Season 2 Episode 6 - Building a Story Brand with Amy Kendall

 In this episode of The Transition Table, Diane sits down with Amy Kendall, founder of Hello Story, a marketing, messaging, and copywriting agency. Amy walks through the StoryBrand framework — developed by Donald Miller — and how business owners can use it to craft clearer, more compelling messaging. The conversation covers why customers should be positioned as the hero (not the business), how to identify the right ideal client and understand their emotional pain points, and how building a brand narrative around a guide-and-character structure helps businesses become more memorable and effective in the marketplace. Amy also shares practical tips for mining customer reviews and asking deeper questions to uncover what truly motivates your audience. The episode wraps with a discussion on why clarity is the ultimate competitive advantage — and why getting outside help often makes all the difference. 

You can reach Amy here:

email: amy@hirehellostory.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amykendall-hellostory/

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello everyone and welcome back to the transition table. Continuing on our marketing thread, today I am thrilled to have Amy Kendall of Hello Story here today to talk to us about the story brand process, understanding your customers, and how to better relate to them as you build your business and create something that will provide a prospective buyer or people that you work with who might take over your business with a strong foundation on understanding not only your product and your business, but also who are your key customers. So, Amy, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and take it away?

SPEAKER_01 0:43

Perfect. First, thank you so much for having me, Deion. I really appreciate the opportunity to chat with you today. Um, and like you said, my company is Hello Story. We are a marketing, messaging, and copywriting agency. We focus on helping businesses find the words that they need to get customers to buy. So, like you talked about, um, a lot of this comes down to knowing who your customer is and understanding what it is that they're looking for so that then you can be positioned as the solution that they're looking for. Um, I am a story brand certified guide. Um, so if you're familiar with Storybrand and Donald Miller, that's the framework that we'll be kind of referencing today, just with the vocabulary and stuff like that. If you're not familiar, I'd encourage you to go look him up on YouTube. He has tons of content there. Um, and it's a great way to think about how figuring out your messaging and how you can you know share what you're doing with with your audience and connect with them quickly.

SPEAKER_00 1:34

And his book is great.

SPEAKER_01 1:35

Yes, he has many. Building a story brand is a great place to start.

SPEAKER_00 1:39

Yes, that was the one I was thinking of. So talk a little bit more about Story Brand and Okay, okay.

SPEAKER_01 1:47

So Story Brand is really if you've been doing marketing for any amount of time, anyone who um you mentioned Story Brand to, they will agree that it's an excellent framework because it's not earth-shattering, it's not rocket science. That's what I love about it. What it is is it takes all of the things that as marketers we rely on as our best practices and our principles and puts them into a repeatable framework that we can use to build an effective and compelling brand story to talk about our businesses as they're trying to connect with clients. So the basic framework is that you have a character, which is your customer, who has a problem, and then they made a guide, and the guide is your business, and you have a plan that encourages someone to take action so you can call them to action, and then so they can achieve success and avoid failure in their life. Now, a lot of times what I've seen is that brands try to play the hero in the story that they're telling, and this is a mistake because truly we're not the character in this story. Our customer needs to be the hero, and then as a brand, we need to be positioned as a guide so that we can then help the customer to gain what it is they're seeking in their life. So the story brand framework makes it easier to think about the different pieces of what you're trying to say in a way that then can be formed into a story and shared effectively. Stories are important because our brains as humans, we've been programmed to understand and look for stories for thousands of years. It's how we remember things better. And so by using the power of story as you build your business, it helps your message be more memorable. It helps people more quickly understand what it is that you're offering them. And quite frankly, the businesses that can be understood and remembered, those are the ones that get the that win in the marketplace. And so that's really what we're after, and that's why we use uh a story framework as we're building those narratives.

SPEAKER_00 3:35

I agree. And as you know, I use storytelling a lot in talking about my why. But I think it would also be helpful to understand that when you're building a story brand, how do you create the character in such a way that even though you're the guide, that the guide isn't you, Amy, but the business, so that it's something that can help an owner maybe not be as involved in the day-to-day.

SPEAKER_01 4:07

Yeah, I think it really comes down to what I work through with clients when we are trying to figure out their brand message is really understanding who is that character that we're talking to. This is the basics of figuring out your ideal client profile of, you know, what, where are they? Where can we find them demographically, psychographically, and then leaning into as well, what problem are they looking to solve as it relates to your product or service? And how does that problem make them feel? And why is it wrong that they have to struggle with that problem? When we really understand those things, it makes it a lot easier to then craft a solution offered by the organization as a whole, not necessarily just the individual owner that speaks to that solution, right? Like it becomes more about um, I'm trying to think of a good example that I can share. Let's just use Exit Factor as our example, right? So for Exit Factor, you guys are helping these business owners who are struggling with burnout or exhaustion, or they're just not sure what they're supposed to do. They're worried that it's not gonna be as valuable, they're not gonna get the value out of their business, right? And then we can create the solution. You as the guide, you bring experience, art brings experience, exit factor has all these resources that we're bringing in, and it's that hole that we then craft as the solution and the answer to the problem that they're facing.

SPEAKER_00 5:31

Perfect. That sounds exactly like a great example, and thank you for using our business. And you know, we also in Utah we have two additional consultants that are fabulous. So the business is not reliant on me as Dion, but Exit Factor provides those resources at different levels, tailored to exactly what the client needs.

SPEAKER_01 5:55

Well, and even just like your Vortex framework, right? Like that's something that as a guide collectively, Exit Factor has to offer that you can teach as an individual, but you don't necessarily have, you didn't bring that with you. That was something that came with Exit Factor. So all of those things together then become the the guide who can help the business owner go from this overwhelmed, exhausted, unsure state to having a successful exit that allows them to achieve the life that they have been working towards this whole time.

SPEAKER_00 6:28

Well, thanks for the sales. That was great. And I guess the last question I'd like to ask you is what are some good questions to ask yourself as a business owner with your leadership team as to who that hero or the main character is. And how do you figure out how to align that with the perspective client who is the hero in the story?

SPEAKER_01 7:00

Yeah, so I think first off, I will say that getting building this narrative, building this brand message is actually very tricky to do for yourselves. And I feel this because I try to work on my own stuff and it is hard. So I appreciate very much that having an outside set of eyes, having an expert to help you walk through this process can be very, very um helpful and save you a lot of time and effort, but it can also just help notice things that you may not be able to notice yourself because you're so close to the process, right? But and this is also why it's good to have like a leadership team that you're working through this with because you can kind of bounce ideas off of each other. Um so the things that you want to think through is who are we serving? Like, are we serving the right person right now? And then really dial in who is that person that we're serving, right? And ask what question or what problem are we solving for them. A good way to do this is you can go back into like your customer reviews. A lot of times people will say, Oh, I was struggling with this and these they helped me with this, or go into your port tickets or things like that, see what people are coming back with, identify some of those patterns and say, Oh, well, if they keep saying this is the problem they have, then this is we can probably rely that this is a problem that we're solving for them. Um, and sometimes they'll talk about it at a very granular level, so you'll need to kind of back it up a few steps, right? So take a higher level view of it. But there's different ways that you can you can ask or you can kind of mine your data to discover those. The other thing that I encourage people to do is not just identify, like, what is the actual nuts and bolts thing that's keeping me from, you know, I'm I'm here, I want to get here, what's the problem that's keeping me? It's not just that, it's also how your customer is feeling about that problem. It's really understand that we are really important that we're able to understand that so that we can emotionally connect the message to them. Um, so for example, if I if I am talking to a lawn care company because I want my grass to be taken care of, I might be, you know, hey, I just don't want to do this on Saturday, right? So that's one level of the problem. But the next level of the problem is I'm frustrated because I would rather be at my daughter's lacrosse game watching her, but I feel like I have to, you know, take care of the yard because I've got to keep up with the neighbors, right? There's a couple different emotions in there. There's the frustration, there's also the embarrassment, there's like, there's all kinds of different things that play into that. And understanding how they're feeling about that allows you to build messaging that is gonna connect better with them and that they're going to more quickly um be able to resonate with and then say, Oh, these guys get me. This is who I want to work with.

SPEAKER_00 9:48

Yes. I mean, uh, we use that a lot with our um clients. One of my favorite things to do is the five whys. Right? Yeah, you just dig deeper and deeper. I don't wanna I don't want to mend my lawn. Why? I want to be at my daughter's lacrosse game. Why why is your lawn important if you want to be at your daughter's lacrosse game? I want my yard to look nice.

SPEAKER_01 10:15

Why? Because my neighbor is a jerk. Yes, all of that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:22

So but that those are really good uh tidbits. And uh by the way, in the interest of full disclosure, I have worked with Amy. Amy's been very helpful to us in our business, and I will make sure that we include all of your contact information in the show notes. Any last final words uh that you think would be helpful for people.

SPEAKER_01 10:46

So I would just say I would encourage all businesses that the ones, the businesses that really win are those who are able to get as clear as possible on what they do. You need to own a problem and you need to be able to articulate what that problem is very clearly and concisely so that people can remember you and you can own kind of that space in their brain so that when they have that problem, they think of you. Um time after time, the businesses that win are those who are the most clear. And so do the work to figure out how you can be more clear and how you're talking about your business. Like Dion said, building a story brand, that book is an excellent place to start. There's lots of content from Donald Miller online as well. You're also welcome to follow me. I I put out videos on LinkedIn that frequently talk about how do you do this. Um, so there's tons of resources out there, but it's one of those processes that it's really easy to consume a lot of information on and then not actually take the step to do the work because the work is hard. So I encourage people to actually take the time to do that. And if you feel like you're banging your head into a wall, find somebody to help you because having those outside, that outside perspective, just someone who's removed from being in the day-to-day of the business with you can be hugely helpful in helping you make the big strides forward because it's someone who's not, you know, steeped in the inside language that you're used to using and all of those things, and can can really kind of step outside of that, look at it with the customer's perspective and help you figure out what are those pieces that really are most important.

SPEAKER_00 12:20

That's great. Thank you so much for your time today, Amy. And we will be back soon with another episode of the transition table.