EntreLeadership - #103: Donald Miller–Branding Your Story

Episode Date: July 13, 2015

When it comes to talking about their companies, most small business owners don’t know where to start—until now. We’re talking with best-selling author Donald Miller about why you need to tell your company’s story and how to do it well so that you can effectively spread your message. End of story?  Don’t miss this interview! entreleadership.com/podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Helping business leaders grow themselves, their team, and their profits. This is the Entree Leadership Podcast. Now, here is your host, Ken Coleman. Coming to you from the Music City, this is the podcast of leaders, by leaders, and four leaders. Thanks for hanging out with us. We know you get to choose from so many podcasts, so we appreciate you downloading us. Hey, this episode features my conversation with New York Times best-selling author Donald Miller. I'm privileged to be the man's friend.

I've interviewed him several times, and recently we've gotten to know each other on a friend level. Great thinker. What he's doing with Storybrand, storybrand.com, in helping organizations tell their story well, is absolutely groundbreaking stuff. It's really strong. And we're going to get right to that. And here's why. I think this is a conversation that will hopefully

either validate what you've been doing or absolutely reshape what you need to be doing. In fact, there's one big point that I'm going to call out ahead of the conversation because I think it's that important so that when you hear it, I want you to lock in. And that is this. Don makes the point that the customer, your customer, is the hero. That's right. Not you. Not your brand. Not your service. The customer is the hero. You figure that out. It'll shape everything.

All right, folks. It's time for one question with Jeff Mask from InfusionSoft. Let's talk about your passion. People say passion all the time. We understand what it means. We know how to use it in a sentence. But what does that mean when you say, because I hear you say it,

and Clay say it all the time when we're around you, you're passionate about small business. Well, what does that really mean? Small business is personal. we're purposely not going and working with mid-level and enterprise businesses. That's not personal. When you serve a small business owner, you are literally affecting their personal lives. You're helping them become a better mother or father or community member.

That's why we're passionate about it. We firmly believe in entrepreneurs being the bedrock of our economy. And when entrepreneurs are better served, our nations, our communities and our nations will be better served. And it sounds very touchy-feely. It sounds very pie in the sky. as real as it gets because it's personal for us. We felt that firsthand and we experienced that and understood that when we can serve ourselves in that regard, there are millions of people globally that we can serve and help their communities and nations become better. Again,

you may look at it and go, yeah, whatever. But if you could reach through this podcast and see me, you'd understand it is so personal, it is so passionate. We, I can't even contain my energy. I'm so excited. I know. And I love that. I'm telling you folks, Infusion Soft will help you grow yourself, your team, and your profits. That's what we believe in. Check them out. Infusionsoft.com slash entre. That's infusionsoft.com slash entree. This is a great conversation. Let's get right to it. New York Times bestselling author, Donald Miller, talking about the story of your business. All right, Don, this is such a thrill to have you in studio. We've been talking about what you're

doing with the story brand. And there's two facets. So before we dive into the brand itself and what you're doing to help companies tell their story better. I want people to know that you're also helping individuals as well. So everything you're doing under that brand of story, would you just give a summary of that? Because I think it's so important. Well, it all started with Storyline, and Storyline is the conference that helps people live a better story,

and that's just based on a book that I wrote about that. So I had about 350 people coming to this conference, but there were 600 seats in the theater, and it would drive me crazy, right, to have those empty seats. I ended up figuring out why my conference wasn't going as well as I wanted it to when I got on a plane one morning to fly to Indianapolis to speak. And the guy sitting next to me on the plane was reading my latest book. And that had never happened to me before.

So I thought this is going to be fun, right? So I just jokingly said to him, hey, is that a good book? And thinking he would look at me and go, oh, my gosh. And he didn't. He looked to me. He said, I love this book. I've read this book three times. I'm actually flying to Indianapolis tonight to hear this guy speak.

And I thought he's going to get it in a second, right? So I said, well, I hear the guy's kind of a jerk, actually. And he said, man, you know, I've never heard. Well, you know, I realized I've got two hours with a fan, you know, with a customer, if you will. And I can ask him all sorts of questions about my brand. And what I realized is he couldn't tell me why he liked my stuff. He couldn't tell me how I changed his life. I hadn't given him the words to spread about my brand, which is probably the reason the conference was only doing about 60% capacity.

So I went to a cabin years later. about a year later in Asheville, North Carolina, I thought, you know what, I'm going to come up with some messaging about my brand that's really clear. And I knew that I would use the elements of story to do that because as a writer, I've studied story for 10 years, wrote a screenplay. Story is the best way to compel a human brain. If you want people to remember something, frame it as a story. So how could I overlap all these 2,000 years of best practices learning how to tell stories with a communication messaging system, with what should be on my website? What should my email blast say? All that kind of stuff.

Developed a system, a framework, a seven-part framework, filtered my company's messaging through that framework. And all we did was we changed the wording in our advertising. We changed the wording in our email blast. We went from 350 to selling out a theater of 970. Two months before the conference, we didn't have any more tickets to sell. Then we went to a 1,700 seat theater, sold that out with about a month ago. We're in a 2,400 seat theater.

And next year we're looking at a 7,100 seat theater. we did that without any advertising. All it was was just crystal clear messaging that people could then turn around and say, oh, I need that, right? And I think that's what all of us as entrepreneurs are looking for. We're looking for a way to talk about our company where customers say, I need that. Like within three seconds, they just go, I need that. And so often we're so close to our own work that we project our knowledge of it onto other people.

We talk over people's heads and it doesn't work. So we developed this process called the Story Brand Framework. We've taken hundreds of companies through it now, and they've had great success. It's extraordinary because you started out to kind of help people individually, and then you realize this is great for my company, and then companies are going crazy. Coming to Nashville and they want to know. Why is it that we just kind of, we don't understand how that story works? And then when you share this process with them, it's just like pulling scales off of people.

Well, a lot of people don't realize that when you go to a movie, it's extremely formulaic. There are really only seven stories that ever get told. I actually have software on my computer where I can plug in each scene and it tells you what to do. My wife doesn't even like going to movies with me more. I'll elbow her and say,

hey, that guy's going to die in 31 minutes and she just hates it, right? It's extremely formulaic. It's like music. You know, if you think about noise, the sound of a dump truck backing up or birds chirping or children laughing, if I played for you noise,

your brain would just recognize it as noise. But if you filter that noise through certain principles, through certain very serious rules, you can create music. And if I played for you music, a Beatles song or something, you could repeat it a week later because the brain registers it differently. That's the difference between random events and a story. A story is just events filtered through rules. And so the story brand framework, we take your messaging

and we filter it through very serious rules, a framework. When I go to many clients' websites before Storybrand, they're really just putting noise into the world. They're talking about things that don't register with the human brain very well. So we teach people to speak very simply, compellingly so that the messages are repeatable, and our clients have seen great success with it. Okay, so folks, are you dialing in now because you kind of got the context here? Now we're going to break this thing down because this is so important. Ask yourself this question as Don's talking.

Am I just kind of firing messages off a canyon? They're just bouncing out there in space because I think this is so huge. So get ready to write. I want you to walk us through those seven. Can you do that? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Because this is unbelievable stuff when people realize what are those frameworks?

What are those seven stages, if you will? Well, I'll do it twice. I'm going to do it really quick and then I'm going to back up and go a little bit slower. I'll tell you first how a story actually works, like when you go to a movie. And then we'll come back and we'll talk about what impact that has in your messaging. So here's the basics of a story, seven parts. one, you've got a character, right? That character wants something, but they encounter trouble, a problem.

That's number two. They can't get themselves out of the problem, so another character steps into the story. That's the guide. Yoda steps in for Luke Skywalker, Obi-1 steps in for Luke Skywalker. That's step three is the guide. Then the guide gives them a plan, something that they can act on that gives them a sense of confidence. That would be Yoda saying, Luke, trust the force, right? And then the fourth aspect is they have to act on that plan.

plan. It's the call to action. They have to go and fight and try to win the day. And then six and seven are what could happen if this does or doesn't work. This can end in a success or a failure. That's the seven aspects of story. You see it repeated over and over in almost every single movie that you see. And it works. And it's been tested over 2,000 years. And that's the formula that works. So that says something to me. That says the human brain works this way already. That's right. So if we can speak the language that the human brain actually speaks, we will be speaking in such a way that people understand this. So the story brand process starts with the character, right?

Except most companies think they're the hero of the story. This is a critical mistake. You aren't the hero of the story. Your brand is not the hero of the story. Your customer is the hero of the story. So we actually don't teach people to tell their story. We teach people to understand the story of their customer. They are all on a heroic journey.

And the first thing we have to define about your customer is what do they want? as it relates to your brand, what do they want? And we need to get that crystal clear. Then we also have to understand that everybody wants something, but there's a resistance to it. They're experiencing a problem. They can't get what they want. That's usually an external problem.

If you're a plumber, it's a broken pipe. If you're a lawn care guy, it's weeds in the lawn, whatever. That's an external problem. But an external problem manifests an internal problem. It frustrates people. It frustrates people to have broken pipes. It frustrates people to have weeds in their lawn or their lawn doesn't look as good as their neighbor.

companies that sell solutions to external problems do okay but companies that sell solutions to the internal problems those external problems create go through the roof in other words if we understand the frustration our customers experiencing speak to it and say we can resolve that that's what they're really looking for they're not looking for a solution to the external problem they're looking for a solution to the frustration that the external problem is causing in them okay now that we got to stop yeah Because that's a heavy thought and a real shift. So I want you to just pause there and pick up, but that's huge. Do you find when you're doing these workshops and you're working with leaders on this issue

when you make that point? Is that a light bulb moment or does that take a little bit more time to really grasp? There's a couple light bulb moments. One is your brand is not the hero. In other words, your customer does not care if your grandfather started the company. That's a big shift. They really don't care. It's a big shift. No, you've got to only think about your customer in their story.

And yes, the internal problem versus the external problem is huge. Now, here's an example of it. And we show how Apple does this, Coke does this. One of the things that I like to do in the workshop is I start talking about political campaigns, presidential campaigns. If you look at the problem that George W. Bush ran against Gore on and won that election and really shouldn't have won that election. He wasn't as big of a name or a known personality, even though his dad was president. Gore had the upper hand there. But George W. Bush ran on the problem of high taxes.

That's an external problem, right? but it has an incredible internal manifestation. He could go around the country and say, you know what, you're not going to be able to send your daughter to college because you're giving your money to the government. Yeah, that's a raw nerve. It's a raw nerve. Right. Okay, and he won the election, and then we could get into that.

Can we go through all seven parts of that campaign that he and Carl Rove came up with? And it's a fantastic, clear messaging. And then if you look at Mitt Romney, Mitt Romney, probably similar ideology to George W. Bush, he ran on the problem with the national deficit. Now, you and I know as entrepreneurs and you working with Dave Ransy, certainly know our national debt is a serious, serious problem. Our children's children may not grow up in the America that we've known and loved because of this problem, our debt to China and Saudi Arabia. I was so grateful that Mitt Romney was willing to talk about this. But here's the problem with it.

If my parents are running up their credit card debt and I can't feel it, I'm not really wanting to do anything about it. I'm just playing Nintendo as a kid, right? Yeah, you shake your head when you hear about it, but it's not visceral. There isn't an internal manifestation. Now remember, why do customers make decisions? They make decisions to solve internal problems. Yes. So Mitt Romney chose an external problem with no internal manifestation. Nobody could understand it, and he didn't get any passion behind the campaign.

Those are the sort of solutions that we're looking for in your brand. A lot of brands will go in. They'll talk about their external problem that they solve, but they're not talking about the frustration that that problem is causing. And if they talk about that, customers engage much, much better. So simply put, for those of you that are listening, whatever you sell, whether that's a product or you offer a service, you have to kind of ask that question. It's not that we're talking about. It's what that does to solve an internal emotional issue for the customer. It's that and. It's that and something else. Yeah. Right. So take the plumber.

The plumber, you know, he fixes a crisis if there's a leak or flood, but if he gets there quickly and he solves it quickly, there's several emotions there, right? Yeah. So the internal emotions with a plumber with people dealing with plumber, the guy's not going to come on time. I've got a stranger in my house and got to fix this. This is going to be too expensive. He's going to overbill me. So in your marketing collateral, if you can overcome those fears in your marketing collateral, and really you want to survey and focus group and find out what the key ones are, that's where you're going to win.

That's where you're going to win. It's enormous. And people don't understand how human their customers are and how they're looking for a guide. They're looking for Yoda to help them win the day. And let me just give you an expert. of somebody who does it really great. Yes, this is great. Dave Ramsey.

Are you familiar? I know a little bit about the band. Dave is on every book cover and half the billboards in Nashville, right? Right. And yet, he does not position himself as the hero in the story. He celebrates his client's wins. He gives them a clear path and a plan just like Yoda does to Luke Skywalker. He gives them a finish line.

In Star Wars, it was Destroy the Death Star with Dave. It's the Dead Free Scream, right? All of that is understanding that your customer is a hero in their own story and they're looking for a guide and an advisor to help them win the day. But the story's all about them. It's not about the guide. It's about them. And because Dave positions himself perfectly as kind of Yoda or Obi-W-1 really intuitively.

That's right. Because he does that intuitively, people migrate toward them because they understand this guy gets me and he understands what I'm frustrated about. If you position yourself as a hero in the story, you are subconsciously competing with your customer because they think they're the heroes. So when you come along and tell your heroic story, you go, well, that's great for you. I'm going to go on my way now, right? Because I've got my own thing to figure out. Think about this. John McCain, war hero, right?

I mean, just tortured. A guy who we respect for that so much wasn't elected, right? John Kerry, war hero, wasn't elected. It's amazing how America actually doesn't look for a hero. They look for a guide. That's how powerful this stuff is. Well, I got to stay here for a second because you're listing out these political candidates who didn't win. And this is not a political conversation. This is a wonderful framework.

It's about messaging. But Bill Clinton, what was his most successful statement? Like his politics are not, what are you're ready? I feel your pain with his thumb up. I feel your pain. And listen, I know there's people listening and you don't like the guy and you may not have believed him, but enough people did. No, if we can be objective and just look at messaging. Just be objective. That's right. We're talking about Bill Clinton, fantastic. George W. Bush did a fantastic job. Probably very few people did a better job than Ronald Reagan. as he positioned America as a shining, a shining city on a hill. That was him giving,

telling the heroes of America, you can do this. He was giving them a finish line. George W. Bush's thousand points of, or George H.W. Bush's thousand points of light. That's that success bucket, right? That's exactly right. In branding,

we want to show people the happy ending that they can have if they engage our brand. And also let them know a little bit about the failure that we can help them avoid. That raises the stakes in our brand messaging. You know, the bottom line, Ken, is we've been speaking, human beings have been speaking the language of story for thousands of years since the days of Plato. Beowulf is the same story as James Bond. That's right.

I mean, almost just plot to aspect for plot aspect. We've been doing this for thousands of years. So if brands, and some of them intuitively do it, Apple does it, Starbucks does it, Coca-Cola does a great job. They intuitively understand their customer's story and position themselves as the guide. But if we can learn to do that, it might be the difference between. a successful business and a business that fails. Because I can't tell you how many people I know who have really great products and services that customers rave about, but they're not spreading.

And I think their problem is they're just not talking about their products the right way. So let's continue. So I kind of interrupted you. We're on this guide point. You're backing us through the seven phases, if you will. And I interrupted you. That was so huge. All right.

So I got you at Guide. Are we now on the plan? Is that where I left? That's right. Okay, good. So every business needs to offer some sort of plan or some sort of solution. It basically means this. You need to walk your customer very carefully through how to do business with you. You almost need to make it so simple that it seems dumb, right? And so in our

marking collateral, in order to attend a story brand workshop, we say one, register for the workshop, two, show up, three, all the stuff that would seem, you know, very easy for anybody to understand. But if you don't walk your customers through that, it's not that they're dumb. They're just giving you one and two seconds. We have a couple different kinds of plans that we recommend. A process plan and an agreement plan. A process plan is step one, two, three. Here's how to do business with us. If you're a financial advisor, it'd be one, schedule a listening appointment. Two, let us propose a plan for you. Three, let's execute that plan. That's all stuff you're already doing, but when you spell it out and give it a name, you see an uptick and the engagement. That's the process plan. Then there's an agreement plan. And an agreement plan is just a list of things that you're going to do that alleviate the customer's fear.

Here's a great example. A brand that we really like and we think has a pretty good narrative is CarMax. So CarMax is a used car dealer franchise all over the country. They're exploding in growth. As a business, CarMax actually doesn't sell used cars in their marketing. You know what they sell? They sell the fact that you don't have to deal with a used car dealer. No hassle.

No hassle. Well, no hassle. I'm not going to argue with somebody. I'm not going to get ripped off. Everything is about not having to deal with a sleazy used car dealer. they don't market to an external problem. They market to an internal problem. That's so beautiful. And they explode. So they have an agreement plan with their customer, 15 points that every one of them is aimed at alleviating the fear of the customer. The price on the car is the price that you're

going to pay. Our people don't work on commission. You know, on and on 15 things that help you understand if you walk into that car lot, you're not going to have somebody in a plaid suit attacking you. That's exactly right. Listen, I'm going to tell you, personally, I have bought the last four cars from I researched them. I went three times and researched them. I finally felt so guilty. My wife was like, I got to replace the Hyundai. So we bought her a car at CarMax. But here's what's interesting. They tend to hire as salespeople, kind of folks who are pretty much retired. Like, they're there to have coffee and hang out with people. That's right. That's right. And they're the most wonderful folks. I asked a guy once. I said, do you like working here? He said, yes. I said, why do you like working here? He said, because I don't have to compromise my values. He's a used car salesman. Yeah, right. That's a terrific brand. Boy, it is. And they're exploding and they're being rewarded. it's important to point out that's an actual team member saying that it's a team member saying that's a team member that's a team member that's unbelievable yeah so their plan is an agreement plan to alleviate their customers that's probably the most complicated aspect of the framework right we spend a good two hours in our workshop helping people understand how the plans work how you can market it and but most of them

are already doing it they're just not organizing in such a way that people can understand how it benefits them okay so i want to talk about pain point we we got some men and women that are listening to this conversation and they're going, okay, I get this. You know, we're kind of pressing in on a pain area. If they feel as the, as if their story is just a complete mess. Yeah. What do you say to that person? Well, it's because it's not planned. You haven't sit down and sat down and thought it through. But it's not too late, correct? No, no, it's not too late at all. What happens is imagine I'm standing at a whiteboard and I write the numbers one through 10 on this whiteboard, one, two, three, four, five, six, seventy nine, ten. There they are. The line of numbers across the whiteboard.

Put an X above ten. That represents how much you know about your product and service. And you know a lot, obviously, because you're an expert. But people buy at the knowledge level of one and two. And so when you dumb things down in order to sell it to somebody, most businesses dumb it down to about seven. The problem is people buy it one and two. And so what we have to do is we have to go back and simplify our messaging so that people can get it. And that actually takes time and effort. And we do that with this seven-part framework. One of the tests that you can do right now, go to your website if you own a business, and see if it passed the grunt test. We call it the grunt test. Imagine a caveman in a cave beating his chest looking at a website. He needs to know,

Dave Ramsey, help me with money. I got debt, bad, right? That's it. And anymore, websites have so few words on them, so much of it is visual and imagery. But if people can go to your website and within three seconds understand what you do and how it applies to their lives and how it will alleviate their frustrations, you will see an uptick in business. I'm sitting there listening to what you said, and I think that Twitter is a wonderful exercise. I would absolutely agree. Because you're talking about websites. If you can be thinking, like, how do you Twitterize all your marketing company and things like that? Is that a good exercise? Oh, absolutely. I'll tell a story about a guy named Steve Jobs, you probably heard of. Steve ran, was co-founder of Apple,

we all know that. And the company did decently well. He had some great investment. And he developed a computer that he called Lisa. This was a technological advancement. It was a pet project of his. He named it after his daughter. I mean, this is something he really loved. When they released Lisa, and it's a more complicated story than this, there were some problems with price point and those kinds of things. But when they released Lisa, Steve and the ad agency that worked with them released it with a nine-page ad in the New York Times, mostly of technical data and features. Nine pages. The computer bombs.

Steve has let go from Apple, starts a company called Next, and invests in a company called Pixar. Well, Pixar was not a studio. They weren't storytellers. This was a hardware company that was developing computers for NASA and the medical industry. So Steve is very interested in the hardware. He didn't care about stories.

The company continues to lose money. Steve invests more and more until he has a 51% ownership. and he's still trying to salvage the hardware. He's a computer geek. He wrote a nine-page app in a year of times. He's got a guy on staff, though, named John Lasseter. And John Lasseter is hired by, you know, Pixar is hired, but they just wanted John to use the technology to create an ad for Listerine. So he did this little animated thing.

Disney saw it and said, can you do Toy Story 1? Suddenly, now Pixar is a studio that makes movies and tell stories. And Steve Jobs, a tech geek, is surrounded by a bunch of people who sit around every day and go, how can we make it more clear? How can we make it more clear? How can we make it more clear? That got so much into his DNA that when he was brought back to Apple,

it went from nine pages in the New York Times to two words. Think different. He simplified it. It passed the grunt test. It was visual. It called the hero of the action. The other thing is,

with Lisa, Apple was the hero in the story. That's right. After Pixar, he realized, no, my customer is the hero in the story. You watch Apple iPad ads, they hardly talk about the technology. talk about you. They'll talk about you. That's exactly right. And the fact that you want to express your voice in the world and you need a tool to help you do it. And so Apple is just Yoda giving Luke

Skywalker a trust-the-force philosophy so that he can go destroy the Death Star. I'm just sitting here listening. I think the big question, if you're writing notes here, that I want you all to ask yourself is, you know, how could we be Yoda? Just a very simple question. What is my customer trying to do? How are they frustrated about it? How can I give them, how can I position my product as a tool that they can use to win the day. And you know, the beautiful thing about that is it just makes us as business people way more altruistic. We don't have to sit down and look at our belly buttons and think about ourselves all the time. The more we think about our customer and their story, which is the happier we're going to be as we just become better people, right?

We're going to be rewarded for that. Our businesses are going to be rewarded for that. And what's so great about it is like this story thing really gets back to the purity of why we do what we do. Every business that's listening in today, every owner, every manager, whatever you're at, you are essentially solving problems. That's how business exists. The only reason somebody walks through your doors, they've got a problem. That's the only reason they're walking through your doors, they've got a problem.

And we just forget about it, and we get focused on all our problems, meaning how do we get more people to buy our stuff? Yeah. And it's just gotten all turned upside down. It turns into noise because we're running a sale, and we walk through an airport, and we bought this book, and it gave us this technique. And three weeks later, we walked through an airport and got this book, got this technique. And now we tried 50 different things, and we've got no marketing plan or strategy at all.

We really need to cut it all back. come up with a very simple compelling message and executed in all our branding material. I think we have to talk about millennials in the context of this conversation. Because I think, you know, this is a generation. It's like they're talked about every day. You can't open up a business website, Inc. Magazine entrepreneur or whatever it is without some type of focus on millennials. Like they're this new force coming into the marketplace. They're leading, they're creating companies.

But they are so connected to this idea. Are they not? I mean, you get this story thing. It works for everybody. but I just wonder what your thoughts are on the millennials. Well, they don't like to be sold to. They don't like to be sold to. They don't like the hard sell, but they're very, very engaged by story.

You know, up to 85% of millennials want to know what your company is doing that's good for the world before they'll buy your product. That's really unbelievable. It is. So they want to know that you're good, that you care about other people, and that you have a product that will solve their problem. The other thing that you're seeing so much in millennials also comes out of story structure. And this is an old one. but every story is really about a character that transforms. It's about a character that's scared in the beginning and brave in the end

or selfish at the beginning and selfless at the end. There's a character transformation there. This is going to be a little bit complicated. We explain it in the workshop, and I show you example after example from ads around the world. But companies that participate in the transformation of their customer win, and what I mean by that is companies that might be selling a product, but they sell a product that in such a way that it encourages the customer. It makes them feel like there's somebody better.

For instance, Coca-Cola makes you feel like, or they're trying to make you feel like somebody who appreciates life and takes it seriously but also lightly and loves and wants to get along and wants a peace for the world. That's Coke's whole MO. They're trying to transform your identity into that person. If you think about Apple, it's that you're independent, that your voice should be heard, that technology shouldn't be for just geeks.

it should be easy to use, that you're cool. All of that stuff is being sold by Apple. They're selling products, yes, but what they're really selling is an identity and a transformation of an identity. Now, that's a little bit more complicated. Yeah, but that's so good. You know, you can do it. It can be done very easily.

Yeah, I want to ask you another question in a second, but let's stay on transformation for a second. Because sometimes when we hear that word transformation, it takes on this very ethereal. Right, right, right, right. You're not saying it's always that. No. Transformative can take on a very kind of practical. Super practical. And it really, a lot of it is just how you position yourself as a brand. You know, the guy who runs my company, my C-O, his name is Tim Scher. He went through Financial Peace University and he and his wife paid off all their debt. So Dave, without even knowing that he was my guy, had him on the show. Somehow they called and they said, come on in, had him on the show and they do their debt-free scream. And we actually show the clip of Dave talking to Tim in the story brand workshop. And we talk about how, how, now listen to what Dave is saying. At what point does he position himself as the hero? Never. That's right.

And at what point does he help Tim and Katie believe in themselves and what they've done? And it's through the whole thing. This just proves that you've got what it takes you guys. You're a smart young couple, you know, on and on and on. Now there are going to be other problems in your life. But you know, because you solve this, you're going to be able to solve those. He just instilled in them confidence and participated in the transformation of his client. And brands that do that go through the roof.

Absolutely. And, you know, follow up on that. The genius to what Dave does is the same formula. The interview never changes. with the people. It's always, well, what would you say to others is the key to doing this? Well, everybody who listens to the show knows what the answer is. Right. But he lets them share it. And I can't tell you how many times we have people come into the office. They'll do it today. And they'll do a scream. And they'll mention, I just listening to other screams, watching the other screams kept me going.

Yeah, he showed them the finish line for their story or for a customer story. And we all go, well, I want that finish line for myself. Yeah. And it's all a narrative. And the scream is interesting. It's a finish line. It's the credits roll. It's the climactic scene. It's the end in success. In story, we call it the obligatory scene.

So in story, there is an external problem that manifests an internal problem, and there's also a philosophical problem. So one of the things we teach in the story brand framework is that if the external, internal, and philosophical problem of your customer can be alleviated, or at least there's a promise to alleviate it, when somebody buys your product, you've got a narrative. marketing campaign. That's terrific. Okay, let's look at Chick-fil-A. We do a lot of work with Chick-fil-A. The external problem at Chick-fil-A is hunger, right? Sogar mom's driving down the street. Kids are hungry. That's the external problem. But the reason Chick-Flea is so successful, I don't think is because they're solving an external problem. The reason is they're solving an internal problem. People hate the way they feel when they walk into a dirty, fast food place. They don't like the choices, the place is dirty, and then they're giving their money to somebody who really doesn't want to work

there. What Chick-fil-A has done is completely alleviated the internal problem. You walk in, the place is clean, people are nice. You give your money to the person. They say, my pleasure. It actually looks like they like being there, and there's a suspicion that maybe they do. And there's usually a nice senior citizen walking around asking you if they can refill your drink. Exactly. They're grabbing an umbrella if it's raining and walking into your car. I mean, you know, it's just southern hospitality. So the external problem is solved, the internal problems solves. But then also, they're closed on Sunday. They're a values-driven organization. You also feel like you're solving a philosophical or at least contributing.

to the solution of a philosophical problem at Chick-fil-A. So we think when we go to Chick-Flea that we're biting into a sandwich that tastes good. A lot more is happening in the human brain than that. You're actually solving an external problem, hunger. You're solving an internal problem if I don't have to feel bad about myself or feel bad for dragging my kids into this restaurant. And a philosophical problem that I'm supporting

some sort of philosophical understanding of the world that I associate as being very positive. External, internal, philosophical, all resolved in the obligatory scene of a purchase. So if we frame our external internal, internal philosophical problem in our marketing well and lead people to an obligatory scene of a purchase, you're going to have people going crazy because they are heroes looking for an obligatory scene in life. Now, from the data that I've understood, Burger King does about $1.5 million a year, open on Sundays. $2.5 million a year for McDonald's open on Sunday. The average McDonald's, $2.5 million a year.

Billion? Million. This is the average store. Oh, the average store. I'm with you. Okay, I got you. The average Burger King store is $1.5 million. million average McDonald's 2.5.

Average Chick-fil-A, over 3.5 million closed on Sunday. Something else is happening there besides selling chicken. That's so true. This is so beautiful. And in the workshop, some of this is complex as you break it down. But once men and women get it, these leaders, it actually, and you set it properly. It takes care of itself. I want people to grasp this, right?

Like, if we tell the story well. It's a process that you learn and duplicate over and over. And once you understand the process, you can never. forget it. See, that's beautiful. No, you'll never forget it. And I love that. All right, so we love to give value to our audience, and you've got something really cool that's free. Now, the story, we want people to check out Story Brand. It's a phenomenal workshop. We're dreaming up some ideas. Maybe we'll partner together in the future. But my dot, storybrand.com. I want to make sure you get that. My dot storybrand.com is a great little free resource that you offer to folks. Talk about it. We teach people the

framework in our workshop. But we don't let them go there. We off-ramp them with all sorts of practical tools, ways that they can apply their new brand script, ways that they can apply their messaging. So this month, if your listeners go to my dot storybrand.com, you can watch a video on how to write the perfect sales letter. Now, that applies, of course, for writing all sorts of web copy and email blast. But it's just a formula. We basically read every book we could write on how to write great web copy and came up with a four-step process. Literally, if you write these four paragraphs, you will see a greater engagement as you try to sell somebody something. So if you go to my.storybrand.com right now, you can watch this perfect sales letter video for free.

I would actually show your entire staff this video. I just got a text message from a guy this morning saying he watched it. He wrote the perfect sales letter. He got $26,000 in sales that day. Wow. And now he's being paid by his fellow salespeople to write their sales letters. And I said, Jeremy, why don't you just let them watch the video? They can write their own.

He said, you didn't hear me. They're paying me to write their sales. I have no interest in them watching this video. So that's just a free resource for you guys. And if you'll give us your email address, we'll sell you some things. But if you don't want to be sold anything, just get off our list. And you'll be great. And you'll be great resource.

And every month you're producing things like this. Yeah, we just interviewed Mark and Brian Canlis at Canlis Restaurant in Seattle. 17 grand awards in a row from Wine Spectator. We flew up there. I wanted to talk to them about how do they do world-class customer service. And if I'm not mistaken, that's the free resource next month. So every month, something great and valuable for you for free. All right, so that's my dot storybrand.com.

Check that out. Of course, tell us other ways that folks can connect with you. By the way, they are based right here in Nashville. So not too far from our headquarters. So this is a great opportunity for these folks to get involved in this. And I want y'all to check it out. How can they connect? Well, if you're already in, you say, we've got to do this workshop.

Our brand messaging is really cluttered. Go to storybrand.com. Register for a workshop here in Nashville. We'll see you here. All right. Fantastic stuff, Don. You're a good friend. Love what you're doing.

This is great stuff. And thanks for taking time out of your schedule to hangings. Oh, this was such an honor. My pleasure. He is Donald Miller, the website, storybrand.com. I think this is important. You need to check them out. You need to figure out the story of your brand and how to share it.

Storybrand.com to learn more. I want you folks to think back to a bad hire. How much money did it cost you? I mean, think about this. This is painful stuff. Hiring is so important. And oh my goodness, bad hiring is. so detrimental. It can literally set you back in so many ways. Lost money, lost production,

lost hair. Hello. You know what I'm talking about. Well, folks, Dave Ramsey has figured it out. And I mean he has figured it out really well. And so we are so thrilled to offer you the Entree Leaders Guide to Hiring. How do we do it? How do we attract Eagles and repel turkeys? That's what Dave says. And he's figured it out and he's done it well. Nearly 500 team members. and we're doing such important work, quite frankly, we don't have time to deal with turkeys. So we're going to give you the entree leader's guide to hiring. All you got to do is text 33444-33-44, and you put in the word EL-hire, as in entree-leadership, hire. E-L-Hire, 33-44-4-4, and we will send to you absolutely free, no strings attached, the Entree leadership guide to hiring.

Well, folks, we so much enjoy these podcasts. Hope you're enjoying the weekly podcast. Spread the word, why don't you? And as always, we'd love to hear from you. What's your feedback? Give it to us. Podcast at ontreleadership.com. Also engage with us on Twitter.

Follow us first and then engage. Some great stuff coming to you from Twitter all the time. We are on Twitter at Entree Leadership. And hey, if you tweet something about the podcast, put the hashtag conversation that matters in the tweet. We love to track the conversation that is happening. Well, I want to thank Donald Miller for taking time out of his busy schedule. I want to thank Jeff Mask for being with us from Infusion Soft. They are great partners to what we are doing.

On behalf of Eric Anthony, our producer and the entire Entree leadership team, thank you all so very much for listening. We'll talk with you again very soon.