What do you think is maybe the most important thing someone needs to know to stay focused so that it doesn't become the next abandoned project? Sure.

I teach there are seven questions you have to know the answers to before you write a book or before you promote a book.

So the first one is specifically, who is this book for? I live in a world of multiple right answers, but a wrong answer is everybody, everybody in business.

Anybody could benefit from this book.

No.

The more narrow the focus, the better.

I want people to be interested in to fewer people.

And generally speaking, I may already know the answer to this, but I'll ask the obvious question of, I guess, yeah, bells and whistles good if you can, or does it matter? Are we back to this? As long as you have the book, you've solved 90% of the

Take us through that a little bit.

Tell a story.

There was a couple.

So I like to say with people, heard that i started a company they congratulated me i found it interesting congratulations and i used to say you too can cash in your 401k and start a business if you want but america honors people who are willing to start a business i say we're the 15 who are willing to create jobs for the other 85 percent um so uh for me uh I had worked for other people.

I had been the president of someone else's advertising agency.

And I decided that it would be better to own 100% of a small business than manage 100% of someone else's business, if you're with me.

Because when you manage someone else's business, the questions every month are, did you bring the bag of gold? And why isn't the bag of gold bigger this month than it was last month? So I had a different model in mind.

So now that you've been in this business for a while, What are your big challenges today?

Darren, do

you know what the Merriam-Webster word of the year in 2025 was? No.

AI slop.

AI slop is what's happening.

And, you know, people can spot that kind of writing.

Chet GBT loves to have three bullet points and then a M dash at the end and tag a thought onto a sentence.

Yes.

If people want to find out more about you or the books that you've written, where do they go?

Yeah.

It's an underdog story, a Cinderella story, a rags to riches, a David versus Goliath.

Are you the little guy versus the big guys? Now, I know we've got a lot of the Inc.

5000 listening to this.

I know we have people with revenue over 100 million.

They probably don't identify with the Davids.

They're more like the Goliaths already.

And the worst case would be a ghostwriter who just agrees with everything you says, writes the book that you want to write, that nobody wants to read, that doesn't have a catchy title, that doesn't have a great narrative attached to it, that doesn't follow a story arc that really compels people where they'll remember the stories and the lesson is embedded in the story as opposed to it just being a preachy book about here's all the things I know.

So email to Henry Darius for a free class and mention the podcast name, podcast, Founders Podcast with Ash, and then you're might get into a free class that's that's pretty good so let's move on to the next stage then so a founder came to you sign up for the class and then potentially sign up for your coaching sessions you work with this founder for i don't know six months to get a book together and then is that is that what you do and then the second part of the question is what happens afterwards

Yeah.

So the planning and the preparation generally takes six months, all told.

And, you know, we can do them faster, but founders are busy people and they've got lots of balls to keep in the air and all that.

So we just work into it.

I helped a...

A president of one of the large pharmas in the United States, can't mention his name or the company, because it was during COVID, and he wanted to write a book during COVID.

Hmm.

I'm just doubting that.

Well, I'll try to break it down simple.

So for the Warren Buffett book, this was McGraw-Hill, so a major New York publisher.

A New York Times bestseller, the New York Times has about like 2,000 bookstores that they monitor sales at.

So you have to have a big publisher who can get your book into those bookstores.

But at the end of the day, We said it would have been a $100,000 investment to make this a New York Times bestseller or a $20,000 investment to make it an Amazon.com bestseller.

And we went with Amazon.

Walk me through the eight, if it's correct.

Yeah

... complete Sherlock Holmes.

It's a book like this thick.

And then I would read every Sherlock Holmes book I could get.

Uh, Agatha Christie.

I loved that.

I watched all the movies that I could watch.

Mm-hmm