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Our guest for this episode is rarely online. But when she is, she’s telling small stories with big meaning.
Meet Michelle Warner—she’s a business strategist and consultant who architects business models and marketing strategies for clients who sell high-priced services. She also hosts the podcast Sequence Over Strategy—an idea that represents her entire platform’s differentiated premise, and one the story she brings to us today reflects.
Michelle has founded multi-million dollar startups, raised capital the traditional way, and generally followed “the blueprint” for business growth before burning out and finding a new path forward. She is an independent consultant and educator who doesn’t need to rely on social media for growth.
What I admire about Michelle is that she’s designed her life and work in a certain way—she’s intentional, genuine, and carefully curates anything she elects to spend time on. These characteristics are reflected in her life, in her work, and in the way she tells stories.
In this episode, we dissect one of her signature stories she recently sent to her newsletter. It was well-received, but the ending needs work, and she recognizes there are some structural problems with the story. We work on that together to turn this into a signature story she can take with her everywhere, and we identify the job this story does for her audience and her business.
You’ll get a deep look at the small changes that you can make to a story to communicate with greater impact.
Jump into the conversation:
(03:39) Meet Michelle
(17:40) Michelle’s Story
(21:28) Dissecting the Story
(23:04) First, Last, Favorite
Meet Michelle Warner—she’s a business strategist and consultant who architects business models and marketing strategies for clients who sell high-priced services. She also hosts the podcast Sequence Over Strategy—an idea that represents her entire platform’s differentiated premise, and one the story she brings to us today reflects.
Michelle has founded multi-million dollar startups, raised capital the traditional way, and generally followed “the blueprint” for business growth before burning out and finding a new path forward. She is an independent consultant and educator who doesn’t need to rely on social media for growth.
What I admire about Michelle is that she’s designed her life and work in a certain way—she’s intentional, genuine, and carefully curates anything she elects to spend time on. These characteristics are reflected in her life, in her work, and in the way she tells stories.
In this episode, we dissect one of her signature stories she recently sent to her newsletter. It was well-received, but the ending needs work, and she recognizes there are some structural problems with the story. We work on that together to turn this into a signature story she can take with her everywhere, and we identify the job this story does for her audience and her business.
You’ll get a deep look at the small changes that you can make to a story to communicate with greater impact.
Jump into the conversation:
(03:39) Meet Michelle
(17:40) Michelle’s Story
(21:28) Dissecting the Story
(23:04) First, Last, Favorite
Resources:
⚫ Listen to Michelle’s podcast: https://www.themichellewarner.com/blog/sos001
⚫ Check out Michelle’s website: https://www.themichellewarner.com/
🔵 Follow Jay: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayacunzo/
🔵 Subscribe to Jay’s newsletter: https://jayacunzo.com/newsletter
🔵 Learn about Jay’s coaching and consulting: https://jayacunzo.com/
🟢 Created in partnership with Share Your Genius: https://shareyourgenius.com/
🟢 Cover art designed by Blake Ink: https://www.blakeink.com/
🟢 Find and support our sponsors: https://jayacunzo.com/sponsors
Creators & Guests
What is How Stories Happen?
What does it take to resonate? On How Stories Happen, experts, entrepreneurs, and world-class communicators dissect their signature stories piece by piece. We explore how they found their stories, how they developed their ideas, and how they're using a given story to grow their business and leave their legacy. Hosted by Jay Acunzo.
This is How Stories Happen, where experts, entrepreneurs, creators, and communicators dissect a single story piece by piece. We hear how they found it and developed it, how it might improve, and how they're using it to build their businesses and leave their legacies. This is a show about resonance, not reach. It's about making what matters to our careers, companies, and communities because when our work matters more, we need to hustle for attention less. I'm Jay Acanzo.
Michelle Warner:All the good questions. Oh my god. You're gonna panic me. It's much more natural to just look at silly things that are going on in my life to draw a story out of that. It checked all the boxes but one, a very significant one.
Michelle Warner:The house faces north, and I've been throwing a good old tantrum about it. And then the last two paragraphs, I don't know where I'm going or how to end it. So it's telling me a little bit of a structure change is needed. Gonna be a hard habit to break, but I'm I'm up for it. That is such a better way to go about it.
Michelle Warner:I love I'm gonna start that immediately. This is what I wanted to hear.
Jay Acunzo:When you create content online today, it's easy to feel stuck on the hamster wheel churning out endless stuff. Your stress goes up, your volume goes up, but your results, they don't. And then you have Michelle Warner. Michelle is barely on social media. She's very choosy in what she publishes, and instead she competes on the power of her stories, not the volume of her content.
Jay Acunzo:And she does that primarily by telling small stories with big meaning pulled from her everyday life. Michelle earns a living as a business strategist and consultant who works with entrepreneurs that sell high priced services. She helps her clients design their business models and their marketing strategies. In her career, she's done the venture scale startup thing, and she's now an independent consultant. She's from Chicago and is now living in the mountains of Colorado.
Jay Acunzo:Everywhere she goes, she carefully designs her life and her work her way. I love her approach to building her business and the way she thinks about storytelling. And today, you'll get a really deep look at the really tiny changes that you can make to a story to communicate with greater impact and get off the hamster wheel. Together, we take a story that she shared on her newsletter and treat it like a draft. We really chop it up and rearrange it together, and we try to build it into a signature story she can take with her everywhere she shows up.
Jay Acunzo:Alright. Let's freeze some hamsters.
Michelle Warner:I'm Michelle Warner, a business designer and strategist, and I help entrepreneurs who sell high ticket services, design better business models and marketing plans.
Jay Acunzo:What is your creative practice? Like, what are you routinely creating and shipping out into the world?
Michelle Warner:I guess my newsletter and my podcast.
Jay Acunzo:How often?
Michelle Warner:Every other week ish, it changes.
Jay Acunzo:And I'm on that newsletter. It's excellent, by the way.
Michelle Warner:Thank you.
Jay Acunzo:You're welcome. And you have a new podcast?
Michelle Warner:I have a new podcast. Yeah. It's gonna go live, I think, next week.
Jay Acunzo:What's the premise of the show?
Michelle Warner:Oh my god. You're gonna panic me. Sequence over strategy.
Jay Acunzo:Yeah. Okay. So I love this premise that you press a lot of your work through this one premise. It's like the lens through which you see your content, your Mhmm. Client work, all of the things.
Jay Acunzo:Can you just explain sequence over strategy to people that may be unfamiliar with the idea?
Michelle Warner:Yeah. To me, it means 2 different things. It means, number 1, doing things in the correct order is more important than doing them well, and it also means that the things that you do need to be in fundamental alignment. And if they're not, then they're also not gonna work really well.
Jay Acunzo:Right. I'll give you an example from my business because you and I have talked about this before. If I am selling, which I do, things that are higher priced, higher ticket, I don't need a huge volume or huge throughput of clients to have a wonderful year. Why in the world would I prioritize traffic based marketing tactics when I should be thinking more about the relationships that I have? Or even, like, when it's all about content showing up in small masterminds to give talks instead of huge audiences full of people who mostly can't either can't afford me or won't need me.
Michelle Warner:This is
Jay Acunzo:a paradigm shift for a lot of marketers to think about, like, well, I have a relationship type offer. I should have a relationship type marketing. Yep. And I think we're all pretty colored by, like, mass media, social media, traffic, followers, endless grabbing at fame. So I like to talk about your teachings when it applies to marketing, when it applies to content, as essentially there's a very big difference between a big audience and a valuable audience.
Jay Acunzo:And most people can very easily define what a big audience means, but have no preconception and really need one of what a valuable audience means to them in their business.
Michelle Warner:Exactly. And that means sequence the strategy for me because the first question is all about what is the best first question to ask, and nobody's asking that first question of what is a valuable audience to me. So then it doesn't even matter in what order you do things if you're not even doing the right thing. So that's where the sequence over strategy comes in at that level is let's make the right decisions and ask the best questions first.
Jay Acunzo:In my teachings, it's, hey. Stop creating so much content before you have a premise to inform it. That's sequence over strategy. The first step, the first thing, the first need you have takes priority over what are all the moves I need to make in some pristine playbook. Yep.
Jay Acunzo:You're writing your newsletter. You're hosting this podcast coming up. Anything else that forms your creative practice? Are you appearing on other podcasts? Are you guest blogging?
Jay Acunzo:Are you giving talks? What else are you doing?
Michelle Warner:Yeah. I'm appearing on a lot of other podcasts. I'm doing a lot of teaching. Talks is a big word. I think a lot of workshops and guest teaching is more what I'm doing.
Michelle Warner:I'm not on stages giving a deck based talk, if you will.
Jay Acunzo:Makes sense. And yet you're bringing those stories that I feel like I've seen you iron out through your writing, I'm assuming, into those workshops, into those small group discussions.
Michelle Warner:Yeah. 100%.
Jay Acunzo:Is there a kind of story that you like to tell? You know, I would describe especially when I started telling business stories, I was very colored by a history as a sports journalist. I was very much in love with the saccharin stories of feature pieces, human interest pieces of athletes, and I would say that that kind of bumps up against the edge of being too saccharin, too sentimental without going over the edge. That's a kind of story that I really love. Is there a kind of story you love to tell?
Michelle Warner:It's interesting you bring that up because I also have a background not in athletic journalism, but in athletic PR. So I am very drawn and very influenced by the stories that I see play out in front of me when I was working in those worlds. There are points where I'm telling very human interest athletic stories from my career and and athletes' careers that I worked with, and I use those a lot in business, actually. But I would say that right now, I am much more drawn to very casual, almost self deprecating, like, the things that happen in my everyday life. It's much more natural to me to just look at silly things that are going on in my life and being able to draw a story out of that.
Jay Acunzo:Mhmm. And in the story that we talk about later, it feels like that relates. That's of a piece. And I'd also say that you having this clear premise in your mind is, like, the lens through which you see all these moments that you're experiencing. That other people might say, that's not worth telling even if it's interesting to me, or they just don't even notice it as a potential story thread to pull or a source of teaching or metaphor, and yet you do.
Jay Acunzo:And I like to think of this as if you have your subconscious working on the problem at all times, then you can just go about your day and not be thinking about work, and something goes off in your mind is like, I don't know if that's a thing, but I'm gonna save it somewhere and maybe pull that thread later. I think really effective storytellers have that habit that they've ironed out over years of their lives. So I don't know if that connects back to the way you operate, but that's what I'm always going through as I move about my day.
Michelle Warner:A 100%. I also think I have an unfair advantage there because it is so easy to do things on a sequencer to not stop and ask the right question that I am constantly catching myself in my normal life breaking my own rules. And so it's easy to notice that and to make fun of myself when I'm at the grocery store without a list and I'm screwing things up, and I know I'm gonna have to go back. All of those everyday moments are just like, oh, this is what I tell people to not do all day long.
Jay Acunzo:How much of an organized system do you have for catching these little moments that you notice at the grocery store or making, you know, morning coffee or walking your dog on the beach during the winter months as I know you love to do? How systematized is this sort of intake of yours?
Michelle Warner:There's a dumping ground in Notion. That's what I use for project management. So I have a page where I just dump a note that will remind me what happened. And if I'm out and about, I will give myself a 2 second voice note. I don't try to form the story, but it goes into a voice note on my phone so I can manage to get it into Notion when I get
Jay Acunzo:back. There's a sequence over strategy thing I've noticed here, which I think you'll love. There's a ton of people that I've encountered. I'm very fortunate now to be of the stage in my career where people think I have some kind of secret and I just do not. Like, Jay, you must have known how not to make a mess when you make stuff.
Jay Acunzo:And I'm like, no. I just maybe move through the mess more confidently and more joyfully or can direct it a little bit better. It's always a mess whenever I make anything. And I think people start with the idea phase, and they're like, so you have some super regimented tagging system. And I'm like, no.
Jay Acunzo:I have one page in Notion that I, like, save. I basically pull the thread as much as inspiration lets me in that moment and vomit words. So it's like a 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 sentence paragraph. That becomes the idea that I save for later. And then, occasionally, I'm like you where I can't type anything.
Jay Acunzo:I'm walking in or driving, and I'll send myself a text or a voice note. And that's it. Maybe instead of ironing out the perfect idea capture and collating system for you, You should put yourself on a deadline and tell a bunch of stories for I don't know how many months, and then let's revisit whether or not idea capture and organization is a problem for you. Like, sequence over strategy. This feels like one of those things that people want the perfect system, and and they actually don't.
Jay Acunzo:Save a bunch of ideas or learn how to spot them in the first place.
Michelle Warner:100%. I have encountered so many templates and great planning tools for content. I've even tried a couple of them and immediately forgotten that they exist. Or when I tried to write off of them, it was a complete disaster. So, yeah, I just need a little prompt, and it reminds me of something, and off I go.
Jay Acunzo:So let's get into the story that you brought for us today. I believe you said this story is something you've used before public. Like, it's already been published, but you wanna improve it. Just set this up for us. What kind of story or where have you used this before?
Michelle Warner:Well, it came from my Notion database, and so it has been used as an email before and on the fly email, kind of how I describe the creative process. I needed an idea, saw it in the Notion database, and it probably went from idea to draft email in less than 30 minutes and was sent out resonated really well. And now as I'm looking at it and looking for some more core stories, I thought, oh, that one resonated really well. It could probably use some more massaging that it did not get in the 30 minutes it went from idea to email.
Jay Acunzo:Oh, interesting. So from the idea list to an actual email, like, you sent it out to your newsletter, You said you wanted to turn it into possibly a core story. Is that one of those stories you take with you in your guest appearances, in your teachings? Like, when you say core story, what do you mean?
Michelle Warner:Exactly. So as you know how the way I market, I break it into 3 stages, awareness, engagement, sales, and that awareness moment is how I meet people. And those have what I call core stories in them, the most resonant, the ones that people understand the most because I can use them over and over and over again because I'm always meeting people when I'm in that awareness stage of marketing.
Jay Acunzo:So your awareness is I need to go and show up where there are densities of my prospective clients and create what you call a trust transfer, which is this podcaster, their audience trust them. Now they trust me a little bit more because they spent an hour with me instead of seeing me post a bunch on social media, which is very fleeting. So in the awareness stage, when you're out kinda meeting and handshaking your audience, you're saying you're bringing these core stories with you to show up in the strongest possible way.
Michelle Warner:Correct. I wanna have 3 or 4 of those stories that I can match with the audience, and I know I can repeat them because I'm going to these places. I'm meeting new people each and every time. Whereas my weekly every other weekly newsletter is more of an engagement once people know me, and so there's a different level of loyalty already there. I'm not gonna repeat stories from them.
Michelle Warner:They're just gonna get something new all the time.
Jay Acunzo:I love that. Okay. So the title that I'm seeing here for the story, because I'm gonna watch you read it, is SOS story. I don't want you to explain what that means. Let's leave that open for now for our audience.
Jay Acunzo:So SOS story. Michelle, whenever you're ready, please take us through the story, and then we'll dissect it together.
Michelle Warner:If you've been here for a minute, you know that I bought a new house over the winter. It checked all the boxes I was looking for, and it had taken me 2 plus years to find. Check that. It checked all the boxes but one, a very significant one. The house faces north.
Michelle Warner:This may not seem like a big deal to some of you, but I'm guessing some of my fellow northern climate friends are nodding their heads knowingly. Because when your house faces north, your front yard, your sidewalk, the entryway, all of it, it's shaded most of the day, which means the snow melts weeks later than your neighbors across the street, and even a little dusting of snow or frost can turn into ice that's still around 2 weeks later. It was not in my plans to buy a north facing house, but when I found the perfect location and structure, I took the trade off and did it anyway. Which brings me to the spring when I'm all kinds of annoyed because I want color in front of my house. It was a long winter.
Michelle Warner:I want daffodils. I want tulips. And most of all, I want a beautiful spring blooming tree. A crab apple, a red bud, a dogwood. I do not care as long as it's colorful.
Michelle Warner:What do I have instead? Some ground cover greenery and a maple tree, and I've been throwing a good old tantrum about it. But here's the thing. The tree of my dreams isn't in alignment with what I have. If I give into the tantrum and plant 1, you know what I'll get?
Michelle Warner:A pretty picture on a leaflet from the nursery showing me the blooms that my tree will never produce because its location is not in alignment with it blooming. So, sure, I can buy the tree. I can pick the surface level thing that I want, but that doesn doesn't mean it's gonna bloom. Why am I telling you this? Because you're probably all doing some of this version in your business.
Michelle Warner:You're probably plucking shiny strategies and outcomes out of the blue and hoping they'll bloom. But if you haven't taken the time to figure out if they're in alignment or what steps you need to take to get them into alignment, they're not gonna work. Here's a version I hear from folks all the time. They wanna sell a high price service based offer, but they don't wanna go out and build the relationships required to find those customers. They'd prefer to post random content on social media instead in the hope someone stumbles across it.
Michelle Warner:The vast majority of businesses buying premium priced service based offers aren't buying them because they saw you post something on LinkedIn. Yes. Of course, there'll be an occasional needle in a haystack. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about what happens the other 98% of the time.
Michelle Warner:They're buying those services because there was a relationship in place that played a role in facilitating the introduction or the sales conversation or something else along the way. So if you wanna sell high priced services, but you don't wanna do the uncomfortable work of building the right relationships to support those sales, you're doing the equivalent of planting a blooming tree in a north facing yard. Sure, you can do it, but the results are probably gonna fall well short of your expectations. There are so many other places I see misalignments and things being done out of order in business. I see you taking months to launch a website or a podcast without understanding what job you want it to do for you and then wondering why you're not getting any results from your sparkling new thing.
Michelle Warner:I see you making your product better and more advanced, but still marketing to an audience of beginners and then wondering why they don't buy. I see you jumping on any podcast that invites you instead of doing the work of reaching out to the podcast that your audience listens to and then wondering why you aren't finding your people. Notice something here. None of these situations have anything to do with the quality of your work or your ability to execute. They all have to do with the order in which you're doing things.
Michelle Warner:I can be the best tree planner in the entire world, import the best soil from wherever they have the best soil, water that thing with precision, and the tree of my dreams still isn't gonna perform. Before you worry about that execution, you have to make sure you're doing things in the proper order. And the first step of that order is always to know whether what you're thinking of doing is in alignment with your reality. Something I call sequence over strategy.
Jay Acunzo:Awesome. Thank you. How did that feel?
Michelle Warner:I haven't read out loud on Command in a while, so it's a little different. Yeah.
Jay Acunzo:Let's phrase it as opportunity that this show is providing people, which is like, oh, I'm getting better at, like, taking something written or something I speak out loud on a stage to lots of people and finding a way to translate it to this medium. So Yeah. You're welcome for the practice, I guess, is what I'm saying now.
Michelle Warner:Well, I appreciate it. It took a lot for me to not go and already try to edit this down into a perfect story that I would put into my training. I thought I'm just gonna leave it as an email, and we'll go through the process.
Jay Acunzo:Yes. So I thank you for that. This is the version that showed up in your inbox. Were there immediate things that as you were reading it, you're like change, kill, rearrange? What was going on in your head is I find that especially the material I'm most familiar with, there is a second voice that begins to emerge where I'm no longer focused on, like, the content or the talk track.
Jay Acunzo:I'm now focused on the performance of it, so to speak. I'll be, you know, on a stage or on a podcast doing something that I'm familiar with at a high level, and then there's a secondary voice that's like, oh, maybe try this, or, hey, that person made a noise, react, or something like that. I don't know if this is a real phenomenon. I have not looked into the science of it, but only when I am performing a story in some medium do I have 2 internal narrators. So, anyways, did you have a second one appear?
Jay Acunzo:And if so, what was she saying?
Michelle Warner:Well, what was going on, number 1, was it just felt long, and it didn't feel like the words I would use as I was talking felt like the words I would use as I was writing. And the examples is like, oh, those could be stronger. Listen. You could tell it was written in half hour.
Jay Acunzo:I wanna play a quick game that we're gonna play on the show moving forward. I I'm liking it so far called first, last, Favorite. I'll introduce that in a second. And then I wanna talk through the improvements we could make that are a little more ad hoc or that you maybe were thinking about when you brought this story up in the first place. But just to frame it so first, last, favorite.
Jay Acunzo:There are these related phenomena called the primacy and recency effects, which state or suggest anyway that memories are shaped by the first and most recent or latest moment with someone or something. So if you want your story to convey something both overtly, like what you're trying to say to people, but also implicitly, like, how they feel about you, then you should overinvest in really strong start, really strong close. And those tend to be 2 areas that are really difficult for a lot of people when they write or speak. And then so we'll do first, we'll do last, and then we'll each share what we thought was our personal favorite bit of the story. So I just wanted to hear your take on first.
Jay Acunzo:So as a quick reminder, if you've been here for a minute, you know that I bought a new house over the winter. It checked all the boxes I was looking for and had taken me 2 plus years to find. I live in a small town and was looking for something very specific. Check that. It checked all the boxes but one, a very significant one.
Jay Acunzo:The house faces north. Why open that way, or what do you notice about that open?
Michelle Warner:You know, I open that way because it was a really big deal for me. I highly doubt it hits anybody else in the gut the way it hits me in the gut because I had sworn for 10 years I would never buy a north facing house.
Jay Acunzo:Yeah. I think there's something I saw that was great and something I think it could improve on. The thing that was great was through the metaphor, you're hitting the first two beats of a story built to resonate. I think stories have a certain structure to it. We know about storytelling structures.
Jay Acunzo:There's a structure I like to use that I'll talk about a lot on the show, but the first two sections are alignment and agitation. So align and agitate. First, you wanna acknowledge, like, this is what you're going through. This is who you are. This is what you'd want.
Jay Acunzo:This is what you're going through, then agitate. But what gets in the way is this, and that matters because of these reasons. And it's just like, hey. I'm I know you. I know what you're going through, audience, client, peers, and I also know this is the problem that you're struggling with.
Jay Acunzo:And, oh, by the way, that's the problem, you know, I'm implying that I'm gonna help you solve. So you kinda do that metaphorically. I wonder if you could just drop a line, because then you go on to talk more about the house and planting your garden. It's a little while before you talk about my business, and that's why I read you. So I wonder if you just open the door to that using, like, a more plain language line earlier in the metaphor.
Jay Acunzo:So it could sound something like, it checked all the boxes, but 1. A very significant one. And that is the same miss. I experienced the same big miss in my home buying process that we all tend to experience in developing our businesses as entrepreneurs. And then you go back to the house metaphor.
Jay Acunzo:So you're not, like, spelling it out for them, and even that line itself that I just said, that might not be it, But you're just opening the door to being, like, and, hey, pay attention, because later on, I'm gonna reveal this part of it is super important. And that buys you some some time and permission to continue to elongate the metaphor. So I think that's, like, something you can sort of move up.
Michelle Warner:Tease the business earlier.
Jay Acunzo:A little bit. And like I said, it's hard to pull off because you can go way too dramatic with it way too soon. Right? To be like, and this little thing I experienced that has no bearing on your business is the most transformative part of working with me for yours. Right?
Jay Acunzo:Like Yeah. It takes a little bit of practice to nail it. So I don't know what the line is, but I think earlier on, you could have tied it to the work that you do or their business. And just to bring this point home, I wrote down this line here that you use. You say, why am I telling you this?
Jay Acunzo:And I feel like that's a sign that you didn't implicitly address it already. They should know. They should be one step ahead of you, like, almost previewing in their mind, oh, I know where this is going. And when you land it, they're like, yes. So satisfying.
Jay Acunzo:And so if you have to say, why am I telling you this? It exposes you a little bit. It's a sign that maybe you haven't constructed it to really go with them on the journey that they're on. You're just more about you than you are about them.
Michelle Warner:I'm laughing because why am I telling you this is in 90% of my emails. So it's telling me a little bit of a structure change is needed.
Jay Acunzo:Yeah.
Michelle Warner:Let me ask you this. Remember when I was saying that I always laugh at myself and catch me myself in these moments?
Jay Acunzo:Right.
Michelle Warner:Would it be less dramatic, but still open that door to not force an ongoing sentence, but the same way I say, why am I telling you this in 90% of my emails? What if I'm saying, and yet again, I found myself not following my own rules that I know you're not following too? That's awkward, but something along those lines.
Jay Acunzo:Like, inescapably, I needed this truth about building high ticket service offers as an entrepreneur. I needed it in this version of my life. Again, that's mealy mouthed. I use this analogy a lot where, you know, I could give you a flat bit of advice, which is very forgettable. I could say, studies show that people are afraid not of the task in front of them, but of the unknown.
Jay Acunzo:So stop agonizing. Stop doing all the research. Stop outsourcing it or skipping it, and just try the thing once. So I'm basically like the Nike slogan. I'm saying just do it.
Jay Acunzo:Anybody could say it that way. Right? Or I could say it like this. I could go, I have an espresso machine in my kitchen, and for years I was afraid to make it, which is embarrassing because I'm Italian, And I would ask my wife. I would follow espresso influencers.
Jay Acunzo:I almost took a course that cost 100 of dollars to make great espresso at home. But today I make espresso every day. And the only thing that changed was I made it one time. And I realized, oh, I wasted a lot of time agonizing over the research. I wasted a lot of time outsourcing it, following the influencers, thinking about the book or the course or the YouTube tutorial.
Jay Acunzo:I wasn't afraid of the thing itself. I was just afraid of trying something new. I was afraid of the unknown. So kind of like I got quicker in that example to the language they would use to describe whatever new thing they're facing, whatever risk or innovative attempt to their work or change in their life they're facing, they're gonna relate to my espresso story because I'm starting more quickly to use, like, I arrived at the emotional stakes less what happened, more how it made me feel or what it made me realize. So that's what I would front load a little bit more.
Jay Acunzo:You do get to it, but I would actually move it up. And it would be preceding this moment of, so why am I telling you this, so you don't need to say that phrase.
Michelle Warner:Fair. It's gonna be a hard habit to break, but I'm up for it.
Jay Acunzo:Yeah. You know? And then you can see a situation where I would tell you the espresso story in 3 parts. Like, this happened, So that's all the stuff about me not making espresso, and then now I make it daily, which made me realize, like, oh, I wasted a lot of time, and maybe this is the thing I should have realized sooner. That's where people start to really connect with you, because it's the emotional stakes made clear.
Jay Acunzo:And then you teach, and you can pivot from this happened to which made me realize to say something like and that's the thing about trying new things. If what we're afraid of isn't the task, it's the unknown. Don't do all the agonizing research. Don't outsource it. Don't wait.
Jay Acunzo:Move quicker to make the unknown known. Try the thing once. Right? And then you could teach more after that. So I would say that your story here is really strong on this happened.
Jay Acunzo:There's a lot of detail about what you went through. It kinda doesn't move up, which made me realize soon enough where I can go, oh, okay. I this is really, really relatable. So I would move that up earlier. What did you realize?
Jay Acunzo:Even if you just hint at it, so you buy that attention. So people go, oh, I'm I'm still paying attention to the house buying metaphor, because I know something's coming. So I would move up, which made me realize what was your realization from this seemingly irrelevant thing to make it relevant to entrepreneurs. And then you do a really good job with the that's the thing about, even though you don't use that phrase, you you do pivot to lots of good moments of insights and teaching. So so, again, this happened, which made me realize that's the thing about the topic I teach, the insight I have today.
Jay Acunzo:So anyways, this is exactly the kind of story I was hoping you would bring to the show when I prompted you for it, and and you delivered. So thank you for that.
Michelle Warner:I'm well aware. I'm self aware enough to understand that.
Jay Acunzo:Yeah. So that's the first part. I wanna go to the last part. So, again, primacy and recency, the last part of this. They all have to do with the order in which you're doing things.
Jay Acunzo:I can be the best tree planter in the entire world, import the best soil from, and this is such a Michelle statement, from wherever they have the best soil, and it played it for comedy, which was great. So import the best soil from, yeah, however that happens. I could water the thing with precision, and the tree of my dreams still isn't going to perform. Because before you worry about execution, you have to make sure you're doing things in the proper order. And the first step of that order is always to know whether what you're thinking of doing is in alignment with your reality.
Jay Acunzo:It's something I call sequence over strategy. So talk to me about what strikes you about that ending, good or bad.
Michelle Warner:Well, I will fess up here that I did a little editing on this one. This original email did end in a pitch.
Jay Acunzo:How dare you. Shut deals.
Michelle Warner:I know. So after the in alignment with your reality, it went into a pitch. I added it's something I call sequence over strategy. I'm aware that's not how you should end it. I don't know how to end it, though.
Michelle Warner:So I do think that the beginning of the end is kinda funny. It is totally me. You can tell me it doesn't work if it doesn't, but that is about as me as this email gets. And then the last two paragraphs, I don't know where I'm going or how to end it.
Jay Acunzo:Let's back up a step because the lead into this does inform it. You were doing that sort of agitate period where you were mentioning symptoms. Like, I see you taking months to launch a website or a podcast without understanding what job it'll do for you. I see you making your product better and more advanced, but still marketing to an audience of beginners and then wondering why they don't buy. You kinda list down there more in the list.
Jay Acunzo:The ICUs are like, I acknowledge there's an illness here, and here are the symptoms. Right? And that's a huge way to not just get on the same page as people, but, like, add useful or almost generous tension, if I can phrase it that way. Because you're gonna use that tension to slingshot them towards a solution, a shift in their thinking that is more likely to stick because you contrasted it with this tension. And I think the key the crux of this is none of these situations have anything to do with the quality of your work or your ability to execute.
Jay Acunzo:I think that's like a little rock you have to loosen in their brain for this piece to work. So take that for what it's worth. Like, that to me was the biggest takeaway. But at the end, you reveal, like, another takeaway, which is, like, think sequence over strategy. We know that the order in which you do things does matter.
Jay Acunzo:I mean, it's an obvious point when you point it out. We're not actually executing on it. And the reason we should isn't because it sounds nice, because it's so nice and so secure seemingly to go find the blueprint, to go find the playbook, to latch on to the trend, to do all this stuff that you critique quite well, Michelle. It's so much easier to do that then get on board with what our brains embrace is more logical, sequence over strategy. And the reason, the barrier, the rock you gotta unstick for the rest of their stone wall to crumble and therefore their objections to fall away, is that line there.
Jay Acunzo:None of these have anything to do with the quality of your work or your ability to execute. And I'm tying this back to my world. I'm like unthinkable, my previous show, I thought was super high quality. But over time, I realized I'm dragging this along as deadweight because it's not serving the business I actually have. Doing a lot of SaaS industry focused marketing activities that either looked like I was a SaaS company or I would communicate with SaaS marketers no longer served my business.
Jay Acunzo:I could do those at a high level. I'm pretty confident. People said nice things. But to your point, it's not about the quality of what you were doing, Jay. It's not about your competency.
Jay Acunzo:It's about your sequence. Right? And so the house analogy comes back in full force there. Right? It's like the house I occupy faces north.
Jay Acunzo:It's that the business I built for myself or aspire to faces in this direction, and we're just not seeing it. So I think that's how you end. As you revisit or bring down that hidden point towards the bottom instead of reintroducing or or even just introducing for the first time the phrase sequence over strategy, you wanna make sure that they leave with their main objection, or in this case, an objection, loosened from their brains.
Michelle Warner:That makes sense. And, also, the context in which this would be shared is usually a little bit of an icebreaker at the beginning of a workshop or a training. And so if you agitate it that way, then the next line is almost, so let's talk about exactly how to do that, and then Right. Launching into the training curriculum.
Jay Acunzo:I like to call them super stories. Like, I have a few, say, more than 6 less than 10. I define these super stories as I am familiar enough or have developed enough of the details of the story that I can tell it long, I can tell it short, I can tell it medium, and I can branch off of wherever I decide to land to arrive at a different insight as needed by the moment I'm in or the audience I'm speaking to. So this is one of those super stories, because you could tell this in a very short form, like, quick comparison, almost like straight ahead metaphor. Right?
Jay Acunzo:I live in this house. Here's the situation. Think of the tree. Now let's quickly talk to you about your business and how this analogy applies over there. Or you could bring this back if you do a workshop.
Jay Acunzo:You could always be referencing the metaphor of the house and the tree because you have all the elements. Right? You have, like, the business I am in, the house I am in, the direction your business is heading, the direction my house is pointing. There's, like, a way to massage this at every turn for different audiences, different insights, or different purposes depending on where you wanna use it. It's a slam dunk to use it as a little open in a workshop or an answer on a podcast.
Jay Acunzo:Mhmm. But you could choose to play it forward. And as you do, you'll probably find more details to include, omit, agitate, all that good stuff. So to me, just earmark this one. Because if you can nail the ending here as you point out, I feel like there's just a lot of staying power in different places.
Michelle Warner:I agree, and that is encouraging to hear the different ways that you can use it because that does unlock my brain too. If you end it with that story of none of these situations have anything to do with the quality of your work or your ability to execute and then just getting into what exactly that means and having people have the ability to laugh at themselves over this as well is something I want. And I think if you're playing on that note, that makes that doable rather than getting dramatic about it again.
Jay Acunzo:Totally. Even the, again, the emotional stakes being clear because that's where people connect. The notion early on that the house checked all the boxes except for 1, and that was the most important one. Right? How stories happen as a podcast could check all the boxes for me and my business.
Jay Acunzo:Right? But the most important one is, for the use case for this show is, does this map to the career I wanna build? Does this map to the business I want? So, like, it's vivid because you describe the checkboxes of the house, and you want them thinking about the first checkbox. And then you can decide, do I need to take that further in my storytelling?
Jay Acunzo:Is the checkbox part as crystal clear, as high stakes as it needs to be, or did I rush past it? So that's another way you can start to play with it is, like, what is the thing that they need to take away from this? Or where are the emotional stakes? The word is isolate. Did I isolate that moment?
Jay Acunzo:And you can do that verbally if it's written. You can do it visually if it's written too, but you can do it verbally by, like, describing it, describing how you feel about it, all that stuff. You don't need to overly perform it or punch people in the face with it. You can just present it tactfully and well. So anyways, first, last, I think we did right by the last bit.
Jay Acunzo:I think we know how to improve it. What's your favorite part of this piece?
Michelle Warner:The parts where I can kind of laugh about it. I mean, I do throw a tantrum that I can't have a tree in my front yard or the part about the best soil from wherever they have that. Like, I laugh out loud when I write that. So I enjoy sharing kind of ridiculous moments and, like I said, how I call myself and my own stuff.
Jay Acunzo:I actually have the same favorite as you do. I did smirk while you were telling it, and I also was tying it back to not only my business, but also the way I like to tell stories is can I give a wink and a nod to the audience that although I'm describing, say, soil, I'm really describing, you know, not the best soil, but the best microphone or camera? So, like, I don't know how you would execute it, but I could see a scenario where I'd be like and then I did all this research trying to find the best soil. And did you know there's, like, all these types of soil? Like, this brand and this brand, and I would make one of those brands sound like, say, Blue Yeti, one of the popular mic brands.
Jay Acunzo:It'd be like, Blue Yeti soil, or that's a bad version. But, like, did you know there's all these ingredients in this? And one of the ingredients would sound like XLR cable. Wait. Hold on.
Jay Acunzo:What? I would do it in a very tongue in cheek way because that's my style. It's like bad dad jokes meets parenthetical asides constantly. So I love that moment because it was good already, but there's so much you could do with it, whatever you bring it.
Michelle Warner:Yeah. It's a good point because when I read that, I'm also kind of mentally rolling my eyes at some of the things I hear, probably similar to you. I start hearing about people posting on LinkedIn 14 times a day and Yes. Wondering why that doesn't work. And yeah.
Jay Acunzo:Were there things that you brought it to the show to work out specifically? I do have a few bullets I wanna move through, but is there anything already on your mind is, like, this isn't working or this area doesn't feel right?
Michelle Warner:No. I was looking for this overall approach because I know how I wing out a story, and I have never studied the structure of it or anything. So this is what I wanted to hear.
Jay Acunzo:When you talk about the 98%, the vast majority of businesses who buy premium priced service based offers so, like, an example would be, you know, buying from you or me to hire either of us as a consultant for your business. Our clients aren't buying from you or me, Michelle, because they saw you post something on LinkedIn. And the aside here, yes, there will be an occasional needle in a haystack. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about what happens the other 98% of the time.
Jay Acunzo:You took a step in the right direction. I kinda wanted to see you run further, and here's what I mean by that. You've, I think, pinpointed a real objection, which is I'm thinking about 2 or 3 leads that I was talking to to consult with me or to hire me to speak who did say that I love following you on LinkedIn. So now I'm more prone to running headlong at that. And I wonder if there's another way to frame this or a way to just spend a little more time on this beat because simply saying the other 98% of the time it's not that may not be enough.
Jay Acunzo:Now it may not be enough because it's just a mention of a stat, which doesn't move people. Or it might not be enough because they're going, but you yourself are admitting, Michelle, I don't need a ton of people. I just need a few because I sell for a high price what I do. So So it's actually enough that I'm doing. So, like, show me that it's wasteful.
Jay Acunzo:Or bring it back to the analogy of the house in some way. And you could have gone a little bit further there. So given that feedback, like, what's on your mind, or how might we go about that?
Michelle Warner:I think it's very fair feedback. That line came from some very real objections in two directions that I get and I will admit frustrate me a lot. Number 1 is that people will say, I don't think it's out of malice, but they wanna have that gotcha moment when I am explaining that traffic based marketing doesn't work and that they're wasting time on LinkedIn. They wanna say, but, oh, 4 months ago, I got one person. And I'm thinking, okay.
Michelle Warner:Congratulations. There's a needle in the haystack, but that didn't fill your business, did it? Or I get folks who say, well, we did a cold calling effort, and out of 60 phone calls, 1 person converted, so it worked. And I wanna say there's nothing about that that worked because I bet you want those 60 hours back that you spent on sales calls to get one conversion.
Jay Acunzo:And I am here to tell you that the math, although it seems like it worked for you, does contain a lot of waste, which you freely acknowledge because it's 60 hours to close one. And I'm saying there's a way to be more efficient about that. Right? What I just basically asked you was, so what are you trying to say here? And you're like, here's what I'm trying to say.
Jay Acunzo:It's based on these two interactions. So my response to that is, cool. So say that.
Michelle Warner:So say that.
Jay Acunzo:It's so hard to do when we're, like, bumping up against the trees in the forest that I'm able to just see the whole forest. Right? This is why you and I both believe in coaching and collaboration with friends and these kinds of vehicles. Right? You have 2 really prime examples for, like, in this case, here's the problem, and in this other related case, here's another problem.
Jay Acunzo:So in conclusion, yes, we're getting some business coming through this, but it's incredibly wasteful. It's inefficient. Maybe it's expensive. And more to the point of the way you help your entrepreneur clients, Michelle, you don't end up building something sustainable and repeatable and calm even. You kinda trap yourself on this hamster wheel, and you're not able to be very proactive in building your business.
Jay Acunzo:So, like, that is me kinda editorializing that whatever 2 or 3 line section as, like, potentially trying to solve their objections, but just leading to more in a way that doesn't take you too far afield from the points you're trying to make.
Michelle Warner:No. This is fantastic because the I just had is that I throw in that little caveat so that I don't get the emails of people who are never going to believe me. Right? And they're never gonna engage with me. And so I'm just trying to say I'm just trying to dismiss them, but what you're making me realize is that my best clients are reading that and do need it explained to them because it is a very real objection.
Michelle Warner:So it's worth taking that moment instead of just rolling my eyes and trying to dismiss folks who just kinda wanna have the gotcha moment and are not ready to believe it yet.
Jay Acunzo:I immediately laughed or did what I could only describe as a guffaw. Let's use that. I laughed immediately because, like, I couldn't hold back when you said, like, I wrote that so that I didn't get these responses. I do that all the time. And it's a subtle switch, and you can get really snarky on a dark day and do it poorly, but I've almost started, like, hunting those, making them characters in my story.
Jay Acunzo:But one of the first, if not the first episode of the show features my friend, Andrew Davis, as the guest. Wonderful keynote speaker. I've seen him give a talk where he just lays out a beautiful point with storytelling and insights and a visual framework. And he comes to this nice rounded edge where he concludes with, like, a memorable phrase, and then he pauses and he goes, but I know someone in the back is thinking, and he plays up the analogy, and he makes a voice out of it. Like, and he's like, All right, Peter, come with me now.
Jay Acunzo:It's like you can hunt those and add those objections to amplify the person in your mind who's kind of like an amalgam of voices voices you've actually heard, but also help the people that you're very for see, oh, this person is very for me because I too dislike those objections or those people. Right Right? So there's ways to make a character out of it is what I'm trying to say.
Michelle Warner:That is such a better way to go about it. I love I'm gonna start that immediately.
Jay Acunzo:Yeah. When you think about this point you're making, I always think about these 2 types of stories. There's, like, a lead story, which is like, hey. Let me propose a change, and let me show you what this looks like. It's not a case study.
Jay Acunzo:It's not like, here's what they went through and then they purchased from me, and now life is good. It it has stakes. There's uncertainty to it. There's a protagonist, and you wanna see what happens next. But the lead story is meant to say, here's Michelle, and she went through what you're going through.
Jay Acunzo:And then went further and embrace this change I'm here to propose, and let me show you what this looks like and maybe extract plain language insights we can learn from Michelle on the back end. And that prompts you to go, oh, I get what you're saying now. Please proceed to teach me how to do it like Michelle did it. Right? That's a lead story.
Jay Acunzo:It's illustrative end to end. Then you have supporting stories, which you know you get certain objections that you have to address, or there are certain questions you always get when you're interviewed or when you talk to a prospect, or even, like, you have a methodology, and you're trying to teach the pieces of it. And And it's good to have those stories in your bag. Where does the house bit sit for you? Is this meant to, like, open my eyes to something foundational you teach?
Jay Acunzo:Or is this something more specific and just as valuable but a little bit more narrow?
Michelle Warner:That is a really good question because I could easily make the argument in both directions.
Jay Acunzo:And that's that's why I asked that question because I could see it kind of getting caught in the middle. It kind of introduces the premise, sequence over strategy, just as a whole through a moment in your own life, and it kind of addresses what I truly think is the power statement. I'll read it the way you wrote it because you'll say it better than I did. None of these situations have anything to do with the quality of your work or your ability to execute. You're just not seeing it.
Jay Acunzo:That's the big, big piece that gets you on the train that you're driving. So I could see this going in both ways too. Not saying it has to be 1 or the other, but I'm curious after spending time with me, like, where do you think this might fit in your arsenal?
Michelle Warner:In many ways, if you understand none of these situations have anything to do with the quality of your work or your ability to execute, that is very foundational and what I need you to understand if you're gonna get on board with my work, because that's actually the point of sequence over strategy. And at the same time, there's something in me that is wondering if there is a more foundational or lead story to explain these two branches of sequence over strategy. Number 1, it's asking the right questions and making the right decisions first and then doing things in the right order. Since it has those two branches, it's a little tricky. So this is a very round the bend way of saying, I am not sure.
Jay Acunzo:Yeah.
Michelle Warner:And I think it's pointing out to me that, now that I understand that structure of stories, I need to kinda grapple with those two branches of what sequence over strategy really means and figure that out.
Jay Acunzo:There's no one right way. This is totally from the outside looking in. So take this with a block of salt. Having gone through this experience with you, what I'm thinking about is, how do I use this story better to knock down or at least start the conversation around all these objections for me dropping current behavior and starting to be open to your key message. It's almost like a a story for the skeptics or a story for the starters, where what you're saying is the main beginning point of the metaphor is you're doing this thing, you're in this place, It's pretty fixed, and it's posing this.
Jay Acunzo:Could be a problem, could just be a fact, and we're not facing it head on. It's your house is facing north. You sell high ticket premium services or aspire to. That's the first thing you gotta know. And like you say later, you could be the best planter of trees, builder of things.
Jay Acunzo:It doesn't matter because this is the house you're building, and the details of that need to start you down the path towards better decisions. And, like, if I ask you, Michelle, what's the importance of sequence over strategy? You could give me the one line answer and be like, for example, I bought a house. It just has this recurring compounding value for your business to bring this with you. So I think it's not an illustrative story.
Jay Acunzo:I do think it's something narrow, and that narrowness is objecting because I'm good at the other stuff. You're almost like speaking to me, honestly. Before I met you, Michelle, I was like, well, I'm doing all these things. I'm pretty good at it. And you're like, yeah.
Jay Acunzo:But your house is facing north, man.
Michelle Warner:That's what I'm realizing. That's the most important piece is what are the fixed pieces of the story. I talk about that a lot. I'm like, what are the stakes that have been put in the ground? And if we're not gonna change those stakes that are put in the ground, then we have to design around it, and we have to make decisions around those stakes.
Michelle Warner:You're exactly right.
Jay Acunzo:So sum this up for me. You came in feeling one way about the story. What have you realized about storytelling since?
Michelle Warner:I have realized that a story needs a job to do. I'm gonna call myself on all my things again. A story needs to have a job to do, so I have to figure out what job I want this story to do. And then a story has structure, which I knew but did not know how to create, and I'm also gonna give myself credit that I think that there are elements that I am good at in telling a story, in terms of bringing in some random kind of flippant moments.
Jay Acunzo:Yeah. It's, like, it's very similar to, like, thinking thinking of someone who's jumping out of the plane and what happens next, as they parachute down to the ground. There's, like, a good metaphor here. It's like some people jump out of a plane, and they just wanna make it down safely. So they, like, cling to the things they need to cling to.
Jay Acunzo:You know, if you're starting out telling stories, it's like a story structure that you found or a course that you take or or a type of story that's proven for you. It's like you I just wanna make it down. I'm just trying to get through this. And then you get a little more confidence, and you start jumping out of the plane. You you do a little flip first.
Jay Acunzo:Right? It's like the same story, but a better open, a little personal anecdote or something like that, a metaphor, a joke. And then over time, it's not that you're just jumping out of the plane with a flourish. You're, like, I know I can aim where I land. I can land wherever I so choose.
Jay Acunzo:I can land this story on any insight, and then I can also make it interesting on the way down. So I think that's kinda where you're at with this story. It's like you have all the basics there and a little bit of the safety behaviors of a storyteller who is just kinda feeling their way through the story for the first time. But you are also a very seasoned storyteller, so I know that you know several moves to add to this to, you know, put a spin on it and lean into the things that feel like little personal flourishes to flesh those out further or picking different places you could land this and and then being able to do interesting things en route to that.
Michelle Warner:That makes a ton of sense. I think that there was a lot of gut instinct structure involved and not a lot of formal thought, And it's now time to apply the formal thought. Right?
Jay Acunzo:What do you wish people who are, like, observing your work and going, oh, Michelle's a great storyteller? What do you wish they knew about what you're going through that would allow them to maybe pursue it with more confidence?
Michelle Warner:I think that I have lost all barriers to sharing things that happen, and I don't know if people struggle with that. I know they struggle with it in other formats, but I don't really ever edit any of the personal things that I will bring into my storytelling.
Jay Acunzo:What does that give you? What's an advantage in doing that?
Michelle Warner:I think I don't overthink that piece of it. I guess it means I I don't feel like I have much of a filter when it comes to trying to make it look good or look better than it was. I have no problem sharing kind of disasters or silly things or or whatever, and and maybe that makes it more real.
Jay Acunzo:What I'm hearing is when you're an autobiographical storyteller, it actually matters more that you don't try to clean it up and tell the overly polished success version of this, that your own blunders and questions and happy accidents and frustrating accidents, like, those things are actually not just the details of what happened to include, but the way you felt about them. Like, getting closer to the truth is what people actually latch on to.
Michelle Warner:I think that is true. I don't get much into this we should be vulnerable conversation because I don't know what that means, but I I do think there's a lot of forced vulnerability out there where people are trying to force moments of life to look more vulnerable to connect. And I just operate without a filter and try to tell things as they were. And I do think that maybe that comes off as more true, but that is just how I've always operated. If I try to make it look too clean or think too much about how people are gonna respond or think, then it just gets very unreal very quickly.
Jay Acunzo:How stories happen was created by me, Jay Acunzo, and it's produced by Share Your Genius. Cover art by Blake Ick. Learn more about these kind creative humans and how they can help you by checking the links in your show notes. And while you're there, please explore my sponsor link so I can keep the show going and growing. Big thanks to everybody who supports the show in any capacity.
Jay Acunzo:You're a listener, you're a sponsor, you're a partner of some kind. We're episode 2 right now. I am so excited about what the show is already becoming for people. I just don't think that there's a look at the craft quite like this out there. So I'm getting a word that comes to mind here, catharsis.
Jay Acunzo:So I hope this show is providing you creative catharsis. And for more catharsis, connection, frameworks and ideas for becoming a stronger storyteller, visit jayaconzo.com. When you're there, explore my free newsletter, my books and my consulting for experts and entrepreneurs who wanna differentiate through substance and stories, not hollow stunts. Thanks again for listening. I'm back in 2 weeks with a brand new episode, but until then, keep making what matters because when your work matters more, you need to hustle for attention less.
Jay Acunzo:See you.