Founders think about their products.
Customers think about their frustrations.

Story Engine connects the two.
Experience includes
Fidelity Investments
Siemens Healthineers
Google
Klaviyo
Autodesk
SOLIDWORKS
What is a Story Engine?

One core story that everything else builds from.

A Story Engine connects what your customers care about with what you uniquely believe and do. It becomes the source of truth for what you say and how you say it across your website, sales, ads, email and content.

Website copySales decksInvestor decksAd campaignsEmail marketingEventsNewslettersSocial postsContent marketingBlogs STORY ENGINESOURCE OF TRUTH
Where positioning stops too early

Positioning can tell you where you fit. Eventually, you still need to write the homepage.

And then the sales deck. The next campaign. The newsletter. The next post. Without a central story, each one becomes a fresh decision and the message starts to drift.

You need one core story that gives all of it direction.
Does this sound like you?

You built a great product, but explaining why it matters is the hard part.

  • Prospects don't immediately understand why it matters.
  • Your website explains what you do without really connecting.
  • Sales tells the story one way while marketing tells it another.
  • Creating content means staring at a blank page wondering what to talk about.
  • Every new campaign starts with another conversation about what the message should be.

If this sounds familiar, you may be missing one clear story connecting what you've built to what your customers actually care about.

The Prooving Ground approach

Build the story before you build more marketing.

We work from the customer's world toward the story your company can credibly own.

01

Tension

What's happening in your customer's world that's worth talking about?

02

Point of View

What do you believe about it that gives the problem a sharper interpretation?

03

Resolution

How does what you do credibly address that tension?

04

Provocation

What's the sharpest, most interesting expression of the idea?

05

Story Engine

The core story that gives your marketing a shared foundation.

What changes when you have one

A foundation for your marketing. A head start every time you create something new.

Your website, sales deck, campaigns and content all start from the same core story. So instead of facing a blank page or reinventing the message every time, you already know the idea you're building from.

Your website has a clearer story because everyone agrees on the idea it needs to communicate.

Sales knows what to emphasize instead of rebuilding the pitch from person to person.

Content has a point of view and a steady source of ideas instead of another blank page.

Ads, email and social can tell different stories while reinforcing the same underlying message.

Your product becomes easier for the right customers to understand, care about and remember.

Selected work

When the story gets clearer, the product gets easier to understand.

Different industries. Same job: connect what the company built to something the customer already cares about.

Building36 smart thermostat
Building36

From smart thermostat features to a smarter way to keep the customer relationship.

HVAC contractors spend heavily to win homeowners, then have surprisingly few ways to stay connected. Reframing the thermostat as an ongoing connection made remote monitoring, diagnostics and proactive service matter for a reason.

Event agency

A clearer story helped turn expertise into a stronger commercial proposition.

The work focused the value proposition around what clients were trying to accomplish, not just the agency's capabilities.

+15%reported lift in commercial performance
Healthcare

Make the audience's problem easier to recognize before asking them to care about the solution.

Clarifying the story around a real HCP tension gave the campaign a more useful center for content and engagement.

1,500HCP inquiries generated
About

Work directly with a senior strategist from start to finish.

I've spent more than 20 years in agency and marketing work helping companies turn complicated products, services and ideas into stories people can understand and act on.

You work directly with me throughout the process. No handoff to a junior team. The person helping define the story is the same person shaping it with you, pressure-testing it and translating it into something your marketing can actually use.

I especially like working with founders because you usually started with something real. You saw a gap in the market, understood there was a better way and built it. The hard part comes later: getting everyone else to see what you see.

20+ yearsmarketing & agency experience
2 sessionsto build your Story Engine
Build your Story Engine

What should your marketing keep building from?

In two focused sessions, we'll turn what you know about your product and customers into the core story your website, sales and marketing can use as a shared foundation.

Start a conversation →