Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
Welcome to the Victory Show.
[00:00:14] Speaker B: Hey Victors, welcome to this episode of the Victory Show. If this is the first time you're joining us, I'm Rachel League with Bestseller By Design. Our founder Travis Cody is the best selling author of 16 books and we've had the privilege of helping hundreds of business consultants, founders and entrepreneurs write and publish their own best selling books as well. Through that journey, we've discovered a fascinating pattern most businesses really struggle to break past the seven figure revenue mark. On this show, I sit down with some of the world's most successful CEOs, leaders and business owners to uncover the strategies they used to scale way past that mark so you can do the same. So get ready for some deep insights and actionable takeaways that you can implement in your life and business. Starting now. Today's guest is Ed Lyons, a master of strategic storytelling and a driving force behind Woden, the Philadelphia based firm helping purposeful companies become essential brands. As managing partner since 2014, it has led the development of Storykernel, Woden's proprietary framework that uncovers what makes a business different and distills it into strategic narratives that move prospects through the funnel and turn customers into evangelists. With more than a decade of experience transforming startup and established companies alike, Ed works directly with founders, CEOs and revenue leaders to define why their brand matters and how to communicate that in a way that inspires loyalty and drives growth. His work is grounded in the belief that story isn't just a way to explain strategy, it is the strategy beyond. Woden has held executive roles across tech, real estate and media. He served as Chief Revenue Officer at Philadelphia Weekly where he led a reader supported digital pivot and revenue transformation. Ed is also the co author of Story Is the A Guide for Turning Company Purpose into Market Leadership and a sought after speaker on brand narrative positioning and the psychology of customer decision making. Today I'm excited to dig into how Ed grew his storytelling business to help founders clarify their message, stand out in noisy markets, and build brands our customers can't live without. Ed, welcome to the show.
[00:02:10] Speaker A: Thanks for having me.
[00:02:11] Speaker B: It's great to have you on the show. Tell us the origin. How did you, in your early career in media and revenue leadership, decide then to go on to found Woden? And why is storytelling the vehicle that you chose to scale with?
[00:02:24] Speaker A: Yeah, great question. I feel like everything in entrepreneurship is just failing forward, right? So you know, my career really started in college with being just an atrocious student. You know, I went to college, I really didn't know what I wanted to do. But I went to Boston University, bounced around a couple different majors. Initially, I was like an English major. I was going to be an English teacher. I hated that.
The economics. I was going to be an attorney, which my parents were very excited about. But I hated that. Switched to finance, Hated that. And as I'm kind of like casting about for what I want to do with my life, fellow that I had known from growing up was living in southern New Jersey just outside of Philadelphia, and was starting a community newspaper company and said, hey, you should come down and you should do this with me. So, as we all know, 2005, community newspapers, big growth industry.
And so I'm like, yeah, this will be great when I lose. Who cares? I can always go back to college. You know, literally went into the classifieds of the Boston Phoenix, bought a Saab 900 for $500, put everything I owned in the back of it, and drove to Philadelphia. And I had been here ever since. And so, you know, this newspaper company that we built, really great company, grew up to 14 newspapers eventually, but I think also gave me maybe a little bit of a sort of false understanding of what was hard and what was easy about entrepreneurship. So we had a really good founding team, so never really had to kind of build that team of people. It was pretty tight, and the product was just great. Like, we had really kind of merged existing models in newspaper business. Kind of this idea of like a shopper, the idea of like a good community news weekly company grew pretty successfully, endured the Great Recession, which was, of course, atrocious, but really kind of like the messaging for that business came to us pretty easy. So we built the company, grew the company, and eventually sold it. And our next kind of venture, we went into telecom. Another buddy of ours had bought a DSL Internet service provider out of bankruptcy in Columbia, South Carolina, and eventually sort of moved that business into doing bulk telecom for student housing. And again, same kind of strengths as the first business. Great team, great product. But getting traction was so much more difficult. You know, get in front of our kind of prospects who were these big sort of publicly traded real estate companies and really could not get them to see our value the way that we did. And just I had been totally blind to this as a problem. It's just not something I dealt with in my first business and really couldn't figure out, like, how do you get other people to understand the potential in our business that we do in a space that's very commodified and we're kind of Superficially, the services everyone provides are the same.
We tried to hire a couple of people to help us with this. Really couldn't kind of land on a good solution. So if you're listening to this and you're an entrepreneur, you know that if you can't throw money at a problem in your business, you've got to solve it yourself. So we went through a process of really kind of developing our narrative into this company and really became sort of the catalyst for how we grew. We shifted the messaging away from our product, really started telling this sort of customer centric story of change. And what we saw when we did that was the pricing objections kind of fell away. The company really took off. And I always had this kind of moment of clarity, like, holy shit. We didn't change anything about this company except the story we were telling. And it was the difference between kind of barely being able to make payroll and ultimately really kind of being pretty successful. And so when we sold that company, kind of came out of that and said, like, you know what, like, that was exciting. That was fun.
I would've paid someone a bunch of money to solve this for me. Like, that's what I want to do next. And as you pointed out, for the last 10 years or so, that's been the journey that we've been on here. Would incredible.
[00:05:53] Speaker B: I mean, it's so great to have had that, you know, real proof point of seeing it happen before your own eyes and then almost says that was the prototype or the blueprint for then starting Woden, because you had that, that evidence. So tell us, what did the early days at Woden look like and how did you land your first few clients?
[00:06:10] Speaker A: Yeah, two different questions. So, you know, I'm, you know, this sounds kind of like crass, but I think gives probably a perspective to how I at least think about growing a company. Like, until you have people paying you, you don't have a business. Like, you just have an idea. And I think you really have to get validation from the market that what you've got, people are willing to actually fork over cash and pay for. So, you know, when we started the company, you know, we had no clients, obviously, we had no office. And I lived in Philadelphia at the time and I would literally get up every morning. We knew we wanted to do this kind of story driven work for people. I wrote this is before the days of like having automated cold email, right? This is 11 years ago. So none of this stuff existed at the time. And I had written in word a bunch of like email templates I would get up every morning, I would make a pot of coffee, I would sit down at my desk and I would literally go through every single Craigslist in America. And I would look for every company that was hiring back when people use Craigslist to hire people. And I would go through every Craigslist in America. I would take every person who was hiring for a marketing job and I would cold email them through Craigslist, basically saying, don't hire someone, hire us. I mean it was like brutal. I mean it was literally like get up every day at one point, just quick aside, you know, maybe like three or four weeks into this and I was talking to my mother and I said, yeah, I don't know what's going on. I said, every day around like 4:30, I'm having these just like crushing panic attacks. And she's like, well, totally your day. And I go through and she's like, yeah, you're drinking 16 cups of coffee every morning before like 11:00am like, no shit. And I'm like, oh, good. Points.
For those who know me, my legendary coffee consumption is actually a fraction of what it was at one point in my life. But so we do this and you know, get a couple bites. And I remember our first client was this company leads today. They were like a tech startup out of Colorado. A guy would only do the call at like 8:30 at night or something. And you know, we got on the phone, we had no product to pitch him. We know nothing. And like just like don't even know how insight we convinced this guy to hire us. But you know, that was whatever it was. Right. Four grand a month, which was enough to sort of give you, give you a little toehold and get you started and you know, kind of grew from there. And we've gone through obviously a bunch of pivots since then, which I'm sure we can talk about. But I think to me it's like, how do you start? To some extent, it's like just guile and effort. Like you just have to get people to start paying you and then that. You know, as long as you've got enough money to stay open, the Runway is infinite. Right. It gives you all the time in the world. You need to figure it out. But I think way too many people spend too much time in stealth or figuring out their product.
Just get it into the market and see what people say. And you'll kind of figure it out as you go.
[00:08:52] Speaker B: Absolutely. So, okay, you get them on a 4K retainer per month. So it's not a project based. You're going to be a constant resource for them. What kinds of things? If you can recall or even just in the early days, if not for that company specifically, were you offering them that would be on a consistent basis versus one off project?
[00:09:09] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, it was a terrible business, right?
Again, this is part of why you want to get things into the market. Because everyone thinks when they start their company that they've got it figured out. But if you talk to anyone that's been in business for any period of time, you know that like the list of things you fuck up versus the list of things you get. Right. Is very heavily skewed towards the former. So we started the company, it was like story driven digital marketing. And yes, we were doing kind of what we expect, you know, email landing pages, ads, but we were bad at it, you know, so we grew the company.
You know, I've always been in sales, a pretty good seller. And we got the company like relatively quickly, I'll say within like maybe two years, up to about a million in revenue. But we were experiencing just enormous amounts of churn in the business, you know, so you go out, you'd win a new account, someone else would turn around and say, yeah, you guys suck at this. And so we really just couldn't kind of get the company, got to that first plateau, but couldn't get out to the growth mode. The big thing we were seeing though was like our team wasn't happy, right? So the work we're doing, it's not fulfilling. Again, this is early 2000s. This is the peak of like how many likes did I get? And you're like chasing type of engagement. How many people open my email, which we now know doesn't even matter, right. And so, you know, you're really just like in this constant rat race against metrics that don't matter. Customers who are never happy don't appreciate what you're doing for them. And so what we really kind of, as we were offboarding these clients realized was the feedback we got was essentially, we suck at these ongoing services. But at the beginning of the project, when you guys built out our story, which we had initially just developed frankly as like a honeypot to pull people in. They're like, that was really actually pretty cool. We probably would have paid you guys a lot of money just to really do that more thoughtfully.
It was a great focusing exercise for us. And I think anytime again, you're growing something and you can figure out what people are willing to pay you for it's. A good sort of indication that that's the direction you ought to lean in. And so from there, you know, really kind of took our business out of that digital marketing side, which is a whole different story that you've heard, and then kind of moved into this world that we're in today, which is fundamentally different, maybe six years ago, you know, way different than where we started. And it really has been, I think, what unlocked, I think the potential that was probably inside the company all along that really needed to, to get focused on, to really kind of achieve.
[00:11:27] Speaker B: Tell us a little bit about. You mentioned team members having a variety of feelings about the early days. What did the team look like and how did that evolve as you're moving into that more successful scaling motion?
[00:11:39] Speaker A: It's a great question. So we hired, you know, early on, a lot of digital marketers, a lot of creatives, much of the stuff we were doing. And I think people liked the concept of the work. What I'm about to describe, I think I've heard from some other kind of people that have historically owned like digital agencies. They like the work. It just burns people out. Right. It's not, it's very volume based. It's not super strategic. Right. The clients are always, I guess we'll charitably call them demanding. And so, which I don't mind, I'm not a demanding client. Our current clients are exceptionally demanding as well, but demanding in like a different way. Um, and so, you know, but then when we got to this point where we really weren't growing, I was really trying to nudge the team towards where I wanted us to go. So I had sort of understood that the story was where we needed to lean into.
We really had to start kind of building out our own methodology around that and initially had kind of built out one more product we called the Story Guide, which is really going to be the kind of tool for how people stood this, this message up inside their organization. And we sold a couple of them. I think I sold two or three of them early on. I could not get the team to like double down on that. You know, you come in, you'd say, this is our future, this is where we're going. But you know, people aren't stupid. They know what's paying their salary, right. So they kind of look at it like, yeah, we've sold $25,000 of these things and we do a million a year in revenue with this thing. I'm going to do this thing and you know, maybe this is a failing for me. As a leader, but how much I talked about the vision, just couldn't. Couldn't do it. And so, you know, if you're trying to move your company in a direction, you can't get people to kind of get ready to go. And you pick up like, an appreciation for why Cortez burned the boats when they got to the new world. And so I said, okay, like, we gotta give people just one path to walk here. And I didn't tell anybody at the company. And I went out and sort of solicited other digital agencies in Philadelphia to buy business from us and ended up working on a deal with someone, sold our book, came back to the office, called an all hands meeting. Sort of guy went to our little conference room at the time and said, guys, great news. I was excited. I tell people. I was genuinely, this is thriller. Got some cash in the bank. We've got this new direction. I can see the future. I can see where we're going. I was psyched. And so I was like, very in my mind, positive meeting. Here's what we're going to do. No more digital marketing. No more Instagram, no more Facebook. This is where we're going to head. Uh, and everyone quit except for one person. They were all like, yeah, this is great, but not what we signed up to do. Like, we want to be in this marketing world, not in this sort of strategy world. And so you're on your own. The good news is our. Our Runway extended meaningfully, you know, overnight, because no one was there anymore. Really kind of realized, like, all right, we gotta move into this kind of new direction for where we want to go. And. But it kind of gave us this real fresh start. I mean, so the same company in terms of name, you know, brand, but that was where we pivoted entirely into the kind of world that we live in now, which is this idea of the strategic narrative. Right. So how do you really, number one, get focused in on that core story? At the center of the brand story kernel, as you already mentioned, really is kind of our core offering around that. And then that's become now a variety of other products. A collaborative session that we do on top of the story kernel with the team to really collaboratively build out their messaging hierarchy and really think about how they're going to put that story in the market. The story guy still continues to kind of be the blueprint for how you put things across the buying journey, create that kind of pull motion, our story accelerator program to help folks kind of stand this up inside the organization and really kind of become their own storyteller. And then as of 45 days or so ago, a product called Story Engine, which is a custom AI that pulls the clients work that we've done, our methodology and a couple kind of applications our team's trained it on that we're getting some great uptake on already. So we really have kind of built this whole universe of products that are devoted to helping people really understand, you know, what makes them valuable. Right. And how they can really kind of tell a story that takes their buyers and transforms them into believers.
[00:15:27] Speaker B: The story kernel, the storytelling piece, traded now from the digital marketing, where there's a very clear roi, there's a lot of metrics associated with that. How did you explain the value proposition of something that maybe in theory feels a little softer or harder to pin down the ROI on? And did you find that the market demand was more push or pull? Did you have to go out and pitch a lot or people coming to you saying, I need a story, help me?
[00:15:51] Speaker A: Yeah. So three. Three great questions there. I'll kind of tackle them maybe in a little bit different order than you expect. Right. So the first thing I'll say is I'm a big believer that you can never win consistently selling roi. If you've, you know, been any kind of sales before. You know, every CFO or CEO is going to make a buying decision, has seen the ROI slide in your deck a thousand times. Every single person that comes to them is going to promise some kind of fantastic roi. It never pans out. So everyone knows it's bullshit and it becomes noise. Right? You say, yeah, if you hire us, we're going to do this free. But they know that's not true. Even if you deliver good results, they know that the RLI slide probably is real. You have to shift your selling motion to a cost of inaction. Right? So what really gets buyers moving is understanding not the potential gain of making a change, but the cost they're incurring by doing nothing. There was a study maybe two years ago, there's this, like, brilliant guy, Peter Weinberg, who used to be at LinkedIn. He's now got a company called Evidenza, which is really cool. And, you know, he did a big research study as part of his work at LinkedIn, and he uncovered that essentially, at any given point in time, only about 5% of your target market is actively, like, looking to make a change. So 95% of buyers that any company could reach at any given point in time, they're good with the status quo. And so really, if you're going to build a good go to market strategy, your job's not to get in the game on the 5%. You're probably going to talk to those people. They're already pretty educated. Name of the game is how do you pull the 95% into the market and get them only looking at you. So for me, a lot of the way that we've built this narrative and the go to market strategy for Woden is not on what's the ROI going to be. It's what's killing you today by not being able to clearly articulate your value.
So, okay, tell me about the buyers that you get in front of who you know, reduce your value down to price. Tell me about the deals that you should be winning that you're not. Tell me about how your cost of customer acquisition is going way up. Because the same things that you're doing just are not resonating with the market. And what you're showing people is the risk is not looking at how you tell your story. The risk is doing nothing. Right, because that's, you're just not going to get motion in the market the way that you want. We do help our customers look at roi. So I really believe when you think about, like narrative, the ROI metric, there really should be efficiency across the buying journey. If you've got a good story, you're going to pull in a higher percentage of best fit buyers at the top of the funnel. Presumably there should be a higher conversion rate from your kind of initial either outbound or awareness marketing activities into that initial conversion. And then presumably, right, those folks are going to get a better story that pulls them through the funnel and they're going to convert at a higher rate. I like that because as I sort of talk to our clients about a lot, you know, if you throw more volume at the problem, you will have some increased level of success. Right. If you make more phone calls, it might not be more efficient, but you'll get more deals. If you spend more money, you'll generate some additional level of activity. You want to tell a story that takes that delta between your cost of customer acquisition that's growing and your conversion rate that's flattening and tighten that up as much as possible. And I think that's what narrative does really well for people.
[00:19:02] Speaker B: And so it sounds like, you know, focus on the 95%, really, the education is a big piece of that. And there's a lot of outreach on your end. What is the message that you start with given those People are not already looking for the solution that gets them interested in it.
[00:19:17] Speaker A: Yeah, it depends on how we reach them. But again, being pretty old school, big fan of cold calling, we do a lot of cold calling here to potential, you know, clients. And the number one thing that our sellers ask people is, you know, when you look at your go to market activities, what you're doing in sales and marketing, are you getting the same results for the stuff you're doing today than you were a year ago? And the answer to that question from people is universally no. And then you got to ask them, like, okay, so, like in the last year, did your product fall off? No. Right. Like, okay, has your buyer meaningfully changed? No. Right. So what's going on? Right. If, like you're, you know, if you're doing all these things you're doing a year ago and it's just not working, like, what's the issue? And the reality is, like, you know, most people, it's just harder to acquire customers today. There's more noise. AI has obviously totally saturated all of our inboxes. You know, it's harder to make content that's compelling on digital channels. That's why you're doing this podcast, I'm sure. And so you really have to think about, like, how do we tell a story that's going to get someone to stop and say, I want to learn more about that. And, you know, so I think for us, that's usually the big trigger for folks is that they're just not seeing the results from stuff that they saw a year ago, and they know they've got to do something different about that. And we have some other triggers that we look at that we think are make people good or great people to reach out to that are likely to experience that challenge. But that really is the big one.
[00:20:38] Speaker B: How do you find the right person in the company to talk to who understands the problem and. Or is the decision maker?
[00:20:45] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, for us, it's one of the same, you know, And I think this is when you think about sort of scaling a company. Right. I mean, I think getting super clear on who your buyers are, who your champions are, and who your detractors are is critical. Right. So this, in our world, we will not engage with someone who's not the CEO or the CRO. So I don't care if you call me up and say, I've already got the budget, I've been told I have to go hire someone for storytelling. I say, great, we'll do a discovery call, and then you get your CEO on the next call and if you say, well, he doesn't want to get in the next call, I say, cool, then you guys aren't going to work with us. And you know, there's a lot of reasons why you think about like how we work through our approach. You're talking about for an engagement, like we do big organizational change and you know, that's just not going to work if you don't have a sponsor or don't have buy in at that suite level. You know, I really believe that in today's world your go to market messaging has to be holistic. And what I mean by that is, you know, yeah, you've got marketing messaging you put out there, but your sellers have to use that same language. And frankly your social proof, your customer enablement, your product messaging, those things all have to feed into that. Buyers today are so much more educated than they've ever been. Right? So you think about, we use like I'm sure everyone does these days, but you know, software that lets you see like who's hitting your website. And I watch one of our sellers will call someone, they won't take the call, you know, the seller will follow up with an email. And then like, what do you know, right? Like they ignore the email but you get the ping on the website. And so like what happens? Right, well, the seller then makes like a video for them. They're still getting ignored. But you see the view on the loom, right? And so these are all people that are engaging in a lot of information gathering and then you see even like on the site, data or a loom. Now you're seeing people from the company that aren't even the person we're reaching out to looking at that. So you know, they're having a conversation that you're not directly a part of. Now the good news is by the time they get into that discussion with you, they're generally pretty educated. I think this is true for everybody. If you can shape that narrative before that conversation the way that you want, you're going to convert people at a pretty good level. If those things don't match up. So they see one message on your website, the seller reaches out with a different message, they go look at your reviews and they see something else that's going to have the opposite effect. It's going to erode that trust and it's going to make them say like, yeah, you know, like I thought these guys were good for us, but maybe not. And so for me, you know, you can't you can't execute something like this effectively if you don't have buy in from someone who can yoke all those groups together and say this is where we have to go.
And now the key is then you take all those other audiences and you recognize that while none of them are your decision maker, all of them can nuke the deal. Right. So the magic is you got to have that conversation with the CEO while simultaneously making their life easy, cultivating all those relationships with people. But when the CEO comes to their next LT meeting and says, yeah, I've been talking to you guys from Wood and I think we should do this, you want six people around the table who go, yeah, I've heard of them. And that's actually a great idea because all it takes is that one person who says no, I don't think we should do it. And like that's probably going to, probably going to kill an opportunity that makes sense for both, both sides.
[00:23:44] Speaker B: So much psychology that goes into it. And I, I love this idea of really thinking through not just who are going to be the champions, but also the detractors and how can you soften the blow or change their mindset so that when it does come to final decision time, everyone around the table is already bought in with scaling. Go ahead.
[00:24:02] Speaker A: I was going to get everyone to at least neutral.
[00:24:04] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:24:04] Speaker A: Tell our, our sales team all the time, right. Like there's only one person that can say yes for this deal but there's probably like a dozen that can say no. And like we don't need all 12 to say yes but we need all 12 of them to not say no if we're going to be successful.
[00:24:19] Speaker B: A great, great approach with scaling services based businesses. I think a lot of times people see it as exchanging time for money and so with people as your greatest asset, how do you think about growing the business? Is it grow the team, get bigger clients, all of that combined?
[00:24:39] Speaker A: Yeah, it's a great question. I mean there's two sides to it, right. So you know, I don't, it's not the answer you want. I feel like I actually don't know a ton about growing a service based business because it's really always been an ethma to me Michael. I've never lived in that world. So when we started Woden, I mean the first thing I did is we talked about the names of what we offer was productize everything.
Right. So you know, here the story kernel has like a very defined scope. How we execute that client to client looks a little bit different but like what do you get? It's the same for everybody. And accordingly, you know, everything prices, flat fee. Right. You know, we have our own, you know, sort of math in the background for what we think is the right price to charge for a client. Everything's flat fee. It's true for all of our project phases. Now you're right that we are literally trading time for money, but I, I don't think about it that way for a variety of reasons. Like one is if you want, if you're thinking about your business, you know, if you have FTEs, which we do here, you know, the people cost is not scalable. Right. So you really can't think about it as trading time for money because that would imply that I've got the ability to draw down my personnel spend if business is slow, which like we were hourly, or maybe I was just like a bigger prick and furloughed more people, I probably could do. But like trying to build the business that we're building. Like you got these people here and like some weeks were busy and maybe some weeks are a little less busy. You still got to pay people the same if you're going to pay them either ways. I at least have never thought about it that way. Just because like we're not paying people by the hour, they're not billing the way that like an attorney might bill.
I don't really fully kind of understand the economics of how a business like that might work. So I look at it very much from the product side and you know, on our back end we've got hours that we allocate to projects, you know, then we've got obviously levers that we understand in terms of what we need to cover SG&A, and what, you know, goes into profit and bonuses and all that. But we went the other direction, which was we tried to productize it as much as possible. And I think what that's done in exchange though is given our business like a good degree of stability. It's also given our clients a lot of certainty. So you come in, we don't position it as, hey, you're going to buy this team, it's, you're going to buy this result. So, you know, the story kernel, the promise there is that in six weeks we're going to figure out the story that you need to put in the market and if we don't get that right, you can fire us and we'll give you your money back, which is a pretty kind of powerful, put your money where your mouth is type thing for people. Now Like, I can tell you exactly how many hours we've allocated to do that work. Client has no idea. And frankly, the client doesn't care. And like, our least methodology here would be we have hours that we allocate, but, like, if it goes sideways and we need to spend more hours, like, the answer is we spend more hours. And likewise if we kind of crack the nut on it a little bit faster and we're able to just really kind of knock the narrative out, like, you know, the client doesn't get a refund for those three hours. We say, great, we figured it out. And I think, like, that allows us to look at our team almost more. Like, you might look at like, you know, a team of engineers where, you know, like, hey, they're going to come in, they're going to work on this. They've got to ship the product by this date. We think we have enough engineers to execute that. And, you know, maybe we'll do it faster, maybe we'll do it slower, but we have to get the product shipped by this date. And I think that's very much the kind of the mentality that our team brings to this.
[00:27:52] Speaker B: And so then are you thinking of getting larger cap clients as a way to grow or sort of efficiency in how you get those done so you can get more of those products out?
[00:28:03] Speaker A: Yeah, it's great question. It's all volume for me. Right. So, you know, I'm a. I try to be very transparent about our pricing. You know, I literally have a spreadsheet that we put your numbers into. So, you know, we have to figure out for a client how many interviews do we have to do, how much research are we going to have to do? But we've got formulas that drive that based on the company size, based on what their needs are. And my whole deal is we do not negotiate on price here. Like, we put the numbers in the sheet. That's the deal. That's what you pay. And what I'll say, which is interesting about that, is for like a smaller company, that can sometimes feel like a lot of money, and for a larger company, it can feel like an absurd bargain. But sort of my whole personal philosophy there is like, I, I'm not going to add some 25% escalator for a big company just because I think they'll pay it in the same way. I'm not eating into my margin just because, like, it would be hard for you to be able to afford this. Right. You know, you don't go to, you know, you don't Go to Slack and try to negotiate your per seat license or whatever. Right. It is what it is. Right. So in that regard, we don't really look at our business necessarily from that standpoint of like, all right, how do we get, quote, bigger clients? The delta between a mid sized client and a huge client really actually is that big, maybe 30%.
I'm really looking for two things. Number one is obviously just aggregate volume. We want more companies.
We're really animated by a belief that every company needs to take this story driven approach to be successful. I don't think the whole market sees it that way, but I think in a world where you can't buy adoption, where it's harder to grow than ever, where customers have more options than ever and you are not rock solid on your value, you're absolutely screwed. And so number one, volume, volume, volume, because it's just, it's core to our belief like everyone needs to do this in the same way that you buy a website or get a logo. Number two is how do we continue to deepen the client relationship? So I'm going to our core three products, which are pretty intensive, fairly expensive, take a period of time to do, you know, and then we're working with the company through the story engine and through story accelerator to help them stand that up. You know, the real value for us is how do we extend those relationships to be as deep and as long as possible. Number one, it's just the whole way of thinking that we want people to adopt in terms of being narrative driven, looking at their customer journey that way. Number two, right. The deeper and longer those relationships, the more virtuous it's going to be for everybody. Right. So those longer term relationships are less expensive for the client than the initial investment, but they have a disproportionate impact on amplifying the value of the initial investment.
And of course, number two, the more work or the more impact that the client gets out of the work that they've done with us, the more they're going to go out and evangelize that story with the other people that they know and kind of perpetuate the way we're growing the business. So yeah, don't look at size, volume. And then again, deep and long client relationships really, really are the key to the game.
[00:30:56] Speaker B: Ed, how do you define victory?
[00:30:58] Speaker A: You know, it's changed a lot over the last 11 years, I think. I'm really happy to say at the moment I would say I define victory by the number of things that I watch my team do. That previously only I could. It's cliche, right? That, like, if you're going to grow your business, you got to get a good team around you. But I also think good team is like a very sort of abstract and sort of difficult thing to measure. Everyone always says, get a good team, get a good team. But, like, how do you do that? Mr. Channel. And what's really exciting to me is when I watch people in our team deliver client solutions that are consistent with what I would do without me having to intervene. Right. Or I watch deals get worked in one where people articulate our value, clearly build that trust with the client, and the client's building that trust with Woven as a brand as opposed to with me as an individual. You know, victory for me is every day where there are fewer things that I have to do because our team's capable of doing it. And I can spend more time doing what I think is probably the most important part of our business, which is coaching and developing and supporting those people to reach our own potential within the business.
[00:32:04] Speaker B: If you could give your younger self one piece of advice, what would it be?
[00:32:08] Speaker A: You don't need that last martini.
[00:32:10] Speaker B: I love it. Too fun. Well, Ed, it has been an absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you so much for joining us today.
[00:32:15] Speaker A: Thanks. I really enjoyed it. Rachel, thanks for having me on. And Hope shared some insights that were worthwhile. Thanks so much. I enjoyed this as well.
