, GPT. You could ask, you can use Claude. I love Claude. Gemini is really good. GPT, caught I like, I use it when I write, when I’m writing articles, I like chat, GPT. I create a couple of nice images, but I think Gemini is really good on images I sent. I don’t think I sent that to you, but it depends on what you do. So I would say, whatever you’re comfortable with, it’s best to pay, you know, the $20 for Claude or or for chat GPT. But just get involved. I’ll just give an example. I have to matter of fact, here’s another thing that’s interesting. I like to watch YouTube videos, but not to be entertained. I like to learn. So I will take the video, and I will take I will copy the transcript, and then I will plug it into chat, GPT, I’m sorry, into Claude, and then write a prompt instruction to the brain, a large language model to say, summarize this in a prompt. I would define the role, and I tell her what I’m looking for, and we’ll produce a written summary of that video, that YouTube video, I like to study sales and AI and profit. I’m always learning something every day. So that’s an example of how I use. I mean, I use for many, many things. If I want to write an art I mean, I had a conversation I was sharing with a potential strategic partner, and I wrote my my memo or my email to him, but then I said, what would what would Claude? How would that call? I want to get a second opinion. Wrote a fantastic email for me. Now, I had to edit a little bit, but it was good to say, Well, that looks good. I’m gonna go with that. So I’m thinking I’m embracing what I call AI first. You know, I could do it myself. But if I can utilize leverage AI and that technology, it amplifies who I am, and it makes me better, and it reduces my time to do those kinds of things that you could write, writing a letter for 30 minutes an hour. But if you can embrace AI, that can reduce your workload time, and then you can focus on the things you love to do. Makes sense? Jim, yes, it does. Yeah, that’s just an example. I mean, you could load up EXO spreadsheet and and ask Claude or asked chat GPT to to summarize this, this spreadsheet, tell me the insights that you get from I mean, there’s so many things I use chat, GPT and claw for as a matter of fact, I actually use claw code to code stuff when I’m creating new projects and services. I got some really good ideas. Matter of fact, I’m creating an avatar of me to coach sales, AI a EXO profitability. And it’s so funny. I wrote the prompt, and I asked to tell me, I told it to write a prompt for me. The prompt is 30 pages long, and that’s for my first superpower I talked about with you today. So it’s, it’s amazing. I mean, you could use those same but, you know, you could do other things. I mean, I actually took it and I created, or recreated my vision for my company, and it blew my blew me away. And if you don’t like that version, you just, you know, say I don’t like that one. Give me another one. You can actually take that content from maybe chat GPT and have Claude evaluate that output. I mean, I can go on. I mean, there’s so many things I use it for. It’s, it’s amazing. And I.

51:42 Jim Beach: How long should a book be these days?

47:01 Jim Beach: Heard that you were willing to play our little game, the quick 10.

47:07 Kenneth Darryl Brown: Yeah, I think I could do that.

47:15 Jim Beach: Music. All right. Are you currently sober?

47:21 Kenneth Darryl Brown: Let me check, yeah, okay.

47:24 Jim Beach: Do you want to accept the standard wager?

47:29 Kenneth Darryl Brown: Oh, this cost me money. No. Well, it depends.

47:31 Jim Beach: On whether you win or lose.

47:34 Kenneth Darryl Brown: Okay, I’m going for it.

47:36 Jim Beach: There you go. All right. Number one, your favorite creativity hack.

47:41 Kenneth Darryl Brown: Well, I was thinking about the YouTube thing, watching YouTube videos, using Claude to create summaries. But I think my creativity hat would be the notebook LM. I can create audio podcasts and ask the questions. I can create a video. Slides, you’ve seen all this stuff, infographic. You’ve seen that too. You can do quizzes. You can analyze data. Do flash cards, great. I mean, you can chat with the information that you upload and know who that generally you knew this. You can create a briefing document, a study guide, a blog post, a keynote speech, an article, and give an overall concept of what I do, sales, AI, EXO and profitability. Matter of fact, this morning, I created five outputs. I created a blog post, a speech, a document, concept overview this morning.

48:51 Jim Beach: Remember Ken, this is the quick test.

48:53 Kenneth Darryl Brown: I’m sorry. I’m sorry, sorry. Favorite.

48:55 Jim Beach: Bootstrapping trick.

48:58 Kenneth Darryl Brown: I asked I understand what Bob Littell says, is net weaving. So I asked people, How can I help them? And then I connect that. Oh, so sorry. I love coaching. I like to embrace the Exo model AI. I love the exercise. I love to learn and read, and I love movies.

49:23 Jim Beach: Number first, the first three steps in starting a business are,.

49:29 Kenneth Darryl Brown: You got to sell, learn how to sell, conservative selling. You got to understand embrace AI and EXO and profit. You don’t, you won’t be successful. I said that was three steps again, four steps. Sorry.

49:42 Jim Beach: Number five, the best way to get your first real customer is.

49:46 Kenneth Darryl Brown: You got to know how to conduct the first meeting. Focus on the other person, their why, their personal story, their goals, their likes, what they don’t like, and how you can help them. It’s not about you, it’s about them and where they’re at and what their pain is, and how you can. In essence, to be a strategic partner.

50:02 Jim Beach: Number six, your dreamiest technology is,.

50:06 Kenneth Darryl Brown: Do I have to say? This is network? Lm,.

50:10 Jim Beach: Okay, then you go ahead and die. Life’s over for you. Bucket list. Number seven, best entrepreneurial advice.

50:19 Kenneth Darryl Brown: Know your why, know your personal story, know your strengths and your ideal client.

50:26 Jim Beach: Number eight, worst entrepreneurial mistake.

50:29 Kenneth Darryl Brown: I was a systems analyst, got hired and I want to be a certified financial planner in Atlanta. And the guy said, Well, if you go into buffalo, just, just stay up there, and then switch over. And I said, Okay, I’ll do that. I started. And I made the well, I made a decision, come back to Atlanta, and he said, Well, you gonna lose all your clients? I had to, I lost 100 plus clients, and start my financial planning practice all over again.

50:55 Jim Beach: Yeah, weather is so much better. Number nine, favorite entrepreneur, and why,.

51:01 Kenneth Darryl Brown: You might have heard him. Elon Musk, billionaire, kind of like the richest man in the world. He owns Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink, number 10 favorite superhero. Elon Musk, okay, okay. Batman and spider. Spider Man, I, I can’t I just like those three people,.

51:25 Jim Beach: All right, Awesome Answers. Ken, while we calculate your score and find out the winner of the wager, how do we find out more about you? Get in touch. Reach out to you all that stuff, please.

51:36 Kenneth Darryl Brown: Well, you can contact me on LinkedIn. I’m working on my new website, rebranding, X, you can check me out there. I’m also on Facebook, and put too much stuff there. So, yeah, that’s Oh, and you wanted some offers. I got stuff that I can.

51:53 Jim Beach: Provide. Can I do that? Yeah, sure. Give away a thing.

51:57 Kenneth Darryl Brown: All right, I have an app. It’s called the sales AI EXO profit evangelist. So if anybody wants it, they can download it. You can reach reach me on Twitter or Facebook. He says, Kenneth Darrell Brown, that’s how you reach me. KENNETH Darrell Brown, D, A, R, R, Y, l, so you can get my free app. It’ll be your online business analyst when you’re not talking to me or business support person. And also I have, if you want to hear the blueprint, 2026 I got the video. That’s actually, if you download the app, it’s on, it’s you can get it through the through my app. And also, not only just the video, but also the audio too. That’s about 30 plus minutes, but it’s really good. So I’m searching for my tribe. I’m looking for my my other sales AI EXO profit evangelist,.

52:52 Jim Beach: So they’re out there. You’ll find.

52:54 Kenneth Darryl Brown: And another offer you want to request the first appointment. I’m looking for my tribe again, if you offer no cost, no commitment consultation, that means it’s free. And so if anybody’s looking for a second opinion, I can, you know, want to talk to be your strategic partner, resource and asset, I’m in Fantastic.

53:17 Jim Beach: Can I have just gotten your score? Oh, you’re I’m so sorry you got a 94 but you have to have 95 to win. I gotta come on again. Someone from the Metro Chamber that dinged you. I don’t know how that happened, but one so you owe us a Tesla. We always play for a Tesla. So did you get one of those over to our office, please, 10 miles away.

53:40 Kenneth Darryl Brown: I’ll see what I can do. All right. Thank you very much, Jim,.

53:45 Jim Beach: You are very welcome. We are out of time, but you know what we do? That’s right. We come back tomorrow, be safe, take care, and go make the million dollars. Bye. Now you.