How to Tell the Story of Your Business

Story is a tool that gets attention and business leaders [music] need attention. You're plugging your brain into their brain. It shortens the sales cycle. Let's talk about how to tell the story of your business. People come to me all the time. They say, "Don, we have such a great story. We just don't know how to tell it." That is what this YouTube video is all about. I'm going to teach you how to tell the story of your business in a short, succinct, memorable, and most importantly, entertaining way. One of the best pieces of advice I ever got is years ago as a writer, somebody said, "Don, when all else fails, just try to be entertaining." So, as I've written business books and memoirs, I try to put something that's a little bit entertaining on every page because it really helps the reader turn the page. It's also true if you tell the story of your business in the lobby at church or to new clients or at a dinner party, whatever, you want it short, succinct, and interesting so that people make an emotional connection with your business. Maybe they they'll they'll they're much more likely to do business with you if they make an emotional connection, but they're also more likely to tell their friends. By the way, if you want to hear more from me, go to weekly soundbite.com. weekly soundbite.com. I send out an exclusive video where I analyze a successful messaging and marketing campaign. Look at the sound bites they used in order to make something amazing happen. Just go to weekly soundbite.com. With that, how do you tell the story of your business? Stories are formulaic. And if you understand the way screenplays work, the way stories work, you know how they work. In fact, many scholars argue that there's only seven story formulas that work, period, to compel a human brain. I actually believe that. It's based on a book by Christopher Booker called the seven basic plots. Took him 34 years to write that book. And if you understand the concepts really well, you can actually predict and know what sort of movie you're in. I can't tell you how many times I've blow my wife and say, you know, that guy dies in about 31 minutes. And it's true. They are very, very formulaic. Uh, but I'm I'm going to try not to ruin stories for you forever. What I want to do, though, is teach you how to use a story formula to tell the story of your business so that it's entertaining and compelling. And the bottom line is this. The way that you are currently telling the story of your business is really boring, really uninteresting. It doesn't create an emotional connection and it's not helping you grow your business. We are going to change that. Today, today's video is all about how to tell the story of your business. And this is a proven formula. I want you to to watch why story is so important, how it compels the human brain, the brain science behind it, because it's going to help you really formulate your story once we get to the end. Why does storytelling matter? Being able to tell the story of your business connects customers more deeply with your brand. There is nothing like story. Story is the most powerful tool to compel a human brain. In fact, the human brain daydreams about 30% of the time that it's on the planet. 30% of the time you're just sort of letting your mind wander. You're not controlling your mind. And that happens all the time. However, when you tell a story, the brain stops daydreaming and plugs in at a more engaged level than with any other tool known to man. In fact, you can watch a 2-hour movie and not daydream the entire time. You can read a Harry Potter book from beginning to end and have that book compel your attention the entire time. Story is a tool that gets attention and business leaders need attention. What's the brain science behind this? Well, stories create what's called neural coupling, meaning the listener's brain mirrors the storyteller. So, if you are excited about your business, if you're interested in the history of your business and you can [clears throat] tell that history in a compelling way, the brain that you're talking to actually what you're doing is you're plugging your brain into their brain. So, they are doing the same thing and they're having the same emotional connection that you have with your own business. In fact, your business and business interests become their business and business interests for a momentary period of time while you are telling that story. That's pretty much like magic. I mean, that's as close to, I don't know, brainwashing as you can possibly get. Not that we want to brainwash anybody, but we want them to share our passion about our business. Stories also release dopamine. This is a pleasure chemical. This is the thing that makes you do something over and over and over again because you got a little bit of a dopamine spike. And so when you tell the story of your business, you're creating a dopamine, a small dopamine spike in the brain of the person that you're talking to. And they have a positive association with your business. They remember it and are more likely to do business with you. Humans make decisions based on emotion first and logic second. So if you're a very logical person and you tend to explain your offer in a very linear, logical way, that's great. But you need to add an emotional tool to your tool belt when it comes to your business. You want people to feel something when they think about your business. And the bottom line is this. If you want customers to feel your brand, you must tell a story. Now, the leading researcher that I'm going to reference is Dr. Yuri Hassan. Uh he is a Princeton neuroscientist. He's conducted a series of fMRI studies to understand what happens in the brain when someone listens to a story. And its core disco discovery is called again neuroupling. And here is what Dr. Hassan found. Three things. First, when a speaker tells a story and a listener is engaged in that story, the same areas of the of the brain activate in both people. So if the storyteller's emotional centers fire, so do the listeners. If the storyteller's sensory areas light up, so do the listeners. And this doesn't happen when you just list features and benefits and facts. It only happens when you use the story formula that I'm going to show you later. The second thing that Dr. Hass found was the listener's brain begins to mirror the storyteller's brain. In some cases, the listener's brain activity even anticipates the speaker's next idea. You're you're coupling those two brains. Third, the more aligned the brains are, the better the communication. The synchrony predicts how well the listener will remember and understand the message. If you want to break through, use a story formula for to do that. So, first we want to get through to the customer's brain. We're going to do that with story. We want to we want them to mirror our excitement, enthusiasm, and positivity about our products and services. And we want them to remember and tell their friends. Story is the best way to accomplish these three objectives. All right. Why this matters for business storytelling? It's got to be pretty obvious. Stories literally sync your brain with your customer's brain. This increases trust, empathy, attention, and memory retention. So, let's talk about what that means. If it increases trust, empathy, attention, and memory retention, it shortens the sales cycle, right? It also dramatically increases the idea that people will talk about your business and spread that idea to their friends. It means people don't just hear your story, they feel your story. And when people feel things, that dopamine hit comes and they get a positive association and even a minor addiction, if you will, or a habit formed about positivity regarding your brand. All right, a few things about your story before we get to the formula. It needs to be interesting. Again, this is the best advice I've ever gotten as a writer. I got it before I ever wrote my first book. book. A guy named JF Baldwin told me, "When all else fails, entertain." Don, I don't care if you're writing non-fiction. I don't care if you're writing fiction. I don't care if you're writing uh instructions on how to change an ink cartridge on a printer. Make it entertaining and people will like your work. It's the same with storytelling. Make it interesting. Make it entertaining. We'll get into some tips on how to do that in a minute. Also, make it brief. Do not ramble on. Make it brief. Simplify. Don't overwhelm. Every aspect of that story that you're telling somebody is like handing them a bowling ball. And if you hand them too many bowling balls, they just can't handle all the facts and uh of the story and they're they're just going to drop it and not engage any more. Also, make it emotional. Share what mattered. Not everything that happened, but share what mattered. Make the audience feel something. And then finally, make it about the customer. Yes, I'm going to get to that in a second. Your story needs to be about the customer. All right, here's a pro tip. Great storytellers rehearse and practice until it feels effortless. I'm going to give you the formula. It's going to be a lot of it's going to be kind of counterintuitive, but as you lay the facts of your business's story on top of this formula, you're going to have something to practice. All right. Why should your story be about the customer? And what in the world am I talking about when I say your story needs to be not about you but about the customer? Well, let's go there. Here's the misconception. I should tell my story. Customers want to know about me. This is not true. Customers only want to know about things, people, ideas that help them survive. So, if your story is about how your grandfather started a company 75 years ago and how you've had a lot of trouble taking it over and he was gifted in a way that you're not gifted and you're trying to increase your your great places to work metric and this sort of stuff, they can't find themselves in that story and so they start losing interest because your story is not about their survival. We're going to get to that in a second, but don't make the story all about you. Yes, it's your factual story, but it's the facts that that happened that helped you empathize and serve the customer. That's what we're actually interested in. All right. The reality is this. Customers aren't interested in your biography. They are interested in why you care about them. So, your story is not your whole story. Your story is only what happened to you and your business that caused you to care so much about the customer. All right? Your about us page should really be your origin of empathy story. Here's why we care. We were doing business with a pool cleaning company. They put way too much chemicals in the pool. Uh, one of our kids got sick because of that. Uh, we couldn't swim for a month of the summer and we decided pool cleaning should be done better. Is that my story? Yes, it's my story. But it's the it's the aspect of the story in which I what was born in me was a seed of empathy for the customer. That story is infinitely more interesting than I really wanted to make a lot of money but I didn't have a college education. So I decided to start a pool cleaning company and it was something I could do in shorts and a t-shirt which was very important to me. I could also have weekends off and evenings off and so I started a pool company. Do you see the difference between those two stories? They're both true, but one is actually very, very interesting and emotionally empathetic toward the customer, and the other is all about me. Two origin stories. One has to do with the customer, one has to do with me. The one that has to do with the customer is going to be the one that actually grows my business. What happened that made you care about their problem? And why is solving that problem? Why did that become your mission? Your story is not look at me. Your story is here's why I care about people like you. What I'm really getting at when I say this is don't play the hero, always play the guide. What do I mean by that? Well, in stories, there are four major characters. Victim, villain, hero, guide. As it relates to us, I want to talk about the hero and the guide. The hero is the character in the story that is in a hole. They have to try to get out of the hole. They are afraid. They are illequipped. They are usually very, very weak. They get strong at the end, but they're weak. They're up against the challenge, and they're in desperate need of help. The hero is Luke Skywalker. The guide, on the other hand, is Yoda or Obi-Wan Kenobi. The guide has been in the hero's predicament before, but they've overcome it. They've developed a level of competency. They have there's challenge in their backstory. There's pain in their backstory, but now they are competent and strong. You always want to position yourself as the strong competent guide, not the weak, reluctant hero. when you actually say we're trying to grow a company, uh, we're trying to double our revenue this year and increase our profit margin and increase our great places to work metric and we're trying to increase our profit margin and you're you are telling the hero's story. That's not what you want to do. You want to you want to tell the gues backstory, the hero that how you were once a hero and you became a guide and now you're helping other heroes out of it, out of that hole. That's the story that you are trying to tell. That's the story that goes on your about us page. The story that you open up your keynote with. The story that you tell when you're on podcast interviews. The story that you tell when you're in the lobby at church. Tell this the backstory of the guide. How you were once weak but you got strong and now you help other heroes get strong in the same area that you are currently strong in. That's the story that you want to tell. This is really important because guides have empathy for the hero. Why? Because they're strong and they've been there before, but they're no longer there. The guide is no longer in the hole. The guide is no longer struggling. The guide is competent. The guides have authority. They know how to get out of the hole. They know how to solve the problem. They are by far the strongest, most capable character in the story. Heroes are the second weakest after the victim. They also have a plan. I've got a system that's going to get you out of this hole. That is the story that we respond to. Heroes have problems. They have obstacles. And they have self-doubt. Why would you ever position yourself as the hero in the story? That means that you as a brand have problems, obstacles, and you're filled with self-doubt. You don't know if you can deliver. Never, ever, ever, ever position yourself as the hero. Always position yourself as the guide. Your business wins when the customer sees themselves succeeding with your help. This is what I mean when I say your story needs to be about the customer. Let's talk about what this looks like and illustrated in popular stories. The hero is Luke Skywalker. The guide is Yoda. The hero doesn't know how to be a Jedi. Is illquipped. Can't lift an airplane with his mind. Why can't he do that? That seems easy. Yoda has figured that out. He's the cute little fuzzyeared guy who knows how to lift a a a jet fighter or whatever with his mind. He knows what the Luke needs to do, and he can train him to become like him. Now Yoda we know used to be a struggling Jedi but he's not anymore. You are the guide. The customer is the hero. Hunger Games. You've got Katniss. Katniss Everdine. She's competing in the Hunger Games. Doesn't want to be there. Illequipped. Has no idea. Is scared to death. And Woody from Cheers. Hey Mitch over here is the guy. Now notice Woody has a drinking problem. He has an attitude problem. He's probably a little bit depressed. He's very very cynical. Uh but he's good and competent at one thing, winning the Hunger Games. He won the Hunger Games himself and now he's helping Katniss. So your brand doesn't have to be perfect and you don't have to be perfect, but you do have to be competent at getting the the hero out of the hole that they are in. You have to be competent in your area of expertise. Never apologize. Always state your competency and your authority to get the job done for your hero. Uh, interestingly enough, people will ask me all the time, Don, if we're the guide and the customer is the hero, I can't talk about myself. That is absolutely not true. Never. I've never said that and it's not true. You can talk about yourself all day long. You can tell the backstory of how you became the guide all day long. You can talk about your authority and your competency all day long. You can talk about your empathy all day long, but notice how everything that I'm talking about is actually not about me. It's about the customer. In fact, Mary Poppins in the popular movie Mary Poppins is the guide and George Banks is the hero. And yet, the guide is on screen almost the entire movie, and George Banks is on screen very little of the movie. So even though George Banks is the hero, the story is really about the guide or at least the guide gets the most screen time in the story. So do not be afraid to talk about yourself. Do not resist uh talking about yourself. Do not be sort of falsely humble and uh make it all about the guide and say things like it's not about me, it's really about you. None of that is true. You are an incredibly [snorts] competent guide helping your customers solve a problem. And the reason that you're so competent is you were once in a hole yourself. You were up against challenges. You overcame those challenges, which gives you the authority now to help the customer. That's what guide energy is. Your brand is the guide, not the hero. You want to be Yoda, hey Mitch, or Mary Poppins. Why don't you want to be the hero? Reason one, the hero is weak. They are confused, overwhelmed, and searching for the next step. Reason two, if you're the hero, you remove yourself from the customer's story. Two heroes equal two separate stories. So, when you position yourself as the hero, the customer sees you as not in their story and in somebody else's story. Your customer's brains stop paying attention because they do not recognize you as their guide. So, be the guide, the wise mentor with empathy and a plan. Let's talk about the dramatic ramifications of playing the hero instead of the guide. I want to convince you that if you play the hero, you're going to lose. I'm going to pick on a Republican here in a second, but I'm going to pick on a Democrat, Hillary Clinton. Her tagline was, "I'm with her." This makes the politician the hero. Voters were invited to support her journey, not their own. I really believe if she would have just said she's with us instead of I'm with her, she would have won. The margins are were that close. It was a Do you remember it was a nailbiter. I mean, he won by a hair with make America great again. Now, if make if he's trying to make America great again, he's positioning himself with an offer for the voter. She's not giving an offer for the voter. I'm with her going where? I'm with her doing what? like driving around in a minivan. I like what does this mean? There's there's no offer here. Jeb Bush made the same mistake. Jeb can fix it. If Jeb can fix it, Jeb's the hero in the story and he's fixing it. What is it? That's not a clear offer. It creates cognitive dissonance. That's not the story that they should have told or invited customers into. uh Adam Newman who uh who collapsed uh a company called WeWork. The narrative became about his visionary persona not about what the actual customer gets. Customers and investors lost trust. He should have gone out there and said, "Hey, let me tell you my story. This is why I am absolutely obsessed with shared workspace. I used to have to work alone. I was so lonely, so bored. I didn't have the synergy. I didn't have the feel that I was with a big company. I didn't have the feel that I was succeeding. I didn't have the accountability around me. I didn't have the environment that inspired greatness. And so I I made an environment where solo workers could come together. It's called we work. And this is my passion and this is my obsession. Thank you for listening to my story. Did he tell his story? No. He told your story and you resonated in your brain with that. You identified with his pain that he has overcome. and you you said, "This guy's an expert on helping me figure out how to not feel so alone as a solo entrepreneur. I'm gonna join Weiwork." That is not what he did. He made it about himself. Another obvious failure, Elizabeth Holmes with Theronos, who's currently doing time. She she led with her hero story. She was obsessed with being the center of the story and it all being about her. And of course, it was a lie. It was fabricated data. It was uh the truth got ahead of reality. Things that they couldn't do, she was saying they could do and the story collapsed under scrutiny. I have friends who lost uh dozens and dozens and dozens, maybe hund00 million dollars uh with this company. And it was all because the leader decided to be the hero. And by the way, if you're the guy, tell the truth. Tell the truth. Tell the truth. CNN Plus, do you remember this? This was an app you could buy. and CNN it should have succeeded. I mean they had the reach and everything but the story that they told was really about the network's innovation and it was not about the customer's needs. They did not explain why you would need CNN plus and not just CNN. It shut down after 30 days. So the lesson is this. Hero brands fail. Guide brands win. Now many of you are thinking of examples of people who talk about themselves all the time. They're narcissistic and they still win. Go back and look at that narcissist. Yes, they may be a narcissist. Maybe they think about themselves all the time, but are they really telling their story? Do they talk about their marriage? Do they talk about their kids? Do they talk about where they went to college? Or do they talk about the villain in your story? Do they talk about why they are so great and accomplished at helping you win the day and defeat the villain? Go back and look. I'm telling you, hero brands fail. Guide brands win. You want guide energy. All right. How do you tell your story? This is the backstory formula for telling your story. It is the gues backstory about why they care about the hero's problem and how they came to care. Your story is your origin of empathy story. The story of why you came to care about the customer's problem. Let me just ask you this. Why do you care? Let me ask a better question. What happened to you that made you care so much about your customer's story? It needs to work like this. I was once in a hole. I created something to get out of the hole. Now I help others get out of the same hole. And the life they get to live is awesome because they don't live in a hole. That's it. That is the origin story of your business. And if it wasn't a hole that you were in, it's a hole that a customer that you met was in. Never ever say, "You know what? I heard car washes make a lot of money and so I bought three car washes and I've optimized them with a renewal payment system that tripled my profit. That is literally the story of you starting a company. What you need to say is I have always been obsessed with washing my car. I can't stand it when a car is dirty. I think cars are beautiful. I love a car and I love the feeling of a brand new car. What I didn't like was getting out of my car and pressure washing something and using wax that was really hard to get off and and so I bought a car wash that had a tunnel that anybody could drive through without ever getting out of their car and they could have that great feeling of a new clean car and share in my passion with the feeling of a new clean car. Do you see the difference between those two stories? Both of them are true, but one resonates with the customer, paints them as the hero and you as the guide. Let me give you the fourstep formula for telling your company's story. Here it is. Start in a hole. What is the struggle that you or somebody that you met and knew personally and give them a name, what were they feeling? What were they experiencing? What was the pain? Really get into some detail here and some pain about what you used to experience. Then what happened? the tool, the product or solution that you created that gets people out of the hole. That's the the solution to the problem that you had or your customer had. So the second thing is what did you do to get people out of the hole or get yourself out of the hole? The next is how did that become your mission? Why did this become the thing that you wanted to do with your life to help others escape that same problem? It needs to be framed as your mission. And then finally the transformation because your mission exists. How do you help people transform into a better life? So it's a fourpart formula, right? The whole, the tool, the mission, the transformation. This is your business story. It's not your biography. We're not talking about accurately representing everything that happened. That is not what we're doing here. This is your empathy origin story. And it's the story that will grow your business. What do you do with your story? Simple. Tell it everywhere repeatedly. You want to do that all over the place. First, write it down. Really get it clear. Use AI. Use AI and write down your story and say, "Hey, watch this YouTube video." You can drop the link for this YouTube video, the domain name I should say, into chat GPT and say, "Watch this video and ask me the questions that would allow you to uh use Donald Miller's formula for me to tell my story." And then it's going to ask you questions. And then it's going to print out a really good story for you. Memorize that story so that you can tell it naturally and decide whether to tell it. All right. I want you to tell it on your website in a long form paragraph. I want you to create a voice over. That's a narrative voiceover so that you can um show B-roll of maybe some things in your past or some things that you're doing now that make that story make sense. I want you to open keynote presentations with that story. I want you to tell it at the beginning or end of your webinars. I want you to tell it when you're a guest on people's podcast. I want you to tell it in the lobby at church. I want you to repeat your story. Repeat your story. Repeat your story. Most importantly, repeat it over and over. A story becomes culture through repetition. This becomes a part of your culture. It's the origin story of why we care as a business. Your story is not about you. It's about why you care about them, the customer. Tell that story and customers will follow you anywhere. It's such an important thing to do to tell your story. But don't make the mistake that so many other business leaders make. They tell a boring, uninteresting story that's all about them. Your story is not about you. It's about the customer. It's the origin story of the incredibly strong and competent guide. It's why you care. If you want to know more from me or want to hear from more from me, go to weekly soundbite.com. I send out a weekly video that is not on YouTube, not anywhere, and I analyze an existing campaign that succeeded. So, how did Winston Churchill invite people into a story to win World War II? How did coach Curt Signetti turn around Indiana football by inviting people into a story? How did Gwyneth Paltro launch a $250 million brand out of a newsletter by inviting people into a story? If you want to hear that is it's exclusive content. You cannot pay me. Do not send me envelopes full of money. It's free at weekly soundbite.com. It goes out every single week. I want you to get it, too. Just go to weekly soundbite.com and sign up. Until then, create your story, memorize your story, repeat your story, and connect emotionally with more customers. [music] All right. Thanks so much for watching.