Thank you. Um, what uh, what an honor to be here. Terrific morning. I've because of what I do, I get to sit in a lot of rooms like this, and, uh, I was here about a couple hours early. And so just gleaning a lot of wisdom for my own company and, uh, wish I could be here for for Rachel later in the day. I I'm gonna talk a little bit about just some tactical, practical things that we can do to grow our business, grow our startup that all have to do with words. And this all started for me, this journey, this story brand kinda journey and and talking about businesses and how to clarify our message. This all started by accident. It was years ago, nearly twenty years ago. I live in Nashville, Tennessee now. I lived in Portland, Oregon at the time. And I was a memoirist. I didn't write business books. I didn't know a whole lot about business. I wrote memoirs. And people would read these memoirs when you're when you're a memoirist in Portland, Oregon. You sit around your underwear. You write memoirs. Two years later, people sit around their underwear. They read them. There's no human contact whatsoever, which I've I've really enjoyed that. I I did. I I missed those days to some degree. What's that? Say it again. Talk about hospitality. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Whatever that is, I'm the opposite of that. But, uh, I I I, uh, my assistant at the time, Tara, she called and she said, Don, you're getting a lot of emails from, you know, your books and people wanna interact with you. They wanna ask you questions and that sort of thing. I said, that's kinda neat. She said, what if we put on a conference and you could actually speak at the conference and we emailed our our list and invited people to come. So we did that. We rented the Armory Theater in Downtown Portland. It's beautiful, brand new theater, had 700 seats. We sent an email, signed up for this conference. Don's gonna speak for two straight days and, you know, it was it was really good time, uh, and 350 people showed up. So I'm on stage and the and the room is half empty. I am a glass is half empty guy. I see no benefit to seeing a half empty glass is half full. There's no benefit whatsoever. But, you know, you gotta fill it up. So, uh, so that bothered me. And we sent out surveys to everybody who attended the conference and and said, did you like it? Yes. The overwhelming they liked it. Would you tell your friends about it? Yes. They would overwhelmingly tell their friends about it, which which is living proof that the idea that if you build it, they will come is a lie. It's just not true. We built a great conference and they're still not coming. And I was kinda baffled by this. And one morning, got, uh, got up, went to the airport, was flying to Indianapolis, Indiana, great city of Indianapolis, Indiana, Rachel. And, um, I was gonna speak at a conference there that night. And when I got on the airplane, there's a gentleman sitting literally in the seat next to where I was gonna sit, and he's reading my latest book. Now I had never seen any of my books in the wild. The the the specific genre was sort of Christian ish. I got banned by Christian bookstores, but they still call it Christian. Uh, I don't know. I still don't know why. Nobody will explain it to me. But those those bookstores are now out of business. So because anyway, so I I sit down and the gentleman is reading my my latest book, which is rare living in Portland because there's there's seven Christians, six now, six Christians in Portland. And, um, one of them died. But I I sit down, and the guy is and the guy's reading my book, and I said I said, do you like that book? And I'm thinking my my picture's literally on the back cover of the book. He's gonna say, oh, my word. You know? He doesn't. He just said, I I do. Uh, this is the third time I have read this book. In fact, I am flying to Indianapolis, Indiana to hear this man speak tonight. Well, you know, so am I. Yeah. Me me me too. And, uh, I thought, well, he's gonna have a laugh here in a minute. He just never figured it out. And I so for two hours, I had all sorts of questions. You know, what did you like about his books? And those sort of things. And he would say things he would say things like, oh, you'd have to read them to understand. The more he talked about my books, the less I wanted to read my books. He would say things like, he's kind of a lovable loser. And I'm like, I'm not a lovable loser. Uh, and I realized something that is true for me and maybe true for you as the founder of a startup or running a business or anything like that. Tell me if you identify with this. I was really good at writing the 300 pages that is the book, terrible at writing the sentence on the back of it that makes you wanna read the 300 pages. Does that make sense? Now even though probably you're not a writer, you know exactly what I'm talking about. You know you know your product, you know the market, you understand the content, but how do you summarize it in such a way that you can get people to listen to you or even to want to know more? And so I took that encounter to heart. I I didn't tell the guy who I figured he'd figure it out tonight, uh, and he he didn't come up to me. So if you meet him, apologize for for my for that. But what I realized was I've gotta figure out how to introduce people to what I do in such a way that it will spread. I can't be vague anymore. I've gotta I've gotta master this ability. And so, I had been playing around with story and story structure for years to write better memoirs, to write a screenplay, to to try to write novels, which I I was terrible at, so I never published them. Thank God. Uh, but, uh, I understood story and story structure. And I also understood that story is a very powerful tool to get people to pay attention. And so I began playing with story structure. I wrote the book, Building a StoryBrand. I created well, I actually created the framework first. Uh, and what the framework did was it allowed me to take my very complicated sort of business and all the thoughts that I wanted to share at these conferences and distill the central idea into seven talking points that I could repeat so that people would immediately understand the value that I offered. That was the idea behind this framework. I did that not intending to share the framework with anybody, just figuring it out as a as a geek trying to figure out, uh, how how to do this. And we changed our website. We also rewrote the email that we sent inviting people. Now, we've done this twice. We had 350 people in the room. We did it again. We had 350 people in the room. Then we just all we do is we change the way we talked about what we offered. And the next room was full, 700 people. There was a waiting list. We went to San Diego after that with about 1,200 people, went to Chicago with about 2,500 people. We never had any empty seats after that. And I realized, oh, there's something here. And so, wrote the book Building a StoryBrand and accidentally moved into the career I've been in for the last decade or more, which is helping people come up with these sound bites in order to get the word out. So I wanna teach you the framework. Hopefully, at the end of about thirty, forty minutes from now, you will have a basic understanding of of the sound bites you need to create. And I'll explain to you why they need to be sound bites, why they need to be repeatable, what those sound bites need to be about in order to spread word about what it is that you are doing and what it is that you are off you offer. I think it's a it's a critical skill in leadership, uh, being able to communicate clearly and being able to communicate at the level where the people that are that are listening to you are, rather than talking over their heads, confusing them, that sort of thing. I think it's an important ability to be able to to do this. The reality is that most businesses of any sort really waste enormous amounts of money on marketing. I I think it's just, uh, it's it's sad how much money gets wasted on your marketing efforts. How many of you have ever paid something like 10,000 or more dollars to have a new website created and saw no increase in business from having that marketing effort, uh, shipped? Raise your hand. Okay. How many of you got your money back because they didn't deliver on the promise of growing your business? None of us got that back. So this is one of the few areas where you can just I don't think they're ripping us off. I just think that a lot of marketers see themselves as artists, and they want to sort of, uh, reflect their genius and identity on your, uh, brand business. And really what gets reflected there is a piece of art rather than a piece of marketing collateral that grows your business. So you could literally take your website, print it out, frame it, put it above your fireplace, and now you are a patron of the arts, and at least you can feel good about having spent the money. Uh, let me give you an example of of really bad marketing. You see it everywhere. In fact, I saw it in a I saw it in a, um, in a billboard on the way here. Well, let me give you a better example of a billboard. There's a billboard next to my office, almost towering above my office. There is a picture of a cowboy, it's a gentleman in a cowboy hat. And the billboard says, sitting the fence question mark, hire a cowboy with a phone number. Somebody paid for that. What does it mean? Anyway, oh, by the way, cowboy is spelled with a k instead of a c. No explanation why. This is a cowboy who can't spell. And I have no idea. It's as though the the whoever came up with that idea expects people to pull over on 50 First Avenue, get out a thermos of Scotch, and say, look, a puzzle. Let's figure out what this billboard I didn't I didn't even I'm trying to get to the office. I didn't expect to play a game with a billboard. No. And and so I found out that this gentleman, uh, what he does is he builds fences in your backyard. So sitting the fence, I got it. There's a fence connection. And then, how many of you think that he would have made more money if he would have said hire a cowboy to build your fence, picture of a guy in a cowboy hat, because that's kind of a nice differentiator, building a fence and then a phone number. Raise your hand if you think he would have made more money. Okay. We are deciding something or at least we're hinting around a principle here in the room and that is this, clarity will beat clever. Clarity will beat clever. For whatever reason, those of us who are creating businesses want to get sophisticated when we talk about that business. And I would say that is probably, not always, but that is probably a mistake. That really what you wanna do is be crystal clear about what you offer. I like these three questions. If I go to your website or a billboard or a meta ad or whatever it is that you're actually putting out there, does it answer three questions for me? One is, what do you offer? What do you actually offer? I've spent five, seven minutes on websites without being able to know what in the world these people are selling. That is a waste of my time and your money. What do you offer? How will it make my life better? You want to answer that question in your marketing. How is this going to make my life better? And then third, what do I need to do to buy this? Right? You've got to get those three things. If you get those three things indicated here, I will allow you to be a little bit clever, a little bit cute, maybe a little bit sophisticated. However, I'm just convinced that that is mostly a waste of your time. In fact, I I was called by, um, a gentleman a couple years ago who name is Spectrum Brands. They have Remington Shavers. They but they also dominate the fish tank aquarium market in American pet stores. So if you go to Petco, PetSmart, this, uh, this company is is selling you most of the pet or the fish equipment. And they they flew me down to Florida. We talked for a long time. Bunch of people had flown over from from England and, uh, they were paid a lot of money, very, very smart people. And they said, Dom, we're having trouble reaching families. We're doing really great with hobbyists. That's who buys fish tanks, but not families. And we think there's a massive expansion opportunity there for us. You know, we could use your help. So we talked and talked and talked talked all day. And we came up with three words. And I asked them, will you put these three words on the aquariums? Will you put them on the fish food? Will you put them on signage inside of PetSmart Petco? Will you put them everywhere? The three words are kids love aquariums. The reason is, my wife and I and our and our three year old daughter had spent a month in in London just kinda getting away from Nashville. And there was an aquarium in the lobby of the building we were sitting in. And my wife my my daughter would always wanna stop for five minutes to find Nemo. And I I was just like, I had no idea kids love aquariums this much. I literally filmed it for three minutes so that we could go to bed watching the aquarium on my iPhone. You know, and I'm like, kids must love aquariums. So it was just the kids love aquariums. And, you know, what will happen is people will walk into the pet store looking for a rabbit or a hamster or whatever, and then they will see kids love aquariums, and you've done the thinking for them. You've done the thinking, which is very, very important in your messaging, do the thinking for them. Right? Lay it out for them. We we have a mantra around my office, don't make anybody do math. Don't make don't make anybody figure out what you are saying. If you actually say your tagline to somebody and they say, what do you mean? You have the wrong tagline. It's not a puzzle. You're supposed to be communicating very, very clearly. So, you know, you're thinking for the parent, your kid's gonna love this. I'm looking for something my kid's gonna love. I don't have to do any math. I'll buy the aquarium. So, I said, will you test market this? Or can actually, I said, can we just roll it out? This is that's not how we do it. You know, we're very careful. We do testing. Uh, these people are paid a lot of money. People who are paid a lot of money don't like easy solutions. Right? Because you paid a lot of money. This is supposed to be very, very hard and other people are not supposed to know how to do it. I think you probably know more how to do good messaging and marketing than your marketing agency does. I'm not talking about the execution of it. That's something that you may not know. But you probably know and understand what to say better than anybody else. So I said, you know, can we at least just test market it? And you could tell there was sort of a pushback in the room. The attitude was, well, you know, our boss read your book and now you're a speaker. But, you know, and I'm like, no, no. I think we could just so I I pulled Marcus out to you and I said, hey, will you just test market this in one market and then roll it out if it works? He said, yes. So he called me back about six weeks later. He said, can I come to Nashville and share with you the results? I said, well, you could do that. You could just share it with me over the phone. He goes, no, I actually wanna see in person. So, you know, if he made me wait. He comes to Nashville. We're sitting down. He said, it's either really good news, Mark, or it's bad news. He goes, well, it's good news. 99% increase in sales in the test markets. Now that everybody in this room just goes, what makes total sense? You just told people we have the best cheeseburger in town and cheeseburgers went up. Right? The sale that's it. That's it's really just not any more difficult than that. It does need to be a sound bite and we need to figure out we figured out like the branding stuff. Here's our brand colors, here's our logo, here's the look and feel that we What about the words? The reality is people buy products after they read or hear words that make them wanna buy products. It's the words. Think about the How many of you bought something from Amazon in the last two weeks? Raise your hand. Yes. It's like all of us. So you read a description of the product. You probably saw a couple words that something like overall pick. Have you ever chosen something after reading overall pick? Yeah. I have. Why? Words. Well, yeah. It's words that just say, here's what everybody's what everybody's doing. Everybody can't be dumb. Not true. They actually can. Right? They're all doing this. And I'm like, yeah. If it works for a million people, it'll work for me. Right? I mean, I just need to, like, you know, catch the snake on my porch. Personal issue current. So I bought I literally bought a snake trap recently. Uh, don't name the snake because then you won't be able to kill it. Um, so anyway, it's the words that we use. So let's actually talk about why we need sound bites that are repeatable in order to communicate to the to our customers and to our stakeholders. The reason we need sound bites, the reason we need words and to repeat these words are because there are two things that the human brain is always trying to do. In fact, your brain is doing it right now. Your brain is constantly, uh, doing a lot of things, but two of the major objectives of the brain are to keep you alive. That's the job of your brain. It is your subconscious brain and your conscious brain is constantly scanning the world for data, products, information, and people who will help you survive. What do I mean by that? Well, in a first world economy, certainly in this room, we have the bottom rung of Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs taken care of. We have we have shelter. We have food. We have societal sort of relationships. So we get into much more sophisticated ways of survival. I will posit this. I believe it's true. If a customer has ever bought anything from you, if you have a product that's selling, is because they saw that product as a survival asset. Period. I don't think anybody buys anything unless it's a survival asset. Now, this does get complicated. If I said to somebody, hey, can I go get you a cup of coffee? I'm I'm gonna get a cup of myself. You might say, boy, Don's a nice guy. But on a primitive level, what's actually happening is, and I'm saying, hey, can I create go get a cup of coffee with you in order to create a bond between us? And if I continue to reinforce that bond when barbarians come over the hill behind our cul de sac, you will fight with me. Right? That's what's actually happening in this transaction. Uh, it it it really is. We choose friends because they are a survival asset. We choose products because they are a survival asset. We vote for presidents who have positioned themselves as survival assets. We listen to Tim, as I did back here, do such a terrific job because I saw it as a survival asset. This is going to help me build a better culture for my team, less stress, less, uh, more retention, directly affecting the bottom line. I'm in. Now, some of you will push back on this and say, Donna, I don't know that people are that utilitarian. We're human beings. We care about each other unconditionally. No. You don't. You don't. God does. You don't. And that's the difference between you and God. Stop pretending to be God. And also, let me just say this, if you are a good human being who loves and cares for people in the way that Dan and Horace have talked about up here on this stage, shouldn't you be positioning yourself as a survival asset? Shouldn't you? I mean, shouldn't you the bottom line is, wouldn't you want it set at your funeral? People standing up and say, you know, without guy without that guy, I think I would I would be dead. The encouragement that they gave me. The time they spent with me, the care they showed what are they saying at your funeral? They're saying he was a survival asset. That's what he's saying. Because the brain is hardwired to survive. It is a hostile planet. 72% of the world's population live under the threat and burden of an autocracy. Right? We we live in a fake world here. 250 year old, uh, constitutional democracy is unheard of. The average age of a constitutional democracy is seventeen years before it falls apart. This is a hostile planet. For a lot of people, it's hard to get food. It's hard to get some and you are hardwired to survive on this planet. Therefore, principle number one, unless you position your products as a survival asset, they will be passed up. And you need to do so directly, and you need to explain why this is a survival asset in a sound bite. Now these survival assets, as I mentioned, get very complicated. It's not just my survival, it's my kids survival. It's the health of my family. It's the happiness of my children. It's my spouse. All of that sort of stuff. Human beings lock on to each other because we see each other as somebody who can be helpful in my survival. And by the way, we are very generous in our ability to help other people survive because we want to reciprocate on that. Because we don't reciprocate, we become jerks and then we risk our own survival because people now have us isolated. It is all survival asset trade. That's actually what's happening in the world. So we've got to come up with these sound bites. Now, the second thing that the human brain is always trying to do is conserve calories. And what do I mean by that? I mean, uh, the brain actually burns a lot of calories on a given day. Four to six to sometimes 800 calories. Today, you'll burn probably an average of close to 800 calories. Just processing the information that's being thrown at you today. It's a it's a heavy lift. 20% of the calories your body burns on a given day are burned by the organ that is your brain. There is no organ in your body that burns more calories than that. It is a supercomputer. The problem is, if you process too much information that is unrelated to your survival, your your computer is wasting energy and it won't do it. So God has designed your brain to only pay attention to survival assets and ignore everything else. For instance, we all know where the exits are in this room, but nobody knows how many chairs there are. What you need to know where the exits are, you don't need to know how many chairs. So you're constantly filtering out information. If your brain didn't have this mechanism, your life would be unmanageable. You would have walked into a Starbucks this morning, picked up a pound of coffee. You just said, boy, it looks like paper, but it feels like metal. It's got these little flaps. Three hours later, it'd be said, I wonder if they glue sealed this or stitched it. I wonder if it came over on a boat. You would be processing information you don't need. There's plenty of information to process, but you don't process it. What you process is, that's my cup of coffee with my name is spelled on it. It has caffeine in it, which will give me a little more energy to do my job, to pay my mortgage, to support my family, to survive. And so your brain is always rejecting information. Tens of thousands of ideas a year. And what I'm saying to you is your tagline that you came up with that you thought was cute and clever, and you spent forty eight hours trying to figure, or forty eight hours in a in a retreat trying to figure it out. It's specifically written in such a way that the human brain is designed to ignore it. You are literally spending money distributing messages designed for the human brain to ignore. Designed by God. It is literally you against God and he's winning. He's winning. He's always gonna win. And so, what do we need to do in order to, uh, in order to break through to our customers? We have another mantra around my office and it's this, if you confuse you will lose. If people are confused about how you how you can help them survive, they are beginning to zone out. They are beginning to zone out. So, it's very important that we come up with these sound bites. Now, why sound bites? Sound bites because you have got to get through to the human brain very, very quickly in order for them to agree to give you any more time. And the best way to do that is to control the sound bites that you use to talk about your business. You want people to actually memorize your sound bites. Memorize your sound bites. By the way, give me a sound bite that reflects an interaction with a team member at Chick fil A. What do they say? My pleasure. My pleasure. My pleasure. Now, how is that make you feel more secure in your survival? How is that connected? You're being served and you're being treated like what? A human being. A human being and an important one, which feeds your identity, helps you understand that you are here on purpose, you matter, and that all ties into your survival. That's why that's an attractive interaction with us. That's why being treated with respect is basically saying, you are worth something, which by the way is true. You are worth something. And so the things that Dan and Horace are talking about up here are all survival sound bites. By the way, my pleasure. Dan Salyers at Chick fil A told me it took them three years to roll that those words out. Those two words took three years of a strategic execution campaign to get their team members to actually say it. This is not easy. It's not easy. To come up with these sound bites and repeat them is not easy, but it is very, very important. What I wanna do is show you how you can take story, which is a sense making device, and turn it into these sound bites. Now, why story? Story is something that I studied sort of, uh, unintentionally to write better books, But the only reason I studied story and story structure to write books is I wanted people to keep turning the page. I actually wanted to deliver a more entertaining manuscript and an interesting manuscript. But I I got obsessed with it. Uh, with the Robert McKee seminars, read Christopher Booker's book, read Blake Snyder's book, you know, did all sorts of training on how to tell stories in order to write better books. And what was fascinating to me were the statistics that are that that story comes with. One of them is that the human brain daydreams 30% of the time. 30% of the time you're on the planet you're daydreaming. By the way, that is a survival mechanism. Because what your brain is saying is we don't need to hear what this guy is saying. Let's go into rest mode so we don't burn any calories and your brain can just kind of wander and it's almost like putting, you know, airplane mode on your phone. You're not burning that much energy, but you're also not paying attention. What what the only tool known to man that will break that is story. When you actually sit down to watch a television series or a movie or read a book, your brain will stop daydreaming and it'll pay attention not just for fifteen minutes, it'll pay attention for ninety minutes, for two hours, for three hours. You binge watch Game of Thrones or something. You could lose the whole weekend paying attention to this story, and it won't lose focus. There's no other store There's no other mechanism like that. And so I began to look at story and story structure and figure out how can we actually use this to bring attention to our business? How do we do that? Now, I wanna share with you a structure that exists. It it has existed for twenty five hundred years. It's much more complicated than the one I wanna show you. This is a simplified version of it, But the Aristotle probably wrote about it for the first time in poetics. And it's been instant, the the structure of story has evolved, become honed, and in the last hundred years been tested every weekend at the box office. And a lot of scholars would argue there are only seven stories that ever get told. I would agree with him. Christopher Booker wrote a book called The Seven Basic Plots, 600 pages, text smaller than your Bible, took him 34 to write this book. But he basically unpacks story and story structure and what works to captivate a human brain. His argument is there are only seven formulas. Now, here's the cat out of the bag, these are formulas. And all stories that you see at the theater are based on formulas. And if you don't use these formulas, the audience will not be able to pay attention to your story. So we we know what the human brain pays attention to and what it doesn't. A caveat, I am going to ruin stories for you forever, right now. Uh, my wife hates going to movies with me because she knows at some point I'm gonna elbow her and say that guy dies in thirty one minutes. And he does. He dies in thirty one minutes. But, uh, that's actually not true. Stories are actually so powerful. You can know how they work and still get lost in them. It's really it's a fun fun they're just that powerful. But let's actually look at a story structure. These are seven things that happen in all seven stories. And let's look at them and say, what can we do? What sort of sound bites that we can can we create based on this structure that gets people's attention so that people will pay attention and keep paying attention to our brand? Alright. The first thing that happens in a story is you have a character. The character wants something. And so we need a sound bite that says what your customer wants. You need that, you know, for Dave Ramsey's financial piece. Right? For us at StoryBrand, it's to clarify your message so customers will listen. There's you need some way of saying it very, very clearly. Now, there's two rules on this. Amateur screenwriters break these rules and amateur business leaders break these rules as well. The first is you cannot be vague. If you are defining what the customer wants or defining what the the hero wants in a story, you can't be vague. If I said, hey, let's skip this afternoon session. Uh, there's a movie out across the street and it's about a a a guy looking for fulfillment. Is that interesting to you? No. No. Not interesting. And the reason is it's too vague to understand what the entertainment value of that movie is actually about. Now, if I said to you something like this, uh, another one of Liam Neeson's daughters has been kidnapped. Right? We all have a we have a better understanding of what the entertainment value is. You know, he probably needs us to go help him. You know, we gotta go. So, you know, the what what that really means is though is that people do not move into a fog. They just don't move into a fog. They don't respond to a fog. They don't I've gotta know tangibly what it is that you offer me. One of my biggest clients, uh, unclassified is, uh, national security. And national security was on the phone with with the the comms team yesterday. Uh, their mantra of as of maybe a month ago was not even a mantra. It wasn't even distributed very well. It was like on one brochure. They had one idea and it was it was something like, um, uh, defending our freedom, protecting the future. Too vague. Means it just means it doesn't mean anything to anybody. Now, this this, uh, this tagline, if you will, this controlling ideas, what I prefer to call it, was not helping them in congressional authorizations every year. Congress has to pass an authorization called seven zero two, which funds the NSA. They are in sometimes weeks of senate hearings explaining how they're gonna spend the money, what they're gonna do. There's new congressmen coming through all the time, new members of the senate, and they they needed something that was just more defined. And so, as of yesterday, we came up and it might change. The the there's a new interim director, but we came up with, uh, intelligence means victory. And so, what that it's just three words. What do they actually offer? Intelligence. What are the stakes of whether or not you have that intelligence? Death. Right? Because if you have it, you're gonna win. And if you don't, by inference, what is gonna happen to you? You're gonna die. Right? And so, they're gonna put together a mini book that explains the eight, uh, departments within NSA, and then it's gonna have special messages to the stakeholders, Congress, allied, uh, intelligence organizations. And it's just gonna be a little mini book. It's gonna be a source of truth, which they can put on a member of Congress's desk that's and must be covered. It's gonna say intelligence means victory, a playbook for the NSA, and they're gonna cut those senate hearings in half. Because now they have a way of educating people with sound bites about why it freaking matters that you fund this mission. And so, uh, you wanna think in those terms. You don't want anybody thinking about why you matter or what I get from you. Uh, we wanna be able to say it very, very quickly. Uh, so you can't be vague in your defining what people want. Now, that is an important sound bite. However, there's another sound bite that's actually more important to get right. I'm gonna give you seven categories of sound bites. The next sound bite is more important than all of the rest of them. In fact, if you leave with one thing today, it's this. I want you to come up with a sound bite that defines the problem you solve. What problem do you solve for your customer? What is it? And now you sit down, we solve seven problems. You can't. You can't. You you can in reality. You can't in your sound bite. You need to be known for solving a problem. Your customers file you away in the Rolodex of their brain, not under the name of your business. They file you under the problem that you solve. And what you really want to do is you want to own a problem. If I can give you one giant piece of business advice that ensures your success, it's this, own a problem. If somebody struggles with a snake on their porch, you're the god. By the way, call me. Let me know who you are. Right? If somebody struggles with a dog barking at the door every time somebody knocks, You know how valuable that would be if whenever a dog barks at the door and somebody knocks and is really annoying, they thought of you? You know how many millions of dollars you could make if you own that problem? The only reason people actually part with their money is to solve a problem. That's it. And if it's hard for me to figure out what problem your product solves, it is hard for me to connect my problem with your solution and give you money to get it. So what you wanna do is you want a sound bite that positions you as the solution to a problem. Again, don't be vague. Need a fence? Hire a cowboy to build your fence. And by the way, sell sell cowboy with a c. Let's just do that. Because the guys the guy's name is probably Kyle And so he made it, you know, like inside language on a Yeah. I just wanna buy billboards all over town that just have inside jokes. You know, that's basically what your marketing is. Alright. So, we need to own a problem more important than anything else. Let let me just give you an example on in thought leadership. Um, what thought leader do you think of when I think of the problem of longevity, living long? Probably, just give me a name. Who? Deepak Chopra. Deepak Chopra longevity. Yeah. He was probably, like, one of the original. Peter Attia. Peter Attia is probably the leading guy right now. What about parenting and how to be a good parent? Doctor Spock. Doctor Spock? Yeah. That was that's the old one. Who's the new who's the new lady? Doctor Becky. Right. There is an and by the way, in the world, as a general rule, people only have room for one person in each category. So if you're a doctor Spock guy, you're probably not thinking of doctor Becky. If you're a doctor Becky person, you're probably not thinking of doctor Spock. Now, how do you become that person? How does your product become that person? It you become that person by repeating your sound bite. If you ever struggle with x, you should call me. If you ever struggle with x, you should call me. By the way, this is the most powerful thing you can put on your business card. It's the most powerful way you can introduce yourself. If you introduce yourself instead of saying your title and the company you're with, what you actually want to do is you say, you know when people struggle with this, they call me. I work at Put the title of your business last where it belongs and the problem that you solve first. I remember one of the times I went to national security. It's it's just like three minutes away from the Baltimore Airport. So I I I got an Uber. And I usually if I'm on a plane and people say, what do you do? I don't tell them because they're gonna open their computer, they're gonna get on the Internet and say, hey, can you look at my website? And I'm doing free consulting at this point. Uh, so I I'm I'm in the Uber and and the gentleman, as usually happens in in an Uber, he says, you know, what brings you to town? Business or pleasure? I said, business. So what's the line of work you're in? I thought, here's my chance. He's legally obligated to let me out of this car. I said, well, you know how a lot of leaders and entrepreneurs, they make something really beautiful in the world, but they actually don't know how to talk about it to bring attention to it. When they fig can't figure out how to talk about what they do, they call me. And I give them sound bites they can repeat. And this gentleman, his name is Christian, he turns down the radio. He says, you are a very important person. And I said, tell my wife. Now, we're pulling up to the gates of the NSA and he says, Don, I need help. I I need to know how to message something. And, you know, most Uber drivers have some sort of side hustle. And I thought, you know, we don't have a lot of time, Christian. We gotta go, you know, we gotta go through these gates. He goes, no. No. He he pulls the car over. It won't go through the gate. I think this is not good. And he said, I need to break up with my girlfriend tonight, and I need to know how to say it. And I'm torn because we could get shot, but I'm very curious about what this horrible woman has done to this wonderful man. And we get into it and make a long story short, she's better off without him. But be very careful, human being, because when you introduce yourself as the solution to a problem, your perceived value as a human being will skyrocket. It will skyrocket. The value of your product will skyrocket. But we value things and people who solve problems. We ignore things and people that we can't figure out what problem they solve. I I don't like that about being human beings, but it's just part of the being a human animal. So identify a problem, come up with a sound bite that helps you communicate what the problem is that you solve, and own a problem. Don't make it vague. Do not make it vague. It needs to be specific. And when you say it, people need they either say, I deal with that, or my uncle deals with that, or my wife deals with that, or I know a lot of people who deal with that. That's what you're looking for. If you're vague, people go, that's interesting. By the way, what does it that's interesting mean? Those of you who are married to a woman, it means it's not interesting. It also means we're not gonna do that. Right? Good. Yeah. If you say, honey, they they they're running like a half price on a bass boat. That's interesting. Means you're not getting the bass boat. That's exactly what that means. Alright. So then the next thing we need to do is we need to position ourselves as a guide. Now there are several characters in a story. There's the hero, the guide, the victim, the villain. There's four major ones. Uh, the guide is an interesting character. The guide is Obi Wan Kenobi. The guide is Yoda and Karate Kid. The guy is, uh, Mister Miyagi, uh, in Hunger Games. Katniss is the hero. Uh, Haymitch is the guide. You want to play the guide in the story and not the hero. You need to position yourself and your brand as the guide. And this is when it gets a little complicated because people come to me all the time and say, Don, we need help telling our story. I don't actually want you to tell your story. Uh, I don't think telling your story is beneficial at all in the first several encounters with your brand. I do think after somebody is a customer, it's very important to tell your story because it helps them become brand evangelists. But you really don't want to tell your story until trust is earned and relationship is there. What you need to do in those initial encounters with the customer is invite them into a story. You want to invite them into a story in which they are a hero struggling with a problem, and you are the guide who is competent to help them solve that problem. That's really it. That's really it. And you need you need some sound bites in order to do that. Now, two reasons you never want to play the hero in the story, you always want to play the guide. First is, the hero is a weak character. The hero is ill equipped, afraid to take action, doesn't know what to do, and in desperate need of help. Do you really want to position yourself as the hero in the story? No. Uh, you know, you need to be the person who is competent to help the hero win. You know, if you go see a nutritionist and you say, you know, I really need to lose 30 pounds. I just have these sugar cravings at night right before bed. So I'm eating ice cream. And the nutritionist says, oh oh my word, me too. Wrong nutritionist. Right? You have met a hero in their own story, but not a guide in your story. So what happens is you position yourself as weak and you also remove yourself from your customer's story. So when people ask what do you do, they're actually they're basically saying what is your story? But what I want you to say is, well, you know how a lot of people struggle with this. I really felt for those people because I knew how to solve their problems. So I started a business to actually solve that problem. And now I help people who have this problem get out of that problem. And we've done it for thousands. They think you just told your story, but you didn't. You didn't tell them where you went to college. You didn't tell them you were married. You didn't tell them your kids. What you did was you positioned yourself as a guide in their story. And now, you are their leader. Got asked and by the way, the stakes on getting this right are enormous. We got asked by the Jeb Bush campaign to come in when he was running against Donald Trump. Now, I'm not a I I think our political system is broken. I think the two biggest problems in America are the Republicans and the Democrats. Other than that, we're great. We're in just really great shape. But, uh, you know, we went in and and talked to them. At the time, Jeb Bush's mantra again, he's he's the front runner. He has a hundred and 15 plus $12,000,000 in his various, uh, super packs and general campaign fund. He has all the money that he needs. His tagline is, Jeb can fix it. Now, you laugh, but you might not you wouldn't have laughed twenty minutes ago. But because I told you the rules, you realize that's a horrible tagline. So why? Who's the hero? Jeb. Jeb. Alright. So now, we're we're helping Jeb do something. Jeb's not helping us. Who's the voter by the way? Us. Us. You see what I'm talking about? Yeah. So basically, we're giving charity to Jeb. And by the way, what do we get? What problem are we going to solve with Jeb in the White House? Yeah. It and what does it mean? If I said, hey, there's a great story. Everybody everybody loves this movie. We gotta go see it. What's it about? It? It's about it. Right? No. Too vague. I think cost him the primaries. And then, uh, Hillary Clinton later loses to Donald Trump. What's her tagline? She's no. It was I'm with her. I'm with her going where? Do doing what? We're just gonna go around in a minivan, but I'm with her and we're going around. What are you doing this? What do you wanna do this country country? I just want want the country to be with me. Going around. No, it doesn't work. Right? Position yourself as the hero and vague in the offer. The the words matter. You say, well, Don, you know, come on. She had a 20 things she wanted to do. Listen, even when people vote for something as important as president, they do not sit down and pour a cup of tea and study their choices. They go on gut instinct based on impressions and sound bites. Now, I'm not saying good or bad. Please don't misunderstand me. Uh, I was in Finland at the Nordic Business Forum, and I said, what does Donald Trump wanna do with America? In a Finnish accent, 8,000 people said make America great again. Eight time zones away. That is an exercise in memorization. What it means is they came up with sound bites and they caused the world to memorize those sound bites by repeating them in the same language, in the same way every time, putting them on ugly cheap hats and distributing them. That's it. That's it. So the stakes of this are enormous. And you say, well, Don, I remember the Jeb Bush campaign said, we do not have a sound bite candidate. That's not what we have. We have somebody who wants to sit down in a town hall, wrote a book on immigration, wrote a book on education, is not going to reduce his ideas to sound bite. In which I said, he's not going to be president. Nobody's read the book. Nobody is going to read the book. They're gonna hear a sound bite. And by the way, shouldn't the president be able to communicate simply and get a message across? Right? If we are in the service of our customers, why are you expecting them to basically adore you and worship you and sit down and study your business? That's not a very kind way to approach. No. We need those sound bites. Our sound bites are serving our customers and helping them understand how we can help them win. The next thing you need is you need a sound bite that gives you three steps from their problem to your solution. Uh, we do an intake call, we give you a custom strategy and if you choose we help you install our product. Give them three steps because people don't like to move into a fog and they need baby steps. I found this process to be, uh, to create incremental growth in sales. Because when people are on your website, they need to see three things. Three works a little bit better than four and five doesn't work at all. But the three steps that, hey, what it's visually says to us is the process is easy. Then you need a sound bite in which you call them to action. You actually ask for the money. Raise your hand if you love asking for the money. Okay. We we have a name for the people with their hands up. We call them rich. We call them wealthy. The rest of us can learn something that I learned one day when I bought a watch. Now, I told myself I'd buy myself a nice watch when my company hit a certain point. Uh, I I was at a I went to several jewelry stores, never bought the watch. Grew up poor. We didn't we didn't buy nice watches. Have since gone to therapy. Now I buy watches. But the the the guy selling me the watch, I put the watch on. It was $800 watch. This is not a very expensive watch. And he knew my name. We talked for a little bit. He knew that, uh, I built my company to a certain point. He knew that it had been two years and I still hadn't bought a watch. And so, I said he said, would you like me to box it up? And I said, no. Let me think about it. What does that mean for him? No. He's losing the cent. Brilliant guy. What he actually said was done. You got a great reason to buy this watch. Right? Yes. Your company hit a certain point. Yeah. You're gonna give this watch to your kid someday. Right? Probably gonna give this watch to my kid. You could afford this watch? Yes. You like the watch? Yes. He goes, would you like me to box this watch up for you? I think it's the right decision to buy this watch. And I said, yes. He he also had like a pocket watch. He was swinging back and forth. I want you to stop asking for the money and I want you to start affirming that if you have this problem, this product is the right decision. And I want you to use that language in your proposals, in your pitch decks, over lunch. Let me get this straight. If you are struggling with x, right? Yes. Okay. Good. Then my product y is the right decision. That's it. Because the number one question they have and the hesitancy that they have about buying your product is cognitive dissonance associated with whether or not this is the right decision. And so the best way for you to explain that it's the right decision is to say that it's the right decision. Don't don't put people in the in the mind reading business. Say it in a sound bite. If you are struggling with this, this is the right decision. By the way, you're also reemphasizing the problem. If you have this problem, buying this is the right decision. Okay. You need two more sound bites to close out this talk. One is success. I need a sound bite that tells me what life looks like if I buy your product. And I also need a sound bite that says what life looks like if I don't. This creates stakes. If something cannot be won or lost based on whether or not I buy your product, there's no value to your product. Alright. Let's look at these sound bites really quickly. What does your customer want? I need a sound bite there. What problem is your customer experiencing? I need a sound bite. Have you positioned your brand as the hero? Have you positioned your brand as the guide and your customer's hero? Have you created a three step plan? Are your calls to action clear? And I gave you a formula for that one. Have you explained what your customer's life will look like if they do business with you? And have you explained the negative consequences of not doing business with you? Now, I wrote a book called Building a Story Brand, you can get that book, it explains this framework, it'll walk you through how to do this. I wrote that book about seven years ago. The book has sold over a million copies, but we just in January released two point o. And two point o comes with, you guessed it, storybrand.ai. And I will actually write your your sound bites for you. At least I'll give you a rough draft of those sound bites. I would say they're really good. Uh, we just won an award last week for best AI website of some sort. I I don't know. But, uh, it's it's really good stuff. I'm also gonna give you something called a controlling idea and I'm gonna give you a tagline. I'm gonna give you your version of kids love aquariums. Now, you can actually give it feedback and say, I don't like this. It needs to do this. You can give feedback on all seven categories of sound bites, and you can give feedback on the tagline. That's all completely free. On the other side of a paywall, there are about 25 more assets. Uh, things like lead generators, wireframe websites, you know, advertising. We're coming out with pitch decks, proposals, keynote presentations, but it's all based on inviting customers into a story. So it's been, uh, it's been a great success and I hope it's helpful, uh, for you. I'm not talk If there's a controlling idea, it's this. I believe I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I've tend to be cynical in about, you know, easy fixes. But I've been in this business long enough to know that there's a good chance there are a few magic words that you can find. And if you repeat those magic words, your business will grow. Now, they're not actually magic, it's just based in psychology, but it's going to feel like magic when you discover them. When you discover them, you need to put them everywhere. And you need to do an exercise. Your marketing should be an exercise in getting people to memorize your sound bites. That's it. And when people actually memorize your sound bites and can can say them back to you, you're gonna see exponential growth in your business. You are up against stiff competition, and that competition is noise, distraction, a sophisticated, clever clutter that's out there. And if you are more clear in your than your competition, you will beat them. You will beat them. Even sadly, with an inferior product. You You will beat them. We don't buy the best products and services. We certainly don't vote for the best leaders. They don't even make it through the primaries. Right? We vote for sound bites. It is that kind of a culture. So what if the good guys had great sound bites? What if the good products were supported by an empathetic understanding of where our customers at? They're busy, they're distracted, and the only way to get through them is sound bites. Thank you so much for your time. Honor to be with you.