Rise From The Ashes
"Burnout to Brilliance: Great CEOs, No Burnout"
Leadership is tough. Burnout makes it tougher.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. Rise From The Ashes is the ultimate podcast for visionary CEOs and executives who refuse to let burnout rob them of their brilliance, legacy, and impact.
Hosted by Baz Porter, this show isn’t just about surviving leadership it’s about transforming it. Each week, we delve deep into the art and science of thriving at the top, combining actionable strategies, spiritual alignment, and raw truths that reignite your purpose and optimize your energy.
Here’s what you’ll get:
- Bold Frameworks: Learn the exact steps to conquer decision fatigue, streamline your mental energy, and reclaim control of your leadership.
- Spiritual Awakenings: Explore the intersection of purpose, alignment, and success to lead with clarity and connection.
- Transformational Insights: Hear unfiltered stories and practical wisdom from world-class leaders who’ve turned their burnout into brilliance.
This isn’t just a podcast it’s a revolution for leaders ready to rise, inspire, and leave a legacy that outlasts them.
Rise From The Ashes
This Social Impact Model Actually Works (And It's Disrupting Everything)
Steven Clarke's mother died broke.
But before she left, she whispered something that would dismantle billion-dollar industries: "Always give first."
Impossible advice from a woman who had nothing to give.
Today, that death-bed wisdom is feeding millions, housing the homeless, and proving that the most revolutionary business models don't come from Harvard MBA programs they come from the brutal classroom of poverty.
Steven isn't building another charity. He's not launching another "social good" startup that sounds nice but changes nothing.
He's weaponizing his mother's final lesson into the first social impact model that actually works. The first system where everyone wins more than they contribute. The first blueprint that makes solving world hunger more profitable than ignoring it.
Governments have failed. Charities have failed. Billionaire philanthropists have failed.
But a kid who grew up eating scraps just cracked the code they all missed.
This conversation will shatter everything you think you know about business, impact, and what's actually possible when you stop trying to get rich and start trying to give first.
Timestamps:
00:00 Introduction and Welcome
00:45 Stephen Clarke's Vision for the Future
01:36 Focusing on North America
02:51 Addressing Global Issues
03:15 The Food Industry and Waste
04:06 Innovative Solutions for Social Issues
07:12 The Model Explained
10:25 Collaboration and Sustainability
15:50 Overcoming Challenges
17:55 How to Get Involved
20:48 Conclusion and Final Thoughts
🎧 https://risefromtheashespodcast.com/home
If You’ve Been Hooked on These Episodes… This Is for You
If this podcast has been landing deep… if each story feels like it’s peeling back something raw and real in you… then don’t ignore that.
Every guest you’ve heard made the same decision: to stop performing and start healing.
Now it’s your turn.
Take the Silent Collapse Diagnostic. It’s not a quiz. It’s a wake-up tool for women who are done pretending they’re fine.
No fluff. No journaling prompts. Just a straight-up mirror into where you’re silently collapsing behind the mask of success.
If you're serious about reclaiming your energy, your clarity, your life start there.
Because breakthrough doesn’t begin with doing more. It begins with finally seeing what’s been stealing your power.
Learn more about Baz Porter at www.bazporter.com
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. This is part two from Rice on the Ashes. I'm back here with Kim, and Kim Speed is an awesome human being, entrepreneur who has walked through fire came back and thought, don't really like that, I'm going to launch a business and she actually stumbled on her ideal client. Kim, thank you very much for joining me once again. You're an awesome human being. Can you tell everybody a bit where you've come from and get everybody back up to date? For those people who missed it, go and check out the link. Go and look back at part one, because you're going to want to read it or listen to it. Read it and listen to it Depends. If you can At least listen to it and get to know Kim. Also, her details are going to be on there to reach out to her for any further communication. She's on LinkedIn and her website as well. Kim, how are you? And welcome back. Can you catch everybody up please?
Speaker 2:Yes, Thanks, Baz, Great to be here. So, for those that haven't heard, I am a brand builder. I help entrepreneurs leverage their years of experience, of knowledge, skills and talents and passions and help them turn that into a brand that actually gets them clients.
Speaker 1:I love that A brand that actually gets them clients. It's a rarity sometimes. I can assure you, the journey you've had is quite phenomenal, but what I want to touch on now, um, is changing the landscape of not just entrepreneurial and coaching and uh marketing and all the above, but also corporate sectors, and it's a subject of artificial intelligence, and it's a subject of artificial intelligence. Kim, I know you're dying to dive into this, but how do you, in your own words, how do you see AI changing the face of marketing and branding? How?
Speaker 2:has it affected you personally first? So, as a small business owner, it has made me like feel like superwoman there. There's so much that it has helped with. As a small business owner, we have so many things that we do, we wear all the hats and, um, we have to learn much. So it has helped me to research. It has helped me to expand my learning. It has helped me to build my business. It has helped me to become more visible and stay visible.
Speaker 2:Help me to become more visible and stay visible, which is a really big thing for a brand. A brand needs to be out there and be seen and not selling all the time. It's not about that, but you have to let people get to know you. It's like think about it like dating. You know you're going to meet somebody and you want to get to know them. For some people it takes longer and for some people it doesn't, but you need that period of time where you can share with people your knowledge who you're about. And artificial intelligence has helped me and helped me help clients to be seen and get out there with more ease and less overwhelm. And I know that sounds strange because people are going oh, artificial intelligence and the brand uh doesn't seem to go together.
Speaker 1:But it does. I'm going to share something with you. A very good friend and advisor in my world. His name is Peter Swain, so shout out to Peter. He told me artificial intelligence is not a tool. It's an intelligence and it should be tracked as such. Now there's a lot of people going now going what? It's a tool. I use it for this, this and this. It aids for things. It can enhance the learning and the knowledge, but it is still an intelligence.
Speaker 2:It's there to learn we're learning and it's learning from us.
Speaker 1:Correct, amazing. So in that experience when people come to you and say artificial intelligence. What is the challenge that most people come to you with? What's their like? Oh my God, I don't know how I'm doing this. What's that journey like for them when they come to meet you?
Speaker 2:So the number one thing is I can't use artificial intelligence, I can't use AI to create content for my business, because it doesn't sound like me, it feels slimy because I'm trying to trick people. It really has nothing to do with that, has nothing to do with that. It's all about using it to you know, hone your messaging, like you've got information. How can you make it so that people understand it better? How can you be more effective and more efficient? That's what we can use AI for.
Speaker 2:I mean, we can use AI for a lot of things in our business, like automation and you know, imagery and we'll get into imagery but like just to you know, organize your business and be able to communicate it to somebody so that they get it that you're talking to the right people and you're talking to them in ways that they want to know right people and you're talking to them in ways that they're they want to know. That's what amazing features um that I have seen using ai and branding, um and building your brand and helping you get out there and helping you feel confident about what you're saying. So there's amazing ways you can do things to train your AI to understand you and be able to sound like you and you can have conversations with it. I was laughing just the other day. I actually was arguing with the stupid thing, stupid thing. Yes, I finally won. I said you have not been thinking and go back in this conversation and review and I'll be back.
Speaker 1:I threatened. I threatened to fire mine, I think. Throw mine out the window firing and I call her grace. So oh yeah, um, I won't go down that rabbit hole because we'll be here for a very long time. What in the? There's many forms of artificial intelligence yeah, and we're talking the tip of my hair. Yeah, what's the most effective that you've seen for your specific clients? It doesn't have to be chat, gtp. There's so many of them. What is the one you predominantly use to achieve the outcome for your clients?
Speaker 2:Well, there isn't one. I use a combination of them, combination of them, but I do suggest starting with chat GPT, just because it's I think it's easy and you can start to have conversations and you can, you know, start to feel it out. The other one, though, that goes really well with it, is perplexity. So I love being able to research. I know that you can do that in chat CPT, but I love the effectiveness of perplexity for research. I have taken clients through, you know, doing analysis of their competitors, and they have, you know, all of a sudden realized competitors that they didn't even know about and things that they have, you know, all of a sudden realized competitors that they didn't even know about and things that they could. It just opens this world of things that they could be doing and thinking about for their own business, you know, and looking at competitors maybe or not even competitors, or other companies that they admire, and figuring out how they speak to their clients and customers.
Speaker 2:That I can do in perplexity, Then I can bring it into ChatGPT and use that to build, use that knowledge to build, and I would say, brainstorm and ideate with ChatGPT to come up with great ways to, um, what you know some new, new offers that you might have, or um that you should be thinking about, or different ways that you should actually um approach your lead generation. Um, these kinds of things used to take forever. Even just researching you know the competitive landscape was. It took forever, and you used to have to hire somebody and pay them a lot of money or spend a lot of your time, which, as a small business owner, you don't have. So you didn't do it. Now it's like whoa, whoa.
Speaker 1:It's like whoa, whoa, the first time. What you're speaking now is awesome, because the first time I did this and I was like, oh, I can do this. Yeah, it changed my whole business model. Everything changed within literally 14 hours. And when you realize that you can reverse engineer things that have already been proven, that are successful, that someone else has done but not in your voice, not in your way, not with your knowledge or your experience, suddenly like holy, oh, I can do this I know, and at first it feels really sneaky yeah and like you're doing something underhanded and you think am I supposed to be doing this?
Speaker 1:But it's a cheat sheet. Yes, essentially, and you've got to use this correctly. So, for those people who go, I'm going to go and research all this prompts. Learn prompt, competitive and comprehensive, prompt engineering. Engineering it's not taught very well out there in a lot of places. There are some are very good, there's some that are not so good. So use your due diligence. Please don't go and run out and just go.
Speaker 2:I can prompt and do the rest of it, um and don't just take anybody else's prompt verbatim, like you can use it to test out, but start to create your own.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, because someone once said to me you are the prompt. That's interesting. And what he meant by that I spoke to him yesterday actually Crazy enough. What he meant by that, I spoke to him yesterday, actually crazy enough. Um, what he meant by that was it's got to be your concept, your knowledge, your way of speaking into the intelligence. So it starts to attract, extract your data and missing points, to elevate the uh direction and the instruction of what you're telling the artificial intelligence.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I was like okay, my head has just exploded, how do I do this?
Speaker 2:And here we are again. I think the machine is training us again, yeah.
Speaker 1:But that's just it. So, when you're implementing some of these strategies with your clients, kim, what are some of the results that you're having and you've seen in this landscape compared to five years ago, six years ago, where you were like I've got to pay $100,000 for a market research? You had to sit on his ass for six months and then tell me this is what he's found, because that's essentially what they did months and then tell me this is what is found, because that's essentially what they did.
Speaker 2:There's a sense of confidence that comes because there's somebody validating, there's somebody you know, showing them various ways to do it, giving them options, showing them different ways to show up, I just like the whole brainstorming thing is amazing. And if you open your mind to it and it takes a bit, because I had a conversation actually with a friend I have some friends that are still in corporate that you know they don't touch this stuff and they said, oh, you know, I'm too old to learn this and use it in work and I just I cringe because I'm thinking, well then, you might as well just like shut the door and go. You know, you know you got to keep. I think this is the most fascinating time. The only other more fascinating time was when we started using computers and, um, that changed everything. But this is changing it faster and and even better than than at that time. Um, but it's a fast train and like, get up, get your ticket and get on.
Speaker 1:Exactly that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, confidence is a huge thing Confidence in what you say and who you're speaking to, and being able to have more content that you come up with, even if you want to show up and do these live videos. And I know that we just talked about how you can get artificial intelligence to do your videos for you as you, but that's a whole other story. But I've had to do great scripts for people so that you know it's not even something that you read, but it's like oh yeah, this is what I should talk about. You know just ideas where, because your mind is so busy as an entrepreneur, you're trying to do things, do, do, do that. All of a sudden, they say, okay, let's get creative and make some content that sounds like you and speaks to your ideal client.
Speaker 2:And sometimes you just need a little help. You need an assistant and it's a great assistant that can help you do that and you start showing up more and people start to see you and, like I said, you're not showing up selling all the time. Yeah, sure, you can make an offer, but I I see more people being able to just talk about some of the things that are important to them, show who they are. Um, they're doing a lot more of that now because of this.
Speaker 1:And the thing I think switched dramatically, especially in the personalized services like coaching, even service-based businesses, law firms, dentists.
Speaker 2:The law people were the first and smartest ones to pick this up. I couldn't believe it, and then I started to get smart and started using you know, asking law questions that I needed.
Speaker 1:One of the things that I noticed, especially in this space and in this subject, was the bigger brands, people like Nike, reebok, adidas and a lot of others. Yes, they were using it, but they weren't as popular because they didn't have a personal story. Apple, on the other hand, had a personal story. It had an emotional connection to the their, uh, their audience, their customers. But you, it's so challenging to try and connect a personal story with a corporate brand. You can't connect a brand story from a bank, or it's very you can, but it's very, very difficult. Like chase, for instance. Yeah, what's their story? They take a lot of money, they made a lot of money, but they've got no personal story. Well, very few people know the personal story behind how Chase was built. Yeah, but it doesn't resonate A 200-year-old story from that. Who made a shitload of money doesn't resonate with the millennial or Gen Z girl guy walking around with their iPhone today.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it just irritates them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly that. So what I found was service-based businesses. Entrepreneurs had a newfound salvation within this market. They created a blue ocean, if they're using the correct tools in the correct way.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, baz, this is so true because this is one of the things that I, like for years, have been saying. We are no longer in a world where we talk about do you work B2B or do you work B2C. That is non-existent, especially for a small business. You work H2H. It's human to human. I've been talking about this for years, years, but it was hard for people to you know, how do I connect with people? What am I going to say to them? Um, this is yeah yeah, how do I go on date?
Speaker 2:yeah, that's a whole other ai and that gets weird yeah it's really really weird um yeah, what you're. I love what you're saying is.
Speaker 1:It is human to human. That I think's been forgotten in a lot, in a lot of areas. And you were speaking about it. You were trying to tell people they don't buy your product, they buy you. Or a version of you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, people don't want to hire organizations or corporations. That's not what they're looking for. And when they do work with those people, they're looking for the individual within that company that they can have a relationship with. They want somebody that knows their name.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I've experienced this when I've gone to some of the meetings I've been in. Yeah, and they're like who are you? I'm Baz and you're da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. How do you know our names? Because I do my research.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you can use AI to do it faster now. Yeah, put a person's name in and find out about them, which is, and make them feel like you, you have, you're interested. It's amazing. All of a sudden they lean in and that's just it.
Speaker 1:That's the human connection there. Yeah, suddenly you've personalized something. One of the best emails you can ever write and I know this because I've done a lot of research is name. I saw you do something, something, something I know you're. You love sailing. Yeah, I'd like to connect with you. Suddenly they're interested because they know you know something personal about them. It's not just random. You know something, so they so they're going to read it. And all this previous data, which some of it was right, some of it not so much. Short emails for busy people yes, it worked for a time frame, but that trend is now changing. Yeah, and trends within artificial intelligence if you don't get on them, you won't have a business in 10 years. It's that simple.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you've got to learn it, and you know what I think it has revitalized my business. It's revitalized me in that this is something new that I'm interested in and not everybody's going to be interested in it, but I was looking for that. You know what's going to be interesting and something new. I was getting bored. This changed everything for me.
Speaker 1:What's the future you see within your business and for your clientele?
Speaker 2:So what's the future you see within your business and for your clientele? You're going to be able to use this as a team small businesses. There's going to be so many jobs that are replaced and I know that's like everybody's like oh my gosh, jobs are being replaced and what are we going to do? There's going to be new jobs and those are the ones that you're going to need to figure out and those are the ones that, if you're a small business owner, if you can figure out how to deliver that or deliver in a way that serves people that are going to have those different roles, you're going to come out on top.
Speaker 1:I think what you're touching on now is, um, kind of bordering on a genius, because what you're just breaking to now is adapting to the changing lifestyle and the role, the roles of the future industries, because there's not just going to be your uh, predominantly predominant industries. Your turn is. You've got healthcare, you've got finance, wealth. You're now opening up a completely different sector with different roles, but more advanced, which means there's more money and capital going into this new ventures. Yes, I met somebody the other day day she's going to be appearing on the podcast shortly as well. She just designed a platform to help and prevent bullying and I was like, well, I was bullied as a kid at school, horrendously. I know thousands, if not millions, of people are going through that now, but ai's made that possible. There is another person in our, in our orbit, kim, that is preventing child um harm suicide. Yeah, because ai has made that possible and the human to human connection is also expanding that it's allowing people that you'd never have a chance to converse with come together as well.
Speaker 2:So, yes, it's going out there as an artificial being, but then it's pulling in real humans together when it matters most I love that, kim.
Speaker 1:We're nearly at time. Um, where do people find you? What is the message you want to change the world with, and is there anything you'd like to give to the audience as a gift?
Speaker 2:Yes, so you can find me on LinkedIn. That's where I'm hanging out probably the most right now. So Kim Speed on LinkedIn, and I'm just going to say keep an open mind and keep learning, don't be afraid. Test things out. This is a new world, enjoy it, and if you're a business owner, figure out how you're going to use it, because it can make your business explode. And I have a couple of GPTs that I've custom made that help people with their brand. One is discovering who you are, and the second one is finding your voice, and I would love for you to give it a whirl and test out this AI and have some fun with it.
Speaker 1:Where do they find them?
Speaker 2:I will give you the link and have a special link for your community, Baz Awesome.
Speaker 1:I appreciate your time, kim. I appreciate your love and what you do for other people. Thank you very much. Thank you so much From my audience. Thank you very much for joining me. It's you, it's all about you. Please share the message. Inspire somebody today. Remember you are the miracle. Have a fantastic day. See you soon.
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