#169 – The One Thing You Need to Make Any Business Grow
Don't start sharing your business story without these five things.
This is Adventures in Storytelling your bi-weekly note with resources, insights, and actionable tools for better communication through storytelling. Enjoy.
Consider this a business storytelling dispatch. An important one.
It’s something I’m not sure I’ve made clear in my years of writing this newsletter, but want to ensure you know and leverage. Especially if you own a business or communicate on behalf of other businesses.
You cannot tell a compelling business or brand story, you cannot bring your product or service to life, you cannot create associations and connections between your brand and your audience if you do not establish the fundamentals of your brand and story. Set the foundations. If you don’t have the basics sorted, you’re going to struggle to tell a cohesive story.
What are those fundamentals, well that’s what this note is all about. Here are the key things you need to establish in order to effectively start crafting a business or brand story. And no, once again, it’s not a logo—one day I will write my ranty post about why a logo does not equal a brand, but that is a post for another day.
Back to what I was saying… Here are the five fundamentals you need to establish BEFORE you even consider developing a brand or business
Product or Service Proof of Concept: Are people buying what you’re selling? Are they interested in it and does it work. You need to make sure the thing you want to sell is something people in the world want to pay money for. Marie Forleo (a business coach, whose online business program I mentor in) often says if people aren’t willing to buy your product or service, you have a hobby not a business. Make sure you have a business before you start to put energy into building a story and brand around it.
An Understanding of Your Customer: What they need and how your offering can make their life better—in their own words. In traditional marketing (what you’d learn in marketing 101 or your MBA) this is called a value proposition. The best way to go about getting this understanding is simple—talk to them. Set up time to understand and engage with your customers. To know them inside and out. You need to be fully tapped into what their lives look like and where your product plays a role or can play a role. I always tell my workshop and 1:1 story coaching clients that whatever it is they say to you are the words you should use in your copy (this is another insight from Marie—she really is a source of so much valuable knowledge).
A clear sense of why you want to do what you’re doing: People call this purpose. I call it purpose. But that’s a word that can intimidate some people. So call it whatever you want, but really why it matters is because it gives you a sense of meaning as you build your business foundations and clarity when you have to make the hard decisions. It becomes a north star that guides you as you build and will feed into the brand and stories you share.
What exactly you Offer and How: I’ve worked with many folks who have started businesses with a vague sense of a thing they wanted to create for the world whether it’s a piece of tech or a coaching service. I want you to sit down with yourself and write in one or two sentences EXACTLY what you offer—the thing people will pay you money for—and how you go about delivering it. Often (but not always) the how is also your point of difference so pay close attention to it.
Your True Impact: How will the world change as a result of your offering? And when I say world I mean your world big or small and/or the world of your customer. This is your real-life currency. The real difference you make. This is what they ultimately get from you. Important note: you don’t sell impact they experience it—you sell your offering. (Then they evangelize your impact if you do it right).
Here's an example from my business, Ramsay & Co.
I started Ramsay & Co after working in brand and product marketing at Shopify and seeing how many small businesses struggled to understand and use marketing to grow their business—it continues to be the number one struggle for them and what leads many businesses to fail. So I had proof of concept before going in. I then had conversations with about 10 people both potential clients and former freelance consulting ones to get a sense of what they would pay for the kind of help I could offer them—brand and marketing communications strategy. It helped me get really clear on what they needed and helped refine my proof of concept. I had my purpose before I even went into it and it remains what guides my work and life efforts and has since I was a newspaper reporter (to help people share untold stories). I sat down and wrote out a clear business plan that outlined my services in detail and what made it different from all the other consultancies out there (boutique and storytelling with small business focus and anti-oppressive approach). Then I went back to the notes I took to get clear from my audience what value they got out of working with me and the answer was simple but business shifting: clarity. And all the practical things (like a plan) they needed to grow their business and move it forward).
It’s a lot of work and took some time. But it is a lot easier to take these steps and do it right than it is to try to build a business and then a brand around something that might not have what it takes to work. The only way to find out is to explore and try.
If you need help figuring this step out as you start or grow your business, reach out to me anytime, I’m happy to help however I can.
So before you even consider trying to share a brand story, get the fundamentals sorted first. Then dive in. And have fun. It’s supposed to be fun.
A Story Well Told
Don’t listen to the critics and don’t listen to the (likely sexist) fools. Listen to me. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is excellent. It’s a strangely fitting end for the Furiosa story started in Mad Max: Fury Road despite the fact that it’s a prequel. In my eyes right now, George Miller can do no wrong when it comes to telling stories grounded in strong female characters. It is character development at its finest. I did a re-watch of Fury Road (in my top five all time favourite films) left the last 30 minutes unwatched, went to see Furiosa, and serendipitously finished Fury Road after in an unintentionally the perfect viewing sequence.
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