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Last week I was catching up on some shows on This Week in Startups and in the one show a studio guest mentioned that having a story behind the startup is important, he didn’t elaborate much and if I recall correctly, he merely mentioned it in a sentence, but I didn’t hear only a sentence, I heard an entire discussion and was intrigued to write about what came to my mind.

So I’m no expert in the startup world and I wanted to get that out and about, but what I do do is read a lot and I love entrepreneurship, so I do feel that my opinion is built on relevant material at least.

Right, a story behind a company – I think in every entrepreneur’s life they’ll attend a conference or an industry event in which they’ll meet other people, in fact, I doubt any entrepreneur wouldn’t, it’s one of the best ways to build contacts. Whilst you’re at an event you’re more than likely going to ask someone what they do and you’ll no doubt be asked to tell them what you do. Now if someone asked me, what do you do, I would more than likely tell them that I do digital marketing and search engine optimization. Do you think they’ll remember me? Possibly, but I highly doubt that everyone will, unless I slip them a business card (which I still don’t think works too well if a person’s just meeting people, the business card goes into a wallet and dies). Imagine I was asked what I do and instead of saying digital marketing and then going onto explain what SEO is (haha, trust me, it happens over and over), I instead tell them a story, a story about myself and how I started the company, or a catchy story that explains what SEO is, something different and unique, something that might increase the chances of that person remembering you, and most importantly, the service you offer – See, you want your name to be associated with a service and remembered, that’s one of the biggest things I’ve worked on for many years when it comes to “Christopher Mills”, “iMod Blog” and “SEO” – I like to categorize it as personal branding, and to be honest, it’s changed my entire life, but that’s a story (see what I did there) for another day.

Talking about SEO and how to get people to remember it, I can tell you a little trick that I do from time to time which appears to work well; it’s by no means a wow story, but it’s a little more than just talking about search engine results pages (yawn). About a month ago I was getting my tires replaced at Tiger Wheel and Tyre, and a gentleman walked over, introduced himself and asked if the SEO on my license plate stands for Search Engine Optimization to which I confirmed his guess. He then went on to ask me what is was exactly and what I did (and asked for him to do so in one sentence). Instead of talking about myself, I asked the gentleman what he did, this moved the conversation back over to him and he told me about his business in a sentence, let’s say he said, “I am a plumber”. I then went on to say something like, “SEO is the practice of having people find your website in Google when they’re searching. Wouldn’t it be awesome if a person went to Google and searched for “Plumber Cape Town” and your website appeared right up top?” The man paused for a second and said, “That would get me a lot of leads” to which I smiled and told him that that is exactly what I do and that I was put here on earth to make other people money.. he laughed and smiled. Long story short, I received an email from him a couple days later, he’d looked for me online (remembered my name) and said that he would like to discuss SEO with me in March.

It’s not an amazing analogy or story, but the point I’m stressing is that I interacted, and I used his knowledge to point a point across that is otherwise often misunderstood. No point giving an SEO example about development software to someone who might not have a clue – but it really was the interaction that made him remember what SEO was as well as remember my name, I know because I asked him – I like to close loops :)

There are companies with really awesome stories and such, a great example was spoken about on the KISSmetrics blog, where they tell a story about a company called 52 Teas, here’s the story:

“52 Teas is just another tea brewing company, until you realize that each week, they brew a completely new tea.

With teas such as the Red Hot Cinnamon Chai Tea, the Oatmeal Raisin Cookie Black Tea, and the Cranberry Black Tea, 52Teas is telling a unique story to the hard core tea connoisseur.

One of the most impressive parts about the story that 52Teas tells is that they let their customer participate. They brew new teas based on suggestions they get from Twitter and emails.

Most businesses aren’t going to be able to change their product every week to accommodate the taste of their customers. However, if an industry as old as tea brewing can have a new twist, then chances are your company can as well.”

Think about that, “We make tea flavours” compared to “We make tea flavours based on what people suggest on Twitter” – one has a much higher chance of being remembered than the other, I bet you can guess which one.

So that’s what I wanted to share with you tonight, hopefully it’ll inspire you to speak differently next time you’re asked what you do and perhaps it’ll even lead you to more business and I can once again say I was sent to earth to make other people money ;)