Building blocks of a business biography: Origins

Back in my grad school days, I had the privilege of serving as a teaching assistant to Robert Remini, the distinguished historian who wrote prize-winning biographies of Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams and Daniel Webster, to name a few. He’s the one who taught me that good storytelling isn’t just for novelists and filmmakers. Whether your genre is history, biography or business writing, many of the building blocks remain the same.

In honor of Prof. Remini’s upcoming 90th birthday, I thought I’d start a series on what makes for a compelling business biography. Your story, after all, is what sets you apart from every other business operating in the same space. Who you are, where you come from, the obstacles you’ve faced — those are  the swirls and ridges of your unique company fingerprint. You want to leave those fingerprints on every page of your website and every customer interaction, letting people know exactly who they’re dealing with and turning every purchase into an interaction, not just a transaction.

A good story needs a good beginning, so let’s make origins the first building block of your business biography. We’ll get to your personal history later in this series; for now, let’s focus on the origins of your company. You’ll want to answer two primary questions:

• Why did you start the business? What was your inspiration? What did you hope to accomplish? TOMS Shoes is a compelling brand because founder Blake Mycoskie constantly tells the story of how he was moved by the plight of shoeless children in South America. Maybe your story isn’t quite that inspiring. Maybe you “just” needed the money. But again, the question is why? Were you laid off from your job? Divorced by a cheating jerk? Every origin story has its own drama. The key is to find it and communicate it effectively.
• How did you start the business? Unless your last name is Bush or Hilton, you probably struggled to turn your idea into reality. Maybe you took night classes, held down two “real” jobs or mortgaged the house. All those things make for a great story, so find a way to let your customers know. Sweet Leaf Tea does a great job of this, putting a “scrapbook” on its website with photos and captions that explain the founders’ struggle. (Pillowcases for tea bags? A delivery van with 200,000 miles on it? We can all drink to that.)

Think there’s nothing interesting about your origins? Maybe you should get a second opinion. We’ve lived with our own stories for so long that it’s often hard to identify the dramatic arc. Tell your story to someone else — a spouse, a consultant, even a customer — and ask what they think is interesting.

As a reporter, I’m constantly stumbling across businesses that are far more fascinating than they first appear. Take a company called MAKEaDEAL that I recently wrote about for SmartBrief. They have a smartphone app that could change the face of retailing by allowing customers to request low-price bids from multiple merchants when they’re ready to buy a specific item.

It’s a cool technology, to be sure, but what I really love is the company’s why and how. Founder Todd Chipman isn’t some college kid looking to be the next Mark Zuckerberg. Instead, he’s a husband and father who noticed a rash of small-business closings on the main street of his hometown and started to think about ways that technology could change the marketing equation. Rather than selling out to venture capitalists, he sold his vintage car and bootstrapped the company through more than two years of development, using local pizza parlors and other small businesses to test his prototypes and work the bugs out.

Here is a link for Chipman’s MAKEaDEAL site, and this is a link to Foursquare, a competing service. Now ask yourself this: Which company would you check out first? If the origin story behind MAKEaDEAL tempts you to go find out more, then here’s a final question for you:

Why aren’t you using the power of origins in your own business biography?

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