Getting right to the bones of a business story
Stephen Sammartino, founder of Rentoid.com, has a great article in Anthill magazine on the importance of good story-telling in business and the article is available online for free.
Blogs are about quick snippets, so here’s the upshot: practice, practice and more practice separates you and I from the great business story tellers of our age (Stephen uses Steve Jobs as a great example – have you ever watched Job’s address to Stanford University students? It’s incredible. I’ve added it at the end of this story.)
Sammartino makes a valuable point: don’t leave it until the moment it really counts to practice your business stories. When you meet that potential investor, you need your business stories polished to a high sheen. When you’re trying to engage a potential hire you really need, you want to set their imagination on fire. When you’re pitching to your first customers, you want them to be swept away.
Nobody – not me, not Steve Jobs – gets that to happen without a lot of practice; but how to start? First, we need to dig down to the bones of the story.
Getting started on digging up your bones
Start right now. Write one of your business stories down. Choose one of the following; (a) what your business offers customers; (b) how your business was founded; or (3) the most valuable lesson you learned since you started this business.
Don’t get fixated on how long or short the story is in the first draft, and write it in your own story-telling style, without being formal, and without using business jargon wherever possible.
Once your first draft is done, put it away and let it mature overnight. During the maturation, your mind will be polishing it, even when you’re not consciously thinking about it.
The following day, pick it up again and write a second draft. If the first draft was longer than 500 words, try to get it down to under 500 words by removing elements of the story that aren’t necessary rather than by changing the language you’ve used.
Put the second draft away again to mature for at least another day.
When you pick up the second draft again, read it through again and you should now find that you have the ’skeleton’ of the story clear in your mind. Like a joke must have a punchline, a story has a skeleton – the essential points that must be delivered for the story to have meaning. You should be able to remove the ‘flesh’ of the story itself from the story (the language) and still see a connected, coherent skeleton underneath.
Write down the skeleton of your story as a brief series of bullet-points. These are the bones of your story’s skeleton.
The story’s bones are the memory aid you need to deliver your story flawlessly every time. You only need memorise each bone and then deliver them in the correct order for your story-telling to get a ‘B’ in story-telling school.
Because the story’s bones are so light and easy to carry in your memory, you’ll find you’re capable of carrying the bones of the many different business stories you’ll need with you everywhere you go.
Memorise your bones however you like, but there’s nothing wrong with writing them on your hand for a few days. I have it on good authority that Steve Jobs is so passionate about portable devices (Apple’s Newton, iPod and iPhone) because he can’t stand having pen scribbles on the inside of his wrist all the time 
Now, go practice your bones!
Until your bones are polished, you won’t deliver them any better than you would delivering any other randomly-chosen series of bullet points. You need to practice the story-telling process now, which is the act of putting the flesh back on the bones each time you tell the story. Start with your first bone, flesh it out, then move to the second bone, and repeat.
This method of story-telling lets you develop slightly different story flesh for different audiences. A potential investor may hope to see the ‘muscles’ across your revenue model in a bit more detail than a potential alliance partner. An audience member might interrupt you with a question just as you move from one bone to the next. Using the bone metaphor you are still OK, because you know the bone you’ve just fleshed-out, you know which bone comes next, and within the time available you can build out any part of the body of the story as you need to, as long as you deliver each of the bones you’ve memorised.
When you’ve mastered the art of getting to the bones of a story, you’ll be ready for the next step: adding pace, drama and colour to a story. I’ll write that soon.
In the meantime, how many bones can you count in Steve Jobs’ commencement speech on YouTube? How well do they connect?
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