Winning Through Story: The Power of Narrative in Business Growth
In an era of information overload, storytelling remains a powerful tool for scaling businesses. Leaders who craft compelling narratives align stakeholders, drive engagement, and create lasting impact—proving that data alone isn’t enough to win.
“It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this...”
In our age of mass information and advanced technology the idea that storytelling is invaluable to scaling a business sounds too simplistic. After all, data and hard evidence is what drives decisions right, not parables?
But two things can be true at once.
And a focus on hard facts runs the risk of overlooking that humans are emotional creatures. And building a scaling business is all about people.
So how do you tell a story in an age of information overload? A time where so much information is available you can find data to support any point of view.
Take the following:
“2023 was marked by 10% year-over-year revenue growth in our consumer business. We saw a significant increase in revenue for our subscription membership. We grew our subscription business over 50% year over year.. with over 640,000 subscribers, we are able to improve our adjusted EBITDA deficit for our Consumer and Research Services segment through margin and Operating Expense discipline, which we expect to continue into 2024.”
Extract from 23&Me 2023 Annual Report (redacted for clarity, brevity)
The future sounds rosy? But that company went into administration in March this year.
The point here is not to call out overly-rosy annual reports. Quite the opposite.
The challenge for leaders in today’s data-fuelled world is to provide the verbal ballast needed to keep the show on the road. A world where everyone feels they’re winning:
Investors stay ‘on board’
Staff are engaged
Customers stay ‘bought in’
So how do you create a scenario where ‘everybody wins', while staying within the bounds of things the business could realistically achieve?
Creating value
The answer? Through narrative. Which, when used with precision, is the ultimate value creator.
A conversation with a leader at a scaling African fintech showed just how much precision is needed to create a corporate narrative.
And how much (direct) impact it has when crafted carefully.
Brad Roper is former CEO of financial services at MTN Mobile Money in South Africa - a business of Africa’s biggest mobile telco who now heads up the partnerships function at JUMO, a banking and lending platform company based in South Africa with customers (including many of the region’s biggest telco’s) in 10 countries across the continent.
The complexity of the business means that engaging partners is vital for the business:
“I summarise my role as looking for a four-way win,” says Brad, “JUMO is live in 10 countries, scaling to 23 this year, [and the only way to achieve that] is to find a way that lets the telco or the distribution partner win economically, the banking partner funder of the lending portfolio needs to win. The customer needs to win in the way we design the product through pricing and the market strategy. And we, as the platform operator, need to win. And they're all different stakeholders.”
Instead of using data-heavy presentations to tackle the challenge, Brad found a simpler, narrative-based approach much more effective:
“I could throw a whole bunch of stats at each stakeholder, but the best way I found, especially because we're live in 10 markets, and each market has four different sets of stakeholders, is to understand the context, and produce solutions that are context bound, that are purpose driven, and that in each and every instance is looking for that four-way win.” A story that understands the goals of the audience.
I asked him what that looks like in practice - and his process.
Mission critical
His answer is a valuable reminder of the science on which great storytelling rests and why a company-wide mission (a story of the reason your business exists) is so powerful:
“Working in a tech startup crafting compelling narratives isn't just an art. [You have to] weave the story of the innovation that we're bringing with the impact that we could have for our telecommunications partners, for the banks and what that could mean for the societies they’re working in and for impacting human potential,” he says.
And the process: “The key [for me] is to be able to identify competing viewpoints and goals - and to try and find an innovative way to solve for that human impact and the potential.”
His process involves starting with the big picture mission, the problem JUMO is trying to fix - and work from there, for which he uses just a couple of key numbers around which to build the company’s purpose. Its story.
“Credit penetration in Africa is stuck at 10%,” he says “10% of adult Africans have access to credit services, and only 2% of Africans have some form of insurance. So there's a huge disconnect between connected societies in Africa. And through the innovation JUMO brings we’re trying to solve this.”
So far the approach is proving highly effective. From 10 countries today, the company expects to be operating in 23 African markets by the end of the year. But his use of storytelling is far from accidental - the result of years of experience and an approach grounded in scientific evidence that understands the direct link between storytelling, business and the people that make businesses successful - the team.
Stories relate, data dates
“A University of Cape Town study showed narrative-based presentations resulted in 68% better information retention. So I created personas of people that we would deal with as customers, like a vendor that was selling food, someone working in a car wash so they became a living, breathing person that we could relate to.”
It’s not just fast-growing companies like Jumo that need a strong narrative to stay on course.
Storytelling and the hard work of crystallising a company mission can be very powerful for incumbent firms - to help them innovate, expand into new markets or transform their operations:
“With MTN Mobile Money in South Africa we realised we needed to tell a different story to our target customers - because the dynamics of South Africa [in terms of payments] were very different to Ghana or Uganda where we had strong mobile money businesses. Trying to replicate the same playbook in South Africa was never going to work - the country didn't have the same structural problems. We had to think creatively about how to solve for financial inclusion. This also involved offering new solutions like remittances or augmenting the loans and insurance business to complement the mobile money service and ensure that we resonated with our mission and the customers we were targeting.”
Think long, write short
His simplicity is proof of the wise saying, “if I’d had more time I’d have written you a shorter letter.” Simplicity takes intention.
As Brad remarked as we closed: “you need to take the time to discern the signal from the noise: the stuff that’s truly important from all the noise the information age throws at us.”
Find the needle in the digital haystack and everybody wins.
Simon Hardie is an author and founder of findexable - the digital analytics and insight platform. He co-hosts the Born to Disrupt podcast with Mingzulu and Disrupts
