Storytelling shapes decisions. We’ve all been affected by stories in one way or another because they carry emotion and move us to action. It makes sense that using narratives in business can provide the same deep connection with our customers.
Today I am joined by Gavin McMahon, CEO and cofounder of fassforward, who has learned the power of storytelling. In our discussion, we cover the various storytelling genres and how they address different business needs—from motivating teams to building trust with customers. Stories create a deeper, more impactful communication that moves beyond mere facts, and as neurological evidence shows, the engagement they foster leads to motivation.
Gavin McMahon helps companies shape strategy, leadership, and culture through storytelling. A former engineer who once built submarines, sports cars, and steel plants, Gavin discovered that even the best plans fail without the power of story. After earning an MBA in innovation, strategy, and information technology from the Institute Theseus in France, he shifted his focus from engineering to business transformation. He is the author of Story Business: Why Stories Rule the World and How They Can Reinvent Your Business.
If you are interested in growing your business in a profound and impactful way, this insightful episode is for you.
Get to know Gavin:
Book recommendations:
- A Gentleman in Moscow: A Novel, by Amor Towles
- Gates of Fire: An Epic Novel of the Battle of Thermopylae, by Steven Pressfield
Follow me on:
- Instagram @stacyennis
- Facebook @stacyenniscreative
- YouTube @stacyennisauthor
To submit a question, email hello@stacyennis.com or visit stacyennis.com/contact and fill out the form on the page.
How to use storytelling to lead better and grow your business | Episode 248 Transcript
These transcripts were generated by robots, not writers.
Stacy: Welcome. Welcome. This week we get to talk about one of my very favorite topics, storytelling with a recently published author who wrote a book all about story. This is something that I get to work in day in and day out as a book coach. It’s also something that has been a pulse of my life as a reader of all things books mostly. And it’s also something that I find a lot of my author clients and a lot of my colleagues when they can really unlock that power of storytelling and in their books, but certainly in their businesses and brands, that’s when everything changes. And that was definitely the case for me. I know this is going to be a really practical and fun conversation. So let me introduce you to this week’s guest.
Stacy: Gavin McMahon is the CEO and co founder of Fast Forward, where helps companies shape strategy, leadership and culture through storytelling. A former engineer who once built submarines, sports cars and steel plants, he discovered that even the best plans fail without the power of Story. After earning an MBA innovation strategy and Information technology from the Institute of Theseus in France, he shifted his focus from engineering to business transformation. He is the author of Story why Stories rule the world and how they can reinvent your business. And Gavin, I’m holding up your new book here. Welcome and congratulations on publishing Story Business.
Gavin: Thank you, thank you and thank you for all the help on the way.
Stacy: Well, we’ll dig into your writing process later more because you’ve had quite a journey getting this not only well written, fun and beautiful book done. So we’ll talk through that a little bit later too. But I think your background is really interesting. And you know what was funny? I’ve known you for a very long time at this point, Gavin. I think it’s been probably like 13 or 14 years maybe that we’ve met. Yeah, it’s been a long time and I actually didn’t know your background in engineering. So when I read your book and I got this whole download or maybe I learned it at the very beginning and it just filtered its way out. But you started in this engineering space and now you’re like, I mean, I just see it as this complete changeover into Storytelling.
Stacy: But of course, nothing’s really a complete changeover. I’d love to know how your engineering background eventually led you into the work that you do today in storytelling. And maybe you could also share a little bit about that work so our listeners and viewers can understand what you do and how you’re going to help them today.
Gavin: Sure, yeah. Well, engineering. So why did I do that? I think for anyone that’s got kids growing up or going into university, there’s this whole conversation you have with your parents about what are you going to do for the rest of your life. And mine ended up with engineering because my father was an engineer and I think he thought it was. There’ll always be a job doing that. So I think as an engineer, though, I think engineering is an interesting. Engineers generally want to break things down and understand how things work. They will take things apart with no compunction about, can I even put this back together again? And I think that’s been a good foundation for me because it’s really what I do now as well.
Gavin: It’s nothing to do with bridges or submarines, but it’s got everything to do with how does something work. And I think there is a real connection with storytelling, and it’s really about people because I’m endlessly fascinated by decisions. And how do people make decisions? Not so much in personal life, but certainly in business. And I think it’s, you know, not just individuals, but people coming together in groups. How does the organization make a decision? And I think storytelling is one of the biggest influences of that. Basically. I think people have stories running around in their heads and whatever that story is a massive influence on the decision they’re going to make. Big, small, left, right, doesn’t really matter, but that’s what it is. So that’s how I came to it, really.
Stacy: I love that you talked about that kind of breaking apart because it reminded me of early in my career as a writer and editor, one of the ways that I learned how to write was diagramming. Like, I took articles that started with articles that I thought were great, and I would just diagram them out and try to understand, like, almost the equation to them and how they were working so that I could learn from a fundamental standpoint how to be a good writer. And then also with my book editing background, it was a lot of times I was breaking apart these books and rebuilding them. And that’s really. I’ve never thought about it that way in how storytelling has this structural, almost engineering component to it.
Gavin: Well, I think. I think there certainly are structures in storytelling. I think anyone that reads story business and is trying to write the next great Hollywood screenplay or the next great American novel will be, I think, very disappointed in my definition of story. Because it’s very simple and very flexible. It’s a piece of information wrapped in emotion. And the reason I use that definition is because it’s. I’m all about how do I get in somebody’s head? How do I influence the decision that they’re going to make? Because I think, I mean, when I first started this, I remember you and I had quite a lot of.
Gavin: It wasn’t the first, it wasn’t when I first started, but when I first started working with you on this, we had a lot of back and forth about you got to really narrow down who your audience is. And I’m like, well, anyone can use this. It’s. And I was very resistant to the whole thing. And you were also telling me like, I had to figure out why would people want this? And I always thought, and I still think that honestly, it’s kind of applicable to everyone. I mean, the typical storytelling business book is, I think, targeted at marketers. If you’re a marketer, you need to figure out how to tell stories. But story business is really about how do we use stories all the way through an organization, how do we. If you have an idea, how do you package that idea?
Gavin: And I don’t think it’s. I think everyone has ideas. I’d like to think everyone has ideas and everyone can figure out how to better package their ideas. So I know I’ve wandered off topic. I tend to do that as well.
Stacy: Well, to your point, even a pretty mundane, a mundane like experience or situation can become a great story if it’s packaged correctly. So I wonder if you could explain for myself, our listeners and viewers. I have a hypothesis on this. But you know, when you post on social media. So for me, I’m going to talk about Instagram specifically and I post a really useful piece of content that I’m like, this could completely level up this person’s knowledge or you know, book journey or whatever it is. It’s like I put time into it. It’s really useful, it’s really thoughtful. It like completely bombs. But if I just tell a story often, it doesn’t even matter what the story is. It’s just like a well told story. Those are the ones that perform really well and people actually engage with.
Stacy: So what is it about those two Here I’m delivering this super high value, this One I’m not even actually. The only value I’m really adding, I think, is entertainment. Why is that? Can you break that down for us?
Gavin: Yeah, I think. Well, first of all, I massively empathize with you because I do exactly the same thing, and I would rather do the first one than the second one. There was a guy that I write about, I found out about, and I write about him in the book called Donald Cahn, who was an Alzheimer’s researcher. And he stuck. This is a few years ago, he was trying to figure out what was going on. And so he would stick people in an MRI machine and kind of watch their brain. And at the same time that he’s watching their brain, he was exposing them to images. And some of these images would be very kind of dry and clinical. This is a picture of a chair, that kind of thing. And some of them would be much more emotional.
Gavin: And, a mother holding a baby, someone crying, all of that kind of stuff. And what he found is different based on the images. Different parts of the brain lit up. No. No surprise, probably to most people listening. But he said something, and I’m paraphrasing, I’ll get it slightly wrong, but it’s always stuck with me, which is emotion leads to action and reason leads to judgment. And I think that, in a nutshell, is the story. If you write something that’s very well organized, very well thought out, and is really useful, people are just going to act like a judge and jury. If you write something where people can somehow see themselves in it, there’s some emotion in it, people will do something with it, whether it’s like, comment or subscribe or whatever it is you want them to do.
Stacy: Yeah. And I mean, also, if you think about your own user behavior and your own attention, I think we can all acknowledge that we’re more drawn to storytelling. Of course, you share some of the history of this in your book and the reasoning behind this. One of the things that I found really interesting when I was reading your book is how storytelling, how it impacts your leadership. And I wondered if you could share a little bit about this, because it really got me thinking about, you know, I have a small team, so I’m not leading like a hundred plus, 200, 500 people. But still, that could also be even in your community or your family. I mean, there’s so many different places where we show up in leadership roles.
Stacy: How does storytelling, or lack thereof, impact your effectiveness and impact and influence as a leader?
Gavin: Well, I think you kind of answered it yourself when you said team if you’re a leader. So you could be in a small organization and lead a team, or you could even not be the official leader of that team. But you’re always working with and through people. And when you get to very large organizations, the kind of companies we work with, Fortune 500 companies, you’ve got 50,000 people, 100,000 people, and you’ve got to imagine, well, what are they like on a Monday, what are they like on a Tuesday? And I think generally everyone wants to do their best at work, but there is no doubt over a period of time, there are certain days when it was, they were on fire and it was all singing, all dancing, it’s all great. And they were really engaged in their work.
Gavin: And there are other days when they just couldn’t be bothered to do anything. And I think as a leader, what you are trying to do is you are trying to get people to put the absolute best they can in any one time, number one, but also number two in the direction you need them to go. Because I think plenty of people will be. You know, there’s lots of organizations where someone’s going in this direction and someone’s going in that direction, and they’re all at cross purposes and you have all these mixed messages. So I think storytelling, and I interviewed a few people. One of the people I interviewed for the book, Ronan, was ex CEO of Verizon Wireless, and he talked about storytelling as shared context.
Gavin: And I think leadership storytelling particularly is shared context because if you can get people roughly lined up in the same direction and excited about doing it and then give them the agency to do that, you have much better chance of getting anything done. And every organization gets things done through people. I don’t know why when you’re interviewing somebody who’s going to lead a team and maybe a team of 10 people, a team of a hundred people, the interview is all about what are your credentials for that particular skill? Whether it’s sales or whether it’s engineering or marketing, whatever it is, it’s never about how good are you at getting 100 people to do something. And yet that is what you’re hiring those people to do. So storytelling, I think, is a huge part of the answer. Because leadership is essentially making choices.
Gavin: We’re going to do this and we’re not going to do that. Storytelling is how you amplify those choices through people.
Stacy: Yeah, I love that. I think it’s such an interesting. I, I hadn’t heard it that way, explained that way. Anywhere before. Of course, I’ve worked in a ton of, you know, tons and tons of leadership books, business books. But the way that you describe that, it really resonated. It also got me thinking about. I just finished the book Cloud Cuckoo Land. I don’t know if you’ve read it. It’s by Anthony Doerr. Wow. I mean, I. There’s only like, usually every year there’s like maybe a couple books that I finish it and I’m like, that was exquisite. This book gets added to that list. He also wrote all the Light We Cannot See, which won the Pulitzer.
Gavin: Pride.
Stacy: Yeah. And he’s from my hometown, so we get some bragging rights from Boise. It’s such an interesting. It’s five different stories that are all woven and they all have this thread of a connected story that’s about this magical place called Cloud Cuckoo Land where rivers run with broth and birds fly around and there’s like turtles with cakes that walk around on their backs. And it’s just this like the land of milk and honey kind of metaphor. And what I. What was kind of interesting is I. That, like, kind of fable that’s central to the story. I told it to my kids, but orally. I told them in stages. So and it was like also to get them to like be calm and kind of in transition. When were transitioning to some different activities.
Stacy: The way that day went compared to so many other days where I’m. Get your shoes on, let’s go. Where I was like, okay, I’ll tell you the next part of the story once we’re in the car and you’re calm. It was so motivating for them and it was so easy. And it really, it made me kind of rethink some of how we just do life in, how stories can have such an amazing impact. And to your point, on a leadership team and a team in general, if you have this shared story, maybe it’s not about turtles with cakes on their backs, but it’s a vision that you’re working toward or shared context. To your point, I imagine that there’s some ease and momentum to that is hard to find elsewhere.
Gavin: Yeah, I think the whole world is transitioning and I think there’s still much of it is left over, but the world is transitioning from top down, command and control kind of management. I mean, that came from the military. I think the military is one of the first organizations that’s moving away from it and giving people, you know, down the ranks a lot more agency to make decisions. It’s funny that I think big organizations are struggling to catch up because they still like this command and control and there’s still chains of bureaucracy everywhere. But ultimately, if you’re again trying to get things done through people, it’s not going to work until you can get them. They need to see themselves in the picture. And if they. If you can’t get them to see themselves in the picture, then you’re not telling a story. Everyone has.
Gavin: You think about it. I have stories running in my head about who I am, what I do, what I’m good at, what I’m bad at. I never tell those stories to anyone. But this is how I think about myself. You do too. Everyone listening to this has too. If you do not change those stories for yourself, or if those stories are not influenced by others that are coming at you, then you are never going to change anything. You’re always going to like, I think I’m a terrible singer and I am a terrible singer. But it’s a story that’s running in my head. Therefore I won’t do certain things right. Terrible singer, terrible dancer, won’t do these things. And good at this. Like doing that will do these things. It’s. And it’s the same in business people.
Gavin: You know, someone told me this guy is head of recruiting for a really large company. And he was talking about his previous job. He had someone working for him who was a fantastic recruiter to the point that this guy got invited to weddings all the time of people that he’d brought into the company because the relationship was so good. So the story he told himself was that he was a very high touch. White glove. It’s all about the relationship. This is how I bring people into the organization, all of that. And the person I was talking to was like, he’s only obviously recruiting maybe 10 people a year, which is not enough for what this job that he had. And he had to triple his volume.
Gavin: This guy eventually got him to do it through, I think, you know, coercion and threats and all the not literal HR threats. But, you know, you gotta get this done. And eventually. But eventually, once he left, he went back to the way he liked recruiting people because he always. The story he told himself was, I am a high touch. It’s all about relationship recruiter. And I’m going to give it the appropriate amount of time. And you see that all the time in change. If you don’t get people to see themselves differently, they will never change. They’ll do. Because you told them to do and you asked them to do and you gave the carrot and threatened with the stick. But they didn’t really change.
Gavin: They just did for a while and then they snapped back to wherever they were before because of the story they.
Stacy: Tell themselves in that instance. Yeah, it’s interesting to listen to that because on the one hand, and maybe this is because I identify with more of that like high touch piece of it in the way that I like to work and the relationship piece. But you know, arguably that might be a better way of working, but it’s not to the point of the business. Like, not for the business, I guess. How do you, how do you think about that? Because I think that’s an interesting example for him. Maybe he’s just better suited to be. If he doesn’t want to kind of step into that more scaled space. How do you think about that?
Gavin: Think about it in terms of should he be doing that?
Stacy: Yeah. To your point, I love the way that you explain this and how his narrative is going to influence his behavior once he gets pulled out of this and in this new space he’s going to continue that narrative. But then there’s like, I think there’s an ARGU maybe like not an argument but a, A questioning of, you know, if inherently you don’t want to step into that space and that’s not how you want to operate, then how do you, I guess you just move on to a new organization if that doesn’t.
Gavin: Well, what happens is you, you sit in place and you’re unhappy and unengaged.
Stacy: Yeah.
Gavin: And instead of 80 to 90% effort on an average day, you’re giving it just enough that you can get away with which is a strategy or you.
Stacy: Okay. And in his case, he wasn’t kicked in fully. Like he wasn’t all the way in and engaged in the way that he could be to deliver what he needed to in his role.
Gavin: Well, he was delivering it in the way that he thought it was best to do. But if a strategy is to. If your strategy says we’re going to do this thing this way and people think, well, yeah, I hear you, but I think this way is better. So I’m going to still do this thing this way. And it’s the way, by the way, I’ve been doing it for the last 10 years, no one really gets in trouble. That’s people’s get out of jail free card in organizations is to do what they did yesterday. Because it’s like I didn’t really Understand what you were saying. Oh, I tried that, and it was difficult. So I went back to, I’m still working over here, boss. But that just stymies all change, and it’s because you didn’t change the story.
Stacy: Yeah, I love that perspective, and I’m really glad you gave that example, because it’s interesting. I often find myself saying to our team, you know, I’ve been doing it this way for 16 years, and I acknowledge that there are some things that I can’t see and that I need you to come in and help me see, because I’m in this one way of working. But to your point, it’s really like a narrative. There’s a narrative to that’s driving it, that if you can shift that could have profound impact. So how does somebody do that for themselves? You know, we’re talking about leaders, storytelling to help shift that narrative and bring people together. What about an individual that wants to shift their own story?
Gavin: I think it’s very rare and very hard. It’s more like an evolutionary thing than a deliberate thing. But I think. I think first of all, you have to. Well, I would use the words curiosity and learning, and my first question would be, is the story you tell yourself that you are a curious person and you are the kind of person that likes to learn? Because if you. Starting at that point, then a lot of other things can unfold for you because you can tell yourself different stories. You can turn around and say, oh, I could learn to be an expert in AI or whatever it is that you want to do. If the story you tell yourself is, I’m not really a curious person and I don’t want to learn, then you’re in a completely different place. I mean, I don’t think that’s true.
Gavin: I think anyone can be. I haven’t really cracked the code on how do you turn someone that is not curious to be curious, but it’s because I think every. I actually think talking about it. I think everyone’s curious about something. If you are not curious about the thing that you do for work, then the thing you do for work is really labor, and it’s not work, and you don’t get any worry about it.
Stacy: Oh, that was like a truth bomb. That is so good. I love that I want to drill into one of the core kind of organizing components of your book, which is these different types of storytelling. I don’t know if I got the phrasing right there, Gavin, but, you know, you’ve. I think it’s five. Is it five different six. And I’d love for you to just kind of give us a high level definition of those. And then I have a specific follow up question I will ask you that I’m really curious about.
Gavin: Sure. Well, I call them genres of storytelling. And I completely stole that from the idea that there’s horror movies and science fiction movies. And so there are different genres. And I was thinking about storytelling in business. And the idea is, well, what are the. And I write about six, but I’m sure there are more genres than that. What are the genres that are the big ones that help drive the business? And one of the points I was trying to make in the book is that storytelling is not the sole. It’s not under the sole domain or sole ownership of marketing. Everyone in the organization needs to tell stories. And actually, the better you do that, the easier everyone’s job is. So I started with value storytelling.
Gavin: And the idea about value storytelling is how do you tell stories about what it is you do so that the people are invested in what you do, that could be employees, that could be literal investors buy into that story. And so in this idea of value storytelling, I discovered this idea of story stocks. And a story stock is where the numbers and the narrative line up. And there’s a lot of evidence to show that even the most professional investors are massively influenced by the story around it. So a good example right now is Nvidia. Five years ago, Nvidia basically made game chips for gamers. Now they’re at the center of the AI gold rush. And that literally is the story. AI is a gold rush who makes money out of the gold rush.
Gavin: It’s the people that sell the picks and shovels who are selling the picks and shovels. Nvidia. So all they need to do in terms of their performance is keep demonstrating through the numbers that they are selling lots of picks and shovels. So every time they do a deal with OpenAI or something where they’re selling chips here, there and everywhere, it just reinforces that story. And if you believe the bigger narrative that AI is gold rush, then you believe that Nvidia is a trillion dollar company. So I think it’s really important that companies and individuals understand their value story. And the value story sits in. This is another nice phrase. I found a narrative constellation. So there’s always stories out there. And where do you fit in that narrative constellation? So that’s the first genre, value storytelling. Second is business is about selling stuff.
Gavin: So you’ve got to build the stuff. And so that’s Product storytelling. How do you build product? And I think a lot of engineers, they use cases and they might user stories, but they don’t use stories in the way that can really make their product come alive. So story, product storytelling is really science fiction. It’s really building something that you haven’t quite. It’s not quite. It’s in the near future, but it’s not quite there yet. Then if you’ve built a product, you can start to build a brand. So brand storytelling, which is I think what people traditionally think about when they think about storytelling and business.
Gavin: And then you go to sales storytelling, which is really the kind of one one how do you have conversations and really good sales storytellers are really good at extracting stories from other people and then doing this kind of mix and match where they add their own love stories and horror stories to move people over the line to sell something. And then I talk about after sales storytelling, leadership storytelling, which we talked about, shared context and culture storytelling because that’s the engine that drives everything once you’re not there or if you’re not around. So six genres.
Stacy: I love the way that you break it up. It’s so useful. And it’s also a really nice way for people to look at their business and kind of diagnose where they need to focus and put some attention. I want to dig into the sales storytelling and one of the things that you mention in your book, and I’m not probably phrasing this correctly, but basically every, I think you said something like every store, every convincing story has elements of hope and fear. Is that right? It was something along those lines, yeah. And so I’m going to give you like a practical situation that’s personal and I’d love to know like how to use this. And I think this will be really useful for our listeners and our viewers.
Stacy: So in our, in my business, our team has been really for a long time really focused on integrating storytelling. A lot of consistency in our marketing. We’ve done a lot of blending of I will really literally just tell stories about things that are happening alongside education. And then toward the end of last year, we got really clear on what we want to accomplish with our marketing, which is connecting with people, getting them on a call so we can meet them, support them and if it’s the right fit, work with them. And so now that we’ve focused on that for half a year, that last portion that I described and years before on the like, broader marketing, now one of the things that I’ve. We kind of are moving down the chain now. So I’m looking at. Okay on that, in that conversation.
Stacy: And so many people have had the same experience. You know, I come into it already knowing all of the history and all of the, you know, all of the stories, all of the everything. Right. And then you have a really short window to download that, connect with that person. And then I’m sure there’s other elements of that process of hopefully if it’s the right fit, working together. And I’m just curious to know, in your experience from sales storytelling, what can people be thinking about? And you could use mine as an example. You can bring up another one when they are having that conversation, not just on that call that they’re on, but also in the proposal, in the follow up, in those elements of this sales process with people.
Gavin: Yeah. So I’ll start with something called the motive triangle, which is what you mentioned. I think hope, fear and reason. And I think it’s really important to understand that you need all three. And most business, I think they start with reason and they end with reason because somebody somewhere has drilled into them, roi, there needs to be a return on investment. So then they’ll go down this path where it’s like, okay, so what are our differentiators? Why are we different from the competition? Roi, roi. It’s all reason and rationale. And humans, I think, are great rationalizers, but we’re not very rational. So you have to pay attention to hope and fear. And hope is. Hope is in terms of a product. It’s. You’re selling something, so you’re selling a writing program. You’re really selling a better version of themselves, your prospective author.
Gavin: The hope is that they can go through this process, whatever it is you’re selling, and at the end they are better. Now, their definition of what better is could be. I’m the next discovered authority of whatever. And there. So that’s hope. And you’ve got. I think a lot of your storytelling probably appeals to that. And especially your case studies about other people doing it appeals to that because they’ll, oh, well, if that person can do it, then so could I. And the, and Stacy has a process. The fear is, how long’s this going to take? Can I really do it? Am I good enough? All of that. And you have a lot of tools that help with that fear along the way.
Gavin: You don’t really, I don’t know if you really address them in your marketing, but hope and fear are really important because those are the two Things that will make people decide to go. Hope is a slower pull, but it’s more enduring. Fear is a quick pull and it’s more fleeting, but you need both. And by the way, you also need reason, because even if you’re. As an individual, if I decide I’m going to spend a pot of money and it’s just me, I have to explain it to my significant other that I’m doing this. So I’m not going to say hope and fear, probably even to my significant other. I’m going to give reason, so I’m going to give the roi. So you need all three.
Gavin: And I think the art of it is that most of the printed materials or the decks that you show are all reason. But how is the conversation around hope and fear? And that’s where horror stories and love stories come in. Horror stories are. Yeah, there was someone that tried that the way you’re going to do it, and this happened and it wasn’t so good. And the love story is someone tried it the way we’re doing it. And look at all this great stuff that happened.
Stacy: Yeah. It’s interesting because I think inherently, I naturally reject the fear piece because I’ve always. You never want to feel like you’re manipulating somebody in any way. I’ve always tried to approach those conversations with, I’m here to support you, whatever path that is. But to your point, those are also true. Right. Like, I could tell a story about actually many people who have gone different routes and come back like a year later having spent all this money, and now they’re actually, like, further back than they were, you know, those types of stories that you could tell.
Gavin: Well, I think in your space, there’s quite a lot of fear. There’s the amount, and it’s all around time and wasted resource. And is it really good? Because there are so many people. I mean, I get. It’s funny how poor the research is because now I’m actually published. I’ve still got people saying, writing me emails on LinkedIn and messages saying, would you like to publish your first book?
Stacy: Oh, I get those too, Gavin.
Gavin: Yeah, yeah.
Stacy: Have you ever thought about writing a book, Stacy? Well, yes, in fact, I have.
Gavin: So. Yeah. So there’s so much out there. And the fear, I think, is, well, you do need help to get better at anything, to be good at anything. It makes sense to work with people. And the question is, who are the right people for you? And there is so much out there. And the fear is, do I pick the wrong person? Do I pick Someone that’s really, you know, the used car salesman of foot writing and the, you know. Or I see. So you’ve got to. The fear is also. This is going to take a lot longer than I thought than. I think the fear is. I can’t do that. The fear is. The fear might be. Stacy has a very specific way of doing it and I’m much more free flowing and flexible. Right.
Gavin: So there’s going to be all sorts of hopes and fears in the whole conversation and you’ve got to navigate those. Those things. But also I think every sales conversation, if you. There’s no company in the world that sells everything to everyone. So it’s a weeding out process. I know salespeople are incented to sell to the person in front of them whatever it is they’ve got, but it’s essentially a better conversation if you can figure out what is they really need and have you got it. And you’ll have a better conversation if you maybe walk away from a few.
Stacy: Yeah, I love your perspective on that because I also think that when you storytell, you’re communicating in a way that other people can take in and understand. And I’m sure this is not unique to my industry. I’m sure this is true in yours as well. A lot of times when people are speaking with somebody like you or like me, they’re. They’re new, so they. They actually really need things to be accessible and clear and broken down for them. And it’s actually a more. I think it’s actually a more respectful way to communicate in some ways because then they feel like they can kind of follow along and be in conversation with you rather than you’re just kind of like spouting information at them. I’d love to switch gears a little bit and talk about your book.
Stacy: I held it up at the beginning, but I’ll hold it up again. So story business. It’s such a cool book, Gavin. I also. All of the neat illustrations and there’s just so much complexity to this in the production of it. So I really enjoyed getting to see it in real life and seeing all of the amazing work that you put into it. I would love for you to share because we have so many aspiring authors, published authors that listen to this podcast and watch this on YouTube. Can you share a little bit about your writing process? And specifically I would love to hear about any challenges you faced and how you overcame them.
Gavin: Sure. Well, I think I started writing this book. It depends when you define the start line, but I would Say I started writing this book about seven years ago and probably about three years ago. And. And what do I mean by starter writing that was really writing generally with the overview of there is a book coming, I don’t know exactly what it is. I know roughly the space it is. I didn’t even have the title or the angle. I knew I didn’t. I knew a few things to be true. I knew my clients, the world communicates to each other in PowerPoint. But I didn’t want it to be a book about PowerPoint. I wanted it to be slightly different. I knew it’s about storytelling, I think.
Gavin: So I think probably, maybe six months before I recontacted you and I got onto your program, I had a title and a first line. It just. And a lot of my process is a weird process because it’s. I’ll go to bed thinking about it and then I’ll wake up with answer. And I usually have a notepad by my bed. And so one day I woke up with the title story business. It’s gone through a lot of subtitles. And then I had the first line, which was the first stories were wild. And I knew then kind of how I wanted to open it. And then I went. Your program was really good, except I couldn’t keep up with the pace of the program because I am fairly slow.
Gavin: And I also think one of the things that was difficult for me, challenging for me, is I recognize the truth of you need an outline. And once you have the outline, it works. But it took me probably, I had to write half the book before I figured out what the outline really was. I mean, I kind of did a fake outline for you, which helped me because I knew it was an outline, that it wasn’t going to survive. But it kind of got me going. So I think, yeah, I like, I love the process of actual writing. And one of the best tips I read or heard about was this kind of Stephen King thing where you separate the writing from the editing.
Gavin: Because I think a lot of times I have a tendency, I think most people do, to get really stuck because they try and write and edit at the same time. And once I learn to separate the blah, blah, I’m writing something. My first draft has. It’ll have half a sentence, then slash, something about something. And I’ll literally write something about something in it. And then I’ll just keep going because if I can do that, then I’ve got this kind of vomit draft going. And then I really like wordsmithing. It to. There’s lots of parts in the book where. And I think I recognize this now with other authors where I just. I’m smiling to myself when I’m writing that line or I think that’s hilarious. Now whether anyone else thinks it’s hilarious is. It’s immaterial. That’s the kind of thing that keeps me going.
Gavin: So I love that I got to the end of that process. Robin really helped me as well. And then I had a draft of about. And I didn’t even know at that point was I going to go to a, you know, a big publisher, try and go that route, was I going to try and publish myself? I didn’t know. And everyone I spoke to had a different answer to that question, honestly. And it was basically, you should definitely do what I did. That’s their answer. So I ended up with a book that was a first draft that was probably about 78,000 words. It was big. And it was, I think partly that was because I enjoyed that process so much. But then I also knew, I knew that I needed someone a little bit cruel to help me with the developmental edit.
Gavin: And I found this is not that they are cruel, that’s the wrong word. But Arthur Pine was the publisher and this, Saya was, is the kind of creative force behind that company. And before I was introduced with her to her, I was told that this is someone that really cares about every little detail on the book. And, and I thought that sounds like my kind of person. Because if I can find someone that cares more than me, then I can relax a little bit about that. And Amy was my editor and she was really good actually taking me through that process. But I mean my developmental edit came back. It was an 18 page note and I think it was something like there were thousands of redline comments in the thing.
Gavin: It was a lot to work through, but I actually enjoyed the process of working through that because she’d given me another structure on top of my first draft that I could then work through. So the first phase writing, loved it. Second phase editing, it was okay, not so much promotion, which is the last phase of the book. Absolutely hate it, don’t love it at all. But I come on things like this to talk about it.
Stacy: It can be a tricky part for a lot of authors is that next stage. And it’s ongoing, right. You really have to integrate it into all of your flow of marketing and conversations. And I think one of the things that’s worked really well for the authors that I work with is figuring out what they do enjoy and just really leaning into that. So some people love going on podcasts, so they really lean hard on that. Some hate it and they would rather do this other thing. Speaking. Some people love to speak. That’s an amazing way to get out and share your book and integrate it even into your speaking package. I love that you shared about your outline because I’m sure that this will resonate with a lot of people. And, you know, everybody is unique and different and I would.
Stacy: In how they approach the book writing process. I think one thing about you. Well, a couple things. One is you’re already a very highly creative person, and highly creative people sometimes have a little bit of a different route that they need to take to kind of construct and uncover what they need to construct and uncover. Another thing that I wanted to point out, I think that’s a really nice point of study for anybody who picks up your book story business is you have a very strong voice and you even say in the beginning of the book that, like, I think you said something like making your teachers cringe or something with the grammar, which actually, it’s perfect. I haven’t noticed any typos or weird grammar. But you know, you really love short sentences and you’re funny, and it’s very.
Stacy: There’s a playfulness to it that I think is a really nice point of study for aspiring authors, especially those who have been through, like, the corporate brainwashing of their. Of their writing. And I just thought it was very nicely done and wanted to point that out to you, Gavin. I really enjoyed that aspect of your writing.
Gavin: Thank you. I mean, I like, I say, I think that’s me. I have to write something that amuses me. And so I’m here giggling away when I’m writing something they do that’s funny. And I don’t know if it passes. But I also, I think because I chose the subject, I chose story business. If I’d written a finance book, I think the bar would have been a lot lower in how well written it had to be.
Stacy: Oh, yeah, 100%. You really set yourself up for, like, a high bar in how you wrote it. So speaking of books, one of the things that I ask every guest that comes on is to share about a book. So I would love to know from you what is one book that has profoundly impacted your life that you could share with our listeners and viewers?
Gavin: I’m very disappointed that you’re narrowing it down to one book. I’ll give some honorable mentions so an honorable mention is A Gentleman in Moscow, I think is the title, which is an amortal book which is about. It’s fiction. It’s about a Russian peer or lord who basically gets caught up in the Revolution in 1917. And he’s under house arrest in a hotel. And the book follows him for, I think, basically his whole adult life. So what’s amazing to me about that book is it’s so well written. He never goes out of the hotel. Nothing really happens except everything around him. And it’s just so engrossing. It’s a great. I think Amortells is brilliant. But I think the book I would pick out is Gates of Fire by Steven Pressfield. So this is another fiction, but to me it’s really about leadership and people.
Gavin: So it’s. It’s the story of the battle of thermopylae with the 300 Spartans. And it came out around the same time the movie, I think came out 300. But it’s completely different from the. From the movie. It’s based on the same event, but it’s completely different. It’s told from the point of view. It’s told after the battle where a slave of the Spartan king Leonidas is. Is captured and he is told. It’s a little bit like, I guess, Scheherazade because he’s telling the Persian king why the Spartans were the way they were and why they were so fierce as an opponent and as a warrior race. And he was talking about the whole history of Sparta and how it led up to it and everything else. It’s a. It’s a brilliantly written book. It’s full of leadership nuggets.
Gavin: I talked earlier about leadership is about choices and also about shared context, storytelling. It’s just a brilliant book and I read it years ago and I read it every four or five years.
Stacy: Gates of Fire sounds fantastic. We’ll be sure to link to that in our show Notes for listeners and for viewers. And Gavin, this has been such a rich conversation and I feel like I got some coaching also today. So I really appreciate that. Where can our listeners and viewers learn more about you? Maybe you could share a little bit about how they could work with you and where they can find your book.
Gavin: Sure. The book is available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, all those things. Story business. You can also go to the website Story Business dot Com. I’m the CEO of Fast Forward and Fast Forward. We’re a company that really specializes in leadership and storytelling to help large firms drive change. You can find us at fastforward.com you can also connect with me on LinkedIn. I’ll give you all those details so you can put them in the show notes.
Stacy: Yeah, we will definitely drop that in so anybody can get in touch with you and of course find your books. So we’ll be sure to include all of those links in the show notes. Gavin, thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate your time.
Gavin: Thank you for having me. It was too long for this to happen, but it’s a great chat.
Stacy: Yes. And thank you. Thank you so much for being here, Gavin. And thank you to you, our listeners and viewers, for being with us. I really appreciate your time. I know you got a ton of value out of today and since you’re still listening or watching, you must have really loved this content conversation. So be sure that you are subscribed or that you’re following so that you will get more of these incredible conversations and you won’t miss them. And if you have a moment right now to rate and review or leave a comment if you’re on YouTube, I would really appreciate it because it helps me reach more people with the message of living a life that’s not just better, but beyond better.
Stacy: I always have to also thank Rita Domingues as for her production of this podcast because without her, it would just sit in my computer and never see your eye. Your eyes would never see it, your ears would never hear it. She is the reason everything happens and I am grateful and I will be back with you before you know it.
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