105. Storytelling for Small Towns (Part 1)

Today's guest is Phil Eich, and he is the founder of Storyville, which is a consulting company that helps organizations, including small communities like yours and mine, to tell their stories more effectively. Guys, dang it anyway, I get to meet so many cool people with this work that I get to do, and my favorite thing about Phil and I coming together is that we met in a Facebook group. So props to Downtown Happy Hour. I've had Charlie Burch on our show, we've had Jeff Sigler on our show, and these folks came to me all through that particular group. So there's also Proud Places. Those are two Facebook groups. If you do community development work, I really suggest you take a look at those. They're fantastic. But today, let's talk about Phil, who I just want to say may be my new BFF. This conversation is so rich and it's such an important topic and so aligned with who we are at Growing Small Towns that we actually are breaking this into two parts. So today you're going to hear part one, which is the why, you know, the purpose behind storytelling in the way that Phil is suggesting we approach it. And then we're going to schedule a follow-up and do the how, which we really— I mean, who doesn't love the how? We dance into the how just a touch. He gives a couple of great things to think about, but we're going to dive into that more deeply later. Any time I meet somebody like Phil who is taking kind of a highly buzzwordy idea, and storytelling has become that, it doesn't have the same intention and mindfulness that Phil's approach to it does. And so anytime I meet somebody like that that's doing a thing that's kind of become cliché but they're doing it with that real authenticity and intention, I get so stoked because I just, I'm not about checking boxes. I'm not about saying like, yep, I need to do these things because they make us look good. I wanna do things because they make us Be good. So without further ado, I encourage you to have a listen to Phil Eich, follow Phil Eich, and tell me all the things about what you think is great about it. Okay, enjoy. It's a great, inspiring, hopeful, optimistic episode. So stoked for you guys. Well, hey Phil, welcome to the Growing Small Town Show.

Oh, I'm so happy to be here. I mean, Jeff Sigler, I think, was on your show.

He was.

That was kind of my exposure to, to you. I'm, I'm good friends with Jeff and, and kind of the Proud Places, Downtown Happy Hour crew. Mm-hmm. And, and that's how I was exposed to your show and I was like, growing small towns, this is exactly what I love.

Yeah.

And so I'm super excited to talk to you.

Fantastic. Well, and it's very on the nose, right? Like it's not confusing about what we're doing. We're trying, we're trying to do. Okay. So I am so delighted to have you on, on this program. And by the way, I'm making it my life's aim to get Jeff Stigler to come to North Dakota where I live. And so maybe we'll make it, you guys can road trip together or somehow we make it a big thing.

'Cause, oh, that would be beautiful. 'Cause I actually, I haven't met Jeff in person yet.

Oh, well let's make, let's make that happen.

Yeah, let's do it. Road trip.

Yeah. So for our audience, we're gonna frame this out in a kind of a two-part series because I think there's so much connective juicy stuff about the way that you approach your work and I'm so excited to share really the power of storytelling. So we're gonna break this into two parts just for our listeners that we're gonna talk really about why storytelling, why that particular approach, not just from community development, but every small business that exists in my community, every nonprofit that exists in my community. I think it has become sort of a cliché thing where we're like, oh, well you just have to tell your story. And we say it like that, but we're missing, we're missing the real meaning behind The power of storytelling. So you have started a company called Storyville. Um, so why don't you just start by telling us kind of how you came to do this work? And so just so everyone knows, we're gonna talk about the why this time, and then you're gonna come back and we're gonna capture the how, which is awesome. And I appreciate you being willing to schedule twice with us.

I'm excited to talk about this because like you said, we, we're at a point where the word story and storytelling unfortunately has become really trendy. It's been manipulated in a million different ways. Everybody from, you know, I'm trying to sell you my $10,000 60-minute course to every variation under the sun. And so then when people have this itch, especially within a community to say, hey, we are not sharing our story like we should, and I get how that's important, It can be really difficult to wade through this world where it's like, well, storytelling over here and what, well, what exactly does it mean? So I kind of stumbled into this work. I used to be a 5th and 6th grade teacher here in Bay City, Michigan, and I was teaching for about 6 years and my twin brother lost his job in the recession around 2008-ish. It was a little bit after. And he, so he moved in with me while he was figuring out what his next steps were gonna be. And His next step was to build steel body acoustic resonator guitars in my garage by hand. And so he became one of the only— one of 3 people in the world at that time to build these kinds of guitars by hand.

Can I just stop you real quick, Phil? Why? Why and how? Like, did he— he already had a passion for this?

Yeah, he worked for a builder down in Virginia. And so he was building guitars down in Virginia. Family members had some health issues in Chicago, so he left Virginia to go move in with them, help them out. And he was working at a warehouse. Warehouse, a big warehouse there in Chicago, and then they laid him off. And so he started this business in, in my garage, ended up with a 3-year-long waitlist, and I was looking for a way out of teaching. He was looking for an employee, and so I said, okay, let's do this. And so I started working for him, moved to the city of Saginaw, and while I was building, helping him build these guitars, I also got drafted as the social media guy. Sure, I could take some photos, and that was something that we needed. And so neither one of us really knew what we were doing in both starting a business and in marketing. So what we knew was we did not want to look like all of the other guitar builders that were out there. Kind of the scene in handmade instruments is it's very superlative. This guitar is everything you could ever want to be, it's perfect in every way, like all of this, like really like heady language and it just comes across as— and we didn't want to be that at all. And so what we decided to do was this, this very documentary style approach to marketing where we'd be building these guitars and I'd take a photo and we'd talk about why we were building it that way, or we started playing these fun games with our followers or all, you know, all this other kind of documentary focused stuff. So by the end of the first year, our— we were building guitars about twice as fast, um, but our waitlist was still 3 years long because it just took off like a rocket. And not only from a business standpoint, but we had this ridiculous amount of community that we had created at the end of this first year. People were sending us beer and pictures of their kids and guitars that they had made. And one year we got a giant bucket of live lobster from Maine. There was a restaurant owner And he sent us—

Phil, I want someone to send me a bucket of lobster. It was amazing.

We had to like Google how to like make it.

What do we do with these?

Yeah. He wanted us to have a real Maine lobster dinner.

That's incredible.

Yeah. And it was, it was really surprising because here we were making money. Yes. But we were also creating these real relationships and they weren't even real relationships in a purely digital sense. Like we had shelves and shelves of things that people were sending us. And so. Things were going really good. I unfortunately was becoming really poor. I love the work and, and things like that, but I wasn't making a lot of money. And so it got to the point where I was swiping my credit card at the grocery store to buy food. And the, the turning point came when I went to the grocery store and I had my, my single bag of groceries at the self-checkout, and I swiped my credit card and it was declined because I had maxed my credit card on food. And so I walked out of the grocery store and I was like, I have to do something. Like, what is something I could do right now that people would pay me money for? And so I thought about this idea that I was helping my brother create media for social media and then posting it for him. And so I thought, well, this might be something that other businesses need too. Somebody to come in, create all of their content, and then implement the content for them. And so in order to build a portfolio that I could get clients as fast as possible, I picked up my camera and I started walking into businesses in Saginaw offering to do photos for them for free for 60 minutes if I could use the photos for my portfolio. And so I would go into these businesses, they would say, yeah, cool, whatever, man. And I would start asking them these questions. So the first, business I ever went into was a cobbler shop. I'd ask him questions like, "How did a young guy like you get into a dying profession? What does it take to make a shoe? How would you repair this?" Things like that. And so then I started taking those conversations, I would record them, and then I would put them in the captions as I posted about the work that I was doing to try to create some buzz. And so that worked really well. By the end of the first year, I had a full client list. By the end of the second year, the city of Saginaw had reached out for some help as far as rehabilitating its reputation. Saginaw is a beautiful city, but it's a beautiful city with challenges like every other.

Yeah, for point of reference, what's the rough population of Saginaw?

It's about 48,000.

Okay, and for like me in rural, rural North Dakota, right, like that's a bigger community, so that always helps kind of frame out— and again, let me just be clear about this, like, yeah, Every idea can be right-sized for the size of the community where it needs to land. Okay. So I don't—

1000%.

I don't like it when people go, oh, that's a big city thing. I hear that with some of the things that come out of my mouth and I'm like, it is not a big— it's just a good idea.

Yeah.

So let's talk about that, right? Yes.

Yeah. And what's amazing about that, because, and I'm going to bring it back to the small towns, was that they approached me and were like, hey, can you help us? And I was like, I think so. But I have no idea how, because I've never done marketing at that scale. And so I look back at the work that I was doing and thought about what is a principle here that has made it work.

Of your work. You're looking for like the thread, the common thread of the specialness, the sauce, right? Is what you're looking for.

Okay. And so the special sauce was 4 words, and this is what I pitched them on, was human faces, human stories. That's so great, Phil, because here, here I was working for very small businesses of 1, 2, 4 people, whatever. Now I have to think about how do I market a city of 50,000? And so following principles allows you, like, what is something that is true regardless of context? So human faces, human stories can work for a city of 10 million. Right. But it can also work, and it has worked for a city of 250.

Yeah.

So that was really the birth of Storyville. And so what I would do is I would go into these businesses and I would interview them, and I would turn those interviews, I'd do a little bit of editing to their dialogue, and then I would post them as quote-based stories. So it's them telling their story in their own words. It took off like a rocket, and that eventually spread to other cities, working down in South Carolina and Ohio, here in Michigan now currently, and really just reaching out into all of these communities that really say, "We know we need this. We don't know necessarily how to do it. This is something that— a giant gap in the way that we communicate ourselves to the world." It's been a really kind of a fantastic ride since, and that was about 3 years ago is when that began.

Yeah. And also mid-COVID. Yes. Like right in the middle of all that. So it's relevant in a million ways, but it's only relevant to business success if we choose to make it a thing. So I'm not gonna make it a thing with you, Phil, cuz, because clearly the need to tell stories is just that important. So, okay. There's so much stuff that I wanna ask you and I'm just so grateful to have, to get to hear that entire arc of your story too, by the way. It is. Yeah.

I think it's an important arc because sometimes people, when I do workshop and things like that, people have this idea like, well, I'm not a photographer so I can't do this, or I'm not a writer so I can't do this. Or, you know, we're a very small community with no budget at all. This sounds like something that you need $100,000 budget for. And that is not true in any capacity. When I go and do these Grow Your Own Storyteller workshops, I say, please bring your phone and that's all you need. We bang out how you do this on any possible scale. Could you do this at a world-class scale with a huge budget? Absolutely you could. Can you do this at a world-class level with, your iPhone, iPhone 7? Absolutely, you can too. And so because it's principle-based, and because after the success of it initially, I really dug into, okay, why is this working? Why? It's not because I'm a great marketer. There has to be something under the surface here that is making human faces, human stories approach effective. Because it's principle-based, you can apply it in so many ways. And if you want to get into more principles, I Well, let me—

I want to ask, what did you discover? What did you discover about that? Like, you know, because it is, by the way, human faces, human stories. Brilliant, friend. I mean, and I say brilliant because it's simple, and people— we need— everybody needs simple. You give me a 34-step process to how to do anything, Phil, I'm not— that's not accessible in my brain. I won't use it. I won't refer to it. It will literally die on a shelf, right? So, so what did you discover when you were like, okay, what is it really? And by the way, before you answer that question, I just wanna say that like, this informs the way that I think about everything when it's about principles. Sometimes I use the word values, sometimes I use the word beliefs. Okay. So, because it's what creates purpose. Mm-hmm. In your work, how you interact with people, and it always comes back to those fundamental things. That's what better cultures for our companies, for our churches, for our families, for our communities, it's all based on. A stated set of principles. So it's brilliant. You're wise beyond your— you're like, I'm not a marketer. Yeah, yeah, you are. Yeah, you are. I'm sure now you're like, I'm a marketer. Look it.

Like, yeah, I'm starting to feel more comfortable in that role. So talking about these principles, because one thing that aggravates me is people talking about things that don't apply or that unnecessarily burden people. So especially within small communities, like If you're listening to this, you are probably a person with 1,000 different responsibilities. And so if I come to you and I say, hey, small communities, you need to do this, this, this, and this, and it doesn't really apply to you, and now I've just burdened you with guilt. So talking about these principles, so I saw the success this storytelling approach was having, and I was like, what is making it work? What makes it work is how human beings work. You go all the way back to like the very first community and what makes the very first community work. It's trust, because trust is the single most important thing within communities. If you don't have trust, you can't have anything else. People won't move there, people won't stay there. The volunteer efforts that you do won't work, they won't take off. You won't have growth, economic community development, anything, because at a very fundamental level, the people that required to do those things don't trust that it's going to be worth their time.

Right.

So then you dig further into that and then you think, what then if trust is primary creates trust? And you would think that it's an infinite number of things. So are people funny? Are they nice? Are they, you know, XXXXX? But what science has found is that there are two primary attributes that create Trust, and it's warmth and competence. Some people use the terms empathy and authority. I like the word empathy.

Um, authority feels a little too— yeah, like iron fisty or something.

Yeah. But if you look at the science, they use warmth and competence. It's called the warmth and competence model. And so warmth means, are you projecting that you are friendly, that you care about someone, that you are all of those things. Competence means, are you displaying that you are able to provide someone with something that they don't currently have, but if they form a relationship with you, they are able to gain that? So it could be experience, resources, knowledge, expertise, connection. And in order to create trust, we really have to display both of those things. We have to be both friendly and we have to be competent. Because if it's just— if somebody's just friendly, that's the neighbor that you only say hi to when you happen to get mail at the same time. Competence— if somebody is just competent but they're not friendly, those are, well, they're rich and they don't care about me. Or like, they seem nice now, but they're also smarter than me, so they could dump me at any time. So then That's how we create every meaningful, trusting human relationship from one-on-one between you and me, between our family members, between our friends, and between our communities.

Mm-hmm.

So then the question is, building up from this principle, how does a community display warmth and competence? Because it has to understand if people don't trust us, We can't do anything that we want. We won't accomplish anything that we want. That strategic plan that has been sitting on the shelf will sit on the shelf for another decade if we don't focus on creating trust. So how does a community create trust? It's through human faces and human stories. It's physiological. There was just a study released a few months ago from Cedars-Sinai Hospital, and it dealt with I believe 17 patients with epilepsy, and the study was trying to figure out what caused their seizures. And so what they did was they put electrodes in their brain and they sat these patients in front of this giant screen, and on the screen were hundreds of different images. And they would show this screen with all of these images, and then they would track where the patient's eyes would go. Unexpectedly, what they discovered was that people's eyes instinctively went to other people's eyes. They stayed on images of human faces for longer, and their brains fired in a completely different place than if they looked at a tree or looked at a building. And so you have this incredible physiological basis for we as humans want to see human faces, human stories, to this sociological basis where trust is primary, and if we want to accomplish anything in our communities, we need trust, to this application of storytelling through human faces and human stories. It's just incredible. And thinking about those principles is why it can apply to any community of any size in any situation, economically, socially, whatever it is, because at the very basis of it, We are storytelling animals. We live, breathe, consume, are obsessed by stories. It's what drives us, it's what motivates us, it's what connects us. Storytelling is everything. And I want to say before I stop my soapbox—

I love it. No, you're good. Go.

The transformative moment comes in a community when the community understands that storytelling is considerably more than just icing on the cake, that it's something nice you do when your real work is done, that it's more than just, quote, a human interest story. It is absolutely everything. If you want people to stay in your town, they have to know the story of their town. Most people do not. We wake up, we go to work, we go to the grocery store or out to eat, we go back home. I've never stepped in that rest or in that business before. I've never talked to those people. And so that's where it starts. It is absolutely essential and critical in every single community, in every single place.

Oh, Phil, everything that you were talking about, I just— well, you articulate it better than I do, which is awesome. So, and by the way, consider some of those words stolen. I'm going to steal some of those because let me just say that the pyramid that I've seen is know, like, and trust. It's all similar things. That's like an old marketing thing, right?

Mm-hmm.

But the thing about being known and knowing, that's knowledge. Liking, so we don't necessarily have to like each other for this to work, but that's warmth. And the thing about being known too is there has to be a bit of a vulnerability.

Yes.

And warmth doesn't come without some vulnerability. I love how you frame this out. Now here's my big question. Because I don't have to validate everything you just said. The science does. The research does. Interview your 10 favorite people and ask them what causes them to decide anything, and you're going to find a thread of what you just said, right? So anecdotally and actual evidence-based, we can find all the proof we need that this is legitimate. Mm-hmm. How in a community specifically— because you just said communities, the danger is when we see it as icing on the cake.

Mm-hmm.

But it also happens to be, for a lot of people, especially I would say elected officials, you know, and again, I never wanna disparage my elected officials. Mm-hmm. We need the government. But in a small town, a lot of times there's this impression that they are the gatekeepers to all success. They are the gatekeepers of, they hold the purse strings. They're the ones that can say yes. They're the ones that can say no. This is an intangible thing to them.

Mm-hmm.

Especially if they've never run a business that required any marketing of any kind, right? Right. Because I think if you've marketed anything, storytelling at least is like somewhere on the radar of your brain. You maybe don't understand it as deeply as you, but you kind of get it, right? Mm-hmm. We're talking about people that maybe have never thought about people the way we're talking about it. Remember that I'm talking to people, I'm including myself here. People that are trying to do cool shit in small towns, Phil. It's like, I don't— it's regardless of your title, regardless of your leadership, what does that person do? How can we start to— what is, what is a small step forward, right? What's the grassroots application of this look like for the average person that cares?

Just to kind of repeat the question, how do you convince people who are not convinced that storytelling is important?

Yeah. Or even influence them to consider it. I mean, yes.

I get this question sometimes, and one of the things I tell people is to just prove it to them. And what I mean is, when we talk about storytelling, and this kind of helps define it a little bit, storytelling does not have to be you're out to win a Pulitzer Prize and you're spending 72 hours of your week crafting a narrative and then you release it into the world. And it, like, it doesn't have to be that. This great storytelling can be a sentence. It can be 2 sentences. It can be 3. But a really simple way to do it is to start doing it. Like, let's say, take social media, for example, and you're running a Main Street page and you're like, man, this is really the direction we have to go, but how do I convince people that this is important? You just start doing it. So you pick up your phone, you download Otter.ai, the app.

I love that app, by the way. Use it all the time.

It's free. It's a game changer. And you walk into a business. And you say, I'm going to ask this business owner 3 questions. How did this place start? What's been the greatest challenge you've had to overcome in your life? What do you love about this community? And as they're answering those questions, you're recording their conversation on the Otter app. It's probably a 5, 6-minute long conversation. Otter is transcribing it for you in real time. It uploads it to the cloud. You open that up, you maybe polish it up a little bit because it's not going to be 100% accurate. You add a picture to that and you create a caption with what they said, with a picture of them holding their boot that they made or holding up clothes that they sell, and then you post it to Facebook. And I'm going to tell you that in seconds, it's going to be one of the most popular posts that you've ever created ever on social media. And I can tell you that because it happens over and over and over again.

Mm-hmm.

If every community I've worked with in South Carolina to every community I've worked with here in Michigan, people just lose their brains over it because it connects with them on a deep human level. And then let's say that you repeat that process for 4 weeks, do 1 story-based post a week. Well, now you have hard numbers to show the people that would only be convinced by numbers. And you can say, mm-hmm. Out of the 20 posts that we've done, the 4 storytelling posts reached 100,000 people, which is not uncommon even in really small communities that do this work. I'm thinking like Blissfield, little Blissfield, Michigan. I think there's 2,000 folks there. And not only their community lost it over these stories, but everybody outside of their community as well. And So now you have numbers and you can say to your council members, to your boss, to whoever it is controlling the money, say these 4 posts reached 100,000 people. All the rest of the posts combined reached 6,000. And then you can go to them and say, storytelling is 20 times more effective than everything else that we're doing combined.

Yep.

Imagine, and then you project it into the future for them and you say, imagine city manager, mayor, council members. Imagine if we had the funding or the personnel or the manpower to do this every single week or biweekly, whatever it takes, for the next year, for the next 3 years. We would reach a projected 900,000 people over the course of the next 6 months based on these numbers. Whereas if we didn't do it, we would reach about 11,000. What do you guys think about that?

Right.

And you, so now you're confronting them with the things that will convince them. So some people are motivated by the human element. They don't care about the numbers. They love how the stories make them feel. I love seeing that pizza guy.

That'd be me.

Amen. Honestly, it's most people and it's going to be 99% of your audience, but that 1% that might be the gatekeepers controlling the money, the ones that you have to convince, they're going to want to see some kind of numbers. And so you can prove it to them over a course of 4 interviews and just say, look at what is happening. Look at the amount of attention that we're getting. Look at how this could make you guys look good too. I would love to do an interview with you, city manager, and get you that amount of attention. Like, oh, I kind of like that idea too. If you need to convince people, you prove it to them. And you can prove it to them because it's a relatively easy process, even if you don't consider yourself to be a storyteller.

Yeah. Oh, that's fantastic. Okay. So we kind of tipped into the how just a tiny bit there, which is okay. Yeah. That's fine. Because when we come back for you, I'm gonna want like 5 things, do these 5 things and start 'em right now. Right. Which you just gave us something to work with, which was awesome. I kind of wanna circle back to the why just a little bit. Yeah.

Let's do it.

Because Part of this, and I think, you know, I was talking to you before we hit record a little bit about the fact that like, I don't like to consider myself a public figure, but I have a podcast, I speak for a living, so I'm public in the sense that I'm not afraid to step out and do that. Right.

Mm-hmm.

One of the things that I've struggled with since doing this work and kind of having a more formal role in my community is helping the average person understand that every time I leave this community and I speak about this community with a sense of, I, and I love confidence and warmth because being a welcoming individual is something I really aspire to be. Like, I aspire to be the kind of person that leads with warmth. I hope that's happening. I hope that's landing. That's who I try to be, right? So it's helping people understand that it's every single time I do that, I'm trying to actually build an affinity for our community that other people wouldn't know. Like they wouldn't know or care about Oaks, North Dakota. We have 1,798 people in my community as of the 2020 census.

Mm-hmm.

Okay. So we're a small, small town. So for me, I take that really seriously. Most people aren't like that, right? Most people in their communities aren't like me doing the work that, in the way that I do it.

Mm-hmm.

So can we talk a little bit about how these simple story, this simple storytelling can, first of all, fill the gap for the stories not being told about rural small towns because the larger media, you know, if we just look to kind of the media landscape on the whole, first of all, it's gotten grosser than it's ever been. I mean, it is so gross. It is not human faces, human stories in the mass— that the mass media, right? It's more like awful thing and blame this person or blame, you know, it's just so gross. So there's this enormous gap. What role and why is storytelling a way for us to kind of put ourselves back into the spotlight? And there are people that'll say like, I don't wanna be in the spotlight. I want us to stay, I want us to not, like, there are also people that don't want us to grow. I don't really cater to people with that mindset, but I'm not articulating my question well again, Phil, but can you see where I'm going with this?

I, I see where you're going. So one way it fills the gap is, and one important way it fills the gap is that storytelling does fill the gap. Let me explain what I mean, because if you as a small community do not fill the gap yourself, others are going to fill it for you. And that's where stereotypes come in. And I'll give you an example. So one of the projects that I did was with 25 counties in southeastern Appalachian Ohio. And when you hear the word Appalachian Ohio, Immediately, what pops into your brain? We don't even have to verbalize it because we know, right? Because we've been fed a certain stereotype about the people that live in Appalachia.

Correct.

That gap was filled. That gap was filled. And now a lot of these communities, small communities— there is not a city in those 25 counties above 25,000 people. Yeah, small, rural. What the rest of the country did, because a lot of these communities were unable to fill the gap with the accurate narrative, was the country just said, okay, yeah, this is who you guys are. We're going to write you off as poor, impoverished, uneducated, all of these things. And so what they did, they called me in and I interviewed all of these amazing people starting up their town's first coffee shop. Trying to get stable internet there, doing something at a world-class level that you would never expect. All of these ways that by owning these stories, they could start filling the gap themselves. And so that's what I want to say to small communities looking at this as, oh, like, well, like, why do we necessarily need this? Because other people are telling stories about you that are not true.

Right.

How does that make you feel that they are writing you off, that they do not acknowledge your existence, that they don't look at a town of 2,000 and say, that's a valuable contribution to the world, cities are where it's at, I want huge cities, you guys are nothing? Like, how does that make you feel? That's got to feel violating, right? The violation of pride. And how would it make you feel If more people looked at you and the people you love and your community and said, that is a special place, those are special people, those are important people. I mean, like, imagine filling the gap with a feeling like that instead of a feeling of ambivalence. It's just an absolute game changer.

Yeah, I, again, of course, I just love this so much. It's about taking back the narrative of our own existence.

Yeah.

And for the people that say— what I think has happened in some small communities, and again, some of this, I would say some of this is conjecture, so, you know, you got to forgive me for that. But yet I talk to lots of people in small towns. It's not as if I have no data to back this up, right?

Right.

Certainly anecdotal, because I don't do research, Phil. I'll just be honest. Like I always say that, I'm like, you're not, you're not gonna find science here. I am going to talk to people and start to put together constructs of how we need to do this stuff. But what I think has happened is that some people said, you know, I don't give a shit, I don't care if they think that way about us. Well, that will work to a point, but then when we start to lose residents faster than we bring new residents in, and our— some of our core services start to decline, some of our key things start to go away, then it becomes a, okay, Well, we're not gonna solve this from the inside out. I mean, we will, we will, like using something like you're talking about, but I'm saying we're not gonna have enough babies to make up for, yeah, the people that we're losing. So we have to get— it frustrates me when I see that because that's apathy at its worst, I think. And we kind of just go, well, mm, it's what they say. Yes.

See, and I love this rabbit hole cuz this is kind of a new rabbit hole in this conversation, is that, that feeling of like, well, I don't really care whether or not other people care about me. Is exactly apathy. And that's something Jeff Sigler talks about all the time, right? And I love that he's talking about that because it's such a core and a common thread in so many of our communities and what's really holding us back. And what you're saying is brilliant in that apathy doesn't ever not have an effect, correct? To the person who is feeling apathy, I may not feel effective, and in fact In some cases, I might even feel relieved because my apathy, my like, what do I get out of engaging with this community? Like, I don't really care what other people think, right? It makes my life easier because I don't, I don't have to go to council meetings, I don't have to clean up the trash on the street, I don't have to do any of these things. So my life is easier.

Yeah, it's a release of energy, right? Like, you just go, oh well, I don't have to. Yeah, suddenly I don't have to give, I don't have to show up, I don't have to provide energy, I don't have to.

Yeah, but imagine if you are apathetic about finding a job and you're like, you know what, life is easier just sitting at home. And what ends up happening? You run out of money and then now you can't buy food and now you get kicked out of your house because you can't afford your rent. And now you are in a really bad situation when at first you thought like things were really great. And so this idea that we have given ourselves permission to be apathetic in the sense of perception of both self-perception of how we perceive ourselves as community, and how other people outside of our community perceive us as well. This idea that we've given ourselves this kind of permission has an effect on our quality of life, and we don't feel it right away. We don't wake up tomorrow and say, oh man, we just lost 17 businesses because I didn't care yesterday. It happens slowly over time, right? And then we wake up in these communities that are losing 1,000 people a year that were once built cities predicated on a tax base that could support that infrastructure. And now we don't have it. And everybody's like, "Well, why don't our roads get fixed?" It's like, "Well, because they will never get fixed because we don't have the people here to be able to pay for it." And then our quality of life suffers. And then we wake up one day and we're like, "Well, man, life is really tough and we don't have the things that other people have and we don't have the jobs. And now I need to work 2 jobs instead of 1 job." And that's the cancerous effect of apathy in regards to perception. Well, it doesn't matter how I think about my community or how other people think of us. And then that grows into every single facet of our experience in small communities, large communities alike.

Totally agree. The other thing that's interesting too is this also makes the case for why maintenance requires effort. Jeff talks about that a bit more just kind of from this investment standpoint. Because it's like we think, okay, we fix this thing and then we just forget about it. Well, no, you fixed it and now you have to continually stay on top of maintaining it. And I can appreciate without question the amount of effort that that takes.

Mm-hmm.

If we don't at a minimum invest the energy to keep things the same, it's a slow decline.

Yeah. And I remember, like, I don't know why this stuck in my brain. I was like in grade school and this was back when Nick Saban was coaching the Spartans. And he was interviewed, like in grade school, and he said something like, you're either getting better or you're getting worse.

Always.

And I think about that all the time because it's absolutely true. And like, I'm not refuting your, like, you're staying the same.

No.

But sometimes we think like we can do that. Well, like things are staying the same, things are good, and that's not true. They're either getting better or they're getting worse. It's just happening on a scale and at a rate that's imperceptible at the time. And so whether it's 4 weeks from now, 4 months from now, 40 years from now, it's heading in some kind of direction.

Correct. My take on that phrase is if we're not growing, we're dying.

Yep. Yep.

Growth is also such a kind of contentious word, and that's why I love that it's in my business name. Cuz I'm just like, let's talk about that. Cuz yeah. So for me, I think about the humans that already live here. I spend a lot of time thinking about those folks. How do we help them grow themselves, right? So it's about that investment in the people that already choose to live here. And what does a small incremental cracking open of one individual— Phil, let's just take it down to one person. One person chooses to see something differently than they saw it yesterday. I mean, really start to think about that from a human. That human then walks around with a slightly more cracked open brain and maybe heart, right? Mm-hmm. That's all the work I am trying to do is help everybody that we serve crack open their minds and their hearts just a bit more.

Yeah, this idea of growth too, and this idea of like cracking open a mind, like we think about growth in multiple ways. You can grow out, like expansion, you're getting more people, you're getting more businesses, you're getting more stuff. But the power of storytelling is that your community can also grow down in that, and growing down in the terms that now that, that root goes just a little bit deeper. That seed cracks open just a little bit more so that something can begin. Like, I think about like those seeds cracking open in the dirt. Those are the people that are disengaged, disenfranchised with their community. They're very isolated. They don't want anything to do with it. You could blow them into the next community when the chance arises. But through storytelling, storytelling can crack open that seed just a little bit and give you a shot that maybe they're going to stay here. For the people that do have those roots, they are connected, maybe they're second-generation family, they've got a good job. It grows those roots even deeper so that their kids stay, or so when they go visit another community, they talk well about your community. And now those roots grow a little bit deeper. And so, like, automatically, and especially in a lot of our small communities, we kind of chafe at this idea of growing because sometimes that means losing something. We've given up our identity. And that's not true. That you can grow out and retain your identity and your culture if you're really intentional and you're understanding kind of the processes and the choices and the consequences of those. But you can also grow down.

I love this so much. I'm a farmer's wife and daughter.

There you go.

So let's tie it to agriculture and then everybody wins, Phil.

Yeah.

But that's what this is though. For me and what I think community development needs to look like is creating the kind of environment that sustains and supports that growth. So if we use the seed and we use that example, what is sunlight, water, fertilizer? What is the right— what are those things? What are those ideal growing conditions need to look like? And does our community offer them? And I spend all my time thinking about that, right? Like, and how— and again, this is, this is heady stuff when you're just one person in a community trying to make cool stuff happen. It's a lot to think about. But when I find other people like you that so eloquently articulate the things that are in my brain, it is so lovely because then you just don't feel like a crazy person. And I just think that there are people like us that are choosing to either return to their small towns or they find themselves in small towns and they're literally just on fire to implement these things on any level. And so they're the people I just want to reach out. I want to hug them, you know, virtually.

Yes. And talking specifically to those people, talking about storytelling and then throwing some more gasoline on the fire that they have for their communities, talking about storytelling, there's a great quote from Peter Kageyama's book, For the Love of Cities. And he said something like, I might misquote him, but he said something, "What if we stopped trying to make our cities more livable and instead tried to make them more lovable?" And he goes on about how the human heart is the single greatest motivator, the single greatest mechanism of transformation. That's the power of storytelling, because yes, metrics, yes, business, yes, economic growth, all of those things. But what it does is it makes people care first. I will never shop at that retail store if I don't care about something that retail store can offer me. I will never volunteer. I will never go to a council meeting. I will never help my community in any way if I don't care about it first. That is, I think, one of the most convincing arguments for storytelling is like, we can pummel the world with all of these facts and stats about our counties and/or cities or small towns or whatever. But if we don't also, along with that, communicate why people should care about this place and our people, We're just kind of yelling in an empty room. Like, I don't care about that. 5,000 ads we see every single day. By the end of this week, you will have consumed more information than a person 150 years ago would have consumed over their entire lifetime.

What a fantastic statistic. I mean, yes, seriously.

And so how do you compete against a world like that where people have the attention span of 0.6 on average on social media, 0.5 to 0.7 seconds. We have shorter attention spans than goldfish. So in a world like that, how do you win? You make people care. And then you make people care by leveraging this physiological need for human faces and human stories. When a community decides that storytelling is critical to its life, it decides to reach down into our DNA and say, people are the most important thing in our community. And when we do that, we not only reach into the DNA of the people within our community, but those outside of our community. It's the single most compelling way that we can communicate to both the citizens in our place and those outside of our place.

That's a beautiful way to wrap part 1 of our 2-part series on storytelling. Phil, what a delight. Seriously.

Thank you. Likewise. I love going down these rabbit holes.

Yeah, it's so fun. And again, I want to thank Downtown Happy Hour, really. I mean, that's the Facebook group that ended up connecting us. That's how I met Jeff. And then Charlie Burch has been on my podcast as well. It's just really, really special. I don't take for granted, nor do I take lightly, the fact that you're a busy guy and you care so deeply about these things. I feel super privileged to have met you. And, uh, likewise, I know that our audience is gonna be just thrilled with this. So everybody stay tuned because we're gonna have part 2 coming up with Phil, and we're gonna talk about some of the hows behind this. But thank you for so beautifully laying out these things that I've always felt were true. But then how do you convince anybody of that when it doesn't seem like a lot of people think that way?

But yeah, well, I like— you hit on the magic of it because I think at the base of it, like, we all feel like this is true. We all feel like we need to get back down to the root of our humanity. We need to improve our relationships with our immediate community, that the potential to change the world lies when we walk outside of our house every day. Like, that's where we can have the most effect. Anything we can do to expand that conversation and make it very explicit and say, people, you are not crazy. You are on the right track. This is how we move forward. This is how we regain a sense of community and collective humanity and belonging, quality of life, regardless of resource. Like, this is it. So you are on the right track, people. If you have this little seed of an idea, if you're feeling like this is the direction, like, lean hard into that. And that's what I love about part 2 is like, Okay, so then how do we actually do this in a way that I can incorporate into the work I'm doing? If I don't have any skills in storytelling, if I can't write a lick, like, how do I do this? And so part 2 will be super fun.

Perfect segue. Thank you, Phil, so much. Everybody check out Storyville. We will have everything that he's touched on in the show notes. So please check those out and we'll see you back soon, Phil. Thank you so much.

Thank you.