A thought process and business practice that consists of closely examining a word we use in our business, deciding that we want it to have some new meaning, committing to the redefinition that comes out of that process, and publishing it in our marketing materials.
The practice attaches a 2nd (or 100th, as the case may be) definition of every word, term, or phrase that is important to one’s business.
Storytelling was originally an advertising technique but is now associated with brand strategy. It is also called, for added polish, Strategic Storytelling. This is a concept and a professional practice, as opposed to a copywriting technique. As such, it is a form of Strategic Consulting.
Strategic storytelling calls for creating stories about how people experience a brand. Thus, things like features, benefits, and UVP are revealed through characters’ experience with them in a brief story rather than through, for example, bullet points. Story characters could be customers, constituents, employees, owners, execs, etc.
Other common business-world synonyms include the slightly more abstract concepts, Narrative Messaging and Strategic Narrative.
An umbrella concept under which all forms of communications, from messaging to advertising to publishing to “talking points memos”, are supposedly guided and united by strategic imperatives. Largely used in the context of the military, corporate manufacturing, and Fortune 500 in general. More closely related to Propaganda than to the term Communications by itself.
A form of Messaging which focuses on human characters experiencing emotions related to a brand. The experience may be implied rather than described; a plot isn’t necessarily required.
You could argue that its synonym Storytelling is more concerned with creating narratives with an actual plot arch. In practice though, storytelling, strategic storytelling, brand story, and strategic narrative are largely interchangeable in business.
The propagation of points of view, perspectives, and/or facts that are false and misleading. Propaganda attempts to create agreement among a great majority of its audience while benefitting a small minority of it. Propaganda tends to favor the status quo.
Imagine spending the night at someone’s house and your host has taken time from his schedule to read a book about you and your world.
If you spent the night at Teddy Roosevelt’s White House, you might have expected him to trot out hunting trophies or war stories. Maybe he did – but only if he knew you’d be interested. Or that’s my guess, at least.
That’s because every time he invited a guest to spend the night at The White House, he read a book about them before their visit. Maybe a book they’d written, or a book about their country or region, or one about their profession, industry, hobbies, or interests.
This was more than about ensuring good dinner conversation, of course.
* * *
Now consider 3 of Venkateh Rao’s 42 imperatives for indie consulting:
Learn what’s unique about the sector and its history
Learn the sector’s paper-napkin math and unique measures of itself
Demystify the industry’s science and technology stack for yourself
And ask yourself – do you think Teddy Roosevelt ever failed to grok these basics?
I don’t think he could have broken up the rail and steel cartels if he hadn’t known their numbers, the history, the science and technology.
I don’t know if Teddy Roosevelt was a good person, but I know that he faced down people even more formidable than Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg combined – and prevailed. As did a thriving economy left in his wake.
* * *
The One Book Rule is dead simple: for every one of your 5-10 important clients in a given year, read one book pertinent to each. This is totally experience-based advice, by the way.
Feel free to augment that book with blog posts, films, documentaries, white papers, podcasts, etc. I watched The Notebook when I had an Alzheimer’s research client. Just don’t skip the book. If you don’t like reading, listen to it.
What is pertinent? Anything that helps you understand the client – their business model, their industry, their customers, their solution.
What’s not necessarily pertinent? Stuff that makes you or your company a better person or business person. That’s great material, of course, but the One Book Rule is about understanding the client’s world. (Imagine Teddy reading a book about how to be a better leader instead of a book about his guest – no.)
What’s a “most important client”? You have to define that for yourself. But this is a useful frame if your business model is to serve dozens or even hundreds of clients per year, as opposed to the traditional consulting model of serving 5 to 15 or so.
Why a book?
A. Depth of engagement in an activity (most business books take at least 100 hours to write) lets you pull insight out of it. Check your Audible listening times:
A good book, even a short one, takes 6 to 8 hours to read aloud without stopping. Imagine scripting yourself speaking for 6 hours straight and everything you say is value. How much goes into that.
B. Hardly anyone else does this, so you will set yourself apart. This takes you beyond sine qua non’s such as the basic industry numbers, the tech stack, and company financials. You want to bring 1000s of little ideas to the table, or be able to.
And of course, you get bonus points if you find a book few others have read (“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking”, says Nagasawa in Norwegian Wood).
And on that note, I’d love to hear what you’re reading (:
Rowan
“I help businesses answer that question.”
This is sometimes my response to, “What do you do?”
Not always, actually, but this response works when:
What do you do?
I help businesses answer that question
This might provokes a little mirth, followed by a follow-up question:
haha, ok but no, really, what do you do?
or better yet:
ok, and how do you do that?
From which point the conversation can proceed in many different ways.
One takeaway is that “elevator speech” is a misnomer. It should not be a speech, a pitch, or a statement. Or a blurb resembling any of these. Even when a potential investor or client directly requests a short pitch – don’t do it. You’re not a performing monkey. Instead, throw out a hook that kickstarts a back-and-forth exchange. This works both in copy and in conversation.
How can you direct elevator exchange conversations so they benefit both sides?
If you sense interest, guide them towards figuring out what you do for themselves, with your help. Let them make their own definition. Analogies work really well here.
What do you?
Have you heard of Chuck E Cheese?
Yeah..
I own a place that’s like Chuck E Cheese but it’s not for kids – we serve alcohol and we don’t have clowns and balloons. It’s called Big Barrel.
Hah, got it! So like, Chuck E Cheese for adults?
Ok, I cheated a little with that example. Consumer brands are always easier to explain. Even if no one’s ever heard of them.
But what if you’re a software or consulting business that does something complex and B2B-ish? How do you elevator-exchange that?
What do you do?
Well, you know those crazy wall diagrams with lots of strings, and photos, and stuff – like on detective shows?
Yeah, ok…
Well, I make diagrams like that for private equity firms. I’m a data scientist, I make sense of business metrics
Ahh, so you’re like a business-data detective?
That’s not a bad outcome for a 30-second elevator exchange. The tagline convention of “_____ detective” is hoaky through overuse, so it won’t do as a slogan – but in conversation, it’s a great way to explain what this person does.
Note that the entire exchange passes Jonathan Stark’s Soggy test; it is specific. It comprises what he’d would call a Laser-Focused Positioning Statement.
I am a data scientist who helps private equity firms to make sense of business metrics. Unlike my competitors, I have an unusual detective-murder-board approach to reporting.
The problem with LFPS is nobody talks like that; it’s a statement that tries too hard to be accurate and complete. Thus, it might not lead anywhere conversationally. Whereas your conversational exchange is more likely to invoke a follow-up question:
And so on. To get a quality question like one of these, leave something unanswered. Be specific without falling into the mental trap of “accuracy” or “completeness”. Don’t be too on the nose; actually – say as little as possible. The goal is general understanding and curiosity – forget accuracy.
Feel free to try it on me, what do you do?
Best
Rowan
What do these two paths have in common?
Obviously, they have the same concluding point. But they also share two key tipping points.
More Specialized Knowledge Than Clients
The first and most important tipping point is having more valuable industry knowledge than most clients. Through work and study, freelancers and agencies begin to know more about an important aspect of their client’s industry than most of their clients do. This is about more than technical skills.
For example, I worked in fundraising and marketing for universities, hospitals and other nonprofits for a total of about 13 years, both for a large software and services firm and for an agency/consultancy that I co-owned. At some point in that 13-year period, it became clear I knew quite a bit more than my clients about the technical aspects of nonprofit marketing and fundraising. Later though, it also became clear that I better knew the strategy behind that.
The ‘more knowledge’ tipping point happens organically, mostly through doing the work over and over, but also through self-directed study, such as reading and writing about books (like Dan Pallota’s Uncharitable, in my case) or writing about your work. As a rule, for each major engagement, you should read one book and 5 articles corresponding to it. The study part is essential for grasping how your domain knowledge is related to the industry’s bigger issues.
Of course, fundraising and marketing are just two facets of managing the success of, say, a university. You don’t need to know more than your clients about every part of their business, but you need to know more than they do about at least one or two important aspects of it.
Different Mindset than Before
That by itself isn’t enough though; you need a change in mindset too, among other things.
When you own an agency, this mindset shift can be a little easier because you naturally assume the role of advice-giver. Sometimes clients will even try to pay you for your advice, “we just want to pick your brain for an hour; we know you’re busy so we’ll pay you”.
Of course, clients may try to acquire your advice without adequate compensation. This is especially true if you are mired in the tarpit of hourly billing. But that’s a separate issue; the point is that someone will pay you for your advice.
Then the spark happens, “what if I did a bunch of these brain-picking sessions each week, could that be my entire business?”. The tipping points of acquiring more knowledge than clients may happen gradually but this one usually happens in an instant.
The problem with that business idea is that most clients actually want your advice coupled with your ability to deliver some execution on it. Or the problem might be that you enjoy running an agency or even doing the work yourself if you are solo. Or maybe you find that you can’t even generate insights without at least approaching the problem first from the perspective of the skilled services solutions provider.
This is why it’s tough to jump from a highly-skilled freelancer or agency owner to a Strategy Consultant overnight. And almost impossible without either (a) an established publishing practice or (b) an Alan Weiss-style credentials (Ivy League-ish MBA and/or prestigious brand name work history, etc.)
Which is just fine because the in-between point, that I define as Expertise Consulting (“valuable services backed by strategic insight about industry/market/audience”), might be the place you want to stay for now.
Have a great week ahead (:
Rowan
PS. I think you’ll agree that the word “consulting” is so fraught with negative associations and over-use, that it’s almost impossible to define? That’s why I find it useful to break it down into certain categories of consulting. If any of these resonate with you (or don’t), I’d be curious to hear why or why not.
If you’ve read Storybrand, maybe the hero-villain-guide paradigm hooked you. To summarize for those who haven’t read it:
So how do you talk about your brand without casting yourself as the hero? Or do you.
This is a keen question in the world of B2B startups. In this world, there are two major types – spinoff startups and plain old startups.
1.
Spin-off startups are founded by owners (or sometimes execs) of established solutions businesses of some kind. Like Basecamp funded by the services of 37Signals, a web design and development company.
There are tens of thousands of other anonymous examples – software firms, consulting firms, digital agencies, and even less tech-related businesses: law firms, mortgage brokerages, insurance companies, logistics companies, medical companies, and so on.
Based on new market problems they observe, such businesses often get the idea for a specialized kind of solution, usually packaged as a SaaS product, mobile app, a two-way marketplace (the hardest to pull off), or a web-based, productized service. It’s a new way for them to monetize their expertise.
Spin-off startups are also usually run by an experienced team, a hunting party, who knows how to run a successful business together – and how to hire talent to help them do so.
By the way, this is the better kind of startup client to engage with as an independent consultant. As vgr says:
Choose hunting-party clients over individuals or impersonal organizations
2.
Startup companies are the weird kind that everyone thinks of when they hear the word “startup”.
These have largely become a way for the investor classes to transfer wealth from one generation to the next. And on a similar token, startups are ways for enterprise businesses to expand to new markets or at least dabble in them.
In rare cases, startup investors do effect the transfer of wealth to middle-class founders without significant corporate experience. Rand Fishkin documents how the worlds of millionaire investors and middle-class dreamers collide in Lost and Founder.
In even rarer cases, founders are bootstrapped (not funded by investors or by the profits of an already established business). In the B2B world, it’s hard to bootstrap a product solution without having first built a consulting or other services business and thus learned a few ropes.
* * *
It’s hard for bootstrappers to cast themselves as the guide instead of the hero, especially once traction is achieved. Because they are kind of heroes.
It’s equally hard for founders of funded startups to resist hero-dom. At least in my experience.
Looking for some data to back up that hunch, I had a quick look at the description text of funded Ycombinator startups in the B2B category.
If you filter for young startups (10 or fewer employees) and compare that with mature startups (200 or more employees), you’ll see a clear trend: you.
In the mature startups’ description, one observes the use of the word, “you” or “your”, either explicitly or by implication. This is because they have learned to cast their customers as the hero and their solutions as the assistant, per the Storybrand paradigm.
Of course, it’s easier for them to do so after they reach market and/or VC-world validation. Before that happens, they’re still pitching themselves to investors. Fundraising instead of selling. And on top of that, they have the media celebrating startup founders as cultural heroes. Or the startup world micro-media of social media accounts celebrating their successes.
This validation not a bad thing per se, but it apparently discourages them from thinking about how their customers as heroes – dealing with real life pain-in-the-ass villains.
* * *
See how much easier it is for the spinoff startup brand, with founders coming from a long-term services firm? They don’t need the validation because they’ve already built a sustainable business. They don’t need to be the hero all the time because they’re used to being the guide. That’s basically what consulting is.
In fact, they’re happy to be both the guide and the hero.
Thus they have solved the hero’s dilemma, which is realizing that every hero has to step into the guide role from time to time. And vice-versa.
Now let’s zoom out from the startup world – whatever your business, do you cast yourself as hero, guide, or a little of both?
Have a great weekend (:
Rowan
Quick tophat: a warm welcome to those of you who joined via Venkatesh Rao’s final Art of Gig’s post, glad you are here (:
* * *
Since I was a latecomer to Art of Gig, I had to set aside time this weekend to devour some early episodes. To my great satisfaction, I found one of my favorite subjects: rules.
I’m a simple person: I see a list of rules for independent consulting, I click.
Maybe that’s because there’s no standards-body or degree program for the indie consultant. We need to make up our own doctrines as we go, and it’s massively helpful when someone does that for us. Whether we agree with each and every item of a given doctrine is beside the point. They’re a welcome framework, playbook, manual; we’ll figure out how not to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
I’ve tried to figure out what business manifestos (doctrines, manual, etc) have in common by comparing The Communist Manifesto to the kind of manifestos you find in modern business and personal development books. Five things:
If that sounds appealing to you, then Philip Morgan’s indie consulting doctrine on indieexperts.io may be useful to you.
Just as Win Without Pitching was over a decade ago.
And the 42 Great Imperatives might also be now. Like WWP, the 42 Great Imperatives has tremendous clarity and authority. But it’s also very specific and comprehensive (and quite a bit newer).
It puts into words many half-formed suspicions about independent consulting that have bounced around in my head for years without a specific definition.
To take just one example:
Solve for industry-level questions, not organization or world-level answers
True! It’s enlightening to ask, how does this relate to the entire world? And it helps your practice if you’re looking for meaning in addition to profitability. But your client hired you for the latter.
It’s also tempting to solve organizational problems – but when you get mired in operations or efficiency, you have less energy to exert on juicier profitability problems.
People sell to industries or audiences not to the whole world. So the question becomes, how should the industry be doing things in the near future? How will the audience behave in the near future? Powerful brand messaging lies in the truthful answers to those questions.
Other examples from 42 Great Imperatives that I loved:
Never assign homework the client didn’t ask for
Never accept homework you didn’t ask for
Avoid polished deliverables
Document through communication (such as email), not documents
Do not claim unambiguous value addition amidst ambiguous outcomes
Retrospectives of whole outcomes over personal value-addition estimates
Train your memory to remember an hour of conversation without notes
Learn what’s unique about the sector and its history
Learn the sector’s paper-napkin math and unique measures of itself
Demystify the industry’s science and technology stack for yourself
Discourage use of purely internal jargon in how clients talk to you
Learn more from every client than they learn from you
Generalize what you learn for public consumption, but not too soon
Reading and reflecting on these, I ask – how can this person know me so well? Or know what it is I need to practice so well?
Through his own experience, study, and writing of course.
It’s like David C Baker’s, “Drop and Give Me 20” mandate. This asks you to be able to provide, at the drop of a hat, 20 observations about your clients and their industry. (A reference to Army drill sergeants ordering soldiers-in-training to instantly perform 20 push-ups/press-ups.)
These 20 insights are based on observed patterns and double as insight and advice. As David says,
As you read your list of 20 things to me, nearly off the top of your head, will I have some aha moments? Will I learn something?
Now mash that up with the famous piece of writing advice from Du Maupassant:
“Go out into the streets of Paris and pick out a cab driver. He will look to you very much like every other cab driver. But study him until you can describe him so that he is seen in your description to be an individual, different from every other cab driver in the world.”
This is the true task: description. Except in David’s paradigm, spending a day in the streets isn’t enough; instead, you might spend years or even a decade – like Venkatesh’s decade as an indie consultant. You describe your industry as an individual, different from every other. And have a very specific idea of exactly what she should do.
There are two primary groups we can speak to this way, people like our clients and people like us. (And let’s be honest, here, there’s more and more overlap between these two groups.)
So far we’re mostly discussing great rules for us, as independent consultants or perhaps creatives.
But what about your rules for your clients? If you were asked to “Drop and Give me 20” (or 42 if you want to go next-level) about them, what would they be? What should they do next year – or stop doing?
Talk soon,
Rowan