Know and share your story

Effective entrepreneurs know and share their stories.

Nothing engages an audience like storytelling. The story’s hero is inspiring, the villain is recognizable, and everyone cheers when the hero wins the day. Stories not only capture the audience’s attention, they cause emotions in the hearers that coincide with the speaker’s own response to the story ((Gallo, pg. 50)).

Stories shape our perceptions of life and history. Who remembers the details of the Spanish-American war? But most can repeat the slogan, “Remember the Alamo” and tell you that brave American frontiersmen held off an enormous Spanish army (even if the facts get a bit skewed).

Our stories shape our identity. We are survivors, fighters, rebels, victims, heroes. The story changes with our perception, “Was I the helpless victim of abuse or the courageous survivor?,” and the answer determines how we act in the present.

Every business has stories. There’s the origin story; how the business came to be. kCura CEO Andrew Seija meets with every new hire to tell them how kCura came to exist. It’s a story in the best form: the business can’t keep the doors open, a customer risks a large sum on an important contract with them, they labor hard to serve that customer, and their business is transformed from a general consulting firm to a legal software company with a remarkable new product (you should hear Andrew tell it).

Then there’s the rags-to-riches story. This fits Kurt Vonnegut’s story chart, starting in ill fortune and ending in good fortune ((Gallo, pg. 71)). American’s are suckers for this one. How many businesses are started by someone who dreamed, one day, to rise from their lowly state to national fame? A business consultant or venture capitalist ought to have a dozen of these tucked in their back pocket for inspiration.

There’s also the overcoming story, Vonnegut’s “Man in a Hole” ((Gallo, pg. 69)). Every business hits potholes they struggle to rise out of. And for each story that starts in good fortune, hits ill fortune, and rises again, the business builds a history of recovery stories that enrich and strengthen it for future hardships. If these stories are known and shared, when the next hard time comes, people will remember the business has overcome worse in the past and can do so again.

I’ve often been told I have a gift for storytelling. I’ve wondered what would happen if I honed my natural talent. It’s exciting to realize how important stories are in the business world. The stories told by Andrew about kCura have power to inspire the hearer and strengthen the culture.

A list of half-finished stories comprises my last attempt to develop the stories I’ve picked up into something that can be reliably shared and refined. A recent opportunity to share one of them reminded me of my ambition to build a repository of personal stories, and this chapter expands the value of that exercise from a merely personal endeavor to a useful business skill.

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