How Authentic Leadership Shapes Success with Ryan King

In this episode of Career Coaching Secrets, our guest is Ryan King, an experienced executive coach and leadership development expert who helps professionals unlock their authentic potential and lead with confidence. Ryan shares valuable insights into how authenticity, emotional intelligence, and self-awareness create lasting impact in both leadership and career growth. Tune in as we discuss how to stay true to your values while driving results, and what it takes to build a fulfilling, purpose-driven career.

You can find him on:

https://www.ardentmentoring.org/ 

rking@ardentmentoring.org 

https://www.linkedin.com/company/ardent-mentoring 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryan-king-4396541

Transcript

Ryan King: 0:00

We work across the world and we work across many industries in the for-profit and nonprofit world. So the person we're looking for is not so much someone who works in a specific business or specific industry, but much more the person who's looking to make a difference through their work.

Davis Nguyen: 0:16

Welcome to Career Coaching Secrets, the podcast where we talk with successful career coaches on how they built their success and the hard lessons they learned along the way. My name is Davis Wynne, and I'm the founder of Purple Circle, where we help career coaches scale their business to $100,000 years, $100,000 months, and even $100,000 weeks. Before Purple Circle, I've grown several seven and eight-figure career coaching businesses myself and have been a consultant at two career coaching businesses that are doing over $100 million each. Whether you're an established coach or building your practice for the first time, you'll discover the secrets to elevating your coaching business.

Rexhen Doda: 0:47

Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of Career Coaching Secrets Podcast. I'm your host, Regin, and today's guest is Ryan King, co-founder and CEO of Ardent Mentoring, where he helped leaders and organizations grow through intentional mentorship and development. In addition to leading Ardent, Ryan serves as director of philanthropy and edification at Edify, an organization committed to expanding Christ-centered education around the world. His career journey has spanned educational development with Nexus Systems and pastoral leadership at Inland Hills Community Church, grounding his work in both strategy and service. And it's a pleasure for me to have him on the podcast today. Welcome to the show, Ryan.

Ryan King: 1:29

Thank you so much, Regin. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm really excited about our conversation.

Rexhen Doda: 1:33

I'm excited too. Yeah. So let's get it from the like the beginning of your story. So when it comes to coaching, is where we focus mostly on, but we can talk about all that is covered within Ardent Mentoring. First of all, what inspired you to become a coach and then start Ard Dent mentoring?

Ryan King: 1:51

Yeah, number one, I wanted to make a difference in the world. Ardent's key heartbeat is seeing lives transformed through the work of entrepreneurs around the world. And as I've traveled the world, I've noticed the same grit and genius lie in every person, no matter where you're from. But there's a difference in access to resources. And those access of resources highly affect people's lives. And so I wanted to see transformation in lives, transformation in communities, jobs created, people rescued from human trafficking, relief work, development work, and communal transformation. And so my heartbeat lies in seeing that transformation. And so we launched Ardent, and I've dedicated my life to giving of myself and giving of my time, treasure, and talent into others, especially entrepreneurs, so that they can grow their businesses, multiply their impact, and really see a difference in their lives and the lives of those they serve. And all of that comes from the fact that I would not be where I'm at without the mentors who have been in my life. I can literally track back to college, my success as president of my fraternity, not just within the fraternity, but within winning most improved organization out of 260 plus organizations on campus to my success in the business world, to my success as a pastor, and now my success in the nonprofit world as well. Each step along the way, I could tell you the name of who my mentor was and the number of things they taught me along the way. And so there's a giving back to here. I've been inspired by those that have poured in me to pour into others. And then there's also that part of wanting to see transformed lives and really wanting to make a difference in the world. And not a difference that's just momentary, but a difference that lives beyond me. One of my mentors likes to call it growing fruit on other people's trees. And that's what I really want to say that I would be able to leave a legacy through the systems and the work that I've created that would go on far beyond my life.

Rexhen Doda: 3:40

Now it's been four years with our dent mentoring. When you're working with your clients, first of all, those who are listening, how would you define the ideal client profile? Is there some sort of an industry, demographic, psychographic? Do they have some common goals or other commonalities that you're seeing?

Ryan King: 3:55

Yeah, we work across the world and we work across many industries in the for-profit and nonprofit world. So the person we're looking for is not so much someone who works in a specific business or specific industry, but much more the person who's looking to make a difference through their work. We call it officially impact-driven entrepreneurs. Now we also define impact differently. If we talk about impact in the US, we're really looking for a defined impact through the work or through their mission and their vision that they've established that their work is going to make this specific impact beyond just growing their business. But as we work in parts of the world where there might be 0.2 jobs per person and there's some incredibly educated, smart, willingly hardworking people who just can't find a job. Well, impact in that area does then delve into, hey, let's just help you grow your business so you can offer more jobs. You know, and so we define impact as we go, but our ideal client is an impact-driven entrepreneur. We don't work in the ideation or concept stages. So it's someone who is startup or beyond. We're happy if they're pre-revenue. That's not a problem at all. It's someone who's willing and open to learning. They're humble enough to know that there's things they don't know. And they've been able to identify two or three significant areas where they'd like to grow that's going to help their business move forward and in the end of the day, multiply that impact. And they're able to communicate, hey, I need this specific help. And so what we do is we look at those needs or challenges or opportunities that are in front of them. We align that with the industry that they're within and the context they're serving within, and we find them a subject matter specific executive mentor who really has the knowledge base, the experience, the expertise, and the skill set to speak directly in to the work that they're doing.

Rexhen Doda: 5:42

When working with our dent mentoring, are there different programs that people can take? Are there certain program lengths? Is it one-to-one coaching? Is there group coaching as well? How would you describe the engagement they have with you?

Ryan King: 5:55

Yeah, Regin, that's a great question. Our USPs, you know, unique selling points. Our USPs is that we're one-on-one, we're affordable. And here's the answer to your question: we're focused on the specifics of every single entrepreneur we work with. So we have some phenomenal partners, but we launched Ardent to fill a little gap in our ecosystem where there are incredible incubators, accelerators, entrepreneurial education organizations, investment organizations, impact investment organizations. There's all these incredible organizations supporting entrepreneurs in our ecosystem. We didn't see was that organization that said, hey, what are you specifically going through, Regin? What are your needs that might differ from the needs of another entrepreneur who's running a podcast? And that's where we really focus in. So our program is the entrepreneur. When you register for our program, we've looked at a couple hundred different business needs and we've boiled them down to 40 different topics that you're going to select from to give us some direction as we match you. But the most important section you're going to fill out is where we ask you to define for us two to three areas of specific need you need and the outcomes you're looking for from those areas. And so we offer one or two mentoring sessions per month in general. At the same time, we're always happy to color outside of the line. Every entrepreneurial journey is different. Sometimes we have board members who want to join the call or we have co-founders. So it's not so much one-on-one. Sometimes it's more of a specific, a really, really specific need, like impact investment. And so we match them with someone for just a handful of sessions. But most of the time, it's partnering with an entrepreneur like yourself, identifying the needs that they have and building the program around them. Now we do give resources along the way. We do give blueprints so they know how to operate and build agendas and sessions and best practices. And then we have an interactive online roadmap that helps them identify action areas and 90-day goals from the needs they've established so that the mentoring we offer is not just good conversation and great friendship, which we want it to be, but we want it to be so much more than that. We want it to see practical outcomes that accomplish goals that move the business forward.

Rexhen Doda: 8:06

Interesting. And how long would you say it takes for most entrepreneurs to just see meaningful change in terms of like expectations? Because oftentimes meaningful change does take time.

Ryan King: 8:17

It depends on how specific with your needs are. If you're highly specific and someone yesterday asked for, could you find me a mentor around fiscal sponsorship? This is something within the nonprofit world where an organization fiscally sponsors and collects donations for a smaller organization as they're building. And so this is going to be a very specific need. They asked for three sessions. So I think they're going to see significant change in their learning and knowledge base around fiscal sponsorship and three sessions. But the average mentee, I would say six to 12 months. That when you bring your needs, you're going to begin to see some significant difference right around that five to six month period where you begin to really dive in and put into practice what you've been learning. And then over that next six to nine, six to 12 months period, as you begin to implement what you've learned into your business, you're really going to be able to see this change on the ground where you're working. And so you look at the first six months, you could really break it down the first three months, establishing the foundation. The second three months is really building your knowledge base around what you need to learn. And then you're going to go implement it. And that's why I would say in that six to 12 month period, as you begin to implement it, you're going to see that on the ground change.

Rexhen Doda: 9:26

Thank you. Thank you so much for explaining that, Ryan. And I also wanted to touch upon another topic, which most coaches who are going to listen to this are going to find interesting. Is marketing is always a topic that comes up. Where do people, in your case with Ardent Mentoring, where do people find you or where do you find them in terms of marketing, what is working really well for you?

Ryan King: 9:46

Yeah. Our best marketing is partnerships. So we find others in our ecosystem who are serving entrepreneurs in ways that we're different than the ways we serve them. Then, yeah, and they're complimentary, but they're not the same as what we're doing. And our general pitch to them is very much you're looking for an ROI for your services. Whether you're making it a financial investment or you're making a time and talent investment, whatever your business is doing to serve entrepreneurs, you're looking for some ROI. We want to come alongside you to increase the probability of a really good ROI by working with the specific entrepreneur you're working with. And so our best referral source is partners within our ecosystem. And they introduce us to those they're working with, and we and we do the same and we work together to grow the work that we're trying to do. Second to partnerships, I would say is being part of events that are out there. You know, when our ecosystem gathers, we need to be part of it so that people can hear about the work that we're doing. Then you get into personal referrals, of course. Our current mentors and our current mentees bringing people to the table for us. And last but not least is going to be your SEO, LinkedIn type of marketing, where people are finding us through our website, you know, when they're searching mentoring or they're finding us through something we're posting on LinkedIn. We see a decent amount, probably our best piece of marketing in that is when we do a webinar with someone who's very well accomplished. Our mentor base is full of Fortune 500 CEOs and people who have launched nonprofits that are now in the hundreds of millions and 50 of millions and just have done wildly successful in their work, but they have a heart to help others do the same and to see continued transformation in our world. And so when we launch a webinar with them, we get a lot of traction from that webinar.

Rexhen Doda: 11:32

Thank you, Ryan. And you bring up a good point that having these partnerships could be key for most coaches, even if they're not in the same space that you are at. What I've seen is that between coaches, there's a lot of collaboration as opposed to competition, which would happen with most other industries. But I do like the fact that we are most likely to collaborate with other coaches. Oftentimes it also happens that there's a client is not a good fit for maybe our density, and it could be a good fit for some other company. And then some other company could send also clients your way. That makes sense. And having a big network there could be very helpful.

Ryan King: 12:07

And Regin, let me put in a piece of our secret sauce here and of our DNA. I got it from a friend who runs Hope International, an incredible organization that serves small entrepreneurs around the world with microfinance loans. And his name's Peter Greer. And he wrote a book called Rooting for Your Rivals. When you're in a business and you're geared at making an impact, this is much easier. But I would encourage even those who are running a business and they're geared at making revenue, is their goal of growing their business, which is no problem. We need revenue. We need to grow our businesses, to offer jobs, to support our families. But either way, whether you're looking at impact or revenue, when you begin rooting for your rivals, that's how you build the best partnerships. When their success is your success, and you're not worried about saying, hey, I'm not going to try to serve this client with half of what they need because that's all I've got. I, like you said, I know a better person for you to go to. I know a better coach, a better organization for you, where you're really going to be able to get everything you need. That's what creates those pathways of partnership where you begin to build trust and you really begin to open up the doorway to receiving any more referrals. It's very much that you give it and it comes back to you idea that exists in the world, a little bit of karma there. But the idea is that I constantly root for my rivals because I know that in the ecosystem of what entrepreneurs need to be successful and transform lives, which going back to the beginning of our conversation is my motivation and my number one goal. I don't have everything they need. So in rooting for my rivals, I'm serving my clients.

Rexhen Doda: 13:35

Absolutely. That makes a lot of sense. And now looking into the future for the next one to three years with Ardent mentoring, where do you see it going? Do you have any specific business goals that you're working towards?

Ryan King: 13:46

Yeah, and we can think short-term and long term as we talk about this. We're currently doing pilots in Singapore and Colombia. We're really excited to expand to Asia and begin to work through that market. I've not gotten to visit a lot of Asia, so I'm really excited to go there. But additionally, in our expansion to Colombia, a big goal of ours is to offer our services in Spanish. Everywhere we work right now, our mentors are speaking English. And, you know, so around the world, even though we're in 30 plus countries, it's all English speaking. So we would a goal of ours is to see expansion to Asia. Another goal of ours is to offer our services in Spanish. And then, you know, from there, possibly other languages as well. We would love to see on the ground work established across the world where we have, you know, an ardent ambassador who's working for us in different countries, networking and going to events and making partnerships in those countries. You know, everything we do right now is online or by my or my co-founders visiting those areas. And all of this leads to our big goal of 500 mentees and mentors month to month is that when we set out, we said, what's a number that isn't too large where it's unattainable? Sometimes we talk about a thousand, but a thousand just seems, you know, it's like such a large number. But if we could have 500 businesses that we're working with month to month, we believe that's our first plateau of significant success. Not that we're not making a great impact now and having a great success now. We're working with about 130 enterprises globally. We've worked with 200 overall. We're excited to, you know, expand to above 200 month to month in 2026. But as we look at that future goal, that first plateau where, you know, we really take some time to celebrate it significantly, because I encourage everyone, accelerate along the way, celebrate every win. But that future goal for us is that 500 mark. 500 mentors working with 500 enterprises globally is a goal that we have in mind.

Rexhen Doda: 15:36

I do like a big goal for sure. So yeah, excited for that. And so right now at this point, you said in 2026 you want to reach to 100, or we're about 130 right now.

Ryan King: 15:46

So we'd like to, you know, just clips 200 throughout 2026.

Rexhen Doda: 15:50

Okay. So, like when thinking about that, and as you scale to 500, where is the main bottleneck? Where do you see the main challenges?

Ryan King: 15:57

Some is in the entrepreneurial journey itself. I like to describe the entrepreneurial journey as uphill both ways while it's snowing. When you kick off a business, you're wearing every hat. You know, it's probably some hats that you're not very good at. Our first bottleneck is really the fact that the entrepreneurial journey is uphill both ways. I like to say that, you know, it's also snowing. You're wearing all these different hats, some you're good at, some you're not good at. You're trying to find the funds to pay the people who are good at what you're not good at, and you're trying to grow your team while growing your business. And all of that lies within the fact that to get the most out of mentoring, you've got to treat it like a piece of your work. You've got to prepare for it. You know, you've really got to put time into it. And so that's our first barrier is that the entrepreneurial journey is so busy that sometimes the mentees aren't doing the work to get the most out of the mentoring, if that makes sense to you, where we don't want to blame them for their lack of success, but it's, hey, we've given you a list of best practices so you know how to operate. We've told you build agendas for your sessions, come with questions, send those to your mentor beforehand. Take time to pause and implement in between your sessions, really make goals from what you're learning. When you don't do the preparation or the work beyond the mentoring, you don't get a lot out of your mentoring. And so that's one big goal. The other one I would say goes back to Stephen Covey's, you know, four quadrants, where you have non-important and important and urgent and non-urgent, is that our work, executive mentoring, lies within that important, non-urgent comment, you know, box. And what is unfortunate is that really in that important, non-urgent, that's where the most success is born. Not maybe sometimes where the most success is had, in my opinion, but where the most success is born. And when we don't spend time there, we don't birth things quick enough to lead towards our success or to help us not burn out along the way. And so some of the time it's just getting people to realize they believe our work is important, but it's not urgent. It's their mentoring. They can postpone it to the next day. You know, they can get back to us later. So some of that is helping our clients understand. Thank you for valuing the importance of our work. We encourage you to move it from that non-urgent to that urgent column, or maybe somewhere in between where you're really putting time and work into it. You know, then you have our ability to get our name out there, you know, to build brand awareness. We talk to a lot of people around the world where they're just like, this is incredible. I never knew you existed. We're small, very small. We're, you know, boutique, click, you know, niche in the work that we're doing. And so getting our name out there is a big challenge for us in terms of the work that we're doing. And, you know, last but not least, for us, it's continuing to be able to raise the funds as a nonprofit to do what we do. The market is crowded for coaching, mentoring, consulting, you know, so you have a crowded market. Budgets don't always allow for advisory support. So, you know, getting people to dedicate time and money to advisory support is a big one. And then for us internally, can we continue to raise the funds that as we grow and as we meet these entrepreneurs, they supply part of the funding for us because they pay a small fee for the service, but we have a scholarship fund as we work around the world and we never let money stand in the way of mentoring. And so if there's someone who wants mentoring and they're willing to put the time into really getting the most out of it, we're not going to let money stand in the way. So that requires us to be fundraising consistently.

Rexhen Doda: 19:18

That is a challenge on its own. Right now, when it comes to investments, since we're in the topic of money, when it comes to investments you've done so far with Ardent mentoring, what have been some investments that you feel really good about? Either you learned a lot or get a good return from, could be investments of money, time, or both. And what have been some investments that you would have preferred to have avoided if there's any bad investments as well, which could take you quite a few steps back since you're also raising money too.

Ryan King: 19:45

There is some investments in some technological platforms that we thought would help us didn't go so well. People's time, especially when they're building things that I have no idea about, in terms of you know, the platforms that we use to do our mentoring on. When we first began building, we tried two or three platforms and we spent a lot of money, you know, doing that. And unfortunately that wouldn't work out. And we sort of pulled back and we said, Hey, let's start thinking, you know, it's called KISS. My last mentor gave it to me. Keep it simple, stupid. You know, and I said, Hey, what do we really need to do here? We need to match, we need to get online the mentor. So we started using Google Meet Rooms, and that was fine. You know, it's highly supported by a reputable company, it's you know, free of charge because we, you know, for a small fee when you purchase the business workspace from Google. And so we start, and that solved a lot rather than them having to log into this platform that we're paying for that has all this stuff, and then through our website for a lot less cost, we were able to build out the you know, the pieces of the platform we wanted to give them access to when they logged in. Well, now we have our resources on our page. We have a mentee login on our page. We sort of piecemealed it, which saved us a lot of money, but we wasted a lot of time and money in the beginning thinking we needed like a dedicated, white-labeled platform. Then the second thing along that I would say is there's so many places I could go and so many conferences and events that I could advertise out. I put a lot of time into speaking with my team, speaking with different event people, and really understanding where's the best place for me to be, you know, to grow my brand, to grow my market, to meet mentors and mentees, to meet donors. Where do I need to go? Because if I take a trip somewhere across the world to speak at an event, but that event doesn't really hit the community that I'm looking to connect with, well, that's a lot of time and money spent. So when I've gone to an event and it's unfortunate, I'll be in an event, I'll be like, of course I'm willing to give my time, but man, I paid a couple thousand dollars to be here. I took four or five days out of my calendar, you know, to come be part of this event. And it's a wonderful event and it's doing great things, but it's not for me. It's not the bullseye I was looking for. So really trying to discern where to go, when to go there, and then how much to spend to be there because the packages, you know, when I get invited to different events, man, you can do $5,000, $10,000, $25,000 packages of marketing with them. And I'm like, do I, you know, what's worth it, what's not worth it? You know, I don't want to go there and then be like, oh, I should have done that marketing to get in front of everyone because it's really hard to, you know, network at this event, you know, and so sometimes you got to do that preliminary work and just attend and see and count that as, you know, sort of exploratory work. But those are the two I would say is we've wasted a lot of time and money on the technology, and we're getting much better at that. And we've wasted some time and money on traveling to different events that weren't bullseyes for us.

Rexhen Doda: 22:37

That has come up so much in this podcast, like going to the events that are not actually going to move the needle for you is just like it's it's not a bad event either, but it's not worth the time or money. And it's like more of like a nice to have than a must-have event. So yeah.

Ryan King: 22:54

And if we must say this, this might be good for a lot of your people. I don't know how many coaches are building practices where they're hiring, but my current mentor gave me the three C's to hiring chemistry, competency, and character. They say, we've made some bad hires, and so that costs you money, right? It costs you a lot of time, and you know, then it doubles in the fact that you have to replace them because they are doing work, and now I got to go find another person to do the work that they're doing because they're not doing the work properly, we're not seeing success from their work, but I'm paying them to do it. So I'm losing time and money while I'm spending more time and money trying to replace them. So it's sort of a double whammy. But as we've built back and we've really said, if there's a check in our gut, we're not moving forward. But what we're gonna do is step back and we're gonna say, is this person at least an eight or a nine out of 10 on character, chemistry with our current team, and competency to do the job? If they're not an eight, nine, or ten, what we would call an A player, an eighty is a B, but they're an eight that we can move to a nine or ten, or they're a nine that can move to a 10 working with us. When you hire with too much hope, I've gotten burned before.

Rexhen Doda: 24:00

Yeah. And good point there, where you said if it's an eight, it could still like as long as it feels like it's coachable and you can get it to a nine and ten, then it's still worth it. So that is a very good advice. And I want to get to the final question, which again is about advice, which is not usually what coaches do, but I do like to get your opinion on this. So, for the coaches who want to scale their impact, and in your case, you're also all about impact. What advice would you give to these coaches who are trying to scale their impact? Could be an advice you give to yourself at this point.

Ryan King: 24:30

Know your mission very well. Define your mission and define your vision very well. Take time, test them with others, send them out to others, really clarify, and then sit yourself and know within your heart this is the mission I'm dedicated to. Because mission drift is what can kill a business or stymie growth and all of those things and stop growth. And so I really encourage people to know your mission very, very well so that you don't mission drift. You don't get involved in good things and miss out on great things. Even if you're not doing anything, that doesn't mean you should just go do something good. You really got to take time to define for you what is my mission and what work will hit that mission in the bullseye versus we can go do a lot of good things all day long. We can busy ourselves, we can spend time and money, but if we're not mission focused, I don't think we're gonna make the advances and the progress that we want to make. And when you're having that impact, make sure the impact you're making fulfills your mission and your vision. I can help a lot of people. I always say, I can make an impact in here. You put me as a barista at Starbucks, you're gonna have the best experience at that register. I'm gonna be kind to you, you know, I'm gonna service your drink, you know, all of that stuff. It's gonna be a really great wow, that was a great, great barista. So I can go do a lot of good things, but I better really say, hey, my mission is I want to be involved in seeing lives transformed. What are my skill sets to accomplish this mission? I bring those in. So I bring my heart, I bring my skill sets, I build my mission from that. And then I make sure I don't mission drift. We get a lot of requests to work with mentees that are students, that are in the ideation or they're in the concept stages. We made a decision early on that that's not the arenas we work in. And while I love those arenas and I want to see organizations pop up that work with students to help them discover what they're gonna do and organizations that help people think through their ideas to put it onto paper and to build the concept so that they can launch the business, that's not where we work. And so we get requested a lot to go do those things, and that can really hurt our growth and hurt the fulfillment of our mission when we're working outside of the lane that we should be in. Stay in your lane, know your mission, make sure you aren't missing drifting, and that the impact you're hoping to make is actually accomplished by the work that you're doing and can be measured back to the mission that you have.

Rexhen Doda: 26:47

Thank you so much, Ryan. Thank you so much for that amazing advice. I really appreciate the fact that, like, staying within your lane, keeping a laser focus within the mission and not drifting, that is so important and oftentimes overlooked as a topic. So, yeah, for anyone who is listening and wants to connect with you or find you or connect with Ardent, they can go into the website rdentmentoring.org and they'll be able to find the website. Now, if they wanted to connect with you directly, I believe they can go into LinkedIn and look up Ryan King.

Ryan King: 27:21

They can email me at rking at ardentmentoring.org. I'm always open. They can schedule a discovery call with my team right on the website there. So if you're an entrepreneur and you're looking to get started with you, visit the website. And if you're intrigued by what we have on there and the testimonials and all those different types of things, schedule a discovery call. If you're someone who's looking to connect with me about partnering or being a mentor, or even if you're an aspiring entrepreneur and you want to have a conversation, they can email me directly at RKing and Art of Mentoring or find me on LinkedIn for sure.

Rexhen Doda: 27:48

Thank you so much, Ryan. Thank you for coming to our show.

Ryan King: 27:50

You're very welcome. Thank you, Regin, for having me.

Davis Nguyen: 27:53

That's it for this episode of Career Coaching Secrets. If you enjoyed this conversation, you can subscribe to YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to this episode to catch future episodes. This conversation was brought to you by Purple Circle, where we help career coaches scale their business to seven and eight figures without burning out. To learn more about Purple Circle, our community, and how we can help you grow your business, visit join purplecircle.com.