Storytelling as a strategic advantage

Welcome to 📈🧠 Scale Smarter.

Forwarded this email? Sign up here.

🔗 Jake’s Picks

Must-Read Resources for Founders

🚀 Scaling Startups

• From unfocused to unstoppable: 5 lessons I learned scaling my startup with ADHD (CrunchBase News)

🧠 Founder Self-Development & Mental Health

• Founder struggled with mental health after selling company for $100 million (NDTV)

📈 Productivity Hacks

• The productivity hack that actually makes your brain feel better (Well+Good)

🛠 Tools for Scaling

• Forget coding bootcamps: Airtable’s AI can build your app in seconds (VentureBeat)

💡 Hiring Insights

• Rethinking creative hiring: Andy Cooke on why ‘unlike minds’ mean better work (Creative Boom)

👀 ICYMI

• Ensuring your company is prepared for the worst (Scale Smarter Newsletter)

📝 The story tells itself through your teams

Before you have the perfect product, a full team, and trust from your customers and the market, all you have is your story.  And it’s your story that sells the vision and effectively convinces your first customer, your first hire, and your first investor why your company matters.

However, as your company scales, that original story can easily get lost in the shuffle.  This is especially true when you can’t be in every pitch, every hiring conversation, or every customer interaction anymore.

As a founder, it’s not enough to just tell a great story, you need a system that ensures the story scales with the company so that teams not only understand the mission, they too can repeat the story as advocates for your vision.

There are ways you can scale the story throughout your teams so that it feels as authentic as if you were telling the story yourself.

Reinforcing the story from day 1

Many companies do a great job in telling their story to the external world but what about internally to their own employees?  Starting within the onboarding process for employee’s first day on the job, your company story should be woven into how new hires learn about their own job role.

Storytelling within onboarding...

• Creates immediate buy-in helping new hires feel connected to your company’s mission

• Makes every employee a storyteller as new hires meet other employees throughout their onboarding

• Ensures the story outlives your presence as the founder essentially passing down your story to other employees

At Nike, new hires don’t just receive an employee handbook; they are immersed in the history, mission, and philosophy that drive the brand.  They learn about the early days of Nike’s vision within sport lead by Phil Knight and how this transcends to today’s era.

The storytelling Nike does for their new hires creates the sense of joining a team, where it sets the expectation that they too will go on to tell Nike’s story as new teammates join the company later on.

Use your story as a training tool

It’s easy to get employees to understand what your company does.  It may not be as easy to get them to understand why it all matters.  This is where you can incorporate the origin story of your company within your employee training processes.

Embed where and how your company started within spaces where employees will learn about what they need to do to get their job done.  Your goal should be to have your story in mind anytime your teams are training employees.

Scale your story through rituals

Your story shouldn’t just be a slide deck; it should live in how your teams operate, communicate, and collaborate on shared goals.  In order to do this, you will want to create an environment that allows for the story to be told by employees in their own way.

Employee off-sites and annual retreats help with creating environments that put employees in a comfortable setting to want to share and embrace your company’s story.  This could be something as simple as team dinners or as elaborate as team retreats to foreign destinations.  As your teams create these environments, your story will naturally scale across the company.

✨ Inspiring and influencing through personal storytelling

As a founder, your role isn’t just to build the business - it’s to craft the narrative that will rally people around a shared purpose, effectively making you a better leader, decision-maker, and visionary.

When you can get all of your employees bought in, your ability to inspire, influence, and shape your company’s vision becomes your most valuable tool.

Create a shared purpose through your inspiration

Your company’s energy will come from your belief in the mission.  But as your teams grow, that energy will fade and be absorbed into the many directions daily operations will take.  You can ensure this energy remains through your own personal stories about why the company exists.

At Starbucks, Howard Schultz has been known to tell his story growing up in a working-class family and wanting to create a place where everyone could feel welcome.  Schultz’s personal connection to the company created a culture amongst employees to turn Starbucks into the “third place” between home and work.

From storytelling to magnetic leader

Employees, investors, and customers tend to follow people with a clear and compelling vision.  If the storytelling works, it can turn a founder into a magnet for talent and capital by making their vision feel inevitable and inspiring.

Look no further than Steve Jobs, who was able to inspire teams with this innovative vision for the future of technology.  According to Jobs, when you worked at Apple you weren’t just building consumer products, you were transforming people’s lives and creating a world where technology would seamlessly integrate into daily life.

Using a soft-skill as a strategic advantage

Storytelling can often be seen as a thing that founders have to do for PR purposes.  In reality, storytelling can be one of the most powerful tools at a founder’s disposal, whether it be to rally teams together, inspire talent, or attract customers.

It’s no surprise that the most successful founders like the Elon Musk’s and Mark Zuckerberg’s of the world are also great storytellers.  Their vision for their companies goes well beyond the products they sell, looking at how they solve problems for the world as opposed for their immediate customer.

As much as storytelling can be an internal exercise, the best companies make sure customers become part of the story, too.  Your role as the founder is to create a vision where not only your employees buy-in, but your customers do as well.

The founders who scale the best aren’t just operators or visionaries, they’re narrators of a future that others want to be part of.

🎬 TLDR — Your Actions For The Week:

• Scale Your Team → Formally write out the company’s story that teams can go and use within their own functions

• Scale Yourself → Practice your story with colleagues and friends to better understand which parts resonate so you can refine it for important conversations

Whenever you're ready, here’s how I can help:

💼 Hiring? I built an expert bench of recruiters from companies like Uber, Amazon & Spotify to run the full recruiting process for you. We’re on-demand, can flex up & down, and there are zero commissions or hidden fees—Learn more here.