Latest / The Life-First Solopreneur / 88. Understanding Narrative Power to Achieve Greater Success with Guillaume Wiatr
Transcript
- Guillaume Wiatr (00:00): There are 12 practices in the framework, and one of them is called Evolutionary Purpose. Why? Because I noticed that your business purpose, your human purpose can evolve. Intro (00:17): Welcome to the One=Person Business podcast, the show for solopreneurs, consultants and contractors who are ready to take charge of their business and reclaim their freedom. Join us as we bring you inspiring stories, invaluable insights and practical strategies from successful solopreneurs and industry experts, empowering you to create a thriving business that aligns with your unique goals and allows you to live life on your own terms. Here are your hosts, Joe Rando and Carly Ries. Carly Ries (00:47): Welcome to the One-Person Business podcast. I'm one of your hosts, Carly Ries. Joe Rando (00:51): And I'm Joe Rando. Carly Ries (00:53): Joe, we spend so much time, I mean all day, every day speaking with solopreneurs, trying to figure out their struggles, their pain points, and how we can help them. Marketing is a big one that we hear time and time again, lead generation, but maybe one of the biggest these days is just standing out in a crowded market. There's so much content out there, so many people are doing the same thing. So many people are trying to attract the same audiences. It's so noisy and so hard to break through all of the clutter, which is why we are so excited to have Guillaume Wiatr here today. He helps people do just that through the power of narrative. I think this is such an important episode for people to listen to if they're trying to reach their market and break that noise. So Guillaume, welcome to the show. We're so happy you're here. Guillaume Wiatr (01:41): Thank you so much. Thank you so much for all you're doing for our community of solopreneurs as well. I'm very impressed with the quality of your work and super excited to be here. Carly Ries (01:50): Oh, thank you! Listeners, we didn't even pay him to say that. He just let that out there, so we appreciate that. Thank you so much. And there is so much that we want to get into today because like I said, you really focus on the narrative and people telling their stories. You have this thing called narrative power. What is that to start and why is that so important for solopreneurs? Guillaume Wiatr (02:13): Narrative power is a concept that is actually quite well known and understood in feels like social justice and government, religions, a little less in business interestingly. It is growing in interest because it is basically your leadership ability to defy the normal when the normal is wrong. It's your ability to change the status quo, and it may not seem as something relevant at first for solopreneurs, but very quickly, if you have started your journey in your business, you will notice that there are things you need to change all the time. You need to think about the way you shop up your market and if you don't spend enough time defining what your perspective is and how different it is from your colleagues, you run into problems. You get commoditized, people will push on price. Your positioning is unclear. So this ability to defy what needs to change really drives so many things for a small business such as your capacity to differentiate, but also your ability to scale and grow and change some of your processes, some of your marketing, and most importantly for a solopreneur, how you operate as a leader that determines your vision. (03:37): That's the grand definition for it. I like to make a difference between a story and a narrative. That's another very important element to understand what narrative power is. A story is more of a piece of a narrative. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It's typically the framework that we see in Hollywood movies or traditional business storytelling. The narrative is the system of those stories. One of the thing I always catch people saying is, what is my story as an entrepreneur? In fact, you have so many stories to tell your origin story, the story about the successes with your clients, how you view your work, your perspective story, and what kind of impact you're trying to do in your market. So your narrative is the sum of all that. The two other elements are your mindset, and then the last one is your processes and systems. So a good narrative for a business is the sum of what you say, how you think, and how you organize and process your business. That's why it's so important for a business Carly Ries (04:55): Thank you so much for differentiating between storytelling and a narrative because that is a key point for this and will help listeners as we move forward throughout this discussion. So when you're helping clients develop narrative power, what are some challenges you see? Let's apply it to solopreneurs specifically. What challenges do people face? What do they struggle with? Guillaume Wiatr (05:19): They come to me for things like differentiation. We mentioned that before. Also, they inherently know that they should do marketing by publishing their thoughts, publishing something. That's a very commonly accepted thing. Then they get scared about it. They run into perfectionism, they don't know how to start. They see it as a numbers game. If they're not getting a certain number of hits, and I think it's true for all of us, if we don't feel like we're noticed and liked, then we stop doing it. One of the narrative that I have them change and that they struggle with is seeing marketing as the practice of finding relevance for your business, really exploring the meaning of your thoughts and wrestling for a while with your ideas without trying to be even perfect. That is a change that a lot of people will hear and say, "okay, yeah, I'm in for that." (06:30): That's a simple change, but yet it requires a lot of courage and effort. Another narrative that I help people refrain and they struggle with is how to manage their finances. A lot of my clients come to me with like, yeah, I want to create this. I want to grow my firm. I want to take it to the next level. I want it to be purpose driven, have a bigger impact, and so on. But they don't align that ambition with the proper basic financial processes. They see money as something a little bit dirty and they shouldn't worry too much about, and that's bogus. We need to change that narrative. You need to be in financial peace to be able to have the success and the impact that you want to have. So that's another example, I have so many of them. Joe Rando (07:18): I just want to clarify. This whole process of building a narrative is partly about what you're kind of saying out to the world and partly about what you're saying to yourself. Is that fair to say? Guillaume Wiatr (07:29): Yes, exactly, Joe. There is the inner side of this work and the outer side of this work. In fact, if you look at my framework, which is called the strategic narrative canvas, it's divided into four areas. There is an inside and outside dimension, and there is an individual and collective dimension. For solopreneurs, there is a lot happening in the individual part of the canvas. Obviously they don't have employees. I don't have employees. I'm a solopreneur but I may work with people still and I may wear many hats. So there is that inside and that outside fashion. That's something I see in all of us. That's really all across the board in all of the organizations that we see. Carly Ries (08:17): Well, can we actually dive into that framework? So you said your framework is strategic narrative. How does that work? I mean, this is what you do all day every day. How does it apply to entrepreneurs? What can they take from it? Guillaume Wiatr (08:29): Okay, I look at a business from a holistic perspective. It's a 360 degree approach. As I said before, there are two axis that split everything that happens inside and outside your business into four areas. These four areas are called visionary leadership, meaningful marketing, purposeful operations and teams if you have one, and authentic selling. These are the four big buckets that I help my clients with. One caveat I want to make is that I divided this whole system into those four areas because that's what works best for solopreneurs who are seeking to differentiate very strongly. They're change makers, they're disruptors, they're specialists, experts. Most of the time, actually, I'm trying to think quickly, none of them are generalist. All of them are strategists and want to lead with a very specific idea in their market. So that's why this system is shaped as such. And then in those four areas, I looked at, okay, what do we need to do? (09:42): Let's take the example of sales. To be able to do authentic selling, what do you need? And so there are three things that are key here. One is having offers that are specifically designed for what your clients want to buy and have the money to buy. The second one is to do outreach. So many of us think that just if we put good content out there, we don't need to call people. And that's a lie. You still need to be out there and contact people. Not necessarily do cold calling. It could be warm outreach, but it has to be intentional. It has to be mapped, planned on your schedule and done in a way that matches with your narrative. The third aspect here is to learn how to sell as an expert. This is something I see all the time. We all say, oh yeah, I want to be called the expert in this and this and the way we sell. (10:33): Remember, I was still talking about processes. The way we sell just sends the complete opposite signal. We accept doing things that we're not qualified for. We respond to RFPs, we don't lead in the sales process. All of these say, I am not an expert. And yet on our website for instance, we want to be called the expert. These are examples of the practical things that this canvas helps you deal with. So there are 12 practices, and this method is basically a way to orchestrate those 12 practices. It avoids overwhelm, it helps you get organized. I use it in my business. It's everywhere. It's how I organize my day. This particular podcast right now falls into two things, how I position my business and how I outreach also. Maybe I'll reach out to people who are interested in this method. Everything should be organized this way. When you do this, these are the results that now I have demonstrated with all my clients. After a while they tell me, "oh my gosh, this is such a great repeatable framework. I can see why I say this and inside I feel like that." So they're starting to connect the dots and it just helps build business that are much more resilient, much more courageous too. So hopefully that helps people who are in this for the long game, long term. Joe Rando (12:08): I could see how this helps people think carefully about how they're doing certain things that they're doing in their business, but does it also keep them from doing things they shouldn't actually be doing? Do you know what I'm saying? Kind of that busy work that people get into sometimes that doesn't necessarily propel their business forward. Does this framework help with that? Guillaume Wiatr (12:27): Yeah, I think you're spot on. I designed that framework initially for me. I was doing a whole bunch of stuff that I should not have been doing as a solopreneur. I've been a solopreneur for seven years. Before that, I always had teams and large organizations and so on. When we make the leap, there's always this moment of, oh yeah, I want to do this, I want to do that. This friend tells me I should be doing this. And then we quickly get overwhelmed with a bunch of stuff. So that clearly helps you with that. It helps you be more conscious about, Hey, 30 minutes in the week of a solopreneur could have a huge impact. Somebody is emailing you and wants to chat about this, chat about that. Two weeks ago, I got this email from a guy in Germany who was interested in narrative work, and he's like, yeah, let's meet and I'm available these days. And if I have the narrative of I want to serve everyone kind of mindset, I'd say, yes, let's meet. But I say, no, let's not meet because I don't know who you are. I'm booked out two, three weeks in advance for impromptu meetings. I'm really busy. So let's think about this first. Carly Ries (13:45): It's funny that you said you'd built this for yourself. I was curious, what area do you try to work on the most? What is the hardest part for you in the framework? Guillaume Wiatr (13:53): For me, it's managing my marketing side. I have a lot of ideas and the more I write and do videos, the more ideas I have. (14:07): I can spend enormous amount of time just publishing and writing and doing videos. If I don't balance that system appropriately, then my business could just be a marketing business, marketing what I do, and then I wouldn't be making any money. That's clearly my Achilles knees. Then at times in the discipline that I call visionary leadership, right now as we speak November of 2023, it's a lot lighter than it used to be last year. Last year I really needed to pay attention to my inner narrative, my healthy productivity, my health, my mental health. I also bring an element of spirituality in this framework if people wish. And that's my wish. I started meditating more. I'm not religious, I'm spiritual, and just praying more and just trusting that my business would do the right thing for me. So I included this in my time sheet. Carly Ries (15:18): I so appreciate that perspective. I feel like that's been a huge shift, at least within the past decade, I would even say past few years. Did you say you include it in your time sheets? Guillaume Wiatr (15:35): Yeah, I track my time. I don't sell anything by the hour. I track my time for productivity purposes. I like to understand how much time I spend doing this. I use it as a way to improve my choices in terms of where do I put my creative energy, what do I want to choose to do? Let me give you an example. I do a monthly live workshop the last Thursday of the month, free to attend. It's 60 minutes. So it took me a certain number of hours to prep, decide on the topic, gather my content and so on, reach out to people. In the beginning it was a daunting task, and the way I got to streamline this and make better choices was through tracking my time. So everything I do, the moment I sit on this chair is tracked in Toggle. (16:26): It's a free app. If you don't have a team, it's free. I've used it since the beginning of 2017, and I have data, now I'm sitting on data. So if somebody tells me, Hey, let's work on this project, do this kind of thing. If I have a moment of hesitation, I go back to my dataset and I go, okay, last time I did this, it took me two days. Do I have two days to spend on this? Oh yeah, it turns out that would be great. Or no, actually I should not be doing this. Carly Ries (16:59): That's so smart. I love that approach. If people want to take on this framework, how often should people revisit it? You said you get stuck in marketing world. How often do you take a step back and say, "okay, let me go back to the framework. This is going to help me reframe my mind." How often should people take a step back? Guillaume Wiatr (17:21): There is no rule, I obviously am the creator of this method, and I live and breathe with it, so I look at it all the time, but don't do that. You don't have to do that. In my clients, I have diehard fans of this, and they will reorganize everything to do with it. Once a month I have agency owners and then bigger firms, they're bombarded with other frameworks so I don't mean to impose anything or fight. I just bring in when necessary. I have a client here in Seattle. We revisit it once a year, but we do it as an intensive session. They have a year end series of retreats to look at what happened during the year, then plan for the next year. Me and this team will stare at it and play with it for a good three days, once a year. Then it's on a big board, the four by four in their boardroom. It's there as part of their control panel, if you will, of their dashboard or their business. I facilitate their meetings, and in the meetings, people will kind of gently turn their head and look at it and stare at it. It just reminds them of what we had said we would do, it helps sets better intentions. (18:47): That's a pretty broad spectrum as you can see here. Carly Ries (18:49): Oh yeah. So I want to circle back really quick. At the beginning of the show, I was saying so many things where people struggle. Lead generation is a big thing that people struggle with. Where does the narrative power play into when people are attracting the wrong clients? How does all this play into making sure you have the right niche, you're getting the right people that you want to work with? Guillaume Wiatr (19:13): I noticed over the years that we attract the right clients because we align on similar values, not just on the offering. Obviously we attract clients that want to work with us for the right products and services, but you could get a request or you could go talk to somebody with whom you align on the service that needs to be delivered, but then there is the values later. So that gets a little more fuzzy and intangible. But to me, values are how we decide. You can notice them with very small details. How do people decide to work with you? There's typically a series, there is a cycle or a journey, and that's when the narrative comes in to help you. If you've done a good job at clarifying what your narrative is, what you value, then you should be a lot more aware at making better decisions whether you should work with a client or not. (20:20): If you really claim to be an expert in your field, it is your responsibility to drive this conversation. I would highly recommend to even start by telling yourself, I should not work this with this client. Let me prove myself otherwise. Very few people do that. We all go into a conversation with our wishful thinking, "yes, this is going to be good. Oh my God, client wants to work with me. Yes, okay, let's make this work." It's typically, and especially when we need money, which tends to happen quite a bit at the beginning of a solopreneur's journey, and that's the tension right there. That's when your narrative power is super important to kind of keep you away from those bad clients. Joe Rando (21:11): I can vouch for that. It can be really devastating when you start getting the wrong clients because it can really hurt your business. I said it to somebody recently. They were going to make some exception for me because I didn't match their typical profile. I said, right now I'm a special client and in a few months or so I'm going to be a problem client and it just doesn't work. I've seen it from both ends of it. This is really good advice. Get the people that you can serve, and if you can't, pass them on to somebody else, and maybe they'll return the favor back. Guillaume Wiatr (21:48): Yeah, exactly. It sounded, Joe, that you were describing your position as a potential client to somebody else. Joe Rando (21:56): Yeah. This was somebody that wanted to basically work for Lifestarr as a contractor, but we didn't match the profile. We didn't need what they were doing exactly. It was a good person, good at what she did, but we weren't the right customer. Carly Ries (22:17): And it's ironic because a lot of the times people become solopreneurs because of a lifestyle changes. They were working 80, 90 hours, they didn't like their boss, they just wanted time flexibility, and if you end up saying yes to everybody, you fall right back into that trap. I felt that trap. I left agency life and I was like, I have this all figured out. I know what I'm talking about. And I just started saying yes to everything. It's like three months in I was like, oh my gosh, I don't have that steady paycheck. And I was miserable. I was arguably making more than I ever have but my husband and I would see each other late at night and maybe for a couple hours on the weekend. I was just working around the clock and I was like, this completely defeats the purpose of why I left in the first place. Guillaume Wiatr (23:03): So right there you were talking about a narrative that I was plagued with. I come from a family of workaholics. Now I can say it out loud because I'm conscious of it, but in the beginning there was a little voice in my mind was like, yeah, you need to work hard. I would not challenge that and I would work hard like 50, 60 hours a week, and I remember it would drive my wife nuts. "Why are you always late for dinner? The kids need you" and all that. I could not get out of it. It was so fascinating that just like you, I wanted that freedom and that flexibility and be my own boss. What I did is I just recreated my own prison, somewhere else. At least I was the owner of the prison. Carly Ries (23:54): Exactly. You could break out of jail if you needed to. Guillaume Wiatr (24:00): Every once in a while. Carly Ries (24:02): Yeah, it is wild. Which is why I so appreciate they put this framework together because this is something that I could have definitely used. Guillaume Wiatr (24:11): It's never too late. Even the best go back to it. Joe Rando (24:14): I remember starting out and doing the same thing. Being proud to be at work at eight o'clock at night. Then I used to say, "I'm self-employed. My boss is a jerk." Carly Ries (24:32): We're talking about our why right now. For me, I left because of schedule flexibility. Years after I finally figured that out, and I'm still trying to figure it out. Thanks to Joe for helping me figure out that part. But, people always say, start with your why. It's important. And I say it in a lot of my content, so that's why I'm so curious. You don't necessarily think that's the best place to start, especially for solopreneurs in the professional services space. I'm so curious to know why. Guillaume Wiatr (25:05): Yeah, I disagree with that. Let me unpack because there's a lot to say there. If you're listening to this podcast, don't just run with this without context. Let's rewind the tape a little bit. Just like most people I know, Simon Sinek's, super duper famous talk, 2009, and he presents the Golden Cycle. I watched this and I'm in awe. I'm like, oh my gosh, it's so true. Yeah, absolutely. Start with why. So I went and read all of his books and followed him and so on. Then I tried to not just stay at a theoretical level, but apply it. I would do it in large organizations. I did it at Microsoft, for different teams, I did at AIG, and so on. Then every time after a few years, I noticed the same pattern. We just die by wordsmithing stuff and we create more confusion than we think. We sure, have a great statement that everybody loves the day of their leadership retreat and that everybody forgets the next day. (26:15): I see this pattern, so I'm wondering, or maybe we don't know how to do this thing. Get more trained on this methodology and so on. And I noticed that it worked for certain types of people and not others. Then fast forward a little bit, it's my turn to become a solopreneur in 2016, launched MetaHelm. I'm like, I'm going to start with why. I'm thinking, I've done this with so many people, it should be easy and it's not. What I noticed is the following, you can only define your why if you have defined the what. Let me explain. In the why, in the philosophy of Sinek, why is your purpose, the bigger reason why you exist? Why uou do the work that you do, where your business exists. His famous quote, "people don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it", but those reasons can be drastically different from one person to the other. (27:13): It could be personal. Why do I do MetaHelml? Because I like to work from home and be with my kids. But another reason why is because I like to turn my client's organizations as sources of inspiration that you can resist and so on. So I like to think about this question as a ladder. A ladder of what is it that I'm trying to achieve with that business? And I go one step at a time. One step at a time and every step of the way, I'm like, okay, what is it that I'm doing? I'm doing coaching and consulting, and what does it create? Well, it creates wealth for me. And what does this wealth create for me? Well, I'm able to invest more in my knowledge and deliver a better service, and what does this better service do? (28:08): You can see the pattern here and you add to this and add to this and add to this, and now you start seeing why you exist. But you can only do this if you've worked enough in your business. I see so many of my clients totally agonizing with the fact that they don't have a clear why statement on their website. I tell them, give me a break. Just let it go. You don't need this to operate. You have awesome clients, you do fantastic work. We have more pressing issues. Let's look at your budget. Let's look at your time management. Let's look at your marketing and how you sell as an expert. Then just let this happen more organically and naturally. One way to boost this research is to publish on a frequent and regular basis what you think. What is it that you observe, what meaning do you put in your work, and then you get to your why. All of that to say, I love the why concept, but just don't always start with it. It's a big mistake in my opinion. Joe Rando (29:21): I get it. Because you think about where we started on this, Carly. What we were doing when we started with Lifestarr was not focused on solopreneurs. That happened. And now the entire why has shifted because we weren't thinking about helping solopreneurs. And now a big hunk of the why is we're helping solopreneurs. Guillaume Wiatr (29:40): Here's another thing too. I'm so excited to share this with you, Joe. In French, How do we say why? Porquoi. So there are two ways to write porquoi in French. In one word, which is the literature translation for why. And you can also write in two words, por quoi. It means for what? It is because I constantly work in French and English that I was able to see this. I'm like, gosh, it was in front of my eyes the whole time. But to your point with Lifestarr, the way I've really researched your podcast and looked at your website and so on, there's so much potential in what you do. There are 55 million of us solopreneurs here. That's a huge, huge market. So maybe there's going to be a path in your journey where you're going to meet a Y in the road and have to make a decision and say, do we continue to help these kinds of solopreneurs or these kinds of solopreneurs? Knowing you guys, you are heart-based and really genuine people, you're probably going to go with your feeling and your sense of purpose and say, well, I think life wants to take us there more than there. I can't justify it with numbers, but it just makes more sense to me. Carly Ries (31:36): That makes so much sense. And what I was saying, I felt like there was a glitch in the matrix at first when you were saying it's not necessarily starting with why. It really does make so much more sense to frame it that way. Joe, we did stress out about it a little bit, the why, and it has naturally evolved based off of trial and error over the past few years with the business. We're nowhere near where we started with our messaging three years ago. Guillaume Wiatr (32:08): Maybe this will help nail it even more. In my framework as I said, I have four disciplines and then I break them down into three practices, four times three is 12. So there are 12 practices in the framework, and one of them is called evolutionary purpose. Evolutionary purpose. Why, because I noticed that your business purpose, your human purpose can evolve. Carly Ries (32:45): I feel like I could talk to you forever. I'm so intrigued by your framework, your thought process, how you got there. I really thank you for refreshing our minds. We're going through an evolution right now with how we want to approach things for 2024 as well. This really shines some light on future conversations we're going to have. I really thank you for that from a personal standpoint. But our listeners will get a lot out of this too. You help people find successes in their business and give them the chill factor they need sometimes. So we want to know what your favorite quote is about success. Guillaume Wiatr (33:22): I knew you were going to ask this question because you ask it to everyone, and I'm like, I don't have a good quote, so I'm just going to tell the truth. I don't have a quote. I didn't cheat. I didn't go like, oh yeah, let me Google this and find a good quote. But, I'll tell you how I define success. First, to me success to me is a moment. It's not a number, it's not a status, it's a moment. You can feel it, how you felt successful, and there are things that show it. But to me, success is the moment when you feel like you are here on this planet doing what you're supposed to do. That means that first you need to be clear with what you're supposed to do or what you think you're supposed to do. And that, is in constant evolution. So that requires knowing yourself first. Know thyself as the very ancient say, and then look at what you're doing. If they match, then that's success. Carly Ries (34:27): I think you just created your own bumper sticker quote right there. So, in the show notes. Love that. Well, this has been so wonderful. Thank you so much. If people want to learn more about you and what you do, where can they find you? Guillaume Wiatr (34:42): Metahelm.com We talked in this episode a lot about the frameworks that people are. Where is that framework? It's available for free. It's on the methodology tab of the website. There's a whole page about it. You will see it visually. There are light definitions. You can also take the quick assessment. It's 12 questions and in five minutes you know where you stand in this framework. Then I have resources galore all free on YouTube and so on. Carly Ries (35:26): We'll include all of that in the show notes, and thank you so, so much for coming in the show. We'd love to have you back again once our business evolves. Maybe your business will evolve at that point too. Guillaume Wiatr (35:38): Yeah, anytime. I want to say it again, thank you so much for all the resources you put out there and the conversations you're having and the tools. Thank you so much for your work. Joe Rando (35:49): Thank you for this. This was really good. Carly Ries (35:55): Listeners, thank you so much for tuning in. We'll see you next week at another episode of the One-Person Business Podcast. Closing (36:03): You may be going solo in business, but that doesn't mean you're alone. In fact, millions of people are in your shoes running a one person business and figuring it out as they go. So why not connect with them and learn from each other's successes and failures? At LifeStarr, we're creating a one person business community where you can go to meet and get advice from other solopreneurs. Be sure to join in on the conversations at community.lifestarr.com