STORYMINERS™ : What's Your Story? : Presented to TEC June 14th, 2005

presented to

June 14, 2005

Behind every successful enterprise lies a story – not a business plan or mission statement, but a clear, compelling idea that beats in the company’s heart. If you know how to tell that story, you can unleash its power. Your employees will literally “read from the same page,” and your customers will feel the value of your brand with every experience.

Sharing your story means defining exactly who you are, and who you’re not. (After all, no company can be all things to all people.) It means visualizing your ideal customers, and understanding exactly what they need and want. It means designing a strategy that consistently delivers what your brand promises. And it means organizing a system that keeps everyone in your company attuned to the goal, regardless of job description.

STORYMINERS® helps you discover and tell your story with Brand Framework, a set of six compatible elements that define your company, your customers, and the products and services you offer. It is a roadmap for operating a customer-invested business. With it, you can translate your initiatives into a language all departments understand—from sales & marketing to accounting, operations and technical.

“Imagine the remarkable results you will achieve when your company is in alignment, when everyone shares ideas and information freely and makes decisions with complete understanding, accountability, and respect. Your business delivers what your brand promises. That’s what happens through STORYMINERS’ Brand Framework.”

– Mike Wittenstein, Chief Experience Architect, STORYMINERS®

“STORYMINERS is an integral part of the success of my recruiting firm. The consultants have a gift for helping entrepreneurs translate their innermost thoughts and desires for their business and making them real. By creating a solid game plan and business processes, my company was profitable within three years – two years earlier than the industry standard.”

–Caroline Hotmer, President and CEO, ACE Resource Solutions

Independently, the six elements of Brand Framework can improve your business. Collectively, they can transform it. Executing your vision becomes more natural, efficient, and fruitful when you realize that running your company is a matter of telling stakeholders your story. As you will see, the six elements have some conceptual overlap. That’s not an accident – they build on and reinforce each other, like the chapters in a well-written novel, to form an organic whole.

Reason for Being. If you can articulate in a few words why your business exists, you’re on your way to telling your story. A company’s Reason for Being is its DNA – its unique identity, expressed in everything it does. Reason for Being is not a strategy that changes according to market conditions, or a set of behaviors aimed at producing particular results. It’s core, focused, and unchanging. It’s what people really mean when they talk about “vision,” a crystal-clear sense of identity.

When you have a Reason for Being, you know exactly who you are, and who you’re not. A reason for being sets forth a purpose for everyone and every activity in the business. People know exactly why they’re there. That helps them solve problems, act ethically, and be productive every day.

A great example of Reason for Being in action is STORYMINERS®’ client Diversakore. The makers of structural steel solutions, they thought they were in the building products and services business. That thinking was limiting their opportunities – they hadn’t pinpointed their niche. So STORYMINERS® helped them define their Reason for Being. Together, we realized that Diversakore exists to “share innovative designs that enhance building performance.” We found that better building performance is what all of Diversakore’s customers want, from architects to developers to contractors. Now the company creates greater value than it ever could through it’s products and services alone; with the packaging and infusion of it’s intellectual property – this innovative company is redefining the market in which it participates.

Marc Rahimzdeh, Diversakore’s CEO, says: “The team at STORYMINERS® helped us focus our thinking and taught us a fresh vocabulary and concepts that we could apply to our business. One outcome is our new website. It tells our story through words, graphics and animation, literally bringing our system to life. It used to take more than an hour to get our concept across. Now it takes less than a minute.”

Guiding Principles. Every company needs a roadmap to help people execute their vision. And in today’s climate of corporate scandal and consumer skepticism, credibility and trust are more important than ever – no matter what your business. Guiding Principles define which behaviors are acceptable and which are not; they’re the “yellow lines” on the highway that guard against collisions. People with different styles can work together on complex projects, knowing their contributions will fit together because they’re all following the same rules.

Guiding Principles set limits, but they also focus energy on goals. For instance, iPay Technologies, another STORYMINERS® client, wrote a Guiding Principle “to always make payments on time.” Sounds basic. But when you consider that iPay is in the electronic payments business, you realize this principle is absolutely crucial to its success. The company knows that if it doesn’t make payments on time, it loses trust – and without trust, its Reason for Being is in danger.

We practice what we preach at STORYMINERS®, and our Guiding Principles affect all our decision-making. One, “we will always decide and act in our clients’ best interest,” helps us make sure we do the right thing for our customers and removes any potential conflicts. Another, “we will always encourage and respect multiple perspectives in thinking and design,” ensures that we never settle for the first solution – we always ask for more input. This Guiding Principle keeps us creative, inclusive, and thorough every time we think a problem through, and it means that people continue learning as they do their jobs.

One of our most important Guiding Principles is “we will always operate with a customer-centric Reason for Being and with Guiding Principles.” If that sounds a bit like a snake with his tail in his mouth, it is. The Principle commits us to doing what we say we’re here to do – with no exceptions. It’s a pledge to our customers, but it’s also a constant reminder of why we come to work every day.

Emotional Outcomes. Starbucks doesn’t sell coffee, Nike doesn’t sell sneakers, and J.P. Morgan doesn’t sell financial advice. What these companies sell is an emotional impact on their customers, who keep coming back because they know they can count on a good experience. Prices may rise or fall and products may change; but when customers trust you to provide a great feeling every time they come in contact with your brand, they will stay with you.

So, what emotions do you want to create in your customers? Once you define those feelings, you can engineer a strategy to deliver them. You can create clues and send messages that evoke them in a huge variety of situations, from in-person transactions to on-line surfing. In fact, empathizing with customers’ needs and desires actually makes your job easier. Instead of imposing an experience and hoping it will “take,” you and your team can theme every part of your business around an Emotional Outcome you know will be positive.

This illustration shows how SOHO HERO™ is developing its business service franchises around four emotional outcomes. SOHO HERO™ knows that business customers want to feel understood, connected, supported, and empowered. Naming those outcomes helps SOHO HERO™ recruit the best new franchisees; make a store’s grand opening truly grand; market the franchise successfully; and win loyal customers with little extras like WiFi access and personal service. People have a total brand experience because SOHO Hero has achieved a holistic understanding of what customers really want, and every store is designed with those emotional outcomes in mind.

Experience Design. Delivering reliable, rewarding results isn’t a hit-or-miss process. You need a detailed blueprint that translates the big picture into action points. Experience Design drills down to the fundamentals that make one brand preferred over another, and then makes them visible across the organization. Every business unit has a clearly marked path for getting “there” from “here.”

“There,” of course, is an outstanding customer experience – ensuring that your brand will fulfill its promise. But in implementing Experience Design, you’ll also add clarity and focus to your business decisions. Recognizing new opportunities and spotting potential trouble spots are easier when you specifically map your strategy around specific Emotional Outcomes.

Sometimes that means reworking your internal organization. STORYMINERS® client iPay Technologies delivers bill payment solutions for financial institutions across the U.S. With annual growth of 100% and constantly changing customer needs, iPay realized that one of the first steps to winning in the market was to get – and keep – the best people on board.

STORYMINERS® helped iPay design a completely new approach to new hires based on the Emotional Outcomes that matter most to iPay’s new employees and job applicants. Instead of being “oriented,” they are “welcomed” – a process that starts even before their first day. They receive handwritten notes at home from executives and emails from colleagues. They find a parking space reserved for them, and they find their computers and voicemail set up and ready to go. The result? Within 18 months, the company increased its headcount from 45 to 122, while growing its client roster from 348 to 715. “We couldn’t have grown profitably and comfortably without STORYMINERS®,” says Chairman and CFO Mike Bowers. “They kept us from wasting a lot of time and energy.” Mike adds that the Workforce Welcoming project has helped iPay attract employees with stronger skills and a greater commitment to service. iPay’s customers can feel the difference.

Roles and Accountability Design. In the traditional “chain of command,” leadership vision trickles down through a grid-like, hierarchical organization chart, getting diluted along the way. But if you redraw the chart through your customers’ eyes, your Reason for Being stays front and center at every procedural step. Instead of functional silos, you have a smooth-flowing process in which virtually every relationship is “client-facing.” A good design for roles and account ability is both structure and strategy.

iPay’s new organization chart, says Mike Bowers, “looks really different, but it works like a charm. It gives everyone in the organization an equal understanding of why we’re in business and how we work together. It’s like a Ouija board on steroids. Part map and part periodic table, it helps us all see our roles, our contributions and our relationships more clearly and without operational doubt.”

SOHO Hero also revamped its roles and accountability design – and found it made a speedy impact. The new template made CEO Chris Kouloukas decide to move marketing up earlier in the schedule of new store openings. As a result, SOHO Hero is quickly gaining a level of awareness among brokers of retail development and local neighborhoods in a way the preceding brand could not.

Story. Your story sums up your identity, and captures and communicates it in a compelling way. It creates a profound emotional connection between your business and your customers, employees, and shareholders. Ultimately, your story is the word-of-mouth recommendation one happy customer gives another, the jokes and memories workers share at the company picnic, or the “hot tip” one investor shares with another. But in the beginning, it’s no more than a simple statement of who you are.

For ( IPA )™, a hospital products manufacturer, STORYMINERS® developed this story to encapsulate its identity for employees and suppliers. In just three frames, it conveys the company’s way of approaching the market, its energy, its integrity, and its reliability.

If you think of successful brands, you’ll realize that you experience them as stories that you tell yourself, not scripts that someone is reading to you. Nike co-founder Bill Bowerman believed that “if you have a body, you’re an athlete.” That internal story provides the emotional pull of his company’s mission statement: “To bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world.” Nike’s shoes bring out consumers’ inner athlete, even if they only wear them to the supermarket. It’s a good story, and it doesn’t get old.

Since the beginning, STORYMINERS® has helped dozens of clients define their true values, find their identities, and clue their customers into why they’re better than the competition. Your story is there – mine it, define it and leverage it – and just like SOHO HERO™, you’ll find that the best of your story has yet to be told!