Creating a better business story by learning from big brands

Your pitch deck says one thing. Your website says another. Your investor conversations land differently every time.

Most founders don't notice, until people stop engaging, understanding or believing.

The strongest brands don't have this problem. What they communicate is clear, consistent and connected – and that's a big part of why people trust and back them.

In this session, Joe Johnson draws on his corporate communications experience to share three practical lessons founders can apply straight away – from pitch decks and investor conversations to brand messaging and beyond.

You'll leave with three key considerations for your own business story – what's working, what's not and where to focus first.

Topics covered in this session

• The clarity test – what big business is required to communicate and how founders can leverage the same blueprint

• The consistency gap – why the strongest brands sound the same everywhere and how one flexible foundation beats starting from scratch every time

• The connected story advantage – how joining up what you communicate makes your business more convincing to investors, customers and partners

About the speaker

Joe is a pitch, comms and business story advisor working with start-up founders and growing businesses.

With 30 years of strategic communications experience (advising businesses such as Virgin Money, Santander, Barclays, EY, Prudential and John Lewis), he helps shape stories that work across audience, channel and context to make sure founders sound as credible and persuasive as they can be.

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Transcript

Lightly edited for clarity.

Caitriona: Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's Lunch and Learn. My name is Caitriona, and I'll be your host today.

For those of you attending a Lunch and Learn for the first time, Enterprise Nation is a vibrant community platform for start-ups and small businesses.

I'm pleased to introduce Joe Johnson, who is a pitch, comms and business story adviser.

In this session, Joe draws on his corporate communications experience to share practical lessons founders can apply straight away.

If you have any questions throughout the webinar, please post them in the chat, and we'll do our best to answer them at the end of the session. Today's webinar will be recorded, and we will send a follow-up email with the recording and further resources later today.

Over to you, Joe.

Joe Johnson: Thanks, Caitriona, and hello, everybody, to today's webinar on building a better business story.

I'm going to jump right in, otherwise I'll be here all day, and we've only got about 25 minutes.

Just a brief introduction. As Caitriona said, I've got a long and varied history in corporate communications, mostly at agencies and advisory consultancies working with big brands. I've been based in London for about 30 years.

The reason I'm here is to bring some of that experience and understanding across to small businesses and start-ups, which I think is really useful and, hopefully, something that can have a bit more impact. Sometimes working with big brands is a bit like trying to steer the Titanic.

I use this term, "a better business story", and if you bear with me, we'll come to what that actually means very shortly. I think there are a couple of reasons why a better business story should matter to founders.

The first, and the most important, is that it can make a real difference in helping your audiences understand you, believe in you and, ultimately, invest in you.

The second is that you are probably continually reassessing how you communicate, who your audience is, what you need to say and how you need to say it. A stronger business story means less reinventing the wheel every time you do that.

The last point is longevity. It's almost an ROI argument. You might start by looking at how your business communicates for presentations and pitching, but it quickly becomes much more than that as audiences ask for more and more information.

Over the next 25 minutes, we're going to run through three things that I think make a big difference when explaining your business story: making it clear, making it consistent, and making sure the elements of the story actually join up. That last one may sound slightly more abstract, but it is what helps make the story convincing.

By the end, I'm hoping you'll take away three questions that will help you think about whether you're really covering those three areas.

So the framework for today is those three C's, and we'll start with clarity.

I always like to begin with an insight. What do we mean by a business story? It's all the bits of the business you use to explain yourself. You may have come across terms like business model, strategy, purpose or mission, but often those can feel a bit jargony.

The good news is that we don't have to start from scratch to understand what a business story is. We can make use of work that's already been done, particularly in the listed company world, and borrow the parts that are helpful.

There has been a big effort in reporting and communications to help PLC businesses explain themselves better to their audiences. Some of that thinking appears in guidance from UK regulators.

I'm not suggesting you need to go away and read all of that, but there is a helpful foundation there. It points to the different elements of a strategic business description, and those elements should surface in your presentations, pitch materials and the conversations you have.

If the guidance feels too dry, we can just look at what big brands actually do. I've put two examples on the screen, one from Diageo and one from Barclays. You can see that the language they use, purpose, vision, strategy and values, starts to repeat. There is a common framework there in the way large businesses explain themselves.

What's important isn't just covering each of these elements. It's also making sure they relate to each other. That is what helps people understand your business more clearly.

It's worth making a small point here. When I first started working with PLCs, you would often get little more than a chairman's letter and a set of financial tables in an annual report. It's far more sophisticated now, and it's more sophisticated because audience demand has driven that change.

The key point for founders is that we can learn from that work. We don't have to invent the whole thing ourselves.

So what does that mean for founders? It means you don't need to start from scratch. In many ways, it's a translation job.

If big brands can figure out how to do this, then so can we. Purpose becomes an answer to the question: what are you doing? What is your business about? Why do you do it? What is its wider relevance? Vision is about where you're trying to go. Strategy is about how you're going to get there this year, over the next three years, over the next five years.

So that translation job becomes much more accessible than trying to decode formal reporting guidance.

The first big question, then, is really about self-reflection. If somebody looked at all your communications without having spoken to you, could they properly understand your business? Would they understand what you do, how you do it, where you are going and why it matters?

If the answer is no, then the issue may not be the presentation itself. It may be that the core elements of your business story are not being communicated clearly enough.

Let's move on to the second C, which is consistency. If clarity is about whether somebody understands your business, consistency is about trust.

This is quite intuitive. If you are talking about your business one way in one conversation and another way on your website, and then differently again in a presentation or in person, it creates doubt. People start to wonder which version is the real one.

I think consistent communication is something that big businesses have become much better at. There are some strong arguments that consistent messaging contributes to revenue and brand strength, but even without the data, it makes sense. If the same core message appears again and again, it feels more credible.

On the screen, I've included some examples from Barclays. One is from a sustainability hub, one is from a different part of the corporate website, and one is from an investor presentation.

What stands out is that all three are talking about strategy in essentially the same way. That hasn't always been the case. Not that long ago, you would often see different versions of the same story depending on whether the audience was analysts, sustainability specialists or customers. Over time, there has been a realisation that consistency matters more.

That's really the point here. You think carefully about the story first, and then you apply it in different contexts. You don't rebuild it each time from scratch.

For founders, this matters because your business story shows up in lots of places: on your website, in your social channels, in your deck, in your proposals, in recruitment conversations, in networking conversations and beyond. Those different audiences do not need completely different versions of who you are. They need the same core version, adapted for context.

If you are continually rebuilding that story, not only are you wasting effort, you may also be undermining trust.

That brings us to the third C: connected communications.

Sometimes I find this a little harder to explain because people use words like "joined-up" and it can sound vague. But what I mean is whether the different elements of your business story actually feel like they belong together.

Do they look as if they came from the same business, the same strategy, the same founder thinking? Or does it feel as though someone has made them up separately and jammed them into the same deck or page?

A good example of this from larger businesses has often been sustainability. For years, many companies would talk about sustainability in one area of their communications, but when you looked at the actual business strategy, it wasn't mentioned at all. So the pieces didn't join up.

When somebody is engaging with your business, they are not just asking whether you have a strategy or a vision or a purpose. They are asking whether those things make sense together. They are assessing coherence.

There are endless articles and webinars that promise shortcuts to the perfect pitch or the perfect presentation. Some of them are useful, but many leave out this key point: how do all the parts of your story stack up together?

When audiences engage with your story, they are looking for signs that your business model supports your strategy, that your strategy makes sense in light of your market, that your purpose aligns with your activity, and that your values don't feel bolted on. That coherence is what makes the story believable.

A lot of the time, this lack of coherence comes from siloed thinking. In big businesses, that's often because different departments produce different bits of the story. In founder-led businesses, it's more likely to be a time or headspace issue. You've done one piece for one purpose, another piece for another purpose, and over time they no longer fit neatly together.

So if you're not joining the story up, you are missing a trick. It will come across as fragmented, and it won't be as convincing as it could be.

Here are a few simple founder-level examples of where this can go wrong. Your website may say one thing about your purpose, your pitch deck may say something slightly different, and your LinkedIn profile may describe the business in yet another way.

Or your mission may sound ambitious, but your offer and pricing may suggest something much smaller. Or your values may sound customer-focused, but your language may still feel overly corporate and impersonal.

Those gaps matter, because people notice when things don't sit together.

So, after that quick run-through of the three Cs, let's bring it together with the three big questions.

First: is it clear? Have you got a business story that covers the things your audience needs to understand? Do you know what those core elements are, and are you getting them across simply enough that someone unfamiliar with your business could understand them?

Second: is it consistent? Across your website, your materials, your socials, your presentations and your conversations, are you saying the same core things in recognisable ways? Or are you constantly reinventing the message?

Third: does it connect? Does your story feel like a whole? Is there a logic to the different parts? Do they feel as though they belong together, and do they help create belief in your business?

That's the quick run-through.

Any questions would be great. I look forward to connecting with you on the platform. And if you need any help with your business story, whether that's around clarity, consistency, connection or all three, then do give me a shout.

Caitriona: Thanks, Joe. If anyone has any questions, please do pop them in the chat.

In the meantime, I can get started with a question here. How often should founders revisit and refine their core narrative?

Joe: My view is that you have the ability to get most of it right up front rather than continually rebuilding it.

Some elements of your story, like your vision, mission or purpose, should be fairly long term. They should not need constant change. Your strategy, though, might need updating more regularly, perhaps yearly, or even sooner depending on what's happening in the market.

Given how quickly the business environment can change, as we saw during COVID and are seeing again now, the context can shift dramatically. That may require changes in strategy.

So the answer is really that some parts should stay steady, and others should evolve. It's a mix rather than a fixed schedule.

Caitriona: Thank you. We've got an interesting question from James. What is Joe's favourite business story that you may have seen or been part of consulting on?

Joe: For me, it's often about seeing a business genuinely shift how it explains itself.

Most of the big businesses I've worked with have had some good ideas, but often those ideas get flattened by the time they reach the top. So the stories I like most are the ones where you can actually see a real change in thinking.

I think Barclays is probably one of the better examples for me, simply because I worked with them over a long enough period to see that change happen. They had a real challenge around social relevance and how they explained why they existed.

Historically, many PLCs would effectively say, "Our purpose is investor value. We are here to make money for investors." Shifting that into a more modern, socially aware explanation of the business is actually quite a big change.

So I'd probably say Barclays, because I saw the process of them becoming more coherent and more convincing in the way they spoke about themselves.

Caitriona: Thank you.

A question from Trish from Sweet Ella Bakes: are there any food businesses that you feel tell a good story?

Joe: Unilever is one worth looking at. It's not a perfect example, but in terms of food and consumer-facing communication, they are often ahead of the game, particularly on social relevance and sustainability.

And I would also mention Diageo. I know that's beverage rather than food, but they're quite good in this space too. They've thought carefully about what they're there to do and how they explain that in a responsible and customer-sensitive way.

So those would be two useful examples to look at.

Caitriona: Thank you. What's one quick exercise that we could do this week to pressure-test our own business story?

Joe: If I was being very direct, I'd say go back to that final slide with the three Cs and use those three questions honestly.

Could someone who has engaged with your business before explain it back to you clearly? Would they understand what makes you different?

Are you saying the same core things in all the places where your business shows up? Or are you rewriting the story every time you communicate?

And finally, does it all feel like it belongs together? Or are you throwing a load of different messages at the wall and hoping something sticks?

That simple exercise can reveal quite a lot.

Caitriona: Thank you. Do you have any tools that you recommend for maintaining message consistency?

Joe: For me, it's really about the framework more than the tool.

It doesn't need to be a fancy app. A lot of the work I do around message platforms and consistency has started with something as simple as a spreadsheet. You break the story down into its core elements as columns, and then you look across and ask whether the pieces flow together.

That can also help when you need to tell your story with a different emphasis. Rather than rewriting it, you can start in a different place and reorder those elements depending on the audience.

So if, for example, you're speaking at a time when your market is changing very quickly, you might begin with the market context and then move into your strategy. Your purpose and long-term direction can still remain the same, but the order you present things in can shift.

So I think the answer is the framework itself. Once you know the elements and how they relate, maintaining consistency becomes much easier.

Caitriona: Thank you. I don't see any other questions coming in on the chat, but that feels like a good place to end.

Thank you so much, Joe, for your presentation. Thanks, everyone, for joining us today. We'll be sharing the recording and further resources in a follow-up email this afternoon.

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