We have so many brilliant minds working on producing great innovations, but we only hear from a few of them. Why? Because, often, these innovation experts struggle with their communication. Today’s guest, Susan Lindner, has observed this, leading her to create Innovation Storytellers—a consulting firm that helps companies to communicate more effectively with their ideas and get those ideas out there. In this episode, she joins Michael Zipursky to tell us more about the importance of storytelling, especially in driving innovation and growth to our consulting businesses. She takes us through the process of how to develop stories and effectively tell them. On other avenues of growth, Susan then talks about using speaking engagements to maximize business revenue. Tune in to hear more about growing your business as Susan dives deep into other important topics, from business models to mindset shifts and more!
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In this episode, I’m here with Susan Lindner. Susan, welcome.
Thank you so much for having me, Michael.
I’m excited about our conversation. For those who aren’t familiar with you and your work, you are a storytelling coach, a consultant, and a keynote speaker. You are an entrepreneur because you’ve run multiple companies. We’ll get into all that. You are the Founder and CEO of Innovation Storytellers, which is a consulting firm that helps companies to communicate more effectively with their ideas and get those ideas out there. You work with organizations like WeWork, AT&T, GE, and a whole bunch of others. There’s probably a lot more that you want to add and maybe even correct something that is there about your companies. Anything that I need to adjust there or cover at a high level?
That’s great. The work that I’m doing is helping turn innovation experts into incredible storytellers so that they get the resources, runway, and recognition that they deserve because so often, they do not.
I love the clarification that you made because you said something there that is important to put a bit of a spotlight on, which is innovation experts. We’ll talk more about that because that to me makes it sound like you’re very targeted in who you want to speak to and who your ideal client is. In the work that you’re doing in terms of helping people to tell their stories or bring their ideas to life, that’s applicable to almost everybody on Earth, or at least a lot of people. You’ve been very selective. I want to get into that. Before we do, we need to start with how you got to where you are. The way that you were introduced to me and recommended to come on the show was, “You have to ask Susan about her time in Thailand because she was doing something very different from consulting.”
You were working as a field epidemiologist in Thailand, seeing people dying from AIDS. The thing that I’ve heard and maybe from our research is you didn’t know how to communicate how deadly this virus or this disease was at that time. You wanted to make sure that people who were at risk could know about the danger of this. If you could take us back to that time, what was going on, what were you thinking, and how does that connect to the business that you have now?
For me, it’s a very direct line. Other people don’t necessarily get it, but it’s inescapable. I’ll take you back to 1994 Northern Thailand in Chiang Rai Province, which is right on the border with me and Mark. At that time, 1 in 6 sexually active people were HIV positive. Where I lived, there were three AIDS funerals a day and the red-light district that I was charged with working in had already gone out of business because most of the sex workers and many of their customers had already died. Given capitalism what it is, where there is supply, there is demand.
A new red-light district opened and my job was to begin to understand. Everyone was very clear about what HIV was and how people were dying. No mistaking that. The challenge was how we get people to use condoms. There were no medicines available at that time. Clean syringes were not an option. I was in the Golden Triangle area, home to opium and heroin use, and those were not readily available. The condom was our first line of defense. I work in innovation, so we love tech, new tools, and all those cool things. If you were to guess, Michael, as a breakthrough innovation technology, how old is the condom?
Goodwill is the act of making someone else's life better. Click To TweetYou’re putting me on the spot here. My mind was going to 1950 or 1930. I have no idea.
I’m going to ask you to look back further. I did a double-check with ChatGPT, just to double-check my facts. I had been saying 10,000 years first noticed in Grotte des Combarelles in France. In the caves of France, there are paintings on the walls. We don’t know if that is a public health message or if that is bragging about somebody’s fantastic night from the night before. Ten thousand years looks like the first human evidence of the condom. Apparently, it is somewhere found in an excavation in the pyramids in Egypt. I might have to check that Carbon-14 dating on those condoms. This is a tool that’s been around with us for a very long time, and it clearly wasn’t working.
The Minister of Public Health at that time was creating these very terrifying posters that basically had a scary hungry ghost depicted on it with the words in dripping blood that said, “Get AIDS and die.” That fear campaign was quite effective for about the first six months. We saw a drop in infection rates, but about six months later, those rates came climbing back up again. We did what any good marketer would do. We doubled down and made scarier posters and billboards, which were horrific, people with symptoms and people dying literally on the posters. That worked too for a couple of months and then they started climbing again because human nature believes that, “If I smoke this cigarette, I won’t get cancer. If I eat that triple cheeseburger, I won’t become obese.”
That’s our nature. We want to believe it’s not us. We needed to find a different way. In my mind, we needed to change the story both that the sex workers, the customers, and the brothel owners were telling themselves and the new stories that needed to replace them. I’ll say I was dedicated to this effort. My nickname where I lived was Condom Girl because I would go jogging in the morning and hand out condoms in the market over breakfast. I worked in a restaurant at night called Cabbages & Condoms whose effort was intended to make condoms as ubiquitous and easy to talk about as cabbages. You could pick up a handful of free condoms on your way out of the restaurant.
It was a social enterprise, needless to say, run by the nonprofit where I worked. We needed to switch the story. As an anthropologist, which is my background, we did some ethnographic studies. We did some questioning of the brothel owners, the customers, and the sex workers to ask them how they felt about their current state of being and what empowered them in their current state. How did they feel about their motivations for owning a brothel, going to a brothel, or working in a brothel? The mamasang said she was interested in making money, and the customer said they were looking for a good time. The women and men who worked in those brothels said, “I want to survive.”
Most of those sex workers were seeing eight customers a night. Eight times a night for anybody is pretty challenging. Using a condom every single time without fail is almost impossible. When we flip the script and ask the question, “How could you become the hero of your own story?” the mamasang would then say, “I would make sure that I had the cleanest brothel so that people would feel safe coming here.” The customer would say, “I want to be the protector of my family. I want to make sure I don’t bring HIV home.” The sex worker said, “I want to be in charge of my own destiny. That would make me use a condom every single time.”
We wound up turning prostitutes into entrepreneurs by teaching them chicken raising, pig raising, duck raising, secretarial skills, or computer skills. Some things didn’t work out by the way like hairdressing. In Thailand, you lay down flat on a table and get your hair washed three times. It feels amazing, but there are two real risks of customers coming in and wanting more than a haircut with that hairdressing. We had to nix that because our hairdressing school wound up turning into a mini brothel. There is gem cutting and gem polishing. Burma and Thailand are phenomenal places with a wealth of stones.
We turned women into gemologists almost without that expertise of understanding the gem. In any event, that wound up dramatically dropping HIV infection rates because everyone was motivated by their own self-interest. They could become the hero of their story. Learning that and being armed with that shifted how I went to work then as a consultant in the PR space, helping small businesses and startups. I begin not just talking about their cutting-edge technology, but also how it was going to have a dramatic impact on our customers. What would the transformation look like? After a short stint at the Centers for Disease Control tracking variant and resistant strains of HIV coming to America, I wound up joining the dot-com revolution and working in a PR agency with dot-com startups.
It’s a very powerful story. There’s a lot to unpack there for our audience that are reading because they’re thinking about, “How do I take this and use it to help me to build my consulting business and get to that next level?” One of the questions that people might be pondering now is, “This makes sense. I know I need to better understand what desires or what drives my ideal client. I need to figure out how I make them the hero.” For people who maybe aren’t sure how to get that information, ultimately, you’re talking about identifying what people care most at the core.
Not the service level, but understanding what resonates with them, what would get them to take action, and what would get them to say yes to having an appointment or sitting down to have a conversation. How do you suggest that people do that? Let’s say you’re sitting with a friend now who’s a consultant and they want to meet executives in tech companies. They want to better understand what is top of mind for those people and what their challenges are. How do you suggest that people go ahead and do that if they don’t have a big budget to conduct studies and do that work? What have you found or how do you think about backing that activity?
As I think about my customer’s target audiences, I ask a couple of questions. Number one, my technology is the least interesting thing at the table, or what I am selling is actually the least interesting thing but rather their problems are the most fascinating. We’ve heard it 1,000 times. “Fall in love with the problem. Never the solution. You’ll be in business forever.” How often do we get curious about what it would take to make that person a hero if they worked with me? I would ask a consultant, “Consider you have the opportunity to work with target market X and bigwig at X company or CEO of a middle market company even, how is their life going to get dramatically better on the other side of working with me?”
I’m not talking about, “I’m going to put ten new leads in your inbox or I’m going to shape the outcome of a particular challenge you might be facing.” What’s on the other side of it? Oftentimes, I’ll use a phrase like, “The consulting work I do helps executives channel their leadership abilities.” The key phrase here is “so that.” “So that you can go on to do that next thing.” That is a mindset shift, and it’s a neurological shift when we create goodwill. All that work in Thailand was about creating goodwill. By goodwill, my definition is the act of making someone else’s life better and the target market we’re going after.
Do we actually know what would make their life better? Do we know once our service is inserted into their life, how their life would become better? Raises, promotions, and they get to go home at a decent hour. They get to look like the hero in their own business. They get to solve challenges more effectively without burnout. What would that transformation look like in terms of making someone’s life better, not just their bottom line or their department’s bottom line, etc.? Do we know the answers?
When you’ve identified what those things are, let’s say you have a hypothesis so it might come from conversations or some research that you do. However you get it, you have an indication, a belief, or a hypothesis about what people care most about, what their desires are, and so forth. What do you then do with that? In your experience, you help companies to essentially develop their stories or more effective ways of telling their stories. How do you take that information about the problems that somebody’s having, the desires that they have, or where they want to make improvements and then actually bring that to life? What are the next steps when you take or identify that idea into turning into something more than that?
A tolerance for failure is absolutely critical in the innovation space. Click To TweetIs the question I’m still trying to land the meeting like how do I use it?
It could be in that context. What I’m wondering about is the process. It sounded like the first step is identifying or better understanding what your audio client cares most about. Once you have that information, what do you then do with it in terms of developing it into a story? Do you weave that story into the content? I want to know how you go about from that initial stage one all the way to putting it to market and so forth.
I want to turn up the volume a little bit on that need or desire. Something about working in life-or-death situations is how I make it life or death for the person that I’m connecting with. Here in New York, it’s a violent place, but we ask the question, “Where is my customer bleeding from the neck?” That creates a sense of urgency and importance. It’s not enough to like, “I’d like to get home by 5:00.” The sense of urgency is because if I don’t, X will happen. Maybe that’s the add-on. The way that I go about from a marketing standpoint thereafter with trying to talk to a client is to understand how to diagnose the problem from its most minute to its greatest. I then begin writing stories about that progression based on past clients or things I’m seeing out in the world.
To your point, I’ve chosen a very narrow niche. I work with innovation teams because that’s my joy. I love being 3 to 5 years ahead of everyone else in the room and knowing what’s coming next. I also find innovators are oftentimes struggling with their communication more so than folks who have an MBA attached to their name because they’re so dedicated to their science or their discovery or whatever it is that they’ve lost that connection to how the rest of us communicate in a way that’s exciting. They think we get it like most of us. For example, there’s one that’s quite topical.
I’m sure many of your audience probably saw SpaceX and Elon Musk’s newest rocket that exploded. I’m writing a blog post on this that Elon Musk congratulated his team in the face of that failure because the thousands of victories that went into making that failure are epic. Sometimes, we forget about congratulating Edison on try number 9,000 with still another 1,000 tries to go. A tolerance for failure is something that is absolutely critical in the innovation space.
I might identify all the little steps along the way and write stories about my clients or what’s happening topically that I can bring to a conversation with an innovator that says, “I get innovation culture, what failure looks like, how painful that is and the ribbing you have to take from other members of the C-suite. I want to help be a consultant to help your teams better communicate both the failure and the victory. Where can we start?”
I’m going to take a step at summarizing a bit of what you mentioned and hopefully, this helps others as well. It sounds like you start off by getting the processes very clear about what the pain points are, the bleeding neck, and the desires. It is understanding how your ideal client thinks and everything that’s going on inside of their life as much as you can.
We say context before content before I even sit down to write a story. Context first.
You slice that up into little pieces and find ways to tell a story, share a case study, and bring something newsworthy into your content that addresses each one of those little things. If it’s Jane wants to be home by 5:00 to be with her kids or Tom wants to be home because he’s never home and that’s going to affect his relationship, you would identify whatever that case or situation might be, create content around that one little slice, and put that into the world.
You do that for every little slice so that you resonate with the specific person you want to make an impact on and ultimately become a client. Also, I believe I heard you say pull in those examples to share with people or to bring up in a conversation because now you’ve covered the gamut of everything that is likely top of mind specifically for them. Is that a good summary or anything you want to add to that?
Because of that, you wind up getting the top, middle, and bottom of the funnel. People are still investigating, and they’re like, “I would like to get home by 5:00. I wish I didn’t have to create a 60-page slide deck to get my point across. If I could get that done in ten slides through better storytelling, then I can get home by 5:00. I can go back up again. What’s it costing me? Am I not getting a raise or promotion, or am I not getting my incredible breakthrough idea or my project through to approval from the board and the team because I’m not effectively communicating at the board level and it’s costing me my job?”
I’m tying into those two professional goals, personal and organizational, that are driving things at the bottom, which is people who are about to close. That’s how I think about how storytelling functions and how I communicate with my clients, but also how I teach them to communicate. What are my spheres of influence that those concentric circles that I need to keep influencing with a story to bring them on board and get them to work at 110% capacity with my cool new thing when I still need to hit my quarterly goals?
I want to dive into your business in a moment, but before we do, I want to try and help anyone here that might be struggling and currently thinking, “I understand how powerful stories are, but there’s nothing interesting in my life. I don’t see anything to talk about.” How would you counsel somebody like that? I’m sure you’ve run across a few people like that in your years of doing this. Where do you suggest that they look? How do they navigate or shift that mindset away to be able to see all the opportunities around them?
Let’s recall one thing. We only learn in two ways. We learn by a story, “Don’t touch the stove. It’s hot,” or we learn by experience, “My hands are on fire.” Unless you’re getting divine intervention, and someone is planting a brilliant idea from upstairs into your mind, those are the two ways that humans learn, story and experience. When you think about your experience at school, you got a lecture and then you went to the lab and you got to see it play out. This is the way that humans learn. One other thing I want to remind you of the benefit of a story is memory, which is a productivity device for anyone in the room. If there are any skeptics on the storytelling side, Stanford did a study that found that just giving people facts, which is sometimes as consultants, it’s what we do.
When we begin to harness the emotion and empathy of the person sitting across the table from us, we can tell amazing stories. Click To TweetI call us seagulls. We fly in, we poop a bunch of data onto a prospect’s desk, and then we fly away again and hope that they get it. They don’t remember it, don’t retain it, and are certainly not able to communicate it back to their boss to hire you. Story is a memory-making device because we add things like the emotion that triggers all of these fantastic neurotransmitters in the brain that make a story stick. We can dive a little bit more into that if you like, but to your question about, “Do I have a story to tell?” the answer is of course you do. Recounting your day to your kids and your family or on a phone with a friend is storytelling. How do we find story? This is fantastic.
Most storytellers start with your basic four. Those are people, so people who have had an impact on your life positively or negatively. Places, so a place that triggers a great emotion. Great means voluminous or intense emotion. It could be the beach or the mountains like every dating profile says. I like the beach in the mountains. It could be a haunted house or your moldy-smelling dorm room. Those things immediately conjure emotion and memory. Those are people, places, and events. Maybe it’s moving out, going to college, or an illness. What is an event in your life? Christmas.
The last is objects, so treasured objects. It could be that ice cream you had three scoops high that you took your first lick and it fell on the sidewalk. Maybe it’s your first driver’s license or your first car. Those four will always trigger, if you can think about a pivotal person, good or bad, your bully or your favorite teacher. Places, events, and objects are where we typically start and where most stories start.
For anyone that might be feeling challenged to create a story or you don’t think there’s one inside of you, I’d recommend creating even a little visual of the people, places, events, and objects. Use that as a bit of a prompt to help you recall something that fits into one of those boxes and start from there.
I can give your audience an easy framework because a story can be four sentences that could change someone’s life. Think about a story that you might tell and then tie it to a theme. What’s the theme that’s going on in your prospect’s life or even in your own? Maybe it’s perseverance, resilience, growth, or innovation. Think about what that theme is. Next, if you were able to take that, “I failed my driver’s license test four times, but I persevered and I finally got it. I then got the crappy 1988 Mazda that was handed down to my older brother Greg. It gave me the freedom that I never knew I could have before but it would never happen without persistence,” easy story.
Now I can take that persistent story and talk about what’s happening with my team and how we get through if it was COVID, work from home, layoffs, and whatever else comes through. Those are the bridging steps. The way you make it shine is through emotion. If we don’t talk about the struggle of how hard it was to get that license and recognize with empathy how challenging it is when you’re surrounded by layoffs, we’re the team that’s left and we can do this. When we begin to harness the emotion and empathy of the person sitting across the table from us, we can tell amazing stories.
People, places, events, objects, and then once you have that story or your theme, you connect it to your business, your work, or whatever you’re focusing on. Make sure that you’re bringing in emotion and empathy so that you’re connecting on the feeling side as well.
There is one more thing I’ll add to it. The big three questions as you finish writing your story is to ask yourself, “What do I make sure when I am done speaking that people know what to think and feel?” You’ve put the emotion in them. You decide if they will feel innovative, guilty, enraged, or inspired. That’s your job as the storyteller to input the emotion. What do you want them to do? If you want them to do anything, emotion is the catalyst to get someone off their ass and do something. We all act based on emotion. We create momentum based on emotion, not on logic.
I took some notes there because I’m going to start using some of this good stuff. I appreciate it, Susan. Let’s shift a little bit to talk about your business. In the research that we did, we do it with all guests to get a better understanding of your background and what you’re doing now, it seemed that speaking is a big part of your business.
Talk to me a little bit about speaking and how you are using it to grow your business. Is it something that you are doing as a revenue-generating activity or the focus is to maximize the revenue of speaking in terms of your business revenue? Do you look at speaking more as a way to get in front of potential ideal clients and then generate projects from that or both or maybe something different? What do you think about speaking and its role in your business?
I would say I was the world’s worst professional speaker when I first got started doing this back in 2015 and 2016. I say worst because I spoke to 600 companies for free before I realized that you could get paid for it.
You weren’t the worst. You were the most charitable.
I should have written all of those off as expenses. I could have used a better consultant for my accounting clearly at that time. I had a public relations agency, PR, marketing, social, and branding called Emerging Media. We’re a small agency, around fifteen people. We were doing well. I started speaking in order to attract more clients, traditionally non-native English-speaking startups, meaning international startups that wanted to make their mark on the US market. That was the focus of my business at the time. I would speak at consulates and international groups about messaging in PR and branding and so forth to bring in new clients. It was effective. What happened was I found out that I enjoyed speaking more than servicing those clients after a while.
Sure enough, one day, I was speaking at the Belgian American Chamber of Commerce called BelCham here in New York, and someone came up to me after my talk and said, “We could use this kind of thinking at GE.” I said, “Do you think GE has a budget for a speaker?” She looked at me like I was the biggest idiot on the planet and said, “Yes. GE has cash.” With that, I scored my first corporate client. They flew me to Zambia to speak to maybe the top twenty soon-to-be C-level executives in the country. In the company, they were flown in from all over the world for a learning trip to Zambia.
When you are the only person in a niche, you get to own it. You get to brand it how you want to. Click To TweetThe night before, my first big corporate workshop, the head of HR leaned over and said to me, “Our next speaker after you isn’t going to get in for another three hours. Do you think you can pull out about three more hours of content?” I was like, “Sure. Absolutely. No problem.” I was up all night in my hotel room in Zambia adding slides and adding workshop activities. It was great. It was amazing. I was on cloud nine and thought, “This is what I want to be doing.”
Quick question on that. Back in the day, before you had reached 600 charitable free speaking gigs, how are you landing those speaking gigs? Did you reach out to the Belgian American Chamber Embassy and say, “This is what I’d like to talk about?” Was it relationships or connections? How do you go about getting those kinds of opportunities?
In some cases, I would reach out directly, but there are other groups I found like incubators and accelerators, specifically targeting startups and those that targeted international startups. They knew about my work because I’m very nichey. There are very few PR people that I knew of at the time that spoke five languages, was an anthropologist, and had a background in working with international startups. I created connections to venture capital firms that funded international startups.
They would turn me on to folks at the consulate or in other groups. They would have me come and speak with their portfolio companies. There were specifically for-profit companies that were doing what I called entrepreneurial tourism that brought startups in for a week and exposed them to the New York startup ecosystem. I was 1 of 10 speakers during the course of that week. That’s how that worked.
It’s a classic bit of hustle, a bit of being in the right place at the right time, and then the fact that you were showing up allowed you to then start to get more and more. You’re building momentum as a snowball gain steam.
Also, I’m building an ecosystem. I was good about keeping in touch with all those people who created speaking opportunities for me and coming back and saying, “When do you have your next delegation? When can I come in again? How are things going?”
How often were you doing that? A lot of people now are sitting on this database. They may or may not necessarily use a CRM, but they have people inside of their ecosystem. However, they’re not necessarily very intentional in following up with them, checking in, and asking those questions. What were you doing and what have you found is the best practice for you in terms of how often you’re touching and reaching out to people?
Touchpoints. I wish I could say obviously by my serious business acumen of giving away services endlessly for free. I can’t say I had a timing methodology. I’m insatiably curious, Michael. It’s pretty annoying to some people. I always want to know what’s going on. I was seeing everybody’s calendar and would be like, “I see you’re having a fill-in-the-blank startup night. Could I come to give a talk?” They’re like, “Sure.” I also went the extra mile. I didn’t stand up in the room and talk. I created a slide deck where I thought about what startups need to know. I put that together and made it entertaining, fun, and multimedia. I put the effort in so that that talk became honed. I don’t think I would’ve gotten that opportunity with GE if it was my first time around.
I knew where the pauses were and where I had to break. To your point about marketing, because I did own a marketing agency that was constantly liking and following back people on Twitter and LinkedIn at the time, I’m getting into people and messaging people over LinkedIn and saying, “I’m giving a talk next week. Can I come and speak with your audience too?” I would say, “I’m coming to San Francisco.” I wasn’t. I would reach out to 6 or 7 different organizations, and they’d say, “Sure. Come and give a talk. We’ll gather the startups in our accelerator and from the consulate or the Chambers of Commerce.”
International Chambers of Commerce were a huge opportunity for me because they wanted the business side and also the grownups wanted to start sounding like startups. This was a shift that happened about ten years into the dot-com boom in around 2008. When I would speak at conferences, it was like, “I need to turn my battleship into a speedboat. How can I sound like these guys? I’m like the sweaty guys in the hoodies and the jeans or the coders who don’t leave their desks.” They’re like, “Yes, them.” I’m like, “We can do that.”
You ran your previous PR marketing and social company for about seventeen years or so. You had a team of about fifteen or so people a couple of years ago. In 2022, you rebranded. You went a bit of a different path. I’d love to hear from you on why the rerun but also why the shift in the business model. Now, you are a solo consultant business operator. You do bring in 1099s and contractors on an as-needed basis. That’s a big shift in the model in going from 15 people to 1, essentially. Walk us through why did you do that and what was going on.
I got a little tired of Monday morning from someone coming into my office and saying, “Susan, can I speak with you privately for a minute?” Not needing to solve my client’s problems, but also needing to help with my employee’s challenges who needed a day off, a raise, were pregnant, get to rehab, or get to whatever shift it was. It became exhausting as part of not wanting to be in this service business in this way anymore and to be doing the work rather than overseeing the work. I have no problem doing sales. I actually love closing new businesses. That invigorates me. The people challenges were not my favorite. That was one. Number two, I didn’t want to be in the PR and marketing world anymore. I wanted to be on this other side.
I liked corporate. I felt like I had been doing startups for so long. Part of me could do it in my sleep. I’m working with Fortune 500 and Fortune 100 companies and tackling global workforces, staff of 40,000 people at a time, and localizing messaging and storytelling around the globe. It’s because a story that hits well in New York may hit very differently in New Zealand or Nairobi. The anthropologist in me was craving this multicultural opportunity on a big scale.
To also see personal transformation among scientists whose work I found was so fascinating and important. Helping turn them into better communicators was fantastic for me. Those shifts were important. The other is COVID hit. That was a game-changer for everyone, particularly for me personally. We had the lockdown the week of March 17th, 2020. The week after every single speaking engagement and consulting engagement I had canceled or postponed. I lost $60,000 in revenue that second week of the pandemic.
Anyone who is invoking change is innovating. Click To TweetDo you think you would’ve made this shift from 15 people to 1 if COVID had not happened? Were you already going in that direction?
I was already there. I had changed that by 2018.
Whatever you’re comfortable sharing, but how did the business itself change from a revenue margin perspective? I’m wondering. Did you have any concerns going from, “We’re making X amount right now with fifteen people and things are getting done without my direct involvement in terms of delivery?” It sounds like you’re being pulled in a lot of different directions but to any concern of, “Am I going to take a big pay cut or how is this now going to work if it’s just me doing a lot of stuff initially contractors?” What was the shift in mindset, and what did you see or experience as you went from 15 people to 1?
I experienced my stress level dropping dramatically and a reduction in overhead, which brought me incredible calm. I started working when I was thirteen years old. I lied on my working papers and said I was sixteen. I’ve never not had faith in my ability to bring in a paycheck. I wasn’t worried about that. GE was my test case that I could do this and that people wanted this content. Now it was my job to go out and sell it. I didn’t have a fear of that. It took me a while to figure out what to do exactly. I had gotten to the point where I was done with doing PR.
I had reached my threshold. I knew there wasn’t going to be any ongoing work there. I didn’t know that I could do public speaking as my primary revenue generator for a while. My sister talked me out of it and said, “Are you crazy? You’re ridiculous. I don’t even know who you are without your agency behind you. You have two kids who are about to go to college. Don’t be ridiculous. You’d be a fool.” I listened to her and I was miserable for a year. I said, “Screw it. I can’t do it anymore. I’m going to put all my energies into it.” I did. I listened to my naysayer sister, but she had all the best intentions in mind.
What’s been the biggest challenge for you as you’ve made this transition and maybe even in the last year or so? You went through that in one form or another, but if we put COVID to the side, what’s been the biggest challenge for you inside of the business?
Not just for me but for my clients as well is churn. It was amazing when COVID hit how quickly innovation teams were being slashed, “We need to focus on the block and tackle right now. Our industry is hitting quarterly returns. We don’t even know how we’re going to do that.” I was like, “It’s probably your innovation team who knows how to pivot better than anyone. You should talk to them.” However, that wasn’t my decision to make. It’s actually what started me creating the podcast because there are all these amazing innovators who were helping big companies to pivot. Getting their expertise out into the world was part of my motivation for starting The Innovation Storytellers Show. In fact, it came about before the thought of rebranding.
As a storyteller, the number one trait you have to possess is being a great listener. Click To TweetThe podcast came first. Having more and more innovators on the show, I kept learning what they were doing. I’m wanting to share that expertise and then be able to take that and go, share it, and incorporate it into the storytelling work I was already doing. The decision to rebrand and go after this market was very focused because 1) I thought they were getting short shrift in the C-Suite. 2) I thought that I could help them and I didn’t see anybody else doing this work. I know when I am the only person in a niché, I get to own it. I get to brand it how I want to. I also get to charge what the market will bear because there are very few people who are doing this work.
I love that perspective. Many people have the exact opposite, which is they look at going narrower and more specialized and focused as giving up the opportunity. I love how you talked through that because your words were all about how, by narrowing in more, you are creating more opportunities. It is fantastic.
Can I share one thing where I actually learned that? I have a mentor who always says to me, “You got a niche to be rich. Once you get known in one thing, then you expand.” I follow that advice deeply, but I heard it in practice from a YouTuber. She was very shy at work. She was responsible and an engineer building robots. She was terrified about failing in front of her colleagues. She started a YouTube channel specifically to make robots that don’t work. She’d have all of her failures out on YouTube. This way, she could be a professional when she got to work, and it wound up blowing up.
Her first robot looked like one of those hard helmets where you have two things of beer on either side that you can drink from like a hard hat, but it was trying to make you brush your teeth. It had a toothbrush and toothpaste. She’s in the mirror trying to brush her teeth and the toothpaste is going everywhere. It clearly does not work. Her ability to own this niche made her one of the biggest YouTubers at that time. She said, “I was in a niche nobody else wanted to be in. That’s why I’m the number one expert in robots that don’t work.” I was like, “That I can do. I could be an expert in stories that do and don’t work.”
That’s a great example, a great story, and a great perspective. A few quick questions before we wrap up. I’m wondering. You come across as somebody who is thinking about growth and development. You’re not sitting still even though you meditate and all that stuff. In terms of the business, now as a solo operator-founder with contractors, how do you think about growth?
For you, where are you looking now to achieve greater growth inside your business? I know that for different people, growth means different things. It’s not only about making more money. Maybe it’s about more profit and more time. For you, how do you think about scale and growth given that you have somebody call it a constraint that there are fewer people than you had before?
I always use the palm of my hand. The core of my business is consulting, so I go to large. If I look at the palm of my hand, that’s where the bulk of my cash comes from. These five other fingers are where I think about spreading wealth. I do workshops and breakouts. I do keynote speeches. I have started creating this Innovation Storyteller Studio, which is a masterminding program where people can bring their stories once a month and have my expert guidance and also the wisdom of their peers to do that. I look to expand my business by doing executive intensives by bringing innovation leaders around a table and sharing their stories of what they need to tell the CEO about what’s coming next.
You can have a strong hand and a warm heart at the same time. Click To TweetSome of that is strategic planning. The other is I’ll say I’m expanding my reach beyond my typical Fortune 500 client. I am now working, for example, with the World Bank. I am writing the innovation story for the country of Serbia. I’ll be writing the stories of how Belgrade is going to become the biotech hub of the Balkans. I’m working on training at the WHO and, hopefully, the Air Force soon.
I’m looking at my client base as shifting as to who are the masters of change and who needs to become masters at the stories around change. Anyone who is invoking change is innovating, and I want to help them with their story to make that more palatable because nobody wakes up wanting disruption for breakfast with their Cheerios. We got to make that spoon full of sugar and help the medicine go down. That’s what a story does.
Out of everything that you do, what’s one thing that you feel gives you the upper hand or gives you the edge in terms of listening to podcasts, reading books, or interviewing people? Where do you tend to allocate your time in terms of something that’s a non-negotiable, but you know that you need to do this to help you perform at your highest levels? It might be a personal thing, having a green smoothie in the morning, meditating, or something else completely different. What do you do that you feel is core to the success that you create?
Listening. As a storyteller, the number one trait that you have to possess is being a great listener. It’s one thing to be curious and ask smart questions, which most consultants do. Taking in what you hear and not hearing the words spoken, but the emotion behind it is so critical for me to be successful in terms of helping my clients communicate very technical information, emotive information, and impactful. It’s stuff that we can’t see the ripples for many years, especially for products that might not be out for 3, 5, or even 15 years from now. I try to fine-tune my listening skills more than anything else.
In the last six months or so, what is one book, it can be fiction or non-fiction, that you enjoyed and you’d recommend to others?
I’m a devotee of Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich. I run a mastermind for the Black National Speakers Association specifically on that topic. I’m pulling up my Audible to make sure that I get the name right. I would say the book that I’m reading now is Tiny Beautiful Things, written by Cheryl Strayed. She is the author of Wild, the movie with Reese Witherspoon where she hikes the Pacific Coast Trail.
She put out a book, which is also a movie on Hulu. It’s a collection of advice columns where she was the respondent to a column called Dear Sugar. The way that she responds to people in the most empathetic and down to Earth and sometimes in-your-face freaking-figure-it-out way reminded me that you can have a strong hand and a warm heart at the same time. I strongly encourage anyone to read the book or to check it out on Hulu. It’s phenomenal.
Susan, before we wrap up, there is one more thing, which is very important. How can people learn more about you and your work? Where’s the one place they should go?
I would say come to InnovationStorytellers.com. There you can find the podcast and all of my blogs on how to become a better storyteller. I’d love your feedback. I’d love to hear from your audience about how I can help and support them on their storytelling journey because we’re all storytellers, Michael.
Thank you again so much for coming on. I enjoyed our conversation.
Me too. Thank you for having me.
Important Links
- Innovation Storytellers
- Innovation Storytellers Show
- Think and Grow Rich
- Black National Speakers Association
- Tiny Beautiful Things
- Wild
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