Speaker 1I'm Ted Seides, and this is Capital Allocators. For the second year, our summer series will share some of the best episodes of the past, curated from our favorites and yours. You can pull down many of the great ones on our Spotify playlists. This series pushes them to your regular listening feed. Our 2026 summer series focuses on improving the investment process. Over the next six weeks, we'll share 10 gems from interdisciplinary skill sets that will help you level up your investing across decision-making, interviewing, storytelling, negotiations, and habit formation. This week's summer series is a twofer on the essential skill of storytelling. Whether pitching an investment fund to a prospect, an idea to a portfolio manager or CIO, or a request of a family member, storytelling helps you get what you want. To help understand the art and science of storytelling, Matt Dix, a retired middle school teacher and author of the bestseller Storyworthy, and Don Miller, creator of Storybrand, a business started with his book of the same name, describe how to improve your storytelling ability.
Speaker 2Before we get to the interview, we're excited to introduce the next chapter of Capital Allocators University, an online on-demand curriculum with an annual in-person gathering for investment professionals committed to continuous learning. One of the great ironies of investing is that the skills that matter most over a long career are often the ones least formally taught. Things like decision-making, communication, leadership, time management, interviewing, and building relationships. That's why we've evolved Capital Allocators University into an online on-demand experience, making those lessons accessible to investment professionals everywhere. The best careers don't compound through knowledge alone. They compound through knowledge and relationships. If you'd like to explore the curriculum or someone on your team comes to mind, visit the link in our show notes or the university page on our website. Thanks so much for spreading the word about the next chapter of Capital Allocators University.
Speaker 1Capital Allocators is brought to you by AlphaSense. Here's something for you. Most AI tools today are very good at sounding right. But can you actually do that? Can you actually trace it back to a filing, transcript, or specific passage that drove the answer? Or are you just trusting the confidence of the output? For allocators, that's not a minor concern. A missed filing, incorrect source, or context that gets lost somewhere in the retrieval chain aren't edge cases. They're how decisions go wrong. AlphaSense is the AI platform built specifically for this. They own the context. Content. Over 500 million curated documents from broker research and expert transcripts to filings and earnings calls. And they own the retrieval layer on top of it. That means every answer can link back to an exact, verifiable source. Because the answer is only as good as what's underneath it. And with AlphaSense, you know exactly what that is. See it for yourself. Try a free trial at alpha-sense.com. That's alpha-sense.com with a hyphen in the middle slash capital. Capital Allocators is also brought to you by Morningstar. In a sea of data, you need to know what you can trust. Morningstar's data, analytics, and research helps bring clarity across public and private markets, connecting independent research and data into the tools and AI platforms you use every day. So insights are easier to spot and act on. Morningstar. Nothing in your way. Visit morningstar.com slash game on to learn more. Capital Allocators is also brought to you by Juniper Square, the operations partner trusted by the leading private market GPs. One theme that keeps coming up on the show is GPs that build the strongest and most durable relationships with LPs are the ones that have both strong returns and strong operations. AI raises the stake. And having Juniper Square as your operations partner helps ensure your data is organized, accurate, and accessible so you can unlock operational alpha. That's why thousands of GPs trust Juniper Square. Learn more at junipersquare.com slash capital allocators. Please enjoy my conversations with Matt Dix and Don Miller from the end and beginning of 2025. Don, thanks so much. Thank you so much for joining me. Good to be with you, Ted. I'd love to hear about your path to discovering this art of storytelling. Oh my gosh.
Speaker 3It's very Forrest Gump-ish. Just sort of meandering through. I didn't get out of college. I still don't have a college education at 53. I went to Alvin Community College, home of the Fighting Dolphins, We Will We Will Splash You, and got in a Volkswagen van in the late 90s and traveled around the country, got a job at a publishing company in the warehouse. And four years later, I'm in a publishing company. I ended up running the company. I somehow figured I was pretty good at publishing. Started working with authors, wrote a book at night, and then wrote another one. And the second one ended up on the New York Times bestsellers list for like 42 weeks. So suddenly I had a career as a writer with a background in publishing and fell in love with the written word. Would sit around in coffee shops and just read, read, read, read, and write, write, write, write. Had a great career, good 10-year run. Had a bunch of memoirs that sold really well. And then the publisher always wants more of the same. And they wanted an eighth memoir. And I thought, if I write an eighth memoir, I'm a clinical narcissist. I'm just a regular narcissist, not a clinical one. So I did some consulting for Accenture on project management and narrative structures. And I thought, this is fun. But I actually think there's a marketing framework here. That if you take the ancient narrative structures that Joseph Campbell has written about, and Robert McKee, and Blake Snyder, and Christopher Booker, and laid it over a messaging framework. So that a company could clarify their message into some soundbites that get people to pay attention. There's something there. I wrote a book called Building a Story Brand. And that book took off. So suddenly I was a messaging consultant with my one year of experience running a publishing company. So if that's not winning the lottery twice, I don't know what is. But I've really loved the memoir career. And now I really love helping people come up with soundbites and taglines. And it's been a very, very fun second career. Helping other people. Tell their stories and invite customers into stories.
Speaker 1As you started talking to companies, what did you realize were the most important parts of the story?
Speaker 3It's clarity. So people want to sound smart, or they want a tagline that's cute and clever. And clarity wins the day every single time. And it's almost like people have trouble believing that it can be that easy. And it can actually grow your business. There's a friend of mine who runs a brand called Spectrum Brands. They have rimming. Tintin shavers. They also have a brand that dominates the fish food aquarium market in pet stores. And we spent a day together trying to solve the problem. How do you get families to buy aquariums? Because right now it's mostly hobbyists. And I think they make $100 million selling pet equipment. And we just came up with three words. Kids love aquariums. And these are Oxford guys. These are very, very smart people who pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to test market things. And they don't take chances. And I said, look, just test it in one market. Just put kids love aquariums. And see what happens. They didn't want to do it. Their boss had found this author that they brought in. And they was like, who's this guy? Went to Alvin Community College, home of the Fighting Dolphins. Give me a break. They put kids love aquariums on everything in the test market. Saw a 99% increase in sales. So at the end of distribution, that should amount to about $100 million in extra revenue from three words. So that's the part that fascinates me. I absolutely love it. And I've been able to talk to everybody from national security to selling plungers to selling. Airplane engines. And we think people buy things because the quality of the product. I think that's why they don't buy it again if it's a bad quality. But they actually buy things because they read some words that help them understand really quickly how this could solve a problem that they have. And if we make them think, they're not going to do it. Big mantra around my office is don't make people think. Don't make people think at all. In other words, if they have questions, you have not stated it very clearly. If they're wondering what you're talking about, you haven't stated it clearly enough. And I just think there's an enormous amount of growth to be had in stating it clearly. And it's very hard to do. When you get really close to it, it's hard to see what it is that customers are actually responding to. So I have a lot of fun helping people figure that out.
Speaker 1What's the difference between creating that in a soundbite and the full breadth of a story?
Speaker 3There's three phases that customers go through in the buying journey. And it's also the three phases everybody goes through in a relationship journey. And the three phases are curiosity, enlightenment, and commitment. So curiosity is something that you've said that makes them want to do due diligence. And that's where the tagline comes in or the soundbite comes in. And it's also what most people are missing in their messaging strategy. They've got lots of lead generators or due diligence or white papers or case studies that enlighten people about how their product works or how their process works or whatever it is, why you should invest with them. What they don't have is the soundbite. that makes them want to read the white paper or the case study. So the soundbite is more important than anything else. In a relationship, when I met my wife, I thought she was attractive. So that piqued my curiosity. And then I got to know her and thought, this woman is really stable, really smart. I could build a life with this woman. So that was the enlightenment phase. And then the commitment phase was when I got down on her and I said, well, you marry me. And customers weirdly go through the same journey, but we're all missing the first date. We're all missing the first impression. And without that, you just don't date as many people. Because one out of every 100 will wander upon your case study and accidentally read some of it and go, you know, I think we might need this. But 50 out of 100 will do that if you entice them with some soundbite that piques their curiosity. Let me give you an example. I'm not a fan of our American political system, where it's at. But look, we went into the Jeb Bush campaign, and his tagline was Jeb can fix it. Okay, if Jeb can fix it is the tagline, he's making two mistakes. One, he's making himself the hero. So this is actually about Jeb. It's not about the voters. And he's going to fix it. I don't know what it is, and I can't associate it with my survival. I can't associate it with me living a better life or being more happy. It's just it. So two mistakes. He made the story about himself, and he made it elusive. He also wrote a book on immigration, and it's a very good book. He also wrote a book on education. This man is a scholar. He's very, very intelligent. He's ridiculously qualified to be president. What he did, though, was he is somebody. Who was very prepared to be president, but not prepared to get elected. And those are two different skill sets. So he got beat by a guy whose immigration policy was build a wall. So the tagline actually won the day. And what the tagline did is it communicated a action that we could take that would make something better. And Jeb can fix it did not. And you can see how words can lead to confusion, which is what almost all of us are doing. We're just putting words out there that confuse people and they ignore it. So that's the tagline. So that's the importance of these tag bites. I think inviting people into a story is really when we get into enlightenment, when they're saying, where can you take me? What role can you play in my life? What problem can you help me solve? And we've got to have sound bites that answer those questions.
Speaker 1When you're working on that sound bite piece to attract it, how do you know that if you're so close to it, that it won't confuse someone from the outside? I test it.
Speaker 3Sometimes it's just obvious. Eat more chicken has made Chick-fil-A billions and billions and billions of dollars. We're going to test market it, but that's going to fricking work. And kids love aquariums. I thought of that because we were in London and my daughter, my three-year-old daughter, would make a stop at the aquarium in the lobby for five minutes so that we could find Nemo because there's a fish that looked like Nemo in there. And as soon as they started talking about it, I thought, but kids love aquariums. And as soon as it came out of my mouth, I thought, that's it. You have it in an intuitive sense. I think if you have any questions about what that means, that's when you're in trouble. And ultimately, you want to test it with a market and see if you get a bigger response. And if you do, you know you're on it. You're on to something. How do you think about the difference between products, fish, chicken, and services? There is almost no difference. We always have to add the word and services when we're talking about story brand, but there really isn't a difference. The key is clarity, clarity, clarity. We think of our services as products. We think of them as things that we sell that have descriptive copy on webpages and things like that. Sometimes there's SEC compliance that you have to work around and make sure that you're compliant. But other than that, it's just, hey, if you're struggling with this problem, this service is the right decision for you. And that's really it. By the way, that's a formula. I don't want to pass over that. If you actually say, if you're struggling with this, or if you're feeling a little insecure about this, or if you're confused about this, buying this is the right decision. Those are the magic words. Buying this is the right decision. Because what they're wondering is, is this going to work for me? And what they're really wondering is, is this the right decision? And if you actually just say, this is the right decision. They go, oh, okay. Otherwise, they say, I'll get back to you, and they don't have any time to research it or think about it, and so they just forget to call you back. As you dive into that
Speaker 1enlightenment phase, I'd love you to walk through the arc of what you call the story brand that draws on Joseph Campbell and the others. Okay, so there's seven
Speaker 3story elements, and these are seven plot points that take place in almost every movie that you go see. And we know that the human brain daydreams about 30% of the time. It's very difficult to get a person to pay attention. But if you use this formula, you can get people to pay attention to your story for two hours, for three hours, for a whole weekend if you're binging something on Netflix. God forbid you start Game of Thrones. A lot of ice cream later, you'll stop paying attention to that. And each of these plot points is able to create a sound bite for you that invites customers into a story. So the very first thing you have is a hero, and the hero is your customer, and the hero has to want something. So Rudy has to want to play for Notre Dame. Bridget has to want to marry her boss in Bridget Jones. The hero has to want something. It has to be very clear. This has to be established, by the way, in the first three to six minutes of the film. If you don't, then people start wondering where this movie is going, and they start to daydream. So you cannot break these rules. So what that means for us in business is we have to define something that our customer wants as it relates to our business. And the first mistake that people make is they are elusive or vague. The other mistake that people make is they list too many things. So if Jason Bourne wants to know who he really is, and he wants to lose 30 pounds, and he wants to marry his high school sweetheart, and he wants to adopt a cat, we have lost the plot of this movie because we're asking our viewers to burn too many calories to figure out what this movie is about. What is the one thing that your customer wants? Do they want trustworthy advice? Do they want a great return? Do they want transparency in the process? What do they want? And you can actually pick one thing, and it will differentiate you in the market. And you say, "Well, everybody offers that." Well, if they don't say it, nobody knows they offer it. And you can actually own it. So you want to own the mentality. You want to own the mental real estate on transparency. You want to own the mental real estate on constant communication. You want to own the mental real estate on the best and most wise and successful investment strategy. You got to own something. And then as soon as you say that, people go, "Well, I want that." Well, now you've got them in a story because they're saying, "I am a hero in a story about somebody who wants transparency in my investment portfolio." So you have to define something they want. The most important thing, though, even more important than that, is the problem that you solve. So every hero wants something, but they encounter problems in order to get it. And if there's no problems, there's no story. So this is the real hook. So we get hooked on a movie when Rudy wants to play for Notre Dame, but he's too small. He can't want to play for Notre Dame, and he's 6'5", 350 pounds, and was a five-star recruit out of high school. That's not a story. There's got to be some issue that he's dealing with. So if we identify the issue that our potential customers are dealing with or our target market audience is dealing with, they get hooked. They say, "Finally, somebody who knows me."
Speaker 1When you're talking to someone and trying to figure out who they are, trying to figure out what the problem is, what are those different sources? What are you trying to get at?
Speaker 3It's a great question. The problem is the most important thing to get right. In fact, if you get one sound bite, it's the problem. I'd say it's 75% of the sound bites, and the other six are the other 25%. It's that important because the problem is the hook. There's actually three levels of problems in every story, and there should be three sound bites in your messaging system as it relates to the problem. The first is external, and that's usually the physical problem. For example, there's a bomb that needs to be fired. It needs to be disarmed if we're writing a story. There's a roof that's got a leak. That's if you're a roofer, that's it. That's the external. People think they want a solution to the external problem, but they actually don't. What they want is a solution to the internal problem, and the internal problem is how the leaky roof is making me feel. Frustrated because that was supposed to last 30 years, and it lasted 10. So now I'm frustrated, and I feel ripped off because I got a leaky roof. Well, now that's the actual problem you're resolving. People buy things because they are emotionally agitated. By the way, if I have a leaky roof, and I don't care about a leaky roof, am I fixing my leaky roof? No. I feel like I'm losing my investment. I feel like mold is growing in the attic. Whatever it is, there's an internal thing. Discovering you have a leaky roof can be very, very frustrating, especially if the roof is supposed to last longer than it is, and it feels like the problem is getting worse. You can actually feel like this roof is threatening you and trying to take your money by the day. So feelings, feelings, feelings. And then there's a third level of problem, and it's the philosophical problem. And the philosophical problem is a justice issue. So when you say things like, "You deserve a roof that is fixed right," we have gotten to the philosophical problem. So the key is the three-step process where you're saying, "Discovering you have a leaky roof can be a very frustrating experience because your roof should have lasted longer than that. You deserve a roof that will last 30 years, just like they told you a roof would last 30 years, and that's why we have the 30-year roof guarantee. You've just opened the external, internal, and philosophical story loop and offered to close it with a guarantee." That's what happens in movies. When Luke Skywalker goes to hell, when he goes to destroy the Death Star, he shoots a proton torpedo through an exhaust valve, and that is the external problem. He's got to destroy the Death Star. The internal problem is the question of whether or not he's a Jedi, which he struggled with this entire movie. And the philosophical problem is good versus evil. So when he actually shoots that proton torpedo through and destroys the Death Star, he is resolving the external, internal, and philosophical in one shot. And when that happens, audiences feel this incredible three-part resolution in their heart, in their chest. They feel it, and they want to clap. Screenwriters will be very strategic to open the external, internal, and philosophical story loops. And you want to do the same thing in your elevator pitch or your brand messaging.
Speaker 1So we've got a hero who wants something and has a problem. What's the third element?
Speaker 3Third thing we want to do is we want to position ourselves as the guide, not the hero. The customer is the hero in the story. We are the guide. So the guide is Gandalf. The guide is Obi-Wan Kenobi. The guide is Yoda. The guide is Mary Poppins. The guide is the character in the movie who has the wisdom and enlightenment the hero get what they want. The biggest mistake people make is they play the hero. You go back can you look at this recent campaign? Kamala Harris did three things wrong that I can think of from a messaging perspective. She didn't have a clear offer. Her offer was basically, I'm not Donald Trump. You try building a restaurant on, I'm not that burger down the street, and see if it grows. People go, what do you serve? Well, I'm not that burger down the street. Well, do you have fries? Well, I'll tell you, their fries stink. Well, can you tell me anything about yourself, please? And when we just bask in the resentment that we have toward our opponent, you're going to fail. You've got to have an offer that's really differentiated. Second, she offered way too many things. He offered make America great again, make America healthy again, make America safe again. He had soundbites that people could remember when they went to the polls. I don't know a single thing she offered. And then her tagline was, let's win this. What is this? So I can either let's win this, or I can make America great again. You choose. I only say this to say the stakes are very high. And when you position yourself as the hero, the story is about you. When you position yourself as a guide, the story is about the customer. And they want the story to be about them.
Speaker 1In a lot of situations, let's say in the investment world, the problem is investment returns or some type of investment return. But there's actually a person who's also making the decision. How do you think about how to address the person or the hero in the story?
Speaker 3So the investor is the hero. The person managing the money is the guide. And there are two things that the guide needs to do. That if they do these things, the hero will automatically say, that's my guide. One is empathy. So there's a soundbite that the guide writes down or intuitively understands that they need to listen to the customer's problem. What has been your frustration with investment opportunities in the past? Well, I just never got a good return, or they were never transparent, or I was always losing sleep worrying about my money. At that point, when you hear a customer say that, as the guide in their story, you want to stop. And you actually want to spend a good bit of time there. You want to say, tell me about that. And then when they tell you about it, you want to say, that sounds very, very frustrating. And that actually isn't fair. In fact, I would say that's not right. You are empathizing with the pain that the customer has. And when you do that, they sense you care about me. Now, the second thing that you have to do after you empathize is you have to demonstrate competency. You have to say, all of my clients have had that problem and that frustration. And let me tell you how we delivered so they could never feel that pain again. So the guide is competent and caring. And those two go together, to create you in my subconscious as the person that I'm going to do business with.
Speaker 1So in that situation, where let's say it's a complex proposition, how do you decide what to focus on and what to let come in the background?
Speaker 3You need what's called a brand script. So that's a soundbite on the character, a soundbite on the problem, a soundbite on the guide, a soundbite on the plan, a soundbite on the call to action, a soundbite on the success and failure. Those are the seven soundbites that you need. And when you're talking to an audience, if I'm running for president, I'm talking to the teacher's union, my character is going to want more pay and more respect as a teacher. Their problem is whatever that problem happens to be that the union doesn't like. So I'm going to tailor that brand script for that audience. If I'm talking to the general public, I'm going to try to find several problems, but I'm going to create a brand script for each one. Taxes are going to be one. The rising price of college is going to be another. So I'm going to pick my message, my brand script, for each audience. So if I'm running for president, I've got an overall plot brand script, and then I've got what I would call subplots. The teacher's subplot, the debt subplot, the religious liberties subplot, healthcare subplot. And I've written brand scripts for every single one of those. And then the key is to stay disciplined and repeat those soundbites over and over and over until the audience that I am talking to has them memorized. And when they have my talking points memorized, I'm going to smoke the competition. So I can't go into a room and just answer questions willy-nilly and show people how smart I am. I've got to give them soundbites to memorize. So that's the key. When it gets complex, you have more brand scripts.
Speaker 1So you've got the hero who wants something, they've got a problem they're encountering, and you are the guide. What happens from there?
Speaker 3Usually if it's a complex sales process, there's a three-step plan. And the three-step plan would be, let's use the example of an at-home chef. So let's go away from investments. If I'm talking to somebody who's an at-home chef and I say, "Hey, what do you do?" They should start by saying, "You know how most families don't eat together anymore, and when they do, they don't eat healthy?" "Yeah, I know exactly how that feels." So he's just stated a problem. Rather than saying, "I'm an at-home chef," notice he didn't answer, "I'm an at-home chef." He started with a problem. Then he says, "I'm an at-home chef." Now he's just positioned himself as the solution to the problem. And then he gives you a three-step plan. Working with me is very easy. I usually do an intake session. I find out about your dietary restrictions, what your favorite foods are. That's step one. Step two is I cook one meal for you and your family. Step three, if you like it, we enter into a retainer. Would you like to have an intake session? So I just gave them a three-step plan, and then I invited them to take the first step. I broke it down into baby steps so it's all really easy. And there's also no cognitive dissonance. When you're selling something that's complicated, for instance, you coming into my house and cooking meals, I don't know how this is going to work. I don't know if you're going to smell up the kitchen. I don't know if I'm going to like the food. I don't know if I'm going to like you. I don't know if I want you around my house. All that is subconscious, but it's cognitive dissonance. There's something that's not right here. But when I actually give you baby steps, we can do an intake session, I'll cook one meal. I just made it really, really safe to take the first two steps. And if we do take those first two steps, we're much more likely to take the third and fourth and do business together. What's the next step in the story? The next step is calling people to action. It's asking for the money. And I'm not somebody who likes asking for the money. It is not natural for me. But I learned to do it a different way. I was doing messaging for an archeological dig, the City of David. And I was leaving Israel. And in the airport in Tel Aviv, they had a watch kiosk. They were selling watches. And I told myself after my company passed 10 million, I'd buy myself my first nice watch. So I'm there. It's been two years. I still haven't bought the watch. And I'm holding a watch in my hand. And the guy says, "Tell me why you want this watch." I said, "Well, my company passed a certain point, blah, blah, blah." He said, "Can I box this up for you?" I said, "No." I said, "Let me think about it." I hand him back the watch. And he gave the best answer I've ever heard that changed my life. He said, "Don, do you like that watch?" I said, "Yes, I like that watch." He said, "Can you afford this watch?" I said, "Yeah, I can afford this watch." He said, "You have a good reason to buy it. Your company passed a certain point." He said, "I think the right decision is for you to buy this watch. Would you like for me to box it up for you?" And I said, "Yes." I think he also had a pocket watch that he was swinging and brainwashing me. But I realized what he did that was so different was he gave me permission to do what I already wanted to do. And he also clarified the offer and made sense of it for me. He came back and said, "Your company passed a certain point. You have the money, and you like the watch. This is, in fact, a good decision." Because what I was wondering is, is this a good decision? And as soon as he laid it out and said, "This is why it's a good decision," and by the way, as the expert, let me tell you this is a good decision, I did what I wanted to do, which was buy the watch. And I still have that watch to this day. I'll give it to my kids. So I've learned that if I'm working with somebody on a consulting gig and I say, "Okay, your tagline is really bad. Your messaging is really not very clear. We can get on the schedule together, and I can't afford my services. Yeah, I think that we're going to see a significant revenue increase if we work together. I believe this is the right decision. Let's see if we can make it work." So that "I believe this is the right decision for you" is the key line. So you want to call them to action. There's two more things that you want to do. You want to sound bite saying what their life will look like if they do business with you, which should be what we call in screenwriting, the climactic scene. And there should be a foreshadowing of the awful, terrible, horrible thing that will happen to you if you don't. You are going to keep trying to make meals. They're going to taste terrible. Your family's not going to eat together. You're never going to connect because you can't sit around the table because you're constantly doing dishes or whatever. And twice a month, if you hire me, you won't. By the way, if you do hire me, you're going to connect with each other. You're going to actually have time to talk. You're going to eat really healthy, great tasting food at least twice a month. So I've just laid out what's called the stakes, the vision of a better future and the vision of a worse future dependent on whether or not you do business. So those seven sound bites that I just said, I described make up a brand script. And then once you come up with your brand script, you actually want to repeat those sound bites over and over in everything you do in your marketing, your messaging, some of them on your business card, on the side, on the wall of your business, in your proposal, in your talking points and keynote presentations. You come up with a campaign and then you repeat the same words over and over until you're blue in the face.
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Speaker 3I'll take everybody on this call through an example of their company. Because at storybrand.ai, it's actually free. You answer, I think, five questions about your business, and it gives you the seven soundbites. And then you can revise each of the soundbites if you don't like them. So you just go there and type in your own stuff, and it'll also give you a tagline, not unlike Kids Love Aquariums. It gives you four to choose from, and four different categories of taglines. There's one that's called the call to action tagline that I almost always prefer. So I just want to tell everybody there's four. But storybrand.ai will do that for you. Let me give you one for storybrand.ai. The way that you were talking about your products is confusing, and you're unable to connect with customers. So our character wants to use clear messaging, but their problem is their message is confusing. So we've already got the first two soundbites right there. I have studied messaging for about 30 years now, and have a knack and a system for being able to help you clarify your message. I know how painful it is to sit there looking at a blank cursor, blinking on a screen, and not know what to say. So that's empathy and authority. Now I position myself as a guide. The way you actually clarify your message, you go to storybrand.ai, you answer a few questions about your business, and it spits out the soundbites for you. That's the three-step plan. The call to action is, if you would like a clear message, and you're tired of confusing customers, the right decision is to just go to storybrand.ai and use it. And then the success and failure is, if you go to storybrand.ai, about seven minutes from now, you can be looking at a crystal clear message, and it costs you nothing. And if you don't go to storybrand.ai, two things are going to happen. One is you're going to continue confusing customers, and your competitor is going to go there, and they're going to smoke you in the market. So that's success and failure. So forgive the infomercial sales pitch, but that would be a good example off the top of my head. And by the way, storybrand.ai would have done that equally as effectively in about half the time that it took me to answer that question.
Speaker 1How do you think about the science compared to the art of coming up with that messaging?
Speaker 3There is some intuitive ability to it. I've written, gosh, 13, 14 books now. I don't know how many thousands of hours that I've spent trying to figure out the next sentence. So that has done something in my brain that is just different. And then it's an age-old debate. Are you channeling something, or is it coming from your subconscious? The rest of it, though, is science. And by science, I mean you want to start every sales letter with a problem. And then you want to position the product as a solution to the problem. So for storybrand.ai, I wrote over 120 pages of single-space rules behind the scenes that always start with a problem, always make it less than 12 words, always do this. So I think that without the science, the art doesn't work. I remember I played tennis in high school, and back there at my alma mater, Alvin Community College, home of the Fighting Dolphins, I played with the tennis team. I've got to be very clear, in case I'm fact-checked, I was not on the tennis team because I wasn't good. But I remember the tennis coach saying to me, you're really good. I wish you would have learned the proper form because that should come first. You should know the physics of the court. You should know to bend your knees. You should know to stay on the balls of your feet. You should know that you need to get down when you hit a backhand. You don't know any of that stuff. So your tennis is very, very limited. You're going to be able to beat some amateurs, but you'll never be able to beat anybody who learned from the very beginning the actual form. And then, once you understand the form, you can play with it and get really artistic and creative within the form.
Speaker 1When you get to that last step, the commitment, when a product or a service has a long sales cycle, how do you think about applying the methodology to getting that commitment?
Speaker 3Well, I'll share one bit of it, and that is trust equals value over time. One of the most important things, if there's a long sales cycle, is that you're sending really helpful, valuable information to whoever's considering that every week. People will forget about you very quickly. So the most important thing in a long sales cycle is certainly give them the information they need to make the right decision, but stay familiar. Because the more times they see you, interact with you, the higher the trust is. I remember when I dated my wonderful wife, who's a gift and somebody I don't deserve. I dated her. I moved to D.C. to get to know her better and to start dating. After a few months, I was like, this is the woman I'm going to marry. She's great. She sat me down one day and she said, Don, you are a quality time guy. And I thought, okay, I think that might be a compliment, but I'm not sure. What are you saying? She goes, well, you just get to know people really fast. You make decisions very quickly. They tend to be good decisions. You trust people very quickly. You have a strong intuition about who is worth spending time with, who isn't, and you can do that quickly. And I said, well, that's wonderful. Thank you. Yeah, that's a compliment. She goes, I'm not a quality time girl. I am a quantity time girl. And I said, what are you saying? She goes, this is going to take you a minute. I need to spend a lot of time with you in random situations. I need you to meet my friends, my family. I need to see how you deal with conflict. Just hold your horses. We're going to be dating a while, is what she said to me. I said, are you breaking up with me? She said, no, no, no, please, please. I'm not breaking up with you. I need quantity time. And I gave her the quantity time and now we're married. I went back and looked at my sales funnel data and discovered that 85% of my customers bought from me long after the sales cycle was done. And they'd gone into what's called a nurture email sequence. Just crazy. Random information, random helpful stuff. Sometimes a year after the sales sequence was done, they finally trusted me and placed an order. And I realized, oh, human beings are not actually quality time people, by and large. They are quantity time people. So what that means is your emails going out to them, them seeing the occasional social media post, them seeing something on YouTube, them hearing about you at a cocktail party, is very important to gain trust over time. So I would say that's the biggest advice I have for closing long-term sales. You got to get them the information they need, your sales reps are continuing to meet with them, but they're also hearing about you in the background quite a bit.
Speaker 1What have you learned that's improved the approach between the original Building a Story brand and the new book coming out, 2.0?
Speaker 3We added a lot. We added the storybrand.ai component and I added 10,000 words of stories of people who've succeeded because I think people learn really well through stories. But we added one thing to the book that wasn't in the first book. We added the idea of a controlling idea. That every campaign needs a controlling idea. The controlling idea is the idea that I'm going to submit to as I write this story. For instance, the controlling idea for a rom-com might be a man meets the woman of his dreams and soon discovers she's engaged to his jerk brother. Okay, so if that's the rom-com, I have to then submit every single scene and every single word to that idea. Because if he's also trying to make the football team at Notre Dame, we have two different stories. And now I'm causing the. audience to burn way too many calories trying to figure out what the story is about. And remember the rule number one that we talked about was don't make anybody think. So there needs to be a controlling idea around your company. There needs to be a controlling idea, I think, around every product. And then your messaging needs to submit to that controlling idea or else you will confuse people.
Speaker 1What have been the stories that have most resonated that you added to 2.0?
Speaker 3Gosh, the Kids Love Aquarium story is in there that I've repeated over and over. I remember working. Working with a woman who had a company called Gardenary. She helps mostly women build kitchen gardens. She's paid a million dollars a year in her consulting to help you figure out your garden. And the word gardenary is a made-up word. And it came from her saying that she wanted to make gardening ordinary. So she put gardening and ordinary together and came up with the word gardenary. And I said to her, Nicole, Nicole Burke, follow her on Instagram, by the way. She's amazing. Nobody has ever woken up in the morning and said, I want to make gardening ordinary. Not a single person. In fact, you might be the only one. Millions of people have woken up saying they want to start a garden. So why don't you buy startagarden.com and become the start a garden lady? Well, she did that. And what do you think happened? So there's just stories like that all over the place where what you're saying is great. It's just that people have to stop, pour a glass of whiskey, sit down, light a cigar and try and figure out what the heck you're talking about. And nobody is doing it. Nobody. They need to understand it while they're driving down the road. And as soon as you say it, they need to go, I want to start a garden. I'm going to get that woman's book. And once you hit that, it's like striking oil. You put the straw on the ground and things start flowing.
Speaker 1How about on the other side of it, of something that you really thought was going to resonate and then just didn't? That's mean. That's a mean question.
Speaker 3I could give you a thousand examples, except I've chosen to forget them all. Things that aren't working. We had a tagline for storybrand.ai that was and still is, say it clearly. And we brought in some of our own certified community to sit in the conference room and test it the other day. And somebody said, what's it? I said, shut up. So I make as many, if not more mistakes than everybody listening to me right now.
Speaker 1You know, a lot of our audience in the asset management industry, there are a lot of say products that are similar to one another. And when you have a structure of an industry that has a lot of products competing for the same customers, how do you think about that differentiation?
Speaker 3You've got to find, well, one thing that differentiates you. In fact, it's one of the questions we ask in a lot of the prompts at storybrand.ai is what makes this different? And a lot of people make the mistake of thinking that because everybody's doing the same thing, they can't really talk about a differentiator. But the reality is, as soon as you talk about something that everybody else is doing anyway, you have just differentiated yourself because nobody else is talking about it. It's the difference between reality and perception. If my competitors aren't talking about this thing and I start talking about it, it looks like I'm the only one who's actually doing it. the way, I deserve to win because they weren't smart enough to talk about it. They assumed the customer knew and the customer didn't know. So it's really important that you don't get caught up that we're all doing the same thing. The perception is if they're not talking about it, you are, that you're the only one doing it.
Speaker 1How about a different situation where you only have one client? So it could be a single family office or it could be an endowment for one university. How do you think about the importance of describing your approach or what it is that you're doing to serve just that one client?
Speaker 3That's a great question. And I'd love more time to think about it. So this is an off the cuff answer. When you're with that single customer, you want to continue to position yourself as the guide in their life. And you do that with statements of empathy and statements of competency. It's not good enough to understand what the problem is. You have to go back and say, hey, if I heard you correctly, this is what you're frustrated about, or this is what you're struggling with. That sounds terrible. You certainly shouldn't have to struggle with that. That statement, right there, positions you as the guide. You almost want to create a little checklist. And when you get back in the car, you hang up the phone, you look at the checklist and go, did I make a statement of empathy? What's really beautiful about that is your heart will follow your mouth and you'll begin looking for places. And one of the family values that we have, we have four core values in my family, the three of us, me, Betsy, and Emmeline, three and a half year old. One of them is attunement. So we talk about all the time, the importance of being attuned. And what we mean by that is the understanding what the people around us are feeling. Now, imagine a three and a half year old who grows up in a home and we're constantly talking about attunement. Hey, what do you think our friend was thinking? She's six months pregnant and she hasn't gotten over the nausea and it's really frustrating her. What do you think she's feeling? So if my daughter goes, that would be terrible. Emmeline, that is so great. That is such an attuned thing to say. Millers are attuned. We are setting her up to win. So I think the number one thing that we want to do with people is be attuned. And then, you cannot lack competency. You can't. It is incredibly important that you know what you're doing and you know how to get people out of that. In fact, in screenplays, if the guide expresses that they don't know what they're doing in the area in which they're helping the hero, the story is ruined. If you watch the King's speech, Daniel is the drama teacher who's teaching the King how to not give a speech without stuttering. The King actually confronts him at one point. He said, you're a doctor, you're a PhD, and you're not. We had you check, and he said, I never said I was a doctor. You assumed I was a doctor. Perhaps I shouldn't have let you assume that, but you assumed that. I didn't. And by the way, if you don't think I have competency, I helped so many people after World War I with the challenge of post-traumatic stress become effective communicators. So don't you for a second question my credibility. That was an incredibly important scene. Because if he would have said, look, I'm sorry, I lied. The truth is I don't have any competency, but maybe we can do this together. That movie does not win an Academy Award. The customer is putting their faith, in your competency, and you've got to have it. And they also won't put their faith in your competency unless you actually care about them. So that empathy and authority are the two things, even if you just have one client that you constantly want to be thinking about and
Speaker 1demonstrating. I have to ask, what are the other three rules of the family?
Speaker 3Grounded. So Millers are grounded. By the way, these are all aspirational. We're trying to become these things. We aren't them. We're grounded. So we're able to stay calm and we know who we are and we don't think too little of ourselves or too much of ourselves. That's what grounded means. That's what grounded means to us. We are helpful. We do not carry the burdens of the world on our shoulders. But if there's something that we see and we can help, we do it. We actually take action. And then the last one is fun. When there's an opportunity to have a good time, we're going to do it. Our mission statement is, in a world tempted by cynicism, we believe life can be beautiful. So we have an enemy. My house has an enemy. By the way, it's very important that every story has a villain. And the villain is cynicism. We just fight cynicism and we point it out when we're being cynical about something. And then we have a tagline because memorization is everything. Life can be beautiful. So the mission statement tagline and the four core values are the story that we're inviting my daughter and ourselves into.
Speaker 1The importance when you're working with businesses of putting themselves as the guide as opposed to the hero is this interesting concept because ultimately you're doing that so that you can win. How does that guide then not translate to the hero?
Speaker 3Oh, yeah. I had a health scare. And there was eight days when I thought I had one to five years to live. And that health scare ended up not being credible. But during that eight days, what amazed me was all I cared about. I didn't care about writing another book. I didn't care about money. I cared about my wife's well-being, my friend's well-being, and my daughter's well-being. That's all I cared about. And that was very comforting to know that I'm not a complete jerk. But it also said that the meaning of life, I think, for all of us is really to play the guide, not the hero. And I remember this guy named David Gentiles. He was like a father to me. And David was always poor. He worked at a church in Austin, Texas at the end of his life that only had about 100 people attending it. His career got smaller and smaller the older he got. And he got more into the trenches with people and less famous. While that was happening in David's life, I was getting famous. My books were on the New York Times for like 40 weeks in a row. And I remember thinking, this isn't really fair because David is such a better human being than me, but nobody knows who he is. And there was a guilt there for me. So David died in an accident. And they called me and said, will you deliver the eulogy? And I said, I would be honored. And I assumed there wouldn't be a whole lot of people at his funeral because he never wrote songs or wrote books. Instead, he was living at homeless shelters and people were living in his house. And he was doing things that were incredibly sacrificial. He's guide-like. And they called and said, it's going to be at this church, the church that has 100 people. And I said, great, I'll be there. I flew into town. And they called me and said, hey, we can't do it at the church. Turns out we're getting a lot of calls. We're going to do it at this other larger church. Turns out I said, great. I wrote down the address. They called back and they said, we actually have to do it at this mega church. And I said, okay, that's a big church. Then they called back and said, we can't do it indoors. We're going to do it at a baseball stadium. I show up to deliver the eulogy at this man's funeral. And there's probably 4,000 people in the audience. There are two news trucks with satellite dishes covering this man's funeral. And I realized that you can get famous playing the hero, but you get loved and respected by playing the guy. I would admit that that is the actual point of life is to play the hero so that you can figure out how to be the guide and help other people win in their life. And I remember interviewing Pete Carroll. I interviewed him for a book once and he was coach of the Seahawks. He had yet to win a Super Bowl, but he'd won a couple of national championships at USC. And I asked him, was there a point early on when you felt like you were special? And most people say, no, they're trying to be humble. Pete said, oh yeah, yeah. I knew I was special. I said, really? He goes, yeah, I was a scrawny kid, but I knew I was bigger than my body. I knew that I had more potential than my body was giving me. And he said, Don, but the reality is I had the luxury of succeeding early. I said, that's an interesting thing to say. What do you mean the luxury of succeeding early? He said, well, when I succeeded in athletics, I had the luxury of doing that early because I realized it doesn't mean anything. It's ultimately not fulfilling. In fact, there's a diminishing return on success. And I said, that's fascinating. He said, yeah, you can get really depressed the more successful you get. And he said, what happened was I figured out that helping other people win was actually more satisfying than winning myself. And there's no diminishing return on helping somebody else. And I just thought that was one of the most beautiful things I'd ever heard. And it feels true in my life too.
Speaker 1All right, Don, I want to make sure I get a chance to ask you a couple of fun closing questions. What's your favorite hobby or activity outside of work and family?
Speaker 3I have a group of friends, guys, we call ourselves the lions and we go fishing. We go fly fishing once a year. And then they all come to my house for the college national championships, about 15 of us. And there's some of them who live in Nashville and some of them travel in sometimes. But my favorite thing to do is to get together with those guys, smoke cigars and listen to music. I have an Oswald's Mill audio system and we sit around, listen to vinyl records and music. And it is absolutely my favorite thing to do. What was your first paid job? Popeye's fried chicken. I was the biscuit maker at Popeye's fried chicken. What'd you take out of it? I took out of it that life is extremely hard for a lot of people. I will never forget watching a guy who I really liked, older than me, probably 50 something. And I was 17, scraping the plates and eating the food as he was washing dishes. And I took from it. I'm really lucky. What's your biggest pet peeve? I think, this sounds so judgmental. I guess any pet peeve is judgmental, but a human being who is the pinnacle of God's creation, every human being is, who has no vision or ambition for their life. They don't want something. And I just think that's a wasted experience. You're not a wasted person. You're the pinnacle of God's creation. But you're wasting this. This is a really beautiful thing we get to do here. And you're wasting it.
Speaker 1Pet peeve. Which two people have had the biggest impact on your professional life?
Speaker 3Blake Snyder passed away, sadly. I never got to meet him, but he wrote a book called Save the Cat that explains story and story structure for screenwriters. And that's been the most influential book and his teachings and thinking. And he's been the most influential. And then nobody has changed my life more than my daughter, Emmeline. She's three and a half. Nobody ever will. I really liked life before I met her. And life became very important to me after I met her. And who I was as a human became very important to me. My favorite role in life is a husband and father. But father is the most important one. I really like being a husband. But the father one is like, gosh, so much is dependent on you. People don't clarify their message. Honestly, who cares? You're going to have less money. But if she doesn't have a good dad, there could be very bad endings in that story.
Speaker 1What's the best advice you've ever received?
Speaker 3I have ever received. was about a book, when I was writing a book. I had a friend named Jeff Baldwin, who had just written a book. And he said, Don, nobody will care about your book as much as you do. And what he meant by that is do not trust an editor to fix it. You fix it. And when he said that, it applied to every aspect of my life. You can't outsource excellence. You got to do it yourself.
Speaker 1What's a mystery that you wonder about?
Speaker 3My faith is a faith of percentages and they fluctuate. For instance, if you say, do you believe in God? I say 80% right now. Do you believe there's an afterlife? 72% certain. And then you talk to me five minutes later, 73. This is up and down. So, I mean, I had a health scare. I remember being in a cold plunge, crying my eyes out because I thought I was not going to get to watch my daughter grow up and that she was going to grow up without a dad. So I wondered a lot about near-death experiences, what the afterlife is like. Now, I'm 100% certain there's a God. There's just no other explanation. Whether or not we get to meet him, I don't know. I'm 72% sure at the point of this conversation. Why am I so important that God would want to meet me? I don't feel that important. Those are the things I spend a lot of time thinking about.
Speaker 1What life lesson have you learned that you wish you knew a lot earlier in life?
Speaker 3Resiliency. That the number one characteristic of the successful is not a skill or a trait or a philosophy. It's just the ability to get back up and keep going. And if you do that, you're going to make it to the top of that mountain if you just don't quit. I wish I would have learned that early on.
Speaker 1Don, I have one more for you. What brings you the greatest joy?
Speaker 3When my daughter loves me back. And she does. She does all the time. She clearly loves her mother more. I get up every morning, nine out of 10 days. I'm the one who goes into her room. I open the shades. I say, Emmeline, it's a beautiful day and you are a beautiful girl. And I love you. And I can't believe we get to do today together. And she looks up at me with a big smile and she says, where's mama? Yeah. So that's my life.
Speaker 1Don, thanks so much for sharing all your wisdom about telling great stories. Ted, thank you for having me. It's an honor. Thanks for listening to the show. If you like what you heard, hop on our website at capitalallocators.com where you can access past shows, join our mailing list, and sign up for premium content. Have a good one and see you next time.
Speaker 4All opinions expressed by Ted and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Capital Allocators or the firms. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of Capital Allocators or podcast guests may maintain positions and securities discussed on this podcast.
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