Unlock Your Way with STK is a founder development podcast for experienced CEOs who've hit a ceiling.
Host Suzanne Taylor-King, founder and diagnostician for growing businesses, explores the invisible constraints that stall progress long after strategy and hustle stop working.
Each week: a diagnostic conversation with a founder or leader who found the real constraint, not another tactic. Because the problem you're solving may not be the real problem.
New episodes weekly for founders ready to see what they can't see from inside the business.
Ep82 Bret Ridgway—How to Reinvent Your Business After 60, Use AI to Launch a New Idea, and Turn Books Into Marketing Tools That Actually Make Money
You sent your audience to Amazon to buy your book, and now you have no idea who bought it. That's a lot of readers and no way to follow up.
Suzanne sits down with Bret Ridgway, a children's book author with a long career in publishing, speaking, and speaker fulfillment, to talk about what a book can do for your business when you treat it as the front end of your sales process. Suzanne shares a $197 book funnel she bought that turned out to be a full coaching program, and Bret explains why the format you put your content in changes what people will pay for it.
Bret also tells the story behind his Laugh and Learn Library. After he was pushed out of the fulfillment company he co-founded, he started playing with Google Gemini to make a cartoon image of crickets playing croquet. That turned into Games Animals Play, an A to Z book of animals doing silly things, and a plan to give away 1,000 copies this year.
In this conversation, you'll discover:
- Why a nonfiction book works best as the front end of your business, and how bouncebacks inside it send readers to your website
- What you give up when you send your audience to Amazon to buy your book, and what to do instead
- How the same content can sell for $15 to $20 as a book and $97 to $197 as a binder, and what that teaches about perceived value
- How selling from a stage works: 85-90% content, a high-ticket offer at the end, and why event promoters expect a split
- Why Suzanne and Bret both see AI as an adaptation of the work and not the end of it
- Why relationships are your most important business asset, and why Bret still writes handwritten notes
Find all the show notes and links here: https://www.unlockyourwaywithstk.com/82
25 Sept 2026
Ep81 David McIlroy—Why Chasing Likes Is the Wrong Growth Strategy (and What Works Instead)
David McIlroy joined Substack in June 2023 with fewer than 200 subscribers who migrated over from another list. He never promoted it on social media. Today, 99% of his audience has come from inside the platform itself.
Suzanne sits down with David, a Substack writer and creator who helps other writers get their best thinking out of their heads and onto the page, to talk about what actually drives growth once the vanity metrics stop meaning anything.
David's take is blunt: likes don't tell you whether your business is growing. The real signal is what happens in the background: the DMs, the comments under an article, and the conversations nobody else sees. He builds his entire approach around connecting with people first and worrying about the sale later, if it comes up at all.
In this conversation, you'll discover:
- Why likes and vanity metrics are the wrong thing to chase if you actually want to grow a business
- The difference between marketing that makes people feel like they have a problem and marketing that simply opens a door
- Why vulnerable, self-deprecating stories build more trust than any polished pitch
- How David is launching Velocity, his new group coaching program for writers, by being upfront about the price from day one
- What changed on Substack after the Notes feature launched, and why it pulled in so many writers and journalists
Find all the show notes and links here: https://www.unlockyourwaywithstk.com/81
14 Jun 2026
Ep80 Kevin Maney - How to Use the Category Creation Formula to Own Your Market and Make Competition Irrelevant
One pre-IPO company had been operating for 20 years. After one category design session with Kevin Maney, a veteran executive raised his hand in the conference room and said he felt embarrassed. The answer they'd found was so obvious in hindsight, he couldn't understand why it had taken two decades to see it. Kevin's response: it's like trying to be your own psychologist.
Suzanne sits down with Kevin Maney, co-founder of Category Design Advisors and author of the new book The Category Creation Formula, to walk through the strategic system behind how companies win their markets.
In most digital markets, one company captures roughly 75% of the category. One company. All the pricing power and market share. The Category Creation Formula is built around a simple question: why wouldn't you do everything possible to be that company?
The formula is Context + Missing + Innovation = new market category. Context comes first: what's changing around your target audience, what new problems are appearing, what's no longer being adequately solved. From there, the missing piece becomes visible. Then you build the innovation to fill it. The order matters.
In this conversation, you'll discover:
- Why category design starts at the CEO level, before any marketing message gets written
- How the Context + Missing + Innovation formula works with real clients
- What a 20-year-old pre-IPO company learned about itself in one session
- Why writing a book disciplines your thinking in ways that make you a clearer leader and speaker
- How Kevin's advisory firm grew almost entirely through word of mouth
Find all the show notes and links here: https://www.unlockyourwaywithstk.com/80
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