Best of Storytelling: Donald Miller

[MUSIC] >> On Ted Sides, and this is Capital Allicators. 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 two-fer 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, an author of the bestseller, Story Worthy, and Don Miller, creator of Story Brand, business started with his book of the same name. Describe how to improve your storytelling ability. Before we get to the interview, we're excited to introduce the next chapter of Capital Allicators 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 Allicators 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 Allicators University. Capital Allicators 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 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 Allicators, that's not a minor concern. A missed filing incorrect source or context that gets lost somewhere in a retrieval chain aren't edge cases. They're how decisions go wrong. Alphasense is the AI platform built specifically for this. They own the content over 500 million curated documents from broker research and expert transcripts to filings and earnings calls. 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For investment professionals that means your entire team gets on-demand coaching, grounded in the behaviors that drive results, and build the kind of fellowship that retains your top talent. We use Alex and our team at Capital Allicators' swears by it. Try Alex for yourself at the link in our show notes, try Alex.admiredleadership.com. Please enjoy my conversations with Matt Dix and Don Miller from the end and beginning of 2025. Don, thanks 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. It's a very forest-gumpish, just sort of meundering 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 ended up running the company. Somehow I 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. When sit around in coffee shops and just read, read, read, read, and write, write, write, write. Had a great career. Good tenure 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 is 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 sound bites that get people to pay attention. There's something there that 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 really love the memoir career. And now I really love helping people come up with sound bites and taglines and it's been a very, very fun second career, helping other people tell their stories and invite customers into stories. As you started talking to companies, what did you realize were the most important parts of this story? It'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 Remington 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 on everything and see what happens. They didn't want to do it. Their boss had found this author that they brought it and there's like, who's this guy? Went to Alvin Community College home with a fighting dolphins. Give me a break. They put kids love aquariums on everything in the test market. So I 99% increase in sales. So at the end of the distribution that should amount to about $100 million extra revenue from three words. So that's the part that fascinates me. I absolutely love it and have been able to talk to everybody from national security to selling plungers to selling airplane engines. And we think people buy things because of 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. What's the difference between creating that in a sound bite and the full breadth of a story? There'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 sound bite 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 sound bite that makes them want to read the white paper or the case study. So the sound bite is more important than anything else. In a relationship, when I met my wife, I thought she was attractive. So that peaked 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 the, 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 sound bite that peaks 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 as 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. 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 skillsets. 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 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. When 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. Sometimes it's just obvious. Eat more chicken. Has made Chick-fil-A billions and billions and billions of dollars. Yeah, we're going to test market it, but that's going to frickin' 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 was 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 they came out of the mouth, I thought that's it. You have 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 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 web pages 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 this. 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 enlightenment 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 story 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 day dreams 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 and Bridget Jones. The hero has to want something and 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 the 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 born 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 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 six, five, three hundred fifty 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 said, finally, somebody who knows me when you're talking to someone and trying to figure out what the problem is. What are those different sources? Where are you trying to get out? It'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. That's usually the physical problem. For example, there's a bomb that 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. When 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 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 desert. In general 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 and their chest. They feel it. And they want to clap. So 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. So we've got a hero who wants something and has a problem. What's the third element? Third 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 to help the hero get what they want. The biggest mistake people make is they play the hero. You go back and you look at this recent campaign. Donald 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 say, what do you serve? Well, I'm not that burger down the street. Well, do you have fries? Well, I'll tell you, they're 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. How can she offered way too many things? She offered make America great again, make America healthy again, make America safe again. He had sound bites that people could remember when they went to the polls. I don't know the single things 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 then what the story to be about them? In 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 this story? So 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 sound bite 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 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 and my subconscious is the person that I'm going to do business with. So 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? You need what's called a brand script. So that's a sound bite on the character, a sound bite on the problem, a sound bite on the guide, a sound bite on the plan, a sound bite on the call to action, a sound bite on the success and failure. Those are the seven sound bites 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. This is 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 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 sound bites 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, Willie Nilly, and show people how smart I am. I've got to give them sound bites to memorize. So that's the key. When it gets complex, you have more brand scripts. So 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? 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 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. And he says, "I'm an at-home chef." Now, he's just positioned himself as the solution to the problem. And then he gets 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. But 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 it at 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. 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 archaeological 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. It's 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. 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, you 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 by 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 you 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 by 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 and 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 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 and the wall of your business and 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. We're going to take a quick break in the action to tell you about Ridge line. Ridge line makes your day unrecognizable. That's how refreshingly different it is from legacy investment management technology. With Ridge line front to back AI native platform, you're Typical tech pains disappear, no integration headaches, no data discrepancies, and no upgrade cycles. Instead, you get real-time data flowing through everything from portfolio accounting, to reporting, to reconciliation, trading, compliance, and more. In the AI era, asset and wealth management firms moving to Ridge Line gain a decided advantage. That's why customers call it miraculous, game-changing, and an awakening. If that's not how you would describe your investment management tech, request a demo at RidgeLine.ai. And now, back to the show. I'd love you to take me through an example of a company you worked with all the way through the seven steps. I'll take everybody on this call through an example of their company, because a 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 in 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, 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 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 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, surbend.ai would have done that equally as effectively in about half the time that it took me to answer that question. How do you think about this science compared to the art of coming up with that messaging? There 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 the problem. And then you want to position the product as a solution to the problem. So for surbend.ai, I wrote over 120 pages of single space rules behind the scenes that always start with the 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 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 it back in. 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. When you get to that last step, the commitment, when a product or service has a long sales cycle, how do you think about applying the methodology to getting that commitment? Well, 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 DC 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. It's what she said to me. I said, Are you breaking out? 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 for me long after the sales cycle was done. And they'd gone into what's called a nurture email sequence, just random information, random helpful stuff. Sometimes a year after the sales sequence was done, they finally trusted me in place to 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 posts, 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've 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. What have you learned that's improved the approach between the original building a story brand and the new book coming out 2.0? We added a lot, we added the story brand dot 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 romcom 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 romcom, 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. 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. What have been the stories that have most resonated that you added to 2.0? Gosh, the kids love aquarium story is in there that I've repeated over and over. I remember working with a woman who had a company called gardenery. 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 gardenery 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 came with word gardenery. 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 start a garden.com and become the start a garden lady? Well, she did that. 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 poor glass of whiskey, sit down, light us a garden, 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. How 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. I can give you a thousand examples, except I've chosen to forget them all instead of working. We had a tagline for storyband.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. You know, a lot of our audience in the asset management industry, there were 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? What do you think about that differentiation? You've got to find the one thing that differentiates you. In fact, it's one of the questions we ask in a lot of the prompts at the story behind that 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. But when 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. And by 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 and you are, that you're the only one doing it. How 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? That'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 or 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 Imelon, 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 importance of 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, you know, 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, that would be terrible. Imelon, 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 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 checked out." 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." Anyway, if you don't think I have competency, I helped so many people after World War One 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 demonstrating. I have to ask, what are the other three rules of the family? Grounded? 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 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 are inviting my daughter and ourselves into. The importance when you're working of 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? Oh, 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 friends 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, my second book was dedicated to him. 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 a hundred 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 assume 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 him and said, "It's going to be at this church, the church that has a hundred people." And I said, "Great. I'll be there. I flew in the town." And they called me and said, "Hey, we can't do it at the church. It turns out we're getting a lot of calls. We're going to do it at this other larger church." 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 submit 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 national championships at USC. And I asked him, "Was there a point early on when you felt like you were special?" 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 scraughty kid, but I was really good at athletics and I knew I was bigger than my body. I knew that I had more potential than my body was giving." 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. All right, Don. I want to make sure I get chance to ask you a couple of fun closing questions. What are your favorite hobby or activity outside of work and family? I 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 get together with those guys, smoke cigars, and listen to music. I have an Oswald's Mill audio system, and we sit around listening 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, and Popeye's Fried Chicken. What did 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 that 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. Pet peeve. Which two people have had the biggest impact on your professional life? Blake 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 in the line. 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. What's the best advice you've ever received? Best advice I have ever received was about a book when I was writing a book at 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. What's a mystery that you wonder about? My 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 they 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 then 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. What life lesson have you learned that you wish you knew a lot earlier in life? Resiliency. 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 had to learn that early on. Done. I have one more for you. What brings you the greatest joy when 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 see Emily. It's a beautiful day and you're a beautiful girl and I love you. And I can't believe we get to do today together and she looks up to me the big smile. She says, "Where's my mother?" So that's my life. Done. Thanks so much for sharing all your wisdom about telling great stories. Ted, thank you for having me as 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. All opinions expressed by Ted and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of capital allocators or their 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.