The 7 Essential Stories Need to be the Trusted Advisor

It's funny. 2 weeks ago, I was presenting my Dare to Be the Exception program, speaking to a room full of franchisees when one of them said something that the CEO had an exception with. The CEO jumped up and it was obvious that he was irate. You don't understand! What he was mad about was that the franchisee had a narrative about their business, which was different than the one the franchisor wanted told. So, how do we as business leaders take control of the narrative so that people talk about our business in a way that reflects our true essence? And that's what we're talking about today on Marc Haine Live. Welcome to today's episode. This is where small business owners and entrepreneurs pick up core skill sets to help them create the jaw-dropping, show-stopping experience that their customers and their employees deserve. I am your host, Service Expert and Master of Experiences Marc Haine. And it is so great to have you here with us today. Thank you so much for investing your time in today's episode. I can tell you, I have a very special guest today, a sales and marketing consultant, Kurian Thirakan. And today, we will be talking about what you can do to take control of your narrative so that you can reflect your true essence and maintain and even build your brand integrity. My one ask of you today is that you share this episode with someone you know who could use this information. If you followed me at all, you know that my abundance thinking is that knowledge is power but only if we share it. I can tell you how often I've come across a business whose purpose seemed to be blurred or the same with no definable difference to other people providing the exact same products and services. I look at their websites and their marketing collateral and it's really clear that they have a difficult time communicating really the essence of their organization. And this goes for businesses as well as nonprofits, any organization. And it seems like a lot of businesses are just wallowing in the sea of sameness. So, this brings us to our Question of the Day. So, here's a challenge. If you were to look at the websites of 5 of your competitors, can you pinpoint what makes them unique? When you compare them to your website, can you pin down what makes you unique? I'd love for you to be part of this conversation. Why don't you go ahead and share this episode on your favorite social media platform? Hashtag it #ExperienceLeadership. and put your comments down. How are you differentiating in your marketplace? As I mentioned, my guest today is Sales and Marketing Strategist Kurian Thirakan. Kurian is the founder of StrategyPeak Sales and Marketing Advisors. And he is a 27-year veteran of the sales and marketing industry. He is the best-selling author of The 7 Essential Stories Charismatic Leaders Tell, which details how anyone can move people and mountains with the power of their story. He has consulted for companies in numerous sectors including professional services, manufacturing, distribution, and for nonprofits. In addition to his consulting practice, he is also an executive in residence at the business accelerator Tech Edmonton. And for our people south of the border, that's Vistage where you are. We have Tech here in Canada. And this is where he really helps clients with their go-to Kurian, welcome to the show. It is brilliant to have you here today.

Marc, thanks for having me on today. Episode 138, I see.

138!

You could tell. That's a lifetime in the podcasting business. So, congratulations.

Thank you so much. Hey, before we get into today's topic, could you tell us a little bit about how you serve your clients?

The ultimate thing that we try and do is to get our clients to understand what value they actually create in their prospects', in their customers' lives. And until they really understand that value, they can't create the narrative. And until they can't create the narrative, they can't attract their ideal customer profile. So, what is it that you create in the way of value? And what is the story that you're telling to bring people in?

So, it really seems to me from what I'm hearing that you help them find some way to provide clarity into what their service offering is.

Andy, I think you said it earlier, right? There's a lot of blurriness when you go to websites and such, especially with startups. And not so much— and it doesn't have to be a startup. You can see that in a number of different just businesses, period. The clarity of what their value propositions are and how they will achieve transformation for their clients is very, very muddled. And so, when we create the ability for them to tell a story that is razor sharp and what that transformation story is, then they're going to have a much better time on attracting that ideal customer profile.

Yeah, what was interesting, I did get your book. And what I really loved about it was that you actually created kind of almost like culture pillars in defining kind of before you even got into kind of the 7 stories. You created these culture pillars, which I thought was a really interesting way to do it. Because essentially, as opposed to a marketer looking at the business from outside, And saying, okay, well, here's how we're going to get you noticed. You're really starting really foundationally by talking about what is the organization's culture.

Yeah, and culture is the always-on operating system that guides behavior even when there is no one around to watch, punish, or reward that behavior. Everybody just sort of knows what to do. The values are clear. The beliefs are clear. And the 7 pillars of culture operate in alignment to make those stories come alive. And the stories are then infused. It's a reciprocal arrangement. The stories are then infused back into the culture. So, you have this beautiful flywheel effect that allows the organization to grow on the core values and beliefs that they share.

Yeah, it makes sense. You know, it's so funny because somebody once told me that the definition of a brand is what people will say about you when you're not in the room. But then to your point, culture is the way people behave when there is nobody else in the room.

And it's the lowest behavior that you tolerate. It's not the highest aspirations. It's the lowest behavior that you will tolerate.

Granted. And I've got episodes actually on the podcast where we talk a little bit about the idea of reward and recognition and the power that plays versus when we ignore bad behavior and how bad behavior will always escalate. When it comes down to this idea of creating this presence, this essence, understanding what your essence is, why is this topic specifically important in today's what I like to call the almost post-pandemic era? Because I think a lot of things changed in the last 4 years.

And we're talking about brand essence, aren't we? At this point, brand essence, right? It's even more important today. Now, you see ChatGPT just sort of come out of the woodwork recently and such, right?

Yes.

But that's just the latest iteration of enablement through a variety of tools and knowledge. No one has to go to Harvard or MIT anymore to access Harvard and MIT strategy. That is very clearly available to everybody. No one has to go to a copywriter anymore and pay tens of thousands of dollars to get the initial fundamentals of what their copy should be. And I illustrate that on a regular basis. Every Monday, I do a coaching call with our clients. And we regularly create copy for them through ChatGPT. Now, a copywriter is going to put that humanistic in that final razor-sharp edge. But ChatGPT can get you that 80% level. It can get you to 85%, right? And then, you go to the real professionals to do the other things. So, the enablement of anybody and everybody to tap all sorts of different knowledge bases— accounting, finance, strategy, marketing, sales— means that there's a lot more people competing for your customer's business and your customer's attention. And so, unless you really define that essence of your brand as to why somebody should choose you, You're going to quickly become maybe just a commodity in this vast seascape of choice that your prospect has just by clicking around on the web.

And to your point, in the last 30 years, the barrier to entry to get really good copy has really dropped. I mean, it used to be to your point. It used to be, I remember 30 years ago working for entrepreneurs and they're like, oh, we can't compete against the big brands who've got all this marketing collateral. They've got the messaging and they're out there and we're just in our little local And they were frustrated by that. But now, for the first time really, this is where it's all converged now because the barrier to entry to get really powerful messages out there is so easy.

And so, I'm part of a— so, I have a strategy company called StrategyPeak. But I'm also a partner in a business called Socialite Communications. And Socialite Communications is a digital marketing agency exclusively for Shopify merchants. But we have a learning portal as well for beginning Shopify merchants. So, the million-dollar-plus clients are over in the agency. But the beginners, are over in the learning portal called Merchant Mastery. I regularly use ChatGPT to help people develop their copy. And I was with a candle manufacturer out of New Orleans just 2 days ago. And I took her little about page. It was just that much. And so, you can imagine what would happen if I had 8 paragraphs to work with. I only had a paragraph, paragraph and a half. Put that into ChatGPT. Gave it a very specific prompt to give me 10 advertising hooks. From what that is. It was brilliant, utterly brilliant. Now, I could have probably come up with those as well. But it would have taken me maybe an hour, hour and a half to do that. And I know what I'm doing. But this lady now has the availability of ChatGPT on demand. She plugs that in because I just showed her how to do it and how easy it was. And bang! 10 fantastic advertising hooks came through, of which 3 were brilliant.

Amazing!

They were absolutely brilliant. And she immediately resonated with it because she could understand that's why her customers are buying from her. These hooks there.

Yeah, and what I find really interesting is there are consequences to not getting up on this stuff. I just read your blog this morning. I laughed because I read your blog, How to Get Yelled at by a Rotarian this morning. And in it, you list a whole bunch of former Fortune 500 companies that have evaporated within the last 50 years. Why is it that so many organizations fail, do you think?

Well, and so that particular blog post, if anybody wants to read it, just type into Google, How to Get Yelled At by a Rotarian. That's based on a real-life experience I had just a few years ago. That was based on the 1955 Fortune 500 list. But it doesn't matter. 1965 would also be applicable. 1985 would be applicable. And 40 years later, 80% of that list was gone. Gone off the list, right? And what happens is that these stellar, very powerful companies lose their way. And what they lose is they lose the narrative that is resonant with their audience. That's the very first thing they lose. The company doesn't lose first. The product doesn't lose first. The story loses first because you're not continually reiterating the story to be functionally relevant and emotionally specific to the needs and wants and desires of their audiences. So, you can imagine that Microsoft or Apple's products of 20 years ago would be laughable today. But that's not Microsoft and Google's or anybody else's business. The technology companies know that they have to continually iterate, iterate, iterate to stay on top of the wave of expectations, let alone the wave of what's possible. Microsoft right now has gotten the full advantage of ChatGPT because they invested $10 billion into it and such. And Google is quickly scrambling. And the thing with ChatGPT, they're actually using Google's AI engine in there, shockingly enough, right? But no, and so, we're going to see that. So, we have an arms race going on. But the arms race right now, if we think about it, we're not talking about the technical prowess of ChatGPT or Google's Bard. We're not talking about that. You know what the average person is talking about is, wow, AI, AI, ChatGPT. How do I use it? That's the functional narrative that's going on in people's heads. They're not talking about Bard or ChatGPT even. They're talking about AI. And whoever comes up with the easiest interface and with the most powerful results, is going to capture that intention into a revenue stream.

And having said that, there is a huge challenge between writing down what your brand essence is, defining what that is, and actually living it. So, are there any myths that we should be aware of when it comes down to communicating the essence of our Well, I don't know if it's a myth so much as it's a mistake.

And I see our beginning students make this quite a bit. I see very established companies making this. They guess at what they think the customers want.

Hmm.

I've seen too many entrepreneurs come in with patents. They spent $30,000 on a patent that is going to be about a new product that they've never shown to a prospect. They've never done any one-to-one market research. We say in our program, our Merchant Mastery program that before there's product-market fit, maybe there has to be farmer's market fit. So, you go to the farmer's market, right? And then, you get people to look at the product. And you hear the unfiltered and undefended words that they are saying so that you completely absorb what they love, what they hate.

Yeah.

And what they mildly, yeah, they don't really care for, which is just as devastating because you can actually correct what they hate and you can actually triple down on what they love. But that middle ground of, yeah, that's okay, that doesn't help you. In fact, that's even more dangerous.

And I've seen that play out time and time again with people who wanted to create online courses that they go ahead and they create the course without doing any kind of market test, without They're thinking, oh, I know this industry has this problem. And then, they wonder why nobody shows up for the course at all.

Yeah, Marc, if you go to my blog post, it's all on strategypeak.com. I do a blog about that, about how I market-texted a course all on elevator pitches. And so, I have a whole course on elevator pitches. I thought maybe I should put this online. And that would have cost me about 100 hours of my time for filming and scripting and all that kind of stuff.

Today.

Today, right? And What I did instead is I found a really good course on elevator pitches on Udemy. And I became an affiliate for that course. And I tried to— and then, I tried to drive traffic to that course because it was already a bestseller course and see if we could actually make money as an affiliate. And if you couldn't do that, that's going to be even a tougher job to compete with the bestseller already, right? And then, you have to invest all those things. And after several hundred dollars, and that's not a big test either, right? I got a lot of traffic to the affiliate site for that program. Zero conversions. Now, that by itself is not a complete test. But it did show me the difficulty of being able to, what is it, compete just on an elevator pitch course. So, you know what I did? I didn't film the elevator pitch course because I didn't think there was a possibility of me able to recover my cost, let alone make some money on it. Right.

Sure, yeah, no, I see that. Getting back to kind of this idea of powerful stories within corporations and within organizations, I'd like to talk a little bit about the most powerful story element you think we can use to persuade anyone. And we'll get to that right after this. Okay.

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I am having a great discussion with StrategyPeak CEO Kurian Tharigan. At the top of the show, I talked about this idea of being in the sea of sameness. How can people shake that condition?

By recognizing that— and remember back to the Rotary blog. There's a concept called strategic drift and you are a victim or a victor of it at your discretion. You do nothing, you're going to become a victim. But to become a victor, you have to understand that your customers are continually moving forward. Your technology impacting your industry is continually moving forward. Your competitors are continually moving forward. So, even though you might be a perfect fit for this time and place, because it's a moving target, you have to continually become functionally relevant and emotionally significant as that target keeps moving forward, as that sweet spot keeps moving forward. Unless you recognize that there's only change. And that's a very trite thing to say. That's the only certainty is that there's going to be change. Sounds so trite. But until you have lost your company as a result of doing that, then you don't fully understand what that means. I was sitting with a restaurateur who I just met that evening. And there's about 8 of us around the table. None of us really knew each other. And it was a high-end restaurant in town like an Edmonton 5-star restaurant.

Right?

Well-known name. And he was telling me he had to close it after 20 years. And I asked him why. But you know, I used to go there. Why did you close it? Well, Kiran, my customers as they got more successful, this is a high-end restaurant, right? As they got more successful, they're spending more time in Phoenix, Scottsdale. So, half the year they're down in Phoenix, Scottsdale being snowbirds. And the other half are dying. So, he failed to renew to the next generation below that of the up-and-coming, well-heeled, well-pocketed people. And eventually, his marketplace just sort of collapsed in on itself. And there was no one else to be relevant to take his place. Now, he could have possibly got up but he's probably just tired by that point.

Yeah. And so, before our show, I was telling you what I was doing before I started the podcast and everything else as a hospitality specialist. And this time and time again is the conditions that we fall into is I would work with people who were like, 20 years ago, we were so successful. And all of a sudden now, we're Right? And they've just lost market share because they failed to evolve with their marketplace. And they stay stagnant and they just kept doing what we just keep doing what we were doing before because we were so successful. And but to your point, people, what a good opportunity would have been for him to open up maybe a smaller unit in Arizona.

Yeah, well, exactly. Those kind of things, right? But this idea of innovation that What we always say is that at least 5% of your product line and service line should be new on a year-by-year basis as you're trying experiments. And maybe only 1 out of that 5% actually takes hold. But if you stay still, you just have entropy working against you. Eventually, you will be functionally irrelevant.

Yes, I love that. And you came up with a saying. You said, functionally Functionally relevant and what was the other thing?

Emotionally significant.

Emotionally significant. I think for anybody watching that, please write that down. Put it on a sticky note next to your computer because if that doesn't resonate with this during this podcast, then I don't think anything will.

Before we uncover— Yeah, let's dive into that just for one second. Okay, most people are reasonably good at the functionally relevant part. But until you become emotionally significant, you have not fully penetrated the brain. Functional relevance Keeps you at a commodity level. Emotional significance becomes a brand identity in that prospect's mind.

I love that. That makes a ton of sense. And really, when we talk about it, I was having this discussion with my mom yesterday. She says, I don't like the word branding because I don't understand it. And so, we talked a little bit about how do people feel about stuff. And that is the emotional connection that you're just talking Yeah, yeah, yeah. Before we uncover the 7 essential stories, could you tell us a little bit about the most powerful story category that business leaders can use?

Well, if you— so, the 7 stories as a whole. But if you were going to tell just one, it would be the transformation story. How you're going to get them from where they are today to where they want to be, right? And that is the traditional story that most companies have to tell. Otherwise, they have nothing to sell.

Right.

Until you promise transformation through your products and services, there's nothing to sell. But a powerful story category thereafter. So, this is essential. Transformation is essential. The big idea, key message from that transformation story all wrapped into one.

Sure.

The powerful story to really get that imagination going though is called the Mighty Winds. And the Mighty Winds story, what I say is that all businesses are actually sailing ships. And sailing ships, most people just start a company and they build the boat. And it's a sailing ship. It's not a powerboat, okay? It relies on wind to power its sails. Most people build the ship and there's all sorts of different sizes of sailing ships. Big schooners, hobby cats, Hobie Cats, right? Whatever it is, you have to adapt the design of that ship to the prevailing winds. Now, here's the thing. Most people just build the ship. Here it is.

Come on by.

Buy something. That doesn't often work very well anyways. So, the very first thing you do is you have to ascertain the direction, strength, and availability of the wind. And unless— until you understand that, you don't know which way, what kind of boat to build, how big it should be. Is it sailing? Is it freight? Whatever it is, right? And which way you're going to actually sail. And the 7 winds that power your ship sails are the big environmental— sorry, the big macro trends. Societal trends, technological, environmental, economic, political, and legislative trends. Those are the 7 Mighty Winds. And these are blowing all the time. They're always blowing and their directions change and things happen. Right now, you can see in, for example, in Peru. And I was just down in Peru teaching an innovation class down there for Tech just a little while, Tech Edmonton. And a couple of years later, it's a lot of havoc in the middle of Peru of all places, right?

Of Peru.

And of course, Venezuela next door, a couple of— it's got that same kind of thing. Well, those are all political legislative and underpinned by economic things. And so, fortunes are created and fortunes are destroyed in that process on that very basic thing. I'll give you a real clear example of this. I've used this story quite a bit recently. And that is there used to be a fellow in town here who had a store called the CD Rental Store, 1992, 1993. And used to go down there and buy the CD, take it home, rip the CD of the track, and return the CD the next day, right? And he was doing a booming business. And he was doing such a booming business that in 1994, I figured exactly when, late '93, early '94, he went down to Calgary and opened up a second store, which was Sure to boom as well based on the success of the Edmonton location, right? And he was just in time with that opening for NAFTA 1, the North American Free Trade Agreement, which overnight outlawed the rental of compact discs. And that's a very sad thing to say. But he was wiped out immediately. Now, NAFTA wasn't negotiated overnight. It was negotiated for years. But there's an example of a legislative wind that suddenly refused to billow his sails. And now, his ship bobs along and he had to close both stores. That's what it is.

But we just recently had that with the pandemic.

Yeah, we had that with the pandemic, right? And so, you have what we say with these macro winds is that they create tsunamis of destruction and tidal waves of opportunity. So, things like Zoom Zoom, for example, got its incubation, birth incubation, and rapid ascent into Titan all because of COVID Now, what happened to Skype? Where did Skype go? Skype was around for a long time.

It became irrelevant. It became irrelevant.

Google Meet's still around. Things just happen. But Zoom, bang, right to the top powered by the mighty wind of this COVID.

More than anything with Zoom because I mean, they were still doing well before the pandemic hit. They had a ton of issues when the pandemic hit. But what they were willing to do was they were willing to adjust and evolve as quickly as the market was demanding for it. If you remember all the security issues, right? All of a sudden, the government—

Yeah, exactly.

Well, they addressed it. And to your point, I mean, they went from 1.6 million users to 160 billion users or something like that. Yeah, it was ridiculous, the growth. And of course, they weren't ready for it and everybody chastised them. But I mean, when you actually take a look at how they did business through that, I mean, they were the saving grace really at the end of the day.

And there's an example of I would not have searched for an alternative solution if it was not for COVID. And something easy for everybody to get into and overcame the limitations of Google Meet, right? So, there's an example again where that mighty wins. When you show people that change is happening and you have to be on the right side of change, then they are motivated to act.

Yeah, yeah. Kerryann, this is absolutely like a great discussion. And if people are watching this and listening to this, And they want to get in contact with you. How can they reach you?

Come to strategypeak.com. Strategy and there's a mountain peak.com. And on the right side, you see all my contact details there. There's a ton of blog posts there. I think they're funny. I think they're entertaining. There's maybe even educational. And if you take a look on the bar on the right-hand column, you can actually download a copy of the infographic for my book, 7 Essential Stories Charismatic Leaders Tell. And it'll give you all 7 with examples. You can implement that this afternoon. It's free.

I love that. Could you tell us a little bit about your book? Just give people a kind of high level. Sure.

The book itself, I wrote that a couple of years ago. And it's called The 7 Essential Stories Charismatic Leaders Tell. The front half of the book is all about culture. And until you have a culture that's aligned with the stories that you want to tell, there's nowhere for those stories to penetrate. It's barren ground. It's barren ground, right? But when those cultural elements are very clearly defined, then you can actually use them to to create the fertile soil for the rain, the life-giving rain of these stories. Otherwise, it's barren ground. You might as well have covered it with a waterproof tarp. And so, the rain doesn't rain. The stories just bounce off. So, we pull that together for— it's a leadership book. But it's also based on market leadership as well because it's the same 7 stories that a company would have to tell to attract their perfect customer. And the reason, the way we came up with the 7 stories is that we did a ton of research. There's a lot of great historical examples of how it was used, how it was abused and such in it, right? So, I researched that for a couple of years before we finally put it out there. These 7 stories though are primal stories. And they answer primal questions in your people's minds, whether they be employees, customers, whether they be stakeholders of various kinds, These are primal questions. And they're the same questions that every person that wants to belong to a religion has in their mind. So, that's how ancient this is. There's been thousands of religions throughout history. Thousands. Today, the dominant ones are Christianity, about 2.1 to 2.3 billion. Islam, which is like 1.8 to 1.9 billion. And to round out the Abrahamic religions, we have Judaism, But that's only 14 million. But those are the 3 powerful ones here for now. And they have overtaken all sorts of things. So, we may have heard of Zoroastrianism. But that was one of the dominant religions at one point in time in the Persian Empire. At one point in time, right? But today, these are the 3 religions that have the most adherents in the world, right? Most adherents. Hinduism is up there as well, 800 million, something like that. But these religions, the way they are able to attract people into the tent and then bring more people through the actions of the current adherents telling the stories that got them in, the stories then put them out. And the stories are what create the attraction. So, the 7 stories are things like creation and origin, identity, values, and beliefs, the big idea, which is the transformation story. In Christianity's terms, it would be salvation. Right? The enemy we face, which is what we fight for, what we fight against. The mighty winds, we just talked about that. What are the forces in nature and with people that are arrayed with us or arrayed against us? And those first 5 stories, they are the left side of the equation. And if they're believable, if they're believable, if you've told them well, then there's a natural equal sign. And the equal sign goes into story 6, which is, here's the journey we must undertake. And it's just natural. Here's the journey we must undertake. And finally, story number 7 is a summary of the first 6 stories all told in one telling. We call it a meta-narrative. And it's the why we will win story. It's why we will win. It's the why we will win narrative. And the only difference is the summary now has in addition to it what we call keystone elements, which guarantee the win. And some very common keystones, there's hundreds. But some very common keystones we'll be familiar with would be things like superior people, God is with us, death ground. If we don't move, we will die, right? Superior technology and on it goes, right? And those keystones now give that final push. for that summary meta-narrative. You know, say, come on in. And then, there's further better tellings now. Not better. More deeper tellings of the creation story. How did we begin? Okay, who's the enemy we face? And we just keep going like that. And ultimately, all of this forms a nice complex, what we call a story complex, a narrative complex, right? And they all, if you take a look at religion, all the stories that are told through the Bible, or the Quran, or wherever it is, the Bhagavad Gita, They all interlock in one way or the other and support each other. They stand alone but then they interlock and support each other as well. And so, you have the story complex that carries your brand for you. That's what you ultimately want to do because the very first thing, the absolute very first thing, Marc, that anybody buys from you is the big idea. Then, the series of key messages that come from that big idea. All wrapped up in a powerful transformation narrative, right? And then, these other stories come in and support that in a very powerful story complex.

Love it! I love it. I'd love to uncover what our audience can do to start defining their story. And we'll get to that right after this.

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Welcome back! I'm speaking with Sales and Marketing Strategist Kurian Thurakan and we are just having a heck of a good conversation. As you can tell, Kurian and I are passionate about serving entrepreneurs and business managers just like you. So, if you belong to an industry association or an organization that you feel could use our services, feel free to drop us a line or do a connection request. Our details are in the show notes. So, Kiran, I love this idea of creating these stories. And to some people, I think we understand the power of stories because we have it surrounding us from the time that we're children. But how does one define their brand story? Like somebody who's running a shop, how do they wrap their head around what needs to be done to define a really good brand story?

Well, the very first thing you do is don't consult yourself. Don't ask yourself about what that is. You might have some good guesses. But ultimately, you have to go out and find that farmer's market fit or equivalent. And that simply means go and talk to your prospective customers. Talk to the audience at large. Talk to your competitors' purchasers. And then, really understand What is the motive for what drove them to that purchase decision, drove them to that brand adoption? I was doing this exercise just a couple of days ago with a client of mine from the U.S. And we were really distilling. He had a line of bracelets, very unique jewelry. And it's copper-oriented with a little What is it? Thread. It's a rope. It's a lanyard type of rope. It's meant to wear jewelry for the outdoors. That's what it was. And so, I wasn't letting him off the hook. I really wanted to understand why people were buying. Then, I realized he's his own perfect customer because he wears his own product. He created it for himself. And when we looked at it, why does he wear it? Why? Well, it's nice jewelry.

No.

That's not why. It's functional jewelry. No, there's nothing functional about this jewelry, right? And it was a cutout of a— it was like a metal cut punch of a stream with a mountain in the background. And it was sort of like a copper plate strung together like this beautiful little piece of jewelry. But it's tough enough to go outdoors with him, right? But it reminded him. I finally got it out of him. And I knew where this was going to go, is that it triggered that when he was in a fluorescent cubicle, it triggered for him what it was really like to be out there in his happy place. It was the rejuvenation of his soul when he was supposed to be where he's really supposed to be. Not in this fluorescent-lit cubicle. But in the middle of that stream with that landscape in the back of that mountain majestic in the backdrop, right? And that was the trigger. It was a reminder that. Now, that's not the only purpose. But that was one of them. So, if we start developing copy now and hooks and such based on that rejuvenation motive, now we've got something much more powerful than, hey, this is great jewelry. Come buy some. It's a completely different thing.

It's interesting because you mentioned just before the break, you mentioned the creation story. And I told you that part of what I had done after I migrated out of hospitality was I was working in economic development. And I would go around to different businesses. And I talk a lot about that in my book about how you go into a business and it feels really sketchy.

Yeah.

And then, you meet the owners and they look defeated. They look hurt. They look tired. And it was really interesting because to me, it seemed like a business that The owner didn't care. Were they burnt out? Absolutely. But what really turned it around almost instantly was when I went to them and I said, hey, tell me how you started. Why did you start this business? And all of a sudden, they flashed back 18 years or 20 years to when they made the decision to open up this business. And you could see as he was telling me the story, his eyes would light up. All of a sudden, his posture changed. Everything about him changed. And for me, that was the true indicator of how powerful that story is. And somewhere along the way in the last 18 years, he had lost that plot. How do we re-fire that?

So, I will regularly put up a quote of the week to help promote the book and such, right? And one of my favorite quotes is the following, right? When someone loses their way, It's almost always because they have lost their story. When they regain their story, they will regain their way. And it is about recapturing that. And I've had that exact same experience as you, Marc, where we go back to that initial creation story. And I've actually had people pull out a sheet of paper that they had written 18 years ago. And they read it. Their eyes light up. And the profound realization that they've lost their way from what that initial thing was. And as they were so desperate to create money and cash flow in their business just to keep it alive, they found themselves debasing their values and getting away from the original mission, right? And you continually dilute, dilute, dilute, dilute what that brand value proposition is. And now, you're just chasing a dollar. And that's a very poor way to keep your soul alive. And sometimes, that's all an entrepreneur has in the beginning is their deep drive, passion, and their ignition of their soul in that direction. Yeah.

So right there, there's the next step I think. The next step call out that I think we need to make for this podcast is if you find that you have lost your way, one of the first things you can do is go back to when you first started. And what was the mission? What was the vision you had in your head about your business? And see if you can reignite that and then communicate it forward to your employees because they probably don't understand what your mission is either.

Yeah, I was in the mergers and acquisitions business for 12 years. 8 of those were with a national accounting firm downtown, right?

Yeah.

And one of our favorite things to do when we're establishing the value of the business for sale is to take the CEO, the CFO, and the Chief Operating Officer, put them in separate rooms, and ask them the same question. The same question was, where's this business going in the next 5 years? Because when somebody buys a business, they're not buying your past history. They're buying the future, right? And so, we need to understand where it's going. And it was very rare that we got the same answer out of those 3 people.

Amazing!

The CEO is one direction. The CAO, business as usual. The CFO is not planning for any expansion. Right. Those 3 were not on the same page the vast majority of the time. Right? Let alone now, there's a cascade effect to the employees on the floor.

As we wrap up, is there any cautionaries about businesses kind of self-investing? You already mentioned one, which is don't do it in a silo. Don't do it for yourself. Make sure you go out and talk to your customers. Are there any other cautionaries? Are there things that we need to be doing to make sure that we're on the right track as we move forward?

Yeah, it's very important to abandon your ego. You have to abandon your ego. You've got to hear the ugly and not be so enthralled with the love, right? You got to hear the hate and not be so enthralled with your mother saying, you'll be good at whatever you do, son. Not a problem. None of that's helpful. What is helpful is that you assemble all of the data together and you distill what the customer really wants, right? And you'll often find the negative is we actually actively teach our students to look and ask for the negative. So, don't ask, how well did we do on these NPS questions? But we specifically ask them to say, How can we improve? Which is a different question completely, right? So, how can we improve? Because if we're already doing something well, we can probably continue to do that well. But the improved part is where all the immediate lift is. Once you fix the, what can we do? How can we improve? Then, that is much more of a quick evolution up. So, we have to look for things that make us uncomfortable. Things that may bruise our ego, which is important, which is why we say you shouldn't have an ego in this, which is kind of weird because the reason people get into business is because they have confidence in themselves in some way. Sometimes, that's misplaced confidence. Sometimes, it's misplaced. But unless you had that initial leap of faith, and it takes a little bit of ego to do that. But as you're building the company, you have to abandon this defense shield and really be able to absorb everything that a customer is telling you.

Just take a look at any of the internet reviews and stuff that are out there, right? Any kind of criticism is like a personal attack. And it's like, it's not. It's not about you.

It's about the experience. Well, one of the things we teach our students to do is go and look at their competitors' reviews. Okay? And find out what people love about their competitors and what they hate about their And the hate, you can learn so much more about the hate part of it if it actually has information. You can't just say, I hate these people. But I really dislike the 6-week waiting period before the furniture came in because it came in on a container from Asia, whatever it is, right? And so, you know immediately at that point that these time lags are a thorn in a lot of people's sides. Can you fix that? I don't know. But there's an opportunity for you to take a look at that.

Yeah. Well, and then you start asking yourself questions like, if it's not impossible, what will it take?

Yeah.

Right? And so, I mean, there's so many different aspects to this. And I love that our conversation today kind of vied away from just marketing. But we embedded this idea of the marketing within the leadership realm of how to effectively run your business. I think this has been a brilliant conversation. Could you remind everybody one more time how they can get a hold of you?

If you go to strategypeak.com, strategy and as in mountain peak dot com, all one word, you'll find all my contact details there. And you might find the one or two very entertaining blog posts.

Love it! And before we sign off, do you have any last thoughts about what we've been talking about today?

Story is the only way we understand our world. That's it. That is the only way we understand our world. But beginners and sometimes people who've been at it a long time, they go to the tactical aspects of how to market, how to sell, or whatever else, right? And they fail to understand that the very first thing that anybody buys from you is the big idea with the series of key messages all wrapped up in a transformation narrative. And then, if you're really doing well, you'll have these other 6 stories create that story complex around it to support that. If people don't buy your story, they won't buy anything else.

I love it. I love it. And to that point is if you're not telling your story, somebody else will. Kurian, I want to thank you so much for sharing your passion expertise with us today. This has been such a fun conversation. Thank you for making time.

Marc, thanks for having me on your 138th show. Lifetime! Lifetime!

Now, you're down in the— it's rubber stamped now.

Perfect!

Kiran, thanks so much!

Thanks again, Marc!

Why don't you let me know if this was of value to you? As always, my offer stands. If you would like 30 minutes of my time to brainstorm your business with you and your team, feel free to book yourself on my online calendar. The link is in the show notes. It's the one marked Meet With MarcHaine.com. MarcHaine.com. It would be my absolute honor for me to be of service to you. While you're at it, why don't you go ahead and leave a comment or review about this episode? I'd love to get the reviews down wherever you're consuming this podcast. I'd love to read your review. Was this of value to you? Did you get anything out of it? If you did, what was your big takeaway? I'd love to get your feedback. Thank you so much for joining me today. It's been brilliant having you along for the ride. My name is Marc Haine. I hope that you stay safe, stay healthy, and I hope you dare to be the exception.