Stories Sell: Storyworthy Strategies to Grow Your Business and Brand

By Matthew Dicks and Masha Cresalia

WIN CUSTOMERS AND BUILD BRANDS THROUGH THE POWER OF STORYTELLING

Moth GrandSLAM all-time champion storyteller, writer, and business coach Matthew Dicks presents a guide to using the power of storytelling for success in business of any type or size. Matt has found that the basic principles of effective storytelling are universal, teachable, and more crucial than ever for business communication. Jam-packed with examples, Stories Sell reveals the ingredients of a compelling story and then demonstrates how they can be incorporated into persuasive marketing copy, productive face-to-face conversations, effective sales pitches, and presentations that people actually want to hear. Topics include:

• The three elements of a winning story: stakes, suspense, and surprise
• Finding the right narrative structure (and why beginning at the beginning isn’t always the best method)
• The power of being vulnerable: how admitting your mistakes can build rapport with audiences
• When and how to use humor
• Zigging while others zag: making yourself stand out from competitors

Whether you’re an online marketer, advertising professional, salesperson, small business owner, independent contractor, or Fortune 500 executive, Stories Sell will teach you to find your voice and get your message across for maximum impact and profit.

• Language: English
• Publisher: New World Library
• Release date: Jun 11, 2024
• ISBN: 9781608689057

Matthew Dicks

MATTHEW DICKS is a writer and elementary school teacher. His articles have been published in the Hartford Courant and he has been a featured author at the Books on the Nightstand retreat. He is also a Moth storyteller and a two-time StorySLAM champion. Dicks is the author of the novels Memoirs of an Imaginary Friend, Something Missing, and Unexpectedly Milo. He lives in Newington, Connecticut, with his wife, Elysha, and their children, Clara and Charlie.

Book preview

Contents

Foreword

Introduction: It Started with a Question and Ended with a Story

Part 1: Climb Aboard

Chapter 1: How I Landed Here

Chapter 2: Do I Need Storytelling?

Chapter 3: Zig vs. Zag

Part 2: Finding Your Stories

Chapter 4: Story Then Purpose, Not the Other Way Around

Chapter 5: Why I Have the Good Stuff

Chapter 6: Homework for Life

Chapter 7: First Last Best Worst

Chapter 8: 3-2-1

Chapter 9: Stories Are Often Invisible to the World

Chapter 10: Building a Culture of Storytelling in Your Business

Part 3: What Is a Story?

Story: The Spoon of Power

Chapter 11: A Story Is a Story Is a Story

Chapter 12: A Story Is about One Thing or Nothing

Chapter 13: Building the Frame of Your Story

Chapter 14: The Weirdness of Your Perception of Attention

Chapter 15: Wondering Is Everything

Chapter 16: Stories Happen in the Mind, Not the Slide

Chapter 17: But and Therefore, but Never And

Chapter 18: Chronology: The Beginning Isn’t Always the Beginning

Chapter 19: How to Be Funny

Chapter 20: Tense and Perspective: Keep It Close and Personal

Chapter 21: Guess Who Put All of This Together Perfectly?

Part 4: Marketing and Sales

Chapter 22: Who Is Doing the Speaking?

Chapter 23: How to Not Build a Deck

Chapter 24: Numbers Should Not Be Numeric

Conclusion: Good, Hard Truths to Wrap This Up

Acknowledgments

Endnotes

About the Author

Foreword

It’s my second week at Slack, where I’m a senior product marketing manager. On a team call, I’m told they want me to solve their Microsoft problem. Earlier this summer, Microsoft released its own subpar version of Slack, the business communication and collaboration platform, but it’s free and they are distributing it to every Office 365 user — all 345 million of them. It’s like opening the freezer and finding free ice cream. Even if it’s not good ice cream, it’s there, so you eat it.

I’m terrified. How can I compete with free ice cream?

Luckily, when I got the job, I picked up Storyworthy by Matthew Dicks. I knew I’d need all the ammo I could find to do something different on Slack’s competitive team.

I tell the team with fake confidence not to worry: The best story always wins.

Then I get off the call and freak out. They need me to make silver bullets from scratch. I decide reading Storyworthy isn’t enough. I need Matthew Dicks himself to teach me everything he knows.

It’s the day after my birthday, and I email Matt one run-on sentence sprinkled with the words Slack, enterprise, and corporate, hoping it has enough corporate hair-flipping to warrant a response.

I find out later Matt has never heard of Slack, but he does have a philosophy of always saying yes, which his wife, Elysha, reminds him of when he mentions a random woman from the internet has cold-emailed him asking for help building corporate narratives and delivering them to sales teams.

Matt’s yes changes the course of my career at Slack and later my life.

I go all in with Matt. I have to. Nothing else can win against Microsoft except the best story, and I’ve been calming everyone’s fears across the company like a tent-pole evangelist with that one line.

Two things feel radical during our first remote meeting.

First, I’m startled by how present Matt is. He isn’t diverting his eyes, checking messages on the side, or answering emails while I’m talking, like I’m used to with my coworkers. It’s like we are in the room together. He understands the urgency of the request and is working with me by offering up ideas, phrasing, and concepts, though he’s never even seen the product I’m working on.

Second, in the middle of our session, I realize that I’m learning. And not by observation, like listening to a VP talking in a meeting. Matt is teaching me with the care and patience of a teacher invested in me learning a skill for life.

It’s profound to have this level of attention and not have to fight for it.

As I put pen to paper with Matt crafting a new story for Slack and myself, it’s like learning how to build a Bentley from scratch with a master craftsperson, starting from molding clay. I talk about my paddleboarding stories, former World War II sites in Sausalito, and something I scribbled at 9 p.m. on a Tuesday while drinking wine during the pandemic. It all goes into the narrative we’re building. I add humor, vulnerability, stakes, suspense — everything Matt teaches me.

Are you sure I can tell all these personal stories in this narrative? I ask nervously. Matt tells me it’s the only thing people will remember.

Four months later, I still don’t know how to put vacation hours into Workday, and my 401(k) is not set up, but I’m sitting in front of four hundred sellers, ready to jump off the diving board and deliver this narrative.

This is my silver bullet.

People cannot believe what they hear. They have come expecting a standard sales enablement meeting, someone shrugging through a slide deck with barely a pulse. What they get is high-velocity, bottled-up-then-shaken, cork-popped-open storytelling. Word gets out as our meeting is going on. Zoom crashes, unable to hold more than four hundred sellers. People beg for the recording.

Two years later, Slack continues to use that same sales narrative.

I become known as a storyteller. Someone who will go there. Someone who will zig when everyone else is zagging.

I continue learning everything I can from Matt — down to the details of how I finish a presentation. We practice me finishing like a gold medal gymnast landing perfect tens on the mat, hands outstretched. Instead of rolling off into the oblivion of another forgettable Zoom meeting, I try to stick the landing every time. Every detail matters in storytelling.

I write out my lines until I memorize them, and I keep writing them until I begin to feel something Matt possesses effortlessly when he tells stories — confidence.

I don’t tell anyone my big corporate secret. I write a What Is Slack? webinar constructed around stories of an evening surf session and a Taco Bell dinner. A few months later, the webinar is already garnering two hundred thousand dollars in sales.

Up to this point, learning the craft of storytelling from Matt is the only thing that has felt meaningful in my career. And it’s given me a meteoric rise professionally. It leads to radical opportunities — writing Slack’s first product narrative, writing Dreamforce keynotes, and creating Slack’s first corporate marketing division.

Before they give me my own team, they ask me what my secret is. Story-telling coaching, I say.

The moment I have a team, I send them all straight to Matt to begin their religious studies. Six months later, one of my direct reports is presenting at a Salesforce sales kickoff, while sharing the stage with CEO Marc Benioff, in front of all seventy thousand employees. Moments before she goes on, I watch her mouthing her talk, eyes closed, listening to her AirPods just like Matt taught her.

My cozy village disappears when Slack is acquired by Salesforce, and a small army of nonbelievers enter and become my peers. They don’t believe in storytelling. They believe in structure, slides, and formulas.

I’m devastated: How are there so many nonbelievers in storytelling? I tell Matt there are days I sit on Zoom meetings and feel a strong gravitational pull to be bland, forgettable. To not start with a story. To not be funny. To not show vulnerability.

Keep going, Matt says, coaching me. Keep telling your stories.

One day, they really need it. Nobody can figure out how to tell the story of why Slack makes sense with Salesforce. Their first draft falls flat. They ask me to write something new in forty-eight hours. I craft a narrative with surprise, stakes, and a sprinkle of vulnerability. I build a universe around these two products and show how that universe is so valuable for customers. I know it needs one more thing — a perfect transition, which has been my Achilles’ heel. Matt and I have been working on this for two years.

At 3 p.m. on a Thursday — the worst time slot, when everyone is brain-dead — I get in front of the senior leaders of Slack and Salesforce, and I leave everything on the dance floor. I’m out of breath when I finish staring at the green laser beam on my computer’s camera.

Silence follows. I can hear people’s eyes blinking. They were expecting me to sell them on a horse-drawn carriage — an old way of presenting, old ideas, a boring formula. But it’s a Bentley. Handcrafted elegance, craftsmanship, and attention to detail.

It’s bulletproof. They can’t disassemble it. They can’t pick it apart. Nor do they want to. They realize the performance they’ve just experienced. The narrative makes it to Dreamforce, Silicon Valley’s biggest event of the year, storytelling bells and whistles and all.

At that moment, I know I’m ready for something new. I’ve been on a two-year journey with Matt, not only studying storytelling but getting ready to start my own consulting business. We’ve been formulating my own product narrative framework. How SaaS (software-as-a-service) companies can tell the narratives of their products, just like I had written for Slack.

After starting my company, I land clients in industries from biotech to supply chain, and Matt comes along. We do the same thing for other companies that we once did at Slack and Salesforce. But now we go even bigger. We take out the biggest brushes and tell these companies’ stories with the broadest strokes.

Maybe you are a businessperson who wants to use storytelling in your corporate work but lack the know-how, just like me when I started. Perhaps you are ready to use storytelling to completely and radically transform your career. Having mentored hundreds of corporate folks like me, Matt has developed unique, streamlined strategies to teach people how to use their personal stories in business. He’s taken everything that he has learned during his years of consulting and put it in this book, so every person can have what he taught me.

This is your opportunity to learn the art of storytelling from a master craftsperson and build your own Bentley. It’s your chance to be mentored by Matt and learn how to outsell all your peers using stories alone. Most importantly, this book will help you learn how to think in story, a skill that will separate you from the pack and make people pay attention.

Nothing sells like a story. But it has to be a good story. Matt can teach you how to craft a great story.

— Masha Cresalia, founder of Product Narrative Consulting

introduction

It Started with a Question

and Ended with a Story

My career as a wedding DJ began in the fall of 1997 when the phone rang.

Think chunky, white phone with an extendable antenna, possibly bent or broken, sitting on a charger the size of a four-slice toaster.

I was writing a college paper on the sixteenth-century poet martyr Anne Askew — the only woman on record known to have been both tortured in the Tower of London and burned at the stake, lucky her — when I heard the voice of my best friend, James Bengi Bengiovanni. Without bothering to say hello, he spoke eight words that changed my life: Do you want to be a wedding DJ?

It was a crazy question for many reasons.

In the decade-plus that I’d known Bengi, I’d never once expressed the desire to be a wedding DJ or a disc jockey of any kind.

Nor had he until this moment.

I also had no desire to own and operate my own business. I’d never even considered going to work for myself. Frankly, it sounded dreadful. Fraught with stress and responsibility. I wanted to be a teacher and a writer. Possibly a punter in the NFL, though that dream was nearly dead by the time of Bengi’s phone call. I had never played organized football in my life, though a flicker of hope still lived.

A punter, maybe, but not a music man.

In addition to these problems, I had only attended two weddings, and one of them was Bengi’s wedding two months earlier. Not only did I know nothing about being a wedding DJ, but I knew almost nothing about weddings.

This was why Bengi was calling. He, too, had only attended two weddings so far, including his own, but he had despised his wedding DJ and was convinced that we could do a better job.

I was convinced that we could not do a better job.

We couldn’t have been less equipped. Not only did we know nothing about the wedding industry — who knew there was an industry? — but we knew nothing about music outside of our own rock and heavy metal favorites.

And even if I wanted to be a wedding DJ, which I didn’t, I didn’t have time. I was currently attending Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, full-time, working on a degree in English and creative writing. Hence the study of the poet martyr.

At the same time, I was also attending St. Joseph’s University, studying for a degree in elementary education. Also full-time.

I was also a full-time manager at a McDonald’s restaurant and working as a part-time writing tutor at Trinity’s writing center.

I was also writing a column for Trinity’s school newspaper. Running triathlons. Managing a fantasy baseball league at a time when box scores were only available in newspapers.

This was the busiest I had ever been in my life. Every moment was consumed with something. So when Bengi asked me, Do you want to be a wedding DJ? my answer was simple.

I said, Yes.

I said yes because that is what life had taught me to do. I said yes because I knew that no one was ever going to ask me this question ever again. Nor would I ever have the opportunity to go into business with my best friend as a wedding DJ ever again.

Truthfully, I said, Yes, but let me finish this stupid essay on Anne Askew, then we can talk.

So Bengi and I entered the wedding industry knowing almost nothing about weddings or the business or even music. We drove an hour south to a place called DJ World and bought equipment we didn’t know how to use and music that we had barely ever heard before. We bought tuxedos at the Men’s Warehouse and found a way to squeeze everything into Bengi’s Dodge Durango.

Once we figured out how to wire speakers to mixers to CD players and even a tape deck, we rented a VFW hall and hosted a party for our friends, only to discover how terrible we were at choosing music, mixing music, and even keeping music playing continuously.

By the end of the night, our friends thought this business was a terrible idea and told us so.

Compared to our competitors — large companies with decades of experience, staffed by professional DJs whose sole job was to entertain guests at weddings and parties and even appear on the radio — we were like monkeys scratching sticks in the dirt. While our competition was producing the highest quality sound and mixing songs with beat-by-beat precision, Bengi and I were still trying to figure out how to wire our system so that it did not audibly hum and how to be ready for the next song before the first finished playing.

Our competitors had disco balls, overhead effect lighting, smoke machines, and a multitude of props and costumes.

We had none of this. We didn’t have much of anything.

Despite all this, we decided to move forward and launch the business.

Over the course of our now twenty-six-year career as wedding DJs, Bengi and I have met with 498 potential clients — in person, over the phone, or more recently, via Zoom. Of those 498 potential clients, we have booked 483 of those weddings, including the first 106 clients with whom we met.

That’s a 97-percent conversion rate from a company comprised of two people who started without any experience or knowledge of the industry. And it’s a 100-percent conversion rate for the first three years. And this was accomplished by two people who both had full-time jobs, growing families, and a multitude of other commitments.

Yet we quickly became one of the most expensive and respected DJ companies in Connecticut and a recommended vendor at many wedding facilities. Within a year, we had binders full of letters, cards, and photos from satisfied clients.

Over the years, we’ve even built some brand loyalty in a field that isn’t known for repeat customers. Two of our clients later divorced and hired us again for their second weddings.

One of our former clients is now one of my best friends.

Eventually, I got ordained online and became a minister, adding those services to our offerings. I’ve officiated more than fifty weddings in the past decade, and my conversion rate for my ministerial services is 100 percent.

How did we manage to accomplish all this despite our well-documented limitations? And how did we manage to do so well, so quickly, in an industry dominated by established players and legacy brands?

Simply put...storytelling.

Before I ever took a stage to tell a story, before I ever consulted with a single client on storytelling, and long before I wrote my first book on storytelling, I was engaged in the kind of storytelling that you will find in the pages of this book: the kind of storytelling that grew my business almost overnight.

It turns out, much to my surprise, that I was following my own advice long before I ever learned it.

It started at our first bridal show in January 1998. In September of the previous year, Bengi and I had worked our first wedding — free of charge for one of Bengi’s coworkers — for which we received a two hundred dollar tip at the end of the night. It wasn’t a great performance, but we hadn’t failed miserably either. We continued to be utterly incapable of mixing songs with any skill, simply plowing one song into another absent any concern for beat, volume, or even genre. I stood so close to the bride and groom as I emceed the cake cut and the groom’s toast that I ended up in the photographs.

The photographer clued me in on this gaffe at the end of the night.

We also lacked some of the hits playing on the radio at the time, and we had difficulty deciphering the requests of guests if they didn’t know the actual name of a song, since our knowledge of music was so limited.

Play the one about the girl named Eileen. You know...the Eileen song.

We had no idea what that guest wanted, even though you probably do.

But the married couple was pleased, so with one wedding under our belt, we went to the Hartford Bridal Expo in January and rented a tiny booth in a far-flung corner of the conference center. We stuck a folding table in the center of the booth, adorned it with a tablecloth, and went to work.

By contrast, our competitors rented enormous booths in the center of the convention hall. They played music and exhibited elaborate light shows. Music was still recorded on physical objects back then — records, CDs, and cassette tapes — so the size of your music collection was something DJs highlighted as a part of their marketing. Our competitors placed enormous racks of CDs on tables to demonstrate the scope of their collections.

Bengi and I placed a single flyer on our table. We printed black lettering on a red background, copying it on my college’s photocopier when no one was looking. We purposely made it one of the simplest, least-attractive flyers we could imagine. While our competitors hosted small parties in their booths, complete with Hawaiian leis, branded refrigerator magnets, multicolored trifold flyers, elaborate coupons, and inflatable guitars, Bengi and I simply talked to prospective clients, making every effort to connect with them on a personal level.

In other words, we engaged in storytelling.

The kind of storytelling that makes yourself known to prospective clients.

The kind of storytelling that informs the possible customer of your offering while simultaneously engaging and entertaining them.

The kind of storytelling that expresses vulnerability and authenticity.

The kind of storytelling that makes a person laugh, nod in agreement, smile with certainty, and sometimes even cry.

At the first bridal show, we talked about why we became wedding DJs in the first place: Bengi’s DJ did not afford him the level of choice and control he had desired. He didn’t get to know Bengi or his wife in any meaningful way. He mispronounced the names of bridal party members (introducing me as Michael) because he wrote the names down on the day of the wedding, just minutes before saying them. When Bengi asked for a song to be played during the dancing portion of the night, the DJ said he would need to wait because he was in the middle of a set. Instead of making Bengi and his wife the center of attention, the DJ did things like lead the party train himself and dominate the party by constantly speaking on the microphone.

Bengi didn’t like any of this. As his best man, I didn’t either. So we decided to become wedding DJs who were dedicated to making sure that the couple was always in charge of their day. We were more than willing to offer our expertise (though at the first bridal show, we had none), but at the end of the day, the couple would always be in full control of their wedding day.

Most wedding DJs at the time thought we were crazy. They worried that allowing the couple to choose their own music would make them look foolish in front of the guests, whom they viewed as their next potential batch of customers.

Bengi and I believed that the best referral would come not from a guest at the wedding but from the couple who hired us and was thrilled with the results.

We knew that telling a different story would set us apart from the competition.

Years later, Bengi and I worked a Sunday afternoon wedding where only Celtic music was played. The bride and groom asked that I learn a traditional Celtic dance so I could lead their family and friends in it during the reception.

I did. It was odd but also fun, memorable, and hilarious. The guests smiled and laughed while they danced.

Other than for that one song, no one danced at that wedding. The guests may have been displeased with the music, but the bride and groom loved every minute of their wedding and referred us to two of their more traditional friends later on.

They later told us that we were the only company willing to work with them. Every other DJ passed on their wedding, seeing their requests as a nonstarter.

When every DJ company in the industry was zigging, we were zagging. We were doing things that our competitors thought foolish.

We were disc jockeys who put music in the backseat.

While our competitors were selling their ability to mix songs, match beats, choose the latest greatest hits, and stage elaborate light shows, we rarely spoke about the music. Instead, we let clients get to know us. I talked about my job as a teacher, my love for my dog, my inability to play golf well, and my Boston roots. We told stories about Bengi and me first meeting on a Saturday morning while working at McDonald’s as teenagers and how we bonded over our mutual love of Adventures of the Gummi Bears, a Saturday morning cartoon.

Back in the day of chunky phones, new cartoons were aired almost exclusively on Saturday mornings. Children (and some childlike teenagers) would eat bowls of sugar masquerading as cereal while watching The Smurfs, Snorks, The Wuzzles, and yes, Disney’s Gummi Bears.

On a Saturday morning in the spring of 1988, Bengi and I found ourselves working in the same McDonald’s restaurant in Milford, Massachusetts. As Bengi called bin and I ran for drive-thru, I asked him why he didn’t come in earlier on Saturday mornings. He explained that he liked to watch Saturday morning cartoons before coming to work, and he specifically mentioned the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon and Gummi Bears.

I grabbed two cheeseburgers, placed them in a bag, delivered them to my drive-thru team, and then returned to Bengi and the bin, singing:

Dashing and daring, courageous and caring,

Faithful and friendly, with stories to share.

All through the forest, they sing out in chorus,

Marching along, as their song fills the air.

Gummi Bears,

Bouncing here and there and everywhere.

High adventure that’s beyond compare,

They are the Gummi Bears.

I later learned that Bengi hadn’t liked me at first. He saw me as the new guy, trying to take his spot in McDonald’s social hierarchy.

That moment at the bin changed everything.

That story and many more were what made the phone ring off the hook the day after our first bridal show. Prospective clients would say, You’re the two guys with the red flyer. We remembered you because of that red flyer.

They were too kind to say the ugly red flyer, but that’s what they meant. But ugly or not, our flyer was different and memorable.

Those phone calls led in many cases to home visits (we had no office yet), where contracts were almost always signed that night.

In more than a handful of cases, we left the client’s home to await a decision after the couple interviewed other DJs, only to be chased to our car and asked to come back inside to sign a contract on the spot. They had made their decision within a minute of us leaving their home.

In these meetings, we continued to ignore the elements that most DJs thought important and instead told stories. We shared our lives with them.

Once we actually began working at weddings and gained experience, we began telling stories in answer to clients’ questions, too. For example, we were asked: I don’t like my father very much, but I feel like I need to dance with him or risk making a scene. What can I do?

Rather than telling the troubled bride what to do or offering options, I told her about how Lauren, a previous client, had chosen the song What a Wonderful World, which is a smidgen over two minutes long — one of the shortest of the recommended father-daughter dance songs — and how I also cut the song short by fading it away early to make the unwanted dance even shorter.

I told the story of Elaine and how she shared the dance floor with all fathers and daughters at her wedding so that she and her father weren’t the sole focus of attention. She ended up dancing with her father, but so did everyone else.

I told the story of Kelly, who shared her father-daughter dance with her husband’s mother-son dance, thus reducing the focus on her and her father. It takes a special kind of mother to be willing to share the spotlight at her son’s wedding, but Kelly’s husband had that kind of mom.

And I told her about Alicia, who danced with her father to a specifically chosen slow song during the dancing portion of the night alongside her guests. Halfway through the song, I asked the guests to applaud Alicia and her father, but by avoiding the clearing of the dance floor and the pomp and circumstance of a traditional father-daughter dance, we reduced the import of the moment significantly.

For every question asked, we told stories of possible solutions. We created movies in the minds of our clients so that they could see how these solutions might play out at their own weddings. We often made our clients the protagonists of these stories, in the same way I frequently advise companies to do today.

When clients asked why they needed to hire a two-person DJ team — thus increasing our price significantly — we told stories about times when one of us kept the music going while the other managed a medical emergency, removed a drunken, belligerent uncle from the wedding with the help of the best man, helped a nervous father put together a toast after he had forgotten to prepare, and held a maid of honor’s hair back while she vomited in the bridal suite.

I told couples about how I often found myself bustling bridal gowns, coaxing nervous flower girls during introductions, managing parental concerns lest they reach the attention of the newlyweds, and hunting for a multitude of misplaced bouquets.

I told them the story of finding a missing bride in a parking lot one night, weeping because her newly married husband somehow didn’t know that she was a smoker. She had promised herself that she would quit smoking on her wedding day, but now that it had arrived, she had come to the unfortunate, inevitable conclusion, cigarette in hand, that it would not be possible. Together we strategized a means of telling her husband the next day, and I assured her that he would understand and support her.

Ten minutes later, she returned to the party to dance the night away.

By hiring a two-person team, we explained, one person can keep the party going while the other can solve every problem that arises when you bring together two hundred people — including ex-spouses, annoying relatives, and unreliable friends — for an emotionally fraught, logistically challenging, open-bar evening of celebration.

We almost never mentioned the music.

Two months after that first bridal show, we had booked twenty-four weddings before ever performing a second wedding. For a while, as we signed contract after contract and increased our prices again and again, our company’s slogan was, Someday, we’ll do our second wedding.

As I look back on my career as a wedding DJ, I am astounded by how much of the storytelling advice that I offer clients today helped me break into a market absent any experience or skill and quickly fill our calendar with events.

That advice boils down to a single strategy: relentless storytelling. It’s the constant, strategic use of stakes, suspense, surprise, and humor to entertain, engage, and create wonder. It’s establishing meaningful, personal connections with customers and partners. That is, being vulnerable, or the subtle art of sharing yourself whenever possible. It’s creating marketing materials that are both different and memorable. Zigging while others are zagging. The goal is to set your company apart from the competition by telling a different, better, more engaging story.

Our competition sold itself on music, lighting, special effects, and fun.

We sold ourselves, our company, our previous clients, and our experiences. We sold connection, attention to detail, concern for our client’s wishes, and authenticity.

This was how we became one of the most respected DJ companies in the market.

Fourteen years after launching our DJ company, I told my first story onstage at a Moth event in New York City. Two years after that, I began teaching storytelling to individuals around the world. Two years after that, I began consulting with businesses around the world.

Today, I consult with Fortune 100 corporations, local businesses, and everything in between. I work with entrepreneurs, nonprofits, advertising agencies, universities, attorneys, politicians, clergy, Olympic athletes, the FBI, and so many more.

But I’ve also lived the story of so many of my clients. I, too, have built and grown a business of my own. My DJ company, unfortunately named Jam Packed Dance Floor DJs (a real misstep), never rose to the scale of Microsoft, Amazon, Slack, Johnson & Johnson, Salesforce, or Alphabet, all of whom I work with today, but I have lived their experience. Put my own advice into practice. Done the work they hope to do, too.

I have shared my DJ experience in this way for three reasons:

To tell you a story. Hopefully, in doing so, I have entertained you a little. Made you laugh. Not out loud, of course, but that kind of interior laugh that happens when you read something amusing. Maybe you even mumbled, That was funny. Hopefully, you also feel a little more connected to me. Maybe you believe in me a little. Trust my expertise. Want to hear more.

To let you know that I’m not simply an academic who has spent years studying the craft. I’m not a consultant who emerged from an MBA program and thought he had something to say without doing anything of meaning. I want you to know that in addition to being a world-class storyteller and consultant for some of the largest companies in the world, I also built a business using the very same strategies and techniques that I teach in this book. In fact, I’ve since built a second business and am in the process of building a third. I did the work that you are doing now, and I continue to do so.

To avoid writing the kind of traditional introduction that seeks to outline all that readers might learn. I hate those introductions. I never read those introductions. I find them akin to keynote speakers who spend the first seventy-nine seconds of their talk thanking the person who just introduced them, introducing themselves again, and outlining their objectives. I actually watched this very thing happen last week. It was awful. Also tragically typical.

Instead, I wanted to grab your attention with something different, to zig where others zag, to be engaging, entertaining, and connective.

I wanted to do what I teach so many others to do. I wanted to prove to you that I know what I’m doing.

In teaching, we call this modeling.

In the real world, we call this a good start.

Hopefully, you agree.

Part 1

Climb Aboard

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Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.